Grave of Hummingbirds Read Online Free Page A

fingers against the wall with the butt of a rifle as she raised her arms, shaking with effort, to protect her daughter. In the end, they had to go through her to get to Penelope. She took two bullets to the chest and one to the head.
    The men dragged his mother away, and Alberto crept out of his dark, tight hiding place to huddle beside his grandmother until his father, dazed with shock and fury, lifted him away.
    They never saw Penelope again.
    “Can I have the buttons from my shirt?” Alberto said, bracing himself as a hand grabbed a fistful of his hair and pulled his head back.
    “What did you say?” The other guard stepped forward, crushing glass beneath his boots.
    Just then, the door opened, and the man in his sloppy suit returned. “Let him go,” he said.
    Incredulous, the guards balked.
    “You heard me. Let him go. He’s simple, can’t you see that? He’s nineteen and acts like a ten-year-old. There’s nothing in his thick skull.”
    One of them unlocked the handcuffs.
    “Go. Get out of here. Stay out of trouble.”
    Alberto limped into the charge office to find Dr. Vásquez Moreno waiting for him.

    Gregory had secured Alberto’s release with a wad of dollars and tended to his injuries at the clinic. He hadn’t meant to incriminate him.
    That night, he couldn’t sleep. Disturbed by the lack of light in Alberto’s eyes, he wallowed in remorse and pity for the boy, who never really stood a chance after his mother was abducted. He also felt responsible for him and inexplicably answerable to Nita, as though he and Alberto were somehow connected through her.
    Alberto’s mother was older than Nita, but the two had been friends. When Gregory and Nita lived in Cuba, they’d learned of the work Penelope did with the women employed in factories and on farms near Búho. Many faced the dangers of getting to and from work safely each day. Members of Libertad a los Campesinos, restless and bored and far removed from the ideology that originally inspired the organization, randomly used and discarded women who traveled long distances on decrepit buses at night or early in the morning. Drug money kept them in weapons, and terrified bus drivers complied with their demands to pull over and look the other way.
    Penelope sought to unite women and organize them into groups who traveled together, armed if necessary. She told Nita that she intended to put pressure on employers and bus drivers to protect workers. Until women were more independent, the men they were forced to work for had to take better care of them. At best, give them higher wages, but at the very least, keep them safe.
    She might have made a difference. People were beginning to follow her; journalists had started to quote her.
    When Gregory and Nita had learned of Penelope’s disappearance, Gregory could barely restrain his wife from leaving him to return to Colibrí. For weeks Nita lay awake sobbing, afraid of what the kidnappers would do to her friend, knowing that at the end of the horror they’d inflict, they’d kill her. Night after night Gregory held Nita as she pleaded with him to let her go, but he resisted, and at last, when he thought she’d never stop, she gave in.
    She settled again into the life they’d built in Cuba, yet turned inward at odd moments, often gazing wild-eyed and wordless at him.
    He felt it, too—the rage and despair—but with nothing close to her ferocity. At times, Nita’s passion frightened him. He loved her for it, but when she ventured alone into some dark, inner place he couldn’t access, he watched her slip away and feared she’d never return.
    An ugly doubt had taken hold then that, ashamed, he suppressed. But it persisted whenever he allowed himself to question her loyalty, or suspect her secrets.
    At last, twelve years after leaving Colibrí, desperate to see her happy again, he took her back.
    Gregory kicked his sweaty sheet to the floor and got up to prepare a pot of coffee. He breathed in its scent, a poor