“Gayle and Bobby will give us away,” Irma said, then smiled. “Of course, Bobby doesn’t know that yet. It’ll be just like him to be the only one there who isn’t in a tux.”
“He’ll behave.” Maybe Sheriff Robert Torrez would consent…maybe.
Irma reached out and touched Estelle on the forearm. “If you’d be matron of honor?”
“I’m honored. Of course.”
“And I’d really like to borrow Carlos as the ring bearer. He’s the handsomest man in my life.”
Estelle laughed. “He’ll take the responsibility very seriously.”
Irma took a deep breath, obviously relieved to have the whole affair out in the open. Gary Herrera, Irma’s fiancé, would be relieved too, Estelle thought. His willingness to share his beloved with the corporación over the past three years had bordered on the saintly.
Out in the living room, Francisco had settled into Bach as the composer of choice for warm-ups. Irma stepped closer and lowered her voice. “Do you think he’d play for the wedding? May I ask him?”
“Of course you may, querida. ” Estelle chuckled. “The real question is what he might play. You know how he is.” Play-on-demand had always been a concept that had escaped Francisco. “You’re as apt to get his famous Car Crash Composition as you are Schumann, Haydn, or Bach.”
“I’ll work on him,” Irma said. “And…” She stopped, frowning at the cornbread. Nothing in the perfect pan of golden aromas warranted a frown—the crust was just so, neither too dark nor too light, only lightly fissured with small canyons to catch the melting butter. “Gary has been accepted into Stanford’s MFA program.”
“¡Caramba! ” Estelle whispered in delight. She took her time pouring the tea water into her mug, unable not to think of all the ramifications of Stanford University…a long, long way from Posadas, New Mexico. “An MFA?”
“What he really wants to do is write screenplays. Teleplays, really.”
“That’s a side of him that I never realized,” Estelle said. Gary Herrera, a popular middle-school math teacher and basketball coach, did not fit her image of a playwright, working in smoke, caffeine, and alcohol-laced solitude. “You two are going to become Californians, then? Por dios, I can’t imagine.”
Irma grimaced. “Well, for a while, anyway.”
“When does he start at Stanford?”
“We’re going out in June, right after school finishes. And you know the superintendent? Dr. Archer? He promised Gary an unlimited leave-of-absence. I’m so pleased about that. He’ll have a job waiting for him if he wants it.”
“Dr. Archer would be foolish not to. Ay, what an adventure for you two. And what about you, querida? What new vistas for you in California?”
“I would like to study Spanish,” Irma said quickly, as if she had expected the question. “Historical Spanish. I talk to your mother, and she knows so much. I could listen to her all day.” Estelle’s expression was so blank that Irma plunged on. “Like Spain, centuries ago? Not street Spanglish…that’s all I know.”
Estelle slowly shook her head. “You’ve been with us for years now, querida, and why didn’t I know that this was an interest of yours?”
“Well, I never talked about it, I mean except with your mom, Estelle. How could you know?”
“Ay. I sometimes feel as if I live on another planet.”
Irma’s eyes teared, and she wrapped her arms around Estelle. “We just need to do this,” Irma whispered. “Gary and I. We’ll be out there for two, maybe three years. Do I get a leave of absence too?”
“You always have a place in our family, Mrs. Herrera.”
“Oh, not yet!”
Estelle squeezed her shoulders. “I was just trying the name on for size. It suits you.”
“What is this conspiracy going on out here?” The voice that interrupted them was thin, fragile, little more than a croak. Teresa Reyes, bent over her aluminum walker, was so tiny that six year-old Carlos could look her straight in the eye when they stood face to face.
“October sixteenth,” Estelle said. “The best holiday of the year.”
“I know all about that,” Teresa said, wrinkling her nose. “That Gary…he doesn’t know how lucky he is.”
“We’ll all make sure he does, mamá. ”
“You have a month and more to make plans,” the old woman said, and it wasn’t clear to whom she had addressed the remark. “Things are going to be different around here.” She regarded her step-daughter sternly, black eyes bottomless. “It’s an opportunity for you, Estellita.”
Estelle held up both hands in surrender. Teresa was right, of course. Irma Sedillos, cheerful, bright, trustworthy—willing to be on-call, just as were both Francis and Estelle—would leave an enormous hole in the corporación with her leaving. Estelle realized that she had coped with the notion of Irma’s eventual, inevitable leaving by not thinking about it. Now she had a deadline. Seven months after the wedding, the Herreras would move west.
For a few minutes she watched her youngest son playing outside the back door while, in the front room, Bach grew more complex. She nudged the door open and Carlos looked up. He wore a good deal of the excavation on his face. “Time to clean up for dinner, hijo. ”
“¡Mira! ” Carlos swept a hand grandly to include the road he’d been engineering up the side of the mine. A sand box would have been too simple. This excavation, where once there had been a struggling flower bed, sank deep enough that it had earned the name “burglar trap” from Dr. Francis. If the driver of the over-loaded Tonka was careful, the ore truck wouldn’t plunge over the precipice—that had happened a time or two.
“How deep are you going?”
He regarded his work judiciously. “I think seven levels.”
“Ay, ¡caramba! Such a grand mine.” Carlos had been captivated during a stop at the Morenci open pit in Arizona during a family trip the previous summer. Now, with a little more work, he’d be able to sit in the bottom of his pit with his head level with the patio.
“I’ll probably need a new truck,” he mused, ever hopeful.
“Maybe so. Come on, now. Shut down the mine and clean up. Nana made cornbread for us.”
“Papá is home!” Francisco bellowed from the living room, and Bach’s Invention sped up to light speed, finishing with a resounding crash. For the next half hour, Estelle let the natural momentum of the meal draw them together. Dr. Guzman didn’t allow the conversation to center on Butch Romero’s misfortune, and Francisco’s initial apprehension about what his father was going to say about the rattlesnake episode relaxed.
They talked about Irma’s impending marriage and studies, but no one dwelled on what losing their nana would mean to the household. At one point, Estelle happened to glance across at her husband. Francis raised an eyebrow as if to say, “and now what? ” But he didn’t pursue the question.
“Did you see the paper?” he asked instead. He cut another square of cornbread and balanced it on the edge of his salad plate. He leaned back in his chair, scooped the mail and the newspaper off the counter, and shuffled through them quickly, seeing the note from Padrino, Bill Gastner. He tossed the rest of the mail back on the counter and folded the newspaper neatly, presenting one of the inside pages to Estelle.
The article included a photo showing Nate Underwood, a biology teacher at the high school, as he bent over an animal’s skull, probe in hand. It was a surprisingly good picture, taken from table level so that the skull appeared large and impressive, with the teacher looming in the background. Frank Dayan, publisher and sometimes roving reporter for the Posadas Register, had triumphed this time in his struggles with the digital camera.
From the left, a student leaned over the skull as well, pointing a pencil at one heavy, blunt canine tooth.
“I heard about that,” little Francisco said. He leaned over Estelle’s elbow to look at the picture. “Freddy found that.”
Skull of Rare Jaguar Found, the headline trumpeted. Estelle scanned the brief article. A Su
nday afternoon jaunt south of Borracho Springs ended with discovery of a jaguar skeleton by a local student. Intrepid explorer Frederico Romero, 18, said that the skeleton was found in the San Cristóbal mountains, in a small cave deep in Salazar Canyon within a few hundred yards of the crest.
The rest of the article didn’t add many details of the discovery’s circumstances. Salazar Canyon was carved out of the north flank of the San Cristóbals, one of the few mountain ranges on the continent that ran east-west. Hunters like Sheriff Bobby Torrez would know the mountain range and its various canyons intimately.
“I’d like to see that skull,” her husband said. “Did Padrino have something to do with all this? I saw the note from him.”
“Curiosity, at the least,” Estelle replied. “Anything unusual, there he is, especially if it has something to do with local history. I’m guessing that curiosity has Padrino deep in his library, exploring. Irma tried to get him over for dinner, but he refused. I didn’t think that there has been a jaguar sighting in this part of the country in generations.”
“That’s what the teacher said,” Francis added, nodding at the newspaper.
She looked at the article again. “At first, I thought it was a mountain lion skull,” Romero reported. The high school senior added that, “But then I found a little patch of fur that was still attached to one of the hip bones.” Biology teacher Nate Underwood agreed with his student’s assessment.
“The skull is much too heavy and broad to be a mountain lion,” Underwood said. “The jaguar is an altogether different genus—a much bigger, heavier, more powerful cat.” Underwood said that although now considered to be an endangered species throughout Mexico and Central America, the jaguar’s original range included portions of the Southwestern United States, particularly areas near plentiful water.
“This animal might have died of old age,” Underwood said. “The teeth are blunt and show lots of wear. One of the canines is broken off near the jaw-line as well. This big cat wasn’t much of a hunter any more. That’s one theory. There’s some damage to the skull, too. It’s hard to say what happened to him.”
“Curioso, ¿no? ” Estelle said, handing the paper to Francisco. “What was old gato doing this far north. You should walk over to the high school to see it tomorrow.” Even as she said it, she remembered that the gulf of the parking lot between the elementary wing and the high school might as well have been the San Christóbals for younger students. They weren’t allowed to wander about by themselves. “Maybe your teacher can take you over.”
“How did he get way up there on the mountain?” the boy asked.
“Somebody chased him,” Carlos offered.
“Or he might have just been tired, sick, old…that’s as far as he was able to go before he found a comfortable place to call it quits,” the boys’ father said. “Nice view from up there. Lay on a nice warm rock and wait it out.” He frowned judiciously at a piece of cornbread. “It’s too bad that Freddy’s younger brother didn’t go exploring with him. It would have been more productive than chasing snakes.”
Estelle saw little Francisco duck his head as if he’d been slapped. “I wonder what trail Padrino is following with all this,” she said. “Maybe he remembers someone talking about jaguars years ago.”
“They would have been rare then, too.”
“Do they eat people?” Carlos asked.
“Not this one anymore, hijo, ” Estelle said. “With teeth like that, he’d be lucky if he could catch a sick calf. Maybe that’s what Padrino is thinking about. Maybe somebody down that way has complained about losing cattle.”
“If they lost cattle, it wasn’t because of this old guy,” her husband laughed. “And that skeleton could have been lying in that cave for ten years…or more. Enough time for all the bugs and mice to pick it clean. If all of the skeleton is there, they should bring it out and get it mounted. That would make a rare display.”
“Freddy might have been thinking along those lines,” Estelle said. “I hope that Mr. Underwood told him that he can’t just possess the carcass or skull of protected animals without permission from the Fish and Wildlife Service. Even the school would need permission.”
Her eldest son wrinkled up his face. “Not even an old skull? That’s silly.”
“Well, it’s like possessing eagle feathers,” Estelle said. “They don’t want those things on the open market. You start allowing that, and pretty soon you’d have a flood of things showing up at garage sales.”
“I think that you could sell a jaguar skeleton in old Mexico for a good deal,” Irma said. “If there’s such a thing as a sacred cat, the jaguar is it.”
Estelle nodded. “It’s likely that the school will be able to cut a deal with the feds to keep it as part of their academic collection.”
“If Freddy gives it to them,” Francis amended. “Of course, now that he’s gone public with it, what choice does he have?”
Chapter Four
The next morning, the last thing on Estelle Reyes-Guzman’s mind was the old bones of a dead cat. The younger Romero brother who’d managed to peg himself in the eye with a charged rattlesnake fang was her immediate worry, since despite the rapid EMT response and the most advanced treatment, Butch Romero’s case was proving a challenge. The optic nerve provided a short, direct, wide-open pathway to the brain. Whether the venom was delivered by an angry rattlesnake’s strike or by the fragments flung by the plastic strings of the trimmer, the end result had been the same.
Irma Sedillos arrived at the house by five-thirty Friday morning, and her cheery punctuality reminded Estelle of what her family was about to lose. She became acutely aware of the family’s dynamics that morning. Dr. Guzman left just before six to begin his hospital rounds, armed with fresh coffee and an enormous slice of butter-slathered banana bread. Youngest son Carlos was a snoozer, and dove his head under the pillow when Estelle kissed his forehead. Francisco had been awake for an hour, chaffing at the routine. He was forbidden to play the piano until Estelle’s mother had awakened, and had settled for second best, sitting on the sofa with the unplugged electronic keyboard, playing silently with an intensity driven by the music that had accumulated in his head overnight. There would be time for a quick breakfast before the school bus picked them up at five minutes before eight.
A few moments after eight, Estelle headed out the door, fortified by her own share of fragrant banana bread and a full Thermos of hot tea under her arm. Deputy Jackie Taber would have finished her shift plus an additional two hours of overtime, and the day and the county waited for the undersheriff.
As she prepared to pull out of her driveway, Estelle took a moment to review her log notes from the day before. She found George Romero’s cell phone number and keyed it in. He answered on the second ring, his voice distorted by static and signal gaps. At that early hour, he might be in the motel’s shower, or he might have spent a sleepless night at the hospital.
“…omero.”
“George, this is Estelle, down in Posadas.”
“Hey, let me call you back…a minute.”
Estelle switched off and waited, eyes roaming the neighborhood. Two doors down, she saw neither George’s late model Suburban nor Freddy’s aging Dodge pickup.
In a moment, her phone came to life. “Guzman.”
“Yeah, that’s better,” George Romero said. “What’s going on, Estelle?”
“I know it’s early, and I apologize for bothering you, sir. But I wanted to know how Butch is doing.”
“Well, it isn’t good. I don’t know what the hell is coming next. He’s lost the eye, I know that much. But I don’t understand what they’re doing now. I know that they’re talkin’ about some brain swelling that they’re trying to get under control. We’ve been here pretty much all night.”
“Ay. I’m sorry to hear that. Is there anything we can do for you at this end? Anything you or Tata need?”
“Some sleep,” Romero replied. “Well, hey, there is something you can do, as a ma
tter of fact. You know, yesterday, I couldn’t find Freddy before I had to drive up here, so I left a note for him in the kitchen where he’d see it. I didn’t want him driving up here in that rattletrap of his. There’s nothing he can do up here anyway. Look, I tried to reach him last night on his cell, but no go. And hell, I tried around eleven, too. He should have been home. Probably out with Casey Prescott. You know how that little deal goes. I tried the house a few minutes ago, but no luck.”
“You tried this morning?” She looked down the street again. “His truck isn’t in the driveway at the moment.”
“Yeah, just a few minutes ago. No dice, though. If he’s where he’s supposed to be, he’ll be over at the school. I could call over there, but I don’t want his phone going off in class. I guess I could call the office, but if you wanted to run on over? If you had the time? You could fill him in on what’s goin’ on, make sure he understands that I don’t want him drivin’ up here. Absolutely not. No way.”
“I’ll do that right now,” Estelle said.
“Just tell him to sit tight, and have him give me a call when he has the chance.”
“I’m on my way.”
“Hey, thanks. I appreciate that. We’ll keep you posted, Estelle. How’s Francisco doing with all this?”
“He’s upset, certainly. But he’ll be all right. He’s worried about Butch.”
“Ain’t we all. Maybe he’ll learn something from all this.”
“Sin duda. ”
The drive to the high school’s student parking lot just behind the football field was a matter of a few blocks. Posadas High School included fewer than two hundred students in grades nine through twelve, most of whom didn’t drive to school. It took only a moment to cruise through the lot, looking for Freddy Romero’s primer-gray, sixties vintage Dodge 4x4. The undersheriff circled the lot twice, then crossed through the teacher’s parking area, finally parking on South Pershing Street in front of the school.
“PCS, three ten is ten-ten Posadas High School.”
Double Prey Page 3
