The shop was cool, and everything in it was fascinating, exotic, and bright. There were dragons in red and black and green, and statues of milky white glass, and fans and vases and fountains. She’d been admiring the hairpins in the glass case, particularly the jade, with the intricate carvings all along its length and Chinese letters spelling out words.
“You like the hairpins?” asked an elderly woman, probably the owner.
“Yeah, but they’d never work for me,” she’d said. “Too much hair.” She’d shaken her locks a little as she’d said it.
“You just have to know how. Come here. Sit right here. I’ll show you.” As she said it, the old woman opened the case and took out the jade hairpin Camellia had been admiring.
She’d sent an eager smile her mom’s way, and got the go-ahead nod. So she scooted up onto the small stool the lady hadindicated. There was a mirror on a stand on the counter, and the lady turned it around so Camellia could watch her work.
She gathered her hair up, twisted it around, but not tightly, and wove the hairpin in and out and through, resulting in a delightfully messy bun. “There, you see? Easy.” The whole thing had taken about three seconds.
Camellia had loved the look and adopted it on the spot.
“What are the words?” she’d asked.
“Love fearlessly.”
“Good words,” her dad had said, pulling out his wallet. “It looks too pretty on her to leave behind.”
As she tapped over the sidewalk in front of the library, heading back to her car, Camellia caught her hair in both hands, smoothed it, re-twisted it, and stuck the hairpin back through. It had become a habit to undo and redo the messy bun. No two were ever alike. She sometimes did it to channel frustration, and she was definitely frustrated.
She’d found absolutely nothing about a missing baby. The flood, yes, and the timing of it fit, but no mention of a missing baby
“How can there not be anything?”
She wanted to see Wolf again. She wanted it more than was smart and more than was healthy. It had been three days and her eagerness to see him worried her, because she was determined they could only be friends. She would not put herself in harm’s way ever again.
They could be friends only. And that could work. She liked him; he was easy to be around. But she needed areasonto see him, and she hadn’t found a thing. Nothing. No mention in any newspaper of a missing baby anywhere upstream of the park around the time of the flash flood. She’d turned up nothing on the net either. It was weird, was what it was.
Could Cilla have lied?
It seemed unlikely she’d go to all the trouble to falsify those journals twenty-eight years ahead of time. Okay, so what if she didn’t lie, what if she just got her facts wrong?
Maybe poor Wolf hadn’t washed down the river at all. Maybe somebody had left him there, close enough to a campsite to ensure he’d be found. It was a weird way to abandon a baby, but it seemed more likely than a newborn surviving a trip down the Rio Grande without a boat.
She’d said he was a newborn, but Camellia wondered if a fourteen-year-old girl would be very good at guessing a baby’s age.
She took out her key fob and unlocked her car. Her phone rang as soon as she did, and she took it from her shoulder bag while sliding behind the wheel, glanced at the number, which she did not recognize, and answered it anyway. Could be a new client. “You’ve got Camellia Rio,” she said.
“Who is he?” said the voice she’d hoped to never hear again.
Frost formed over her veins. She found the end call button with her thumb and threw the phone away from her, onto the passenger seat, wanting to wash her hands.
It immediately rang again. And again. She waited until it stopped and then, her hands shaking, she reached across the car to pick the phone up. She turned it to face her and tapped on the dots beside recent calls. The dropdown menu included “BLOCK CALLER.”
It rang again before she could touch it, and it startled her so badly she hit answer instead of end. And in the instant she realized it, her fear turned to anger, rose up in her chest, and exited in a rush through her lips. “Leave me alone, you fucking psychopath!”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, hey…”
It was not the voice she’d expected. It was Wolf’s voice. She closed her eyes, whispered his name with a question mark after. “Wolf?”
“Where are you?”
“Public library. Parked in front.”
“Okay, I know the area. Go around the block. There’s a bar on the other side, Joe’s Place. I’ll be there in five.”
She looked around and wondered if Earl was out there watching her the way he used to. Or at her house, watching it and her mom. Her mom!
