Betrayed by Jeanette Windle Read Free Book Online

academia.
     
    Or just because dirt and poverty and primitive living conditions and inept bureaucracy and never-ending insecurity lost their charm, and not even retreating to the air-conditioning and walled luxury of Zone 10 sustained an illusion of home.
     
    It was better not to get involved. To let them come and go with their short-lived dreams and convictions and missions. To save the emotional energy for battles Vicki could win. A handful of garbage pickers. A Mayan baby. A mother.
     
    Just walk away.
     
    Except this time it wasn’t so easy. Because this particular youthful and naive volunteer who had stomped with angry self-righteousness into the airport was Vicki’s younger and only sister.
     

 
     
    Chapter Four
     
    Only for my sister would I put up with this.
     
    Vicki pushed Redial on her cell phone. Eleven o’clock at night, and Holly had neither called nor answered Vicki’s repeated attempts.
     
    “Hi, this is Holly. It’s an awesome world. Help me save it.”
     
    With irritation Vicki cut off the voice mail without leaving another message.
     
    Walking across the smoothed concrete that was the infirmary ward floor, she looked down into a portable crib. Maritza was the hand-lettered name taped to the end. The sleeping baby girl was clean and freshly diapered, her thick black hair spiking with perspiration from a lingering fever, but the bronze features smoothed to peaceful lines, her rosebud mouth making contented sucking motions.
     
    Sleeping beside Maritza in a narrow cot was her mother, her dusty homespun exchanged for a faded but serviceable nightgown. Even in sleep, her thin fingers clutched the bars of her child’s crib. Casa de Esperanza’s volunteer doctor had diagnosed her with malnutrition and a postpartum infection that had lasted for months.
     
    In the end Vicki had been late to her meeting at Casa de Esperanza. It turned out to be a dilapidated colonial-era mansion in one of the oldest parts of the city, close enough to the ravine she’d seen from the air to smell the acrid fumes of burning garbage. Again familiar. I could be back in Mexico City or even India .
     
    A small door set into the right-hand portal opened onto a courtyard that was scrupulously clean, even festive, with potted citrus trees and ornamental bushes. The house itself had been built two stories high around three sides of the courtyard, with all rooms up and down opening onto a wide veranda.
     
    The verandas were made cheerful with potted plants, and if Vicki immediately spotted where gray Duralite slabs patched the original red tile roof, the interior walls were all freshly whitewashed, giving an overall effect of a peaceful, green oasis. Quiet it was not. In the courtyard, this was because of women and children, even some men, who waited their turn through a door identified by a square red cross as well as the Clínica Esperanza hand-lettered above it.
     
    But most of the noise came from over the wall to the right where a concrete building rose above the old colonial mansion to at least five stories. Vicki had recognized the sounds of playing children. Presumably, the subjects of her investigation.
     
    Now Vicki smiled wryly at the recollection of the meeting. The short- and long-term missionaries were far different from what Vicki had expected. There were more than a dozen, some Guatemalan, others expatriates. Unlike Evelyn, they all wore jeans and yellow T-shirts with Casa de Esperanza and a child’s rendering of a house imprinted on them.
     
    Each team leader took Vicki through a neat printout of their particular responsibilities—including the clinic Vicki had already seen, the children’s home next door, and a number of nonresident nutrition and educational programs—as well as their accompanying financial statements.
     
    All of which Vicki would verify later. It was easy enough to write an impressive report. Though at first glance it looked almost too good for Vicki’s inherent