Land of Burning Heat

by Judith Van GIeson

  “No,” Tey said, placing one gnarled hand over the other. “He could not.”

  “The medical investigators could find out if he is your ancestor by testing your family’s DNA.”

  “DNA? What is that?”

  Trying to explain DNA was daunting, so Claire settled for: “The medical investigators can take a piece of hair or skin or even saliva and compare it to the skeleton. They can tell from that if people are related, even people who lived four hundred years apart.”

  “The investigators can do that?”

  “Yes, but they need your cooperation and your permission.”

  “I will have to ask my grandson. He is the one who has the Manuel Santos name.” Claire felt the door had closed again; she knew what Manuel would say.

  “Do you know anything about the document Isabel found or the cross?”

  “Nothing,” Tey said. “I never even saw them. She told you, but she didn’t tell me. I will never understand that.”

  “Maybe she didn’t have time.”

  “Maybe. The police have the cross now.”

  “Do you know who has the document?”

  “No.” Tey pushed herself away from the table to stand up. She went to a canister on the kitchen counter, picked out a stem, brought it back to the table and dropped it into her tea. “My arthritis is hurting me,” she said. “It does that when it rains.”

  “What’s that?” Claire asked, expecting to discover another good herb.

  “Marijuana,” Tey replied. “It’s very good for the arthritis. I grow it myself between the corn stalks.”

  “Here?”

  “Why not? It’s my land. I was born here. I grew up here. I came back after that no-good man I married left and took the Santos name again. What are they going to do? Arrest a ninety-two-year-old woman and put me in jail with that Tony Atencio? Wait till they see what I would do to him.”

  Claire was reminded that people who lived to a ripe old age had a strong will. “Do you smoke the marijuana?”

  “Only when the pain is very bad.” The dog in the yard began to yip. “That’s my grandson. That’s the way Sonny barks when he hears Chuy.”

  “Don’t get up,” Claire said. “I’ll let him in.”

  “Chuy can let himself in,” his grandmother said.

  Claire stood up anyway, went to the window beside the front door, and watched Chuy park his truck and walk across the yard. The dog stood up, wagged its tail and let Chuy scratch its head.

  “Whose car is that, Grandma?” he asked as he pushed open the door. He was wearing his Santa Ana T-shirt and jeans that were caked with dry mud.

  “Mine,” Claire said.

  “Hola, Chuy,” Tey said.

  “Hola.” Chuy bent over, kissed the top of her head, then turned to Claire. “I thought you said you were coming later.”

  Claire could think of no excuse for her early arrival so she changed the subject. “Were you at the house?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Was my truck there?”

  “No. It was gone, but I could see the scar where you hit the tree. That must have hurt.”

  “I cut my arm,” Claire admitted. “How did the house look?”

  Chuy shrugged. “Looked the same to me. I didn’t see any SUV tracks in the yard. The only tracks I saw went from the ditch to the picnic table to the tree like the truck had had too many beers.”

  “Have a cookie, Chuy,” his grandmother said.

  He took a cookie from the plate, snapped off a piece and crunched it in his mouth.

  “The police saw the tracks last night,” Claire told him.

  “Did they?” asked Chuy. “Well, maybe it was one of Tony’s homeboys who went back to check the place out.”

  “What kind of vehicle does your brother drive?” A lawyer living in the hills of Placitas would likely have an SUV, Claire thought.

  “Manuel?” Claire saw ambivalence toward his older and more successful brother ripple across Chuy’s fluid features.

  His grandmother was quick to remind him that Manuel was Chuy’s brother. “Your brother does not drive a black car,” she said.

  “Right. His SUV is gray,” Chuy said. “A black car like that drove by yesterday afternoon when I was in the yard, but I couldn’t see who was inside it.”

  Tey’s sharp eyes told Chuy his statement had not gone far enough.

  “My brother was home last night anyway,” he added. “I called him and then I went up there after I left the casino.” He looked to his grandmother for approval.

  She nodded.

  Claire thought that Manuel could have easily been at Isabel’s house while Chuy was still at the casino, but she didn’t say so. A wall of family solidarity had gone up and shut her out. She couldn’t tell if this was a knee-jerk reaction to an outsider, if the Santoses had something to hide, or if they just valued their privacy.

  The marijuana in Tey’s tea hadn’t dulled her mind. “The medical investigators want to compare our bones to the old bones to see if we are related to an Inquisitor. I said we would have to ask Manuel.”

  “Sure, Grandma,” Chuy said, sitting down next to his grandmother and putting his hand on top of hers. “If that’s what you want.”

  Claire saw this as a signal that it was time for her to go. She thanked Tey for the cookie and tea and said good-bye.

  In her white rental car she drove out of the yard. In a way the car was cover, but the cover had been blown now that Chuy had seen it. She couldn’t drive by Isabel’s house anymore without feeling that she would be noticed. She had been wanting to visit Isabel’s grave and this seemed like a good time. Tey and Chuy were occupied; she wouldn’t have to worry about running into them at the cemetery. She’d be free to think her own thoughts about the death of Isabel Santos.

  ******

  Claire drove through the town of Bernalillo. The cemetery wasn’t where she thought it should have been—beside Our Lady of Sorrows Church. It was below the on-ramp to the Interstate. It didn’t seem like a very desirable location, but the cemetery was established long before the Interstate. She had seen it many times but had never stopped. She turned off the side road from Route 44. Just past the cemetery a lot full of trailers advertised with a large sign that it was having a sale. The sign was tied to the fence and snapped in the breeze.

  Claire parked and entered the cemetery surprised by the bright reds, pinks and yellows of the artificial flowers that covered the graves. She’d been expecting a duller, grayer place.

  She liked to visit old graveyards; she saw them as an illustrated collection of poetry and short stories. Stories could be found in the names and dates of the departed: the men who had survived wars, the men who hadn’t, the women who had died in childbirth, the children who had died young, the people who lived to a ripe old age even in the hardest of times. People didn’t live any longer now than they ever had but a higher percentage of them lived to an advanced age. There was art in the symbols carved into the more elaborate tombstones—the birds, the crosses, the intertwined wedding rings—art in the ceramic figures left behind and in the weathered wood of the oldest markers. Poetry could be found in the epitaphs, many of which were in Spanish. Claire saw juntos para siempre (together forever), descance en paz (rest in peace), and one she especially liked, si para el mundo eras uno, para nosotros eras el mundo (for the world he was one, for us he was the world).

  It was intriguing to think her ashes would eventually be scattered in the water or the wind, blending into the elements without a marker now that she no longer had a husband to lie beside in eternity. It would also be reassuring to be buried in a family plot beside her mother and father, her grandparents and the generations before them, people she never knew but would always be related to by the substance of her bones. Someday, if her children made no deeper connections in the course of their lives, they might lie next to her, too. This cemetery celebrated family and she envied the people here who would be juntos para siempre. But for her it was a dream. Her fami
ly had been in America almost as long as the Santoses, but the Reyniers had never settled in one place long enough to have a family plot that went back several generations. Reyniers were scattered across the country from New York to Arizona. Unless Claire was willing to start her own dynasty, for her it would be the water or the wind.

  But the Santoses were deeply rooted in New Mexico and Bernalillo, and Isabel would be buried near her ancestors. Claire went to her grave and found it marked with a brand new tombstone. Isabel Santos, it said, descance en paz. Hearts were carved into the stone, but Claire would have preferred the symbol of a butterfly. The artificial flowers on the grave were the right color—dark red, the color Isabel wore when she visited CSWR. A pebble sat on top of her tombstone. There were other people in the cemetery, but their attention was focused on the newly departed, not on Claire. She picked up the pebble and balanced it in her hand, thinking that holding it might tell her something, that being tactile would be better than being intellectual or emotional. It was hard not to get emotional at Isabel’s grave, thinking she had already begun the process of turning to dust, hard not to feel that if she had only been in her office when Isabel called, if the document had been safely stored at the center, her death might have been prevented.

  Claire took strength from the solidity of stone. Did people put pebbles on graves because stone endured? She knew people who collected stones because they liked the color or the markings or because a stone reminded them of a place they had been. The pebble in her hand was an ordinary gray stone crisscrossed by white lines, but if she stared at the lines hard enough and long enough, they took on the shape of mist and clouds. She replaced the pebble, trying to put it exactly where she had found it. Her hand dropped to the top of the tombstone and she let it rest there, saying a final good-bye to Isabel Santos, whispering, “Rest in peace. Descance en paz. If there is anything I can do to make sense of your death, I will.”

  Other members of the Santos family were buried near Isabel. Most had tombstones with names, dates, a cross and descance en paz chiseled into them. The names Ester, Isabel, Manuel and Jesus occurred several times. Sometimes Claire came across families and couples buried together. Isabel’s parents had died within two years of each other and their cross was marked with intertwined wedding rings and the epitaph juntos para siempre. Sometimes individuals were buried alone. There were other tombstones with pebbles on them. While she stared at the Santos tombstones she heard the trailer sign flap-flapping in the wind.

  She moved away from this section and wandered into the far corners of Our Lady of Sorrows Cemetery where the markers were older and more primitive. Wooden crosses were attached to the fence or lay on the ground. If they had ever been inscribed, the inscriptions had weathered away. It made it difficult to tell how far back the cemetery went. The oldest dates Claire found were nuns who were buried here in the 1880’s. It made her wonder where all the bodies from the 1600’s and 1700’s were.

  A jackrabbit jumped out of the weeds and stared at her. In the very back corner Claire found the tombstone of Isabel Santos de Suazo, who also died young in 1890. Twenty years later her husband Moises Suazo was buried beside her. This was the oldest Santos tombstone in the cemetery. It had no cross. This tombstone was decorated with an open flower with six petals. There were lines in the middle of it that looked like musical notes arranged in the shape of a W. It was either a stamen or a symbol that Claire couldn’t read. Scratched beneath the flower she saw the curved arms of a candlestick. This etching was rougher and lighter than the professionally carved flower and looked as if it had been added later by hand. When she was back in her rental car Claire sketched the markings she had seen on a piece of paper. Then she drove to the police station to ask about her truck.

  Chapter Twenty

  ROMERO DIDN’T HAVE HIS OWN OFFICE. He shared a room with several other detectives. Phones were ringing, people were talking, but Claire felt he tuned it all out and focused on her. His eyes were warm and sympathetic.

  “How is your arm?” he asked.

  “Fine,” she said.

  “You’ll get your truck back soon,” he said. “The SUV must have tapped your truck’s tail end as you went into the field. We found some paint marks that could help to identify it. We’re checking Atencio’s family and homeboys to see if any of them own a matching vehicle.”

  “Were the paint samples gray or black?”

  “Black.”

  “Manuel Santos owns an SUV.” Chuy had said that vehicle was gray, but Claire wasn’t sure she believed him.

  “How do you know that?” Romero asked.

  “Chuy told me. I went by there this afternoon.” Claire didn’t consider it her civic duty to tell Romero that Tey Santos had been sipping marijuana stems she raised in her vegetable garden.

  “I’ll look into it,” Romero said.

  Although Claire hoped he would, she wasn’t convinced; a wall seemed to go up whenever she mentioned the name of Manuel Santos, possibly because he was a local boy who had made good. “I asked Tey if someone had been in the house and covered the mirrors. She said she did.”

  “That the kind of thing abuelas do.”

  “Did you ask your grandmother about it?”

  “Not yet.”

  “She told me she lit candles while she was in the house. She leaves the door unlocked; she says there is nothing left to steal. Tey thinks Tony Atencio is a very bad boy and that he killed Isabel.” It seemed only fair to pass that on.

  Romero made no comment.

  “She said she would ask Manuel about comparing their DNA to the old bones, but I’m sure he’ll say no.”

  “We can’t make them unless we can establish that the old bones will help solve the current crime. Considering that the bodies are separated by four hundred years it’s a very long shot.”

  “I know,” Claire said. “After I left Tey’s I went to the cemetery to see Isabel’s grave. Someone had put a pebble on top of her tombstone. Is that one of the old ways, too?”

  “I don’t know.” He shrugged. “Maybe in the old days when people were too poor to afford flowers they brought stones.”

  “Maybe,” said Claire. “I came across the tombstone of another Isabel Santos who died in eighteen ninety. That one had flowers and a candlestick carved into the stone. Have you ever heard of her or the man she was married to, Moises Suazo?”

  “No. How’s the rental car working out?”

  “All right.”

  “I’ll give you a call when the truck is ready.” He stood up signaling that the meeting was over. “Thanks,” Claire said.

  ******

  She drove home through Sandia Pueblo where the road was lined with the faces of wildflowers. Recent rains had rejuvenated them, but even when it hadn’t rained for months flowers bloomed in New Mexico. It could be a harsh place, but from May to November there were wildflowers beside the roads. Anyone who couldn’t afford to buy artificial flowers could easily pick real flowers. But real flowers didn’t last. Stones and artificial flowers did. Was that why people put them on graves?

  ******

  She poured herself a glass of Chardonnay when she got home, took it into the living room, sat down on the sofa, and stared out the window at the Sandias where the piñon and juniper were sprouting shadows. She had a phone call to make and she wanted to have her thoughts in order before she did. It was early evening here, nighttime where she was calling. She didn’t have the home phone number of the person she hoped to reach, but she got it from information. She hoped he would be home and wouldn’t consider this an intrusion. She hoped she wouldn’t wake him up.

  “Hello,” he answered in the grouchy tone of an animal disturbed in its lair.

  “Harold. This is Claire Reynier.”

  “Oh,” he replied. “And how are you?” The grouchiness disappeared from his voice. Harold Marcus seemed genuinely pleased to hear from her.

  “I’m good. I hope I didn’t wake you.”

  “No, it’s only nine o’
clock here and it’s Saturday night. I can’t go to bed at nine o’clock on Saturday even when I have nothing better to do. What’s on your mind?”

  “Have you learned any more about the skeleton?”

  “Well, let’s see, bone chemistry indicates he’s a Caucasian. He died in the early seventeenth century when he was in his thirties, apparently of natural causes. I don’t have the results back on the tooth enamel so I can’t tell you where he grew up. The logical choices would be Spain or Mexico.”

  “I went to the Bernalillo cemetery today to visit Isabel Santos’s grave. Someone had placed a pebble on top of her tombstone.”

  “That’s interesting.” Claire only had his voice to go on, but Harold seemed fully awake now. “It’s an old Jewish custom to leave a stone at a grave.”

  “Why do they do that?”

  “It’s a sign that someone has been there.”

  “I found the grave of a woman named Isabel Santos who died in eighteen ninety and was married to a man named Moises Suazo.”

  “It’s a Catholic cemetery, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Catholics aren’t likely to name their children Moses.”

  “The tombstone didn’t have a cross but an etching of an open flower with a stamen in the middle that might be a symbol or a letter. I drew a picture.”

  “Can you fax me a copy?”

  “Yes.”

  “How many petals did the flower have?”

  “Six.”

  Claire heard the excitement of discovery in his voice. “I’ve seen similar flowers in other Sephardim cemeteries. It could be a representation of a six-pointed star. The Star of David appears on Jewish tombstones although in the past a six-pointed star wasn’t exclusively a Jewish symbol.”

  “I also saw a candelabra carved on the tombstone, although it was lighter and rougher that the other carving. It may have been added later by hand.”

  “How many arms did the candelabra have?”

  “Nine.”

  “That could make it a menorah. It would appear that Isabel the Saint married Moses the Jew. In the nineteenth century Ashkenazi Jewish merchants settled in New Mexico, but Suazo is a Spanish or Portuguese name, which would make Moises a Sephardic Jew. Nowadays when there are interfaith marriages, all too often the man forgets he’s a Jew and takes the religion of his wife. That’s one reason there are so few of us. But the tombstone would suggest that Isabel was the one who converted. Did they leave any heirs?”