The old monk turned the santo toward Father Fortis. “Now count the knives protruding from Our Lady.”
Chapter Seven
Worthy’s thigh muscles burned as he hiked up the road to Acoma where Victor Martinez’s grandmother lived. Ten yards ahead of him, Sera Lacey, without a hint of fatigue, was telling him about the ancient city.
“Some pueblos in New Mexico are completely closed to outsiders, even to police. Others are open only on certain feast days. Acoma is open nearly year round. You see, the tourists like their pottery, and the Acoma tribal people need the money.”
Worthy gasped. “So what do they do if they have a serious crime?”
“They have their own police. Of course, they can always request outside help, but I’m telling you this for a reason. We have no jurisdiction in Acoma. You can’t throw your weight around up here, and neither can I.”
Worthy stopped to catch his breath. Is that how she sees me? he thought.
“Even some Anglos who’ve lived out here for twenty years don’t know that the Pueblos are all autonomous nations that just happen to be within New Mexico. That’s why we had to sign in at the visitors’ center down below.”
“An old monk at St. Mary’s told me something about that this morning,” Worthy said. He pushed his sunglasses up his nose and gazed out across the valley to other mesas, all barren. Nature here seemed to bear a grudge against the land, blistering it with heat strong enough to crack boulders. Only the squattiest scrub brush grew in the sand.
“I understand why their ancestors lived on top of these mesas for protection, but why don’t these people move down?”
“Tradition doesn’t have much to do with convenience,” Sera replied. “Once we reach the top, we’ll be in the oldest continuously inhabited city in North America, Lieutenant. I bet you didn’t know that. There’s no electricity or running water. That and the heat make life pretty rough, but they wouldn’t think of insulting their ancestors.”
She pointed to another mound perhaps a mile away. “See that mesa over there? It’s called the Mesa Encantada, the Enchanted Mesa. It looks like it would offer even better protection, right?”
Worthy nodded, glad for the rest.
“Long before the Franciscans arrived—no one knows for sure just how far back—the ancestors of the Acoma lived over there. But one day a horrendous storm destroyed the only pathway to the top. The men were on a hunting party over there by Mt. Taylor.” She pointed out a snowcapped peak to the west. “When they came back, they could hear the cries of some of their women.”
“But they couldn’t get to the top,” Worthy said.
The policewoman didn’t say anything for a moment. “The women had to choose between jumping to their death and waiting to starve on top.”
“And the men? What did they do?”
“They mourned their losses, then married women from neighboring pueblos. Life started over on this mesa, practically next to the other one.”
His partner’s words made him think of what Father Fortis had told him over lunch, about Father Linus’s santo and the nun’s wounds. The past in New Mexico cast a long shadow, rearing up and colliding with the present.
Silently, the two trudged the remaining hundred feet to the top and walked to a small adobe house that bore a tour sign. While the policewoman went inside to present her credentials, Worthy remained outside, trying to catch his breath in the thin air.
Their ride from Santa Fe had gone smoothly. Sera pointed out major sights as they drove west from Albuquerque, the petroglyph-embellished canyon walls near the Rio Grande River as well as the bleached-white church of Laguna Pueblo.
At her initiative, the conversation turned to family, and Worthy offered a hurried account of his divorce, the more recent thaw, and finally his daughter Allyson’s running away.
When he finished, Sera caught his eye. “So the VanBruskmans choosing you to hunt down their daughter wasn’t exactly a coincidence.”
“No, no accident. But to tell you the truth, I never knew where my own daughter was hiding out. One day she just came back to the house and went up to her room.”
“She’s never told you or your wife—your ex-wife—where she’d been?”
“No, and why would she? She’s got that over us. She came back on her own, and she can run away again on her own.” Maybe he should have told the VanBruskmans that, he thought.
“So tell me about your kids,” he asked.
Sera produced a wallet photo of a boy kneeling in his Little League uniform, a smaller version of the one in her office. “That’s Felipe, my one and only.”
“He definitely has your eyes.”
“Actually, he looks more like Stephen, my late husband.”
Worthy winced. “Oh.”
Sera didn’t say anything for a moment. “It happened five years ago. It was Christmas, with the rush and all, and he was driving for UPS up by the Colorado border when he hit a patch of black ice. Stephen was an Anglo,” she explained, “which is where I got the name Lacey. My maiden name is Ortiz.”
“Spanish, right?”
“Yes, Spanish,” she’d said, laughing. “You really aren’t from around here, are you?”
“Obviously not. But I thought the way you spelled your first name must be ethnic.”
She laughed again. “I was supposed to be a boy, and then I would have been Felipe. My parents already had eight girls, so they couldn’t think of a name for me for three days. Then my mother remembered that my father’s one good Sunday shirt was by Sero. You know, the shirt company. So I became Sera. That’s a true story.”
Waiting outside the tour office for the policewoman to reappear, Worthy looked over toward the other, tragic mesa. Those ancient people thought they’d built a place of safety. Instead, they’d built a tomb.
As if on some cue, doors of the adobe houses opened along the main dirt road of Acoma. One by one, women emerged from their homes, boxes in hand. Setting them down, they brought out pieces of pottery and arranged them on old card tables.
“What’s your ex-wife like?” Sera asked from behind him.
“What?”
“Come on, Lieutenant, it’s a simple question. What’s she like?”
He shrugged, aware he was blushing. “I’d say she’s tall, blonde like me, a bit shy. She was pretty …. Actually, she still is.”
Sera laughed as she picked up a stone and turned it over in her hand. “No, silly. What does she like, not what does she look like. I mean, if you’re still trying to work things out, why not surprise her with some pottery?”
Still blushing, he looked away toward the distant Mt. Taylor and thought of his phone conversation with Susan the day before. “Before the divorce, I always brought her back a gift. Now, after Ally’s trick, I’d better not.”
“Oops. Sorry for butting in.”
“Don’t worry about it. By the way, you should lead when we talk to the grandmother.”
Her eyes studied his face. “Why?”
“Like you said, I’m not from around here. And there’s something about this place, the quiet of it. There’s just too much I don’t know.”
Sera caught a stand of hair and hooked it behind her ear.
“I guess we can try that,” she replied as they began the trek down the road. The women nodded to Sera, but said nothing as the two walked in silence to the end of the path and then turned left. They approached a brightly painted blue door where a fringe of newspaper strips dangled above it as a wind stop. Sera mounted the two steps and knocked softly before stepping down to where Worthy waited.
The door opened, and an old, bowlegged woman looked down on them. Her face was creased with deep lines running from nose to jaw, like someone who’d lost her teeth. Her hair, weightless with age, danced in the breeze. Her left arm shook at her side.
Sera introduced the two of them and then waited again. The woman paused before motioning them inside, as if it took extra time for the words to travel the ten feet between them
.
The room was dark as a cave, with only a small fire of twigs lighting a corner fireplace. Smells of resin and something fried hit Worthy. He removed his sunglasses and realized that his head was only inches from the gnarled log beams holding up the floor above. Not until Sera bowed to a corner of the room did he realize that another woman was sitting by the fire, knitting needles in her hands.
The grandmother pointed to a pair of chairs, but the policewoman remained standing until the old woman sat down in the rocker.
“Thank you for inviting us into your home, Mrs. Tambo,” Sera said.
“My family and my ancestors welcome you,” the old woman replied, bowing slightly.
The four sat quietly. The only sounds were the clicking of the knitting needles and the occasional hiss from the fire.
“Lieutenant Worthy has come from Detroit in search of a missing girl. Her name is Ellie VanBruskman.”
The grandmother looked Worthy over as if weighing the policewoman’s words. Just when he thought his partner would have to repeat the introduction, Mrs. Tambo spoke.
“How did the girl lose herself?”
Sera turned toward Worthy and waited. The other woman’s needles stopped as she reached down to a basket on the floor for another ball of yarn.
“We believe she ran away to find Victor, your grandson,” Worthy said, surprised at how loud his voice sounded in the room.
The old woman continued to study Worthy, then turned back toward Sera. “Is the journey so far that the father and mother cannot come, or are they too old?”
“Actually, the reason I’m here … the reason we’re here …” he began before catching himself. “The truth is, Lieutenant Lacey knows more about this case than I do.”
Sera held his gaze for a moment before answering the grandmother. “If we don’t find the missing girl, I’m sure the mother will come.”
The old woman rocked slowly, her one hand shaking rhythmically in her lap.
“Is this man her kinsman?” the grandmother asked.
Sera waited, as if testing Worthy’s decision. “He carries the parents’ worry,” she said.
“But you said he was a policeman. They must be a poor family.”
A log popped in the fire. The other woman poked the coals with an iron rod.
“You may be right, Mrs. Tambo. The family must be poor to send him first,” Sera answered.
Mrs. Tambo stopped rocking. “Victor said a girl by that name shared her books with him. Victor said these books were more expensive than my pottery. Victor said the girl had plenty of money. Now you say the mother is too poor to come.”
Sera nodded. “I’m glad you know what good friends the two of them are. We fear she may be in trouble, perhaps lost in the desert.”
The other woman stopped knitting and stood abruptly, holding onto the mantel for support. For a second, Worthy thought she would speak, but she only knelt down to jab again at the coals.
The grandmother grunted, taking something from her pocket and putting it into her mouth. Her toothless gums mashed for a moment before she spoke. “The girl took pills that hurt her. So Victor said.”
Worthy sat forward, glancing over at Sera, but the policewoman’s gaze remained on the old woman. In his last-minute meeting with Mrs. VanBruskman, he’d had the feeling he wasn’t being told everything. Was it drugs the mother had covered up?
A sigh, then a hurried cough, came from the other woman by the fire.
“Was Victor talking about illegal drugs?” Sera asked.
“The mother gave her pills,” Mrs. Tambo replied.
Worthy watched the woman’s jaw rise and fall with each chew, the wrinkled skin on her neck lagging a half-beat behind.
“Victor said she couldn’t laugh,” the grandmother continued. “I do not trust a woman who has money for books and for laugh-stop pills, but no money to find her daughter.”
Of course, Worthy thought, remembering the file. The grandmother was talking about the anti-depressants. Ellie VanBruskman must have been taking the type that locked her into an emotional middle range, lopping off the highs and the lows. Spontaneous laughter would have been rare. He also knew that when the girl’s pills were finished, if they weren’t already, she would probably soar for a while before crashing.
The old woman’s rocker stopped. “Victor is a good boy.”
The other woman poked again at the fire, sending sparks up the chimney.
“We found a note left by the girl at Chimayó. It was addressed to your grandson. Victor hasn’t done anything wrong, but we do need his help,” Sera replied.
Worthy felt a change in the room. Everyone seemed to be waiting for something.
“Mrs. Tambo, may I speak … to her?” Sera asked, gesturing to the other woman.
The grandmother gazed down at the floor as she said something in her native language. The other woman responded in the same low voice, and Mrs. Tambo nodded to Sera.
The policewoman rose and approached the fire. She reached out for the woman’s hand, and when she spoke, her voice was soft, hardly audible over the fire’s hissing.
“Mrs. Martinez, I am a mother, too, and I know what it is to worry about a son. If something has happened to Victor, please let us help.”
The woman seemed to crumple, hiding her face for a moment.
“He said someone was following him in Detroit,” she said, her voice shaking. “After he was here for a few weeks, he said he was being followed again. That was when he went to his uncle’s in Chimayó for Holy Week. He’s done that before, but this time he didn’t stay for more than a few days. Now we don’t know where he is.”
“When was he in Chimayó?” Sera asked.
“The end of February, maybe March, I think,” the mother answered.
But that would mean Victor Martinez had left Chimayó weeks before Ellie VanBruskman’s visit, Worthy realized. No wonder Ellie had missed him at the healing church and left her message. But where was she now, and was it still worth searching for Victor?
Sera knelt and patted the woman’s arm again. “Maybe he’s taking care of her right now. When we find them, I’ll tell him his mother is worried. Okay?”
The mother drew out a handkerchief and wiped her eyes. “Tell my padrelito that his mother misses his gentle smile.”
“I will.”
As Worthy and Sera started to leave, the grandmother handed Sera a box. The policewoman raised it to her face and inhaled. “It smells delicious. Thank you, Mrs. Tambo.”
Five minutes later, Worthy sat next to Sera on the steps of Acoma’s seventeenth-century church.
“What’s padrelito mean?” he asked.
“My little priest. It’s her nickname for Victor, I guess.”
He wrinkled his brow. “Little priest? I wonder what that’s about,” Finding Ellie VanBruskman suddenly seemed even more of a challenge.
“Here, have some fry bread.”
As Sera handed him a piece, she squeezed his hand. “Thanks for what you did in there. Even Cortini would have tried to force the interview.”
Worthy shrugged. “It was tempting, but I would have ruined everything. Detroit and Acoma exist in different worlds. Tell me how you knew about the mother.”
Sera tore a piece of the fry bread in half and looked at it. “Every time Victor’s name was mentioned, her knitting needles stopped or speeded up.”
“I missed that,” he said. “I’m probably going to miss a lot.”
“I don’t know. Cortini told me who you are.”
Worthy gazed toward the valley and the distant canyon walls beyond. “Which version did he tell you, the flake or the super cop?”
“Not the flake. You’ll have to tell me about that yourself. No, he said you’re one of the most decorated detectives in Detroit. So you letting me handle the interview my way is very special.”
“Any more bread?” he asked, trying to change the subject.
Sera reached into the box, but her hand stopped abruptly. She gasped as sh
e lifted the napkin carefully from the bottom of the box, exposing several letters held together by a ribbon. Rising to her feet, she looked back toward Mrs. Tambo’s house.
“They’re from Ellie VanBruskman,” she said in a low voice. “The grandmother wants us to have them.”
“Well, open them.”
“No. Not here. I don’t think the mother knows she gave them to us.”
The two said nothing as they walked to the road leading down off the mesa. In some of the windows, Worthy could see kerosene lamps burning, but there was no sign of the women or the pottery. He thought of the box in Sera’s hand, the letters from Ellie to Victor. Had Victor seen them before he left for his uncle’s? If not, what help could they be?
As they reached the edge of the mesa, Sera stopped.
“Can I show you something?”
The question took him off guard. “Sure.”
Sera led him to a worn path running alongside the last house. The path seemed to end at the edge of the ancient mesa, but then veered sharply down and to the left, forming a snaky route through the rocks to the valley below.
“It’s the old way down,” Sera explained. “Are you game?”
Not waiting for his reply, she led the way, the box of bread and letters gripped in her hand. Worthy followed gingerly until a huge boulder obstructed their progress. Without hesitating, Sera turned right as if to leap into open air, then reached out at the last second for a smoothed-out handhold in a rock.
“How old is this path?” he asked.
“Only six or seven hundred years old,” Sera said as she disappeared around another rock.
Worthy followed cautiously, aware that one false step could mean a drop of over a hundred feet to the rocks below. He called down again, hoping to slow Sera’s progress. “Do you think the path on that other mesa was like this? With handholds, I mean?”
Her footsteps stopped below him. “It had to be. They didn’t want their enemies to have an easy time.”
They finished the descent, with Sera laughing as she encouraged him to jump the last four feet to the valley floor. He let go of the handhold and landed softly in the sand.
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