Steven Havill - Before She Dies

I left the bar feeling better, though. Victor hadn’t told me not to come back. That was a start.

I pulled out on the state highway from the parking lot and drove south, passing the turnoff to County Road 14. I stayed on the highway as it curved up through the western pass of the San Cristobal Mountains. On the south slope, after a series of switchbacks guaranteed to keep drivers of huge, clumsy RVs alert, the highway swept down through the intersection with State 80 running east and west and finally past the ancient village of Regal.

That settlement, counting twenty-five people on a good day, was a quarter mile off the highway, and the dirt approach road was hard-packed clay and stone. It wound across an arroyo and passed within ten feet of the carved front doors of the IglEsia de Nuestra Madre. The year 1849 was carved in the cornerstone of the mission, the second oldest structure in the village. An even older mission, now in ruins, lay half a mile to the east, it was part of one of the least visited historical monuments in the state.

Like so many ancient Mexican settlements, the streets of Regal were sunken dirt channels that meandered from yard to yard, with the adobe houses fronting immediately on the byways. If I wasn’t careful, I could catch the front fender of 310 on someone’s porch swing.

As many houses were abandoned as occupied, and they varied from neat, tidy little four-room adobes with steeply pitched metal roofs and brightly painted window trim to crumbling piles of rain-melted adobe blocks with broken windows, shattered door casements, and junk-strewn yards.

I idled up one nameless pathway after another, threading the patrol car right through yards and winter-dormant gardens. And one dog after another joined the chase, escorting me through town.

What few names were posted either above doorways, on long-abandoned mailboxes, or in the small yards were musical and familiar, Martinez, Sanchez, Chavez, Misquez, Hernandez. As I drove by one small house with M. Esquibel on the bent peeling mailbox, I saw an old man making his way one shaking step at a time around the side of his home, eyes glued to the ground, cane placed carefully for each step. In one arm he carried half a dozen sticks of firewood.

He ignored me, perhaps not even hearing the quiet idle of my car’s engine, or perhaps not seeing well enough to catch the motion.

Around the other side of the house was a small adobe barn, remodeled sometime during the current century to serve as a garage. The wooden door was down, making the structure unique. It was the only outbuilding I’d seen in the village whose contents weren’t both visible and spilling out far beyond the confines of the original structure. But it fitted the rest of the yard, neat and tidy.

I watched Senor Esquibel disappear into his house. I didn’t know him, but I was willing to bet he’d been born within a hundred yards of where he now labored to stoke his wood-burning stove.

Parked next to the garage was his wood supply, a stock trailer a quarter filled with split pinon and juniper.

I spent another fifteen minutes in Regal. I didn’t drive over to the border crossing gate less than a mile away. Deputy Howard Bishop had already talked to the officers there, with little success. It was a day crossing area only, with the gates locked at night and no officers on duty after six. The border patrol had the same details on our case as anyone else. They’d be watchful and even helpful when they could.

Easing 310 back out on the paved road, I glanced at the dash clock. Jim Bergin’s Beech Baron would be approaching Gillette, and in another four and a half hours Patrick Torrance would be back in Posadas. Then we’d start constructing a face.

Deputy Bishop winked the lights of his patrol car at me as we passed on Bustos Avenue. I turned into the small parking lot of Kenny Pace’s Western Wear and waited while Bishop swung around and pulled in behind me.

Howard Bishop was one of those big, sleepy-eyed characters, loose-jointed and tending toward flab. The two major loves of his life were his wife, Aggie, and collegiate football. He’d married Aggie right after the two of them had graduated from Posadas High School. The closest he’d ever come to collegiate football was watching it on television.

“Howard may look like he’s slow, but he’s got a mind like a banana slug,” Sheriff Holman had once said in a rare moment of amused pique. That description was both unkind and untrue. Bishop had an exasperating allergy to paperwork, but generally was an intelligent, honest, fair cop.

He adjusted his Stetson and folded his dark glasses into his shirt pocket before getting out of the car. I walked back and leaned against the front fender of 307.

“Sir, I talked to twelve different people about Tammy Woodruff.”

“Anything of interest?”

Bishop laid his clipboard on the hood of the car and ran his finger down a neatly printed list of names. “These here are the people I talked to. Neighbors, mostly. Seems like Tammy didn’t have too many close friends. Except whatever cowpoke she was going out with at the moment.”

“Who are the boyfriends?”

“Torrance and Prescott most recently. But Jane Ross-Tammy’s boss when she was working at Ross Realty? — Mrs. Ross says that Tammy talked a lot about some guy she’d met down in Cruces during the half year she spent at the university.”

“That’s not surprising. And she was in Cruces more than two years ago.” I knew that Tammy Woodruff’s work and school record had been as checkered as her romance list. She’d briefly tried a dozen or more occupations before evidently deciding that the best career for her was living off her father’s incomprehensibly soft heart-at least until a suitable, deep-walleted boyfriend could be found. “Who were Tammy’s girlfriends?”

Deputy Bishop looked puzzled. “She was spending all her time chasin’ the boys, sir.”

“She has to have a girl friend, Howard. Someone for girl talk. We know that wasn’t her mother. And the odds are good that if she does have a best friend-girl friend-then there’s a well of information there.”

“I don’t know,” he said dubiously.

“Start with the high school yearbook for the year they graduated. Look at the pictures in the activity section. Maybe rodeo club. Who the hell knows. Talk to Glen Archer. He’s been at the school ten years or more, so he was principal the year Tammy graduated. See who her girl pals were. And then see if she was still hanging out with one or more of ’em.”

I silently cursed the bad luck that had put Estelle Reyes-Guzman in a wheelchair. She could talk information out of a stone, and in a tenth of the time it would take the other deputies. As I watched Howard Bishop ease his county car back out onto Bustos Avenue, I wondered if I had been focusing on the right set of tracks. I sat in 310 with the door open for a few minutes, watching the light traffic of Posadas.

Sheriff Martin Holman had talked to the Woodruffs the night of Tammy’s transfer from crushed truck to ambulance to helicopter, as had Sergeant Torrez. The couple had been hit hard by their daughter’s death, and since those terrible moments had been holed up in their Posadas Heights home.

A scant twelve hours had passed since the first rap on their front door by Martin Holman. Twelve hours wasn’t enough time to think about the healing process-that would take months, even years. But Karl and Bea Woodruff might be able to think again, if someone with a light touch talked to them.

I closed the door of 310 and headed for the hospital. When I arrived, Estelle Reyes-Guzman was helping Linda Real deal with the reporter’s bizarre mother. Mrs. Real had decided it was an appropriate time to visit and complain. She glared balefully at me, but didn’t repeat her earlier litigious threats.