Delmara shook his head sadly. “I circulated the report, guess you weren’t in the loop yet. This parcel, twenty-eight acres, got bought three months back by Darco Development, a consortium that builds mini malls. They ID patterns of upscale residential growth, find cheap land a couple miles past where the growth is heading … build and wait.” He nodded toward the uncleared land. “We see scrub and buzzards, Darco sees a future population center.”
“Before Darco?” Gershwin prompted.
“Owned by Allen Feldstein, a retiree who had a cab company in New Jersey and retired to Coral Gables in 2001. He bought the parcel seven years back and built a home, planning to subdivide the rest into plots … never happened because Mr Feldstein stroked out a year later. Darco bought it from his widow, who’s now eighty-eight.”
“Maybe Feldstein knew about the cistern.”
“I talked to the wife. Feldstein walked the land exactly once, a few days before signing the deal. ‘He went out to see about places to put houses and getting all that junk cleared off,’ is what she said. She said Feldstein wouldn’t have gone out there again by himself. He was terrified of snakes.”
“Before Feldstein?”
“Owned by a guy named Driscoll for almost forty years, cattle-rancher type. Never ran many cattle out here, having a bigger tract a few miles north. Might have been Driscoll who built the cistern, maybe to trap extra water for his stock. I’d have asked, but Driscoll’s been dead a dozen years.”
“Leaves him out. Anyone else around? Or any thing?”
“A couple miles down the road there’s a dying town with a dock, bait shop and grocery, and a little restaurant-bar-gas station. I put the average age of the residents at a hundred and thirty-seven.”
I knelt and scuffed my hands through the sand like it could tell me something. My fingers pulled a ten-inch bolt from the soil, rusted half through. I stood, tossed it deep into the scrubby trees, and turned to Delmara.
“So who knew the cistern was here, Vince?”
“Probably not anyone still alive.”
He sighed and turned to his cruiser, off to interview the last remaining neighbor who might know Paul Carosso.
“Mind if Ziggy and I tag along?” I asked.
“Sure, come meet Hattie Doyle, though I’m doubting she has anything to add. You sure you want to waste your time?”
“It’s that or talk to rental agents.”
He gave me a glance but didn’t ask, and we walked to his car. He pulled his keys, then paused, looking across his roof line at the Rover.
“How about you drive, Detective Ryder? I wanna see how it feels to be on a safari.”
24
After reluctantly leaving the wonderful blue pool, Leala had spent the night in a nearby park, snatching shards of sleep between a pink wall and a thick growth of scarlet azalea spiked with agave. The spot was small but concealed even from the moonlight, allowing Leala to sleep naked with the thin yellow dress drying on the spikes of an agave.
When the orange sun climbed past the trees and began brightening her hiding spot, Leala continued down the street, ready to leap from sight. What would they do to her for escaping?
A memory returned and Leala’s heart stopped. She wavered in the street on loosened knees. What had she been told by the Amili woman?
“If you don’t behave, we will punish your mama, Leala. If you do anything wrong, your mama will be hurt very bad. Do you understand?”
She had to call her mother. Leala ran down the block and saw two heavy women talking on the sidewalk. Pushing aside her fear, she approached.
“Pardon me, señoras. I must make a call to Honduras. How might this happen?”
The women looked at Leala’s bare feet and wrinkled clothes, then at one another. “Where are you from, little girl?” a woman said, her plump arms crossed and disapproval in her eyes. “What is your story?”
“Please, good lady. There is trouble and I must tell mi madre.”
The women again looked at one another. Silence until one of them pointed and said, “The abacería down the street. You can call from there.”
Leala ran until she saw a small sky-blue grocery on a corner criss-crossed with electrical and telephone wires, its walls spidered with crumbling stucco and its windows plastered with signs. One of the signs said, TELEFONO A CENTROAMERICA Y SUDAMERICA. Another, hung in the front door, said, OPEN/ABIERTO. Leala stepped inside and saw an aisle crowded with crates of bananas, mangos, papayas and limes. Other aisles held canned goods, toiletries, spices, food mixes. There was a freezer for dairy products and soda pop and beer. Items hung from the ceiling and were piled against the walls.