“Well, then, everything should be fine. If I see Estelle, I’ll tell her. Did the good doctor happen to mention how seriously Estelle’s mother had been hurt? What she broke?”
“I think her hip, he said.”
“Oh my.” Mrs. Reyes was one of my favorite people, even though I could barely understand a word she said when, on rare occasions, she chose to speak her own brand of fractured English. Ancient, tiny, independent, she lived in the same adobe cottage in Tres Santos, Mexico, where she had been born in 1910-and where Estelle had spent the first sixteen years of her life after the old woman had adopted her. The village was just twenty miles south of the border and an hour’s drive from Posadas.
“When did Francis leave? Do you know?”
“He called here at sixteen twenty-one, so I imagine shortly after that. Erma told me that one of Mrs. Reyes’s neighbors called her, and she called Dr. Guzman.”
There had been occasions, as Mrs. Reyes became more and more frail, when I’d heard the Guzmans discuss medical care in Tres Santos, and the discussion never lasted long. Francis had mentioned the one resident physician by name, along with the words snake oil in the same breath. The forty miles wasn’t a problem drive-most of it could be dusted off at a hundred miles an hour if need be. But the border crossing at Regal was closed at night. If there was an international emergency, it needed to happen between 6:00 A.M. and 6:00 P.M.
I assured Gayle that I would pass on the message, told her to keep trying the radio to contact Estelle, and then hung up. What I wanted more than anything else was a potful of strong coffee, but I knew I could have my fill at the restaurant in just a few minutes.
I dialed the Guzmans’ and when Erma picked up the telephone, I could hear in the background the kind of organized bedlam that she loved best.
“Just a minute now. Don’t hit me with that,” she said, and I heard a giggle. “Hijo,” she said, and the warning was stern. “Guzman residence,” she said to me.
“What’s he going to hit you with, Erma?” I asked.
“Just a pillow. Is this Mr. Gastner?”
“Yep. Did Estelle get the message about her mother?”
“Oh yes,” Erma said, the “yes” lilting with her heavy Mexican accent. “She came in the door about five minutes ago, and she left right away. I think they sent an ambulance to Tres Santos to bring her mother up here.”
“That would make sense. Look, if they need anything, will you let me know?”
“I sure will. But I think everything will be all right.”
As all right as being eighty-eight with a busted hip in a foreign country can be, I thought.
“Don’t let the kids wear you down,” I said, and Erma giggled.
After I hung up, I looked outside at the glowering sky. Slate gray and jagged-edged, the clouds scudded in from the northwest. It wasn’t going to be a pretty night for a three-year-old to be stuck out on a New Mexican mountainside.
I cleaned myself up, and by the time I walked back out into the kitchen, I felt almost human again. Camille was busy at the kitchen counter, fussing with a long plastic box. She glanced up at me and smiled.
“Would you like me to fix a nice salad here instead of us going outside again?” she asked.
“I need green chili,” I said. “And there’s nothing in the house anyway.” I pointed at the box. “What’s that thing for?”
She straightened up and tilted the gadget toward me and I squinted through my bifocals. I grunted with indifference when I saw that it was one of those compartmented pillboxes where the drugs can be arranged by the day, plenty of little cubicles to serve the needs of even the most spaced-out, helpless patient.
“Put the meds in here and it’s easier to remember what’s what,” she said. “Just do it by the week.”
“Oh, gee,” I said. “Are you ready to go?”
She filled the last two compartments with a rainbow, then handed me a bottle of long blue-and-white concoctions. “You’re supposed to take these with dinner,” she said.
“Absolutely,” I said, and tucked the bottle into my jacket pocket. We made it out of the kitchen, down the hallway, and across the foyer. I ushered Camille outside, and I was just closing the front door behind us when the telephone rang again.
“Do you want me to get that?” Camille asked.
“No,” I said. “Estelle and Francis went down to Mexico, and Erma has everything under control. Five gets you ten it’s just the sheriff. He has this mistaken impression that I want to be useful again.” I turned the lock. “Let’s eat.”
The Don Juan de Onate restaurant was across town, on Twelfth Street. It had been a favored haunt of mine for the better part of twenty-five years, still owned by Rosie and Fernando Aragon, their son Miguel, and his pudgy wife, Arleen.
Exactly what connection Don Juan had had in the early seventeenth century to the dust and sagebrush that would eventually become modern Posadas County was a puzzle to even the most ardent historians. Perhaps the explorer had walked through the place on his way north. Perhaps it was just because Rosie and Fernando liked the sound of his name. I didn’t care.
We settled into a fake leather-upholstered booth, and with a perverse comfort I noticed that they hadn’t fixed the broken springs in the seat. I rested my elbows on the table and my chin in my hands.
“Tired?” Camille asked.
“Just really glad to be home.”
“I bet.”
A waitress arrived whom I didn’t know, and I tilted my head back so I could focus on her name tag. “JanaLynn,” I said. “When did you join the Aragon forces?”
“Sir?”
She looked puzzled and I smiled, taking the menu she offered but leaving it closed. “How long have you worked here?”
“Oh,” she said, and ducked her head. “I started last week.”
“Well, welcome aboard.” I folded my hands on top of the red menu with Don Juan and his skinny horse on the padded cover. “I’d like the burrito grande plate, smothered in green. And coffee.”
“Salad with that, sir?”
“No thanks.”
“A salad would be good for you, Dad,” Camille said, then grinned at the withering glance I shot at her. She continued the grin up to the waitress. “He forgot to tell you to hold the cheese,” she said.
A burrito without cheese is sort of like a chocolate ice cream soda without ice cream, but I didn’t have the energy to argue. Camille mused through the menu, finally ordering a respectable dinner herself.
When the chips and salsa and water arrived, we both sat back, me contented, Camille no doubt plotting. Outside, the parking lot was a black polished sheen of chilly moisture. Not a single star poked through the overcast. I shook my head and sighed. “A bad night,” I said.
“There’s not much anyone can do, is there? For the child, I mean.”
“Not at night, no. He’s too young to build a fire to attract attention. I don’t know. Maybe the National Guard helicopters could look for him after dark with spotlights if the weather was decent, but not in this soup. They’d be tangled in the trees in nothing flat. Search and Rescue might work the dogs all night. There’s that possibility.”
“I don’t see how such a little toddler can just wander off like that without being noticed,” Camille said.
I grunted and sipped the water. “The ‘without being noticed’ part happens all the time, sweetheart.” Movement caught my eye and I looked out the window again. A county car had pulled into the parking lot, and an instant later, it was joined by a dark brown Buick.
“Our peace and quiet is over,” I said. JanaLynn arrived with dinner, and I concentrated on inhaling at least a healthy sampler before the sheriff found us.
Chapter 6
“Do they know you’re here, do you suppose?” Camille asked. I watched Sheriff Martin Holman walk across the parking lot toward the restaurant’s entrance, head down, hands in his pockets. At five ten, the same height as I am when standing up straight, he was a head sho
rter than Sgt. Robert Torrez, who walked beside him.
Torrez was explaining something to the sheriff, and with Holman, it could have been something as simple as the time of day. The sheriff nodded, then nodded again, then shook his head.
“He knows all right,” I said. “He would never eat here, given any kind of choice. The country club is more his style.”
And sure enough, within the minute, JanaLynn appeared around the salad bar’s divider, followed by Holman and the towering sergeant.
Martin Holman pasted on his widest smile, stuck out both hands, and shook mine like a long-lost brother. I didn’t bother trying to get up by scrubbing my belly through my burrito. “Back in the real world,” he said. He waved a hand at my dinner. “And this figures. A safe bet that it’s the exact opposite of what the doctor ordered.”
I shrugged and had the courtesy not to say something nasty about his preference for embalmed chicken and green beans. Instead, I said, “Sheriff, this is my eldest daughter, Camille. From Flint, Michigan. I think you two knew each other, back in the dark ages.”
Martin pumped her hand, too, maybe for just a little too long. Camille’s smile was radiant. “I’ll be darned,” she said, as if I’d never talked to her about the current sheriff of Posadas County. “You aren’t that scruffy little kid that sat in front of me in Mrs. Dutcher’s American history class.”
“Not anymore,” Holman said. He feigned mock hurt. “And I don’t think I was ever scruffy.”
I glanced down at his polished boots, still mint after a day up on the mountains, and the sharp crease of his gabardine trousers. Even the raindrop circles on his leather jacket were placed just so. “I don’t think so, either,” I said. “Join us.” I pushed myself over closer to the wall, taking my burrito with me. “Robert, it’s good to see you. Camille, this is Bob Torrez, the department’s senior patrol sergeant.”
Torrez nodded at me, then at Camille. He was handsome enough that he probably could have landed a Hollywood job, but instead he had settled into place, keeping tabs on his eight younger brothers and sisters. I’d suspected for years that the long-term arm’s-length love of his life was our senior dispatcher, Gayle Sedillos. Maybe the two of them figured there was no hurry, since they saw each other as regularly as shift work.
Holman sat down beside me, and Torrez balanced his huge frame on the edge of Camille’s bench seat, careful not to slide too close.
“You’re still eating that stuff,” Holman said.
“I’m still breathing.”
“Uh-huh.”
JanaLynn had sidled back around the divider and now looked at the sheriff expectantly. “Just coffee,” he said. “Decaf.”
“Bobby?” she said to Torrez.
“Nothing, thanks.”
She left, and Holman leaned forward, his voice low. “Bobby? What’s with Bobby?”
“She’s my cousin,” Torrez said without a trace of fluster. “They all call me that.”
“I think he’s related to half the county,” Holman said, and he then turned to me, his arm on the back of the booth. “So. What do you think?”
“About what?”
“About being back.”
I chuckled. “Long overdue.”
“I should say so. What’s first on the agenda for you?”
I looked sideways at Martin, wondering what he really wanted. “First, we’re going to clean up the mess in the house. Camille made good progress today. And by the way, thanks for covering that window, Robert.”
Holman leaned forward and folded his hands on the table. “Yeah. That was a hell of a welcome home for you.”
I nodded. “What’s the news on the youngster?”
Holman shot a glance at Torrez, then shrugged. “I just don’t know. I really don’t. That’s one reason we stopped by. You weren’t home, and at dinnertime there weren’t too many other places you were apt to be.” He grinned and craned his neck, looking around at the other booths in that section of the restaurant. They were empty.
“Are they going to go with a night search?”
Holman nodded. “The National Guard’s going to keep after it, along with Search and Rescue. It looks like the weather is holding stable enough that they might be able to use the choppers with spotlights. And I’ve sprung all the personnel the county can afford. Bernie Tafoya even has his dogs up there. This will be the second night. I don’t know. It looks grim.”
“That’s rugged country,” I said.
“Yes, it is. About the worst in the county.” He paused, then traced one of the patterns in the plastic tablecloth with his right ring finger. “And I get the impression that there’s something about the whole thing that Estelle doesn’t like.”
“Meaning?”
Holman shrugged. “I don’t know what I mean. She asked Bob here to coordinate things for our end. So he’s been working with the Guard and SAR.”
“Who’s up there now, by the way,” I asked, “coordinating things?”
“Eddie Mitchell, and he’s got Tom Pasquale keeping him awake.”
“He’ll love that,” I said. Eddie Mitchell had been with the Posadas County Sheriff’s Department for nine years, after an unhappy stint with one of the big metro departments. I knew that the taciturn and efficient sergeant delighted in assigning young Pasquale to every dull civil-law job that came along, but I agreed with him-that was one way to keep the youngster out of trouble until he aged a bit.
“Estelle had a family emergency,” I added. “That’s going to be her first priority for a while. There’s no problem with that.”
Holman waved a hand. “No, no. I know her mother took a header. I know about that. No, what I mean is before that. Everyone is working out of a base camp, like right here, just east of the tip of the Pipes.” He drew a little circle on the table, close to the edge. “That’s about where the hunting camp was that the kid strayed from.”
He turned and rested his head in his left hand as he looked at me. “I was hoping that being a young mother herself, Estelle’s intuition might tell her where the kid went, right away. But she’s got something else on her mind. She’s not communicating with us.”
I frowned and put my fork down. “She’s not communicating with you? What do you mean?”
Holman shrugged. “Just that. You know how you used to joke that Estelle was half Oriental or something? She gets so damn inscrutable that no one knows what the hell she’s thinking? Well, at a time like this, it just seems like she sure as hell should be talking to us. That’s a little kid out there. I’d like to hear her ideas.”
“Did you talk to her?”
“You bet. Her stock phrase for anybody in the search is ‘Just cover every square foot.’”
“Well? Good advice, seems to me. What else is there to do?”
“Sure. But for most of the afternoon, she’s off on the back side of the mesa, well out of the search area, doing who the hell knows what. Just before she got the call about her mother, I happened to catch sight of her standing off about fifty yards from the family’s campfire site, leaning against a tree, staring off into space.”
I chuckled. “That sounds familiar.”
“I thought maybe you’d have a talk with her when she gets back.”
“Of course. But I tell you, Marty, it’s been my experience, and yours, too, that Estelle does things in her own good time.” I took another forkful and chewed thoughtfully. “I’ve spent many a time waiting for her to decide what she wants to do. And she usually isn’t wrong, either.”
“It’s not just my imagination, then.”
I laughed. “No, Sheriff, it’s not your imagination. So tell me about this family. Pasquale told me their name, but I’ve forgotten already.”
“The Coles,” he said, and looked at Torrez. “Tiffany, right?” Bob nodded. “Tiffany Cole is the mother’s name. She moved here about a year ago.”
“They were hunting?”
“No. Just camping. The campsite looked more like it was just a place to blow
off a little steam.”
“And just the three of them? Mom, her boyfriend, and the boy?”
“I assume so. She’s a wreck, so it’s hard to get any kind of answer out of her. Bob, you talked with her some.”
“Just those three,” Torrez said, his voice almost a whisper.
Camille looked puzzled. “It’s hard to imagine a three-year-old covering enough distance to get himself lost.”
“Yes, it is,” I said. “But he doesn’t have to travel far, as the sad experience we had about ten years ago with the Culpepper boy proved to us. That youngster was eleven years old when he walked away from a hunting camp over by Regal, and they found his bones six months later. He’d curled up under a rock snag less than two hundred yards from the camp.” I shrugged. “Now he was eleven, and two hundred yards is close enough, on a still night, to hear normal voices.”
“It wasn’t a still night, though,” Martin said.
“No, it wasn’t. It was a goddamn blizzard, and the youngster apparently fell and fractured his skull. And it was so cold that he probably froze to death the first night, if the injury didn’t kill him first.” I put down my fork and pushed back. “And that’s that. If this little tyke is only three, and this is his second night out, with the possibility of freezing rain, then he’s had it. And a little body is just terribly easy to miss, even if you’ve got a thousand troops combing the place.”
Holman sighed.
“And that’s probably exactly what’s bothering Estelle, Sheriff,” I said. “Remember that her oldest boy just turned three himself. So this is up close and personal.”
“You’ll talk with her, though?”
“Sure.”
Holman put his palms on the table and pushed himself to his feet. “Did you happen to talk with old man Apodaca about the grave in your backyard, by the way?”
I grinned. “No. Camille and I walked out there this afternoon. Damnedest thing I ever saw. I keep thinking that I’m just going to tell the village to put an oxbow in their goddamn water line and leave her bones in peace. I’ll deed him the land, if that makes it easier.”
“Whatever you want to do,” Holman said, but he didn’t sound convinced. “Let me know what Estelle says,” he added.
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