Page 38 of Girl in the Water
Then he could find her a safe place to live, set her up with a safe life. Andthenhe could return to Brazil and take care of business.
In his pocket, he had a cell phone he’d picked up as they’d run from Finch’s house. The phone had to have been dropped by one of the attackers in the fight. That cell phone would have numbers in its memory. And those numbers would lead him to names.
Daniela shifted next to him. She blended into the shadows of the tree, a part of the jungle.
Would it be a mistake to take her someplace else?
“If you could be anything, what would you be?”
She didn’t have to think about it. “A teacher.” Then she asked, “Did you always want to be a soldier?”
He’d told her that was how he’d met Finch.
Ian looked up into the starry sky. “When I was young, I wanted to be an astronaut. Someone who flies in a spaceship to the moon,” he explained, in case she didn’t know the word.
She thought about that for a moment. “But you didn’t go.”
“Turns out I have dyslexia. It’s something in your brain that makes it hard to learn. Mine is not bad, just enough so I couldn’t pass the test.”
“I’m glad you didn’t go to the moon,” she said. “I think it’s better that you came here.”
He closed his eyes.
With jungle sounds all around him, he slept. And didn’t dream about the van going into the Potomac. He rarely had that dream anymore. And thank God for that.
He woke up with Daniela’s head on his shoulder. The sky was lightening over the village, some people already out and about. Even after two months in Santana, the village was something else, an alien landscape, the kind of place he’d only seen on TV before, on the National Geographic Channel.
He nudged her. “Wake up.”
She blinked at him slowly, sleepily. It was the first time they’d slept together, since that first night he’d met her. A fine mist drizzled on and off, and the moisture had clumped her eyelashes together.
Ian pushed up and away from her, walked into the trees, then stepped behind a wide trunk to take a leak. Wished he could take a shower and have breakfast. He stayed there for a while, giving Daniela time to do whatever she needed to do this morning.
By the time he went back, she was digging at the corner of the hut with a bamboo stick.
He helped her and got himself good and muddy in the process. “Let’s hope we’ll find what we need.”
In ten minutes, they had the box. It hadn’t been buried deeply. Rope held it to one of the stilts, probably so the river wouldn’t steal it if the floods reached all the way here and washed away some of the dirt.
They crouched behind the ruins of the hut, and he pried the cookie tin open. Its lid decorated with a picture of the Manaus Opera House, the box was a little rusted, but whole—it hadn’t let in water.
Inside was a copper ring, and a medal carved from some kind of bone, hanging from a string. Next to the medal, they found a small wooden cross. And under it all, one piece of folded paper in a plastic bag: Daniela’s birth certificate, stained but readable.
Ian released the breath he’d been holding.
He still didn’t know much Portuguese, but he didn’t need to know much to read the date.
“You’re eighteen years old.” Surprise pushed the words from him. “Your birthday was a month ago.” He grinned. “Hey, happy birthday.”
Daniela’s eyes lit up, as if he’d given her a gift.
He glanced back at the paper and found another line that needed no interpretation. “This says your father is William Wintermann. Do you know who that is?”
He handed her the rumpled birth certificate and thought about how little the last name Wintermann fit her. Even Ian’s last name fit her better. Slaney was a large river in the southeast of Ireland and the name of a Celtic goddess.
Daniela read through the sheet of paper, then, as fat raindrops began to splash all around them, she carefully put the paper back into the plastic bag and into the safety of the metal box.
She dropped the box on her lap, then blinked at him, rubbing her thumb over the tan skin on the back of her hand, as if trying to uncover another layer. “He’s the village missionary.”
