Read Unlimited for Free Online

stairs, then the kid appeared in his doorway. “Breakfast!”
    Simon grinned as he took the food. The kid accented everything with a shout of pure joy.
    He ate standing at the window. The tin plate held beans and yellow rice and a limp tortilla. The sun felt good on his face. The food was bland but fresh and filling. The sensations meant he was alive. Even if his safety was temporary, that felt good as well. The place was both active and calm, a remarkable and jarring combination. Simon felt as though he had been deposited in a place he would never understand.
    Then the bell began ringing.
    The kids scampered over to an outside pair of faucets. They crowded about, washing their hands and faces and bare feet. Then they lined up, littlest in front and tallest behind. All aimed at the door directly below the tolling bell.
    “It is time for morning chapel,” Juan declared. “You will come?”
    “You go ahead.” Simon kept his face to the window as the kid scampered down the stairs. Juan’s invitation and the ringing bell brought the professor’s absence a great deal closer. Faith had remained a vital component of Vasquez’s life.
    A clutch of villagers entered through the orphanage’s main gate and headed for the chapel. The beautiful woman, Sofia, was the last through the portal. She shooed Juan ahead of her, her voice a musical chant even when scolding. After she climbed the three steps, she turned back. Sofia looked straight at him, a blistering moment of silent communication.
    Simon raised his cup in a mock salute. She snapped her head back around. Her hair shimmered like a wave of liquid onyx. Then she was gone.
    The bell went silent. Simon stared at the open doorway and listened as the kids began to sing. He could still feel Sofia’s gaze. And he understood her silent message. All too well.
    He had to get out of here. Before he got one of those kids killed.
    Sofia sat in her customary seat, near the back of the chapel. And tried hard to stop thinking about Simon.
    Her brother was in his normal place, up front leading the children’s choir. Because of Pedro’s responsibilities as assistant town manager, he could not attend morning chapel more than once or twice a week. The children treated his appearances as causes for celebration. The orphanage choir stood in a semicircle around him. Pedro pretended to pull on a massive rope, struggling to make them sing on tempo. They sang and they laughed at the same time.
    As she observed her brother, she recalled the day she and Pedro had arrived here. She had been six, her brother scarcely three. A woman had come to their home and shown a paper to the weeping nanny. The woman had then driven them here to the Three Keys. Pedro had cried for their parents on the way. The woman had smiled and said they would come soon and bring them candy. But Sofia had sensed a dark secret hidden in the woman’s smile.
    Three weeks after they had arrived, Harold brought her into his office and spoke to her about how the cartel had mistaken her parents for enemies and sent them home to Jesus. Sofia had not moved or scarcely even breathed because she did not want to cry in front of him. Pedro still wept at night for their mother and father, Sofia could hear him in the boy’s dorm next door, his wails piercing the dark. She had to be strong for them both.
    Harold spoke to her in his heavily accented Spanish, his face suffused with the love and compassion he carried with him everywhere. He asked if she would like him to pray with her. When she nodded, he settled his hand upon her head and asked for a special blessing upon her heart and her life as a result of this change, and that God’s healing grace would restore Pedro and her. He asked for God to help them both through this transition.
    Sofia did not understand much of what Harold prayed, but she felt a stillness fill her, the first such calm she had known since their life had been taken away.
    Sometime before her seventh birthday, she felt