The Replacement Child (6 page)

G
il walked into his house, making sure to dead-bolt the door against the broad daylight. He heard the refrigerator open and found his wife making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in the kitchen. She wasn’t even startled when he said hello.

Susan had a part-time job doing accounting work for a
gravel company in town. They had talked about her going back full-time, but she wanted to be around for their two daughters, Joy and Therese.

He sat on one of the stools near the counter and listened as she told him about an afternoon field trip she was going on to Bandelier National Monument with Joy’s fifth-grade class.

Bandelier was only forty-five minutes away. Gil and the girls had been there dozens of times when they were younger. They would walk around the Anasazi Indian ruins, looking for pieces of pottery in the dirt. When Joy was little she had called them Anastazi Indians, making the word sound Italian. When was the last time they had gone there? He couldn’t remember.

Susan sealed the sandwich in a Ziploc bag and put it into a paper sack with an apple. He handed her the car keys as she grabbed the bag and kissed him a quick good-bye. He reached up and brushed the hair out of her eyes as she moved away, heading out the garage door to her car.

She called over her shoulder, “Don’t forget to get that St. Joseph statue from your mom when you see her tonight,” then closed the door behind her.

Susan wanted the statue so that she could bury it upside down in the backyard, to help sell their house. Her sister had done it and sold her home within a week. His cousins had done it and gotten five thousand dollars more than they had hoped. Everyone in Santa Fe knew someone who had quickly sold his house after burying St. Joseph in the backyard.

Gil glanced around his kitchen. They had remodeled the kitchen and bathrooms when they moved in after he was hired by the city, spending long Sunday afternoons painting and scraping. But even after they were done, Susan said that it was never “homey.” It was not her dream house. Their neighborhood had been built in the 1960s and had been ranch land back when his parents were growing up. The homes had backyards and front yards. Their place wasn’t very big, just three
bedrooms. Susan wanted a house with breathing room, one that was new and didn’t need constant repairs.

They were looking at houses in Eldorado, outside Santa Fe, where all the homes were newly built and spacious. The nearest next-door neighbor was about a block away. The property out there was desert with chamisa and piñon. It didn’t have the tall trees like in Santa Fe or where Gil had grown up near the Galisteo River.

He got up and went back out the front door, bolting it again, and settled into his car. He had gone home to tell his wife about Melissa Baca, whom Susan vaguely knew, and to let her know that he wouldn’t be home until late. But watching Susan ease through making lunch, he realized he couldn’t tell her. He didn’t know why.

He picked up his cell phone and dialed his home number. The phone rang four times and then he heard his own voice urging callers to leave a message. He would tell the answering machine instead.

G
il drove his unmarked Crown Victoria past Oñate Park on Cerrillos Road, where Melissa’s car had been found, but the crime-scene techs had already towed it away. He continued driving, noting the time and mileage. He followed the highway north out of Santa Fe, past the pueblo casinos and roadside vendors, to Española. He spent his time watching the cars as he drove, noting the beat-up Suburban that quickly did a U-turn as soon as he showed up in its rearview mirror. Other cars slowed as he neared, not sure if he was a real police officer or just a man in a dark blue Crown Victoria.

He kept just under the fifty-five-mph speed limit as the flat road slowly made its way into the canyon of the Rio Grande. He passed the apple and apricot orchards of Velarde, Embudo, and Rinconada. The highway climbed up the canyon, the walls getting steeper. Descansos marked the roadside every few miles, the crosses showing where people had died in car accidents.

On the right side of the highway were mostly tall cliffs and a few rock piles. To the left, the wide river moved along the gorge floor, flowing past cottonwood trees and rough mesas.

Gil caught sight of a man fishing the river far below, throwing a long cast and cranking the reel, pulling the lure with the current. Fishing the Rio Grande in winter was always slow, especially
in the canyon stretch. Gil and his dad had fished the Rio Grande only a few times, not liking the noise of the traffic on the highway. His dad had always wanted to be in the most out-of-the-way stretches of water.

During the drive to mountain streams, they would spend long hours debating which casting grip to use or whether bright synthetic fibers were better than natural ones for fly tying. His father, always a lawyer, would never let the argument die. Once there, they would fish in silence, usually with only the bend of the river between them. When Gil was in grade school, he would get bored within an hour or two and then would try to sneak up on his dad, who seemed to spend as much time looking at the scenery as fishing. By the time Gil was in high school, he could stand all afternoon in the water, placing cast after cast with accuracy.

His dad had taught him how to make ties, showing him how to wind and twirl the fur and feathers. But the last time he and his dad had gone fishing together, almost ten years ago, his dad had changed to using premade ties, Royal Wulffs and Humpys. Their white wings made it easier for his dad, with his bad eyesight, to see. His father, who had prided himself on his fly tying, shrugged when he pulled them out of his fly box and said, “Sometimes you do what you have to do to catch fish.” And then he smiled. He died of a heart attack a month later. Gil had been just twenty-three.

The highway popped out of the canyon and Gil took the road toward the town of Taos. The brown plains stretched toward the Truchas Range of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, where the creases of the peaks were lined with snow.

He parked on the Taos plaza and went into a diner to get a green-chile burrito and a Coke. He ate it outside, sitting on a bench on the plaza, watching the tourists who were there for the ski season. The ski area had only some of its runs open. The winter had started with a good snowfall of five inches in October. But now the temperature most days was about sixty
degrees. The tourists who hadn’t come for the skiing loved it. The locals just wanted it to snow.

Gil finished his burrito and tossed the wrapper. He walked back to his car slowly, keeping an eye on a group of local kids as they crossed the plaza, wondering why they weren’t in school. He got into his car and drove past the turnoff for the Taos Pueblo.

One of Gil’s uncles claimed that they were related to Pablo Montoya, who was hanged by the American government after a rebellion at Taos Pueblo. Gil’s aunts said that the story wasn’t true, that Pablo was not related to them but to the Montoya family from the town of Mora. That didn’t stop Gil’s uncle from getting drunk at family parties and telling the children that Pablo Montoya would come get them if they didn’t be quiet. His uncle’s version of the story was that Pablo and his friends were mad at the Anglos who were stealing all the property from the rich Spanish, so Pablo helped lead a revolt in Santa Fe that somehow ended up in Taos. At some point, the new Anglo territorial governor was shot full of arrows and killed—which was true, according to the history books—but Gil’s uncle claimed that Pablo was the one who took the governor’s scalp through the streets of Taos. The Americans eventually hanged Pablo Montoya. Gil’s sister, Elena, had always wanted to take a trip to Taos to look for Pablo’s grave, but that was before their dad had died. Since then, she hadn’t brought it up.

Gil took the highway northwest out of Taos. The hills flattened out to a plain of grasses and sage brush. The only sign of the Taos Gorge out in the prairie two miles away was a thin line of black, invisible unless you knew where to look. One story had it that a bandit being chased by locals galloped his horse right off a cliff and into the gorge, never realizing it was there.

Gil was a quarter of a mile from the gorge before he could see it—a deep canyon in the flat plain with a single bridge over it. He slowed as he approached the Taos Bridge—officially
named the Rio Grande Gorge Bridge—as it was clogged with traffic and police.

After he parked his car on the roadside, Gil wrote down the time—one hour and forty minutes, minus ten minutes for the burrito—and the mileage—81.7 miles. He stood with a group of onlookers who had gathered at the side of the road to watch the crime scene. They were going to be disappointed: Melissa’s body wouldn’t be brought up for hours. He watched from a distance as the state police set up a winch on the bridge to pull Melissa’s body up from the river. A news helicopter from one of the Albuquerque television stations flew overhead, causing dust devils in the dirt parking lot. Gil heard someone next to him say, “What a horrible way to kill yourself,” before the rest was lost in the wind from the helicopter.

Gil took out his badge and showed it to the officer directing traffic. The officer nodded and Gil walked onto the bridge. It vibrated as a truck crossed. Susan had lived in Santa Fe for most of her life, but she refused to visit the bridge. He wasn’t sure if it was its height or its reputation that scared her. There had been talk of setting up a permanent winch on the bridge because the police were tired of setting one up every time a car or a body was discarded. In the past three months, two people had committed suicide off it. A few years ago, a Taos teenager had been charged with involuntary manslaughter after pushing his drinking buddy alive into the gorge. Gil wondered if Melissa had been alive when she was thrown off.

Gil stopped to read a plaque. It was a Most Beautiful Steel Bridge Award, given by the American Institute of Steel Construction in 1966, a year after the bridge was completed.

He walked up to a group of police officers by the OMI van and introduced himself. Gil thought he recognized one of the OMI techs. The tech and Gil shook hands and spent a few minutes trying to figure out how they knew each other—whether they were related or knew each other professionally. The OMI tech had decided that they were third cousins when a state
police officer, a lieutenant by the look of his uniform, approached Gil and led him away from the group.

“I’m Tim Pollack. Your chief said you were coming.”

Gil knew of Pollack. He was the temporary public information officer for the state police, which meant that he was the liaison with the media until someone was found to replace him. Pollack had intense blue eyes and his head was shaved, a style that state police officers seemed to favor.

Gil looked over the side of the bridge; the Rio Grande was more than two football fields below. Someone had tossed a large road-construction barrel over the side. It was a tiny orange dot on the rocks below.

“Was she alive when she hit?” was Gil’s first question. It was his biggest concern. It was news that he hoped he wouldn’t have to tell. He thought of Maxine Baca as she’d sat in the chief’s office.

“We don’t think so,” Pollack said. “But we haven’t seen the body yet. We do know there aren’t any bullet holes, but the body is so messed up from the fall that it’ll be hard to say what killed her, until the OMI sees her.”

“What’s she dressed like?”

Pollack, snapping his gum, gave him a sidelong glance. “If you’re asking if there was CSP, we don’t think so. All of her clothes, including her underwear, are intact.” CSP stood for criminal sexual penetration. Three big words that meant one thing—rape.

“Any evidence she was doing drugs?” Gil asked.

Pollack said carefully, “Not that we’ve seen.”

“Do we have a time on her death?”

“Nothing scientific, just my own calculation. It snowed a little yesterday, just a dusting. It started at about ten thirty
P.M.
Her body still had snow on it when we found her at seven
A.M.,
so she was here before ten thirty
P.M.
last night.”

“Do you know when she was last seen?”

“Her mom is a mess, but from what we could get out of
her over the phone, Melissa left their house about eight
P.M.
last night. We plan on doing a more in-depth interview with her later today.”

“Was she brought out here in her own car?”

“We don’t think so. A woman who lives near Oñate Park saw Melissa’s car there when she came home at exactly nine ten
P.M.
She remembers because she was late for some TV show she watches. Anyway, the woman remembers seeing Melissa’s car. She thought maybe it belonged to a hooker or a drug dealer. You know what that park is like. Oh, and we found blood on the back bumper that we think is Melissa’s.”

Gil thought for a minute. “Her body must have been already cold when she was dumped, or the snow on top of her would have completely melted. She was probably killed in Oñate Park around eight thirty
P.M.
and brought up here in another car.” He watched a sedan full of gawkers slowly roll by.

She hadn’t been alive when she fell. He felt no relief.

I
t was only one
P.M.
when Lucy started back to Santa Fe from the santuario. She toyed with the idea of stopping at one of the pueblo casinos, just to see what they were like inside, but she didn’t have enough nerve to play blackjack or enough quarters to play slots. She contented herself with driving too fast and singing along with a 1980s radio station. She was well into an old Journey song when she crested the top of Opera Hill and saw the city of Santa Fe sprawled out below her. There were no high-rises to block the view, only earth-hugging houses that flowed into the curves of the hills. Not obstructing the landscape but being a part of it. None of the usual “we must dominate the world with our massive structures” city-building mentality.

Santa Fe was set up like an amphitheater, with the Plaza as its stage and the Sangre de Cristo Mountains as its backdrop. Throughout the years, the city had been built in semicircles
around the Plaza, with the older houses closest to it and the newest subdivisions out in the cheap seats. The Plaza, built as the center of the conquistadores’ fort, was still the center of everything Santa Fe.