Chapter 4 - THE WOMAN IN THE PHOTOGRAPH
Lena wanted me to stay away from the windows. I wanted to run, though I had nowhere to go.
Detective Park came to the apartment within an hour. She studied the photograph and took my phone number for a trace.
“Someone wants you scared,” she said. “That doesn’t mean they intend to come here.”
“That’s supposed to help?”
“It means we take the threat seriously and stick to what we know.”
She asked whether I had recognized the man at Maria’s table. I hadn’t seen him at all.
The next morning, Antonio called. I almost ignored it.
“My mother is home,” he said. “She wants to speak with you.”
“She can call me.”
“She wants to show you what the envelope contained.”
I told him about Detective Park and the photograph. There was a pause.
“Good,” he said. “Keep working with her.”
I met Maria at a public café near the precinct. Park knew where I was going. Antonio sat at another table with a newspaper he never opened.
Maria unfolded an old photograph. It showed her outside a community clinic, much younger, beside a smiling woman in blue scrubs.
I knew the woman.
“That’s my grandmother.”
“Rosa Alvarez,” Maria said. “She helped me through the worst year of my life.”
My grandmother had never mentioned Maria Russo. She’d been proud of her work as a nurse, but she’d had a habit of changing the subject whenever I asked about the years before I was born.
“What does this have to do with the envelope?”
Maria touched the edge of the photograph. “Rosa asked me to hold something for her. She was afraid to keep it at home.”
“What?”
“Records.”
“Medical records?”
“Copies of payments made through the clinic. She believed someone was taking money meant for patients.”
My grandmother had died six months earlier. During her last year, bills had arrived faster than I could pay them. I had left school to cover her care.
“Why didn’t she tell me?”
“She intended to. Then she got sick.”
Antonio came over. “Mama, we agreed you’d let me explain the rest.”
“No,” she said. “You’ve had years to explain things your way.”
He looked at me, and for the first time I saw anger he wasn’t aiming at a person. It seemed directed at the whole tangled mess between us.
Maria reached into her bag and handed me a photocopied invoice. Across the top was the name of the clinic where my grandmother had worked.
At the bottom was a signature approving a transfer of $86,000.
Rosa Alvarez.
May you like
“That isn’t her handwriting,” I said.
Maria leaned close. “Rosa said the same thing before she died.”
