She looked searchingly into her husband’s eyes. “Oso, did you know that he’s musical?”
“No. It doesn’t surprise me, but no-I didn’t know.”
“We’ve lived in the same house with him for six years,” Estelle said. “How could we not know?” Francis didn’t reply. Estelle was sure the answer was obvious to both of them. “What if Francisco or Carlos had some enormous talent, and we ignored it?”
“I don’t think that they’re ignored, querida. Sometimes we get busy and maybe we don’t spend the time that we should. But we don’t ignore them.”
“Does something like that eventually come out anyway, eventually? Despite numb parents?”
“Something like what?”
“The music that’s in his heart.”
“I don’t know, mi corazon. I suppose so.”
Estelle stretched her arms all the way over her head, then brought down her hands to cover her face, realizing exactly what her mother had meant.
“What if Teresa Reyes hadn’t taken in that little urchin way back when?”
“Estelle…what if, what if.”
“I’m serious. I was four years old when she adopted me. If she hadn’t done that, if I’d stayed a scruffy little huerfana, watched over by the good sisters of the Iglesia de Tres Santos…what would I be now?”
“You might be La Presidente de Mexico. Who knows.”
“That’s a sobering thought.”
“Hey,” Francis said with sudden inspiration. “Maybe you would have become a nun yourself and worked your way up to Mother Superior. Or married one of those good-looking Diaz boys right there in Tres Santos and had fourteen children to worry about.”
“Ay. What a choice you give me.” She pushed herself upright and slipped her arm around her husband’s waist. “Promise me something,” she said.
“What’s that?”
“Help me keep the Saturday promise I made to Francisco.”
Francis looked skeptical. “You know how things are, querida. If something comes up, he’ll have to understand. That’s just the way things go.”
“Well,” she said, “I don’t want them to go that way this time.”
“Just do your best,” he said. “Your mother always says that, I know.”
“She also says that being safe and well fed isn’t enough.”
“Whatever that means.”
“That’s the trouble, querida. I know exactly what she means. And she’s right, too.”
Chapter Twenty-seven
The German shepherd four doors south sniffed something on the still night air that tickled his attention, and he settled into a rhythmic two-three-two barking. Estelle lay in bed, curled inside the arc of her husband’s body, listening. She could feel his even breathing against her left shoulder. Since his earliest days as a medical student, Francis Guzman had been able to grab deep, comfortable sleep whenever the opportunity arose, whether on a hard couch, an empty hospital bed, or even the floor of the staff lounge.
She knew that Francis would sleep until the alarm, the telephone, or one of his children blasted him awake.
Estelle shifted her head just enough to be able to see the digital clock on the dresser across the room. The neighbor’s dog stopped barking at 1:26 AM For another five minutes, she listened to the sounds of the house and her sleeping family.
Somewhere out in the county, Deputy Jackie Taber was working her regular shift, cruising the back roads, poking into dark corners, leaving the high-speed drone of the interstate to the State Police. Jackie had been sent home earlier in the day to grab a few hours of sleep.
Now, never grumbling about frustration or fatigue, she would plod patiently on, looking and listening. If Estelle turned on the scanner, she knew that she would hear Jackie on the air once in a while, perhaps firing a license number to Dispatcher Brent Sutherland for an NCIC check, something to do to keep them both awake.
The telephone hadn’t rung since early evening, when she’d talked briefly with Sheriff Robert Torrez. The minutes and hours ticked away with the only progress being Carmen Acosta’s slow healing, three hundred miles north. The medical staff still would not hazard a guess about how long it might be before Carmen could remember the incident at all. The grim odds were that the blow to the back of her skull had smashed all remnants of the episode from her mind.
Moving the sheet and blanket as little as possible, Estelle slipped out of bed. Her eyes now accustomed to the dark, she crossed to the chair, slipped into her nightgown and robe, closed the bedroom door behind her, and padded out to the living room.
In a moment, the sharp image of Dr. Arnold Gray was calling the county meeting back into session. Estelle plugged in a set of earphones and settled into the rocking chair beside the sofa.
She saw herself enter and take a seat near Mitchell and Torrez. The commission immediately resumed its discussion of providing services to the village, and more than once, one or another of the commissioners would ask about Kevin Zeigler’s absence. As if to punctuate the problem, Milton Crowley would swivel the camera each time the county manager’s name was mentioned, and even once touched the zoom lens to zero in on Zeigler’s empty chair, as if to say, “Aha, see? This is your government in action.”
Tinneman made a wisecrack about Zeigler’s power lunch, and then Sheriff Torrez rose from his seat and strolled back to the microphone. For the next few minutes, discussion continued, with Torrez answering questions using just enough volume that the commissioners could hear if they paid rapt attention.
Estelle found herself pressing the headphones against her left ear to hear the sheriff. Eventually, their questions for Torrez wound down, and the undersheriff took her place at the small podium.
As she walked to the podium, the camera swung to follow her. Because she had been standing so close to its lens, what the video picked up behind Estelle was fuzzy. Clearly, though, Zeigler’s desk was still empty.
Estelle pressed the remote Pause, and then rummaged through her briefcase to find the agenda for the meeting. Item 17 was open for discussion at that moment. Several less weighty items were scheduled to follow, taking the meeting to its projected five PM adjournment.
Scanning down the list of action items, Estelle could see that a presentation to the commission by a representative of Baynes, Taylor, and O’Brien of Albuquerque was scheduled to present final paperwork for a bonding issue. Dedication of a portion of a little two-track on the western side of the county as a county road joined a host of other similar items-the sort of day-to-day workings of local government that some folks found fascinating, others found stultifyingly boring, and a few, like Milton Crowley, claimed were cloaks for governmental conspiracy.
Item 28, headed Discussion Items, included such blockbusters as sharing a road grader with the tiny unincorporated village of Newton, a hamlet that lay outside the northern Posadas County limits by about a hundred yards; communication from The Country Patriot, which Estelle knew to be Milton Crowley’s newsletter; the preliminary report from the county manager about the feasibility of hiring a private contractor for solid-waste and landfill services; and an entry simply titled Resolution of Litigation. The meeting would conclude with an executive session for Personnel Matters and Pending Litigation.
Estelle wasn’t surprised by either the personnel session or mention of litigation-that was standard procedure for the county. Employees were hired, evaluated, fired. The county sued and was sued on a regular basis, whether over something as simple as determination of an old fence line, violation of a vendor contract, or failure to pay back taxes. The constant flow of civil paperwork kept Sergeant Howard Bishop busy.