The Altogether Unexpected Disappearance of Atticus Craftsman (5 page)

With this hope visible in the form of a smile from ear to ear, he went out into the street and began walking.

CHAPTER 7

B
erta Quiñones, the poor thing, hadn't slept a wink all night. She had been up since six in the morning, passing the time until it was late enough to call the girls, thinking about how she was going to give them the bad news, while she did the laundry, mopped the kitchen floor, watered the plants, and vacuumed the carpet.

This wasn't her normal Sunday routine. Berta was the polar opposite of a compulsive cleaner. When she didn't have to go to work, she forgot about everything and everyone, stayed in bed well into the morning, alone and relaxed and happy. Then she would make milky coffee, go out to the balcony, treat the empty street to one of her best yawns, and spend the rest of the morning reading novels.

In her case, solitude had been a conscious and appropriate choice. Of course, like all literary spinsters, in her youth she too had lived her very own story of unrequited love. You bet. The truth was—and Berta felt somewhat ashamed when she admitted it to herself—that the boy of her dreams never even suspected that Berta loved him. They never exchanged a single word. They saw each other only from a distance and he lifted his head to
look at her only once in the five years that the romance lasted, so in all likelihood he never gave a single thought to the girl with messy braids and glasses whom he once caught looking at him from the balcony of her house, the first in the village, opposite the telegraph office.

Because she didn't dare ask him his name, she borrowed a hero's name for him: Robin, like the prince of thieves who stole from the rich to give to the poor. She also invented a soft voice, expert hands, bravery worthy of a fictional character, smooth lips, long kisses, and a clearing in the woods where she could love him, in secret, far from the curses of witches or the spells of fairies.

Robin used to arrive with the mailbags promptly every morning at eight o'clock. Berta would be waiting for him, curled up at the small window in the attic room, two dreamy eyes behind her glasses, and would watch as he stopped the small Citroën—a white steed covered in dents—next to the post office. He would go in, come out, rev up, speed off.

Berta would feel her heart exploding and have to stay still for a few minutes until her legs stopped trembling and she was able to gather the strength to stand up, collect her books from the floor, and run down the stairs, out into the street, and all the way to the square, where her schoolmates would be waiting for the teacher with their homework ready.

Her mother complained that she had her head in the clouds. “Quite the contrary, Mrs. Quiñones,” the teacher assured her. Berta's head was anywhere but in the clouds.

She was a walking library. She had read so many books, had dreamed so much, had imagined Robin so many times as the protagonist of those wonderful stories that fiction and reality had become muddled.

She was given a grant to go and study in Madrid: documentary maker cum laude, philologist, doctor of literature and language teacher, a genius.

Six years later, when Mr. Bestman, Craftsman & Co.'s development director, interviewed her in an elegant office, he spent a long while examining her CV. He asked her three or four trick questions: What did she think of Harold Pinter? Had she read Yeats? What was her opinion on the Latin American boom and its twenty-first-century legacy. “Do you think that Mario Vargas Llosa will one day be awarded the Nobel Prize?”

After half an hour of intense conversation with the Englishman, Berta became the brand-new editor of
Librarte
magazine. She left her work at the university library and reached the conclusion that you never know what life will throw at you.

By then she had turned fifty and lost all hope of crossing paths again with Robin who, according to a friend, had disappeared from the village with three million pesetas' worth of stamps, the dirty thief, and the telegraph operator's daughter, the filthy whore. She remembered the sweet-and-sour mixture of fear and happiness she had felt on her first day at
Librarte
's small office: the sense of expectation before she met her colleagues, those four women with whom she would share both joy and pain, midmorning coffees, the pitfalls of daily work, successes, failures, and—why not?—maybe even true friendship that extended beyond the office. On her way to work, she bought four potted dwarf roses and placed them next to the four computers on the four desks in the main room with little labels that said
WELCOME TO YOUR NEW HOME
.

The office, ninety square meters on the top floor of an old building on Calle Mayor in the city's historic center, had previously been
the home of a romantic young couple—Berta guessed this as soon as she saw the way the light filtered in through the lace curtains. As well as a tiny office that used to be a bedroom—you could still make out the shadow of a headboard, a gray outline on the white wall—there was a square room with two windows, which now contained four desks facing each other in pairs, a corridor that led to an old-fashioned bathroom with a built-in bath, and an ancient kitchen, no more than a cubbyhole but it was still in good use, with the kind of stove and oven her grandmother used to have.

Apart from the desks, the only furniture was a pine bookshelf, still empty, and a formidable photocopier, the size of a fridge, which took up most of the wall space next to the door. Maybe a nice colored throw, thought Berta, or a crocheted cloth with tasseled edges, might disguise it as a side table.

Soleá had been the first to arrive.

“Soledad?” Berta had asked her as she hesitated between a warm kiss on the cheek or a firm handshake.

“It's Soleá, like the kind of singing,” she had replied in an accent that conjured up her native Andalusia: Granada, the Albaicín neighborhood, her family's whitewashed house, a garden of wild oleander, steep streets.

She was very young, very petite, very tanned. She had recently finished her degree in journalism, and she wanted to conquer the world.

“One day I'll write a novel,” she told Berta. “I've got the plot, I just need to get my ideas straight and focus a bit, Berta, because this huge city still makes my head spin.”

Then came María. She arrived with a worry clinging to her chest.

“This is my daughter,” she said. “Her name's Lucía and I promise I won't bring her to work again.”

But she did bring her again, she certainly did, in a cot, in her stroller, with a fever, with a cough. Lucía became another member of the team, like the office mascot. Berta installed a white rocking chair for her in the corner of her own office. In the little kitchen, they heated up bottles and purées; in winter they knitted her pink scarves. One year later, María announced that she was expecting twins. She was off work for six months because she spent the last two months of her pregnancy in bed, at risk of going into labor prematurely, but Lucía still occupied her space, her rocking chair, her corner. Almost every morning, at nine o'clock sharp, Lucía's father, Bernabé, would arrive carrying her, knock on the door, swear to Berta that he was going to get someone to help, that it would be the last day he left Lucía with them, that he knew that she ran a serious office, not a nursery, but there he would be again the next day.

Manolito and Daniel weighed five and a half pounds each when they were born. They wouldn't feed, they became lactose intolerant, and they caught chicken pox two weeks after Lucía, which meant a whole month of spots and tears, calamine lotion, antihistamines, scabs, and itches. They swapped the rocking chair for a mattress. Berta had to step over the children in order to sit down at her desk. That was when she found she had an incredible aptitude for singing as she worked and telling stories between invoices.

“If we women don't help out one another, who knows who'll help us,” she repeated as a mantra to appease her colleagues' complaints.

The third to arrive was Asunción. She was huge, and on a diet.

She greeted them all with a hug, and the first thing she said to
them, before sitting down at her desk, was that she didn't have a health problem or diabetes or any of that. It was the menopause, which had hit her something chronic, and the hot flashes were killing her.

The last to arrive was Gabriela. Please, call me Gaby, you know, like the clown. She was the only one to notice the flowers.

“You're in love, my girl.”

“Stupidly in love. Up to my eyeballs.”

They all went to her wedding, eight months after the magazine launched.

Gaby in radiant white, the gorgeous groom, the church full of flowers. Lucía carried the
arras
, thirteen coins the groom would give to his bride, and Asunción caught the bouquet.

“You next, Asunción.”

“God help me,” she said, flushed. “I've already been married and divorced.”

•  •  •

The last six years had flown by. Berta turned off the vacuum cleaner, washed her coffee cup, sat down at one end of the sofa, and picked up the phone. Remembering that first morning, she called them in the order they had arrived: Soleá, María, Asunción, and Gaby, her best friends. She couldn't put it off any longer, she had to give them the news.

“I know it's Sunday,” she said to all four in the same apologetic tone, “but we need to have a meeting. Come to the office at eleven. No, María, this time you can't bring the kids.”

CHAPTER 8

A
few days after the unsettling call from Inspector Manchego, Marlow Craftsman decided that, much to his regret, it was time to tell Moira that their son had been missing for three months. He had put off telling her up until then because he still harbored hope that the issue would be resolved before Christmas. That was looking increasingly unlikely. Whenever Moira asked how Atticus was getting on in Spain, Marlow would reply with something like, “Fine, dear, just fine.” And because he was a man of few words, she would be satisfied, roll over in bed, and fall fast asleep.

Only when November came and she began the torturous preparations for Christmas did Moira become more insistent. She wanted details.