I stared at those sketches a long time. Trying to imagine the reality or fantasy of them. But I saw nothing real there. Just a terrible sense of dread, such stress, that I could not live beneath the weight of it. The weight of her journal.

I read more, but my heart wasn’t in it. I kept hoping it was misdirection. You’re drawn to the visual, but maybe that was the least important part.

There was a monkey with a broken leg in the jungle outside of Quito. Javier, a guide, wanted to put it down, but she had them catch it. Make the monkey a splint, put it in a cage to recover. It’s frightened in the cage. I don’t know if she ever set it free or where. She never mentioned the monkey again.

On that same Quito expedition she had encountered the naiad hummingbird. Or had sought it out. Or had found them for sale in a local market as love charms, dead and dried out. I was reading too fast. As if I would find some key or some clue that would leap off the page to help me.

Allie barged in again. I closed the file, set it on my desk. Frustrated anyway by my lack of focus, or perhaps what I began to see as Silvina’s lack of focus. Or a straight answer.

“Just one more,” Allie said, with no apology in her voice. The sheet for the bar drinks with “Jack,” which had to be filed separately as “Meeting with potential client.” I’d made up a last name. “Fusk.” Jack Fusk. No one ever checked. Just like no one ever cared about Larry taking clients to strip clubs.

But “hummingbird” had jogged loose another fear. Something about the torn-out eyes of the foxes.

Was the hummingbird still in my gym locker?

[42]

I parked up the hill from the gym, on a side street, then walked down to the strip mall. I didn’t think I’d been followed, but I wanted some distance from my destination. I wanted to get the lay of the land from up high. A short walk, but a long one in terms of how at the top of the hill lay the rich neighborhoods. Then a strip of scruffy forest, hidden by a tall, wooden slat fence, that no one had developed yet, and then the parking lot.

Outside was a guy I knew vaguely, eating a burrito from the fast-food place down the street and smoking a cigarette. I knew he’d spend a half hour lifting heavy weights or working the tired heavy bag over in the farthest dark corner. Oddly comforting to see him.

But inside, all that evaporated.

One look at Charlie’s face and I knew.

“Your locker was broken into,” he said, in a flat tone.

“You didn’t call me?”