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Light streamed intoBrady’s bedroom when he woke up with a start. He’d heard something outside and then wondered if it was something he dreamt. But Tate had managed to get Emma’s bedroom door open and was growling at the window in the kitchen. Brady grabbed his phone, checking it for messages, and saw none. Then he dashed to the kitchen to see what Tate was so interested in.
A large buck had somehow entered the yard, gotten through the fence somewhere, and was having an early morning salad at the expense of Brady’s tender spinach and lettuce plants. The huge creature looked up at the kitchen window as he chomped on the beautiful green leaves, some of them falling from his mouth carelessly, and didn’t seem to be phased at all with either the sight of Tate or Brady looking down on him.
Brady knew that if he shot the buck, it would be an easy hundred pounds of meat, but he didn’t really want to kill it. He had enough meat for the three of them to last until the end of the year if it came to that. He was more interested in finding out how the buck got inside the yard. Everything had been wired and shut down, and there were alarms that were supposed to go off when something had broken, been cut, or breached the perimeter.
He decided to let Tate scare the buck back to wherever he came from. So he opened the back door and told Tate to go after the beautiful creature.
Tate flew off the back deck, not hitting the ground until he was well beyond the steps. The buck took off running in the opposite direction, heading for the back corner of the property, close to the banana and papaya groves. There was a service road along the fence line Brady used when he hauled material down to the lower part of his garden, and after the buck disappeared, Brady noticed he had left the gate open and disarmed the alarm. He had brought in several peeler logs and a pickup truck full of manure, exiting the fenced garden area without securing the fence because he intended to bring in another load. But he’d gotten distracted and never brought the second load in.
He calmed himself, looking out through the fence material to see the buck’s rear end plowing through an open field on his neighbor’s property. Tate had tried to follow him past the perimeter line, but Brady called him back.
He latched the gate and flipped the switch for the alarms to be armed, relieved it wasn’t foul play but annoyed with himself for having left it unattended, which put Emma at risk.
He and Tate ambled up through the garden while he checked the papaya seedlings Emma had transplanted a few days before, now gaining strength and standing perfectly tall. He gave them a little bit of water and pulled out several of the half-eaten plants that had been plowed up and stomped on, throwing them onto his compost pile.
He’d forgotten to take his phone with him, so first thing he did when he walked in the back door was go looking for it. There had been a message left, and it was from Sergio.
He tried to play the message back, but nothing was working. He dialed Sergio’s number.
“Mr. Brady, I was unable to find Father Salvador. He’s not supposed to come in until noon, and my daughter says he was going to pick up a friend at the airport yesterday, so it sounds like he must have gotten Maggie. I don’t know why we don’t have an answer, but nothing appears to be out of the ordinary except the phone service. We’re used to it here, but I know you are frustrated.”
“I don’t assume anything, Sergio. That’s the way I’m wired. I want to be sure.”
“I understand. I asked about accommodations for Maggie, and nobody seemed to know anything about it, but that’s not totally unusual either.”
“So your daughter hasn’t seen Father Salvador this morning?”
“No, señor. No one has seen him this morning. He left for the airport late in the afternoon yesterday. But the lodging for the clergy is very small. It’s just a tiny apartment here. I think perhaps your wife is mistaken, and he intends to house her at the clinic. They have much more space there. It’s set up classroom-style, because it was set up at an abandoned school.”
“Do you know where the clinic is?”
“Of course. I’m going to go there next. And then I need to return to my shop. But I will call you back, and I won’t leave a message. I’ll just call. You call me. I think we are having a problem with the messaging. Again, it may be an incompatibility with the phone plans. Nothing out of the ordinary, señor.”
Brady didn’t buy that explanation. He was sure there was some kind of situation developing there, even though he had no proof. But he had a bad feeling and had learned to trust his gut.
He was going to have to call Riley, after all, a call he’d planned to make but didn’t think he would have to do it so soon. But if Maggie wasn’t picking up her phone and the priest wasn’t at the church, that wasn’t good news.
It was going to be a long day. But he had to carefully decide the fastest way he could get himself to Mexico. After all, his entire life depended on it.
