Steven Havill: Prolonged Exposure

“You don’t need to talk to them, do you?”

“I suppose not,” I said. Camille stepped closer and inspected the cross. “That’s really very nice,” she said. She reached out and rubbed the smooth wood. “Kinda sad, in a way. Two old folks so close that when the end comes, he can’t bear to have her somewhere else.”

I chuckled. “But she is somewhere else, my dear. This is my property, not the Apodacas’.” I sighed and straightened up. “I could deed them a few dozen square feet, and we could put an old iron fence around this, and it’d be just fine.”

Camille hooked her arm through mine and bumped my shoulder with her head. “That’s sweet,” she said. She pointed off to the west where an orange tag fluttered from one of the tree limbs. A metal stake was driven into the ground below it, with another tag, this one blue and white. “Except for the utilities,” she added.

I grimaced. “I suppose.” I turned and looked off to the east, searching for another tag. “It wouldn’t kill ’em to put a little bend in the line, though.”

“You think they’d do that?”

“Probably not.” I shrugged. “The village attorney will make a fuss. And the housing-development lawyer will fuss.”

“Let ’em fuss,” Camille said, frowning. She bent so that she could see through the bushes to the house across the street. “How could he think this was his property, though?” Camille asked.

“Easy enough. He’s lived across the way for a long time. That neighborhood was there before the interstate went through on the property behind them. Even the street here-Escondido Lane-was just a dirt two-track as recently as 1972, when we moved here.

“And Apodaca lived in that old house long before that. He stepped off his front porch, and what’s he see? This property over here, just across the dirt lane. It was never developed, and then he got old and confused like the rest of us, and he just decided that the property was probably his.” I shrugged.

“Who the hell knows. Maybe at one time, he actually did own the lot. Maybe he’s forgotten that he sold it off. I don’t much care, and when I bought this place in 1971, I didn’t bother to do a title search beyond what the real estate deal required.”

Camille looked sad. “And now I suppose the village is going to want her moved?”

“I don’t know that,” I said. “I really don’t know what the law is for burials. It’s not something that the department deals with every day.” The cool, damp air was beginning to seep through my jacket and I shivered. “Let’s walk back on the road.” As we strolled along the broken macadam of Escondido, I kept looking toward the south. In only one spot was the vegetation thin enough that I could see, a hundred yards or more away, the dark hulk of my house.

Camille stifled a yawn, and it was contagious. I realized I was more tired than I cared to admit.

“Well, we’ve toured a trashed house and waded through the jungles to tour a grave site. Those are the highlights of current Posadas County attractions,” I said. Camille laughed, but I got the impression that she probably agreed. “Mind if I take a few minutes and stop by the office?”

I felt her arm tighten in mine. “As a matter of fact, I do mind,” she said. “You promised. And what I want to do most is go home and have a nice long, hot bath. I’ve been stuffed in a supersonic tin can, chauffeured on the interstate by a kid who thinks he’s the next Unser, sorted dusty old books, and hiked through the mud.” She managed a grin. “I’m tired and hungry, and that means you’re ten times that. Let the office wait, Dad.”

I shrugged. “I was just eager to find out from Estelle what’s going on.” That sounded about as flimsy as excuses come, and Camille waved it aside.

“She’s probably still up on the mountain, and when she comes down, she’ll be more wet and cold than we are. She’ll call when she gets a chance.”

I knew that, but patience wasn’t one of my virtues. Still, Camille was tougher than I was, and I had promised. I reached over and patted her hand just as we walked into my driveway. “Commercial jets aren’t supersonic, by the way,” I said. “And you mentioned hunger. How’s the Don Juan de Onate sound after we get cleaned up?”

“Sounds fine,” Camille said without hesitation, and that surprised the hell out of me.

We went into the house. The damn telephone was ringing.

I would have ignored the damn thing had Camille not been first in the house. She slipped out of soggy running shoes, disappeared down the hall, and picked up the receiver in the kitchen after no more than five or six rings.

“We just got in,” I heard her say. “Give him a minute.”

“It’s going to take more than that,” I said, thumping down on the bench just inside the door. I was no acrobat, and if I tried my daughter’s trick, I’d break an ankle before the first ten pounds of Wellington boots and mud came off.

“It’s Gayle Sedillos.”

“Ah,” I said, taking a deep breath before bending down to pull on a boot again. A slimy dollop of forest floor came off on my hand. “Tell her I’ll call back in five or ten minutes.” I cursed to myself and wiped my hand on a recent copy of the Posadas Register that lay on the bench.

In stocking feet, I padded across Saltillo tile toward the kitchen. “Did she say what she wanted?” I asked, but I knew the answer before the words were out of my mouth. Gayle had worked as chief dispatcher for the department for five years, and in varying capacities for another five before that. Perhaps, in those ten years, she had wasted that many words.

“No, she didn’t,” Camille called, already disappearing into the dark quiet of the house to find herself a hot bath.

I punched in the number and Gayle Sedillos answered in the space between the first ring and the second. Her voice was husky and clipped.

“Sheriff’s Department, Sedillos.”

“Gayle, what’s up?” I had asked her that same question a thousand times over the years, and it seemed a good way to start off after having been held hostage in Flint, Michigan, for a month.

“Sir, welcome back.”

“Thank you.” I knew she hadn’t called for conversation, so I added quickly, “It’s good to be back. What’s going on?”

“Sir, I need to relay a message to Estelle, but apparently she’s on her way down from the search area and either she’s in a dead spot or she’s got her radio turned off.”

“That’s happened before,” I said. An automobile was a good place to mull things over if the interruptions could be eliminated. I’d made it a point to teach Estelle that over the years.

“I thought she might be stopping by your place before she checked in here.”

“That’s entirely possible. What can I tell her?”

“Dr. Guzman went to Tres Santos to check on Estelle’s mother. Apparently Mrs. Reyes fell.”

“Ouch. Is she all right?”

“We’re not sure, sir.”

“Is Erma with the children?”

“Yes, sir.” Gayle’s younger sister, Erma, had been working as nana for the two children in the Guzman homestead for several years. And work it was, too, with Dr. Guzman matching his own brand of strange hours as a vascular surgeon against Estelle’s.

“Well, then, everything should be fine. If I see Estelle, I’ll tell her. Did the good doctor happen to mention how seriously Estelle’s mother had been hurt? What she broke?”

“I think her hip, he said.”

“Oh my.” Mrs. Reyes was one of my favorite people, even though I could barely understand a word she said when, on rare occasions, she chose to speak her own brand of fractured English. Ancient, tiny, independent, she lived in the same adobe cottage in Tres Santos, Mexico, where she had been born in 1910-and where Estelle had spent the first sixteen years of her life after the old woman had adopted her. The village was just twenty miles south of the border and an hour’s drive from Posadas.