I'll try to keep posting twice a week -- Wednesday and Saturday, but there will be occasional interruptions. Here is the fourth (of five) part of Chapter 8.
Williams, Roderick, and Alejandro climbed back into the cart and made their way back to the main road. From there, they turned headed back towards town. Although they figured that Maria would probably have taken a westward course through the wooded area that lay north of Walters’ land, Williams knew that she would eventually have had to have left the woods and found a way to cross the river that stood on the edge of town.
“The only way she could do that, really,” explained Williams, “is to have gone to the bridge that lies right along the main road. Our starting point should be that bridge. We can ask people if they’ve seen Maria and then work our way backwards until we pick up her trail.”
“Do you think we’ll be able to pick up her trail at all, sir,” asked Roderick, “if Alejandro’s right about how good she is at avoiding capture?”
“I don’t know, but we’ve got to try.”
They arrived at the bridge, an unimpressive concrete-and-steel structure that led over the small river that marked the eastern edge of town. The bridge itself curved upward to a peak as it made its way over the river valley, peaking seven feet above its starting point before dropping back down to the other side. At some point, this river had been considered navigable, but irrigation and drier weather in the past forty years had ceased to make traversable by any but the smallest of boats. Thirty-five feet below the bridge ran the river, a narrow ribbon of quiet water that leisurely wound its way down to the Atlantic, becoming a mighty river by the time it arrived. From across the river, high up on the opposite bank, sat the town. People bustled about busily as the noon hour approached, many heading back to their homes for lunch.
Williams drove the cart over the bridge and found a convenient hitching post just on the far side. Tying up the horse, he and Roderick climbed out and began to talk with the people passing by. Their questioning met with little success.
“A Cuban woman, you say,” asked an older man, whose vision clearly was fading. “I haven’t seen anyone like around here in many days; course, I haven’t much of anything too clearly in the past couple of years.”
“I’m just passing through and haven’t seen anyone,” replied the local tailor to Roderick’s questioning. “I’m on my way to try to find someone to repair the axle on my cart. I had to swerve off the road to keep from running over an old man in a mule cart, and I think I damaged my axle in the process. It broke on me after I had traveled about a mile from town.”
A busy mother with two rambunctious children in two provided them with a slight hint. “I may have seen someone like that (Timmy, get back here with Mommy, okay), but I’m not sure. (Suzzie, get up out of the dirt.) I saw a lot of people go by me today, and I’ve had my hands full, as you can see. (We’ll get home in a minute, Suz; I’m trying to help this man find a friend of his.) Sorry I can’t be of more help, but I have to get these two back home before they get any more cranky. (Timmy, put the frog down and get back here immediately!) If you’ll excuse me, Colonel…”
After an hour of intense questioning and searching, a dejected Williams and Roderick returned to the cart, discussing the different conversations. As they neared the cart, they noticed that Alejandro was not there. “Oh, no,” Williams sighed in frustration, “where has he gone to this time?”
His question was answered moments later by the appearance of Alejandro over the crown of the bridge. He walked slowly, clearly pondering a dilemma. He held a small scrap of blue cloth in his hand.
“Where did you go, Alejandro?” Williams demanded in Spanish.
“I was bored,” answered the Cuban, “so I walked back over the bridge to see if I could find anything on the other side. I looked in the plants on the edges of the road, and I found this laying on the ground.” He held up the cloth, a deep blue material in a ragged state of repair. “Maria wore a dress of about this color,” he continued, “a week ago at the market. This could be hers. Maybe she got it caught on some thorns and had to tear this piece away to free herself.”
“Let me see it,” requested Williams. After examining it, he said, “It could be. Can you show me where you found it?”
Alejandro led Williams and Roderick back over the bridge. As they arrived on the far bank, he turned to the left and led them down into a ditch that ran along the side for drainage. Within the ditch grew several small, prickly bushes that seemed to delight in snagging any who dared walk near them. They scoured the area, hoping to find some sign of recent activity in the area.
Finally, Roderick found something on the edge of the gully near the road: tire tracks from a heavily-loaded cart. Apparently, some sort of shipping cart had strayed briefly from the road and beaten down the grass. As they looked at the tire tracks, the wind gusted and what looked like brightly-colored leaves fluttered up from among the prickly bushes before settling again.
Williams quickly grabbed a couple of them out of the bushes. As he did so, he gave a cry of disappointment. “So much for our hope of someone hiding here,” he lamented. In his hand he held two scraps of cloth, one red and one yellow, both lavishly bright, but clearly made of a similar material to the one Alejandro had found. “Maria wasn’t wearing either of these colors, was she, Alejandro?”
Alejandro shook his head but did not say a word.
“Where could all of these pieces of cloth have come from?” wondered Williams out loud, meaning his question to be rhetorical.
“I think I know, sir,” Roderick answered. “Remember the tailor I told you about? He mentioned that he had to swerve off of the road to avoid someone. Could these fabric pieces be scraps from his cart?”
“I suppose so,” responded Williams sadly. “From these other pieces, anyway, it seems to me that what Alejandro found is not going to be of any help to us.”
The three men returned to the road and walked back into town. Just as they arrived back at their cart, they could faintly hear the town clock striking half past the hour. “It’s 2:30,” observed Williams; “let’s head back to Walters’ plantation to see if he’s back there or had any success. Maybe we were wrong to think that Maria came this way.”
They climbed into the cart and rode quietly back to Walters’ estate.
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