Pushing Up Daisies

wouldn't be surprised if she's the mother.'

CHAPTER 31

Yolanda Angelina Grace Rivera was born in Mexico in a dusty, corrugated shack held together by bottle caps. Her mother was a worn-out woman of twenty-three, and by the time Yoly was sixteen, she realized her life would be no different from her mother's. So one season, when the men went north for the harvest, she stuffed a few things in a nylon shopping bag and left her small town to go with them.

In El Paso, the group contracted for agricultural work on the East Coast, picking crops in Florida—beans and tomatoes mostly. Rickety buses and trucks took them from one state to the next, one crop to the next, through the Carolinas, up to Virginia, then to New Jersey and New York. In New York she learned about the tobacco crop in Connecticut, and when the rest of the group drove south to start the cycle again, Yoly headed east.

She worked the tobacco fields for a year, then got work as a nanny for a crew leader with five children. She wasn't much older than the kids she was looking after, but it kept her from the backbreaking work in the fields, and Yoly loved the kids and dreamed of one day having her own family in this quiet Connecticut town. When the season ended, and the crew leader moved on, Yoly stayed. In her last letter home, she said she was engaged to be married to a very important, very wealthy man, un hombre de renombre. Yoly's mother never heard from her again.

Fraser unfolded a familiar-looking piece of paper and handed it to me.

'This is the missing persons flyer I saw at the police station, I said.'

'No one wants to be the one to take it down. It would be admitting defeat.'

'So you think she's dead?'

He nodded. 'I bet her mother wrote a hundred letters, looking for that poor girl,' Gerald Fraser said. 'The department never even answered her. Chief Anderson just threw those pitiful letters in a drawer, said we had no time to chase down 'some little wetback.' Nowadays the mother would go on TV and on the Internet. They'd find the kid like that.' He snapped his fingers. 'Like I said, though, probably dead.' He pushed his coffee cup to the edge of the table and signaled Babe for a refill.

'Those days Chiaramonte had the only nursery in town. He'd hire illegals who were too scared to complain if he treated them badly. He denied it, but I felt sure that Guido and Yoly had met. What if they more than met? What if the baby is Yoly's and Guido's?' He sat back, a satisfied grin on his face.

'Even if it's true, what's the connection with the Peacocks? Did Guido work for them?'

He shook his head. 'The sisters didn't like him. But he did work next door. And he was there a lot more than any gardener needed to be.'

'Still, who would try to kill him now, after all these years?'

That was a question neither of us could answer. If my naive plan had been to save Hugo by finding the real assailant, it was backfiring badly. If Guido was connected to this missing Mexican girl, and she was connected to the baby, that could be a motive for Hugo, or some other Mexican, to have attacked him. And I didn't want to think about who that other Mexican might be. A lot of ifs, but this was a small town—even smaller thirty years ago. Anything was possible.

'I just can't believe Hugo's involved, even if this Yoly is somehow related. Millions of Mexicans have come to the States. They don't all know each other.'

'Ray O'Malley, Mike's dad, and I were out drinking one night. We took some heat for it afterward, but we wrote to the mother in pidgin Spanish. You should have seen the two of us, with no more Spanish than you'd get off a bottle of Dos Equis. It didn't matter, though—the letter came back marked undeliverable. Not that we had any answers for her. We just hated to think of that poor woman sending these letters off into the void, and no one having the common decency to reply. Then this happened,' he said, slapping his leg, 'and I got sidetracked.'

'You don't happen to remember the town she was from, do you?'

'I can do better than that,' he said. He pulled a tissue-thin, pale-blue airmail envelope out of his breast pocket.

'The postmark's illegible, and unfortunately I only put the month and date on the letter itself, but Phil Anderson was chief at the time, and he didn't get promoted till 1973. This would have happened a year or two after that.'

'You think Ray O'Malley might remember?'

'I doubt it. They're not calling it Alzheimer's yet, but he's got all the signs.'

I held the envelope with both hands.

Sra. Celinda Rivera, c/o La Palapa Hotel, Alpuyeca, Mexico

'Can I have a friend of mine take a look at this? I promise to return it.'

'Be my guest. But remember, you'll be raking up something that's been buried a long time, and, chances are, whoever stabbed Guido isn't going to like it. If I think of anything else, I'll give you a holler,' he said, easing out of the booth. 'Don't get up. I'm going to walk back to Sunnyview. The exercise will do me good.'

Once standing, he looked as fit as he did in his academy picture. He strode to the door of the Paradise with just the barest trace of a limp. If you didn't know, you might not have even noticed. He must have felt me staring, because he turned to me just as he was leaving. 'This doesn't count. You still owe me lunch, kid.'

Back home, I checked my atlas. Alpuyeca wasn't even on the map, but an online search showed it was uncomfortably close to Temixco, Hugo Jurado's hometown.

I didn't know if Felix was back—or if he had even really gone away—and I didn't have his phone number, so at 6 A.M. the next morning I headed for the downtown corner where the day laborers congregated, on the outside chance someone there would know how to find him.

Dozens of them, maybe a hundred, clustered at the coffee shop, dressed for work. Some knew who they were waiting for; most just showed up and hoped. They hoped they'd get picked, they hoped the work was safe, and they hoped they'd get paid what they were promised. These were the people who fixed roofs, laid tile, put up walls, planted trees—and we called them unskilled workers. Most of the men I knew didn't know which end of a hammer to hold.

I was the only woman in the coffee shop, except for Gina. At least that's what was written with a black Sharpie on her uniform. It may have been the last girl's name. She was barely visible behind a hill of plastic- wrapped rolls. In Spanish, I asked if she knew Felix. She shook her head quickly and moved on to a paying customer. That went well.

A young man shyly approached me to offer assistance. He identified himself as one of the small army of men Felix had brought to work at the Peacock house. I managed to get a cell number for Felix and reached him right away.

'Hola, maestra.'

'Are you still in Mexico?' Damn—that came out too fast.

'Yes. I had to attend an emergency board meeting and I also agreed to deliver an important package for a friend. Don't get nervous—I'm not a drug dealer. It was a letter to Hugo's mother and a present for her. He didn't want to entrust it to the mail.'

I moved away from the throng of men, smiling and trying to pretend I was having a casual conversation. 'Hugo's been arrested for stabbing Guido Chiaramonte.' A ripple went through the crowd at the mention of Hugo's name, and the men moved away from me, either to give me privacy or to distance themselves from a potential legal problem. I gave Felix the details. 'They have Hugo's fingerprints on the weapon and they think they have a motive. The cops may not know it yet, but Gerald Fraser may have uncovered something even more damning.' I told him Yoly's story.

'Do you think Hugo could have known her?'

'Everybody knows somebody named Rivera in Mexico. Close your eyes, spin around, and touch someone. It is like hitting a pinata: every third person is named Rivera.'

'Gerald has a letter he wrote to the mother. It'd be more helpful to have one of Yoly's letters, but this is better than nothing. Maybe her mother worked at that motel. It's the La Palapa in Alpuyeca. We can at least check to see if the place still exists.'