Prolonged Exposure

Chapter 5

I would have ignored the damn thing had Camille not been first in the house. She slipped out of soggy running shoes, disappeared down the hall, and picked up the receiver in the kitchen after no more than five or six rings.

“We just got in,” I heard her say. “Give him a minute.”

“It’s going to take more than that,” I said, thumping down on the bench just inside the door. I was no acrobat, and if I tried my daughter’s trick, I’d break an ankle before the first ten pounds of Wellington boots and mud came off.

“It’s Gayle Sedillos.”

“Ah,” I said, taking a deep breath before bending down to pull on a boot again. A slimy dollop of forest floor came off on my hand. “Tell her I’ll call back in five or ten minutes.” I cursed to myself and wiped my hand on a recent copy of the Posadas Register that lay on the bench.

In stocking feet, I padded across Saltillo tile toward the kitchen. “Did she say what she wanted?” I asked, but I knew the answer before the words were out of my mouth. Gayle had worked as chief dispatcher for the department for five years, and in varying capacities for another five before that. Perhaps, in those ten years, she had wasted that many words.

“No, she didn’t,” Camille called, already disappearing into the dark quiet of the house to find herself a hot bath.

I punched in the number and Gayle Sedillos answered in the space between the first ring and the second. Her voice was husky and clipped.

“Sheriff’s Department, Sedillos.”

“Gayle, what’s up?” I had asked her that same question a thousand times over the years, and it seemed a good way to start off after having been held hostage in Flint, Michigan, for a month.

“Sir, welcome back.”

“Thank you.” I knew she hadn’t called for conversation, so I added quickly, “It’s good to be back. What’s going on?”

“Sir, I need to relay a message to Estelle, but apparently she’s on her way down from the search area and either she’s in a dead spot or she’s got her radio turned off.”

“That’s happened before,” I said. An automobile was a good place to mull things over if the interruptions could be eliminated. I’d made it a point to teach Estelle that over the years.

“I thought she might be stopping by your place before she checked in here.”

“That’s entirely possible. What can I tell her?”

“Dr. Guzman went to Tres Santos to check on Estelle’s mother. Apparently Mrs. Reyes fell.”

“Ouch. Is she all right?”

“We’re not sure, sir.”

“Is Erma with the children?”

“Yes, sir.” Gayle’s younger sister, Erma, had been working as nana for the two children in the Guzman homestead for several years. And work it was, too, with Dr. Guzman matching his own brand of strange hours as a vascular surgeon against Estelle’s.

“Well, then, everything should be fine. If I see Estelle, I’ll tell her. Did the good doctor happen to mention how seriously Estelle’s mother had been hurt? What she broke?”

“I think her hip, he said.”

“Oh my.” Mrs. Reyes was one of my favorite people, even though I could barely understand a word she said when, on rare occasions, she chose to speak her own brand of fractured English. Ancient, tiny, independent, she lived in the same adobe cottage in Tres Santos, Mexico, where she had been born in 1910-and where Estelle had spent the first sixteen years of her life after the old woman had adopted her. The village was just twenty miles south of the border and an hour’s drive from Posadas.

“When did Francis leave? Do you know?”

“He called here at sixteen twenty-one, so I imagine shortly after that. Erma told me that one of Mrs. Reyes’s neighbors called her, and she called Dr. Guzman.”

There had been occasions, as Mrs. Reyes became more and more frail, when I’d heard the Guzmans discuss medical care in Tres Santos, and the discussion never lasted long. Francis had mentioned the one resident physician by name, along with the words snake oil in the same breath. The forty miles wasn’t a problem drive-most of it could be dusted off at a hundred miles an hour if need be. But the border crossing at Regal was closed at night. If there was an international emergency, it needed to happen between 6:00 A.M. and 6:00 P.M.

I assured Gayle that I would pass on the message, told her to keep trying the radio to contact Estelle, and then hung up. What I wanted more than anything else was a potful of strong coffee, but I knew I could have my fill at the restaurant in just a few minutes.

I dialed the Guzmans’ and when Erma picked up the telephone, I could hear in the background the kind of organized bedlam that she loved best.

“Just a minute now. Don’t hit me with that,” she said, and I heard a giggle. “Hijo,” she said, and the warning was stern. “Guzman residence,” she said to me.

“What’s he going to hit you with, Erma?” I asked.

“Just a pillow. Is this Mr. Gastner?”

“Yep. Did Estelle get the message about her mother?”

“Oh yes,” Erma said, the “yes” lilting with her heavy Mexican accent. “She came in the door about five minutes ago, and she left right away. I think they sent an ambulance to Tres Santos to bring her mother up here.”

“That would make sense. Look, if they need anything, will you let me know?”

“I sure will. But I think everything will be all right.”

As all right as being eighty-eight with a busted hip in a foreign country can be, I thought.

“Don’t let the kids wear you down,” I said, and Erma giggled.

After I hung up, I looked outside at the glowering sky. Slate gray and jagged-edged, the clouds scudded in from the northwest. It wasn’t going to be a pretty night for a three-year-old to be stuck out on a New Mexican mountainside.

I cleaned myself up, and by the time I walked back out into the kitchen, I felt almost human again. Camille was busy at the kitchen counter, fussing with a long plastic box. She glanced up at me and smiled.

“Would you like me to fix a nice salad here instead of us going outside again?” she asked.

“I need green chili,” I said. “And there’s nothing in the house anyway.” I pointed at the box. “What’s that thing for?”

She straightened up and tilted the gadget toward me and I squinted through my bifocals. I grunted with indifference when I saw that it was one of those compartmented pillboxes where the drugs can be arranged by the day, plenty of little cubicles to serve the needs of even the most spaced-out, helpless patient.

“Put the meds in here and it’s easier to remember what’s what,” she said. “Just do it by the week.”

“Oh, gee,” I said. “Are you ready to go?”

She filled the last two compartments with a rainbow, then handed me a bottle of long blue-and-white concoctions. “You’re supposed to take these with dinner,” she said.

“Absolutely,” I said, and tucked the bottle into my jacket pocket. We made it out of the kitchen, down the hallway, and across the foyer. I ushered Camille outside, and I was just closing the front door behind us when the telephone rang again.

“Do you want me to get that?” Camille asked.

“No,” I said. “Estelle and Francis went down to Mexico, and Erma has everything under control. Five gets you ten it’s just the sheriff. He has this mistaken impression that I want to be useful again.” I turned the lock. “Let’s eat.”

The Don Juan de Onate restaurant was across town, on Twelfth Street. It had been a favored haunt of mine for the better part of twenty-five years, still owned by Rosie and Fernando Aragon, their son Miguel, and his pudgy wife, Arleen.

Exactly what connection Don Juan had had in the early seventeenth century to the dust and sagebrush that would eventually become modern Posadas County was a puzzle to even the most ardent historians. Perhaps the explorer had walked through the place on his way north. Perhaps it was just because Rosie and Fernando liked the sound of his name. I didn’t care.

We settled into a fake leather-upholstered booth, and with a perverse comfort I noticed that they hadn’t fixed the broken springs in the seat. I rested my elbows on the table and my chin in my hands.

“Tired?” Camille asked.

“Just really glad to be home.”

“I bet.”

A waitress arrived whom I didn’t know, and I tilted my head back so I could focus on her name tag. “JanaLynn,” I said. “When did you join the Aragon forces?”

“Sir?”

She looked puzzled and I smiled, taking the menu she offered but leaving it closed. “How long have you worked here?”

“Oh,” she said, and ducked her head. “I started last week.”

“Well, welcome aboard.” I folded my hands on top of the red menu with Don Juan and his skinny horse on the padded cover. “I’d like the burrito grande plate, smothered in green. And coffee.”

“Salad with that, sir?”

“No thanks.”

“A salad would be good for you, Dad,” Camille said, then grinned at the withering glance I shot at her. She continued the grin up to the waitress. “He forgot to tell you to hold the cheese,” she said.

A burrito without cheese is sort of like a chocolate ice cream soda without ice cream, but I didn’t have the energy to argue. Camille mused through the menu, finally ordering a respectable dinner herself.

When the chips and salsa and water arrived, we both sat back, me contented, Camille no doubt plotting. Outside, the parking lot was a black polished sheen of chilly moisture. Not a single star poked through the overcast. I shook my head and sighed. “A bad night,” I said.

“There’s not much anyone can do, is there? For the child, I mean.”

“Not at night, no. He’s too young to build a fire to attract attention. I don’t know. Maybe the National Guard helicopters could look for him after dark with spotlights if the weather was decent, but not in this soup. They’d be tangled in the trees in nothing flat. Search and Rescue might work the dogs all night. There’s that possibility.”

“I don’t see how such a little toddler can just wander off like that without being noticed,” Camille said.

I grunted and sipped the water. “The ‘without being noticed’ part happens all the time, sweetheart.” Movement caught my eye and I looked out the window again. A county car had pulled into the parking lot, and an instant later, it was joined by a dark brown Buick.

“Our peace and quiet is over,” I said. JanaLynn arrived with dinner, and I concentrated on inhaling at least a healthy sampler before the sheriff found us.