Esperanza by Trish J. MacGregor Read Free Book Online

have this obsessive need for objective proof. When I suspected my ex was having an affair, when everything pointed to that, I hired this private detective to follow her, take pictures, document it. He did. Pictures don’t lie. I filed for divorce.”
    Divorce. Why did he tell her that? Why divulge it? Well, that was easy. He’d said it to let her know he was single and available.
    “Actually, pictures
do
lie,” she said. “Any image can be altered. But if we know there’s something really wrong with
this
picture, how come we’re still on this bus?”
    He tapped his knuckles against the dark, frosted window. “Hey, I don’t have any idea where the hell we are. It’s dark and cold out there. In here, it’s warm, we have food, a restroom. We even have a
dog.
And the company is great. That’s why we’re still on the bus.” He didn’t know what her quick smile meant.
    “When we get to this town,” she said, “I think we need to consider how to proceed. How I can get to Tulcán. How you can get to the Galápagos.”
    You go your way, I go mine.
“Sounds like a good plan.” The thought that they would head in different directions depressed him. He broke eye contact and stared at the snow-filled TV screen.
    Then he astonished himself by looking at her again, touching her chin, turning her head toward him. Their eyes locked, the air crackled with sexuality, and he brought his mouth to hers. The kiss was light, exploratory, ascene from one of the old black-and-white movies that they both loved. But in those movies, he thought, it didn’t go beyond this kiss, not on screen. Ian pulled back.
    “Hey, if your counterfeiter can wait a few days, how about if you take a detour to the Galápagos with me?” he suggested. “Are you allowed to do that?”
    “Allowed?”
She seemed to nearly choke on the word. “The last time someone asked me that, I was maybe six years old, allowed to walk
here
but not
there,
allowed to do
this
but not
that.
Fuck the Bureau. I can do whatever I want to do, whenever I want.”
    “What about the counterfeiter?”
    “Hey, if I don’t find him, so what? The world won’t end. The Bureau won’t collapse. Sure, I’m allowed, I’m a grown-up.”
    When he kissed her again, an image bloomed in his head of the odd angle of the dead man’s feet, out there by the outhouses.
    Inside the greenhouse, Dominica followed the peasant woman beneath the soft lights as she pruned strawberry plants, plucked ripe papayas from the trees, picked weeds from a garden of herbs. She loved the certainty with which the woman’s fingers moved, how she hummed quietly as she worked, patting the rich, black dirt with her hands and talking to the plants, urging them to grow more quickly. But what was she doing alone in the greenhouse at this time of night? Even in the countryside, the locals knew the dangers.
    She contemplated seizing her just to sample the details of who she was, the flavor of small-town rural life. But she felt a disturbing rift in the web that connected the
brujos
of her tribe, and was compelled to follow it. She thought herself toward the disturbance and it led her to a narrow, twisted road high in the mountains. A lone bus chugged upward through the starlit darkness, the bright glow of its headlights glancing off the sheer faces of the peaks. Puzzled by why a bus would cause any disturbance in the
brujo
web, she drifted in closer and read the words on the side: ESPERANZA
13.
A tourist bus?
    She drifted alongside it, peered in through the dark windows. Except for the driver, it looked empty, yet she sensed three other bodies inside, probably asleep. Dominica hovered over the roof for a moment, moving right along with the bus, then drifted down through the packages and bags strapped to the top, down through the metal and into the twilit interior.
    A man lay on his side, body stretched out across three seats, jacket pulled over him, head resting on his pack. On the other side of the aisle, a woman