Chapter 19

Columbia to the U.S.A.

Rose stayed with Adrienne until she regained consciousness. She had found some bottled water in the Jeep, and with some tissues had wiped the blood off her mother’s face.

“Rose, are you alright?” Adrienne said with panic. “Where is Bella? Where is my little girl?” She looked around the jeep and saw nothing but the dead body of the driver in the road up ahead.

“Mother, he took Bella. He dragged her by her hair and threw her into the back of the truck. It was so horrible.” She cried and put her head down into Adrienne’s lap. Adrienne stroked her hair and hugged her.

“Listen, Rose, we have to get out of here. Are the keys still in the Jeep?”

They opened the driver’s side door and saw keys were still in the ignition.

“Get in Rose. Get in.”

Adrienne slammed the door, turned the key and hit her foot to the gas pedal. She was used to driving around the plantation, but not small dirt jungle roads when the light was slipping away. Yet, she could do this. If she had had to pick a tattoo back at the shop, she would have picked the dragonfly. In Asian cultures it represented courage and strength and that’s what Adrienne possessed now.

When they reached the plantation and drove in through the gate, Alberto was immediately alerted. He had expected them home a little earlier, and was about to send out some of his men to look for them.

Adrienne exploded from the Jeep, caught her breath and ran up to her uncle.

“He took her. He just took her,” she shouted and broke down crying.

“What do you mean?” Alberto said, “Who took who?” As he looked toward the Jeep he could only see Rose. Bella was missing. There was no security driver either.

“Tell me everything,” shouted Alberto. “Everything.”

She told him all about the outing, everything but the part about the tattoo parlor. That was her secret with the girls. Then she told him what happened when they were stopped in the road. She could barely get the word “gunshot” off her tongue.

He moved Rose and Adrienne into the house.

“Stay here. Do you understand? I want you to stay in the house.”

Alberto went outside and got into his truck and drove off toward the smaller houses that were contained within the Compound. Adrienne closed the curtain and went to find Rose who was on the bed in her room with the covers pulled over her head. Adrienne went to lie down next to her and gather her in her arms.

“Shush, shush, I’m going to get you out of this place. I will keep you safe. You have suffered enough in one short life.” She stroked Rose’s hair and snuggled close to her.

“Ouch,” cried Rose.

“I’m sorry,” said Adrienne, “what’d I do?”

“My hip is sore, that’s all. From the tattoo,” said Rose.

“Of course, I’ll be careful,” said Adrienne hugging her ever more tightly.

Neither one of them felt like eating even though their last meal had been hours before while they were touring the town. Instead they just lay there quietly in the bed together. The two of them fell asleep until the next morning when the sun crept in through the curtains and tapped them on their brow.

They both got up from the bed and headed into the kitchen, still dressed in their clothes from the day before. Alberto was sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee. He looked up from his newspaper when he heard them walk in. His face looked tired, and he had stubble over his chin and below his nose. There were dark circles under his eyes.

“Adrienne, my men are out looking for Bella. You understand why I can’t ask the police to help. I swear to you that when I catch that bastard, I will personally slit his throat.” He turned to Rose.

“Rose, I am going to get you out of Colombia. I’ll send you someplace safe.”

“And Mother is coming with me. She can’t stay here. She’s coming with me,” Rose pleaded.

“Perhaps later,” he said with uncertainty. “Can either of you tell me what he looked like?”

Rose jumped right in. “He was a stocky man wearing dark coveralls, like they wear in a garage. He had short dirty blond hair, with a slightly receding hairline and dark gray eyes. He had big feet too and spoke with an accent. I could recognize him again if I saw him. I know I could.”

Adrienne swallowed hard. She had seen his eyes too, and she had seen them once fourteen years before. It was the steely gray eyes. They had unending depth; they were bottomless and soulless.

Her uncle knew too just by reading Adrienne’s face. No words were necessary. Her body said it all.

“Rose, go to your room. I want to talk with your mother,” said Alberto standing up and towering over her. His voice sounded tired, but firm. Rose obeyed and went directly to the room she shared with Bella. She was worried about Bella, and now her uncle was planning on sending her away. It was the unraveling of her second family.

“Adrienne, you and Rose are in danger here. I’ll make plans to send Rose to a boarding school in the United States. Maybe now is the time for you to go back to France.”

“But why can’t Rose and I stay together? Why must we be pulled apart?

“I just think it’s safer if we hide Rose at a boarding school. We’ll send her along first. I have to make arrangements to get her a passport. I’ll send you back to Reims. It’s been your wish for these last, what, almost twenty years. Your mother, my only sister, is frail and could use your help. I need to take on these Russian bastards, alone. They have plagued the coffee plantation long enough.”

“It’s more than coffee beans, isn’t it uncle?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know exactly what I mean,” Adrienne said with some force. “I really don’t believe for one minute that this is all about the coffee plantation. I’ve lived here for seventeen years and I’m not blind. I think you have other businesses which are why those American researchers were murdered many years ago and the Russians want some of whatever else you have to offer.”

“Adrienne, I will make all the arrangements tomorrow. Help Rose pack and make her understand that you, that we, love her.”

* * *

It was several days before Alberto had all the preparations in order. There had been no news on Bella. He had men scouring the countryside and nearby towns looking for her and the Russian. She had simply vanished. Multiple times during the last ten years, it had been brought to his attention that the Russian had been monitoring the activity at the plantation, and his daughter. Alberto had not taken the threat seriously, until now. He obtained a passport for Rose from the Black Market and used Bella’s birthdate and Adrienne’s last name for her documents.

Alberto personally took Rose to the airport after she engaged in a very tearful good-bye with Adrienne and a promise that they would be together in the future. Rose boarded a plane for Boston and soon would be a new student at a prestigious boarding school in Wellesley, Massachusetts. She may have been a year too young to enter the ninth grade, since they didn’t know her true birthdate, but with some “donation” money that Alberto contributed, and the fact that Rose was so far ahead in her studies in Colombia, she was allowed to grace the halls without issue.

The change in venue was very difficult for Rose. She went from living in virtual isolation except for her mother and sister and the plantation workers to living in a dormitory with many other girls. Psychologically she was in pain. She spent many nights crying in her bed until her suite mates reported her to the house mother who in turn sent her to the school psychologist.

Rose had few early memories of her life. Adrienne had seen to that. All she could tell the psychologist was that she missed her mother and her sister, and even her great-uncle. The psychologist recommended that she get involved in the horseback riding program that the school offered. This seemed agreeable to Rose who loved animals and had ridden regularly on the plantation. Back home, she had enjoyed riding a horse over the hills filled with coffee plants, through jungle brush and around the open grassy fields.

Rose understood that there was no other experience similar to riding a horse; not riding a bicycle or, in fact, sitting in or on anything mechanical. To ask another living creature to trust you, to graciously let you climb on their back and move with them was a privilege. A horse has a sense of the person in the saddle, and can feel both confidence, and fear, in a rider. For those who sit poised with assurance, a horse will respond like a purring kitten, embracing a gentle bend of a rein or tap of a heel. Rose was such a rider. She took to horses as though God had put her there. She felt one with them, particularly when she was riding cross country and only had her horse for company. In Colombia these had been great times to think, and now in Massachusetts these were times to contemplate her lonely life and her deep yearning to be united with her family.

Initially, she wrote to Adrienne almost every day when she first got to the academy, but then made it weekly since she had so much schoolwork. The telephone calls were short and intermittent. This made it that much harder for Rose to connect with anyone. The first year was the hardest. Rose didn’t know how to handle the holidays, and was forced, in a sense, to spend some time with other girls’ families who were willing to share their homes with her. The most perplexing holiday was Thanksgiving. This was totally foreign to Rose and one they had never celebrated when she lived in South America.

“Rose,” said one of her schoolmates, “this is a real American holiday. We’re celebrating the first Thanksgiving where, you know, the pilgrims who came over to this country from England gave thanks to the Native Americans who helped them survive a really harsh winter. It’s sort of an everybody holiday. My dad, you know, who is a faculty member here always invites students who have no place to go on this holiday.” She caught the saddened look in Rose’s eye. “I’m sorry Rose; I didn’t mean it like that. There are plenty of students who can’t travel home for a long weekend because their homes are just too far away. Like your home.”

Rose thought for a moment. Like your home. She remembered something that Bella had told her once. Bella said she overheard some of the men talking one day about how Rose came to the plantation. She just showed up one day from the jungle. So where did she come from and who were HER people? Were her parents American? She always considered Adrienne her mother basically because she was the only mother she remembered or knew. But who were her birth parents? Bella was always asking who her father was and both girls would lie in bed at night and talk about it.

“Do you think your mother really had an affair with one of the plantation workers when she was young?” asked Rose.

“I don’t know,” Bella answered. That’s what she says, but I doubt it. She says he was killed in an accident, I think with some machinery or something. I’d like to think she met a foreign diplomat and they had an amazing love connection, but then he had to leave the country on mysterious business. That would be so cool.”

“Yeah, that would be cool,” said Rose. “But what about me?”

“I think your parents may be from America, and I don’t mean South America,” Bella giggled. “The men on the plantation said there was some kind of expedition in the jungle or something, and then I think there was a catastrophe or, or explosion, or something.”

“Well, why didn’t anyone ever try and find my parents or at least where my home was if that were really true? Why won’t anyone talk about it? It doesn’t really make any sense, Bella,” Rose said with some irritation.

“I don’t know. This place seems to be filled with mysterious beginnings, I guess. Maybe Adrienne and Alberto are spies, and they are really married to spies, and your parents were spies, and the whole thing got covered up.”

Both girls laughed, threw pillows at one another and tried to fall asleep.