The Replacement Child (16 page)

But there was something in the box that she wanted now. Something she had just remembered was in it. Ernesto’s police revolver. Maxine got slowly out of her car, wondering if she could reach the box without getting out a stepladder.

G
il sat at the head of the dinner table, taking a helping of mashed potatoes. Susan sat at the other end, with their two daughters between.

“Joy, how did the Bandelier trip go yesterday?” he asked.

“Boring and stupid,” she said sullenly.

Gil pretended that he hadn’t heard her. “Remember when we used to go there when you were little?”

She glared at him and said to Susan, “Can I be excused?”

They had been sitting down for only a few minutes, but Susan nodded. Joy went running to her room.

Susan, who was acting as if nothing had happened, said to Gil, “When you bury St. Joseph, make sure and put a garbage bag over him. I don’t want him to get dirty….”

“But, Mommy,” Therese interrupted. “If you put one of the black bags over St. Joseph he won’t be able to see.”

“That’s true,” Gil said. “How about I put a clear bag over him?” Therese nodded her approval.

She and Susan talked for the rest of the dinner about her classroom’s newt and a friend named Zookie, whom Gil had never heard of.

He was in the kitchen, rinsing the dishes and putting them in the dishwasher, when Susan came up behind him.

“Don’t take it personally, she just doesn’t like any man right now,” she said as she rubbed his shoulder. “The Bandelier trip didn’t go well.”

“Why not?” He turned to look at her, softly brushing the hair out of her eyes.

“The boy she likes completely ignored her and instead talked to Jennifer Vigil the whole time.”

“What boy?” This was the first he had heard of a boy.

“I promised I wouldn’t tell,” was all she would say before shooing him out of the kitchen.

He changed into his sweatpants and went out into the freezing garage.

He did three sets of twenty jumping jacks to warm up. The only sound was the slapping of his tennis shoes against the concrete floor. He opened the garage door and started out at a brisk run. He jogged every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday
right after dinner. He started slowly, waiting for his muscles to warm up, then took it up a notch. He checked his watch as he rounded a corner, then took it up some more.

His basketball coach had made him start running when he was fifteen. He was at St. Michael’s High School and just starting to reach his eventual six feet two inches. By his senior year he’d been an all-state point guard. He’d been good enough to get a basketball scholarship to the University of New Mexico to play for the Lobos.

As he rounded a corner he slipped a little on some ice he hadn’t noticed in the dark. He kept going, picking up the pace, mostly to fight off the cold.

He had never played a game for the Lobos. He had torn his rotator cuff during a practice the second week of school, when his shoulder hit the head of another player. His shoulder had never completely healed: that was why he couldn’t wear a shoulder holster and had to wear a gun belt.

He’d started dating Susan his junior year. Two weeks after graduation they were married. He’d gone to UNM law school while she supported them with an accounting job at a doctor’s office. Two years away from graduation, Susan had become pregnant. A week later, his father had died. He’d dropped out of law school, and they moved back to Santa Fe. And he’d gotten the only job he could take with some dignity.

He slowed as he came near a suspicious-looking car parked in the street. There was a man sitting in the driver’s seat in the dark. Gil jogged slowly, making sure to stay in the driver’s blind spot. As he neared the passenger-side door, the man got out of the car and walked into a house. Gil sped up again, feeling the cold starting to work on his toes.

His family disapproved of his becoming anything other than a lawyer. Supposedly, back in the 1600s, one of the first Montoyas had been appointed acalde, the colonial equivalent of a judge, but that Montoya had been thrown out of office by the locals and sent back to Spain. The Judge would pull out
newspaper clippings written in Spanish about Montoya mayors and governors and articles in English about Montoya state senators and congressmen. All of them had been lawyers, just like Gil’s father.

At the family fiestas, relatives would still say things to Gil like, “The Judge had such hopes for you,” or, “The Judge must be turning over in his grave.” Gil would just walk away.

At a fiesta last year, his father’s cousin, his face red from alcohol and with tamale crumbs clinging to his black mustache, had said, “Your dad would be so disappointed in you.” Gil turned slowly to look at him. Gil was about a foot taller and could see the bald spot on the back of his cousin’s head. The cousin backed up quickly, almost tripping over a picnic bench. Elena was suddenly next to him, putting a hand on his arm and steering him away from the crowd. She said, “Did you know that the first Montoya to come to New Mexico with the conquistadores was out chasing ambulance carts within a day?” He didn’t answer her, so she squeezed his arm and said, “There are fifteen generations of Montoyas going to a hell made especially for lawyers. I’m just glad you won’t be there with them.” She smiled. “Besides, I’ll be there to keep them company.” Elena had been in her first year at UNM’s law school at the time. Now she was finishing up an internship at the state attorney’s office.

He saw the lights of his house down the street and slowed to a trot.

L
ucy had gotten to work late and missed the editors’ meeting. Now she was at her desk, trying to concentrate. She was having a hard time of it. The photo caption she was editing seemed not to make any sense. Half the words were misspelled and no one was identified. The photo itself was great—the director of the Santa Fe ski area was looking forlornly at the ugly brown patches of dirt on his ski slopes. The photo was running
tomorrow with a story about the weather. No snow was in the forecast for the next week.

Her boss, City Editor Harold Richards, was editing the article about Patsy Burke’s murder. Harold didn’t normally read stories. He was doing it because Lucy couldn’t. It would have been a conflict of interest for Lucy to edit the story since she had been at the crime scene as a medic, not a journalist. It was one of those ethics rules that her University of Florida professors had hammered into her. She hadn’t actually told Harold why he needed to edit the story instead of her. And she didn’t plan on telling him. She would never have this problem again—never inadvertently run across a dead body—since she wasn’t planning on staying a volunteer medic at Piñon.

As she watched Harold edit the story, she wondered what Major Garcia had said when they interviewed him. She moseyed over to the fax machine, which sat next to Richards’s desk. She pretended to look over a faxed press release while she glanced at the computer screen over his shoulder: “‘A 63-year-old woman who was found dead in her home on Wednesday was murdered,’ said Major Ed Garcia of the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Department. However, Garcia would not release the cause of the woman’s death.” That’s where Lucy stopped.

She knew the cause of Patsy Burke’s death—she’d been strangled. She tossed the fax into the recycling bin and went over to Tommy Martinez’s desk. Tommy was on the phone, so she stood nearby, wondering how she could tell him what she knew about Patsy’s death without breaking any rules. Ethically, she couldn’t say a word about it. Patsy Burke had been her patient and the same patient-confidentiality laws that governed doctors also governed lowly medics like herself. She also was bound by those pesky journalism-ethics rules, although those were slightly bendable.

But telling Tommy would serve a dual purpose. The
Capital Tribune
would scoop the
Santa Fe Times
on Mrs. Burke’s cause of death.
(Take that, Del.)
And if the newspaper put enough
pressure on Major Garcia, he would have to look into whether Patsy Burke was Scanner Lady and if her phone call to Lucy had had something to do with her death.

The power of the press at its finest.

Lucy would have to stay vague when telling Tommy. Maybe something like,
The investigation isn’t considering everything.
She wouldn’t even be mentioning Patsy Burke and therefore, technically, not breaking any rules. Maybe say,
Did you ask Garcia if she was strangled?

Hanging up, Tommy said, “What’s up, boss?”

She started, then stopped. She knew that what she was doing was exactly what Garcia expected her to do: compromise the investigation by leaking what she knew to the newspaper. She would be proving him right: she was untrustworthy. If the newspaper printed Patsy Burke’s cause of death, he would know that she had given it to them. And then Garcia would never seriously investigate whether Patsy was Scanner Lady.

Lucy said, “Forget it,” and walked away.

G
il sat on Joy’s bed reading
Little House in the Big Woods.
They had started the book, at Joy’s request, a week ago. The first night, eight-year-old Therese had developed a new habit—asking questions every other sentence. The situation so exasperated eleven-year-old Joy that she held her hands over her ears. Gil knew that Therese was doing it only to annoy her sister.

In the end, they had come to a compromise.

Therese was allowed to ask three questions per reading session. But she usually asked only one question, wanting to save up the two others in case something she genuinely didn’t understand came up.

Gil read six pages and stopped when he noticed that
Therese was drifting. Joy was still wide awake. He marked the page and closed the book. He went over to Therese’s bed and turned off her reading light. Putting his hand on her head, he repeated in Spanish the same blessing his father had said over him every night—”May the angels watch over you as you sleep and may God smile on you when you awake.” He kissed her forehead as she smiled a little and turned on her side. Joy looked disinterestedly at the ceiling. He put his hand on her head and repeated the blessing. She kept staring straight up. He expected her to pull away as he kissed her forehead, but instead she said, “Please tell Mother I need to speak to her.”

He found Susan sweeping the kitchen floor.

“I was hoping we had a few years before Joy started the teen-angst thing,” he said.

Susan laughed. “She’s just had a bad week.”

“Our daughter would like a word with her mother.”

Susan put the broom against the wall, then he heard the door close to the girls’ room. Gil picked up the statue of St. Joseph, still sitting on the kitchen counter, and pulled a clear plastic bag over it. He took it out to the garage, got a shovel, and headed to the backyard. He picked a spot away from the trees so that he wouldn’t hit any roots and started digging. The ground should have been frozen at this time of year, but only the top layer was hard. The lights from the house gave a glow to the backyard, enough for him to see what he was doing in the dark. He stopped for a second and looked back at the house. He needed to clean out the gutters and trim the elm tree. He had been thinking about planting an apple or apricot tree in the spring, like they had had at his house when he was a kid. But they might be living in Eldorado in the spring.

Gil put St. Joseph upside down in the ground, facing east for good luck, then filled the hole back in. He put the shovel away and went inside. Susan was still in the girls’ room.

He got a beer out of the fridge and sat on the couch to watch ESPN. It was forty-five minutes before Susan came back.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“Just girl stuff,” she said and went back to her sweeping.

At ten
P.M.
, he turned on the local news. The investigation into Melissa’s death was the lead story. They had picked up the
Capital Tribune
’s article about her drug use. But they went further than the newspaper article: they mentioned her brother Daniel’s drug death and had talked to the Bacas’ next-door neighbor, who said into the camera with enthusiasm, “If I thought one of my kids was doing drugs, I’d kill them.”

L
ucy was bored. She was reading articles on the Associated Press wire on her computer when she heard a voice behind. She spun around in her chair without thinking.

And came face-to-face with Mrs. Claire Schoen.
Hell. Damn. Dear God, please make her have Alzheimer’s or dementia or maybe a bad case of glaucoma so she can’t see me.

“I thought you were an EMT?” Mrs. Schoen said shrewdly.

Oh, hell.

“Um … I am a medic, but I just do that as a volunteer. I really work here.”
Smile brightly,
Lucy thought,
smile brightly.

“You could have told me that when we talked before. How much of what you told me was bullshit?” Mrs. Schoen’s voice was cold.
Help. Change the subject.

“So can I help you with something?”
Keep smiling brightly, Lucy.

Mrs. Schoen watched her closely for another moment before saying, “Someone named Tommy Martinez asked me to drop off this photo of Patsy.”

Lucy noticed that she was clutching a picture. She could just make out the image of a group of women who looked like they were playing cards.

“Right. I didn’t know Tommy had asked you to do that,” Lucy said. “Um … Well … We just need a photo of…” Lucy almost said “Scanner Lady.” “We just need a photo of Mrs. Burke to put in the story for tomorrow’s paper. That way the readers know what she looked like. We do that a lot in cases like this.”

Claire Schoen just stared at her.

“Let me have you talk to the photo editor,” Lucy said as she steered Mrs. Schoen to the darkroom and made the introductions.

Lucy sat back down at her desk and cursed up a holy storm, trying to remember what lies she had told Mrs. Schoen. Lucy had purposely tried to give her the impression that she was a full-time medic. Damn. This was karma coming back to bite her in the butt.

As Mrs. Schoen was leaving, Lucy stopped her. “Look, I’m sorry I didn’t say anything before about working here. I’m an idiot. I wasn’t trying to trick you. I’m … I’m very sorry about Mrs. Burke. Honestly.”