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people named Natalio and Inez Cruz had cared for an eight-month-old baby that was not theirs. A baby who had, accidentally or deliberately, been poisoned.
    "Thees ees Rrrrahdio Rrrromantico," the announcer crooned in heavily accented English, "where the secrets of the heart are hidden."
    Bo turned off the ignition and clambered to the gritty street. A quarter mile away the sprawl of Tijuana climbed uphill from the valley border, clearly visible. The two cities were, geographically, one. But which held the secret that had thrown an Indian baby up on the shores of high-tech Western medicine, and left him there, alone? Bo sucked air through her teeth and stared at the Mexican city, a jagged web of streets in the distance. The secret lay there, she thought. In Tijuana, where she could legally investigate nothing.

Chapter Three
A Wood Man, a Duende
    Chac stretched uncomfortably on Chris Joe's aluminum-frame camp cot, and punched at the pillow. It wasn't really a pillow, but a canvas bag full of clothes. An odor of eucalyptus clung to it from the leaves he kept inside so his Tshirts would smell good. Chris Joe acted as though doing things with leaves and herbs were something new. As if the Maya hadn't used medicinal plants since long before the birth of the Christian god.
    Chac sighed. She knew she'd been asleep and that it was too soon to wake up, but something was wrong. A ringing in her ears. A clammy fear that made her shiver in the overcast mid-morning light. There had been a dream, but she couldn't remember it. Or else this was the dream.
    "Go back to sleep," he said without turning to look at her. "Everything's okay."
    For a moment she forced open her eyes and watched him. A strange gringo boy with the long hair of a woman and thin, pale hands that could make a guitar sing like the soul of a sparrow. As she watched, those hands sewed tiny, glittering stars to the sleeves of a white blouse he'd made for her from a bed sheet bleached in the sun. Row after row of silver flashes on sleeves shaped like wings. The light from the open
    doorway reflected the little specks and made her eyes close again.
    The dream was still real.
    Her father, Tomas, stood a the edge of a small cornfield in his purple and white striped pants, playing a reed pipe as huge clouds blew close down on the surrounding forest. The little field was her family's milpa near Lake Atitlan in Guatemala, and the leaves of corn and squash seemed to whisper.
    In the dark wind Chac held Acito up for her father to see. So he would see the peculiar deformity that would show all the Maya how blessed her baby was. How alike with the gods no matter what Chac had done wrong.
    And when Tomas saw, a hundred other Indians were there, too, and a sound of her mother's heart in the wind. But there was something else. A duende, a dead thing from the cemetery or some other evil spirit, moving through the forest from the north. A noise signaled the duende’s presence. It buried her father's music in scratchy shrieks that became an ugly song she couldn't understand, like the noise from the loudspeakers on the evangelical church in Panajachel.
    Tomas and the others vanished, fleeing the sound. And Chac realized the heartbeat filling her ears was her own. The duende was coming for Acito!
    The baby seemed to weigh nothing as she ran, stumbling in squash vines. Some of the vines were snakes, watching her with furious eyes. The eyes froze her legs so she couldn't run, and suddenly Acito wasn't in her arms at all. Nothing was in her arms but her own heart, huge with terror.
    A bitter scent that was like wasps came from the evil spirit chasing her, and Chac saw one of its white feet running between the forest shadows. The foot was on backward! The duende ran toward her with its terrible, wrong feet and she screamed and screamed as parrots flew up and turned black against the sky.
    "Chac, wake up. You're dreaming. It's not real. Wake up."
    A thread of sweat ran down her back as she sat