The Replacement Child - By Christine Barber Page 0,29

hesitated. Maybe the source was a state police officer?

“Yeah, and their PIO, that Pollack guy, would only give me the same old ‘we cannot confirm or deny’ crap, but then said off-the-record that we’re on the right track,” he said.

Not a resounding confirmation, but for the state police, it was as close as they were going to get.

“Okay, Tommy, we go with it. When you get back we’ll figure out how to word it exactly. We’ll have to be careful,” she said, then added, “And when you call the family to ask about it—”

“I know, I know. I’ll be as gentle as possible.”

She sighed. She hated this part of the job. She had done it herself when she was a cops reporter—having to ask, “Did you know your dead child was using drugs?” No matter how sympathetically you said it, it still sounded cold-blooded. Strangely enough, most parents didn’t scream at her. They softly answered yes or no.

She heard the excitement in Tommy’s voice as he said quickly, “Bueno. Good-bye.”

Gil left the Bacas and started the drive to his mother’s house. He passed ranch after ranch with newly cut roads and big wooden entrance signs. He passed Flying Eagle Ranch and Split Lightning Ranch. All had gone up in the past ten years. Before that, it had been cattle land that had belonged to his second cousins and the Anaya family. A few of the ranches supposedly belonged to celebrities like Jane Fonda and Julia Roberts.

Gil slowed as he came into Galisteo and crossed himself as he passed the Galisteo church. He went past La Tienda Montoya and the Montoya Community Center. He turned off the highway and onto Avenida de Montoya, going slowly over the dirt-and-gravel road. As he passed his cousin’s unpainted small house, a horse whinnied and the gravel crunched under his tires. Next was his uncle’s house. According to Hispanic tradition, the family property had been divided up among the male children of each generation. The land had been granted to the Montoya family by the king of Spain. Back then, it had covered hundreds of square miles. But after four hundred years of dividing up the land among every generation of Montoyas, there was little property left. A lot of it had been lost when the Americans came and took the land through taxes. That was what Pablo Montoya had fought against and gotten hanged for.

Gil turned again onto a smaller road and drove past the Old House, its half-standing walls reflecting the car’s headlights. The flat wooden roof was mostly caved in and the adobe walls were eroded. There had been talk among the Montoyas of restoring the house, one of the few true haciendas left in New Mexico. The Garcia family hacienda, which had been lost in a poker game a hundred years ago, now was a living museum over in La Cienega. One of Gil’s uncles had tried to plan family weekends when they would plaster the old walls and pull the weeds out of the dirt floor, but after Gil’s father had died, no one seemed interested anymore.

He pulled into his parents’ circular driveway, which was closed in by a white picket fence to keep out loose cattle. The cottonwood and aspen trees were ringed with stones and a brick path led up to the New House. The land sloped slowly down to the Galisteo River.

He turned off the car’s ignition and sat for a second, staring at the house. He would have to have the flat roof tarred again in the fall, and the portal that ran run around the house needed a new coat of white paint. Maybe he would repaint the house at the same time. The beige paint was starting to fade in places. The house itself was still solid. It had been built in the 1920s with a good foundation. He got out of the car and went up the front steps, the same as he had thousands of times as a kid coming home from school. His mother was in the kitchen. He smelled the posole she was cooking and heard the clank of her spoon against the inside of the pot.

“Hi, Mom,” he said with a kiss on her cheek.

“Hi, hito,” she said, barely turning away from the stove. She looked older to him than she had yesterday, her gray hair pulled back and getting thinner. She put a steaming bowl of posole, a plate of tortillas, and a glass of milk in front