“But why?” None of what he had said was news to me, but I still didn’t understand why her sorority sisters hadn’t stood up for her. “Did she tell you anything specific?”
Javi sighed. “She hates talking about it. The details I do know are pretty sketchy. Apparently, some freshman kid gambled away his entire fucking tuition during one of the poker games and his parents found out about it. They called the university. The university called the cops. The morning after the party, they showed up at Vero’s sorority house to investigate. Mia and Ava freaked out because they were afraid they’d get kicked out of school, so they confessed to organizing the poker games and offered to return all the money. But when they searched Vero’s room, the cash was gone.”
“And Vero has no idea who might have taken it?”
Javi shook his head. “Every time I try to ask her about it, she shuts down.”
Then that’s where our investigation needed to start. Vero might not like to talk about that time in her life, but if we were going to get her out of this mess, she was going to have to try. While I was in Maryland, I’d find out everything I could: about her friends, about the poker games, about the party she attended… all of it. Someone close to her had stolen that cash from her room. Which meant someone in that house must have heard, seen, or known something about it, even if Vero hadn’t. We just needed to figure out who.
We passed a sign for College Park. Javi pointed toward an exit ramp and directed me through a series of turns. After a few more traffic lights, we entered a neighborhood of shoebox-sized ramblers and split-levels on postage-stamp lots, in varying combinations of brick-and-aluminum siding. They looked like they’d been built in the 1960s. Some looked like they still housed their original owners, or were simply neglected, with sagging shutters and weed-ridden yards. Others had been gentrified, boasting architectural upgrades, security systems, and commuter stickers on the luxury cars parked out front.
Javi directed me to pull over. As I eased to a stop along the curb, he pointed at a split-level a few driveways down. “That’s her house.” It was small but quaint, with a budding cherry tree in the front yard. Daffodils and tulips dotted the front walk. There were no cars in the driveway. “Norma and Gloria are probably still at work,” Javi said.
I shut off the engine. “I’m going to see if Vero’s home. Want to come with me?”
Javi grimaced. “Probably not a good idea. Norma could come home any minute, and Ramón will kick my ass if he finds out I’m here.”
“He doesn’t know?”
Javi shook his head. “I told him I needed a couple of days off to get my head on straight.”
It wasn’t a lie, I supposed. But it wasn’t entirely the truth either. “Want me to drive you to your mother’s house?” I asked. Javi had grown up in this same neighborhood. His mother’s house couldn’t be far. I assumed that’s where he was planning to stay while he was here. He’d be closer to Vero, and it was more affordable than a hotel room.
“Don’t worry about it. My mother’s probably not home anyway. Tell Vero I’m here. She’ll know where to find me.” He looked around furtively. Then he got out of the van and darted between two of her neighbors’ houses, disappearing into the thick line of trees that ran along their backyards. According to the map on my phone, Vero’s street backed up to several acres of parkland, and I hoped Javi didn’t plan to walk very far. I wasn’t sure how many feet Vero’s ankle monitor would let her go.
I took Vero’s photo album with me and walked the rest of the way to Norma and Gloria’s house. The front entrance had a decorative storm door, the security bars curved into curling vines to make them look less like iron bars, but I didn’t imagine they felt any less like a prison to Vero. I reached out my hand to knock. When no one answered, I rang the doorbell. I heard the faint hum of voices, but they didn’t seem to be coming from inside the house. They sounded like they were coming from the backyard.
I walked around the side of the house and peeped around it. Vero sat on a folding lawn chair under a cherry tree covered with pale pink blossoms. Her flip-flops and cutoff denim shorts did nothing to hide the bulky ankle monitor clamped above her right foot. A group of four senior citizens sat on beach chairs around her. Vero took a playing card from a deck on a folding table. Miniature candy bars were piled beside it, and a cooler sat open on the grass. Vero cracked open a soda and took a long sip as she studied her cards. The hunched elderly man sitting backward in his walkernarrowed his bushy white eyebrows at the group. “Do you have any eights?”
“Damnit, Eugene!” A leathery woman with wild orange hair threw up her hands. A pretzel rod dangled between two of her knobby fingers, and a cannula hung from her nostrils. Her voice sounded like sandpaper. “You just asked for eights during your last turn.”
“Maybe he forgot,” suggested a silver-haired Asian woman in a neon-yellow tracksuit.
“You’rethe one with a memory problem, Lenore!”
“I am?”
“Go fish,” said the frail black man seated across from both of them. He squinted at his cards through a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles. Vero reached over and picked up two eights from his hand.
“Those are my cards!” He scowled at Vero as she passed the cards to Eugene.
“If you didn’t want me to know you had those eights, you should have done a better job hiding them.”
“Those were eights?” He squinted at his hand.
Eugene smiled, flashing a handful of yellowing teeth as he threw down his cards. He scooped the candy toward himself as the other man cussed at him.
The pretzel-smoking woman clucked her tongue. “You might as well just dump out your candy bucket and give it all to the rest of us, Wendell.”
Wendell harrumphed. “Says you, Joan. I’ll bet you two of your peanut butter cups that I win the next round.”
“How are you supposed to win when you can’t even see anything?”
“I can see you don’t need no more of them peanut butter cups.”
Joan gasped, bringing on a fit of wheezing coughs. She opened the nozzle on her oxygen tank.
Lenore patted her back. “Deep breaths in. Deep breaths out.”
