One Grave Less (18 page)

“What’s that?” said Rosetta.

“That’s what I’ve been trying to catch a glimpse of, to make sure we’re going in the right direction.”

“You have a compass,” said Rosetta.

“Yes, I do, but it’s good to double-check your compass. Sometimes things cause a compass not to give accurate readings. The hands can be a little bent and can stick, or we could be near a place where the ground contains a mineral called magnetite that throws off the reading. In Kentucky, where I grew up, my father and grandfather taught me how to navigate using the stars. Unfortunately, I’m now in a different hemisphere and the stars are different.”

“So you can’t find your way with the stars here?” said Rosetta.

“Oh, I think I can. I looked at the star charts before I came on vacation here,” she said. Maria turned on the light so Rosetta could see her point at the sky. “See those two bright stars there?” she said.

“Sort of,” said Rosetta.

“Those are Alpha and Beta Centauri. Alpha Centauri is the brightest star in this whole part of the sky. That makes it easy to find. And Beta Centauri is the second brightest. They are called pointer stars because, if you draw a line from Alpha Centauri—the really bright one—through Beta Centauri and keep on going with the line, it points to the Southern Cross.”

Maria drew a line in the sky with her finger. “Can you see that small cluster of five stars that’s shaped like a long diamond?”

“I don’t know,” said Rosetta.

Maria took a stick and drew the stars on the ground as they appeared in the sky.

“Look again now.”

“Yes, I see them. How does this help you find our way home?”

“We have to use a little geometry and a little imagination,” said Maria. She shined her light on the figure on the ground. “First we draw a short line between these two points on the diamond. That forms the arm of the cross. Then we draw a line from the top of the diamond—where Alpha and Beta Centauri are pointing—to the bottom tip of the diamond. That makes the cross. If you keep going in a straight line out the bottom of the cross, it points in the direction of the South Pole.

“The really neat thing is, if we make another cross using the line between the two pointer stars as the arm of the new cross . . .” She redrew the line in the dirt. “Then draw a line perpendicular to that one. That means like this.” Maria showed Rosetta with her two hands what perpendicular was. “That makes the new cross.”

“Okay. I think I see,” said the little girl.

“Good, smart girl. Now let’s draw that line out long, the way we did before, until it meets the line coming out the bottom of the Southern Cross. The point where those two lines cross each other is the South Pole. The opposite direction is north—the way we want to go.”

Maria did the geometry again in her head as she looked at the stars. She collected several sticks and arranged them on the ground so they made an arrow pointing due north.

“This way,” she said, “we can still see where north is tomorrow in the daylight. I’ll double-check it with the compass.”

Maria was hoping the impromptu lecture on the Southern Cross would help Rosetta not be afraid of the dark if she could see that darkness could help them find their way home. As brave as she was, Rosetta must have been afraid most of the time since the tragedy that separated her from Diane Fallon. There were so many things to be afraid of. Maria wanted to make one less for Rosetta.

“Now, let’s get back in the truck before the mosquitoes find us,” said Maria.

Maria arranged the best bedding for the two of them she could under the circumstances. She was leaning against the back of the seat with her long legs stretched out to the passenger side propped up on the box of edible supplies they had moved to the cab. She used some of the bolt of fabric for a pillow. Rosetta curled up next to her holding the backpack like a teddy bear and with some of the fabric folded into a pillow under her head on Maria’s lap.

“I’ll stay awake while you sleep,” said Rosetta.

“I think we’ll be fine here,” answered Maria.

“I’ll still stay awake.”

“Wake me if you hear anything you don’t like. Don’t go off by yourself.” Maria caressed her hair.

“I won’t,” she said.

Rosetta was silent. Maria listened to the sounds of the jungle. She thought she heard the cry of a jaguar. She closed her eyes.

“They came in the morning,” said Rosetta. Her voice was small and came with a tremor. “It was still dark and I was asleep in my room. When I heard the screaming and guns I hid in the closet. I was so scared. I kept thinking, what if Mama came back early and they got her.”

Maria stroked her cheek and hair. She said nothing, but reached and held her hand.

“The bad men searched all the rooms. They found me in the closet. I thought they were going to shoot me, but they grabbed me and took me outside with the other kids. I heard someone ask if he should kill us. That was when I heard the voice. I had heard it before . . . when he came to the mission before. He said it would be a waste. He had on a big hat and I couldn’t see his face, but I knew his voice. He had an accent like this.” Rosetta gave Maria a pretty good imitation of a British accent.

“He asked which one was Fallon’s stray cat. I didn’t know what he meant—then. I thought he was looking for a cat. We didn’t have one. One of the older kids pushed me toward them. The other kids began hitting on that kid for doing it and the bad men fired their guns in the air.”

Rosetta stopped talking. Maria heard her uneven breathing and felt a tear as she caressed Rosetta’s cheek.

“Did you know who the man was?” asked Maria.

“No. A lot of people visited the mission. But he was with an embassy man, I remember. Father Joe talked with him. So did Mama, and Uncle David and Uncle Greg—that’s what I called Mama’s friends. The bad man was tall, really tall, but I don’t think as tall as you, and he had blond hair. That’s all I remember about what he looked like. I was just a little kid. He took my shoes and my CD player. I guess he got it from my room. He said he was going to make a surprise for Mama with it. He told a man to cut my arm and put the blood on my shoes.” Rosetta rubbed her arm and whimpered. “It hurt and I cried. I wanted Mama. I want her so bad now.” Rosetta started crying.

Maria shifted her position and pulled Rosetta up into her arms, holding her tight.

“We’ll get you home to your mama, I promise.” She caressed her hair and kissed the top of her head. “You don’t have to talk about this anymore.”

Rosetta sniffed and Maria gave her one of the squares of fabric to blow her nose.

“I want to tell you all of it,” she said after a moment. “You said you need to know.”

Rosetta told Maria about the long truck ride with the other kids and how scared they all were. She told her about escaping at one of the stops. She was so small she rolled away from them into the brush when she was using the bathroom. She wasn’t sure they even knew she was gone. Rosetta told Maria about finding her way to a native village, where she was taken in by an old woman who knew jungle herbs and medicine plants. The old woman hid Rosetta when the men came looking. The villagers didn’t like the bad men and they didn’t give her away.

During the time with the old woman, Rosetta hatched the idea of finding her mother. The men had told her that Diane Fallon didn’t want her anymore, but she hadn’t believed them. Not really. The old woman died the next year and Rosetta finagled a trip to a large village where she got a job working for a couple. A place to stay for her. Cheap labor for them.

That was when Ariel became Rosetta to make herself disappear. She told Maria that she went from family to family, running away when she discovered that a family couldn’t help her, always looking for someone who could take her to Georgia, United States. She found that if she worked hard and always did a good job, they would give her more responsibility in the household—and that was her power. She told Maria that her idea was to find a rich family, but that never happened. It was always families like the one she worked for at the village where she met Maria. They were well off in their own little corner of the world, but actually rather poor.

The last family had her cook also for Julio and Patia, Maria’s kidnappers. That was how Rosetta came to know about the new woman prisoner. Rosetta always cooked the food for prisoners and she’d heard they had a woman named Diane Fallon. She had seen the person led in and knew she wasn’t her mother, but she also heard she was a bone woman from Georgia, United States. Rosetta had found someone who could take her home. She just needed a plan.

Rosetta’s voice faded so that Maria could barely hear her words, but all her hopes and fears came through clearly in her narrative.

“You are an amazing little girl,” said Maria. “Your mother is going to be so very proud of you.”

“We’ll find her, won’t we?” she said.

“Yes, we’ll find her,” said Maria. “I know where to find her.”

“You have a plan for how to get us to her?” asked Rosetta.

“I’m forming one,” she said.

“Good. You go to sleep and I’ll listen for trouble.”

Maria smiled and settled as comfortably as she could in the small cab of the truck. She listened to the jungle noise and thought about the things Rosetta had told her.

Julio had called himself a trip wire. He had been on the lookout for a forensic anthropologist from Georgia—apparently they thought Diane Fallon was the only one. Maria supposed that Patia figured working at an archaeological dig was a good place to keep a lookout. And it had paid off—or so they thought.

Patia and Julio were also looking out for anyone who asked about feathers and bones. Feathers and bones? What did that mean? What was it about feathers and bones? Bones she could guess—mass human burials, most likely, maybe—but feathers? Were those all the keywords that would trip the wire, or were there other things Julio and Patia were to look and listen for? And did any of this have anything to do with the massacre at the mission?

Did current events have anything to do with what Diane Fallon had been investigating? Maria had heard rumors that Fallon was collecting evidence of atrocities by a dictator she was trying to expose, and it was he who massacred the people at the mission. But then if that were the case, Rosetta’s narrative didn’t quite track. There was something missing.

It sounded like Father Joe discovered something so bad that he thought it would cost him his soul. Pretty tough thought for a priest.

And what was going to happen on the third of May,
tres de mayo
? Maria was sure that was what she had heard—the third of May.

Was there really a danger of going to an embassy? Which embassy? British? People from the UK weren’t the only ones who spoke with a British accent.

And speaking of accents, here they were, as nearly as she could tell, on the Brazilian side of the boarder with Peru, but everyone was speaking Spanish—no Portuguese. Was this some enclave of Spanish-speaking Brazilians? Some forgotten indigenous tribe? Or, perhaps, were they some group in exile? And who were these bad guys in make-shift uniforms? Bandits? The rag-tag remnants of a private army?

Thoughts flowed back and forth through her brain, like panning for gold, as she eventually drifted off to sleep.

The next awareness she had, it was late morning. She awoke to Rosetta patting her on the arm.

“I thought you needed sleep,” said Rosetta. “I need to go. I’ll stay near the truck.” She hopped out.

“I’m sure you were right about the sleep,” Maria called after her. “I feel better.”

Maria stretched and sat up straight. She was stiff and sore but surprisingly rested—and optimistic. She had slept hardly at all after she was kidnapped and she had been terrified the entire time. Some of that terror had left, taken away by the sandman. She rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands and blinked until the blur of sleep left.

“What do you say we eat something and get started?” she said, looking out the window. She decided to wait until after breakfast to try starting the truck. If she were to be disappointed, she wanted it to be on a full stomach.

Her gaze rested on the huge mound of dirt and brush they had parked behind. But that wasn’t what it was.

“Stay here,” she told Rosetta.

Maria walked to the mound and began climbing up the steep bank of brush and rock until she got to the top. She looked out over the huge burned-off clearing that covered, she guessed, over a hundred acres. She saw several giant earthworks, ruins of rock structures, wide lines scarring the ground, all in a pattern. Maria knew all of the major Incan ruins that had been discovered. This one wasn’t on the list. Apparently it had been uncovered by the fire. It was huge, larger than any of the others that were known. And the fire hadn’t even uncovered all of it. She saw ruins leading into the unburned jungle.

Here she was, an archaeologist in the middle of an undiscovered lost city, and she had no camera and no time. She didn’t even have a notebook.

Diane was stunned.

“Now I’m an internationally hunted murderer? How the hell did I fall to such depths?”

Gregory didn’t answer. His fingers were clicking away at the keyboard, looking for more information.

They both stared at the final window he pulled up. There was her picture and her last known address. It was the wrong address, thank God—the apartment she had lived in before she moved in with Frank. There were also the names and pictures of the four men she supposedly had murdered. She stared wide-eyed at the screen.

“Well, this is just bloody ridiculous,” said Gregory.

He flipped through a black notebook sitting next to the computer.

“You remember Cameron. Cameron Michaels,” he said, with a quick motion of his finger toward his desktop.

Diane looked at Gregory’s notes spread out on the desk. Cameron Michaels had a wiggly circle around his name and was connected to the two of them with a straight line and to Father Joseph and Oliver Hill with a dotted line. Straight line meant professional relationship, dotted meant social. If she remembered correctly, Cameron had played the Chinese game of Go with Father Joe and Oliver—a game Diane didn’t really understand. Her preference was chess.