Finally, he threw the stub of his cigarette out the window and switched the headlamps back on. “We go.”
“What about Max?” We had to wait. He’d said he’d be here.
“Max is not coming and I am tired.” Oscar looked like a man who wasn’t going to talk anymore.
“Where?” The panic that crept into my voice didn’t seem to faze him.
“You come with me. Tomorrow, I decide what to do about the police.”
Did he mean he’d turn me in? Did he think I killed Roy? I couldn’t blame him when I wasn’t even all that sure myself. But I couldn’t go to jail. It would be the end of everything. I’d never get a film, and I’d never get home. What would happen to Papa and Penny?
I grabbed his arm before he put the auto into gear. “Oscar,” I said, “I swear to you. I’m innocent.” I had to make him believe me, even if I didn’t believe it all the way myself.
“Señorita—” Oscar said the word as if it tasted sour in his mouth—“one thing I know. Girls like you, they aren’t innocent.”
——————
Señora Sanchia Dominguez decided from the minute she laid eyes on me what I was, and she never changed her mind.
Me sneaking into her son’s bedroom in the dark of night probably didn’t help.
I had tried to figure out my next move as Oscar drove through the beaten-down neighborhood, but before I could even think, we’d stopped in front of a crumbling stucco house, walleyed windows looking out into the dark street. Oscar turned off the auto and sat as the engine died. He closed his eyes and his lips moved. He might have been praying. Maybe I should have said a prayer too, but I didn’t think God was listening to me in those days.
He came around to my side. “Quiet,” he whispered, clickingthe door closed behind me. I followed him up the concrete stoop and waited as he eased open the front door. Inside was dark.
He ushered me through and motioned for me to slip off my shoes. I did, and I tried to be quiet, honest I did, but as he pushed me forward, I stumbled, and a squeak left my mouth. In my defense, inside the house was as dark as a midnight prairie.
Oscar grabbed me around the waist, none too gently. He froze, listening.
A woman’s voice called out. There was a scuffle in another room. A light flared and glowed. Oscar muttered something that sounded a lot like a curse. And suddenly—as they say—the bushwah hit the fan.
A woman, her face illuminated by an old-fashioned oil lamp, appeared like a tall, ghostly figure moving down the hall. But this was no ghost, no sir. That woman took one look at me—my shoes in hand, halfway up the stairs with Oscar’s arm around me—and opened fire like a Gatling gun.
Oscar stepped away from me and raised his hands, talking in rapid Spanish right over her. A moment later, the brothers from the other morning stumbled into the hall with sleepy, disbelieving eyes.
Roman looked me up and down, then jumped into the clash of words with relish. Angel, the young one, seemed to be trying to calm them all down, but he might as well have saved his breath. The woman’s black eyes shot lead. She waved the lamp in my face, making our shadows jump like phantoms on the wall. She pointed to the shoes clutched in my hand and said some words that sounded like a slap in the face. Oscar retaliated, his voice rising. It seemed like everybody was talking at once. Except me. I was just wishing I could disappear.
Finally, Oscar shouted a word I understood.“Silencio!”
The old woman sealed her lips and crossed her arms, her foot tapping out a staccato rhythm on the cracked linoleum. She wasn’t as tall as I’d first thought, probably about my height, and her cotton nightgown hung loose on her thin frame as if draped over a wire hanger. At one time, she might have been beautiful with that bone structure, but the scowl deepened the lines in her bronze face.
“Please.” I just wanted to smooth things over, honest. But boy, I managed to say the wrong thing, didn’t I? “Oscar, please. Just bring me to Max.”
Three faces turned to me. Three mouths dropped open.
“Max?” Angel and Roman said together, disbelief in their voices.
And the mother... well, she sputtered and then choked out a few words. I recognized one:Maximilian.
Now I was even more confused. If he was their cousin, why did they look at me as if I’d uttered a curse? Who was Max to these people? And why had he left me with them?
Roman turned to his older brother and raised his brows. “Ay, ay, ay,you’ve done it now.”
“You, shut up,” Oscar bit out. He let out a breath and rubbed a hand over his face, then jerked his head at the younger brother. “Angel, take her upstairs.”
I just wanted out of this house, but I figured it wouldn’t help at this point to argue, so I followed Angel up the staircase to a single door at the top. The room was hardly big enough to hold a narrow bed covered in a well-worn quilt and beside it, an overturned crate. A rectangle of thin moonlight fell on a crucifix on the opposite wall. “We will wait here,señorita. It is better.” Angel motioned me to the bed and pulled the crate over to sit beside me.
I knew what he meant. Better to be out of their mother’s sight.
