“WHAT DID she say?” Haagen asked.
Detective Nuñes—a first-generation American whose accent told me her family came from the north—gave me a sad look, as if she hated to betray one of her own.
“She said there’s something sinister here.”
“Sinister? Sinister how?”
I pretended not to understand. Nuñes translated. I sat back, looked over the dreary, windowless room: a scratched-up metal desk, hard-backed plastic chairs, surveillance cameras in every corner, those fluorescent lights that look like ice cube trays. How in the world did I end up here? I wondered.
“I’m the victim,” I said. “You have no right to keep me.”
“Ah, you do speak English.” Haagen smiled. “Maybe you should tell us how you’re the victim when Anthony Costello’s the one in the morgue?”
I thought it over. There was a phrase I copied maybe a hundred times in my high school English class: “The truth will set you free.”
“How far back do you want me to go?” I asked.
“However far you need, just so long as you tell us everything you know about Anthony’s murder.”
I went back a full year.
We were standing outside the upstairs guest bathroom. Me and Tony. Usually he liked the help to call him Mr. Costello, but when I first got here, the double ls came out a y. He said it made me sound like a cartoon. The th in Anthony wasn’t any easier, so we settled on Tony.
“How many times do I have to tell you?” he asked, holding up a green hand towel with a small soap ring in the middle.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “It won’t happen again.”
“I wish I could believe that. Once more, and I start docking your pay. Now get out of here. Go find something to clean downstairs.”
I turned to walk away. Dressing me down was nothing new. I hardly even noticed anymore. But this was the first time he’d threatened me. Soap washes out. That’s the point of soap. But when the towels cost six hundred dollars per set, they aren’t towels anymore: they’re little museum pieces that no one should touch.
“Hold on,” he called after me. “We need to talk about that vaccination. Did you make an appointment like I asked?”
I searched for a white lie but came up empty.
“I was going to do that later,” I said.
“Later? I asked you weeks ago. I told you it was a priority. For your visa, but also for my health. This is my busy season. I can’t afford to be getting sick.”
“I understand.”
“You can’t afford for me to be sick. You think Anna will pay your salary?”
I shook my head.
“Wait here a second,” he said.
He stepped into the bathroom, came back holding up a pill bottle in one hand and a cup of water in the other.
“Normally I wouldn’t share these, but since you work under my roof, giving one to you is the same as giving one to me. An ounce of prevention.”
“What are they?”
“The next best thing to vaccination. They prevent colds, the flu, pneumonia—you name it. Now come take one.”
The question I was too afraid to ask: If you’re already taking them, then how can I get you sick?
“I’ll go to a clinic tomorrow,” I said.
“Sorry,” he said. “You had your chance.”
That was a lie. He hadn’t talked to me about this weeks ago, like he claimed. He’d mentioned it in passing the day before, at breakfast.
He had me follow him into the bathroom, then watch as he took two pills and mashed them down to powder with the end of a toothbrush. Then he brushed the powder into the cup, swished the water around, and handed the cup to me.
“Here,” he said. “The medicine makes its way through your system more rapidly once it’s dissolved.”
What choice did I have? My visa, my livelihood—everything depended on this man. I didn’t even have enough money for a flight home. I took the cup, tried to hide the fact that my hand was shaking. He smiled as I drank it down.
“Very good,” he said. “Very good.”
It wasn’t until later that I realized this was a trial run. He wanted to see if the taste of the drink would make me gag or grimace. It didn’t. It tasted like nothing. That pleased him.
“Go on, now,” he said. “I think there’s some broken glass in the game room. Anna was stumbling around drunk last night, as usual.”
I didn’t feel dizzy right away, or if I did, then I don’t remember it. I only remember waking up eight hours later, lying fully clothed on top of the covers in one of the guest bedrooms, with no sense of how I got there. My head was aching. I thought I might vomit. Then I looked over and saw him, standing in the corner and buttoning up his shirt.
It took me two tries to push myself off the bed. The exhaustion felt like a weight pinning me to the mattress. I turned my back to Tony, smoothed out the duvet, then started for the door. He stepped in front of me.
“You’re lucky,” he said. “You know that, right?”
I nodded, kept my eyes on the floor.
“Tell me why you’re lucky.”
I shrugged. All I wanted was to get away from him.
“You see, I hate it when you do that. Why do you nod like a sheep when in fact you have no idea what I’m talking about?”
I didn’t say anything.
“You’re lucky because I didn’t write you up. Normally, when you make one of your patented blunders, I write a little note and stick it in your file. That file will follow you wherever you choose to go in this country. That’s how it works here. Do you understand?”
I said I did.
“You understand that I’ve been very nice to you? That I’ve given you a break?”
I knew what he was really asking. He was asking if I was going to tell anyone about the “vaccination.” He was asking if I planned to report him.
“You are very nice to me,” I said. “Thank you for being so nice.”
He let me pass. I got as far as the front gate before I started retching. When I was finished, I wiped my mouth with my sleeve and kept walking to the highway. On the bus ride home, I made a vow never to return to that place again.