Crunch Time

3

Tom walked out of the living room.

“Tom!” I called after him in a harsh whisper. “Why didn’t you ask her about Humberto Captain?”

“I’m trying to, if I ever can get back to the kitchen.” He paused. “Tell me about this Breckenridge character.”

“He wanted to know if you were here, then he wanted to know about Ernest McLeod. Has it been on the news?”

“Yeah, ’fraid so.”

“Look, what if Yolanda stayed here with us? And brought Ferdinanda? It isn’t really safe for her to be at Ernest’s place now, do you think? I mean, you don’t know exactly how this was set up and you don’t have a motive. So . . .”

Tom put his hands in his pockets. He said, “You want Humberto to come gunning for us, here?”

“Of course not. I just want Yolanda and Ferdinanda to be in a place that’s safe for them, that’s all. The rental’s gone, Ernest’s house will be off-limits for a while, and they certainly can’t afford to stay in a Denver motel.”

“With all the cash we found? They can afford the Ritz.”

“Tom. I doubt she’ll want to cater with me tomorrow. Arrangements will have to be made for Ernest. His AA group will have to be called. Someone will have to phone a church and plan a memorial service. All I’m saying is, we have more alarms on our house than a bank does. I want Yolanda and Ferdinanda to be safe. Please?”

He considered, then said finally, “Let me talk to my captain.” He turned and pushed through the front door. Outside, the wind whipped the ornamental grasses Tom had put in. Another gust bent the Boulder Raspberry bushes, their white roselike blooms long gone. At the side of the house, wind-tossed pine branches slammed the shingles. Tom, who never seemed to be bothered by weather, pulled out his cell, punched in numbers, and began to walk up and down the porch as he spoke.

As Tom continued to pace, I watched him carefully, trying to figure out how the conversation was going. Tom looked into the living room. When he saw me glaring at him, he turned away. The kitchen was quiet, so I turned my attention back to Tom, who was stabbing the air with his free hand as he talked. Eventually he came inside and gave me a thumbs-up.

Only ten minutes had gone by, but it was now five o’clock. In the kitchen, Yolanda looked wrung out. Her normally glowing skin appeared ashen, papery, with a darkness under her eyes like bruises. She seemed fragile, very unlike the commanding presence she’d been in the Gold Gulch Spa kitchen.

Yolanda announced, “I really need to go get Ferdinanda. She worries about me.”

“Just a couple more questions, Yolanda,” said Tom. To John Bertram, he said, “Could you call the Catholic church and tell the priest we’ll be picking up Yolanda’s aunt presently?”

“You have to call his private line.” Yolanda again rummaged in her purse, an intricately knotted beige bag, until she located another card, which she handed to John. “Please,” she implored Tom, “don’t make me stay here and talk to you. Ferdinanda may seem tough, but she’s . . . not. She’s easily disoriented. She claims she doesn’t hear well, either, and I know her body has weakened since she’s been in the wheelchair. I don’t want you to scare her, the way—” She clamped her mouth shut. The way you’ve scared me hung in the air. She said suddenly, “You don’t suppose Ferdinanda has heard from someplace else that Ernest’s been killed, do you? Has it been on the news, I mean? She loves television and the radio. . . .”

“If she’s visiting with the priest, she won’t be watching TV or listening to the radio. Will she?” asked Tom.

“They might be watching television,” said Yolanda. “He and she do that sometimes, when she’s worn him out.”

“I’m sorry, but the newspeople do know,” said Tom, his tone a bit kinder. “Ernest’s only kin is his ex-wife, who lives with her new husband in Denver. The news outlets wanted information, and once we notified her, they got it.”

“Oh, God,” Yolanda whispered.

Tom turned the recorder back on. “You don’t know of . . . anything that had been going on between Ernest and his ex-wife, Faye?”

“What do you mean, ‘anything that had been going on’?” Yolanda asked. Her shoulders slumped.

“I mean, anything that would make her a suspect in his death,” Tom said, his tone matter-of-fact. He brought his face a fraction closer to Yolanda’s, which made her shrink back. “Did they talk? Did they argue? Like that. Anything you can tell us would be helpful.”

“I don’t think they had much contact, if any. He told me that Faye had an affair with some doctor in Wyoming, a while ago. The doctor wouldn’t leave his wife. But then the doctor’s wife died of cancer, the doctor moved to Denver, and the doctor and Faye got married. Aside from Ernest telling us he insisted on getting the house in the divorce, that’s all he ever, you know, shared.”

I knew the story of Ernest and Faye, the story of the house. But still Tom jotted a few words in his notebook.

“What?” asked Yolanda, her tone accusing. She eyed Tom’s notebook. “Don’t you believe me?”

“Should we not believe you?” Tom shot back.

“Tom!” I interjected. “You know what she’s saying is—” But again I was stopped dead by Tom’s look.

Yolanda muttered to herself in Spanish, something I didn’t catch. I’d only occasionally heard her speak Spanish. Back when Yolanda and I were working at André’s, she’d told me that she’d studied it in the Denver public schools, because she was tired of Ferdinanda talking to her fellow Cuban-Americans in a language she didn’t understand. Now, I supposed, it came in handy, when you wanted to curse at someone without them knowing what you were saying. One of the few French words I remembered was merde, and just about everyone knew what that meant.

“Yolanda?” Tom prompted her. “Are you telling us the truth?”

“Of course I am.” Yolanda looked at me for verification, and I risked Tom’s wrath by nodding. “But you know what, Tom?” Yolanda said, turning her gaze to the window over the kitchen sink. “You can believe what you want. Can we go get Ferdinanda now?”

“Just tell me what you know about Humberto Captain.”

Yolanda threw up her hands and narrowed her eyes, first at Tom, then at John. “You guys are always asking me about Humberto! Why?”

“Some months back? You catered a meal for him and his cronies, down in Lakewood,” Tom replied evenly. “And you couldn’t identify even one person who was there.”

Yolanda protested. “That wasn’t ‘some months back.’ It was over a year ago! And I was concentrating on the food, not the faces. Give me a break.”

“Did Humberto give you the cash under your mattress at Ernest’s house?” John Bertram took over the questioning so smoothly, I wondered if Tom had signaled him in some way. “Seventeen thousand bucks? That’s a lot of money for an out-of-work chef to have saved up and hidden.”

“Oh,” said Yolanda drily. “I see. You want to talk about my money again. Did you do my laundry, too? Did you feed the dogs and clean up their poops?”

“You want to go get Ferdinanda,” said Tom. “Tell us if Humberto gave you all that money under your mattress.”

Yolanda clenched her teeth. “Yes.”

“Why?” asked John.

“Why did he give me the money?” Yolanda asked. “Or why did I put it under the mattress?”

There was a long silence. Finally Tom said, “Both.”

Yolanda’s fingers tapped out a drumbeat on the table as she looked out the back windows. “Humberto is a friend. His father brought Ferdinanda and my grandparents over on the boat from Cuba. So Humberto gave us the money because he knew we were having problems. I didn’t have a job. We didn’t have a place to live. He came around when we were packing up what we could salvage from the rental—”

“After it mysteriously burned down,” Tom supplied.

“Yes, Tom. We didn’t have insurance for our stuff. Our landlady, Donna Lamar? She had insurance. So why don’t you ask her if she torched the place?”

I said, “Wait. Since when is Donna Lamar a landlady? You said before that she was an owner/agent. I thought she was just a, you know, rental agent and property manager.” I pictured Donna Lamar, her dark blond hair pulled back in a messy ponytail, her gray sweatshirt frayed, her jeans unfashionably faded. She was a member of our church, but we went to different services, so I rarely saw her there. Invariably, though, I ran into her at the local hardware store as she absentmindedly pushed a cart loaded with cheap cans of paint.

Yolanda said, “Surprise, surprise, Goldy. Donna owns most of those little houses she rents out. Over the years, whenever somebody had a problem getting rid of a small place? Say the owners were going through a bad divorce, or the house was real remote, or it needed major repairs, and the owners had just been transferred? After the house sat on the market for a year, but before a short sale or foreclosure, Donna would creep in and offer half the asking price. If the owner or the bank refused her offer, she’d move on, buying houses after foreclosure or at auction. She wouldn’t fix and flip, because nobody wanted that house in the first place, right? She’d fix and rent. On the low end of the market, renters aren’t demanding. If Donna does have a difficult tenant, she just doesn’t renew their lease. If you’re renting at the low end? If you’re desperate and you’re just one step removed from sleeping in your car? Donna’s your woman.”

“How do you know all this?” I asked.

Yolanda shook her head. “I got to know Donna real well when I was renting from her.”

“But she always looks so—”

“Poor and downtrodden? That’s part of her shtick. Or it was. Lately, she’s cleaned up her act. Maybe she’s putting that insurance money to good use.”

“How did Humberto know you were having problems?” Tom asked, giving me a dark, stop interrupting this interrogation glare.

Yolanda cocked her head at Tom. “You ever tried to keep something secret in this town?”

“Goldy didn’t know your house burned down,” said Tom. “Goldy wasn’t aware of Donna Lamar’s circumstances.”

Yolanda gave me a puzzled look. “Well, I haven’t got a clue as to how you didn’t hear the news about our rental, and about Donna.” I stared at my friend. Somehow, her answer seemed . . . calculated. Was I picking up on Tom’s distrust of Yolanda? That afternoon, my friend had told me all kinds of details about her relationship with Kris. And yet she had not told me that her rental house had burned down, or that her landlady was a jackal. Why not?

Before I could ask her some questions, Tom intervened. “So Humberto, your family’s friend, somehow knew you were having problems, and he came around and offered to help you.”

“Yes.”

“He just showed up out of the blue.”

Yolanda shook her head. “He heard it someplace, I don’t know where. Maybe the news. You don’t believe that he heard it through the town grapevine, then ask him how he knew. You want to hear the story or not?”

“I wouldn’t believe a single word that came out of Humberto Captain’s mouth,” Tom replied.

Yolanda placed her hands palm down on our kitchen table. “Yes, Humberto showed up, out of the blue, as you said. He asked if we needed money. I said we did. He gave me that seventeen thousand. He wanted to know if we had a place to stay. I said I could ask someone I was working for if we could stay with him. At Ernest’s, I put the money under the mattress because I couldn’t think where else to put it.”

I stood up and looked for something to do. This whole conversation was making me uncomfortable. First I was on Yolanda’s side, then I was on Tom’s, then back again. I’d be useless on a jury.

“But you didn’t go stay somewhere Humberto supplied,” Tom was saying now. “You asked Ernest McLeod if you could stay with him—”

“Yes.” Yolanda’s eyes flashed. “So what?”

Tom leaned across the kitchen table. “You went to stay with Ernest McLeod, after your rental mysteriously burned down—”

“Would you quit saying the rental mysteriously burned down? I’ve only talked to sheriff’s department investigators sixteen times about that stupid house, which was a firetrap, by the way. And no, I still don’t know how somebody would go about getting a Unifrutco oil can these days, and using it to spread accelerant—”

“—and you had no place to go,” Tom said, continuing as if she hadn’t spoken, “despite the fact that you had a rich boyfriend with a big house who would have loved to have you back, with no conditions. But then Humberto Captain showed up while your rental house was still smoking. He appeared unannounced, wanting to give you money. And, let’s see. I’ll bet he was wearing one of his beige tropical suits. Makes him look like a Miami gangster.”

“Gee whiz,” said Yolanda, “I’ve heard of cops doing racial profiling before, but I’d never actually experienced it. And they’re called duck suits.”

“I was joking,” said Tom, but he realized he’d made a mistake. “Sorry.”

“Yeah,” Yolanda muttered. “I’ll bet you’re sorry.”

Tom went on. “And Humberto said, ‘Here, Yolanda, take seventeen thousand bucks, and by the way, I don’t actually have a place for you to stay, but I have an idea. To earn this money, could you and Ferdinanda go live with Ernest McLeod, because he’s investigating me, even though he’s not a cop anymore?’”

Yolanda said, “Ernest was investigating Humberto?” Once again, I detected a note of . . . what? Dishonesty?

Tom said flatly, “Don’t try to convince me you didn’t know that Ernest was looking into Humberto’s affairs.”

Yolanda closed her eyes. She said, “Okay, I knew.”

John Bertram was summoned by his cell, and I found myself blinking rapidly. I was surprised by what Yolanda had admitted, but I still felt sorry for her. When my business had been closed after someone tried to poison a guest at an event I was catering, I’d been subjected to Tom’s questioning. In fact, that was how we’d met. But I hadn’t enjoyed the interrogation one bit.

Tom pressed her. “Did you know anything about the investigation?”

Yolanda took a deep breath. “Something about gold and gems.”

“Yeah,” said Tom, “something. Do you know if Ernest found anything?”

“I do not,” said Yolanda, staring straight at Tom.

John Bertram returned and took a seat. “I just got off the phone with our guys who went to see Kris Nielsen. After the rental house burned down, why didn’t you go stay with Kris? Just temporarily? He told our officers he offered to have you and Ferdinanda—”

“The hell with you!” Yolanda cried, jumping to her feet. “I told you, that man was stalking me—”

“He denies stalking you,” John said simply.

“He’s lying,” said Yolanda.

“Was Ernest working for you?” asked Tom. “Trying to prove a case against Kris Nielsen?”

“I don’t know.” She glared at Tom. “But let me ask you something. When your guy went to see Kris, did the officer treat Kris the same way you’re treating me? I’ll bet he didn’t, because Kris is rich. And white.” While these words hung in the air like an indictment, Yolanda pointed first at Tom, then at John. “Kris Nielsen is my ex-boyfriend, and his house is the last place I would go. Ever.” She reached into her bag and pulled out a faded gray nylon windbreaker, the kind that had been fashionable about twenty years ago. The jacket made a slithery sound as she put her arms into the too-large sleeves. I wondered if she’d bought it at Aspen Meadow’s secondhand store, Julian Teller’s favorite clothes shop. “I’ve had enough,” Yolanda announced. “I need to go get my aunt, and then I need to drive back to Ernest’s place and take care of the dogs. And then I’m going to start calling Ernest’s friends.”

“Actually, Yolanda,” I interjected, “I’d feel better, well, actually, you and your great-aunt need to stay with us. With someone gunning for Ernest, and with Kris acting . . . you know, the way he is, I’d feel more comfortable all the way around if you were here.”

Yolanda looked at Tom. “I told Ernest I’d take care of his puppies.”

John Bertram piped up. “I can take care of the dogs tonight. Feed them, take them out before we go to bed. But my wife’s allergic, so I can’t have them in our house. They’ll be all right at Ernest’s place after you get your stuff.”

Yolanda had not stopped staring at Tom. “Are you sure you want us here? I can go back and forth to take care of the dogs.”

Tom’s tone turned gentle. “Yes, I already checked with the department. It’s fine, really. You know how Goldy worries.”

“You want to spy on me,” Yolanda said to Tom.

“We want you to be safe,” Tom replied.

Yolanda pushed through the kitchen door and moved down the hall. “I’ll think about it,” she called over her shoulder. “Now I’m on my way to the church.”

“I told you, we’re coming to talk to Ferdinanda,” Tom replied.

Yolanda pushed the kitchen door open and again pointed at Tom. “When you talk to Ferdinanda? If you treat her the way you treated me, she’ll spit in your face.”

“I thought you said we’d frighten her,” said Tom. “I thought you said she was vulnerable and weak.”

“If you frighten her, it doesn’t matter how vulnerable and weak she is, she’ll hit you. I am not kidding.”

Tom shook his head mildly. “We’ll be nice.”

I thought, Uh-huh.

I went out to the driveway with them, because I wanted to make sure Yolanda was okay. Tom and John, meanwhile, tried to settle on who was going with whom and what vehicle they were going to take. Out back, Jake began to howl, as if he wanted to get his two cents in. The wind had picked up even more strength, and whenever one of us tried to say something, the words were whipped from our mouths. Finally, Tom huddled in next to Yolanda and spoke to her. She rolled her eyes, dug in her purse, and came out with a ring of keys. Then Tom walked over to me and came close to my ear.

“Drive Yolanda’s van, would you please, Goldy?”

“Sure. Can you lock the house?”

Tom walked back up the steps and made sure our front door was secure and the alarm was set. When he returned, he dropped the key ring into my hand. “We’ll drive her to the church. We want her to be with us, in case she decides to share any more information. Then you can drive Ferdinanda and Yolanda over to Ernest’s place, so they can take care of the puppies and pick up their stuff before they come back here.”

“What if they don’t want to stay with us?”

“Then I’ll come get you at Ernest’s.”

“Will department investigators still be at Ernest’s house?”

Tom glanced at his watch. “They should be.”

“Whatever,” I said as I marched to Yolanda’s vehicle.

It was an ancient van that had been retrofitted with a small elevator for a wheelchair. Even with that, the vehicle couldn’t have cost more than a few thousand dollars. Formerly turquoise and white, it was now mostly rusted. I gingerly opened the door. Inside, it was immaculate, although the carpet was worn and the windshield cracked. I cranked the key in the ignition, shifted into Drive, took my foot off the brake, and turned the steering wheel. When nothing happened, I gently stepped on the accelerator. After an initial hesitation, the behemoth growled and jerked away from our curb. It listed to starboard and the engine made a horrible grinding noise.

As I moved down our street behind Tom, John, and Yolanda, the hair on the back of my neck prickled. Was I being followed or watched? Or was I being paranoid? Maybe our discussion in the driveway, or Jake’s howls, had brought unseen neighbors to their windows. I checked the van’s pitted rearview mirror but saw only tiny stalks of silvery snow-in-summer. Tom had told me it was a favorite perennial in Aspen Meadow because it spread rapidly and withstood the summertime hail that crushed more delicate flowers. Tom had helped Trudy, our next-door neighbor, plant a dozen of them along the fence in her front yard, and with this summer’s record rainfall, the invasive plant had taken over.

I refocused my attention and checked the street. No one was behind Yolanda’s van. The sidewalks were empty. The FOR SALE sign in Jack’s front yard rippled in the wind. Oh, Jack, I thought, I miss you. My heart twisted in my chest.

The wind kicked up waves of dust as our vehicles lumbered down Main Street and up toward Aspen Meadow Lake. The water itself formed dark wavelets that mirrored the charcoal sky. My watch said it was only quarter after five, but it seemed like much later.

Our Lady of the Mountains loomed on the hill just above the lake. Despite the cold wind, Ferdinanda and the monsignor were out in the parking lot. The priest, short, slender, and already half-bald, was shivering in his clericals. Ferdinanda, stout, square faced, and frizzy haired, sat tall in her wheelchair. She wore only a shapeless brown dress that looked as if it had been prison-issue from the former Soviet Union.

I wondered why they were outside. But that was clear soon enough, as Ferdinanda was smoking a cigar. She waved it jauntily when she saw the van, but when she realized it was accompanied by a police car, her chin dropped. She stared through the cracked windshield, as if she were trying to make out Yolanda.

I threw the vehicle into Park and jumped out to reassure her, but that only made matters worse.

“Where’s Yolanda?” she demanded of me, pointing the cigar in a menacing manner. “Why is she not here?”

I said, “She’s over in that other—” And then I waved at the police car.

Ferdinanda began to wail. “What’s he done to her now?” she cried.

“Who’s that?” asked Tom as he eased his way out of the prowler. “What has who done to her?”

“Where is Yolanda?” she demanded.

“Estoy aquí,” called Yolanda as she rushed to her aunt. I’m here. Yolanda fell to her knees in front of the wheelchair and hugged Ferdinanda’s knees. I could make out enough of their Spanish to understand that Yolanda was telling her great-aunt that Ernest was dead, that he had been murdered, and that the police were here to question her.

Ferdinanda’s mouth turned downward. She dropped the smoking cigar on the asphalt and leaned forward to embrace Yolanda. The priest worriedly crushed the cigar with his toe, then asked Tom and John if there was anything he could do to help.

“Yeah, go back inside, Father, if you would,” said Tom. “We’re just going to talk to Ferdinanda for a few minutes.”

“Oh no you’re not,” said Ferdinanda. “Put me into the van, Yolanda. I want to go home, take care of the dogs.” Ferdinanda began to roll herself toward the van.

John Bertram abruptly stepped in front of the wheelchair, as if to stop her. “Tom, do you want me to—”

John Bertram did not see Ferdinanda reach beside her hip and pull out a telescoping baton. As Yolanda and Tom both cried, “No!” Ferdinanda pressed a button to extend the baton and whacked a startled John Bertram across the knees.

John hollered, “Christ!” and fell to the pavement.

“You just assaulted a police officer!” Tom yelled at Ferdinanda. The monsignor knelt quickly beside John and spoke softly to him. John, for his part, cussed and held his knees. Was the monsignor used to police officers being hit by the disabled in the church parking lot? Probably not. But the priest seemed okay. John Bertram did not.

“Ferdinanda!” shouted Tom as he hustled to John’s side. “What were you thinking?”

“That man tried to block the way of a handicapped person!” Ferdinanda hollered right back. “I’ll call my lawyer! I’ll sue the sheriff’s department!”

Yolanda stood protectively next to Ferdinanda. At the same time, she tilted her head and gave Tom a raised-eyebrow I-told-you-so look.

Tom ignored them both, knelt next to John, and asked the priest to step aside. Then my husband expertly felt around John’s knees, told him nothing was broken, that he was probably just bruised.

John said something unintelligible.

Tom talked in low tones to John, who must have agreed to something. Tom asked the monsignor for help. Eventually, John put one arm around Tom’s shoulders, one around the priest’s, and the three of them moved haltingly to the squad car. They eased John into the front seat. Tom thanked the priest, who waved to Ferdinanda and Yolanda and hustled back to the rectory. He was probably saying a prayer of gratitude that he was getting away from this particular mess.

With John still inside, Tom got out, slammed the driver-side door, and walked over to us. But instead of losing his temper, he kept his tone even.

“John says he’s okay, just in pain,” Tom said to Yolanda. “I couldn’t feel anything broken, but I want him to be checked out, just in case. Let’s get your aunt into the van. We can talk for a few minutes, before I take John to the hospital.”

The old van had chilled quickly. Once Ferdinanda had gone up the motorized lifting device and was strapped in the back, Tom sat in the passenger seat. I saw him take in how decrepit the vehicle was, with its split seats, torn dashboard, cracked and pitted windshield, and worn carpet. Yolanda got behind the wheel and turned on the engine so it could warm us up. I took the lone seat in back, beside Ferdinanda.

Tom turned to face us. “I need to ask you a couple of questions about Ernest, Ferdinanda. Please.”

“I’m not saying anything without a lawyer here,” Ferdinanda said defiantly.

“You’re not a suspect,” Tom replied. “Will you talk to me?”

Ferdinanda patted her frizz of hair. After a moment, she said, “I suppose.”

“What time did Ernest leave the house on Saturday?”

“What?” she replied, and then I remembered that Yolanda had said she was hard of hearing.

Tom raised his voice a notch. “When did Ernest leave his house Saturday morning?”

“About half past eight,” said Ferdinanda. “He said he was going to walk, try to get some exercise. He’d told us it helped alcoholics if they get high from walking or running, instead of from booze.”

“Is that what he said that morning?”

Ferdinanda turned the sides of her mouth down, considering. “No. That was what he usually said. He didn’t say it that morning.”

“What did he say that morning?”

“I was out on his patio, smoking a cigar. Yolanda was doing the dishes. Ernest? He said, ‘That thing will kill you, Ferdinanda, you ought to stop.’ ” She paused for a moment. “I don’t hear so good anymore. I think that was what he said.”

“Did he say anything else?” asked Tom. “Anything about being worried? Anything about someone wanting to hurt him?”

Ferdinanda rubbed the sides of her mouth with her tobacco-stained thumb and forefinger. “A woodpecker was at his feeder. I think Ernest said, ‘I’m going now. If anything happens to me, ask the bird.’ ”

“ ‘Ask the bird’?” said Tom. “That’s what he said?”

“I think so. I told you, I don’t hear so good anymore. I laughed. He laughed. Then he walked away. He didn’t come home last night. Didn’t Yolanda tell you? She called all over. We were worried sick. We drove over to the dentist’s office, but the dentist wasn’t there. Ernest wasn’t either. Yolanda, she called the clinic, the hospital—”

“When he was saying something about asking the birds, did he say he was going anywhere else besides the dentist?”

Ferdinanda lifted her chin. “No. Ernest promised us he was coming home right after his appointment. He wanted Yolanda’s seafood enchiladas.”

“Was Ernest carrying anything?” Tom asked. “When he left? His cell phone, something like that?”

Ferdinanda’s wizened face looked blank. “He just had on his backpack, the way he always did.”

“One last thing,” said Tom. “When you asked, ‘What’s he done to her now?’ what did you mean? Who were you talking about?”

“That Kris Nielsen,” Ferdinanda replied. Here she took out a handkerchief from an unseen pocket of the brown dress and spit into it. She wadded up the kerchief and stowed it in another invisible pocket. “Yolanda got sick. Sexually transmitted disease.”

Yolanda protested, saying, “Oh, Tía, no—”

Ferdinanda held up her hand to shush her niece. “Yolanda’s doctor asked who was she having sex with. She said only Kris. The doctor said Kris made her sick. So Yolanda asked Kris if he was sleeping with other women, someone with a disease. Do you think he cared about her, about how she was sick? No. He picked up a broom. I knew what he was going to do, so I rolled myself in front of him. That bastard pulled off my eleke and then pushed me aside.”

“Eleke?” Tom asked, bewildered.

“A beaded necklace,” Ferdinanda explained. “It is sacred. But listen. That bastard Kris took that broomstick and hit my dear Yolanda two times. Crack, on one arm. Then crack, on the other.”

My mouth dropped open as I glanced at Yolanda. Her left hand covered her eyes in shame.

Ferdinanda concluded by saying, “That’s when we decided, we have to move out.”

“You didn’t tell me,” I whispered to Yolanda.

“I couldn’t tell you, Goldy,” said Yolanda, still not looking at us. “I was ashamed.” She did glance up at me then. “He hit me so hard I thought my bones were broken. They swelled up, then turned black and blue. My long sleeves covered up the bruises.”

“Yeah,” said Ferdinanda. “Tell her about the VD, too.”

Inside the dark van, I could just make out Yolanda’s face turning scarlet. She said, “Crabs. I’ve been treated. I got it from him, but I’m all right now. It was nothing that would affect food handling. I told Ernest, in case he didn’t want me fixing his dinners. He knew all about STDs and their treatment, and he told me not to worry about it.”

“Did you file a police report, Yolanda?” asked Tom gently. “Over the fact that Kris hit you?”

“No,” she replied in a low voice. “Later, when we were in the rental and things started happening, I called the police. But back then? When he hit me? I just wanted to get out of there.”