Category Five Read online

  But who was?

  There was a nice breeze on the east coast, and she loved how she would occasionally catch the scent of flor de maga blooms riding on the air. Then it would disappear so quickly she would wonder if she’d imagined it, if it was a ghost scent of a bush destroyed by the storm. But then she would see a splash of bright red peeking out from the damaged foliage like hope. As usual, she planned to stop at the church’s senior center before heading to the worksite to check in. She stepped into the dark, cool building, which had no lights on to save generator fuel and stave off the morning heat. The smell was so familiar—antiseptic, medicinal, with an undertone of urine and talcum powder. Okay, it wasn’t flor de maga, but it still comforted her. For most of her childhood her great-grandmother Giga was stationed in a back room of their house, occasionally yelling out to the Virgin or her long dead husband, and Marisol would spend hours playing dolls on the old woman’s chenille bedspread or applying blush and lipstick on her wrinkled, thin lips. On the island old age wasn’t something you hid in a nursing home; it was right there in the next room.

  “Mari!”

  As her eyes adjusted to the dark interior, Marisol saw Camille, the stylish Haitian nurse who helped out with the elderly patients, walking toward her. Camille was a pro, had volunteered as a nurse in war-torn countries all over the globe, and it had taken Marisol awhile to earn the woman’s trust. But sometime over the last few weeks, she’d broken through. A smile here, a hand pat there. Now, Camille pulled her in tight for a hug, the Magi’s-gifts smell of her naturopath oils bringing a smile to Marisol’s face. Her graying hair was cut stylish and short, and her clothes were crisp linen, practical but elegant, the mango color of the shirt a warm companion to her dark brown skin. In other words, she was a total badass.

  The nurse pulled her out of the hug and held her at arm’s length and then did her “staring into her soul” type thing. Did all nurses have that skill?

  “Are you sleeping, Mari?”

  And she was a mind reader, too. She laughed it off. “Too much to do to sleep!” Camille had no idea. Since the nightmares of the previous year had faded, she slept so much better. Just probably not long enough.

  Camille did that cheek-pinching thing older women tended to do with teenagers. The woman’s skinny strong fingers had a pincer-type feel. But it also felt like family.

  “You have to take better care of yourself, niña! Don’t make me drive out to Isla Verde and force chamomile tea on you!”

  Family always includes just a dash of guilt and reprimand.

  “I’m fine, Camille! Worry about your patients, not me.”

  Her lips pulled into a reluctant smile. “Someone has to take care of you. You’re too busy taking care of everyone else!”

  “Look who’s talking.”

  Camille did that dismissive wave thing again.

  “How’s Abuelita today?”

  Camille turned to look at the tiny old lady in the wheelchair nodding off in the corner, her frail body wrapped in a thick cotton blanket despite the heat. Her real name was Ofelia Gutiérrez, but everyone just called her “Abuelita” because she was like everyone’s grandmother.

  “Ay bendito, bless her, she’s doing well today, gracias a Dios. I think she’ll enjoy a visit from you.” Camille glided off to reprimand one of her charges for shuffling toward the exit in his old-man slippers. Every hour or so he would insist he was going to walk back to Rincón, the town on the far west coast of the island that he came from, and she would convince him to wait until after lunch, or a nap, or dinner.

  Marisol pulled a folding chair next to Abuelita and took her cool, dry hand with its papery skin into hers. The woman didn’t move, her chin on her chest, rising slightly with every breath. Mari’s phone dinged with a text. She pulled it out with her free hand.

  Hey! I’m here! Heading 2 Vieques w/ Tio. When can I c u?

  “Vieques?” Marisol said out loud, smiling at the message from Lupe. She was so glad her friend was there for the summer, but why was she going straight to Vieques? At least it wasn’t far from Yabucoa.

  “Vieques?” Abuelita echoed. She tended to repeat pieces of conversation that happened around her like a gray-haired parrot.

  “Hola, Abuelita! Es Marisol. ¿Como se encuentra?”

  “My grandmother is in Vieques. She’s…” She appeared to lose her train of thought. Another frequent occurrence.

  Marisol smiled. Abuelita was eighty-eight. She doubted her grandmother was in Vieques or anywhere at this point. Besides, Abuelita was from St. Croix, not Vieques. But Marisol hated how most people talked to the elderly as if they were children, so she always responded to their questions and comments, no patting of hand and patronizing, Sure, honey, whatever you say.

  “Why would your abuela be in Vieques?”

  Abuelita didn’t seem to hear; she was nodding her head up and down in that way she did when she was lost in her own thoughts. Marisol decided she would sit with her for a few more minutes, then head over to the worksite. She was already focusing on what lay ahead on the repairs to the Vazquez’s house when Abuelita spoke again.

  “She’s angry.”

  “Who? Your abuela?”

  “Yes. She’s so angry.…”

  “At you? No, Abuelita, who could be angry at you?” She stroked the woman’s thinning hair, trying to comfort her. Mari often wondered where the woman’s thoughts went, or when. She would have to do some research into cognitive functions of the elderly.

  “Not at me, at them. They made us leave … left her there alone,” Abuelita said again, then looked up at Marisol with tears welling in her cloudy eyes.

  “Oh no! Don’t cry! It’s okay!” Marisol’s throat tightened and she thought she would cry too. How had she upset the woman?

  And then Camille was there, all comforting hushes, and lifted Abuelita to her feet gently, as if she were a bird, and walked her over to her room. Abuelita was snoring before the nurse had finished tucking in the white blankets.

  Then Camille came back and looked over at Marisol and noticed the tears in her eyes. “Oh no, sweetheart, it’s nothing you said! The old ones, they get sad sometimes. So much loss…”

  “She was talking about her grandmother being angry. And on Vieques. Isn’t she from St. Croix?” Camille handed her a tissue and she blew her nose.

  “She is, but maybe she had family from there. Don’t worry, amor, she’s just confused.”

  Marisol shivered, though the room was quite warm. No wonder the poor old woman was anxious. She’d lost her home to a hurricane. Marisol swallowed so she wouldn’t start crying again. She hugged Camille and left quickly, anxious to get to work.

  The last ten months had been like something from a postapocalyptic nightmare. Volunteering was something, but Marisol had to do more. She looked at the clipboard in her hand and considered tossing it in the car but decided she would bring it to the worksite and gather some more names. But what good was the petition if she couldn’t get it to the right people? The people in power.

  Marisol vowed right then that she would do whatever it took to help get the island past this, whatever she could do to help people like Abuelita recover from Maria.

  She just didn’t know how yet.

  Chapter Three

  Lupe

  “LUPE, WOULDN’T YOU rather spend the day on a beach on the mainland? Luquillo Beach is only a twenty-minute drive from the ferry terminal. I can pick you up on the way home this afternoon. There is no need—” Esteban’s voice was raised so he could be heard over the chugging of the ferry’s weary engines.

  Lupe smiled up at her uncle standing beside her, his thick, hairy forearms resting on the deck’s railing. “Don’t even bother to finish that sentence, Tío. You know damn well”—she smiled at his head-snap at the profanity—“darn well that I’d rather hang with you while you do your badass job than lay on a bunch of microscopic rocks and shells baking like a pale scone.”

  Esteban sighed. He did that a lot when t
hey were together. At this point she felt it was her duty to exasperate him. She had noticed a spreading of gray across his hair on either side of his rugged face, even a sprinkling in his thick mustache, but the white only brought out the warm olive tan of his skin. So she was aging him. At least he was aging well.

  “I don’t understand why you insist on talking like one of my street informants. And I do not have a clue what a ‘scone’ is.”

  “Pastry, triangle-shaped, dry. Tastes like sawdust pressed together. You’d probably like it. It’s old-people food.”

  He glared at her as a smile snaked up the edge of his lips.

  Their relationship had settled into this after the “Cuco Event,” as she liked to call it: a light layer of teasing banter covering a fierce loyalty and unconditional love.

  Vanquishing a supernatural demon together bonds people, don’t you know.

  At least with Esteban. Her boyfriend, Javier, was a different story these days. But that’s why she’d insisted on coming along on this little trip right after landing in San Juan. Javier was working in Vieques.

  They stood in silence for a few minutes and Lupe enjoyed the feeling of the saltwater spray on her face. She’d been looking forward to coming down to Puerto Rico and spending the summer with her uncle and aunt all winter and spring long. Since her father had been working on his sobriety, life in their small Vermont town had been getting better, but there was something about coming to the island and her uncle’s house that felt like … coming home. She needed to have that sensation beneath her feet, like the world was where it should be. Her uncle was the originator of that feeling in her. She had nightmares about him and her aunt moving away from the island, leaving her like a raft unmoored from shore.

  She shook off a chill and changed the subject. “Why have I never heard of Vieques?”

  Her uncle shrugged. “It’s difficult to get there, and most Puerto Ricans go to Culebra, the island next door.” He pointed to a strip of land topped by a head of palms, still recovering from the hurricane, with their tall, stripped stalks and bright green lollipop tops.

  “Why?”

  “Once the U.S. military took over Vieques much of it was not available to civilians.”

  “That doesn’t sound fair.”

  “Well, they’re gone now.”

  Lupe had read quite a bit about it on the way from the airport when she’d found out they were going straight there. The island had been taken over by the Scottish—for, like, a day—then Denmark, then by Brandenburg-Prussia, wherever that was. The island seemed to have been caught in a game of keep-away for most of its history.

  Lupe could kind of understand how it must feel, having spent much of her life being shuttled between Vermont and her father’s family in Puerto Rico. Javier was another reason she had started to feel at home on the island. But a few months ago, after the hurricane, he started to act slightly distant, and seemed impatient to get off their chats. He insisted there was nothing wrong, that it was just the nightmare after Maria, but she knew she was not imagining his distance.

  She would bet her life on it.

  Vieques was growing bigger as they approached, and she could see the whirling blue lights of squad cars waiting near the dock. “What’s the case?” That’s the kind of question that used to get her shut down, but not anymore. As Esteban had often reminded her in the last year, she had a natural gift for detective work and was more helpful to him than half of his own officers.

  “Dead tourists in the bio bay. Three college students from a boat tour.”

  Damn. Lupe loved bio bays. Javier had taken her to the one in Fajardo at the end of last summer. The water lighting up as the kayaks sliced through had been like a religious experience. Blue glowing halos all around. But dead bodies kind of took the magic out of it. “I take it sharks are out of the question since you’re getting involved?”

  “Nope, not sharks. They don’t like shallow waters anyway.”

  An officer approached them, smiled at Lupe, and looked at her uncle with the manner of a dog afraid he would be hit. Lupe chuckled. She loved how everyone was so afraid of the big, powerful man, when to her he was a total softy.

  The ferry staff scuttled around on the lower decks, preparing to dock on the rapidly approaching port, and her uncle was pulled away.

  Lupe closed her eyes and relished the solitude. Preparing for the trip down here at the end of the school year had been crazed. Junior year finals, early college applications, Alateen meetings. But it was worth it so she could be in the same room with Javier for the first time since last summer. Hell, the same country. His fall semester at the University of Puerto Rico ended before it began, thanks to the hurricane, and he had to skip the spring semester to save money to live on. The poor guy never got a break. No wonder he had been so gloomy lately. She had to try to give him more space.

  The boat pulled alongside the dock with a long, painful scrape that sounded like a dental drill.

  “Lupe, ¡ven acá!” Esteban called from below. The minute she joined him on the lower deck, they were hustled into a waiting police car.

  The squad car bumped over the rutted dirt roads that led away from Isabel Segunda, the unofficial capital of Vieques. The small town reminded her of rural Vermont. Quaint, colorful buildings, lots of greenery, but worn around the edges.

  They hadn’t gone far before the houses started getting scarce and the road even bumpier, if that was possible. Where were they going? She leaned forward to talk to her uncle through the window that divided the front seat from back in the cruiser. “Where is the hotel that Javier is working at?”

  “I thought you were the grammar queen?” Esteban gave her a sideways smile.

  “Pray tell, esteemed Uncle, where is the hotel at which Javier is working?”

  “That’s better. It is in Puerto Diablo.”

  Lupe got that tight feeling in her stomach. Been awhile since she’d had that. About a year, in fact. “Um, Devil’s Port?”

  “Yes. The Spanish invaders thought the bio bay was lit by evil gods.” Esteban snorted.

  Lupe didn’t find it as funny.

  She fell back in her seat. “Great.” She watched the unending greenery rush by the windows as the radio squawked, and her uncle and the local officer chatted in Spanish. It was as if they were driving through a tunnel of foliage, the walls a mosaic of every green imaginable, the sun filtering through like lace. She had expected the post-hurricane island to look … well, barren. Some of it had on the drive to Ceiba, but here in the heart of nature it was as if nothing had touched it, or even could. She put her face up to the open window and took a long, deep breath, the scent of earth, salt, and growing things reaching in and, as she exhaled, emptying her crowded brain.

  The car jolted as if hitting turbulence and Lupe’s head banged against the top of the window frame. She rubbed her head with one hand and held on to the overhead grab bar with the other. “Um, you’d think if they’re building a fancy resort, they would make the road a bit smoother.”

  The officer answered. “This area was only accessible by boat up until last month, Miss. They are going to make it smoother before it opens.”

  “Why weren’t there roads leading to it before?”

  He shrugged.

  She hated that kind of answer. It wasn’t an answer.

  Her uncle offered, “After Hurricane Maria big investors started buying up property.”

  Lupe sneered. “The vultures descend.”

  The officer nodded his head. “Well, people were unhappy about the building on this part of the island—it is right up against the wildlife refuge. But this resort will provide many jobs. It already has.”

  “Yeah, but at what cost?”

  The silence in the car was enough of an answer for her.

  The greenery on either side of the road ended abruptly, and they drove into a clearing the size of a football field. Workers hustled like bees around a massive hive of white cinder-block buildings. The car made its way aroun
d a large round fountain, the intricately tiled bowl empty of water, but gathering sand at its edges. They pulled up under the entrance portico, the workers stopping to watch as Esteban and Lupe got out. She was slowly getting used to the attention involved in being the niece of Puerto Rico’s chief of police, but it was still kind of weird.

  “Okay, let’s find Javier,” her uncle declared, about to stride off on his long legs.

  She grabbed him by the arm. “No, Tío, please! I can find him myself.” Ugh. Talk about humiliation. She didn’t need an escort: she was practically seventeen! “Why don’t you go on to the crime scene? I’ll join you soon.”

  He looked down at her with that piercing glare of his.

  She threw up her hands. “C’mon, seriously? It’s midday, and there’s, like, a thousand people around here.” She gestured at the workers around them.

  “How will you get there to meet me?”

  “Javier can drive me. Or I can walk.”

  “No. Absolutamente no.” His voice had that “open up, it’s the police” tone, the one that made people jump. Well, people other than her.

  Lupe rolled her eyes. “Okay fine, I’ll get a ride. I can handle myself, Tío!”

  The radio squawked and she could hear a voice asking about the chief’s ETA. And his cell phone chirped. She could always count on the pull of his job at times like this.

  He sighed. “Very well.” He pointed a finger in her face, and, in their time-honored ritual, she made to bite it. “But you call me if you need a ride. I can have one of my officers come—”

  “Yes, Tío, whatever you say, Tío, of course—”

  “Basta! Enough of your sarcasm.” He opened his phone, barked into it as he folded his tall frame into the passenger seat, and waved as the car pulled away. The original multitasker.