The Replacement Child (9 page)

“No. If Veronica would be here, that would help.”

Mrs. Cordova murmured, “Of course,” as she got Maxine to her feet.

“Would you mind if I looked around Melissa’s room?” he asked. Maxine nodded.

“Another thing.” The women paused at the door as he spoke. “The newspapers and TV stations will be calling.”

“They already have,” Mrs. Cordova said. “I talked to them. They were very nice.”

“I’d be happy to talk to them from now on,” he said before Mrs. Cordova interrupted.

“It’s not a problem,” she said with a wave of a hand.

The two women stood in the doorway looking at him. When his daughter Joy was four, she would cry for her stuffed animals whenever they left the house, her “left-behinds,” she called them. Veronica and Maxine were a pair of left-behinds.

P
atsy Burke sat at her kitchen table reading “Bridge Play of the Day” in the newspaper and sipping chamomile tea. Claire
had told that her she should put some bourbon in her tea to help with her cough that she still had from her bronchitis. But Patsy had never been a drinker.

She looked at the clock, thinking she should go to bed soon. They were going to Hobby Lobby tomorrow morning to get the application. They had already picked out Patsy’s outfit—navy pants and a white blouse. Claire wanted her to wear a scarf for a touch of color and to show them “that you still got style.” Patsy hadn’t decided on the scarf yet. She needed to find the pearl earrings that John had given her as an anniversary present and try to remember where she had put the iron.

She took a sip of tea. She had to admit that she was nervous. She had gone over what she was going to say during the interview in her head. Claire had written up a list of questions they might ask her. A few of the questions stumped her. Like: What’s your favorite book? Patsy hadn’t really read any intellectual books. Claire had told her just to say, “I haven’t had time for a lot of reading lately because I like to stay active.” Patsy had written that down and tried to memorize it. She kept tripping over the words. It just didn’t sound like her. It sounded so confident.

The police scanner on the table made a buzzing noise as one of the fire departments got paged out. John had first gotten her a scanner when he was in the police department so that she could hear what was going on. She hadn’t really wanted it. But he knew that other police wives listened to them, so he got Patsy one for her birthday. She thought it was because he couldn’t think of any other present to get her. She had gotten used to the noise over the years and found that now she couldn’t sleep without it on.

One night, twenty years ago back in Wichita, there had been a bad summer thunderstorm and the electricity went out at their house. The scanner went dead just as they were reporting that a police officer had been shot. Patsy and the boys had been sitting down for dinner. The boys were
teenagers then, but she saw that still they were scared for their father. John Junior persuaded her to call up the newspaper to see if they knew anything. She had the courage to do it only because her sons were so worried. The man who answered the phone was nice. He said that the newspaper still had electricity and he was listening to the police-officer-down call. He stayed on the phone with Patsy for over an hour, telling her exactly what the scanner was saying. And delivering the awful news that the police officer who had been shot was dead. And that it wasn’t John. They said the Lord’s Prayer together for the dead police officer and for John. The next day, Patsy baked the editor some cookies and brought them by the newspaper. After that, she would call him whenever she heard something bad over the police scanner and they would talk to each other and pray about it. Sometimes she would hear something on the scanner that her editor friend hadn’t heard. She would call to tell him about it and he would tell her that she should come work for them as an investigative reporter. She would laugh a little at that, but every time he said it, it made her feel good.

When she and John retired to Santa Fe, her editor friend suggested that she see if one of the local newspapers would hire her just to listen to the scanner. He had said that some newspapers did that with people. But she’d never had the courage to call the newspapers and ask about it. Instead, she would just call sometimes and tell them when she heard something interesting on the scanner. She liked being able to see stories she helped with in the paper. But it wasn’t the same as in Wichita. The newspaper people were so busy and didn’t have time to talk. They didn’t have the patience to talk to an old lady.

Patsy struggled to her feet, her hip giving her the same old twinge. She went to the hall closet and started to pull out boxes, hoping she could remember where she had put her iron. And
trying to think of any book she had read that might impress the people at Hobby Lobby.

M
elissa’s room was muted—a floral bedspread with matching curtains. It was mostly bare, as she had lived in it for only six months, since August, when she’d returned from college to start teaching. Gil saw an old photo on her nightstand, taken during the 1980s, of a smiling older man and a young Melissa. Gil peered closer at the picture of Melissa and Officer Ernesto Baca, trying to remember if he had ever met him. Gil had been a police officer for three years when Ernesto Baca was killed. They must have passed each other in a hallway at some point. But he didn’t know the face.

There were only two pictures on her walls; one was an Ansel Adams photo, the other a framed poster with the caption “Friendship is a gift from God.”

Her computer was on a table in the corner. He touched a key and listened as the Mac chimed on. He wandered around the room, poking in drawers as he waited for the computer to warm up

Her drawers held meticulously folded sweaters and shirts, arranged by color and season—sweaters in the bottom drawers and short-sleeved shirts in the top ones. He ran his hands along the bases of the drawers but found nothing. The bottom drawer on her dresser was stuck. He pulled harder but it didn’t give. He peered under the dresser, trying to see if the drawer was broken.

“It’s always been like that,” Maxine Baca said from the doorway. “Ernesto was going to fix it for her.”

Gil looked up at her, surprised. She said nothing more and walked away from the door.

He got up and went back to the computer. He clicked on the Internet access first, looking to see what Web sites she had
bookmarked. They were mostly reference and some teaching sites.

Next he went to her e-mail. He spent the next hour reading letters to and from friends at the University of New Mexico. Her messages were short. One friend, who called herself Buttons, wrote a long letter, talking about sex, chocolate cake, and sneezing. In response, Melissa wrote just three sentences. Three male classmates also wrote; a few of the letters were fairly suggestive, but Melissa never responded to those. Her writing style was grammatically correct and not very conversational. She used words like
conjecture
and
contemplate.

And she ended each of her letters the same way—”Take care and be safe,” followed by her full name.

I
t was about eight
P.M.
as Lucy sat at her desk, trying gently to convince her county reporter that her opening paragraph on a story about trash fees was too long. But after twenty minutes of talking, Lucy’s patience was wearing thin. Her phone rang and she jumped at it, grabbing it before the first ring was over. She hoped that the phone call would give her an excuse to put an end to the conversation.

“Hey, boss, I’ve got something interesting.” It was Tommy Martinez, who was still out gathering info on the Melissa Baca story.

“Hang on just a second, Tommy.” Lucy covered the mouthpiece with her hand and, as politely as she could, got rid of the county reporter.

“Okay. Go ahead,” she said to Tommy.

“Listen to this. I got it from three sources that Melissa Baca was doing heroin.”

“Sources from where?”

She heard him hesitate before he said cautiously, “Law enforcement.”

She wondered if one of the sources was Detective Montoya.

“Sources we can name?” she asked.

“No way.”

Lucy had expected that answer. “What did these sources tell you exactly?”

“That the state cops found heroin in her abandoned car and that she’s an addict.”

“And so they’re saying she got killed in a drug deal gone bad?”

“Yeah, or she OD’d and someone tossed her off the bridge to make it look like a suicide,” Tommy said.

“When do we expect the toxicology reports back from the OMI?”

“Not for a couple of days.”

Lucy thought for a moment. The last time they’d had an anonymous tip like this, they had waited until the autopsy was done to report it, worried that if they were wrong, it would hurt the family. But the
Santa Fe Times
hadn’t waited and reported it in their story the next day, scooping the
Capital Tribune.
In journalism, there’s no such thing as being second. The
Capital Tribune
’s publisher had come down to have a long talk with John Lopez. Lopez had never said anything directly to Lucy, but she knew she had screwed up. And she knew not to make the same mistake again.

“And how reliable are these sources? Are they in a position to know?” she asked.

“Absolutely,” Tommy said.

Whenever a new beat reporter came to the paper she gave him the same speech—she wouldn’t ask reporters to reveal the names of their confidential sources unless it was absolutely necessary. Her policy wasn’t a popular one. Her fellow editors didn’t share it; they wanted to know exactly who the anonymous sources were before they would allow them to be quoted in a story. Lucy understood their concern—if an unnamed source said something that wasn’t true, they could get sued. Using a source’s name protected the paper.

But Lucy had learned the hard way to not reveal her anonymous sources. When she was at her college newspaper, a fraternity started a list that it called The Romeo Roster. On the list was the name of each sorority sister and the number of drinks it took her to pass out. After she passed out, the girl would get raped. A fraternity brother gave Lucy the list, after making her promise not to use his name. The only other person who knew the name of the frat brother was her editor. A year later—after the fraternity had been suspended and sued—her editor talked about it at a party, even mentioning the name of the frat brother who had given them the list. A week later, the frat brother ended up in the hospital from the beating his former fraternity members had given him.

She wasn’t about to force her reporters into making the same mistake. She told the reporters loudly and often never to reveal their sources, not even to their bosses. She trusted her reporters to make the right decision about whether a source was believable.

It was a touchy subject in the newsroom and the editors had eventually come to a truce. Each editor would enforce his own policy when he was on duty. In her case, she wouldn’t ask who the sources were unless it became necessary.

The reporters knew that they had to have three separate unnamed sources confirm the facts before she would put it in a story. That was a common newspaper rule. Tommy had the necessary three.

“Have you talked to the state cops?” she asked him.

Tommy hesitated. Maybe the source was a state police officer?

“Yeah, and their PIO, that Pollack guy, would only give me the same old ‘we cannot confirm or deny’ crap, but then said off-the-record that we’re on the right track,” he said.

Not a resounding confirmation, but for the state police, it was as close as they were going to get.

“Okay, Tommy, we go with it. When you get back we’ll figure
out how to word it exactly. We’ll have to be careful,” she said, then added, “And when you call the family to ask about it—”

“I know, I know. I’ll be as gentle as possible.”

She sighed. She hated this part of the job. She had done it herself when she was a cops reporter—having to ask, “Did you know your dead child was using drugs?” No matter how sympathetically you said it, it still sounded cold-blooded. Strangely enough, most parents didn’t scream at her. They softly answered yes or no.

She heard the excitement in Tommy’s voice as he said quickly, “Bueno. Good-bye.”

G
il left the Bacas and started the drive to his mother’s house. He passed ranch after ranch with newly cut roads and big wooden entrance signs. He passed Flying Eagle Ranch and Split Lightning Ranch. All had gone up in the past ten years. Before that, it had been cattle land that had belonged to his second cousins and the Anaya family. A few of the ranches supposedly belonged to celebrities like Jane Fonda and Julia Roberts.

Gil slowed as he came into Galisteo and crossed himself as he passed the Galisteo church. He went past La Tienda Montoya and the Montoya Community Center. He turned off the highway and onto Avenida de Montoya, going slowly over the dirt-and-gravel road. As he passed his cousin’s unpainted small house, a horse whinnied and the gravel crunched under his tires. Next was his uncle’s house. According to Hispanic tradition, the family property had been divided up among the male children of each generation. The land had been granted to the Montoya family by the king of Spain. Back then, it had covered hundreds of square miles. But after four hundred years of dividing up the land among every generation of Montoyas, there was little property left. A lot of it had been lost when the Americans came and took the land through taxes. That was what Pablo Montoya had fought against and gotten hanged for.

Gil turned again onto a smaller road and drove past the Old House, its half-standing walls reflecting the car’s headlights. The flat wooden roof was mostly caved in and the adobe walls were eroded. There had been talk among the Montoyas of restoring the house, one of the few true haciendas left in New Mexico. The Garcia family hacienda, which had been lost in a poker game a hundred years ago, now was a living museum over in La Cienega. One of Gil’s uncles had tried to plan family weekends when they would plaster the old walls and pull the weeds out of the dirt floor, but after Gil’s father had died, no one seemed interested anymore.