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“No, apparently they lost it after I sent it.” She sniffled but her voice grew stronger with frustration instead of tears. “They haven’t done anything to help find him since I filed the missing person’s report. This update on the National Missing Persons Database is the closest thing to a match we’ve found. And it sounds just like him but there’s no…” She paused. “There are no useable fingerprints and the Sheriff refuses to send pictures so we have to go in person.”
It wasn’t typical procedure but if Vera had learned anything working with various local law enforcement around the country it was that rules weren’t always followed, regardless of their necessity. “Where is Sylen?”
“A little over an hour northwest of Fort Collins. It’s tiny.”
“Why would he be there?”
“His girlfriend was from there but they’d broken up.”
Dread, hot and thick, burned through her like sludge. She never met his ex-girlfriend, Lily, but Mimi mentioned her. Updates on Alex before he disappeared just months ago were part of her regular calls from home. He was fine. College was fine. Everything was fine.
After losing his dad unexpectedly at fifteen, his mother returned to Guadalajara and Alex had been left in limbo. Struggling with anger and anxiety, he’d lashed out occasionally. Nothing life-threatening or illegal but he’d struggle intermittently. Her parents, Javier and Guadalupe, had taken him in to finish school to prevent further upheaval in his life by moving to a country he had little exposure to before his father’s death.
Disappearing wasn’t new for him. He dipped in and out when things got too overwhelming and Vera came to recognize it was his way of coping with loss and stress. It was just who he was. There’d never been the concern that he wouldn’t return home for her. Not the first time he’d run away for a few days at the anniversary of his father’s passing and not when Ximena called her saying he’d been gone for a week and she reported it to the police. Her plate had been toppling over with problems she barely had a handle on, let alone worrying about their cousin who hadn’t acted out of the ordinary.
But now all those thoughts felt dangerously foolish. She should’ve been home in Fort Collins helping her sister. They’d agreed not to tell their parents since they were spending most of their time back in Guadalajara now that they’d retired. Vera didn’t want them getting upset about Alex running off. Her flippant attitude reared back to slap her in the face. If it’d gone so far as for Ximena to be monitoring the National Missing Persons Database, NMPD, then it was worse than she’d understood. Or maybe she didn’t want to.
Her chin hit her chest as Ximena began to sob anew. As if seeking something familiar, something comforting, her hand seemed to reach out of its own accord and opened the small drawer in the table. Pushing aside pens, notepads, and her spare keys, she grabbed the small photo that lived there since she moved in. The edges were worn and a crease down the center kept it permanently bent. Turning it over, a familiar wave of pain crashed against her hard and fast. Two women smiled up at the camera. Their cheeks smashed together as the blonde on the right had her arm looped around the other woman's shoulders. They were happy. Carefree. Too young to know what was about to hit them. Vera’s chest ached at the desire to be back there again.
Ximena’s voice broke the moment apart like lightning splitting the sky. “You have your own life over there, I get it. But I need you here. I need you to help me. No matter what happens tomorrow, I need you to be here for Alex. Can you do that?”
For Alex. For Ximena. For their family. D.C. could wait a few days. Everything would go back to the way it was supposed to be. She slid the photo back inside the drawer and closed it softly.
“I’ll be there.”
Chapter 2
Vera
“Spot F17, you can’t miss it.” The bored rental car attendant in the Denver airport didn't bother looking up as she dropped the keys into Vera’s palm.
The phone call with Ximena lasted over an hour the night before. A handful of murmured reassurances felt like half-assed help but it was all she had to offer as her sister broke down over sixteen hundred miles away. She booked a seven a.m. flight from D.C. to Denver as her sister's breathing slowed into unconsciousness over the phone.
Downing the last bottle of wine in her cupboards had done nothing but chase away any hope of sleep for herself. The pillow entrails remained strewn across the floor and the apartment a frigid mess. The idea of moving from the hard couch to her bed had been too daunting so she burned bad infomercials into her blurry eyes until four a.m. found her groggy. There was no rest for the wicked or the desperate.
A murmured “thanks” was all she gave the attendant. Grabbing her bags, she headed towards the rental car lot. Nearly six years working undercover for months at a time, sleeping with one eye open, and yet the exhaustion pressing in on her was a fresh kind of hell. She rolled off her couch with the trifecta—sandpaper eyelids, thick cottonmouth, and a queasy stomach. The breakfast burrito she grabbed in the airport had done nothing but threaten to make a violent upward return.
She’d be fine, she reassured herself. She’d gotten a cat nap on the four-hour flight and she rarely puked. It was her or the burrito and she wouldn’t be losing to mystery meat and powdered eggs.
Since flights didn’t go straight into Fort Collins and Ximena was working at the hospital until five, there was no way to get around driving herself, regardless of the bone-deep exhaustion. Putting her sunglasses on, she brushed her hair from her face as she headed into the hazy Colorado morning. Vera’s gaze skipped like a stone across the anonymous people who scuttled around her. Families with more kids than hands, elderly couples with leather luggage, businessmen in tacky suits with phones glued to their ears. It was like watching the world turn from the other side of a thick, murky glass. They were trivial human shapes, no different than the ones back in D.C.
A familiar sensation crept into her consciousness. Like that moment when the alcohol hits and the brain registers the realization with half-hearted surprise. A disconnect. A floating separation of her mind and her body. She was something other, floating above her shoulders the way she had intermittently for weeks. She bobbed, a leaf coaxed by an invisible current. Those were her boots thumping against the pavement and yet she kept feeling herself slip away. Adrift and apart.While she held little hope it would disappear with the impromptu trip, she was surprised by its early return. It followed her to Colorado. An unexercised ghost. Its gnarled fingers poked and prodded at old wounds when she was too tired to figure out why she seemed to be both inside her body and out.
A fuzzy grey sky sat atop the world like an unwashed snow globe. Thick raindrops splashed into her hair, soaking her thermal top and jeans as she moved through rows of parked cars.
At least she didn’t have a dress code now that she wasn’t reporting to the office or working undercover. She tried a deep four-count inhale at the attempt to find a silver lining. The sharp cold of Colorado in the Fall only made her lungs burn as she held it for a count of seven. She pushed it out over a count of eight, letting it mix back in with the pungent mix of weed, jet fuel, and open air. She was home again.
Soon, a green sign read ‘F #1-20’. She spotted her rental before she reached it, the top rack of the black SUV high above the compact cars surrounding it.
While not sleeping last night she did her homework on Sylen. At least what she could find. There was little information available online. Not a town website, photographs of local landmarks or tourist visits shared on popular review sites could be found. Aerial maps showed a place swallowed up by the forest it was built within, giving little insight into the layout. All Vera could tell was that it had more dirt roads than paved and no visible stoplights. She’d chosen the four-wheel drive vehicle intentionally.
Having traveled across the country for work, she saw more than she expected when recruited. But the state she’d grown up in always fell short of the mark when it came to feeling like a true home. Her parents repeatedly reminded her of the story of how they emigrated from Mexico to Colorado when she was five. It was a tale filled with trials and abiding hope that so often bled into life lessons as she grew. It wasn’t just a narrative of movement in their family but of tenacity and hardship; of fighting for what you believed in no matter how difficult it was to come out the other side.
Her father’s work in infectious disease had secured him a position at Colorado State University, allowing them to travel back to Guadalajara to visit family members whose faces had long turned to vague memories. Once Ximena was born five years later there was little time and money to go back south to keep those roots alive. Colorado, with all its perfectly photogenic landscapes, was where all her clearest memories were made, like it or not.
She hit the unlock button on the key FOB and set her bags inside. The seats were freezing against her wet clothes as the smell of new, stiff leather hung in the stale air. No stench of stale cigarettes or soggy stake-out fries, she was living the high life. The heater warmed up slowly as she pulled out of the lot and maneuvered into the heavy Denver traffic.
The familiar views of the city unfolded before her as the street signs and strip malls became things she could draw in her sleep. Merging onto the highway towards Fort Collins, she gripped the steering wheel tighter.
