The Replacement Child - By Christine Barber Page 0,10
Fe. The Martinezes across the street had been living on the land since it had been given to them by the king of Spain. The tiny streets were horse-and-carriage size. The houses were squished together with no room for backyards or front lawns. In the closeness, everyone had walls or fences, to keep out the neighbors’ eyes and the dust.
All the houses were flat topped and square, Santa Fe–style. And they were beige, just like every other home, office, hotel, gas station, and utility shed in Santa Fe. Lucy could write a dissertation on the color beige. Dark beige, light beige, pink beige. Beige like the desert sand. The houses in her neighborhood tended more toward the dark beige, with white trim. It was so unlike where she’d grown up in Florida, where everything was big and overdone, bright and new.
Lucy looked back at her brown/beige bungalow, with its Spanish tile flat roof and tall elm trees around it. It had windowsills painted purple and pink and a tile mosaic of Our Lady of Guadalupe next to the front door. The mosaic was the reason why Del had wanted to rent the place. He’d said that it was a good omen. He had gotten into the habit of touching the mosaic as he entered and left the house.
From her mailbox Lucy could count three images of Our Lady of Guadalupe on walls and doors. The one across the street was painted on the side of a garage, all in earth tones. Either that or it was dusty.
Lucy opened her black mailbox and pulled out three envelopes—all bills. She sighed and clicked her heels back across the street and, without thinking, touched the mosaic next to the door with her left hand as she turned the doorknob with her right. She tossed the mail onto the coffee table, took off her coat, and poured a cup of coffee as she kicked off her pumps, which were already digging into her toes. She went into the bathroom and started the water running in her old-fashioned tub.
She was in the shower before she remembered that she hadn’t flossed her teeth yet. Damn. Whenever she made a detour from her normal morning routine, she always ended up forgetting something. She said out loud, “Floss your teeth when you get out of the shower; floss your teeth when you get out of the shower.”
She was already dressed and in the car a block from her house before she realized that she had not flossed her teeth. Damn.
She stopped by the newspaper to pick up her paycheck, then drove across town to the Santa Fe Police Department. The building was out toward the interstate, in brand-new Santa Fe, surrounded by very wide sidewalkless streets that smelled strongly of baking asphalt even in the weak winter sun. Unlike her cozy, old neighborhood, this was an area of empty lots and strip malls. The police station itself was a squared-off, utilitarian “facility”—that was the only word for it—that had none of the usual Santa Fe charm. No rounded corners or curved archways. You could tell that it was a government building without seeing the SFPD sign out front. The only bow to Santa Fe architecture was the beige that the building was painted, but it was washed out and seemed an afterthought, as if the builders would have preferred a steel gray.
Lucy sat in her car, peering at herself in the rearview mirror as she fixed her makeup, which she needed badly today. The sunlight was only accentuating the dark circles under her eyes. She decided on bright red lipstick in the hope that it would overpower her unfocused eyes.
Lucy got out of her car and walked up to the reception area of the police department while the officer manning the desk, a young man with acne scars on his cheeks, watched her.
“Hi. I’m with the Capital Tribune. I need to look over the hot sheets for today.”
The acne-scarred officer slid a manila folder to her without saying anything.
She opened the folder and looked over the reports, writing down any interesting information. Two men had gotten into a knife fight last night over a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, sending one to the hospital with minor wounds. That would become a brief for tomorrow’s paper or a small six-inch story inside the local section, depending on how badly they needed news. The only other report that caught her eye was about a female teenager getting picked up at Santa