Page 26 of The Deepest Lake

Adrenaline jolts Rose from her pre-dawn mental fog. “Yeah? You’re sure?”

“She hung out at the beach parties. I saw her at least twice. Nice girl. We talked about hiking trails. Spoke Spanish, too.”

“Did you see her go swimming with the other kids?”

“Nah,” he said. “She kept her clothes on. Said she didn’t like to swim.”

“Did she . . . you know. Party?”

“Take drugs? I never saw that. She came, drank a beer with an arm hooked around the waist of her boyfriend the whole time.”

Boyfriend.

“A young German guy named Luka?”

“Definitely not. A Guatemalan guy.”

“Drug dealer? A little guy named Paco something?”

Here, at last, Dennis squints and shifts. “You’re asking about Paco? The little guy missing all his bottom front teeth, with the big swallow tattoo on his neck? That guy?”

Rose has never seen a photo of Paco. She just knows what the police told Matt—that he was local scum, now rotting in some capital jail cell.

“Yeah, that guy,” Rose says. “I think.”

“Last time I saw little Paco Marroquín, he was leaving town on a really nice motorcycle, with a new jacket.”

“I heard he was arrested.”

Dennis scoffs. “Nicest ‘arrest’ I’ve ever seen. Going away party, I’d call it.”

She resists the urge to ask why the police would do that—let someone leave. Possibly even give them money to do so.

“Maybe his family gave him the money, and the party.”

Dennis laughs. “Only the gringos here have that kind of money to throw around.”

Rose shakes her head. “But you mentioned this girl did have a boyfriend? So, you’re sure he wasn’t Paco. You’re also sure he wasn’t German?”

“Definitely Guatemalan. Nice kid, just like her. Clean, polite. Didn’t swim. Didn’t even take off his shirt. Drank one beer and then took off. Speaking of . . .”

He pulls a can of unopened beer from a woven shoulder bag and holds it up for Rose. She shakes her head.

“You’re sure he took off with the girl.”

“Yeah, the two of them. They didn’t hang out for very long. The girl said she had an early morning job she had to get to. I remember that for sure, because most of these college students are here on vacation, and the ones who aren’t tend to move in and refuse to leave, hanging around for months at a time, trying to get by on diets of brown rice, avocado and beer. But that girl—I never saw her again.”

“You’re sure.” She leans closer, wanting to see eye to eye, even if his are bloodshot.

“I’m sure.”

9

JULES

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