When the Devil Doesn't Show: A Mystery (11 page)

“Okay,” she said. “So, what you want is a news brief. For that, you need to wait until just after ten o’clock tonight and then fax over a short press release with the information about the person.”

“Why wait until ten o’clock?”

“Because, my young
padawan,
by ten o’clock, every section of the newspaper has been cleared except the local section. They hold that section until eleven o’clock, in case some other news comes in, like a brief from the police. If you call before ten o’clock they might make a big splashy article about it on page one. After ten o’clock, you are guaranteed it will be only a news brief in the local section. If you call after eleven o’clock, the newspaper will already be on the press, and it’ll be too late.”

“Should I call you at the city desk after I fax the press release?”

“Um…” she said. “Let’s just say I’m not working in the newsroom tonight.”

“That sounds ominous,” Gil said. “Is everything okay at work?”

“It’s fine.”

“It doesn’t sound fine.”

“I’ve just moved to a different department.”

“Was it voluntary?”

“Yeah … so we’re not going to talk about this. Let’s get back to your press release.”

“Will you be working in the newsroom again?” he asked.

“You’re messing with me, aren’t you?”

“For the record, let’s just assume I’m always messing with you,” he said. “So, why did you change jobs?”

“What? I can’t … hear … reception … bad,” she said, while making staticlike noises.

“Lucy, you just sound like a washing machine.”

“In that case, I’ll just hang up on you.” And she did.

*   *   *

A half hour later, Lucy sat “in the rooms,” as they say, listening. They had gone around the circle of chairs, each person saying their name. She’d said, “Tina,” however, and she didn’t add the usual “and I’m an alcoholic,” because she didn’t consider herself one. She was an alcohol abuser, sure. But an alcoholic? She hadn’t ended up on the street or in the gutter. She hadn’t lost her friends or her job. Well, she’d sort of lost her job, but that hadn’t been her fault.

She’d stopped drinking two weeks ago and had been coming to AA since then. She had yet to speak at any meeting, not sure what to say. She listened as a man across from her told his “getting sober” story. He had been a pastor at a local church, a respected member of the community. His life was perfect—except he drank. Secretly. Every night. That part sounded familiar to her, but while she was a beer-drinking girl, he was a vodka man. Lucy knew where this story was going. She’d heard it often over the last two weeks. The man would say that, one day, his wife left him or he lost his job and that’s when he realized he needed help. Instead, the pastor talked about his kids, especially his bright, gifted, funny seven-year-old son. Lucy wasn’t expecting the next part—when a drunk driver hit the wife and son. The wife lived. The son didn’t. The pastor fell apart. His secret drinking became less secret. He drove drunk one afternoon and almost hit a school bus. He tried to kill himself, but one of his other children found him. That’s when he decided to go to Mexico. He rented a
casita
on the beach. He called it his suicide shack. He locked the doors, turned off the lights, and sat on the couch—gun in his hand. But he didn’t do it. Instead, he stayed locked in the
casita,
thinking he’d kill himself the next day. But he didn’t do it. By the third day, the alcohol withdrawal was giving him seizures. He repeatedly woke up on the floor. Ten days later, he left the
casita.
Sober.

Lucy listened to him speak and thought about her own “getting sober” story. It was nothing dramatic. She had just stopped. She wondered if that made her a failure at being an alcoholic. Not that she was one.

*   *   *

Gil stared at the string of Christmas lights he was holding, which had somehow knotted into a ball, and wondered how they had gotten so tangled up. The lights had been sitting in a box since last Christmas, after he carefully wrapped them with twist ties to keep them neat.

Joy, hanging ornaments on the Christmas tree, looked over at Gil and started laughing. “Daddy, we should just buy new ones. I think those are too messed up.”

Susan called them to the kitchen, allowing Gil to put the lights back into the box and worry about them later. Therese was already there, standing at the counter.

“Okay,” Susan said. “Time for the tamale assembly line.”

On the counter was a bowlful of
masa
dough next to one of cooked pork. Susan stood at the sink, where the cornhusks had been soaking for the last few hours. She took a husk out of the water and dried it on a paper towel, then handed the husk to Gil, who spread a thick layer of
masa
on it. He gave the husk to Joy, who added the pork, and then Therese rolled and wrapped the husk tight around the filler. Lastly, Therese stacked them in the steamer pot. Within a few minutes, they had a dozen tamales steaming over the stove. Gil’s grandmother used to say that the reason tamales were cooked during Christmas was because it made the family work together. But Gil thought it might be for a simpler reason—tamales were hard to make, so making them once a year was enough.

“Okay, girls,” Susan said, drying her hands. “Go get ready for bed.”

Gil’s phone vibrated. It was a grave-shift officer calling to confirm that he had sent the fax to the newspaper as Lucy had instructed. Gil grabbed a beer and sat down to watch the NBA highlights. Within an hour, he decided to call it a night. He was still catching up on sleep from the night before. He stopped to check on the girls on his way to the bedroom. Therese, who was already asleep, had kicked her blankets off. Gil pulled them back over her and put his hand on her head. He whispered the same prayer that his own father had said over him each night—
“Angel de mi guardia; dulce companía; vélame de noche; cuídame de dia.”
He kissed her forehead and went over to Joy’s bed. She was still awake and watching him.

“Daddy, can you say my blessing in English?” she whispered. “I want to hear what you are saying.”

Gil closed his eyes, put his hand on her head, and said softly, “My guardian angel; sweet companion; watch over me by night; care for me by day.”

CHAPTER NINE

December 22

The plastic of Lucy’s alarm clock was etched with white lines, which were burns left over from the oven cleaner she had used to try to kill a spider a month ago. She found out the hard way, at the expense of her clock and a large swath of paint on her bedroom wall, that oven cleaner didn’t kill spiders. The alarm went off again, and she hit the Snooze button.

“Nathan,” she said, pushing him as he slept next to her. “Get up. You need to leave so I can pack.”

She got into the shower. When she got out, wrapped in a towel, he was waiting outside the bathroom door with a cup of coffee in his hand. He handed it to her, saying, “Have a good trip. We’ll have that talk when you get back.” After a kiss on her cheek, he left, and she got down to the business of packing. Her flight was at six that evening, so she’d have to leave the house by 4:00
P.M
. Even though her flight was in the afternoon, she had taken the whole day off work. She knew from experience that her packing wouldn’t go well. She started the hunt for clothes. She would need her dressy red shirt to wear on Christmas Day, but she couldn’t find it on her chair, under her bed, or thrown in the back of the closet. She finally remembered it was in the laundry. She pawed through the basket until she found it, close to the bottom. She took it out and shook out the wrinkles. She had worn it three times before it went in the basket. It had no obvious stains or crusty residue, so it was only sort of dirty, not truly dirty. She looked at it again, considering, then folded the shirt and put it on her bed. She decided that since she’d left it in the laundry basket for more than a week, it was clean again.

Next she searched for her flip-flops. She was looking forward to going home to Florida. She missed the white beaches and palm trees, even though New Mexico was just one big beach, without the water. But she missed her mom and her brothers more. Although as much as she missed them, she knew she’d be ready to come home after the three days. True, she was trying to get along better with her mother, but that didn’t mean going insane herself. Her mom could be a bit much, which was a side effect of her schizophrenia. Even on her medication, she was a strange combination of relaxed and intense.

Her brother seemed much less so on his medication. He had inherited the family disease, but had somehow managed to have a fairly normal life. She knew that as a child and sister of a schizophrenic, she had a 30 percent chance of developing the disease. Schizophrenia usually showed up before age thirty, meaning she might still get it. She felt as if she had spent the last ten years waiting to hit thirty so she could finally breathe, knowing for certain she wouldn’t become like her mother and brother.

Lucy went to look for her suitcase, which was in the storage closet in the kitchen. She opened the step stool and took the suitcase off the top shelf. As she was stepping down, her foot hit something glass. She looked down. There was a collection of empty beer bottles in the bottom of the closet, where she had put them months ago, intending to recycle them. She picked up the bottles and went out into the cold. She threw them into her neighbors’ recycling bin, feeling some satisfaction when she heard each one clink at the bottom. They were a reminder of who she was two weeks ago, not who she was today. It made her feel like maybe she could be sober.

*   *   *

Waiting on Gil’s desk the next morning was a copy of the
Capital Tribune.
It was turned to the local section, where one brief was circled in black ink. The newspaper had put in the missing-person information exactly like Lucy said.

As he dialed the office receptionist to see if they had gotten any calls yet about Mr. Burns, Gil flipped to the front page to read the story under the headline T
HREE
D
IE IN
H
OUSE
F
IRE.
The secretary on duty said no one had called. Gil had just hung up when his desk phone rang. Half expecting it to be his mother, whom he usually talked to this time every morning, Gil only answered with “hello,” instead of giving his full name and title. But it was Deputy Paul Gutierrez.

“Paul,” Gil said. “I thought you were taking time off to spend with your daughter.”

“At this very moment, I am sitting at the kitchen table in my bathrobe eating the pancakes she’s made me,” Gutierrez said. “But I wanted to let you know about a case my cousin with the state police is working on. A call came into nine-one-one a few hours ago, about shots fired out in the county. My cousin was the responding officer and found a busted-in front door and a victim duct taped to a chair and shot in the head.”

*   *   *

“Devon, stay still,” Natalie Martin said. She was trying to change his diaper while he was trying to roll off the changing table. “Honey, stop moving,” she said again as she pulled him back down and fastened the last plastic tab. She put him back on the floor, saying, “All done.” Devon toddled off to the living room to find Deacon. She followed after him. The boys began playing near the Christmas tree, which took up a quarter of the room. She had decided to use a red-and-white theme this year. The tree was decked out in a garland of pearl white beads, with red bows holding it in place on the branches. She went to go straighten one of the red bows and, out of the corner of her eye, saw Deacon take Baby Jesus out of the Nativity scene under the tree and lick it. The phone rang. She picked it up as she was still saying, “Honey, please don’t lick Baby Jesus. Put him back in his crib.” She watched Deacon use one of his pudgy hands to put Baby Jesus back in the manger.

“Did you just say, ‘Don’t lick baby Jesus’?” her sister asked, laughing.

“Yes. The boys are at that age where everything goes in their mouths,” Natalie said, as Deacon again picked up the ceramic Baby Jesus out of his manger. “Deacon, put Baby Jesus down.” But he didn’t listen. She heard her sister say something, but Natalie was busy grabbing for a nearby plastic dump truck. “Deacon, look at this truck. Isn’t it pretty?” Deacon dropped Baby Jesus and came toddling over. He took the truck and put the edge of it in his mouth.

“Is the Holy Family crisis averted?” her sister asked.

“Yes. Baby Jesus is safe.”

“It’s a Christmas miracle.”

“So, when does your plane get here tomorrow?” Natalie asked. “I have to figure out their nap and feeding schedule.”

“Ooh,” her sister said. “Can you make
me
a nap and feeding schedule?”

*   *   *

Gil and Joe pulled up in front of a house in La Cieneguilla, a few miles outside the city limits. The walls were old adobe. The house probably had been replastered every year for hundreds of years, as the humans tried to keep up with Mother Nature cracking and crumbling the straw-and-mud walls. The home was built as most of the old haciendas were—in a large square with a hollow center, where there was an open plaza with a flagstone courtyard and huge cottonwood trees. Gil got out of the Crown Victoria and stretched his shoulder for a moment, trying to get the stiffness out of an old basketball injury. Through the pencil-thin tree branches up on a nearby hill he could see a one-room
capilla
with a cross on the top. The chapel, one of many scattered throughout Northern New Mexico, likely had been built by the family who owned the hacienda, so they could have a place to worship without traveling into town on horseback.

Gil and Joe walked down a mud-and-ice driveway to join three state police officers standing in front of the house. One of the officers, who had a goatee and shaved head, came over and introduced himself.

“You must be Detective Montoya. I’m Herman Sandoval, Paul’s cousin. He called to tell me you’d be stopping by.”

They shook hands, and Gil asked, “Can we see the crime scene?”

As they walked toward the house, Sandoval said, “My family has some Montoyas on my mother’s side; they are from Mora.”