Vivian Divine Is Dead (12 page)

Chapter Seventeen

I’
VE BEEN FOLLOWING THE BUTT
of the horse for over two hours, cursing myself for ever leaving L.A. in the first place, when we finally reach the top of the mountain.
If our bus hadn’t broken down, I’d be safe with Roberto by now. But then I never would have met Nick, who can make me tingle just by looking at me. If he’s even still alive.

Below us, rows of whitewashed buildings, dug out of the rock face, shine under a sky thickening with stars. Dark mist clings to the surrounding mountain cliffs. On the far side of the village is a black drop-off, a giant crater in the mountainside. It’s dotted with tiny lights, like stars fallen to earth.

“Welcome to Rosales,” Isabel says. She takes Tenorio’s reins and leads him down the hill, and I follow, feeling pleasantly removed from the world up here. I try to memorize the small streets, the heavy mist, the smell of fried food, Isabel’s long black braids waving in the breeze. It’s almost peaceful.

Peace never lasts as long as I’d like. Before I know it, my massage is over, my spa day has ended, and my feeling of relaxation slips away. But this is like smashing peace until it shatters through me like splinters. Because as I step off the hillside, into the street, the world explodes with sound.

A band pushes past me, trombones wailing in my ears, drums pounding so hard they make my heart beat faster. Skeletons swirl around me, their sinister faces pressing in on me; red devils writhe across the pavement; black-shrouded skulls grin at me maniacally.

Isabel reaches into one of the saddlebags on Tenorio’s back. “Try this on,” she says, handing me a mask draped with several inches of white lace. “It was Paloma’s.”

An unsettled feeling creeps over me, and I suddenly realize Abuelita was right when she called me an
angelita
. In Paloma’s dress and mask, I must look like her from head to ankle; my sneakers are the only thing left of the real me. It’s like I’ve finally disappeared—completely.

“I’m glad you’re here,” Isabel says, and I wonder if she’s glad because I’m a stand-in for her missing niece.

“Me too,” I say, realizing I don’t care, because in a way, Isabel’s a stand-in too, for the mom that died and took part of me with her.

Once the parade passes, Isabel leads Tenorio out into the middle of the narrow street. I follow her, thinking about what a crew we must make: a horse dying on its feet, a middle-aged weaver, and me—a hunted movie star, probably being watched right now.

I glance around at the groups of people lingering in front of houses, expecting to see the barrels of guns poking out through corner windows. Instead, pasted up in each window is a red-and-black poster of a man and woman in a passionate embrace, with the words “
Don Juan Tenorio
” written underneath.

“People come from all over the country to see it,” Isabel says. “
Don Juan
used to be performed every Day of the Dead in towns across the country. Most of them have lost the tradition, but Marcos has kept this one alive,” she adds. “Have you heard of it?”

I nod. “Vaguely.”
If vaguely means every line in the script, backward and forward.
I suddenly miss the back lot, the lights and the hassle and the scripts. I even miss Pierre and his cocky attitude, and Mary constantly in my shadow, and Dad’s stupid angel T-shirts.
Maybe they’re kinda cool, after all.

We turn a corner into a cobblestone plaza. It’s packed with food stands selling tamales, hot chocolate, and vats of fried grasshoppers. Their little bodies jump as they’re fried. Kids in costumes run ahead of us, their laughter ringing off the buildings. The smell of chocolate is thick in the air.

“The children’s parade’s about to start,” Isabel says, tying Tenorio to a fence on the edge of the square, lined with a dozen other horses.

I watch the kids bunched together at a roped-off entrance to the square. It looks like Halloween in L.A.: kids dressed as ghosts, superheroes, even a little bride.

“Cute bride,” I say, pointing to the girl in a white dress and veil.

“She’s not a bride,” Isabel says. “She’s Dona Blanca, the Girl in White. The myth says that Dona Blanca dances with the best-looking boy in town, but when he brags about it, everyone says he was dancing alone. He realizes she’s a ghost, and that death has come for him.”

I look closer at the little girl in the Dona Blanca costume. She’s pulling at her veil, trying to straighten it, when the lace lifts off her face.

It’s the girl from the truck.

Chapter Eighteen

I’
M SHOCKED BY HOW HAPPY
I am to see her.
She’s safe. I’ll never find her dead in a field because of me
. Tension falls off my body in waves.
And maybe she’s even seen Nick!
“I have to talk to that girl,” I say, and dash across the square before Isabel can follow.

Ducking under the rope into the crowd of children, I feel like I’ve just landed in Peter Pan’s Neverland. Children swarm around my knees, giggling and singing. Plump mothers bicker over their kids—adjusting collars, spitting on their hands to rub chocolate off little faces.

“Hey, you! Little girl!” I yell, pushing through the miniature crowd until I’m standing next to her. “I have Honey,” I say.

The girl looks up, and I’d recognize that smile with the missing front teeth anywhere. Then I lean down and take off my mask. Her smile dies instantly, and her lower lip starts to quiver. She dashes away from me, pushing through the waist-high crowd.

“Wait!” I run after her, a giant in a sea of midgets. When I catch up to her at the back of the parade, she hunches over like a cornered animal, tears gathering on her cheeks.
Why is she so scared?

“Honey is alive,” I say, but she just stares at me, confused. “Baaa,” I say, and give her a thumbs-up.

She breaks into a huge smile. “Okay?”

“Okay,” I assure her.
Now for the serious sign language.
I point at the girl and say, “Have you?” Then I touch the corner of my eye and say, “Seen?” I pause. She looks at me curiously. I’m not sure what to do next, so I put my hand to my heart and say, “Nick?”

She shakes her head.

“Oh,” I sigh, disappointed.
What did I expect?
She’d point across the square and there he’d be, waiting for me with open arms, when he’s probably dead in a bush on the side of the road?

She points to me now, and then to her masked face.
I guess it’s her turn to play this game.
The little girl pulls her mask off. She has a long red cut down the side of her face.

I get chill bumps up the back of my neck.
Did Scars do this to her?
My cheek burns as I imagine a knife ripping through her skin, scarring her forever.
Was it because of me?

“Who did that to you?” I ask.

She tilts her head as if she’s waiting for the Spanish version to fall out of the sky and into her ear. I crouch down in front of her and point to my face. Then I draw a moon-shaped line from my forehead to my chin, just like hers.

“No,” she says, shaking her head and looking into the crowd nervously, where her mom is pushing frantically through the other mothers.

“You can’t tell me?”

The little girl glances at her mom, and then she gets that devilish gleam kids get when they know they’re doing something wrong. Her hair tickles my cheek as she leans in closely and whispers in my ear: “
La Familia de Muerta.
”

La what?

Before I can think of more sign language, her mom’s hand closes around her tiny arm. The mom glares at me, her eyes narrowing into thin slits of red-hot anger.

“
¡Déjanos en paz!
” she shrieks. I flinch as her breath washes over me, a mix of coffee and bitter chilies. As the other mothers turn to glare at me, I slink away, wishing I could just disappear.

Then someone blows a horn to start the parade, and the mothers quickly lose interest. Only one person is left staring at me, her mouth hanging open in surprise: Isabel.

Isabel wades through the kids in costumes, the weaving tucked tightly under her arm. “How do you know that girl?” Isabel asks, squinting at me like she’s trying to figure out a complicated crossword puzzle.

The children’s parade is partway across the square by now. The mothers are running ahead, trying to keep the kids in line as they march in a large circle around the square.

“When the bus broke down, we hitched a ride in her family’s truck.”

“We?”

“My friend. He helped me after my bag was stolen.”

“Where is he now?” Isabel asks.

I shake my head. “I don’t know. He was just . . . gone. I wish . . .”
I wish he were alive now, charming people with his sly smile and his huge, well-hidden heart
. “I wish that girl knew where he was. But she just muttered something in Spanish.”

“What did she say?”

“La Familia de Muerta
.
”

Isabel chokes on my words. “What did you say?”

Before I can answer, ten-foot-tall skeletons hobble toward me, carrying a giant coffin. “
La Familia de Muerta
,” I say, ducking under the coffin so it doesn’t whack me in the head. I glance straight up into the gaping eye sockets of a skeleton, peering down at me through the glass bottom of the coffin.

“We can’t talk here,” Isabel says. She pushes her way through the crowd, and I try to follow, but a cart dangling with ceramic skeletons stops abruptly in front of me. The skeletons’ limbs run into each other, their bones clattering like funeral bells. An old woman thrusts a skeleton in my face, its bobbing head nearly amputated off its fragile neck.

“
¿Cómprelo?
” she asks.

I shake my head and push past her, spotting Isabel turning off the main square. I cut into the alley, and quite suddenly, we’re alone.

Away from the crowds, the darkness is unsettling. The smell of the lake is stronger here, a mix of fish and kerosene.

I rub Paloma’s white lace mask nervously between my fingers. I know I should put it on, but it’s itchy, and I can’t see out of it anyway. “What are we doing here?” I ask. “Waiting for muggers?”

“La Familia de Muerta is the most powerful mafia in Mexico,” Isabel whispers. “Maybe the world. They’re based in this region, but they’ve never been arrested, because they own the police.” Isabel looks around nervously, and then leans in closely to whisper in my ear. “Nobody messes with them, or they’re found with their throat slit on the side of the road.”

I shudder at the memory of butterfly wings on the FBI agent’s dead eyes. I can still smell his sweet, rotting stench, and I almost gag. “Why do they kill people?”

“Because they feel betrayed or lied to, or because someone discovered one of their smuggling routes. They smuggle everything illegal: drugs, weapons, people.”

“People?”

“Kidnapping. They even kidnapped the daughter of our last president,” Isabel says, her eyes wide. “They can get to anybody.”

A few minutes later, my heart is pounding a thousand miles an hour as we wind through the tiny streets toward the lake.
Anybody. They can get to anybody.
With every step closer to the dock, the aroma gets stronger, until the heavy kerosene scent slowly mixes with the smell of bleach and dead fish. Isabel refuses to say anything else, murmuring how “anybody could be listening.”

When we finally reach the harbor, I’m relieved to be surrounded by people, sound, even piles of dead fish, although the odor is suffocating. Despite the smell, the harbor is lovely: just a small wooden boardwalk crowded with villagers, all dressed in bleached white clothing. I feel like I’m in a laundry detergent commercial.

“Why are they all wearing white?” I ask Isabel, glad to have something safe to talk about.

“Most of the natives are indigenous. That’s all they wear.”

Only one outfit? How surprisingly hassle free
. Just white.
I think I’ll wear white today.

On the dark lake, fishing boats, their beige butterfly nets covering the water like giant hearts, mingle with tiny wooden canoes and larger passenger boats. I can’t help but marvel at the beauty of it all: the white of the clothing, the black of the water, the swaying of the wooden oars in the lake, the kerosene lamps burning on the sides of the boats.

“That’s Isla Rosales,” Isabel says, pointing to an island in the middle of the lake. White houses climb up from the shore in uneven rows around a white marble staircase, disappearing into the star-strewn sky. “The cemetery’s at the top,” she says, pointing to where the moon is hanging in a glowing ball above the island. “That’s where we’re headed.”

“Do we have to go to the cemetery? Can’t we just deliver the weaving to Marcos, and find out if he knows anything?”

“He won’t be here until tomorrow, like the rest of the men,” Isabel says, shifting the bags to her other shoulder and tucking the weaving under her arm like buried treasure. “Tonight we spend the night in the cemetery with our loved ones.”

I’d refuse to go to the island at all, but the thought of finding Roberto is enough to keep my legs moving.
The quicker I find him, the better. Because as soon as I find Roberto, he’ll confront Marcos about Mom’s earring, help me find Nick, and this whole stupid mess will be over. And not a moment too soon.

Seagulls sweep down over our heads as a fishing boat pulls up to the dock, loaded with live squirming fish. “
Boletos! Boletos!
” fishermen call, pulling their boats up to the dock and gesturing for us to choose between them. In the dark night, the kerosene lamps on the boats’ hulls glimmer like fireflies.

“I’ll buy tickets,” Isabel says, ignoring the fishermen and walking toward a little wooden shack with the sign: “
Boletos
.”

My mind is whirling as I look around me: in the light of a rusty streetlamp, there’s an old man selling candy skeletons, towers of bird cages balancing on a bicycle, little girls licking chocolate off their fingers, their braids almost reaching the ground. I glance back at Isabel, who’s now at the
boletos
shack, haggling with a boatman for tickets.

“Ines.” The word is whispered so softly I think it’s the wind. But then I hear it again: “Ines.”

I look out at the boats bobbing in the water. There are men chanting the price of a trip across the lake, people climbing into boats, their white clothes dipping in the water, an old man smoking a pipe, and him.

Nick.