“Thanks. I feel good. There is life after divorce, you’ll see.”
May sighed. “I hope so. Going through it is a nightmare.”
“Are you going to do all right financially?”
“Not if Rex can help it.”
The waitress brought menus and took their drink orders. A designer beer for May. A lemonade for Claire.
“I feel terrible about Isabel Santos,” Claire confided when they were alone again.
“Me, too.”
“What do you think happened?”
“She walked in on a robbery by Tony Atencio, according to the Sandoval County Sheriff’s Department.”
“He’s only a suspect. Nothing has been proven yet.”
“No, but Tony’s a gang member and he has been in trouble ever since he dropped out of middle school.”
“Did you talk to the Sheriff’s Department?”
“Yes. Lieutenant Kearns visited me. They found the call Isabel made to the Historical Society in her phone records. I told Kearns I had referred Isabel to you, but they already knew that you’d been involved.”
“Was I the only person you referred Isabel to?”
May’s eyeglasses dangled from a cord around her neck. She put them on and studied the menu before she answered Claire. “No. After she saw you she came to the Historical Society and told me you said the document was related to the Inquisition. She asked me if I thought it was valuable and I mentioned Peter Beck and Warren Isles. Peter is an expert on the Inquisition. Warren is a collector in Santa Fe. I thought the document should go to the center, of course, but it was her choice.”
“Do you know if she contacted them?”
“No. I gave her the names and numbers. I don’t know what happened after that.”
“Did she show you the document?”
“No.” Her eyes went back to the menu. “The fish and chips are good. I’d recommend them.”
“You’re a historian. Weren’t you curious? Didn’t you want to see the original document? Weren’t you tempted to go to her house?” Claire wasn’t willing to let May slide by hiding behind the menu.
“I’m not as curious about things as I used to be.” Her eyes—with or without the glasses—were dull as soot. “I tried to do you a favor, Claire. If you weren’t interested in the document, you could have passed it on to someone who was.”
“Actually I was very interested. The police haven’t found the document in Isabel’s house and I’m worried about what happened to it.”
May wrapped her words in the ellipses of disdain. “Well…you know the Sandoval County Sheriff’s Department…”
“Have you ever been to the Santos house?”
“Of course.”
“Do you have any idea how old it is?”
This was a subject May was more willing to talk about. She became animated as she spoke, more like the woman Claire had known, a woman who was interested in her work and proud of her expertise. She put down the menu and let the glasses on the velvet cord drop back to her chest. “It’s a hundred years old. The Santoses have been in Bernalillo since the very beginning. That property was once the family hacienda and they built and rebuilt on the same site. Lieutenant Kearns said a skeleton was found under the brick floor but he didn’t know how old it was yet. It could be a family member. The first Manuel Santos came to New Mexico with Oñate’s expedition. The family settled in San Juan but eventually ended up here although it isn’t known exactly when. Records were destroyed during the Pueblo Revolt.”
“The Spaniards all left then, didn’t they?”
“Presumably. Although it’s possible some of them made peace with the Indians and hid out until the area was conquered again. The Spaniards lived in widely separated family groups. It would have been hard to survive in Bernalillo in the early seventeenth century without getting along with the Indians. Sometimes Spaniards returned to their original homesteads.”
“Have there been Manuel Santoses in Bernalillo since that time?”
“No. The name Manuel didn’t get passed on in every generation. Most of the current Santoses aren’t very interested in their own history. The latest Manuel hasn’t given his son the name.”
“There was an Inquisitor in Mexico City named Manuel Santos in the late sixteenth century.”
“There was?” May seemed startled. “I didn’t know that.”
“August Stevenson gave me copies of Inquisition documents dated fifteen ninety-six with the name Manuel Santos on them.”
“I’m sure Manuel would love to have it known that he was descended from an Inquisitor. That would really help his campaign. That and his gambling brother.” May’s voice was marbled with sarcasm but she laughed. It was the first laugh Claire had heard from her in a while. “But it’s unlikely the two Manuel Santoses are related. An Inquisitor in Mexico City at that time would have been a powerful person. Why would someone with that kind of power leave for el Norte?”
“I don’t know,” Claire answered. “Have you ever come across evidence that any crypto Jews settled in Bernalillo? Maybe the conflict between the Rodriguez and Santos families played out again here.”
“Nothing tangible,” May said. “There is talk that the old ways endured in some families. That they burn candles in secret on Friday night, that they don’t eat pork, that they sweep to the middle of the room. Even though I’ve lived here for forty years and know more about the history of the place than most people, I’m still considered an outsider. Anyone who secretly practices Judaism wouldn’t admit it to me. I don’t know why anybody needs to keep it a secret in this day and age, except that devout Catholics in the family would rather not know.”
“Sometimes people fall into the habit of secrecy,” Claire said. “And are unwilling or unable to stop.”
“Sometimes,” said May. She saw the waitress approaching. “If it’s all the same to you I’d like to order now.”
“All right.”
May ordered the fish and chips. Claire got a duck and spinach salad. While they waited for the food to arrive, Claire’s thoughts returned to Isabel Santos. “Did you know Isabel well?” she asked May.
“Not really. I saw her occasionally when she was growing up. She was a pretty girl with a lot of spirit. She had problems with drugs when she was younger. It caused a rift with her family, especially her brother Manuel, who’s always been concerned about his image. She fell in love with an Anglo guy in California, but eventually she came back. It seemed like she’d made peace with her family and was settling down here.”
“Are the parents still alive?”
“No. She was raised by her grandmother who lives in town.”
When the lunch arrived the portions were enormous. May’s plate overflowed with fries and fish. Although there was more than enough for two, she ate every bit.
Chapter Eight
AFTER LUNCH CLAIRE DROVE EAST ON ROUTE 44. The strip from Santa Ana Star Casino to I-25 was one of the places in New Mexico that combined the best of the past with the worst of the present. There was the casino, the convenience stores, the gas stations and fast food restaurants. But there was also the Coronado State Monument, a quarter mile away from the strip by road but much farther than that in spirit.
It was one of Claire’s favorite places in the state. Although named for a conquistador, it was more of a monument to the peaceful Kuaua people who lived on the banks of the Rio Grande when Coronado’s expedition arrived in 1540. Most of the pueblo buildings were now in ruins. The kiva had been restored and could be entered by a wooden ladder, but the original frescoes had been removed and taken inside the Visitor’s Center, a building designed by John Gaw Meem, the architect who designed the library where Claire worked. She felt a sense of shelter and timelessness in a Meem building. As she walked through the Visitor’s Center she passed a child-sized suit of armor. Historical figures cast such long shadows it was surprising to be reminded that people were smaller 400 years ago. She went out the back door and followed the path aroun
d the pueblo ruins. The comments of the conquistadors were imprinted on sign posts stuck in the ground. In 1540 Pedro de Casteñada wrote about Indian women grinding corn, “A man sits at the door playing on a fife while they grind, moving the stones to the music and singing together.” In 1610 Perez de Villagra wrote “They are quiet, peaceful people of good appearance and excellent physique, alert and intelligent. They live in complete equality, neither exercising authority nor demanding obedience.”
Claire left the pueblo and walked down to the riverbank. Kuaua women were excellent swimmers and easily negotiated the treacherous currents of the river. In summer it had a wide, gentle flow and Claire liked to sit on the banks and watch it wander. She had a favorite spot sheltered by a cottonwood and she sat down there. The view here was south to the Sandias, not gentle mountains from any perspective, but from here they seemed even rockier and more jagged than they did from her house. Traffic crossed the bridge on Route 44, but the rippling water drowned out the sound. Coronado was close to the sprawl of Albuquerque, yet removed by the sense of being in another time.
Claire’s mind regressed to the sixteenth century. It was 1598, almost 60 years after Coronado, before the Spaniards returned in any numbers. Settlers and friars came north with Oñate, and at some point after that a Manuel Santos settled in Bernalillo. Could it have been Manuel Santos, the Inquisitor, or a relative carrying a cross with the last words of Joaquín Rodriguez inside? What would that mean to the current Santos family?
As Claire watched the water, the sun beat down on her back. From the beginning of civilization mystics had gone into the land of burning heat seeking enlightenment. She thought about Joaquín Rodriguez circumcising himself on the banks of the Rio de los Remedios—the courage, the pain, the sense of release and acceptance that could come from obeying a covenant of his God. His blood might have flowed into the water and blended into the current in the same way the waters of one river flowed into another when their paths came together, in the same way that people merged when they followed the same God.
Her thoughts moved on to May Brennan eating enough for two. She sympathized with her confusion and her pain about the divorce, but she wondered if despair was clouding her vision. She was bothered by the sense that May hadn’t told her everything she knew. The May she knew would have insisted on seeing the original and gotten to Isabel’s house even before Claire did. Claire stood up, took one last look at the free flowing river and walked back to her truck.
******
She took Camino del Pueblo south through Bernalillo and when she got to 711 Camino del Pueblo, the building that housed the Sheriff’s Department and other county offices, she parked and went in. The building had been renovated and given a false front that reminded her of a western movie set.
She stopped at the front desk and asked for Detective Romero.
“He’s not in,” a soft-spoken policewoman replied. “Would you like to speak to Lieutenant Kearns?”
Claire had to say yes, although she doubted Lieutenant Kearns would be as interested in the historical elements she’d uncovered as Detective Romero.
The woman rang Kearns and he walked down the hallway toward Claire. His clothes were very plain and rumpled. His posture had the weary droop of an old shoe.
“Ms. Reynier,” he said, “what are you doing in Bernalillo?”
“I had lunch with May Brennan today. Then I went to Coronado Monument. It’s one of my favorite places in New Mexico.”
“Never had a chance to go there myself. One of these days. Well, come into my office.”
Claire followed him into the office listening to the buzzing noises of a police station, thinking of it as the hive the force returned to at the end of the day weighted down with evidence found all over Sandoval County.
“Have you found the document yet?” she asked.
“Not yet.”
“May told me you contacted her about the phone call Isabel Santos made to the Historical Society. She said she gave Isabel and you the names of Peter Beck and Warren Isles. Have you been in touch with them?”
“We’re working on it,” Kearns said, leaning against his desk and watching her with pale eyes, waiting to see where this was heading.
“It could be that Isabel contacted them, maybe even sold one of them the document.” She didn’t want to imply she could do his job better than Kearns could by suggesting that if there’d been a sale there could be a deposit somewhere.
“We haven’t found any evidence to suggest she contacted anyone but you and May.”
“It’s such an important document. It’s hard to imagine any historian or collector hearing about it and not going to Isabel’s house as soon as possible to see it. I did.”
“We don’t know that the experts May recommended ever heard about the document, but as I said we’re working on it.”
“Could you ask May if she contacted anyone?” Claire felt like a yappy little dog. She didn’t like to think she was barking at Lieutenant Kearns’s heels, but there was a lot at stake here, including her own reputation.
Kearns responded to her assertiveness by stepping behind his desk. “She says she didn’t.” The late afternoon sun followed him around the desk, beaming through the window, lighting up the rusty hair on his arms and turning the lines in his face from fissures to canyons.
Claire wondered if it was doing the same to her and stepped away from the light. “If a substantial amount of money was deposited in Isabel or the Santos brothers’ accounts that would be on record, wouldn’t it?”
“We have to have some reason to suspect there was a sale before we can go looking at people’s bank accounts,” Kearns said. “We don’t even know that there was a document. May couldn’t confirm it and you never actually saw it either, did you?”
“To me the content is confirmation. I don’t see how Isabel could have made it up.”
“It might be confirmation to a historian. A policeman needs something more tangible than a description,” he reminded her.
“The cross could tell you more.”
“We’re investigating. The OMI identified the skeleton as a man, by the way. Sex is relatively easy for them to establish. For one thing a man’s forehead has more slope than a woman’s. It will take longer to determine the age and origin of the skeleton. It’s old, but they don’t know how old yet.”
“I asked Detective Romero if the Smithsonian could be called in.”
“They usually only participate in exceptional cases like ones that involve paleoindian artifacts.”
“I think this is an exceptional case,” Claire said. “I’ve been researching Inquisition documents and I discovered that there was an Inquisitor named Manuel Santos who witnessed the execution of Joaquín Rodriguez in Mexico City. May told me a Manuel Santos was part of Oñate’s expedition and was one of the first Europeans to settle in Bernalillo.”
“There could have been more than one Manuel Santos, no?”
“There were very few Europeans in the New World in the late sixteenth century.” Claire persisted although she felt discouraged about convincing a man who worked in Bernalillo without ever visiting the Coronado Monument of the relevance of anything that happened here 400 years ago.
“Even if Manuel Santos’s ancestor was an Inquisitor, that’s not a crime at this point,” Kearns said.
“It could have provided a motive for Isabel’s death.”
“To you Tony Atencio may be an uninteresting suspect but to us he’s a gangbanger with a record. We found his prints in the house. He tried to sell Isabel’s VCR to a buddy of his, and the buddy ratted on him. We had enough evidence to charge him with burglary and keep him in jail.”
Claire thought she could be stating the obvious, but she did it anyway. “Maybe someone else fought with Isabel and she fell. Maybe Tony Atencio found her dead and took advantage of an opportunity.”
“Maybe,” Kearns said in a weary voice that lacked conviction. He turned to the window and asked, “You think it’s going t
o rain?”
“No,” Claire replied, recognizing the meaningless phrase that marked the end of the meeting.
“Either Detective Romero or I will be in touch,” Kearns said.
Chapter Nine
CLAIRE GOT IN HER TRUCK AND CONTINUED on through Bernalillo. She wasn’t planning to go to Calle Luna, but when she saw the turn-off she acted on impulse and swung a right. The decision was made so quickly that she didn’t have time to flick her turn signal. The driver of the car behind her leaned on his horn. His irate face was visible in her rear view mirror. She had learned much about the Santos family since the last time she was here. She wanted to look at Isabel’s house again and see how it appeared through the lens of her new knowledge.
She wondered what it was like when Manuel Santos first came here with an oxcart full of possessions. There would have been paths but no roads. The only buildings were the Indian settlements along the Rio Grande. Before the river was dammed in the twentieth century the Bosque and the valley were a wide flood plain. Buildings had to be on higher ground to survive. Houses were built of native materials. The people were smaller then so the houses were constructed with low doors and no windows. Only the very well cared for buildings from that period survived. Mud houses were organic and eventually they sank back into the ground from which they had come. The first Santos dwelling might have stood on the spot of the present dwelling or it might not. It would be difficult to prove.
May might have more knowledge of the Santos family history than they did themselves but it wasn’t so unusual for a family to lose touch with their own history. Genealogy was an interest that families drifted in and out of and that was partially a function of age. As people got older and concerned with their own mortality, they became more interested in their ancestors. Claire knew that the Reyniers had arrived in New Amsterdam in 1650 on a ship called the Gilded Otter. They had a French name but they traveled to the New World on a Dutch ship.
She turned onto Calle Luna. As she neared the cul-de-sac at the end of the street she saw a Ford pickup parked in front of Isabel’s house, a truck with lots of hard miles on it, a bed full of holes, a body full of dents and dings. It had once been white but was now layered with brown dust. Claire was debating whether to turn around in the cul-de-sac or to stop when she saw Chuy Santos in the yard hunched over and yanking out weeds in the yard. It was hard labor in New Mexico in June when the earth was as fixed as concrete and unwilling to let go of its scrawny progeny. Weeding came easier after a hard rain.
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