The first peal of thunder rolled across the sky. Elizaveta glanced out the hut’s door. Through the swaying trees she could see a section of the canal. It looked to be all foam and spray. No way the boatman was coming back any time soon, she thought. Which meant they would be spending the night on the island, cold and wet. She wondered whether the others had found Rosa’s campground. And if so, had Miguel and Lucinda been there? Were they okay? Or were they injured, dead, or missing altogether?

Elizaveta couldn’t believe their newfound circumstances. How had they gotten tied up in a possible murder mystery? This was supposed to be an easy day out. A relaxing cruise down the canals, sun and Mexican food, a lighthearted adventure, that was it.

They should have listened to the boatman, she knew. They should have shelved the documentary and returned to Cuemanco with him. If they had, she would have been back in the casita, or guesthouse, on the estate in San Angel where she worked as a governess. It was currently home for her. And home was the place you wanted to be during one of Mexico’s summer tropical storms because they could be absolutely vicious. Last month she’d been in Acapulco with Jesus when a tropical storm struck hundreds of miles off Mexico’s Pacific Coast. While the resort they were staying at continued to operate normally, most of the outlying neighborhoods lost access to power and water. Streets turned into gushing rivers while landslides shut down highways. On the low-income periphery of the city, steep hills funneled rainwater into neighborhoods of cinderblock homes, washing many away. During the drive to the airport, which had also flooded, Elizaveta had seen people with picks and shovels digging in mounds of mud and rubble, perhaps for buried friends and relatives.

That was one thing Mexico and Russia had in common, she thought: endemic poverty. The difference was that the poor in Mexico took it in stride and were for the most part content and upbeat, while the poor in Russia were angry, bitter, always grumbling about how bad things were.