Steven Havill: Prolonged Exposure

“Just like a little frightened animal, Marty. Who knows what tiny rock ledge he’s crawled under.”

“I’ll have Estelle give you a call as soon as she breaks free.”

“You don’t have to do that,” I said. “She’s up to her ears. But if I get a chance, I’ll drive up on the mesa later this afternoon, if you haven’t found the youngster yet. Getting out would do me some good.”

After I hung up, I stood for a long time, staring at the designs in the countertop.

“It never lets up, does it?” Camille said. I looked over at her and she was smiling, her expression sympathetic.

“No, it doesn’t,” I said.

My daughter’s sympathy did not extend to agreeing to a trip out to the wilds of Cat Mesa. “They don’t need you for that,” she said flatly, and instead, she suggested that it might be nice if we worked to put to rights the wreckage of my home. She was right, of course, but I didn’t have to like it. Every time I glanced at the mess, my anger returned. A trip to the mesa would have put it out of sight, out of mind.

I plugged in the coffeemaker and watched it brew while she started on the books in the living room. She paused when she came to the picture of her younger brother kneeling in front of his jet airplane with his son. “Billy looks about eighteen years old in this,” she said, and grinned.

“He almost was,” I said.

She carefully placed the framed photo back on the shelf, a colorful break between the tomes of Grant’s memoirs on one side and Lee’s on the other. “You don’t have very many pictures, Dad.”

“I’ve got lots of pictures.”

“I mean out. Where you can see ’em.”

I couldn’t have told her why that one photograph of my youngest son rested there by itself. “I rotate,” I said. “That way, I don’t get confused by too many faces.”

She cast one of her famous withering glances my way. “Do you want a cup of coffee?” I asked.

“No. And you shouldn’t be drinking that stuff, either.”

I poured myself a mug and walked down into the living room. I had arranged my considerable collection of books in general categories by wars: a section on the French and Indian, then the Revolution, 1812, Civil, and so on. Military history wasn’t a passion, but it seemed a logical way to come to grips with a nation’s progress.

I bent down to pick up one of my favorites, a book on Joshua Chamberlain that I had purchased not more than a year before.

“Let me do this, Dad,” Camille said. Perhaps she had heard the grunt, or noticed that I concentrated on one title at a time. At that rate, the pickup would take a year. I handed her the book and she waved toward one of the leather chairs. “Sit and talk to me.”

“I’d like to go out to the grave before it gets any wetter,” I said, doing as she instructed. She stopped with her hand still on the shelved book and turned to look at me.

“The grave? You mean out back?”

I nodded.

“What on earth for?” She turned and held up a book. “This doesn’t belong with the Spanish-American War stuff on this shelf. Where do you want it?” She examined the spine critically. “It’s Baumgarner’s Guide to Injectable Drugs . Charming title.” She looked at me and raised an eyebrow.

I waved a hand. “Two shelves down, with the other cop stuff.”

“Cop stuff,” she said, stooping. “You don’t have very much of that.”

“Too much,” I said. “And if someone buried his wife on your property, wouldn’t you be interested?”

“I suppose so,” Camille said. “In our backyard, it would be an all-star attraction.” She glanced at another book spine. “Did Estelle say there was evidence that kids did this?”

“There might be.”

She looked over at me and grinned. “He said, evasively.”

“I’m not being evasive. It’s just that you can never be sure. It looks like Estelle was able to lift one good shoe print in the den-where one of the little bastards stepped up on the desk to reach the rifle.”

“How much did that filing cabinet that they took weigh?”

“Probably a hundred pounds. Maybe more. It was one of those fireproof things. A couple of stout kids could have moved it easily enough.”

I watched her for a few more minutes, then got up. “I need to move around,” I said. “I get stiff just sitting. And I miss my wheelchair.”

Camille put up a last armful of books and brushed off her blouse. “I bet. Come on, I’ll walk out back with you.”

It might have been easier to walk around my lot, taking Guadalupe Terrace north to Escondido Lane and then east, but instead we wound our way right through the grove of wild and snarled trees, a collection of stunted pinon, juniper, elm, sumac, and several massive cottonwoods.

It was anyone’s guess where the undergrowth was sucking water from. Posadas County was dry as bleached bone most of the time, and I sure as hell didn’t do any watering. If something wanted to thrive in my yard, it had to have the proper attitude. Maybe the roots had all bored northward, invading the village water lines.

After several minutes crisscrossing the northeastern quadrant of my property, we located the grave site. If someone from the Posadas County Sheriff’s Department had actually been here, they’d left no trace. They certainly hadn’t stretched any yellow tape, and that was just as well. There wasn’t much to protect, and the yellow would be an attractive nuisance for neighborhood busybodies and kids.

Before we saw the grave, we saw the work of the industrious youngsters who’d reported Florencio Apodaca’s clandestine work. They had nailed a series of short, mostly rotten boards up the wide flank of a cottonwood tree as a crude ladder. Using that, they’d carried more lumber up into the spreading limbs, managing to create a mess even a pair of ravens would have been ashamed of.

I could understand the attraction. From the tree platform, Escondido Lane was just a stone’s throw away, literally.

Sometime in their work, the little contractors had looked down into the brush. A sharp pair of eyes had caught sight of the fresh earth and the carved cross.

The grave itself was a neat mound of the loose reddish sand, gravel, and clay mix that told geologists that most of Posadas had once been the bottom of a prehistoric lake or wandering streambed.

Standing at the foot of the grave, I could look through a screen of elm saplings, past a utility pole, and see Florencio Apodaca’s front door.

“Nice spot,” Camille said. She stood by a runty juniper that had lost half of its trunk fork to an ax, and not long ago. She shoved her hands in the pockets of her baggy chinos.

“Elegant,” I said. “He could find the place by lining up with that utility pole.”

The marker was a crude but sturdy cross made from two pieces of juniper, and the shavings and chips still littered the ground. The crosspiece, notched tightly into the upright, was further secured with a leather thong.

The wooden cross wasn’t plunged into the ground quite straight, but tipped artistically, looking as if it’d been there for generations. He’d made the vertical piece about three feet tall, and I bent down to read what he’d carved into the crosspiece.

The wood was a rich reddish brown, and Florencio had taken some time to rub off the bark and polish the natural sheen of the juniper.

“‘Gloria Espinosa Baker Apodaca,’” I read.

“No dates?”

“No date. Just the name. I wonder who Baker was.”

“Florencio would know,” Camille said helpfully.

“And no Willit,” I muttered. I shook my head.

“And who’s Willit?”

“Some character who’s pestering our good sheriff. Marty passed him along to me.”