Arturo’s hospital room was dim, illuminated only by the soft green pulse of the telemetry monitor and the amber digits of the infusion pump.
He was propped up at a thirty-degree angle. Two large-bore IV lines ran into his arms, delivering saline and sodium bicarbonate to clear the myoglobin from his damaged kidneys. A nasal cannula hissed softly beneath his nostrils. His skin had lost the terrifying dry heat from the garage; it was pale now, cool to the touch, and glistening with a thin layer of moisturizing ointment a nurse had applied to his burns.
When Marisol stepped through the door, his eyes turned toward her.
They were clear. The glassy, yellowed haze of delirium had retreated, leaving behind the dark, deep-set eyes of the man who had taught her how to bleed the brakes on a Chevy truck when she was sixteen.
"Mija," he whispered.
Marisol pulled a vinyl visitor's chair to the edge of the bed, sat down, and took his left hand. His fingers were cold. She wrapped both of her hands around them, bringing his knuckles to her chin.
"Don't talk too much, Dad. You're safe. You're at Banner Desert."
"I know where I am," he said. His voice was cracked, like stones grinding in a dry creek bed, but the rhythm was entirely his own. "Room looks like the one your mother was in. Only colder."
"You need to be cold right now."
Arturo looked at the ceiling tiles for several seconds. A small, ragged breath escaped his chest.
"He told me... Ray told me you signed the papers, Marisol."
Marisol felt her throat seize. "What papers?"
"The papers to put me in the home," Arturo said. "In February. He brought a man to the house. Wore a gray suit. He had a gold pen. He said you called from Denver and told them you couldn't send the money anymore. Said you had a new boyfriend and you were moving to Chicago."
"Dad, I never stopped sending the money. Every single month. Twelve hundred dollars on the first."
"I know," the old man said quietly. "I told him that wasn't my girl. My girl doesn't run off. But then they took my phone."
"Who was the man in the suit, Dad?"
Arturo turned his head toward the window, looking out into the blue desert dusk settling over the parking lot.
"His name was Vance," Arturo whispered. "Ray called him Uncle Harold, but he wasn't no uncle of mine. He smelled like sour mash and cheap tobacco. He sat at the kitchen table with Tiffany. They had a stack of blue folders."
Arturo’s hand tightened on hers. The grip was weak, but the intention behind it was fierce.
"They told me if I went outside the front door, the state would take the house because of the taxes. Ray said the city had a lien on it. He told me the neighbors were complaining that I was wandering in my underwear. He said... he said Brenda called the sheriff on me."
"Brenda didn't call anyone, Dad. Brenda thought you were dead."
A tear slipped from the corner of Arturo’s left eye, tracking down the deep, sun-etched furrow of his cheek into his gray stubble.
"I didn't lose my mind, Marisol," he whispered, his chest hitching once. "I did the puzzle every morning. The Republic. In pen. Ray would throw them in the trash, but I fished them out. I kept them under the mattress in the garage. I wrote down the dates. Every single day they locked the door, I made a mark on the drywall behind the tool rack."
"How long were you in that garage, Dad?"
"Since May," he said. "When the weather started getting warm. Ray said Tiffany's sister was moving into my bedroom with her kids. He told me it was just for the summer until the guest house was finished. But there wasn't no guest house. I could hear them through the wall. They were building a swimming pool."
Marisol stood up from the chair. She leaned down and kissed his forehead, right at the hairline where his silver hair was still damp from the ice water.
"Rest now, Dad. I'm going to take care of this."
"Marisol."
She stopped, her hand on the metal bed rail.
"Don't let them put me back in the dark," he whispered. "I don't care about the house. Let Ray have the house. Just don't let them put me back in the dark."
"Nobody is putting you anywhere, Dad," Marisol said. "This is over."
She walked out into the corridor and closed the door firmly behind her.
Sergeant Miller was standing near the nurse’s station talking to a plainclothes detective wearing a bolo tie and an ID badge clipped to his belt. Both men looked up as Marisol walked toward them.
"His name is Harold Vance," Marisol said without waiting for them to speak. "He isn't a doctor. He’s an associate of Ray's. He was at the house in February with blue folders. He helped them draft the forged paperwork."
The plainclothes detective—Detective Cruz, according to his badge—pulled a small leather notebook from his pocket.
"We just ran the name Harold Vance against the state penal registry," Cruz said. "Harold Vance is Tiffany’s biological uncle. He served four years in Florence for mortgage fraud and forgery in the early 2010s. He was released on parole three years ago."
"Where is he?" Marisol asked.
"He's not in Phoenix," Cruz said. "We checked his registered parole address in Glendale. The place was cleared out yesterday. But we found something else, Ms. Navarro."
Cruz opened his tablet and turned the screen toward her.
"Twenty minutes ago, your brother Ray asked for his one phone call from the holding cell. He didn't call an attorney."
"Who did he call?"
"He dialed a landline at a private storage facility on Country Club Drive," Detective Cruz said. "And the facility manager just notified our dispatch that a white Lexus matching Tiffany Navarro's plate pulled into the gate five minutes ago."
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