Ariel Gore - Santa Fe Noir

It’s not the worst job in the world, but it’s nothing to write home about either, and it slows down drastically in the winter. So I often found myself distracted by one of my online addictions or the clientele. The Betterday crowd typically consisted of a surprising number of ethnically diverse, model-looking millennials among mostly retired, white, former hippies. Young and old, modern meets rustic — like Brooklyn hipsters practicing animal husbandry.

About a month ago, I was there hoping to feel inspired about follow-up e-mails and scheduling, but found myself immersed, instead, in real estate listings. They’re one of my aforementioned online addictions, along with camper vans and tiny houses. That day’s distraction: a reasonably priced three-bedroom, two bath on Hopi Road, with an open house.

I love open house days in Santa Fe because it’s easy to hit a bunch of them. The city’s actually not that small geographically speaking, clocking in around the same size as Manhattan, the stomping ground of my twenties and early thirties, but its population is tiny by comparison — just.12 percent of Manhattan’s 1.66 million.

What you lose in anonymity you gain in the ability to get anywhere you want to go in twenty minutes or less.

The lack of traffic and gigantic sky had lured me back to the City Different six months ago. Five months later I met Erica at the Tuesday afternoon open house on Hopi Road.

I wasn’t really interested in buying the house — didn’t even have the money yet — but I was interested in her the moment I saw her. She was the definition of svelte in tight black Prince-style pants that flared a bit at the bottom and a black, semi-see-through lace top that showed off her long, lean figure. Her face resembled what a pretty female Cheshire cat might look like, with a wide smile, mischievous to the point of making one momentarily wary.

It was her sharp green eyes that most intrigued me. When she fixed them on me I got the strong impression she knew things. Mysterious things that evade most folks’ perception.

I sensed this for a second and then it was gone, replaced by real estate banter. How long the place had been listed, what the owners were hoping to get for it, why it hadn’t sold yet. That one was easy enough to answer. The layout was bizarre, including a grand staircase leading to a basement (a rarity in the Southwest), with two tiny, windowless rooms entirely carpeted from floor to ceiling.

Outside, there were decks off the dining room and master bedroom, but they were both covered with thin, worn Astroturf. The yard was barren, with a very well-secured dog run in one corner — and, in the other, a concrete storage shed so short it looked like it had been made for little people. The padlock on the door was unlocked so Erica and I peered in. It was empty, and just tall enough to sit up or crawl around in.

“Guess that’s the gnome hovel,” I said to Erica, and she laughed.

We agreed it was weird and started to walk away when the graffiti visible directly above the shed, painted on the concrete wall of the taller shed on the neighbors’ side of the fence, caught my eye. I walked back to make out the lettering.

SOS , it said, then below it, Sex and ME_ _. I couldn’t make out the last two letters.

Whaaat?

“Oh my god, why does it say SOS and Sex on there?” I asked, no longer laughing. “That’s so creepy! Do you think somebody was trying to let someone know about what was going on inside that shed?”

“Or the shed its spray-painted on?” Erica added.

I stepped on a rock to peer over the fence. There were two more sheds toward the other end of the neighbors’ yard that looked like small houses, except the windows were all barred up and the doors were chained shut with thick padlocks. The shed directly in front of me, with the graffiti on it, had a small window facing me that had been barred up with some kind of industrial metal grate. As I looked closer, I could see a dim light on inside behind the ratty curtain covering the window.

I dropped down quickly, a cold sensation suddenly running through my body. I’d been too afraid to scooch up higher to get a better look inside that window. Too afraid of what I might see. Or of getting seen by whoever was involved with whatever was going on back there.

I described it all to Erica and we were so freaked out that we hightailed it out of there. Then, with her following me, we drove around the block to get a look at the house on the other side of the fence. Unlike the quaint red-brown stucco houses on the block, with their nicely manicured or overgrown desert yards, this one was a newer manufactured model placed on a concrete covered front “yard” surrounded by an unusually tall chain-link fence with a big Beware of Dog sign mounted on it.

Oddly, given the sign, the gate to the driveway was wide open, and children’s toys were strewn carelessly in front of the garage at the end of it. The storage sheds I’d just seen were completely obstructed from view by the house and garage.

Something about it seemed off, just like the house behind it. Enough that we decided to report it to the police upon parting ways. They’d called us each back to report that everything seemed fine. They’d gone over and spoken with the next-door neighbors, who’d said an elderly couple lived in the house and they’d never noticed anything unusual.

“Fine my ass,” I’d said to Erica over a Manhattan at Tonic a few days later.

“Yeah, I guess we knew they weren’t going to be able to go in there without a warrant or anything.” She tucked her hair behind her ear.

“I know, but I’m still glad we called it in. Maybe if something else happens it’ll give them enough to check it out. Honestly, maybe it’s just me, but I got a really bad feeling from that place.”

“Me too,” Erica said, “and actually, I didn’t tell you this before because I didn’t want to freak you out even more that day, but there was this house my company listed a few months ago, a foreclosure on Camino Monica...”

“...a total fixer in Barrio la Canada, like three months ago? I remember that one.”

“Yeah, that was it — when my coworkers first went to see it, they found all this weird, creepy shit in the basement. They showed me pictures they took.”

“Another basement?”

“Right? And there was stuff spray-painted on the bedroom walls, like, Satan Lives Here , and a picture of a scary face saying, God can’t hear you crying . And it gets worse...” She paused for a second. “In that basement, there were a bunch of old metal cots with handcuffs on them. Like they’d been keeping people locked up down there. It was horrible. ”

I felt my stomach drop the same way it had when I’d heard a news report about a sex-trafficking bust in Albuquerque. Apparently they’d found a bunch of mostly Native American preteen girls locked up in dog cages in various Motel 6 rooms. They’d been sold who knows how many times a day for sex before the bust.

It’s something most people I know don’t think about, or like to think about, but it happens everywhere. Sex trafficking is one of the largest growing “industries” in the world, and Native women make up about 40 percent of the victims despite being just a fraction of the population. I know all this because my own mother’s twin sister, my Aunt Lupita, was kidnapped when they were ten and never seen again.

Their parents, my grandparents, had immigrated recently from Chile and were working heavy hours, so the girls had gone to the park one afternoon together, unsupervised. Lupita never returned after heading off to the public restroom.

The authorities suspected sex trafficking, and told my grandparents as much, so I’d grown up hearing about it. Hearing my mother’s fearful warnings to my little sister about “bad men,” and never going places by herself. I, in turn, was assigned her chaperone and told to protect her.