Worthy stared at Ellie VanBruskman in the doorway. Ellie, in turn, stared at her photo in the policeman’s hand. Gradually, as the blood drained from his temples, Worthy understood how she’d managed to avoid being noticed. Ellie’s hair was not only black, but cut short, nun-like, and the black-framed glasses added five years to her appearance. There were few similarities between the girl in front of him and the photo, aside from the panic in the eyes.
Ellie leaned unsteadily on the door before holding it open and motioning him to enter. How long had she been expecting—no, dreading—this moment? He reached for his identification, his hand shaking as he held it out to her. He was struck with her lips, how red and cracked they were.
Ellie took off her glasses and answered his unspoken question. “People here know me as Maria Sanchez, a volunteer from Florida. I told them my purse was stolen on the bus from Texas.”
She led him to a couch in a lounge area. Large cactus plants guarded the corners of the room, while a picture of Jesus with children gazed down on them from over the vinyl-covered couch.
Worthy sat down heavily, bone weary. Over three weeks of searching in New Mexico and being harangued by the VanBruskmans back in Detroit had led to this moment, and yet he didn’t know what to say. Was it simply that his line of work usually led him to find dead people, or something else?
“Do you have anything you’d like to ask me?” he began.
Ellie sat down at the other end of the couch and folded her legs beneath her. She looked out the window toward the street for a moment before turning toward Worthy.
She’s as tired as I am, he thought.
“Can I get a pillow for your arm?” she asked. “It looks sore.”
She started to rise, then fell back on the couch as if she might faint. When he moved toward her, she held out a hand. “I’m fine. Really, I am. Just tired.”
Worthy knew she wasn’t fine. She was too thin, as if she’d gone for days without food.
“Ellie—or should I call you Maria?—you don’t look so hot.”
She smiled weakly. “I’m fine,” she repeated. “Even though I knew someone would come eventually, seeing you is a shock.” She closed her eyes and ran her tongue over her chapped lips. “Did she let you see my room?”
“Who?”
“My mother.”
“Yes, she did.”
“Did you find the unicorns in my desk?”
He nodded again. “I thought maybe you used them for babysitting.”
“No, I never did. You see, the unicorns were never my idea. She bought them for me, one after each of my setbacks. It started when I was ten. But even when I was hospitalized last year, she’d bring more in to show me. So you’ll understand why I didn’t bring them out here with me.”
She put her head between her knees.
“Ellie, I need to get you to a hospital.”
“This isn’t fair,” she moaned. “I was doing so well. I am fine. Really, I am. Or I was until I saw Victor’s picture on the news.”
“Are you out of medication?”
“No, I haven’t touched the pills since I left the group.”
Worthy was stunned. “Why not?”
Ellie looked up. “Because I’m fine! I know what it feels like to be depressed, and this isn’t that. I just haven’t been able to keep anything down since I heard about Victor. He was so scared, and then … and then to die that way ….”
“You still need medical attention,” Worthy insisted. “You have to be dehydrated at the very least. Hasn’t anyone said anything about how you look?”
Ellie put her head between her knees again. “Sister Mary Grace did yesterday. She asked if something was wrong, said she’d take me to the clinic. But I can’t do that. They’ll want identification, though maybe now it doesn’t matter.” She groaned again. “I can’t wait to see how many unicorns I get this time.”
Worthy remembered Dr. Cartwright’s wish, that against all odds he’d find Ellie alive and doing fine on her own. Well, he’d found her alive, though hardly doing fine. And he’d been sent to New Mexico for one reason—to bring her back. Did he have another choice?
“You don’t know me, Ellie, and you have no reason to trust me, but I want you to know I’ve talked to Dr. Cartwright. I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t want you to go back there to them.”
Ellie looked up. “I thought you were working for my parents. And anyway, they fired Dr. Cartwright. So if you’re trying to trick me, don’t bother. You and I both know she can’t stop anything.”
The girl’s face was turning paler by the minute.
“Will you let me take you to the emergency room?” he asked.
“But don’t you see? I’ll have to give them my name. I always knew that the first thing my parents would do, given my medical history, would be to alert all the hospitals out here. That means that once they type my real name into the computer, it’s all over.” Tears began to stream down her face. “Honestly, I’m not depressed,” she pleaded. “I swear it on my soul.”
Worthy assumed that if he ever found Ellie, his problem would be solved. Now here he was at three o’clock in the morning facing another decision. “I’m not saying you are depressed,” he said wearily, “but we won’t know what you need until you get some treatment. So let me offer a trade. We’ll go to the emergency room, tell them you lost your ID on the bus, and—”
With her head down, Ellie moaned again. In a voice barely above a whisper, she said, “That won’t work.”
It was a tone Worthy remembered, one that he’d heard from Allyson as recently as a week before. “Then we’ll do it this way,” he said. “We’ll say you’re my daughter. You lost your ID while we’ve been traveling, but I’ll show them mine. Trust me, a cop’s ID goes a long way.”
She looked up again. “You’d do that? You said a trade. What do I have to do?”
“If your condition isn’t serious—and I don’t see why they need to know your medical history—I promise to bring you back here. Then we need to talk.”
“About going back to Detroit?”
“That, but something else. I want to know why Victor left the college last November. I want to know why he died the way he did. Do we have a deal?”
“Okay,” she said weakly. “By the way, what name should I use at the emergency room?”
“I’m Christopher Worthy, and you’re my daughter Allyson.”
Perhaps because the emergency room staff was overwhelmed with victims from an auto accident, things went more smoothly than Worthy had hoped. Ellie was in fact dehydrated as well as malnourished. An IV was ordered, and by seven in the morning, she was released with a prescription in Worthy’s name to ease the nausea. On the way back to St. Claire’s, they stopped for breakfast at Denny’s. The girl’s cheeks were rosy, and her eyes were bright as she ate the scrambled eggs.
“So you can see I’m just fine,” she said as they pulled into the driveway of the home.
“You’re better, but you didn’t exactly clean your plate back at the restaurant.”
“Listen, for me that was a big meal. And my stomach got queasy because I kept expecting you to ask me about Victor. That was our bargain.”
“It is, but I’d thought we’d do that back here. Is there someplace we can talk?”
“Around back in the garden.” She opened a side gate and led him around the house. “Please try to remember that my name here is Maria,” she whispered. “If we run into anyone, who are you going to be? Wait, I know. I’ll say you’re the father of my best friend from home.”
“I now know why you got away so easily,” Worthy said. “You’re pretty good at lying.”
For the first time, Ellie smiled. “You should talk.”
They sat on green plastic garden chairs by a patio table. An aroma of lavender drifted up from the garden, where a statue of the Virgin Mary stood with her arms outstretched.
Ellie pointed beyond the cement block wall to the mountains beyond. “That’s Mexico.”
Worthy wasn’t sure if the comment was an observation or warning.
“It’s where most of the girls come from. They cross the border, wanting their babies born in the United States.”
“Ellie, we need to talk about—”
“I know, I know,” she said. “We need to talk about Victor, but that’s not so easy. You see, there was more than one Victor. I like the one I knew last September. I was walking around Allgemein trying not to look like a mental patient, and here was this guy who was wowing all the professors. But I liked him, and he agreed to be my study partner. He was the brightest person I ever met. My own age, anyway.”
“Then Samir Romadji died, right?”
Ellie nodded as tears began to flow.
“How did the two of them meet?” Worthy prodded.
“At one of these politically correct punch-and-cookie receptions at Allgemein. That’s what Victor called them. He was clever like that. Victor detested functions where everyone in the room besides the college officials was a person of color or ethnic. The photographer would be shooting madly, and everyone knew they would see their faces on next year’s brochures. It made Allgemein look like a miniature United Nations, which it definitely isn’t.”
“Did you ever meet Samir, Ellie?”
She nodded and pulled her knees up to cradle them. “What a sweet kid. I felt out of place at Allgemein, and I was from Detroit. He was from Pakistan, and yet he was so open to everyone.”
“Do you know if Samir ever hung out in Victor’s room?”
“Sure. He had a hard time making friends at the high school, and Victor could see he was in pain. Victor reached out to that sort—me included.”
“And when Samir died?”
Ellie moaned as she had the night before. “Take about crazy timing. That happened just about the time I found out I’m adopted. Victor and I seemed like two people passing each other in some long hallway. But we were going in opposite directions. After that, Victor seemed to get so much … smaller, I guess.”
Worthy watched Ellie as she spoke, trying to figure out how healthy she really was. He thought of the rule that he taught to all new recruits at the academy. Is the subject coherent, alert, and able to show appropriate emotion? Yes, he admitted to himself, this young woman passed on all three counts.
“What I can’t quite figure out is why Victor blamed himself for Samir’s death,” he said.
“That was because he was supposed to go hiking with Samir that Sunday, but by the time his bus got to Samir’s house, the rest of them had already gone.”
“You mean Aaron Stott and the other kid,” Worthy said. “Stott’s being there when Samir died … was that why Victor went to see his father?”
Ellie began to rock back and forth in the chair as she looked down at the ground. “Victor called it the philosopher’s runaround. Stott turned everything back on Victor, questioning why he couldn’t accept life’s unpredictability. He said Stott made Samir’s death seem like a case study.”
“But if the boy’s death was an accident—”
“Was it?” Ellie interrupted. “That’s what haunted Victor. Samir told him Aaron Stott was one of the guys at school who teased him. Victor had someone in his dorm doing the same thing to him. Victor couldn’t get it out of his head that if he’d been there on time that Sunday, he could have saved Samir’s life.”
“Did Victor ever say he thought Aaron Stott pushed Samir over the cliff?” Worthy asked.
“Sometimes. But other times he just wondered if Stott had dared Samir to try the big cliff.”
Worthy nodded. “So there was nothing provable.” No wonder Victor was so torn up, he thought. Victor could have been right. Maybe if he’d been there, Samir would have lived. And if Samir had lived, Victor would have finished the semester and Ellie VanBruskman wouldn’t be sitting in a chair next to him in Arizona with Mexico just beyond the garden wall.
“Ellie, was that when Victor said he was being followed?”
She stopped rocking. “His devil? Yes, it was, and I thought for a few days he might be right. I thought it could be the Stott boy. But then one day when Victor was talking pretty … crazy, I guess, I asked him what this devil looked like. He said it was a wooden skeleton with open eyes. I thought, oh, my God, he’s hallucinating.”
Worthy grimaced. “No, La Muerte.”
“What?”
“It’s a death figure, used by the Penitentes. There was one buried with Victor.”
“Oh, God.” Ellie sat for a moment and quietly wept. “Poor Victor. He wrote and told me the Penitentes were the only ones who could save him. That’s why he came back here, you know.”
Worthy sat forward. “He wrote to you? When?”
“In January, when he told me to meet him at Chimayó. I thought you knew. No, wait, of course, you couldn’t. I tore it up and threw it away. In case you couldn’t tell, my mother tends to look through my things.”
January? Worthy thought. “Do you remember where the letter came from?”
“Colorado. He talked about meeting some guys at an old church or chapel up there.”
“A morada?”
“Yes, that’s what he wrote. He said one of the men was like an angel to him. The man let him stay at his place and even gave him some money.”
Worthy felt needles pricking him in his chest. “He said the angel was a Penitente?”
“I think so. I think he said one of them had known his father.”
“Did Victor say anything else about this angel?”
“Just that he was the first person to treat him with kindness.” She looked out toward the statue of the Virgin Mary. “Wait, there was something else … the man told Victor to look for old moradas and to be sure to phone him whenever he found one.”
Worthy felt his breakfast rise into his throat. “Did Victor say that he expected to see this man again?”
“Yes, yes, he did. He talked about waiting at one of those places for this man to …. Oh, God, was that his killer?”
Feeling lightheaded, Worthy rose slowly from the chair. “I need to use your phone.”
“You don’t have a cell?” she asked.
“It’s a long story,” Worthy replied.
Ellie rose from the chair and hurried toward the house. “I’ll show you.”
He called Sera’s cell phone number. No answer. Next he tried the sheriff’s department in Santa Fe. The desk sergeant told him confidentially that Choi’s search of moradas south of Santa Fe had yielded new evidence. Gang-related vandalism had been found; besides, Sera wasn’t alone in Colorado. Two priests from a monastery were with her. There was nothing to worry about.
The relief that assurance gave him lasted no more than five seconds after he hung up. Despite being reminded that Father Fortis was with her, he wondered what kind of gang would kill a nun and a boy. He called the number back, and after a few moments, convinced the sergeant to make every effort to locate Sera.
His mouth felt dry as he hung up the phone for a second time. “I need to get on the road but ….”
Without speaking, Ellie led him back outside. They walked to the far wall and faced the mountains of Mexico.
“I should put you on a plane for Detroit,” he said. “You know that.”
Ellie crossed her arms across her chest and slumped. “If you do, they’ll commit me to another hospital.”
“No, they won’t. You’re much better. Anyone can see that.”
“You don’t understand. I’ll be legally on my own in less than three months. Then I’ll be gone for good, and they know it. They’ll have to have me committed before that.”
Worthy gazed at the mountains. If he trusted her, would he come back to find her sick again? Sick or well, would she even be here when he returned?
“If I’d wanted to, I could have run away last night,” she said in barely a whisper.
“What do you mean?”
“After I was hooked up to the IV, all the nurses left for that car accident. I saw you sleeping out in the lobby. I could have left, and no one would have noticed.”
“Why didn’t you?”
Ellie turned back toward the house. “Because we have six pretty scared pregnant girls here right now. Two of them were raped. My real mother could have been one of them. I’m not going to abandon them.”