Twilight

“He loved you all. He wanted you to succeed.”

Maria perched uneasily on the edge of the chair opposite Rick’s desk. She folded her hands in her lap in the pose of a proper young lady, but it was only seconds before she began to fidget nervously. “What do you think will happen now? Will they find the person who killed him? They don’t seem to try very hard anymore.”

Rick couldn’t deny that. It was one reason he could understand Dana Miller’s determination to take matters into her own hands. “I don’t know whether the police have given up,” he told Maria honestly. “But I haven’t.”

“Do you have any leads?”

“No, but I think someone knew exactly what he was doing that night.” It was the first time he had voiced that particular opinion, but he was forced to temper it by acknowledging the other possibility, the one Dana Miller and the police shared. “On the other hand, if the killer is from the hood, I’ll find him.”

Maria looked shocked. “You think one of us could have harmed him?”

“No one in the program,” he said firmly. “But others, who knows? Others believe anything is possible here. The only way to prove them wrong is to find the person responsible. Have you heard anything, Maria? Anything at all? Is anyone bragging a little.”

“Who would brag about such a thing?” she demanded indignantly.

“We both know there are people who would like to see the program fail, who would gloat if we lost our funding. They might even commit murder to bring us down.”

“But why? What you do here is good.”

“Not for those who want to recruit every young child into a gang. They’re afraid we might cut into their power.”

“They are fools!” she declared dismissively. “And I have too much work to do to waste time on them.”

As she left his office, Rick smiled at her vehemence. There was no chance that Maria would become one of the lost souls. Raised by two strict, doting, Catholic parents, she and her brothers had been taught right and wrong. Unlike so many others, they had been surrounded by love. They had been taught the value of hard work, grit and determination. There would be no shortcuts, no straying from the straight and narrow.

When Juan Jesus, the youngest, had gotten too friendly with members of the toughest gang in the area, the entire family had come to Rick for guidance. Dollars had been scraped together for the tuition to a private school in Ken’s suburb. A family in Ken’s congregation had taken Juan Jesus in as one of their own on weekdays. Ken had brought him back to his family on Friday afternoons and picked him up again at dawn on Monday mornings for the trip north of town. Those days away from the hood had been the boy’s salvation.

Only Maria knew that the small pittance the family had raised was a fraction of the actual tuition. Had the others known, they would have been too proud to accept the arrangements.

Ever since discovering that Rick and Ken had chipped in to pay the rest, Maria had been coming to the program headquarters every morning to do whatever jobs needed doing. She typed. She answered phones. She cleaned. She bullied Rick into eating, when he would have forgotten. She stayed as long as he did, sometimes longer.

Unofficially, she counseled the teenage girls who trusted her with secrets they might never have shared with Rick. All in all, Rick knew he’d gotten the better end of the deal when he’d made the contribution to Juan Jesus’s education. And when Maria had her college scholarship, he guessed she would study psychology or social work and make an even greater contribution to his program, or another like it.

Now and again, when he saw the flash of passion in her eyes for Yo, Amigo’s goals, when he heard her sweet voice of reason working its magic on a potential backer, he could envision her in the state capital or in Washington, making a difference for all of the teens who seemed intent on sacrificing their youth, or their lives, to gangs. For now, he might be the brains and the drive behind Yo, Amigo, but Maria and a few others like her were its heart. Ken Miller had been its soul.

Not a day passed that Rick didn’t miss him. Not an hour passed that he didn’t contemplate his own inadvertent complicity in bringing Ken into the barrio, where he died. Not a minute passed that he didn’t want to avenge his friend’s death.

Thinking of that brought him full circle, back to the fury he’d read in Dana Miller’s eyes the night before. She was trouble, all right, and it was way past time he faced it. His warnings last night weren’t nearly enough to make her back down.

“Maria, I’ve got to go out for a while,” he said as he passed the desk where she was trying to make sense of the piles of paperwork that accumulated on a daily basis, paperwork that Rick had no patience for, even when he understood the necessity for it.

“I’ll be here,” she told him with a wry expression. “You haven’t touched this in a week. It will take me most of the day to see which is important and which could have been tossed into the trash, if only you’d bothered to read it.”

“Gracias. What would I do without you?”

She shook her head. “I cannot imagine.”

“Neither can I, nina. Neither can I.”

“Then it is good you won’t have to find out.”

“Until next fall,” he reminded her. That was when he was convinced she would have the full scholarship to Northwestern that she deserved.

“Even then, I will be here to worry you every day,” she insisted.

It was an old argument and one they wouldn’t resolve today or even tomorrow. Maria Consuela Villanueva was a woman who knew her own mind, probably had from the time she was two, Rick guessed. There had been times he regretted the age difference between them. She was barely eighteen to his thirty-four. Had she been a few years older, she might have been a good match for him. As it was, he thought of her only as the kid sister he’d never had. Even when she was at her nagging, pestering worst, he would have protected her with his life.

“When will you be back?” she asked.

He thought of the likely battle that lay ahead. Either Dana would slam the door in his face and he’d be back in no time, or she’d listen. He was counting on the latter. He held no illusions, though, that he could persuade her easily to accept his help.

“I’m out for the day,” he said, “unless there’s an emergency.”

“What constitutes an emergency this time? Fire? The arrival of the mayor? A delegation from the capital?”

“Those would do,” he agreed.

“Where will you be?”

“With Ken’s widow.” He shrugged, then added realistically, “Or nursing my wounds beside Lake Michigan with a hot dog in one hand and a beer in the other.”

“Better you should take bandages,” she retorted.

Rick stared at her suspiciously. Something in her tone alerted him that she knew something about what had gone on here the night before. “Why would you say that?”

“People talk,” she said enigmatically.

“Maria! Spit it out. What are people saying?”

“They say that bruise on your cheek is the work of Mrs. Miller. Since it was not there when I left last night, I assume you’ve seen her since then.” She tilted her head and studied his face. “She must not have been glad to see you.”

“I’m sure she wasn’t,” Rick agreed.

“And you think today will go better?”

“Probably not.”

Maria opened a cabinet behind the desk and plucked out a handful of Band-Aids and a bottle of peroxide from the stock kept on hand for the multitude of kids with minor wounds who turned up on their doorstep nearly every day. They were all too practiced at coping with major wounds as well, at least as long as it took to send for an ambulance.

“Then these may come in handy,” she said. “Of course, people say she is also a trained private eye, like Magnum.” Maria was a very big Tom Selleck fan. She thought he was even “chunkier” than Rick.

“She was a private detective,” Rick corrected. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“She knows how to use a gun, yes?”

“Very amusing, Maria. You seem to forget that I have at least a vague familiarity with guns myself.”

“The difference is that you have vowed never to touch another one. Can you say the same for Mrs. Miller?”