Free Dark Water by Laura McNeal Page B

stood before the tree. “Here,” I said, but there was no hammock.
    “It was right here,” I repeated. I touched the trunks of nearby trees, searching for string or string marks.
    Robby walked around with an interested look. I wandered behind him, assuring him, as I swatted insects from my face, that I’d taken a nap
right here
, and then I stopped to examine what I thought was a nest. It turned out to be a swirl of dried river algae baked to the color of straw. Robby kept walking, and in a few minutes I heard him say, “Check this out.”
    He was holding a tin pot in one hand, and with the other he pointed to what I had assumed was a big pile of driftwood. The river was never the same height. Sometimes, the rains fell hard through January and February and the river thundered through here for a month, but it always dried up again, leaving dry islands of uprooted trees and waist-high nests of algae like the one I’d just touched.
    I walked closer to where Robby stood, and I realized that the silvery wood wasn’t just a random pile. It was sticks laced together to
look
like a random pile. When you walked around the other side, as Robby had done, you saw a crude but clever house. It was barely six feet high—lower in the doorway—and the other three walls were made of wood scraps, tin, and rocks. The best part was a sort of stained glass window made of glass bottles wedged into an old window frame. One bottle was blue and one was brown, but the others were clear and had been arranged like puzzle pieces.
    “Isn’t this the greatest?” I said. “It’s like your tree house, only with
found
stuff. Like a fort you can really live in.”
    “The hobo really has been living it up out here,” Robby said,and I could tell he didn’t think it was the greatest. I checked my watch. I knew the farmers’ market was a forty-five-minute drive, one way. And Louise was the type to talk to every peach seller and crepe maker. Still, I was nervous.
    Robby set the pot down on a counter built of more river stones and some mismatched tiles. He opened another pot and lifted up a bag of tortillas to show me, then pointed to a plastic bag strung from a nail on the wall. It was full of ramen noodle packages, the cheapest food on earth. Robby walked out of the house again, still in full surveillance mode, and I wondered how you cooked ramen noodles here without getting caught. Wouldn’t a hiker or a Friend of the Fallbrook Land Conservancy see the smoke?
    I didn’t like the way Robby casually examined everything, but while he was outside, I did touch one thing: on a little stump of wood beside the blanket was a tin box, an ornate cylinder with fluted sides and black and gold latticework, scabbed with rust, that framed two faded, greenish scenes of courtly dancers. On one side, a man played a lute for a woman perched on a cushion. On the other, they had begun to dance.
    I shouldn’t have opened the box, but I did, and when I looked inside, I expected to see rolled-up money or change. What I saw in the bottom of the tin, though, just as Robby said, “There are some hobo bicycle tracks out here,” was a business card and a photograph. The business card said AMIEL DE LA CRUZ GUERRERO. HARD WORKER . The photograph showed a woman in a gingham smock standing in front of a turquoisewall with a red door half open behind her. Her hair was long and black. She wasn’t smiling as she rested both hands on the shoulders of a little boy with a narrow, hopeful face.
    “I think we should tell the police,” Robby said. His voice was very close to the door, and as if hiding the photograph would be enough to save Amiel, I dropped it and the card back into the tin box, closed the lid, set the box on the stump, and made for the doorway.
    “Why?” I said.
    “This is obviously some migrant worker’s camp, and you can’t just live in a nature preserve.”
    I realized this must be how I sounded to others most of the time. “Why not?” I