Borderline (38 page)

“If people wanted Helena’s mother and, now, Helena, for ransom—drug lords or whatever like you were thinking—I can see why they would want to come over the border after they took Helena’s mother,” Lisa said, picking up where they had left off when Anna had mentally dragged her husband into the state penitentiary and given him a nice room on death row. “Not that those cartel people can’t or won’t kill Americans but they might have a harder time of it in the U.S.”

“If that is what happened it explains a lot of things,” Anna said. She stood and paced with Edgar. It felt like the right thing to do with a baby from whom one was trying to induce burping. She told Lisa of the bikini wax, the hands, wrinkled from so long in the water but free of calluses, the painted toenails. “She was wearing a cheap dress,” Anna finished, “but everything else about her spoke of money.”

Lisa thought about that for a while. Helena had had enough milk and Lisa put her on her shoulder and began patting her gently. Almost immediately she emitted a ladylike burp. Anna couldn’t but note that Helena was a superior belcher to Edgar, who had not yet given up his stomach bubbles.

“She could have been made to put on a cheap dress,” Lisa suggested. “To make her feel bad. You know, like breaking somebody down so they won’t have the courage to fight back. The bad clothes could be part of something like that.”

“Or maybe so the body wouldn’t be so easily identified. If they intended for the mother to die after giving birth, they might have dressed her accordingly,” Anna said.

“Why would they want to kill the mama and keep the baby?”

“An infant is a lot easier to hide and tote around than a grown woman.”

“Yeah,” Lisa admitted. “But you got to feed babies, and when they are so tiny sometimes they don’t thrive on formula. I guess anybody evil enough to do the other things wouldn’t care much about a baby, though.”

“We’ll get to the bottom of it,” Anna said, and hoped the bottom wouldn’t be where she’d find Freddy Martinez.

Giving up on Edgar’s digestion, she gave him back to his mother and took the good baby, the Olympic-class belching child, from Lisa. “The chief ranger said Health and Human Services, the real Health and Human Services, is undermanned. They’re still dealing with the refugees from Hurricane Katrina who stayed in Houston. Since Helena is being cared for in a family situation, they said they would come out at the end of the week to take custody of her. That’s three days. Do you want Paul and me to take her somewhere else? Whoever is after her for whatever reason might decide it’s not worth it and go back to where they came from, but we can’t count on it.”

Lisa didn’t answer right away, and Anna appreciated that this was no little thing. Had she been a good person, she would have insisted they decamp immediately to protect Lisa and her family. Helena was the reason she let Lisa make the choice for her. The little girl was doing so well with the breast milk and the love and the company of another child that Anna didn’t want to take her from this impromptu nest any sooner than she had to. Could she have removed the danger by removing herself and leaving Helena with Lisa, she would have done it. As it was, should Lisa be willing to keep Helena, she and Edgar would be safer with Anna and Paul around.

The great hairy fly in the domestic ointment was Freddy. The picture of him as kidnapper and probable murderer Anna had painted in her mind was not indelible, but neither could it be dismissed. Snuggling down with victim and suspect under one roof could have its awkward moments.

After this failed attempt, Freddy—if it was Freddy—might be less likely to have the baby taken from under his roof, afraid the connection would be too obvious. And, with Helena where he could control her disposition, he might be less desperate to take an action that might harm her.

These were the rational—or pseudo rational—reasons Anna listed to herself. The overweening reason was that, try as she might to avoid it, she trusted Freddy. She had trusted him nearly from the moment at the top of the rockslide when she and Paul tied him up and took his gun. Freddy was a very likable guy. Like Ted Bundy? Even evoking the notorious serial killer didn’t put the fear of Freddy into her.

There was an aura around Freddy Martinez that was familiar and comforting. Mrs. Gonzales, Anna remembered, her best friend Sylvia’s mother. Mrs. Gonzales worked as an operator for the phone company in the little town where Anna had grown up. Long after she and Sylvia had parted ways, Anna to a private Catholic boarding school and Sylvia to the local high school, whenever Anna called home the operator would say: “Anna? You haven’t called your parents for a while. They’ll be so happy to hear from you. Will you be home soon?” The sense of warmth and family she exuded always made Anna feel like she had someplace to go if ever she couldn’t go home.

Anna’s instincts wanted her to accept the kindness Freddy radiated. Long ago she had learned not to go with her instincts. They were as much a mess as the rest of her intrinsic workings. She would go with Paul’s; if he thought they should go, they would go.

“I wish Paul would get back,” Anna said, scarcely aware that she voiced her thought.

“I wish Freddy would come home. I wish Freddy had never left home today.”

“Do you think they fired him?” Anna asked.

“No,” Lisa said. “He got called out before he got to Chisos Basin. The park got a call that there were nearly fifty head of horses on the American side and they were heading into the park. Freddy is their best horseman. They jumped on the chance to keep him busy somewhere else all day.”

“The park got a call? From whom?”

“She was anonymous,” Lisa said with an impish smile.

Anna laughed.

“Freddy saves the world, I save Freddy—or at least his job. For now. Once Freddy gets the bit between his teeth about something, he goes all macho, Pancho Villa, man-of-the-house and makes me crazy.”

Anna sat again and laid Helena on her lap. “Why would Freddy risk his job to talk against Judith Pierson?” she asked. “The closing of the border has been debated by everybody forever. Why make the big gesture now at what is, when you get right down to it, just a convention of academics?”

“It’s not just academics. These people are big deals in Texas. They’re teachers and university types but there’s a lot of clout up here this week. But mostly it’s because Freddy knows about Judith Pierson. If you listen to him, she’s the anti-Christ. He says if she gets into the governor’s house we’re going to have to move out of Texas. That’s a serious threat from Freddy. He’s never lived anywhere but Texas—except Mexico, where it’s so close it might as well be Texas. His mother brought him up in Texas.
The Alamo
was her favorite movie. He said she’d gather all the kids and grandkids and in-laws around every time it came on TV and she’d say the lines along with John Wayne.”

“I thought his mother was Mexican,” Anna said.

Lisa laughed. “She was. She said the movie was made up and she could like it if she wanted to and it was good about Texas. Freddy wanted to get her a VCR and a tape so she could watch it whenever she wanted, but then his sister died and his mom never got over it really. She didn’t live all that long after. The doctors said it was a brain aneurism but Freddy and his dad think it was a broken heart.”

“What happened to her?” Anna asked.

Lisa started as if the question had woken her out of a dream and she suddenly realized where she was. “Oh!” she said, and, “Oh. Gosh. It was a long time ago now. She died in a car accident, I think.”

As a liar Lisa was positively embarrassing.

Anna let it go for the moment. “So Freddy thinks Mayor Pierson is the devil incarnate,” she said.

Lisa was so grateful for the subject change she sprang panther-like upon the new topic. “We have relatives in Houston and Corpus Christi. My sister’s nieces on her husband’s side went to school with Judith. She was known as The Piranha in high school because she ate up everything that came near her: boyfriends, girlfriends, teachers. Anita—that’s my sister—said her niece said Judith rigged the election so she could be voted student body president then made sure she was on all the scholarship stuff so she could suck up to the various civic organizations that gave out that kind of thing. Made out like a bandit, I guess, but didn’t graduate with too many friends.

“My sister got to know her when she was on the city council and there was no love lost there. Judith was a climber. She’d grab on to any idea that was on the rise, not bother to do the work involved, take the credit if it worked and say she’d never been for it if it failed. She was quick to lay blame around too.

“Freddy and I met her just one time at a fundraiser. We rode my sister’s coattails in for the free food and champagne, something to do while we were visiting Houston is all. Judith had recently been elected mayor and was in full blow at the party since it was all cronies of hers. She got on a roll about how she was making Texas a shining example of an impermeable border, that she was going to keep the Mexicans and their dirty drug wars from threatening the good citizens of Texas if she had to build the wall with her own hands.

“She wanted to get going building her persona, be the aggressive woman who wasn’t too fancy to get her hands dirty. It was all hot air. Every waiter at the party was Mexican. The boy parking the fancy cars was Mexican. The caterer was Mexican and most of the hotel staff working the event were Mexican. If she closed even the borders of her own shindig her high-end contributors would have jumped ship. Those guys don’t want to clean their own toilets. Shoot, if she closed down the borders that tight, who would she get to build her wall? A bunch of boys from A&M?”

“Freddy didn’t take the hot air well?” Anna asked drily.

“Not so well,” Lisa said. “Since his sister—” She stopped herself and got suddenly very busy with Edgar, who was sound asleep and didn’t want to be tucked and jostled.

“‘ Since his sister died,’ was that what you were going to say?” Anna asked gently.

“He still has bad feelings about that,” Lisa mumbled.

“And after his sister died—in a motorcycle accident, you said?”

“I think so.” Lisa was so busy with Edgar’s blanket he was beginning to wake up and kick.

“After she died Freddy became politically active about the closing of the border between Big Bend and Mexico?”

Lisa gave up. Edgar was whimpering testily. She lifted him to her shoulder. “Why don’t you talk to Freddy about this?” she said helplessly.

“Freddy’s sister was named Gabriela, wasn’t she?”

Lisa nodded.

“She tried to cross the Rio Grande after the World Trade Center was bombed and border patrol turned her back. She lost her footing and she and the baby drowned?”

“Freddy went a little crazy. He wouldn’t stop looking until they found her body. After that, opening the border again kind of became a crusade with him.”

“Why didn’t he tell anyone she was his sister?” Anna asked.

Lisa sighed. For some, telling lies or evading the truth was easy. For Lisa it must have been a task that would have exhausted Sisyphus. In the short time she’d been trying to skirt around this truth she’d grown more drawn and haggard than the entire invasion of the baby snatchers had rendered her.

“Because she was a Mexican national,” Lisa said. “She was crossing the border illegally to have her child in America.”

“Freddy was ashamed of that?” Anna hadn’t known Freddy then but it seemed so out of character it was hard to believe he had changed so much.

“No. It was a long time ago. Freddy was on with the park like he’d always wanted to be. His mom and I talked him into leaving it alone.”

“Because if they looked too close . . .” Anna nudged.

“Freddy wasn’t a citizen when he got on with the park. He didn’t get citizenship until we got married. So he was a citizen when his sister died but Mama Martinez and I thought the park might fire him anyway, because he’d fooled them, fooled the authorities all his life.”

Anna nodded without speaking.

Of the many things bureaucrats could forgive, being made to look the fool was not among them.

J
udith was coming apart. The crying jag after Charles made his announcement hadn’t bothered Darden, except that Judith was in a lot of pain. She was given to outbursts of emotion, in private. High-strung, hard-driving people needed a safe place to vent. Darden had been the “safe” place for more than one big cheese. Men raged. Women raged and wept.

What was gnawing at him was her secrecy. Judith was keeping something from him.

He knew it the way wives know their husbands are running around on them. Darden was an expert on secrets. He’d kept the secrets of presidents and first ladies, ambassadors and their wives; once he even conspired with a presidential child to keep secret the fact that his presidential puppy had chewed the fringe of an historic White House rug. Some secrets invested one with a sense of hidden powers, some with a private delight, but most were akin to the Spartan boy’s fox; the closer they were held the more damage they did to the one holding them.

Judith’s was eating her alive. During breakfast with Anna Pigeon he could sense the cracks widening. Though Judith did a masterful job of hiding it, he suspected Anna had noticed her brittleness and he was positive Gerry had. Gerry missed very little. He could almost see her nose twitching as she munched her toast and jelly and she watched Judith the way a cat watches a bird hopping closer and closer on the windowsill.

Judith had been on her satellite phone most of the night after the rafting party was brought in from Santa Elena Canyon; he could hear her through the wall—not the words but the intensity with which they were spoken.

Then there was Kevin. Not twenty-four hours after demanding his head on a platter they had apparently patched up whatever had put her in a firing mood.