Chapter 6 - THE WOMAN IN THE PHOTOGRAPH
The old photograph showed my father outside a construction office.
He was younger than I remembered, wearing a shirt with rolled sleeves.
Beside him stood a woman holding a stack of folders.
On the back, in my mother’s handwriting, were three words.
Rodrigo and Elena.
“Elena Vargas,” my mother said. “She worked in accounts.”
“Is she alive?”
“I don’t know.”
Fuentes found her two days later.
Elena was seventy-one and lived above a bakery on a narrow street. She opened the door with the chain still fastened.
When I said my father’s name, she sat down before letting us inside.
“I wondered when someone would come.”
Her apartment smelled like coffee and warm bread.
I set the photograph on her table.
She touched my father’s face with one finger.
“He used to bring lunch for people who couldn’t afford it,” she said. “Never made a show of it.”
I had spent days learning why powerful people feared him.
That small kindness almost broke me.
Fuentes placed a copy of the ledger beside the photograph.
Elena’s hand stopped moving.
“Where did you get that?”
“From his box.”
She looked toward the door.
“Jorge must know you have it.”
“He suspects.”
“No,” she said. “If you’re here, he knows.”
She explained that the firm had collected deposits from families promised homes that were never built. Money moved between projects. Refunds were delayed. Complaints vanished into offices nobody answered.
My father had started checking the books.
“Hector called him disloyal,” she said. “Jorge called him dangerous.”
“What did Jorge do?”
“He handled collections. Payments. Documents people were told to sign.”
“Did my father report it?”
“He was preparing to.”
She went to a cupboard and removed an old address book.
From its cover, she pulled a folded receipt.
“Rodrigo asked me to keep this. He said one copy should stay somewhere they wouldn’t look.”
It recorded the delivery of financial records to an independent accounting office.
The date was three days before his death.
“Why didn’t you come forward?”
Elena looked at me.
“Because after his funeral, Jorge showed me a photograph of my daughter leaving school.”
No one spoke.
Then she opened the address book again.
“He came back last month.”
My throat tightened.
“Why?”
“He asked whether your mother had ever mentioned a cassette.”
Fuentes leaned forward.
“What did you tell him?”
“That I knew nothing.”
May you like
Elena looked at the photograph one last time.
“This time,” she said, “I would like that to stop being true.”
