A Desperate Silence (Dr. Sylvia Strange Book 3) (41 page)

     
During the journey, Noelle Harding spoke only once. She turned toward Sylvia, trapping her with piercing blue eyes. "For Serena's sake, I hope you've made the right decision."

     
Sylvia swallowed painfully.
Had she?
Would this journey to Anapra help free Serena from a violent past? Or would it push her past the point of return, triggering an ecstatic experience that verged on madness? Numbly, Sylvia stared out at the desolate landscape.

     
At the child's insistence, the Mercedes stopped in front of a corner
tienda
, a neighborhood store. Signs in the dusty windows advertised
LOTTO
and
PEÑACOLA.
The driver of Harding's car stayed put, and the three other men led the way toward the crumbling hacienda; they negotiated the footpath behind the store.

     
She saw the house from Serena's first drawing—it rode the cleft of a naked hill in the shadow of the Cristo Rey Monument. It was supported by stacks of tires and rotting wood. The surrounding wall was eroding just like the earth it rested upon. The structure was two stories high, grilled and impenetrable—at least for a child. On the highest roof was a small caged turret—a widow's walk. As Matt had described, the entire structure was an evolution of adobe to cinder blocks to woodwork.

     
The child had watched the world from that prison. She would have looked out at Anapra, the river border, and El Paso. At night, she would have seen the lights of Los Estados Unidos. And she would have seen neighbor children playing on the streets below.

     
Sylvia took in the child's world as she moved—almost breathed it in, trying to absorb every detail. Colors, smells, sounds. It was all part of the puzzle. The satellite dish meant that Serena had learned English with the help of U.S. broadcasting; microwaves crossed borders with impunity.

     
Sylvia noticed several small scruffy boys standing off to one side watching the procession, scared off by the men in dark clothes who packed weapons.

     
Serena didn't seem aware of the other children; she was too caught up in the drama of this moment. A moment Sylvia believed must be filled with ghosts.

     
The sun hadn't climbed over the hills, but the air was already uncomfortably warm. Perspiration trickled down Sylvia's neck, back, and under her arms. She could only imagine what it would be like in the full heat of the day. The trail led past rotting trash, withered cactus, the glitter of broken glass. They reached the main gate, which hung open on rusty hinges. On the other side of the wall, the courtyard was more night than day, shaded by a massive cottonwood.

     
One man stationed himself in the courtyard near a dilapidated well. He pulled cigarettes from his pocket and settled in to keep watch. The taller of the two remaining men entered the house. When Noelle stepped through the double wooden doors, Serena went into action.

     
Gripping Sylvia's hand, she pulled with a force that belied a ten-year-old's diminutive mass. The psychologist caught a fleeting glimpse of the living area before she realized that Serena was headed around the front of the house to the exterior stairway.

     
As Sylvia climbed higher, she gazed out at the emerging view of slum, river, and the endless city sprawl. With each step, she felt more isolated, more imprisoned.

     
Matt had tried to tell her what she would find upstairs.

S
YLVIA STEPPED THROUGH
the doorway and stopped in her tracks. She heard footsteps, felt Noelle Harding's presence, but her attention was riveted on the vision directly before her.

     
An explosion of color—vibrant reds, yellows, greens, purples, blues . . .

     
Trees, faces, landscapes familiar and exotic . . .

     
"My God." It was Noelle who spoke. "What
is
this?" . . . house paint, watercolors, crayons, pastels . . . murals covering smooth plaster . . . rainbows, sunsets . . . paint spattered on the floors . . . broken crayons, paint cans . . . charcoal . . .

     
Sylvia's whisper was hoarse. "Serena's story."

     
The child was swaying, dancing around the room—arms spread wide, head back. The energy of the work seemed to flow into her delicate body. She was in a state of possession, of trancelike ecstasy.

     
Sylvia moved into the center of the room. Her eyes raced from image to image—from face to figure to building to landscape. And slowly, the mural began to come into focus. The work had been divided into sections—scenes—but the divisions were stylistic, rather than actual borders. The artistic technique grew more sophisticated and skilled as the eye moved clockwise, south to west to north—because the child had grown.

     
When Sylvia had turned almost a full circle to her starting point, she saw that the work abruptly stopped. Serena's story in Anapra was not quite finished.

     
When her eyes settled on the child, she caught her breath.

S
ERENA LET THE
light and the color flow into her arms and legs. Heat made her skin tingle, almost burning—she was surrounded by her history.
Her story
. As Paco had told it to her—with words and pictures and pieces of the past. Just as Serena had let it flow into her skin and out again—from her fingers to the blank walls.

     
Trembling, she ran to the first panel. She let her fingers trail along the cool plaster, gazing up at the story of her beginning: her mother—angel pretty—cradling a baby to her breast.

     
Tears began to stream from the child's eyes as she stood on tiptoe and kissed Elena's face. For a horrible instant, the room spun around, pulling her toward its swirling center. She gasped for breath, stumbling toward the second panel.

     
El demonio
, a dark blade of fury racing toward her mother. The demon had stolen Elena's life.

     
A cry of pure grief escaped the child. Through tears, she could barely see the third panel—a man trapped behind bars: her father, dying because she wasn't with him.

     
Sobs wracked her small body as she traced the image with her fingers.

     
She had painted Paco almost flying—with a baby bundled in his arms. He had told her the story so many times. And she had grown up in those arms—this home.

     
Then she began to race around the room crying all their names.

     
Breathless, from the center of the floor, Serena cried out, "Good-bye, home! Good-bye."

T
HE PAINTED VISIONS
filled Sylvia with awe. They expressed a level of passionate intensity that was almost frightening. Everything came together on these walls—the child's trances, her prayers, her drawings, her incredible strength of will, her vibrant life-energy. And her isolation.

     
Sylvia had almost reached Serena when she stopped abruptly, her gaze on the farthest mural. She saw a very small child, a girl who knelt on bare knees, face raised toward the Virgin. A beam of light arced from goddess to child.

     
The child in this story had been
chosen
.

S
YLVIA FELT A
small hand clasp hers. She knelt down and kissed Serena's forehead, wiping tears from the child's face.

     
In a voice that cracked with emotion, the child whispered, "Anapra."

     
"Home?"

     
"
Old
home. Good-bye, old home."

     
Sylvia looked deep into the child's eyes, and she could believe Serena had been chosen; she had been touched by something extraordinary.

     
She whispered to the child. "Oh, Serena, you kept your vow of silence."

     
Serena blinked, nodding slowly, as if she had just awakened from a dream. "It's time to get my daddy," she said softly.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

     
"
P
ERDÓNAME
, P
ADRE
." Forgive me, Father. Renzo Santos appeared from his nest beneath a fraying blanket. He crept out from behind the wooden pew, leaving a trail of blood as he crawled across the chapel floor.

     
His sweat- and blood-soaked clothes clung to his body. His dark hair was slick as sealskin. Blood still oozed from his shoulder, although his vessels should have dried to dust. White powder stained his nose and face. He'd snorted the last of his drug, and the chemicals were galloping horses trampling his brain.

     
He crawled past rough wooden pews, approaching the altar and its nimbus of a hundred votive candles, most burned out by now, each flame representing the suffering of man, woman, or child. It took all Renzo's strength to cover two feet, three, four . . .

     
He moved through light and dark, hampered only by his half death. The first bullet was poisoning his body. The second bullet was eating away his power like a rat gnaws through cheese. Was he hours or minutes from dying? It was dawn, the time of day when even churches and cathedrals are abandoned except by the truly wretched. Renzo was terrified to leave this earth.

     
Death was bad enough—but if he left with a black moon and no confession . . .

     
Sacrament . . . absolution . . . blood sacrifice
. . .

     
He slid his knife from the sheath strapped to his ankle. He flipped the blade; in candlelight it shimmered, alive. He pressed the cutting edge to his left forearm—he pushed down through flesh. He lifted the now bloody blade and moved it down his arm almost an inch, cutting. Finally, he set the blade to his wrist and cut again.

     
As he watched the swell of thick red fluid, he hungered for the taste of lifeblood.

     
But Renzo let the blood run freely from his arm to the chapel floor, where it soaked darkly into the rough adobe mud.

     
His blood offering
. . .

     
It was a miracle he was alive. He had barely escaped across the river. Once out of the stinking water, he found refuge in a massive concrete pipe that dripped raw sewage into the Rio Bravo. Bloodied, weak, shivering, he had crawled up the pipe like a suckling crawling back into the womb to undo his own birth.

     
Now time was moving backward, and he had no idea how long it had taken to reach the other end of the pipe. But eventually, he had fallen back down into the world. And when he landed, he found himself deep inside the barrio of Anapra. His mother-the-
puta
's womb was a miserable slum where each and every man was invisible.

     
Renzo Santos Portrillo was only one among millions of miserable human beings.

     
From there, he made his way to sanctuary.

     
A violent tremor wracked Renzo's ruined body. He fell to his side, knees clutched protectively to belly. He lay still, his breathing shallow. Even in the haze of blood loss, the fevered dementia, the drug delusions, he knew that certain factions within the
federales
would work to protect him. After all, he was one of their own. He had tortured and murdered on assignment; he had been paid with federal currency; perhaps the very same money that Amado Fortuna had paid to the
federales
in bribes.

     
His was a world of favors bought and sold—coercion, terrorism, torture, death.

     
Other members of the federal judicial police would refuse to admit their failure to apprehend an international criminal. They would refuse to lose face in front of Los Estados Unidos and the F.B.I.

     
Which gave him time
. . .

     
Was someone there? Or was his mind playing tricks? What did the priest say? Renzo could not hear, so he whispered, "
Venga del oscuro, Padre
." Come out of the dark, Father.

     
The tendons in his neck stood out like thick cords as he lifted his head. He gazed upward, expecting to see the face of the priest. Instead, it was a woman who looked down upon him. Sweet face, brown skin, lips kissed by rose petals. Her boundless, deep-lidded eyes sent out rays of light, beams so powerful they froze Renzo where he huddled on hands and knees.

     
"
La Virgen
. . ." Her eyes closed, light fading, and only in her soft glow could he move again. He reached out one trembling arm, fingers straining to touch the hem of her green cloak. Now he saw she radiated sun rays.

     
Renzo did not know if his lips moved when he said his prayer. Was he thinking or speaking? It did not matter, because the Virgin heard his every word.

     
He felt her hand like a ray of fire scalding his brow. She was burning away his mortal sins. As she leaned down, he heard the rustling of her green cloak. She whispered to him, giving him permission to do what he must do. She warmed him in her boundless light.

     
Agonized and weeping, Renzo Santos began the endless walk of absolution.

     
When he reached the chapel door, he inched his way through. He thought he wouldn't be able to stand again. Muscles shivered violently.

     
The drug state would reach its zenith soon—and then it would fade, the last of his strength draining away with the chemicals.

     
Voices brought him back to the world.

     
The voice of the child.

     
And the voice of Coatlicue—
his
destroyer.

     
He shut his eyes, his body shuddering as a spasm overwhelmed him. He used his fingers as claws. Slick and wet, they found purchase. He stood upright. And now he gripped his knife in one hand.