Fernanda
The trick? Her grandmother actually believed the stories, or believed pieces of them, or maybe just believed the stories as she told them.
Her grandmother believed in a lot. Spirits and wards, crosses and smoke.
She never passed a cemetery without blessing herself and pressing a hand over her navel.
She never came home from a long trip without saging her house.
It worked.
This man in the suit: he was the dark smudge in every photograph.
Here he was at the end of the long front porch.
Here he was in a photograph of what looked like Sarah’s room in the motel, standing near the dresser.
The last frame on the film was a photograph of the motel and its parking lot, shot from behind and at some elevation and there, in the parking lot, the man was staring up at the camera—up at Sarah—with a tight, tight smile and a hand raised in greeting.
Fernanda didn’t understand how it could be possible, but she knew where she’d seen that man before.
He had stepped into the motel’s office at midnight this evening, scaring the absolute hell out of everyone, and eaten a mouthful of buckshot from the shotgun Kyla had brought with her from Ethan’s room.
But these pictures had been taken before the man’s arrival tonight, hadn’t they?
Of course they had. Because look, here in the left edge of the last photograph, at the shot of the motel taken from behind and above: there, that sliver of a car’s hood on the road, about to make the turn into the parking lot. It was the Malibu.
Sarah Powers had taken their photograph, had snapped Fernanda and Kyla as they arrived a little after four o’clock this afternoon.
And the man in the gabardine suit had already been here, smiling and waving to anyone who could see.
Cameras and mirrors.
They catch pieces of the soul.
Fernanda had gone stiff then. Ethan had finally noticed her tension, turned to see what about the film had so fascinated her. Fernanda had lowered the glass, risen, and stuffed the film in her pocket before he could get the chance.
She said to Kyla, “Where is the other roll of film? The one stolen from Sarah’s room?”
Fernanda needed to see that film. Develop it. She felt a sudden sick fascination with what she’d just discovered. It frightened her in a way that was hard to describe.
She needed to know how the gabardine man could do this. How he could be in every frame of this motel. It felt important, somehow. Vital.
Ryan Phan, too, seemed restless. He rose and grabbed a gun, which made Fernanda figure she should take one for herself.
She tucked the Glock down the back of her jeans and stuffed her hands in her pockets, burying the film further.
She did not want to frighten the others with this information yet.
She wanted to see all the photographs Sarah had taken, get the full picture of what was happening. Pardon the pun.
Ethan said to Tabitha. “Didn’t you say that the first night, the night in ’55, ended a little after four o’clock?”
“Yes.”
Fernanda looked at the time. It was 2:37.
Ryan led the way outside. The cold was a shock after so long in the cafe. Ryan jumped like he’d just been kicked. “Jesus,” he said, then looked at her funny. “You all right?”
“I will survive.”
They started down the porch. Fernanda realized, as she walked, just how tired she was.
Her feet were heavy, her mind getting slow.
She’d lived too much for one day. She’d awoken before dawn to snap photographs of Frank’s office.
She’d been caught. She’d been chained to a pipe in the operation’s safe house by noon.
Kyla’s boyfriend, Lance, one of Frank’s better thugs, had arrived at two o’clock.
He had been sent to kill her because Frank did not have the stomach for it.
But Lance had had other ideas. Maybe. Or maybe he had just been trying to calm Fernanda down so she would not struggle.
Fernanda had wondered about this all day. Because Lance hadn’t called her a fool, or threatened her, or gone silently about his work.
He had said, It’s all right. I’m getting you out of here.
If Fernanda had remembered the rest of the story, she would have stopped, right here, and collapsed under the guilt. She did not have time for guilt. Fernanda was going to survive this night. She was going across the border. She was going home to her brother.
The lamps sputtered momentarily, freezing Fernanda and Ryan to their places. Outside, the creatures of the desert let out a SHRIEK.
When the lights recovered, Ryan seemed to make up his mind. “Hey, about this film we’re going to get—you… well, you already know what’s on it.”
But Fernanda hardly heard him. A strange sensation had stirred in her pocket.
Earlier, in the office, she had plucked an object from the mantel of the fireplace: a grooved piece of stone, the size and shape of an egg.
As the night got busy and their little party had left the office with Tabitha, Fernanda had placed the stone into her jacket, hardly giving it a thought.
But now—now she withdrew the stone. She held it beneath one of the porch’s lights. She stared.
The stone was trembling, very faintly. The tremor in the rock was rhythmic, almost like the pulse of a heart.
“Is it me,” she said, “or is this stone shaking?”
Ryan held out a hand. “May I?”
The sensation of the stone unnerved her. She was almost relieved to get rid of it. Relieved, too, when Ryan clearly felt the same thing she had. At least Fernanda was not losing her mind.
Ryan said, “What in the hell?”
He walked more slowly now, his attention riveted on the stone egg. He swung open a door under the motel’s covered walkway. Over Ryan’s shoulder, Fernanda saw your average storage room. Concrete floors. Metal shelves along the walls.
A bare bulb dangled from the ceiling, beneath which stood an empty chair.
An empty chair.
Ryan’s mind was clearly on the stone egg. Fernanda’s mind had returned to the dark smudges on Sarah’s film. Neither of them registered danger until a moment too late.
Fernanda felt a thump in her back, like a heavy punch.
She staggered forward, into Ryan, who stumbled himself and nearly dropped the egg.
Fernanda felt a hand grab the collar of her jacket, holding her in place, while another hand reached into the waistband of her jeans and pulled free the gun she’d stuffed there.
Things were moving too fast. Her mind couldn’t keep up. Pain was radiating from the punch in her back, and when she tried to turn, she stumbled again, striking the wall, and agony spread through her. She didn’t realize she was screaming.
She realized that something was jutting from her back, right between her shoulder blades. Something long and sharp, buried to the hilt.
A knife.
She turned enough to see that Stan Holiday was behind her, but it wasn’t Stanley. Not really. The lights of the porch sputtered again, nearly went out, and when they struggled back up Fernanda saw another man’s face over Stanley’s. Superimposed. Like two men occupying the same space in a shot.
The other man, the superimposed man, was the same man she’d seen in each of Sarah’s photographs. He smiled at her now, as he had in Sarah’s film. He opened his mouth to speak.
Whatever she might have expected him to say, it wasn’t this.
“I know you think you’ve hidden him away, but Frank’s operation is well aware of your brother. There are men watching his house right now. Miguel will be dead the minute you cross the border.”
Fernanda hardly had time to register the horror. Stanley—the gabardine man—raised the gun in his hand. A loose, lazy gesture, almost an afterthought.
The flash of the muzzle blinded her.
Funny, the thing that crossed her mind then. She didn’t think of her brother, or of Kyla’s boyfriend Lance saying, I work for the cartel. You’re safe. She didn’t think of Kyla.
She thought of herself. Fernanda saw herself as a girl, sitting on her grandmother’s lap, asking, “Where did you learn all these stories?”
“El otro mundo.” The other world. “It’s like our world, but better.”
The afterlife, hell, the depths of space? Fernanda’s young mind boggled. “Then how did you hear them?”
“I got them from my little sister. She and her friend went to hike a mountain and never came back. A tall, tall mountain with a city inside it.”
Fernanda thought this was just another story. Maybe part of it was. Maybe none of it.
“My sister still sends me postcards with all the stories she hears over there,” her grandmother said. “Postales del otro mundo.”
Here, on the porch of the Brake Inn Motel, Fernanda didn’t hear the gunshot. She heard a wet spatter that she realized was the back of her head bursting across the wall.
Then nothing.