LITMIR.BIZ

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feel faint,” she told him.

      “I don’t feel faint,” he said, sneering.

      “Well, you look faint. Go on, do as I said.”

      “No.” But the defiant word ended on a moan and he dropped his head between his upthrust knees.

      The older girl lowered herself awkwardly by his side and laid her hand on his shoulder. “Jesse, are you sick, too?” She spoke in English so Devon responded in the same language.

      “I think he’s just hungry. When was the last time you had something to eat?”

      Jesse didn’t answer. The girl looked at Devon and shrugged thin shoulders. “It has been two days for my brother. Yesterday Maria and I ate the last of the chick…the food.”

      So that was what happened to Daniel Elkhorn’s stolen chicken. “Your brother needs to eat. There’s fruit and a peanut-butter sandwich in the bag on his shoulder.”

      “Sylvia,” the child, Maria, whispered. “Tengo hambre.”

      So now she knew their names, Jesse, Sylvia and Maria.

      “Quiero plátano.”

      “There’s a banana. And grapes and an apple.”

      Jesse was upright once more, still pale, his mouth set in a tight line. Sylvia tugged the strap of the cooler off his arm, removed the lid and held out half the peanut-butter sandwich to him. He waved her away. “You two eat the sandwich. Just give me some water.”

      Sylvia bent forward to whisper in his ear, her gaze skittering over Devon before she lowered her head, and when she was done he devoured his small portion in two bites. Devon hadn’t heard what she said, but had no trouble guessing she had urged him to eat to keep up his strength so that they could escape as quickly as possible.

      She wasn’t about to let that happen.

      Maria held out her half-eaten banana. “My throat hurts.” Again she spoke in Spanish, the language she was obviously most comfortable with.

      “I know, sweetie. I have medicine in my car that will help her feel better.” Devon directed her words to Sylvia and Jesse equally. Brother and sister glanced at each other and then Jesse nodded slowly.

      “You can help her.” He used both hands to lever himself up off the old mattress. Devon wondered if it, too, like the chicken and probably the lawn chair, had been stolen from Miguel’s grandfather.

      Devon held out her hand to the little girl.

      Jesse put himself between them. “We’ll all go,” he said.

      Devon nodded. “Okay.”

      She moved toward the opening of the mine shaft, half expecting to turn around at the entrance and find they’d all disappeared again. But they followed her in silence through the wire screening and down the path to her truck.

      Devon lifted the hatch on the Blazer and opened the combination lock on her midwife’s box. The box contained everything she needed for a delivery—oxygen, masks for the mother and baby, suction equipment, a laryngoscope to open an airway for the baby if necessary. A second smaller box held her anti-hemorrhage drugs and the equipment she needed to do the necessary newborn tests. She handed Sylvia a sack of hard candy from one of the top compartments and another bottle of apple juice.

      Sylvia nearly snatched the sack from her hand but murmured, “Gracias,” as she did so. Devon held out her hands to Maria, showing her a bottle of Tylenol. “This will help you feel better.”

      Maria looked at her brother. Jesse narrowed his dark eyes but nodded permission. The little girl came forward and Devon gave her a Tylenol to swallow with the juice Sylvia handed her. Then Devon lifted the little girl onto the tailgate. She weighed next to nothing. “I’m going to listen to your lungs,” Devon explained. She glanced back at Jesse. “Does she understand English?”

      He nodded. “Yes. But she doesn’t speak it very well yet.”

      “She was going to be in special English classes in first grade but—” A sharp word from Jesse cut short what Sylvia might have revealed.

      Devon pretended not to notice. She’d already come to the conclusion that the children must have spent considerable time in the States, for both Jesse and Sylvia spoke with little accent. She put the tabs of her stethoscope in her ears and put the disk against Maria’s chest. “Take a deep breath.” The little girl pulled in air, but the breath ended in another cough. Devon moved the stethoscope to the right side and repeated the directive, then she straightened, draping the stethoscope around her neck. The little girl was congested, but not dangerously so. With rest and food she would be fine in a couple of days.

      But not if she stayed in the damp and dirt of the abandoned mine.

      Maria needed more than a fever reducer and a few ounces of liquid. She needed to be warm and safe. She needed to be where Devon could administer antibiotics if she needed them. “Jesse, your sister needs to be away from this place. Both of your sisters. And you need food and rest, too. Isn’t there someone I can contact to come and help you?” She felt like an idiot as she spoke. Would these children be in the situation she’d found them in if there was anyone who could care for them?

      “We have no one,” Jesse said flatly. He looked more like an old man than a young boy. His dark eyes were sunken into his head, a faint stubble of beard shadowed his chin, and deep lines bracketed the corners of his mouth. “They sent our mother back to Mexico. She died there.”

      They, Devon deduced, meant the INS, la migra. “How did you get here?”

      “We have a truck,” Maria piped up. “But it’s broken.” She pointed in the direction of one of the ruined buildings near the mine shaft.

      “¡Silencio!” Jesse hissed.

      Maria began to sniffle and hung her head. Devon put her arms around her thin shoulders and gave her a reassuring hug.

      “Just leave us some of the pills for Maria’s fever and go away,” the boy said, hostile once more. “We’ll be fine.”

      “I can’t do that. Maria is too ill. She could develop pneumonia. You know what pneumonia is, don’t you?”

      His head came up. “Of course I do.”

      “Let me take Maria to my house and care for her.” Devon tightened her embrace of the child. “She needs rest and care. You all do. Come with me.”

      “No. Like I said, just give us some of those pills and you’ll never see us again.”

      “What about Sylvia? A few pills won’t help her when she has her baby.” Devon was at a loss for any other way to break through his resistance.

      Sylvia looked stricken at the mention of her pregnancy. She crossed her hands over her belly, not in the instinctive, protective contact with her unborn child that was common to women the world around, but in shame and misery. Sylvia’s child was not wanted, had probably been conceived in ignorance or even fear. Had she been raped? Devon hoped with all her heart she had not. Teenage births, especially without prenatal care, could be dangerous for mother and child under the best of circumstances. If the pregnancy was a source of misery and fear compounded by neglect and malnutrition, the outcome could be tragic.

      Devon made up her mind. There was no way in the world she was going to leave the ghost town without the children. But if she made any attempt to contact the clinic or Miguel, they would overhear and probably take off running. She had no doubt they’d been hiding in Silverton long enough to have staked out a number of hidey-holes. The ghost town didn’t draw a lot of visitors, but it wasn’t totally isolated. To remain undetected for any length of time, they had to have been clever and resourceful.

      And if she left with the children and then contacted the authorities, what would become of them? Would they be separated? Deported? Or left to the system of overworked, underfunded advocates for whom they would be just one more set of statistics when

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