talk to each other.

Out the window, the Motel 6 on the other side of Cerrillos Road fluoresced in the morning light. The Quality Inn and the Floor Mart looked like they were just waking up.

Lines of cars drove along Cerrillos Road, avoiding the construction barrels that seemed to serve no purpose.

Cerrillos Road, the most cursed road in Santa Fe, was always under construction. It flooded like a river during the summer monsoons and cracked mercilessly after the winter snow. It seemed to be a giant five-mile-long strip mall of car dealerships and cheap motels.

It was an ugly road in a beautiful town. A scar on a perfect cheek.

When Lucy had first moved to Santa Fe a year and a half ago, she had no idea how to properly say words like “Cerrillos,” with all its double letters mocking her. During her first month in town, she had been laughed at by co-workers for pronouncing Acoma Pueblo like a combination of “a” and “coma,” and Pojoaque Pueblo like “po-jock” and “kay.” Her solution was to become a master eavesdropper. She data-mined conversations overheard at gas stations and grocery stores for the right way to pronounce the names of towns, streets, and mountains. She also picked up the walking-around Spanish words you had to know in order to have a conversation in English. She had learned that a porch was called a portal—with the accent on the second syllable—and that an exposed wooden ceiling beam was a viga. A santuario was a kind of church, and an arroyo was a dry riverbed. Now, she could almost whip out the right Spanish and Native American words like a local.

She took a final swig of her coffee and considered taking another bite of her breakfast. She had ordered Moons Over My Hammy based solely on the name, but the eggs had gone cold and the cheese looked pale. She poked at it with her fork, then decided to let it rest in peace.

She yawned again and shook her head to wake up, but she knew it was time to go. She had to be at the newspaper early today so she could go over her yearly review with her boss. She was not looking forward to it. She stood up and told the boys she was leaving. They had started to say their good-byes when Gerald said to her surprise, “I’m going to take off, too.”

Suddenly, she was wide-awake—and curious.

The Rodriguez house was set in an open area marked with a few small juniper trees and cut by the arroyo going past the backyard. It was in one of those Santa Fe neighborhoods where there is no structure to the streets or property. The roads were dirt, and the houses and trailers seemed to be in no particular order. In fact, there was a reason why some of the city’s streets were not precise in their design. Many local families had followed the colonial property inheritance rules. Traditionally, a father would equally divide the property between his sons. Then the sons would divide it between their sons, so that generations later, extended family members lived in tight family clusters, minus the pieces that were sold off to developers over the years. Gil guessed that was what happened here.

The Rodriguez house itself was simple. It was small and boxlike with its flat Santa Fe roof. They had chosen a pale shade of beige exterior paint many years ago that had never been refreshed, but the paved pathway leading to the front door was free of weeds, and there were a few flowers near the porch.

Gil knocked on the door, which was opened by a young woman with big eyes and long dark hair who was hugely pregnant. This had to be Ashley.

“Hi, I’m Gil Montoya, and you might remember Joe Phillips, with the Santa Fe police,” Gil said as Joe gave a little wave. Gil purposely didn’t use their detective titles so as to keep her at ease. As it was, she frowned at them, but Gil said, “I was hoping we could come in.”

He could tell she was about to refuse, so he said quickly, “It is important that we talk, and I think it might be easier for you if we sat down.”

She opened the door, and they followed her into the kitchen, where she eased herself down on a chair. A woman washing dishes turned to look at them and said harshly, “Ashley, why are the police in my house?” The woman