To the edge of hope, and then into night

It was not hard for Maria Avelina Palaguachi to imagine a different life. Money was pouring into the village from friends and relatives who had already left for the United States. New two-story villas glistened on the green hills, powerful pickup trucks roared down the dirt roads and parents could afford to send their children to school.

“There is nothing here,’’ Palaguachi told her father around 2005. “I’m going.’’

Her choice would set her and her young son on a path to a mysterious and violent end in February in Brockton, allegedly at the hands of a housemate, Luis Guaman. But, interviews with relatives in Massachusetts and Ecuador revealed that the young mother would regret coming to America long before then. For months, she had been confiding in close relatives that she was giving up and going home. On the day she disappeared, she said it would only be a matter of days.

The village of Ramos Loma, more than an hour’s drive into the mountains from the Pan-American Highway in southern Ecuador, is little more than a string of houses and a battered school. Residents are mostly a Quichua-speaking indigenous group who wear traditional dress of wool hats and long, embroidered skirts for women. Spanish is their second language, but roughly half cannot read or write it.

Palaguachi was the second-youngest of eight children born to farmers who planted corn and tended pigs for a living. She had long dark hair, a heart-shaped face, and impatience with her family’s poverty. They slept on brittle mattresses of tree branches under thick wool blankets to block the chilly mountain air. They had no access to medical care; one sister died of measles as a child.

Palaguachi was 13 when a financial crisis in Ecuador triggered an exodus of migrant workers. One by one, her brothers and sisters joined the thousands of illegal immigrants flowing into the United States. In the province of Cañar, where she lived in the Andean highlands, farm workers could earn $7 a day working for rich landowners. In Massachusetts they could make double that — in an hour.

In the village, Palaguachi was lonely without her brothers and sisters. During the week she tended livestock with her father or cooked on their wood-burning stove. On Sundays, she would go to General Morales, the parish seat, to attend Mass and watch the men play volleyball on the plaza.

One day she met Luis Cela, a reed-thin teenager who worked in the banana farms. He lived with an aunt because his mother had left for America. He asked her to be his girlfriend, and she said yes.

A few months later, she told him she was pregnant. Scared and broke, he left for the United States without saying goodbye.

Later, he called Palaguachi from Milford, where he had found work as a roofer. “Why did you go?’’ he recalled her asking.

She gave birth to Diana in 2003, feeling angry and rejected by Cela. Later she would tell her sisters that she did not ever want his help. “My daughter is not going to beg from anyone,’’ her sister, Maria Eloisa Palaguachi, who lives in Brockton, recalled her saying.

Maria Palaguachi was smart and plucky — she was the only sister who learned how to drive a car. But she could also be stubborn and impulsive.

After Diana was born, she married a poor farmer. Her sister Maria Eloisa tried to talk her out of it over the phone.

“I thought that she wasn’t in love,’’ her sister said. But she said Palaguachi wouldn’t listen. “She had this rage.’’

She went to live in his adobe home, but the marriage fell apart. She complained that he had hit her, though relatives said he denied it.

And she was pregnant again.

One day around 2005, Palaguachi left the house, telling her husband she was going to mail a package to the United States.

She never came home.

Instead, she carried out a plan she had earlier hatched with her parents. She dropped her daughter off at their house, and then crossed the border illegally and headed for Massachusetts.

A troubled man’s path In another cliff-side village in Ecuador, off a foggy mountain pass riddled with landslides and terrifying drops, Luis Guaman had similar dreams of going to the United States.

The slight man with jet-black hair was a farm worker in his 30s, the father of three boys and one on the way, when he decided to leave. His in-laws said they put up their land as collateral on a $12,000 loan to pay a smuggler to bring him to America.

But Guaman was also troubled, they said, prone to violent, drunken rages. They said he stabbed a neighbor, that he beat his wife, including on their wedding day, and punched his father-in-law in the mouth, knocking out a tooth. They said he never paid off the loan.

“He was bad, bad, bad,’’ said his father-in-law, Eloy Guaman. “He would hit me and kick me.’’

Guaman’s older sister, Maria Magdalena, dismissed the stabbing as a drunken brawl. She said Guaman had worked hard all his life. Their father died when he was a boy, and his sickly mother sent the children away from home to work in exchange for food and shelter.

His sister said she did not believe that her brother was capable of murder.

“I think it’s all a lie,’’ she said recently, wearing mud-spattered rubber boots in front of their gray clapboard house and tiny stand of corn. She added, “He lived peacefully working, like us, working here in the country.’’

His mother and sister had not heard from Guaman since he left in 2004. In 2006, Guaman’s wife, Transito, moved to the United States to find work and send money to her parents to pay off his debt.

Over her family’s protests, she reunited with Guaman and they had a baby girl.

But, she said, the violence reignited. In 2007, she told Milford police he punched her in the chest, grabbed her throat and threatened to kill her and their infant daughter, Blanca. In 2008, Guaman and another man allegedly tried to kidnap her after she left him and moved to New York.

Arrest warrants were issued in both cases, but Guaman disappeared into the underground community of illegal immigrants in Brockton — a path that would lead him directly to Palaguachi.

Struggle in a new land Many of Palaguachi’s relatives did not know that she was coming to America until she was halfway through an arduous border crossing that took her on a boat from Ecuador to Central America, and on foot across the border from Mexico into the United States. Once she arrived in Massachusetts, she was quickly absorbed into the tight-knit Ecuadoran community, where everyone seems to have one another’s cellphone numbers and where the men often work dangerous roofing jobs, rising before dawn to work and returning home as late as 9 p.m.

First, Palaguachi moved to Milford to stay with a sister, Maria Dolores. Then, after she gave birth to her second child, Janet, in 2006, she moved to Brockton to live with another sister, Maria Emilia, and look for work.

In early 2007, Palaguachi found a new boyfriend, Manuel Jesus Caguana, a soft-spoken construction worker from her village back home. At her urging, he settled in Brockton. In March 2008, she gave birth to a son, Brian.

Though Brockton was a bigger city, Palaguachi only found occasional jobs cleaning buildings or clearing debris for a brother-in-law who was a roofer. She sent her daughter Janet to Ecuador to live with her parents. She never seemed to get ahead.

Sometimes, as Palaguachi beaded jewelry with one of her sisters, she would dream aloud of owning her own cleaning company and building a house for her daughters in Ecuador. She said she wished she did not have to depend on a man.

But she depended on Caguana. Their relationship was fraught with trouble, in part because both were still married to other people in Ecuador. He said they often argued over Palaguachi’s fears that he would go back to his wife.

Caguana said she threw him out three times, and during one of those times, in 2009, he briefly returned to his wife. Then he changed his mind again.

Palaguachi took him back, but a niece in Brockton, Mercedes Tenezaca, said she was crushed.

“She said, ‘I’m never going to forgive my husband,’ ’’ Tenezaca recalled her saying; Caguana and Palaguachi called each other husband and wife. “She said, ‘What he did to me, I won’t forgive, even in death.’ ’’

Quiet, subdued housemate Because they had little money, Palaguachi often found herself living in crowded apartments in Massachusetts, sometimes with strangers, to share costs.

Guaman was one of those occasional housemates. For a few months in 2007, he lived with her family in Brockton. Then about a year ago, he called Caguana and asked to stay with them in Brockton.

The couple needed the money. They rented a flat on Warren Avenue. Guaman took the second bedroom and later, Aparicio Valencia de la Cruz, from Mexico, rented the living room. They split the $875-a-month rent.

As a housemate, Guaman could be quiet and subdued. Sometimes he would shut himself in his room or sit in the kitch en with a baseball cap pulled low over his brow.

But he was friendly enough, and Caguana said he felt safe leaving him alone with Palaguachi and his son. After she disappeared, Caguana said, some relatives told him that Palaguachi and Guaman had a secret affair.

Nobody knows for sure if they had a romantic relationship. But the unanswered questions haunt Caguana, and he replays those final days in his mind after work, as he eats alone in a local restaurant.

“Who could imagine something like this happening?’’ he said.

Intent on returning home In the months before she died, Palaguachi had begun quietly telling relatives that she was bent on returning to Ecuador. She told her mother in Ramos Loma, her sisters in Massachusetts, and her boss and brother-in-law, Manuel Tenezaca, as they worked at a construction site in December.

But it was hard to know whether she meant what she said. Tenezaca suggested that she stay another year to save money. He thought it was odd that Guaman, who worked with them that day, had also said he was going back to Ecuador.

Palaguachi never told Caguana about any plans to go and, in February, said she wanted to accompany him to Virginia, where he had a two-week construction job. He refused, saying the trip would be too expensive.

He said he tried to call every day from Virginia, but that when he did manage to get her, she seemed distant. In one conversation, she asked where he put the rent money, then hung up.

The last time they spoke, she quickly passed the phone to Brian. The boy, who loved the Power Rangers, the Pink Panther and Sesame Street, was cheerful. He loved to crawl into Caguana’s lap when he was on the computer, and beg him to play a cartoon on the screen.

“He was asking when I was coming back,’’ he said.

Heated argument alleged The morning she disappeared in February, Palaguachi called her first love, Luis Cela.

Her voice was clipped and dismissive. Cela said she told him she was going back to Ecuador in five days.

“I’m going to be with my daughters in Ecuador,’’ Cela recalled her saying, in an interview in Milford. She told him to call their daughter, and that she was busy packing. Then she hung up.

One of the last people to see her alive, her housemate Valencia de la Cruz, told police that he had overheard a heated argument between Palaguachi and Guaman before she and Brian vanished.

They were behind closed doors. Prosecutors said Valencia de la Cruz told them he heard Palaguachi tell Guaman that she did not love him.

Police found their the bodies Feb. 13 in a trash bin behind their house. She was 25; he was almost 3. They died from blows to the head.

A village left stunned One warm afternoon later that month, a covered pickup truck carried their white coffins, shipped from Boston, to Ramos Loma. As mourners gathered in the village schoolhouse for the wake, it became clear who had prospered in the United States and who had not.

Some seemed to have everything. Palaguachi’s sister Maria Dolores and her husband, who returned to Ecuador about a month earlier, own a big pickup truck, a farm with 60 cows, and two houses, one decorated with framed photos of the trucks they had in Massachusetts.

For many, though, the gamble never paid off. Some were deported before they could save any money, others couldn’t find enough work in the United States, and a few suffered the ultimate loss: Palaguachi’s nephew died in a roofing accident days after her murder; a brother-in-law was killed in 2006, electrocuted while on a construction job.

But the fate of Palaguachi and her son stunned the village. They had never known the murder of a woman and a child.

The village mourned for two days and two nights. They lighted slender white candles around the coffins and filled silver vases with red roses.

An old woman peered at Brian’s small body, grimaced and turned away. Another passed around shots of sugarcane whiskey. Before long, many mourners were drunk, including her father, Felix.

At one point, he staggered to a chair a few steps from the coffins. As others sat silently, he murmured softly to himself, some indecipherable lament.

“How long has it been?’’ he said, looking at the ground. “How long has it been?’’

Many expressed fear that Guaman, who fled to Ecuador and was jailed for having a fake passport, would be released and come for them.

People whispered about the children.

Palaguachi’s daughters, Diana, now 7, and Janet, 4, are bright and precocious, but often covered in dirt and wandering on their own.

Their grandparents are feeble, and struggle to care for them.

Palaguachi left them nothing, save the US citizenship that Janet earned by being born in the country.

By sending her back to Ecuador, her mother may have saved her life.

On the day they buried her mother and brother, Janet and her sister ran wild around the small hillside cemetery filled with painted tombs and overgrown weeds. As the men hacked at the earth, Janet paused and watched them from a wooden platform, her Converse sneakers perilously close to the edge.

A teenager barked at her to step back. The girl frowned and ran off, to play among the graves.

Maria Sacchetti can be reached at msacchetti@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter at @mariasacchetti.