The Replacement Child (15 page)

Gil shook his head. “I checked on that last night. I listened to the dispatch tapes from that night myself. There was nothing.” Even though he hadn’t really known what he was looking for, he had spent twenty minutes checking the tapes.

“How can that be? Maybe someone erased them. You guys have had that problem before.”

Four years earlier, two police officers had made the mistake of discussing over the radio how they looked at porn on the Internet while at work. When the investigators went to find the tape of that conversation, it had been “accidentally” erased by one of the dispatchers. The police officers and the dispatcher had been fired.

“I thought of that, so I asked the dispatcher working that night if she had heard anything. She hadn’t. And I believe her. There is no evidence of that call.” He said the next part gently: “Maybe your Scanner Lady made the whole conversation up. Maybe she’s a lonely old woman who wants a little attention.”

She looked him in the eye. “Thank you for your time, Detective. I’m sorry if I seemed upset. It has been a difficult day.”

She turned and walked quickly away. Gil watched her get into her car and leave. He felt like he had just lost an argument with his wife.

L
ucy left the police station and drove straight back to Scanner Lady’s house. The yellow crime-scene tape fought against the wind. The deputy posted at the front door looked bored as he talked on his cell phone. Lucy parked down the street and walked to the house next door to Scanner Lady’s. She knocked and an old face peered out the front door.

“Hi. You’re Claire Schoen, right?” Lucy asked. She had called the newspaper and gotten one of the interns to look up Mrs. Schoen’s name in the cross directory, where all you needed was the address or phone number and got the resident’s name.
“My name’s Lucy Newroe. I was one of the medics who came to help your friend Mrs. Burke.” Lucy felt her name being chiseled on some gravestone in hell. An hour ago she’d been ready to tell Gerald that she was quitting the fire department, and now she was using it to con an old lady.

“Oh, yes,” Claire Schoen murmured as she opened the door wider, letting Lucy into a living room designed in Southwestern Tourist Shop—pink, howling coyote bookends and a kiva. Lucy counted seven chile ristras hanging from the ceiling. A fake Navajo rug on the wall clashed with the geometric designs on the couch. Lucy thought the color of the brown carpet probably was called cinnamon mesa or chocolate petroglyph.

Mrs. Schoen blended into the scene with her cowboy boots, broom skirt, and checkered vest. An elderly Dale Evans. With a touch of alcohol on her breath and smeared, bright pink lipstick. Old-lady-colored lipstick.

They sat down on the geometric couch with Mrs. Schoen twisting a Kleenex in her hands and occasionally dabbing at her eyes. Lucy guessed her to be about seventy. Mrs. Schoen was drinking a brown liquid from a coffee cup, but Lucy was sure that it wasn’t coffee.

“How are you holding up?” Lucy asked.

“Like hell,” Mrs. Schoen said. “The police asked me if I heard anything last night but I didn’t hear a thing. I wish I had; maybe I could have done something. I would have given that robber a piece of my mind. I just saw Patsy yesterday and she felt fine.”

As if getting murdered has something to do with your health,
Lucy thought.

She nodded. “So, tell me about Mrs. Burke.” Lucy hadn’t been a reporter in more than a year, but she asked open-ended questions out of habit.

“We were going to go to Hobby Lobby today to get her a job. And tomorrow we were supposed to get together with a bunch of blue widows and play bridge like we always do.”

Lucy was nodding and saying things like, “You don’t say?” at places where she thought it was appropriate.

Mrs. Schoen started crying again. “Why would someone hurt Patsy? She was just an old lady. She would have let the robber take whatever he wanted. That goddamn asshole.”

Lucy tried to hide a smile. An old lady who cursed and drank. Maybe that would be Lucy in fifty years. As Mrs. Schoen continued to talk, Lucy considered how to broach the real reason why she was there. She was too tired to be truly devious, so she decided just to switch the subject. Maybe Mrs. Schoen in her grief-and-alcohol-induced haze wouldn’t notice.

“When I was in Mrs. Burke’s house, I noticed a police scanner.”

“Oh yes, she loves to listen to that thing, bless her heart.”

“Why did she have it? It’s an odd thing to have around.”

“She likes to have it for background noise. I never understood why she doesn’t just turn on some music, but it’s her business.”

“You know, I have a friend who has a scanner and calls up the newspaper whenever she hears anything interesting.” Which was a lie.

Mrs. Schoen jumped in excitedly. “Patsy does that, too.” Lucy let out the breath she’d been holding. “She loves to call the newspaper about something she hears and see if it’s in the paper the next day. She just crows and crows about it when that happens, bless her heart.”

“Do you know how often Mrs. Burke would call the newspaper?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe once a week or so. It depends on what she hears. She doesn’t talk to me about it much because she knows I think it’s a damn waste of time. You’ve got better things to do in life than to call up the newspaper.”

Lucy changed the subject again. Mrs. Schoen didn’t seem to notice the jumping around.

“I didn’t see any ashtrays in the house. Was Mrs. Burke a
smoker? It’s just good to know for our medical files.” Lie number two.

“Hell no. She hates the stuff. I think it gets her sick.”

“Did she have any breathing problems? Maybe asthma?”

“She had some bronchitis last year that she was having a hard time getting rid of. And of course she has allergies.” Of course. Everyone in Santa Fe had allergies. Allergies and bronchitis would account for Scanner Lady’s raspy voice and occasional coughing fits.

“Mrs. Schoen, I was also wondering if you had a videotape of Mrs. Burke or maybe a tape recording? Maybe an old message she left on your answering machine? I sometimes like to hear the voices of patients I was never able to meet.” This last lie was the biggest but Lucy breezed past it.

“Oh, that is so sweet.” Lucy cringed. “But I don’t have anything like that. Sorry.”

Lucy rose from the couch and said her good-byes. At the door, Mrs. Schoen said, “Thank you for stopping by, bless your heart. I just hope they catch that asshole before I do.”

G
il stayed at the station doing reports and trying to get hold of Pollack. At five
P.M.
, he got into his car and took the interstate north, toward Eldorado and his mom’s house. He triple checked his speed before he set his cruise control for five miles under the seventy-five-mile-per-hour speed limit. Twenty minutes later he got off the freeway and slowed as he drove into Eldorado, where he stopped at a Texaco to fill up. As he pumped his gas he stared across the highway at the Eldorado subdivision. He and Susan had looked at three houses in the area. She liked the elementary school, which was better than the public schools in town. Eldorado was also only ten minutes from his mother’s house. They were looking at four-bedroom houses, planning ahead to when his mom came to live with them.

He turned and looked at the other cars at the gas station, checking for strange behavior or stolen cars. But this was Eldorado. The four SUVs in the parking lot showed signs of doubling as minivans. In one car, Gil saw a child’s car seat correctly buckled in, and another car had a bumper sticker that read
MY CHILD IS AN HONOR STUDENT AT ELDORADO ELEMENTARY.

He went inside the gas station to pay. It took him a second to realize that he was the only Hispanic in the store. There were an elderly couple, a woman and her two young kids, and a man in a business suit. Gil paid the female cashier, who had a sunny smile and wished him a nice day.

He took the highway south into the grassy Galisteo Basin, then turned to follow the train tracks past more new ranches. At some point his family had owned this land, but the deed to the property had been eaten by mice, so when the Americans came, his family couldn’t prove that they owned it. Back then, one of his relatives had tried to stay on the land to protect the acequia that irrigated the family gardens and orchards. But someone had hit the man over the head with a shovel and killed him. The acequia had since grown over. Gil and Elena had gone on expeditions as kids to try to find the acequia, pretending that they were conquistadores. He had made them aluminum-foil helmets and swords and carefully made maps of their route. They found petroglyphs and an old kiva left by the Galisteo Pueblo Indians, but not the irrigation ditch.

He pulled up to his parents’ house and went inside to the kitchen. His mom had made an enchilada and green-chile casserole. He kissed her cheek as she pulled the casserole out of the oven.

“Here,
hito,
I was keeping this warm for you,” she said as she scooped out a spoonful and set it at his usual place at the table.

“Mom, before I eat, I’m taking your blood sugar. Where’s your machine?”

She waved her hand and said, “I lent it to your aunt Sally. She thinks Uncle Benito is having a problem.” His mother never used the word
diabetes.
She always called it a
problem.

“Mom …” he started, ready to question her about it. But instead he said, “I’ll get you a new one.”

He took a few bites of the casserole, then got up to get milk out of the refrigerator. As he pulled the fridge door, the hinge Jammed. The open door settled below the outer frame and pulled the entire weight of the fridge forward.

“Mom, how long has this door been like this?”

“Oh, I don’t know. A month or so.”

He opened and closed the door several more times to see how the hinge was broken so that he could fix it. He also opened the freezer to check its hinges. It was fine. He was about to close the freezer door when the movement dislodged one of the packages in the freezer. It came sliding out slowly. He caught it like a football. The package was wrapped in butcher paper. He saw “10/11” written on it in his father’s big handwriting. Below it was “Brown Trout. Rio Chama.” He remembered when his dad had caught the fish; he had called Gil at college and told him about it, laughing as he remembered how he had slipped into the river as he reeled the fish in. Gil put the package back in its place on top of the other frozen fish. He had never asked his mother why a stack of fish Dad had caught ten years ago was still in the freezer, and he probably never would.

Gil closed the freezer door and went outside to the workshop to get the tools he needed. The workshop was a shed almost attached to the house. It was a small room with two windows. A collection of old fishing rods stood in the corner. There were a few made of hazel and some of ash. His father had believed in using a six-foot rod, saying that it gave him the precision he needed in the fast mountain streams. Gil’s old rod had also been six feet. Susan and the girls had gotten him a new one for Christmas. An eight-and-a-half-foot carbon fiber
rod, zero weight, with titanium line rings, a cork grip, and a light trout reel. He hadn’t used it yet.

He found the Phillips screwdriver and took it and the pliers back into the kitchen, shutting off the workshop light behind him.

M
axine Baca sat in her car in the driveway, not able to remember why she was there. She had been left alone to sleep while Veronica Cordova went to pick up some groceries. As soon as Veronica closed the front door, Maxine had gotten out of bed and into the car. But she didn’t know why.

She watched her breath on the windows. She thought about driving her car through the closed garage door, but there was no one left who would care if she did. She climbed out of the car and tried to pull open the garage door, remembering too late that Ron had put in an electric door last month. She got back into her car, found the door opener, and pulled her car in.

Still she didn’t get out of her car. She sat in the dark garage and thought about Ernesto. He had built the garage five years after they were married. He had said that he wanted her to have a place to put her washer and dryer, but he’d really built it to have a place to put his worktable. His tools that used to hang on the walls of the garage were at Ron’s mobile home. Almost everything that was Ernesto’s was gone. She had made sure of that. There was only one box left on the shelf in the back of the garage. She shifted in her seat so that she could see it. In it were his awards from the police department and things from his desk at the station.

When she’d heard that Ernesto had been killed, she wanted all his things out of the house. She gave his clothes to the Salvation Army and his car to Manny Cordova. She’d thrown his favorite coffee cup in the trash. She didn’t remember much of his funeral. She remembered being helped by Melissa into a wheelchair she had gotten from somewhere. Melissa had pushed her into the church for the funeral and pushed her into the cemetery for the burial. Ron might have been around somewhere, but she didn’t remember. She thought she remembered Melissa putting her back into bed. The whole thing seemed like she was watching TV. The morning after the funeral, Maxine had gotten up and put on her apron. She’d cooked up some eggs and swept the front porch. Ron had shown up for breakfast in a police uniform. She hadn’t cried. What did it matter? It would be better if Ron died quickly, so that they could buy the plot next to Ernesto and Daniel and bury him there. Everything was out of her hands and in God’s.

That same day, a police officer had brought over the box of things from Ernesto’s desk. She didn’t care enough to throw the box out. Melissa had sat on the living-room floor and gone through it. Whoever had emptied out his desk had tossed everything into the box—paper clips, a half-eaten Milky Way bar, a few pens. All Maxine had been able to think about was that it was getting her living-room carpet dirty. She’d had Melissa put the box on the shelf in the garage and hadn’t thought about it for seven years.