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Raquel and the girls will wait for three fretful days before they report Billy missing. He has never gone away for more than a day without telling her in advance, never, and has never been gone more than a day without calling her. The police will issue a bulletin and promise to keep an eye out, but after another week, and knowing the utter incompetence of the local cops, Raquel will hire private detectives in Matamoros to try to find him, and then engage the services of even more expensive investigators from Monterrey. Both companies will exploit her hope with false reports of possible leads, billing her steadily, until the daughters lose all patience with them and fire both firms and threaten legal action if they submit even one more invoice. Neither the girls nor their mother ever knew the particulars of Señor Calderas’s or Billy Capp’s private enterprises, but none of them are fools and they have always suspected that many of the men’s dealings were of an illegal nature involving dangerous people. Still, they keep hoping for word from him or about him, but when he has been unheard from for six months, the daughters accept that he is dead and put on mourning dress. So, too, their mother, although for the rest of her life—another four years, before she succumbs to breast cancer—she will harbor a secret hope and wake every morning with the thought, This is the day he will return.

After two weeks without word from or about him, Quino’s only certainty regarding Axel is that he was not captured by police. Had he been, it would have made the news. Cacho bets that he has returned to his family. Quino accepts the bet and sends his best men to Brownsville. Days later they report that Axel Prince Wolfe is not living with any of his family, nor has anyone claimed to have seen him in either Matamoros or Brownsville. Quino and Cacho agree that he is either dead or, for whatever reason, has gone somewhere else and deliberately chosen not to come back.

Why did he go, you think? Cacho says at the breakfast table.

Quino shrugs. Something personal, I would suppose.

Wish he had let us in on it.

So do I. But as you know, he was one for keeping secrets.

Cacho nods. Yeah. Had some funny ways. Ran in the family, he told me.