In the Midst of Winter

  “You’re not thinking of getting Daniela involved in this, are you?” exclaimed Richard, horrified.

  “Why not? Daniela loves adventures, and when she heard what we were up to she was only sorry not to be here to lend a hand. I’m sure your father would say the same.”

  “Did you tell Daniela all this on the phone?”

  “On WhatsApp. Calm down, Richard, no one suspects us, there’d be no reason for them to investigate our cell phones. Besides, with WhatsApp there’s no problem. As soon as we’ve dealt with Kathryn, we’ll put Evelyn on a plane to Miami. Daniela will be waiting for her.”

  “A plane?”

  “She can travel within the country with her Native American ID, but if that’s too risky, we can put her on a bus. It’s a long journey, a day and a half, I think.”

  THEY ENTERED THE OMEGA INSTITUTE along Lake Drive and passed the administration buildings in a white landscape of absolute silence and solitude. Nobody had been there since the start of the storm. No machines had come to clear the path, but the sun had begun melting the snow. There were no tracks from any recent vehicles. Lucia took them to the sports field, because she recalled seeing a box for sports equipment big enough to hold a body. Kathryn would be safe there from coyotes and other predators. But Evelyn said it would be a sacrilege to put Kathryn somewhere like that.

  They continued on to the shore of a long, narrow lake where Lucia had paddled a kayak on her visits to the institute. It was frozen over, but they did not dare step out onto it. Richard knew how difficult it could be to judge the thickness of ice at a glance. There was a boathouse on the bank, a few canoes, and a jetty. Richard suggested they tie one of the light canoes to the Subaru’s roof rack and drive along the narrow path bordering the lake in search of an out-of-the-way spot. They could leave Kathryn on the far bank, covered by the tarpaulin. Within a few weeks, when the thaw began, the canoe would float across the lake until someone found it. A funeral in water is poetic, he added, like a Viking ceremony.

  Richard and Lucia were struggling with the chain mooring one of the canoes when a cry from Evelyn stopped them. She pointed to a nearby grove of trees.

  “What is it?” asked Richard, thinking she must have seen a guard.

  “A jaguar!” exclaimed Evelyn, ashen faced.

  “That’s not possible, Evelyn. They don’t exist up here.”

  “I can’t see anything,” said Lucia.

  “Jaguar!” Evelyn repeated.

  In the white expanse of the wood the three of them thought they glimpsed a big yellow animal that turned and leapt away toward the gardens. Richard assured them it must be a deer or a coyote. There had never been any jaguars in that region, and if there had been other large cats, such as pumas, they had been wiped out more than a century earlier. It was such a fleeting vision that he and Lucia doubted they had seen it, but Evelyn, transfigured, began to follow the tracks of the supposed jaguar as though she were floating above the ground: light, ethereal, diminutive. The other two did not dare call out to her in case someone heard them, but followed behind, waddling like penguins to avoid slipping in the snow.

  EVELYN FLOATED ON ANGEL’S WINGS along the path past the office, the store, the bookstore, and the café. She drifted on until she rounded the library and the lecture hall and left the large dining rooms behind. Lucia remembered the institute in the high season, green and filled with flowers, myriad birds, and red squirrels, with visitors moving in slow motion in the garden to the controlled rhythms of tai chi, others strolling between their classes in saris and monks’ sandals, as well as youthful employees reeking of marijuana on their electric carts loaded with bags and boxes. The winter panorama was desolate and beautiful, with the phantasmagoric whiteness adding to the sense of vastness. The buildings were locked up, their windows sealed with wooden planks. There were no signs of life; it was as if no one had been there for fifty years. The snow muffled the sounds of nature and their crunching boots. They followed Evelyn as if in a dream, without making a noise. Though it was a clear day and still early, they felt as if they were enveloped in a theatrical mist. Evelyn went on past the cabin area and took a path to the left that ended in a steep flight of stone steps. She climbed them without hesitation or watching out for ice, as though she knew exactly where she was headed. The other two struggled along behind her. They passed a frozen fountain and a stone Buddha and found themselves on the top of the hill in the Sanctuary, a square, Japanese-style wooden pagoda flanked by covered eaves: the spiritual heart of the community.

  They understood this was the spot Kathryn had chosen. Evelyn Ortega could not have known the Sanctuary was here, and there were no tracks left in the snow by the animal visible only to her. It was useless trying to find an explanation; as she had done so often, Lucia gave in to the mystery. Richard managed to continue with rational doubts for a few moments, then shrugged and gave in as well. Over the past two days he had lost confidence in what he thought he knew and in the illusion of being in control. He had accepted that he knew very little and controlled even less, but was no longer frightened by this uncertainty. During their night of shared secrets, Lucia had told him that life always asserts itself, but does so more fully if we accept it without resisting. Guided by an unshakable intuition or by the specter of a jaguar that had escaped from a secret jungle, Evelyn had led them directly to the sacred place where Kathryn would rest in peace, protected by kindly spirits, until she was ready to continue her final journey.

  Evelyn and Lucia waited beneath the pagoda roof, sitting on a bench near two frozen ponds that in summer contained tropical fish and lotus flowers, while Richard went to fetch their car. There was a steep access road for maintenance and gardening vehicles that the Subaru, with its snow tires and four-wheel drive, climbed with ease.

  They lifted Kathryn carefully out of the car, laid her on the tarpaulin, and carried her to the Sanctuary. Since the meditation room was locked, they chose the bridge between the ponds to prepare the body, which was still rigid in its fetal position, the big blue eyes open wide in astonishment. Evelyn took off the stone carved in the image of Ixchel, the jaguar goddess, the ancestral protective amulet she had been given by the shaman in Peten eight years earlier, and hung it around Kathryn’s neck. Richard tried to stop her, considering it risky to leave this evidence, but relented when he understood it would be almost impossible to trace the stone to its owner. By the time the body was found, Evelyn would be far away. He contented himself with wiping it clean with a tissue soaked in tequila.

  Following instructions given by Evelyn, who quite naturally took on the role of priestess, they improvised some primitive funeral rites. A circle was closing for her: she had been unable to say anything at her brother Gregorio’s funeral and had been absent for Andres’s burial. She felt that by saying goodbye to Kathryn she was also solemnly honoring her brothers. In her village the last moments and the passing of a sick person were faced without any great drama, because death was regarded as a threshold, just like birth. Those present were supporting the person as they crossed to the other side without fear, delivering their soul to God. In cases of violent death, a crime, or an accident, additional rites were needed to convince the victim of what had happened and to ask them to leave and not come back to frighten the living. Kathryn and the child she was carrying inside her had not had even the simplest vigil. Perhaps they had not even realized they were dead. No one had washed, perfumed, and dressed Kathryn in her finest clothes, no one had sung or worn mourning for her, served coffee, lit candles, or offered flowers. Nor was there a black paper cross signifying the violence of her departure. “I feel very sorry for Miss Kathryn, who hasn’t even got a coffin or a place in a cemetery. And the poor little unborn child, who has no toy to take to heaven,” said Evelyn.

  While Evelyn prayed out loud, Lucia wet a cloth with snow and washed the dried blood from Kathryn’s face. Instead of flowers, Richard cut a few sprigs from a bush and placed them b
etween her hands. Evelyn insisted they also leave the bottle of tequila, because in vigils there was always liquor. They wiped the fingerprints from the pistol and left that alongside Kathryn. That could be the clinching proof against Frank Leroy. Kathryn’s body would be identified as being his lover’s, the gun that fired the shot was registered in his name, and it could be proved he was the father of the fetus. Everything pointed to his guilt, except for one thing: he had an alibi because he had been in Florida.

  They rolled Kathryn into the rug, folded the four corners of the tarpaulin around her, and tied the bundle with the ropes Richard had in the car. Like all the buildings in the institute, the Sanctuary had no foundation, but was raised off the ground on stilts. This left a gap underneath into which they could slide Kathryn’s body. They spent some time collecting stones to block the entrance. With the spring thaw the body would inevitably start to decompose, and the smell would reveal her presence.

  “Let us pray, Richard, to join Evelyn in saying farewell to Kathryn,” Lucia asked him.

  “I don’t know how to pray, Lucia.”

  “Everyone does it in their own way. For me, praying is relaxing and trusting in the mystery of existence.”

  “Is that God for you?”

  “Call it whatever you like, Richard, but give Evelyn and me your hands while we form a circle. We’re going to help Kathryn and her little one go up to heaven.”

  Afterward Richard taught Lucia and Evelyn to make snowballs and stack them one on top of another to form a pyramid, with a lit candle at its center, as he had seen Horacio’s children do at Christmas. The fragile lantern composed of a flickering flame and frozen water cast a delicate golden light, surrounded by blue circles. A few hours later, after the candle had burned down and the snow had melted, there would be no trace left.

  Lucia and Richard

  Brooklyn

  Richard Bowmaster and Lucia Maraz conscientiously collected everything published about the Kathryn Brown case from the moment her body was found in March to a couple of months later, when they were able to consider their life-changing adventure at an end. The discovery of the body at Rhinebeck led to speculation about a possible human sacrifice by members of an immigrant cult in New York State. Xenophobia toward Latinos was already in the air, unleashed by Donald Trump’s hateful presidential campaign. Although few people took him seriously as a candidate, his boast that he would build a wall like the Great Wall of China to seal the border with Mexico and deport millions of undocumented immigrants was beginning to take root in the popular imagination. This made it easy to give the crime a macabre explanation. Details of the discovery pointed toward the theory of a cult: like a pre-­Columbian mummy the victim had been wrapped in a fetal position inside a bloodstained Mexican rug, with an image of the devil carved on a stone around her neck and a bottle with a skull on its label next to the body. The point-blank shot to the forehead suggested it had been an execution. And, according to some scandal-­mongering newspapers, the body had been left in the Sanctuary of the Omega Institute to mock its spirituality.

  Several Spanish-speaking churches put out emphatic denials of the existence of satanic cults in their communities. Soon however, the virgin sacrifice—as one tabloid called her—was identified as Kathryn Brown, a physical therapist from Brooklyn, aged twenty-eight, single, and pregnant. Forget the virgin. It also emerged that the tiny stone sculpture did not represent Satan but a goddess from Maya mythology, and the skull was a frequent decoration on the commonest bottles of tequila. At this, interest from public and press diminished until it faded away completely, making it harder for Richard and Lucia to follow the case.

  The article that appeared in the New York Times during the last week in May, which Richard Bowmaster confirmed through other sources, had little to do with Kathryn Brown. It concerned a human trafficking network that involved Mexico, several Central American countries, and Haiti. Frank Leroy’s name was mentioned in the article, along with that of other accomplices, and Kathryn’s death warranted barely a couple of lines. Even though it was within the police department’s jurisdiction, the FBI had investigated the Kathryn Brown case due to her links to Frank Leroy, who was briefly arrested as the main suspect for the crime but released on bail. For several years, the FBI had been on the trail of a vast human trafficking operation, and they were more concerned with laying their hands on Leroy for that than with the fate of his unfortunate lover. They were aware of Frank Leroy’s involvement in the trafficking but did not have sufficient proof to prosecute; he had protected himself carefully against that eventuality. It was only by linking him to Kathryn Brown’s murder that they were able to obtain a search warrant for his office and house, uncovering sufficient evidence to implicate him.

  Leroy escaped to Mexico, where he had contacts and where his father had lived quietly for years as a fugitive. That could have been his destiny as well, were it not for a special FBI agent who had infiltrated their gang. This man was Ivan Danescu. It was thanks to him more than anyone that they were able to disentangle the criminal knot in the United States and its links with Mexico. Danescu was killed during a raid on a ranch in Guerrero where many of the victims were imprisoned, and where several of the network’s bosses were holding a meeting. According to the press, Ivan Danescu accompanied the Mexican military in a heroic operation to free more than a hundred prisoners waiting to be transported and sold.

  Between the lines, Richard read a different version, because he had studied the methods of both the cartels and the authorities. Any cartel boss arrested usually succeeded in escaping from prison with astonishing ease. The law was constantly flouted, since both police and judges yielded to threats or corruption, and anyone who resisted was killed. Very seldom were the guilty men who operated with impunity in the United States ever extradited.

  “I’m convinced the military entered that ranch to kill, backed up by the FBI. That’s what they do in operations against the narcos, and I don’t see why it would be any different in this case. Their plan to take them by surprise must have failed, and it ended in a shootout. That would explain the death of Ivan Danescu on the one hand and Frank Leroy on the other,” Richard told Lucia.

  THEY CALLED EVELYN, who had not heard the news, and agreed she should come up from Miami to Brooklyn, as she was obsessed with the idea of seeing Frankie again. She had not as yet dared to call Cheryl. Lucia had to convince Richard that now that Frank Leroy was dead, Evelyn was in no danger, and that both she and Cheryl deserved some closure on what had happened. She offered to make the initial contact, and faithful to her conviction that it was always best to take the bull by the horns, she immediately phoned Cheryl and asked to see her because she had something important to tell her. Terrified, Cheryl hung up. Lucia left a note in the mailbox at the house of statues: I’m a friend of Evelyn Ortega’s, she trusts me. Please see me, I have news of her. She added her cell phone number and put the keys to the Lexus and Kathryn Brown’s house in the envelope. The same night, Cheryl called her.

  An hour later, Lucia went to see her. Richard waited in the car, so nervous his ulcer began to throb. They had decided it would be better if he didn’t appear, as Cheryl would feel more at ease with another woman. Lucia discovered that Cheryl was exactly as Evelyn had described her: tall, blond, almost masculine, but a lot older looking than she had expected. She was agitated, fearful, and defensive. She was trembling when she showed Lucia into the living room.

  “Tell me right away how much you want, so we can get this over with,” she said in a choking voice, standing with her arms folded.

  It took Lucia half a minute to grasp what she had heard.

  “Good Lord, Cheryl, I don’t know what you’re thinking. I haven’t come to blackmail you, far from it. I know Evelyn Ortega and what happened to your car. I’m sure I know a lot more than you do about that Lexus. Evelyn wants to come in person to explain, but above all she wants to see Frankie. She misses him a lot; she adores your
son.”

  At this, Lucia witnessed an astonishing transformation in the woman in front of her. It was as if the armor plating protecting her had been suddenly smashed, to reveal someone with no backbone, nothing to hold her up inside, a person held together by an accumulation of pain and fear, so weak and vulnerable that Lucia could scarcely resist the urge to hug her. A sob of relief escaped from Cheryl’s chest. She collapsed onto the sofa, head in hands, crying like a baby.

  “Please, Cheryl, calm down, everything is all right. All Evelyn ever wanted is to help you and Frankie.”

  “I know, I know. Evelyn was my only friend, I told her everything. She left when I most needed her. She vanished with the car without saying a word.”

  “I don’t think you know the whole story. You don’t know what was in the trunk of the car . . .”

  “How wouldn’t I know?” said Cheryl.

  CHERYL TOLD LUCIA that the Wednesday before the January storm, when she was going through her husband’s shirts for the laundry, she saw a grease stain on his jacket lapel. Before adding it to the pile she discovered a key hanging from a golden ring. A jealous itch told her it belonged to Kathryn Brown’s house, which confirmed her doubts about her husband and that woman.

  The next morning, when Kathryn was helping Frankie exercise, he suffered a hypoglycemic crisis and passed out. Kathryn brought him around with an injection and his blood sugar levels soon stabilized. No one was to blame for the incident, but the question of the key had stirred up Cheryl against Kathryn. She accused her of mistreating her son and sacked her on the spot. “You can’t get rid of me. It was Frank who hired me. Only he can fire me, and I doubt he’ll do that,” Kathryn replied haughtily, despite which she picked up her things and left.