Page 2 of Sin of Love
I shove self-pity to the back burner and reassess the situation. I’m missing something. I was so sure there’d be a connection, something that would help me make sense—
“I don’t know what you’re talking about with this cartel shit,” continues Ernie. He never was a good listener. “Are you in some sort of trouble? Is someone after you? I’ve got friends in here, Deirdre Anne—”
I slam the receiver back into its cradle. Metal screeches as my chair slides across linoleum.
Ernie stands, dropping the receiver. Both hands pressed to the plexiglass, he mouths, “Please. Let me help you.”
Dry-eyed, I watch a guard haul him back and push him roughly toward a nearby door.
I stay long enough to see familiar, desperate blue eyes one more time. Long enough to remember that once, he made me feel safe—when I was too young to understand he was the one putting me in danger.
* * *
My first breathof fresh air isn’t very fresh—hot, dry, and tinged with exhaust. Corcoran State Prison, or COR, is essentially in the middle of Nowhere, California. Nothing but a sea of farmland stretching in every direction with a single highway bisecting it.
Back in my car, the air conditioner on full blast, I don’t look back at the prison as I accelerate onto the highway. It’s almost noon and I’m hungry, but I don’t stop in the small city of Corcoran for food. I break the speed limit until the city vacates my rearview, then slow and set the cruise control.
My mind is mush until I’m thirty miles away, far from the man I believed was my father for so many years. A man who says he had nothing to do with my kidnapping…
I never told Nate, but there were many times during my stays in Julep’s bedroom that I overheard him on the phone. Overheard the names El Jefe and Lazcano.
Then, I was too numb and shocked to process. Processing would come later, with the realization those names were familiar. I’d heard them many times before, the last when I was twelve years old, hiding in my secret, earthen dugout beneath the trailer while men with heavy boots walked above me.
Even below the trailer, I heard my bedroom door open. A raspy chuckle followed.
“You’ve been holding out on us, Ernie?” asks a rough, accented voice. “Got a girl in this dump?”
Staring upward, I watch shadows bisect the border around false floorboards. My heart beats so hard I can feel it in my throat. I will them not to look down, to see the finger hole that I use to lift the trapdoor.
“My niece stays with us sometimes,” answers my dad. “I’m not hiding anything from you. Promise. She hasn’t been here in months.”
“Doesn’t seem that way.” A long pause. “But no matter! Let’s get to business, shall we? El Jefe wants you to know how much he appreciates…”
The voice and footsteps trail away, out of a bedroom I’ll never feel safe in again. Not that I’ve felt safe in years.
But this is the first time I’ve felt fear in my dugout—my imagined tree-root cave. It’s the one place in the world I’m supposed to be safe.
Pulling the scratchy wool blanket tighter around my face and head, I squeeze my body into a ball. Knees to chest. Chin to knees.
Too small to see.
