Day of the Dead - J. A. Jance [16]
No, she and Madelina and who knew how many others had disappeared without a trace, just as Maria Elena’s mother and brother had disappeared that day in Chiapas. Once Maria Elena had hoped and prayed to Mother Mary that Mama and Pepé were still alive. Now she prayed that they were dead. And she prayed that she might die, too. It was her only hope.
Four
At the end of a long, sleepless night, Erik LaGrange sat sipping coffee on his patio and welcomed the sun as it edged up over the Rincons. It was Saturday morning. He didn’t have to go in to work today, which meant he could put off facing the music until Monday at least.
You’re only thirty-five, he told himself again, as he had countless times overnight. Losing a job isn’t the end of the world. You’ve got no wife, no kids, no responsibilities. You can go somewhere else and start over. So what’s the problem?
The problem was, Erik knew he’d be going job hunting with no references and with the added burden of a huge black spot on his reputation. In even the best of times, nonprofit development jobs weren’t easy to come by. With corporate and private giving down, jobs like the cushy one he’d had for the past five years were now, as Grandma Johnson would have said, scarce as hen’s teeth. And since he’d spent most of those five years screwing his boss’s wife…
Grandma Johnson would have had more than a little to say on that subject as well. “You should have thought about that a long time ago” was the most likely one. Undoubtedly, she would have added something about making one’s bed and lying in it.
Erik missed Gladys Johnson dreadfully—her cheerful disposition, her way of always looking on the bright side of things, and yes, even that sometimes very sharp Scandinavian tongue of hers. She had read Erik the riot act often enough as he was growing up, but he had never doubted that those scoldings were rooted in love.
Grandma had been Erik’s rock. True north on his compass. The only parent he had ever known or needed or wanted. She had been everything to him—mother/father, aunt/uncle, sister/brother. And, until he made it into junior high, she had also been his best friend. He could remember riding in the car with her singing along with one of her well-worn cassette tapes. Erik’s favorite had always been the one where Helen Reddy sang “You and Me Against the World.” The song was supposedly about a mother and her little girl, but Erik always pretended the song had been written just for his grandma and him.
Right then, though, Gladys Johnson and her sage advice—which had grown even wiser the older Erik got—had been gone from his life for ten years. There was no way she could dose him with a firestorm of well-earned criticism for his foolishness and then help see him through to the other side of the problem. No, in this case, Erik was going to have to manage all by himself.
Down on Skyline, a car horn honked impatiently. Overhead, a noisy jet streaked toward a landing at Davis Monthan Air Force Base several miles away. The jarring background noises sliced through Erik’s reverie and intruded on his thoughts.
“That’s what’s wrong with living in the city,” Grandma Johnson had told him countless times. “With all the traffic and noise, I can’t hear myself think. That’s when I wish I was back on the island, where it was just me and the woods and the water. Then, all I could think or dream about was how boring it was and how much I wanted to get away. Now I wish I could go back.”
Isle Royale was a long damned way from Tucson, Arizona, but remembering Grandma’s voice made Erik know what he needed to do—hear himself think. Hurrying into the house, he grabbed up his knapsack. He loaded it up