The Replacement Child - By Christine Barber Page 0,27

The boys were teenagers then, but she saw that still they were scared for their father. John Junior persuaded her to call up the newspaper to see if they knew anything. She had the courage to do it only because her sons were so worried. The man who answered the phone was nice. He said that the newspaper still had electricity and he was listening to the police-officer-down call. He stayed on the phone with Patsy for over an hour, telling her exactly what the scanner was saying. And delivering the awful news that the police officer who had been shot was dead. And that it wasn’t John. They said the Lord’s Prayer together for the dead police officer and for John. The next day, Patsy baked the editor some cookies and brought them by the newspaper. After that, she would call him whenever she heard something bad over the police scanner and they would talk to each other and pray about it. Sometimes she would hear something on the scanner that her editor friend hadn’t heard. She would call to tell him about it and he would tell her that she should come work for them as an investigative reporter. She would laugh a little at that, but every time he said it, it made her feel good.

When she and John retired to Santa Fe, her editor friend suggested that she see if one of the local newspapers would hire her just to listen to the scanner. He had said that some newspapers did that with people. But she’d never had the courage to call the newspapers and ask about it. Instead, she would just call sometimes and tell them when she heard something interesting on the scanner. She liked being able to see stories she helped with in the paper. But it wasn’t the same as in Wichita. The newspaper people were so busy and didn’t have time to talk. They didn’t have the patience to talk to an old lady.

Patsy struggled to her feet, her hip giving her the same old twinge. She went to the hall closet and started to pull out boxes, hoping she could remember where she had put her iron. And trying to think of any book she had read that might impress the people at Hobby Lobby.

Melissa’s room was muted—a floral bedspread with matching curtains. It was mostly bare, as she had lived in it for only six months, since August, when she’d returned from college to start teaching. Gil saw an old photo on her nightstand, taken during the 1980s, of a smiling older man and a young Melissa. Gil peered closer at the picture of Melissa and Officer Ernesto Baca, trying to remember if he had ever met him. Gil had been a police officer for three years when Ernesto Baca was killed. They must have passed each other in a hallway at some point. But he didn’t know the face.

There were only two pictures on her walls; one was an Ansel Adams photo, the other a framed poster with the caption “Friendship is a gift from God.”

Her computer was on a table in the corner. He touched a key and listened as the Mac chimed on. He wandered around the room, poking in drawers as he waited for the computer to warm up

Her drawers held meticulously folded sweaters and shirts, arranged by color and season—sweaters in the bottom drawers and short-sleeved shirts in the top ones. He ran his hands along the bases of the drawers but found nothing. The bottom drawer on her dresser was stuck. He pulled harder but it didn’t give. He peered under the dresser, trying to see if the drawer was broken.

“It’s always been like that,” Maxine Baca said from the doorway. “Ernesto was going to fix it for her.”

Gil looked up at her, surprised. She said nothing more and walked away from the door.

He got up and went back to the computer. He clicked on the Internet access first, looking to see what Web sites she had bookmarked. They were mostly reference and some teaching sites.

Next he went to her e-mail. He spent the next hour reading letters to and from friends at the University of New Mexico. Her messages were short. One friend, who called herself Buttons, wrote a long letter, talking about sex, chocolate cake, and sneezing. In response, Melissa wrote just three sentences. Three male classmates also wrote; a few of the letters were fairly suggestive, but Melissa never responded