That was debatable.
“Wow. Yeah. You mustreallylike Brandon if you were willing not only to drive half an hour on a vehicle you’ve never used before, but also,” I said with a snort, “to put on someone else’s greasy, nasty, dirty, filthy, infested with dead skin and maybe even,”—I gasped—“lice helmet. It touched and rubbed against your skin and?—”
“Okay! Enough.” He shuddered. “I get your point.”
I laughed. “So, your leg. Is it mostly okay?”
“Yes. I just twisted it when I fell trying to make a sharp turn.”
“Did you at least make it to Brandon?”
William’s smile dropped. “No. The accident happened two streets from here.”
“I’m sorry.” I felt terrible for him.Truly. I did. “Why didn’t Brandon come to visit you?”
“He couldn’t. He was working with Brie. He was going to excuse himself and run out to say hi. I have a feeling Brandon keeps it a secret from them that we talk.”
Someone knocked and I opened the door to find Andrew standing on the other side. In an instant, my heart started a happy dance to a song calledHe Wants to Date Me.
“Hey, stranger,” I said, stepping aside. “Come in.”
Andrew’s eyes narrowed on me. “Were you crying?”
“No,” I lied.
“Honey, he knows you are lying. You have some…” William tapped under his eye.
Oh shoot, my mascara.
“Do we need to talk about it?” Andrew arched an eyebrow.
I shook my head, backing away in the direction of the bathroom. “I’ll be just one second.”
The reflection in the mirror was something I hoped was a lie. My hair stuck out in different directions, my messy bun resembling a tumbleweed, and my mascara was smeared under both eyes, with black streaks running down my cheeks. I got to work.
Several minutes later, I emerged from the bathroom. My hair was brushed and neatly braided, and my washed face had freshly applied mascara and lip gloss.
My heart sank a little. Andrew was gone.
“Where did he go?”
“He came to apologize to me and asked if we wanted to eat dinner in his room while brainstorming where to go next. I said to text us when he’s back.” William patted a spot next to him. “Now, while we’re alone, tell meeverythingabout your date.”
* * *
The empty containers with traces ofsancochoandpandebonowe’d had for dinner littered the desk in Andrew’s room. For an hour, we’d scoured the possible location of the palace, joining the maps Andrew had sketched from the bracelets and trying to compare them to a real map.
William perched on the bed with his right leg elevated, searching the historical maps archive website. Andrew and I were on the floor in a mess of papers. Andrew sat with his left elbow balanced on a bent knee, his hand supporting his head. The other hand held his iPad, on which he was using the Library of Congress website to study maps of Colombia. Google Maps had worked for a while but each time he zoomed out, a river or road would disappear, and it’d become annoying, so he’d switched to the old-fashioned atlases.
I was lying on my stomach, feet kicking in the air while poring over two pages with faded lines that looked like an unfinished floor design. Augustine had many strange sketches of flora, and animals, half-finished portolans with seaport names, and numerous designs of devices that resembled works of Leonardo da Vinci I had seen on display in museums. But these two sheets were nothing like the other. They could have been early architectural plans for Maria’s palace. And I wasn’t an architect by any means, and yes, with time the pencil marks had faded in many parts of the sketch, but my gut feeling was that something about them was off.
I sat up, my back screaming bloody murder after laying on a hard surface for too long. Placing one of the sheets on the floor at my feet, I opened my camera app. Trying to avoid the light reflection of the plastic, I maneuvered my phone above it.
“What are you doing?” William asked.
“I want to try a trick in the Photoshop Express app. There’s a way to mess with brightness levels or whatever it’s called. I used it another time and”—I snapped a picture, replaced the first sheet with the other, and hovered my phone over it—“some of the barely visible lines became more noticeable.” I took the second picture. “Anyway, I want to try it on these to see if anything pops up.”
William threw his head backward, dropping his phone on his lap. “This is so taxing. My head hurts.” He groaned. “How can you do it for hours? I close my eyes, and all I see are rivers and outlines of mountains. What if you’re wrong and Augustine didn’t build it near their old ranch? Maybe he thought he could drug Maria and transfer her passed out from one place to another.”
