“Nice seeing you again, Camille,” he said. “How long are you staying?”
My daughter mumbled something noncommittal that I didn’t catch, and Holman said something about having dinner with him and his wife if we got the chance.
As they started to move away from the table, Sergeant Torrez said, in his usual half whisper, “I’ll be heading back up to the mesa after awhile, if you need anything.”
I lifted a hand in acknowledgment, realizing that Bob expected me to reply that I’d be joining him.
Chapter 7
That evening after we returned from dinner, I made a mental note to call the Posadas village office the next day to see what their updated water-line aspirations were. With that information in hand, it would be time to stroll over and talk to old man Apodaca. I didn’t really relish that idea, but it had to be done.
I suspected that Florencio Apodaca was an intensely private man, and now he had to be intensely lonely, as well. I didn’t see a whole parking lot of relatives’ cars over at his place.
What I really wanted was to hear from Estelle Reyes-Guzman, but the evening wore on and that didn’t happen. I started to dial Erma Sedillos shortly before nine to see if Estelle and Francis had made it back from Mexico. I punched the first four digits and then thought better of it. Erma didn’t need an extra phone call jangling the two sleeping terrors awake.
I walked a circle around the kitchen, stopping in front of the pillbox with all its stupid little compartments. They reminded me of just how useless I was. I turned, walked to the kitchen door, and looked outside. Gusts of wind rocked the cottonwood limbs, and the sky was starless. The thermometer tacked to the window casing read thirty-four degrees. Raw, nasty, and cold.
If anyone needed help, it was the kid lost on the mountain, and I knew damn well that I was useless up there, where the added altitude would make me wheeze, and my bifocaled night vision wouldn’t be able to distinguish between a grove of trees and a battalion of National Guard troops.
That left the puzzling burglary of my home, and my mood brightened some when I discovered that when books were jammed back on the shelves, the living room looked about like it always had, minus the VCR-and that was a dust-catcher anyway. There was no telling what evidence Estelle had gathered when she and the other deputies combed the house after the break-in was discovered. I was anxious to talk with her about that, too, but I knew that a two-bit residential burglary was a long way down the list of priorities just then.
I held out until ten o’clock, then pushed myself out of my leather recliner with a grunt.
“Bed,” I said to Camille, who was curled up on the couch, engrossed in the prime minister’s life. She glanced up at me, her right index finger drifting down to mark her place in the book. “And I may take a run on down to the office later if I wake up.” My daughter didn’t look surprised.
Over the years, I’d come to first adapt to, and then to cherish my own special brand of insomnia. Posadas County was a wonderful, dark, quiet place at three in the morning, and there was no point in lying horizontal, staring at the ceiling, when I could be in a snug car, idling the back roads with the headlights and the radio off, windows down, listening to the quiet musings of the New Mexican prairie.
Camille knew my habits, and she didn’t argue, but I saw her eyes flick toward the kitchen. I knew exactly what was on her mind, and before she could say anything, I added, “And I took my pills, all sixty-five of them.”
I damn near set my alarm for 2:30 A.M., then decided against it, knowing my system wouldn’t fail me.
Because it was my habit to grab a short snooze whenever the spirit moved, whether it be ten in the morning or five in the afternoon, my bedroom was the absolute dark of a room with two-foot-thick adobe walls and one thoroughly shuttered, curtained window.
I had about three sighs’ worth of time to appreciate the comforting smell of the fresh pillowcase before I fell hard asleep. But in what seemed like just minutes, I awoke with a start, Don Juan de Onate’s coffee and green chili already beginning to work their magic. I got up to go to the bathroom and stopped short when I heard faint voices.
Puzzled, I opened the bedroom door and was hit smack in the face by a shaft of bright light that bounced down the hall from the living room. The sun was pounding the east side of the house, but I knew it couldn’t be morning, since there was no smell of coffee. I retreated into the bedroom to find some clothes.
I put on my glasses and saw that it was a quarter after eight.
“Christ,” I muttered, and quickly got dressed.
A couple of minutes later, I strode into the kitchen as if I’d been somewhere important. Camille was dressed and appeared to be fussing with things that looked like vegetables. The coffeemaker was silent, its one red eye blank, its pot empty.
“Good morning, sir,” Estelle Reyes-Guzman said. She was leaning against the counter by the sink. I stopped short and glared at her.
“When did you get here?”
She smiled, but fatigue lined her dark features. “Just a few minutes ago. Camille said the smell of a green-chili omelette would wake you up.” She pushed herself away from the counter, crossed the room, and hugged me so hard, I almost lost my balance.
“She’s right,” I said, and then stepped back, keeping my left hand on Estelle’s shoulder. “You look beat, sweetheart.”
She nodded. “It’s been a long night.”
“How’s your mother?”
“She’s a worse patient than you ever thought of being, sir,” Estelle said. Estelle and I had known each other for more than a decade, and I could count on one hand the times that she had called me anything but “sir.” Her physician husband had been able to break the habit now and then, and what it was that their two boys screeched as a name for me, I had no idea most of the time.
“She’s here now, though? In Posadas?”
“Against her will.”
“I can imagine that. What happened, exactly?”
Estelle took a deep breath and shook her head. “She went outside to toss a pan of water into the garden. She thinks she just planted a foot crooked when she went down that little step behind the kitchen. She busted her hip into a million pieces. Francis has her lined up for hip-replacement surgery on Monday morning.”
I grimaced. “They’re going to do it here?”
Estelle nodded. “Francis thinks it will go just fine. She’s really in pretty good health, all things considered.”
“And then afterward?”
Estelle ducked her head and gazed off in the general direction of the green chili that Camille was slicing on the counter. “I don’t know, sir. We’ll have to take it one step at a time.”
I grunted and plugged in the coffeemaker. To my surprise, Camille didn’t squawk. Instead, she pointed at the cupboard with her knife. “Coffee’s in there,” she said. “Toward the back.”
“Maybe tomorrow,” I muttered, and she glanced at me quizzically. “Tomorrow, no coffee. Maybe,” I said. “One step at a time.”
And in a few minutes, I felt better than I had in weeks. The green chili in the omelette was real, even if the eggs weren’t. And the coffee even made the battalion of pills easier to swallow. I popped the last capsule and frowned at Estelle. “I need to ask your husband how many of these things are really necessary,” I said. I poured a final cup of coffee, set the pot back on the machine, and added, “So tell me what’s going on up on the mountain.”
“You saw Sheriff Holman last night.” It wasn’t a question, and I just nodded. “He’s pretty sure we’re doing everything that can be done.”
“But you’re not so sure,” I said. “Martin says you’re being your Oriental self again.”
Estelle smiled at the departmental joke. “Is there any chance you can come up sometime this morning?”
“Sure. What are you thinking?”
Estelle frowned, gazing down into the coffee. She cradled the cup in both hands. “I don’t think he’s up there, sir.”