“Why is Javi taped to the chair?” Vero asked.
“You told us not to let him leave the house under any circumstances.” Lenore’s forehead crinkled, and she looked to her friends. “Didn’t she?”
Eugene nodded.
“It’s a good thing you had a bunch of that tape,” Wendell said. “Javi heard all the commotion and woke up from his nap. We told him you’d gone out with your friend hours ago and you hadn’t come home yet. He got real upset and said he was going to find you. He got right up out of that chair and started hobbling straight for the door. It took all four of us to get him back in that damn recliner. If it wasn’t for the duct tape, we wouldn’t have had a moment of peace,” he said, holding up what was left of the roll.
Eugene shook his head. “He’s a real firecracker, that one. Has been ever since you all were kids. Want me to cut him loose?” he offered, holding up the knife they’d used to cut their pizza.
Vero glanced over at Javi. The bruises from his bar fight had faded to pale greens and yellows, and new bright purple ones had taken their place after his fall from the window. There was pizza sauce on his cast and greasy handprints on his T-shirt. His hair was wild, and his eyes were seething.
Vero winced. “Maybe you’d better leave him where he is.”
Javi started thrashing. The vandal on the floor started thrashing again, too. Wendell hit the young man on the head with his cane. “You be quiet or I’ll pop you again!”
“You think someone paid him to deliver the messages?” I asked Vero.
“Could be,” Vero said, chewing on her lip. “But I’m more worried about my mom and Aunt Gloria. They’ve been gone all night. Where the hell could they be?”
Everyone’s heads turned toward the garage as the electric door hummed open.
Lenore brightened. “Oh, good! Sounds like Norma and Gloria are back. I suppose we can all go home now.” She rose stiffly to her feet and began gathering up the playing cards.
Vero ran through the kitchen. She flung open the service door to the garage and found Norma and Gloria standing inside it. They gasped. Norma clutched her chest in surprise. They were clad all in black, and both of them had dark circles under their eyes. Gloria was holding her rolling pin.
“Where have you two been?” Vero cried. “Lenore and Wendell said you were gone all night!”
Norma looked confused. “Why are Lenore and Wendell here? And what happened to your hair?” Her eyes raked over her daughter, from top to bottom. “And where’s your ankle monitor? Please don’t tell me you drowned another one.”
“No. I mean, yes,” she said. “It’s kind of a long story. Right now I’m just glad you two are home and you’re both okay. I was scared something terrible had—”
A thumping sound came from the back of Norma’s car. Norma and Gloria exchanged a guilty look.
“What was that?” Vero asked, narrowing her eyes at the trunk.
“Nothing, mija.”
“Don’t ‘nothing, mija’ me. I heard something. What was it?”
Norma and Gloria stared at us with guilty expressions as another round of thumping rattled the car. Vero held out her palm for the keys. When her mother didn’t turn over the fob, Vero took it from her and pressed a button. The trunk popped open. Theosquinted up at us. There was a dustrag stuffed inside his mouth. His hands were tied behind his back, and two sets of shoelaces had been tied around his ankles. Gloria stared contritely at her unlaced sneakers.
“What is Theo doing in your trunk?!” Vero shouted at her mother.
Norma wrung her hands. “We only wanted to help. When you told us you didn’t know where Theo lived, Gloria and I checked the patient records at the hospital. Everyone has gone to the hospital forsomething, right? So we thought it would be a good place to try! We found his address in the billing system, and we went to his house to talk to him. But he wasn’t being cooperative, so we told him we would give him some time to think about his behavior and make a better choice. But when we went back to see if he’d changed his mind, he was gone!”
“Can you believe it?” Gloria said, waving her rolling pin around. “It was like he was staying away, just to avoid us.”
Vero’s face was deadpan. “I can’t imagine why.”
“We thought he must come home eventually. So we looked around inside his house while we were waiting for him to come back—”
“Norma needed the bathroom,” Gloria explained. “I told her not to drink so much water in the car.”
Norma shuddered. “His house was a mess! There was filth everywhere. How do young men live like that?”
Gloria looked to the ceiling and made the sign of the cross.
“So we tidied up a little while we waited, but Theo still didn’t come. We found the address to his gym on a magnet on his refrigerator.”
