The Replacement Child - By Christine Barber Page 0,51

years away from graduation, Susan had become pregnant. A week later, his father had died. He’d dropped out of law school, and they moved back to Santa Fe. And he’d gotten the only job he could take with some dignity.

He slowed as he came near a suspicious-looking car parked in the street. There was a man sitting in the driver’s seat in the dark. Gil jogged slowly, making sure to stay in the driver’s blind spot. As he neared the passenger-side door, the man got out of the car and walked into a house. Gil sped up again, feeling the cold starting to work on his toes.

His family disapproved of his becoming anything other than a lawyer. Supposedly, back in the 1600s, one of the first Montoyas had been appointed acalde, the colonial equivalent of a judge, but that Montoya had been thrown out of office by the locals and sent back to Spain. The Judge would pull out newspaper clippings written in Spanish about Montoya mayors and governors and articles in English about Montoya state senators and congressmen. All of them had been lawyers, just like Gil’s father.

At the family fiestas, relatives would still say things to Gil like, “The Judge had such hopes for you,” or, “The Judge must be turning over in his grave.” Gil would just walk away.

At a fiesta last year, his father’s cousin, his face red from alcohol and with tamale crumbs clinging to his black mustache, had said, “Your dad would be so disappointed in you.” Gil turned slowly to look at him. Gil was about a foot taller and could see the bald spot on the back of his cousin’s head. The cousin backed up quickly, almost tripping over a picnic bench. Elena was suddenly next to him, putting a hand on his arm and steering him away from the crowd. She said, “Did you know that the first Montoya to come to New Mexico with the conquistadores was out chasing ambulance carts within a day?” He didn’t answer her, so she squeezed his arm and said, “There are fifteen generations of Montoyas going to a hell made especially for lawyers. I’m just glad you won’t be there with them.” She smiled. “Besides, I’ll be there to keep them company.” Elena had been in her first year at UNM’s law school at the time. Now she was finishing up an internship at the state attorney’s office.

He saw the lights of his house down the street and slowed to a trot.

Lucy had gotten to work late and missed the editors’ meeting. Now she was at her desk, trying to concentrate. She was having a hard time of it. The photo caption she was editing seemed not to make any sense. Half the words were misspelled and no one was identified. The photo itself was great—the director of the Santa Fe ski area was looking forlornly at the ugly brown patches of dirt on his ski slopes. The photo was running tomorrow with a story about the weather. No snow was in the forecast for the next week.

Her boss, City Editor Harold Richards, was editing the article about Patsy Burke’s murder. Harold didn’t normally read stories. He was doing it because Lucy couldn’t. It would have been a conflict of interest for Lucy to edit the story since she had been at the crime scene as a medic, not a journalist. It was one of those ethics rules that her University of Florida professors had hammered into her. She hadn’t actually told Harold why he needed to edit the story instead of her. And she didn’t plan on telling him. She would never have this problem again—never inadvertently run across a dead body—since she wasn’t planning on staying a volunteer medic at Piñon.

As she watched Harold edit the story, she wondered what Major Garcia had said when they interviewed him. She moseyed over to the fax machine, which sat next to Richards’s desk. She pretended to look over a faxed press release while she glanced at the computer screen over his shoulder: “‘A 63-year-old woman who was found dead in her home on Wednesday was murdered,’ said Major Ed Garcia of the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Department. However, Garcia would not release the cause of the woman’s death.” That’s where Lucy stopped.

She knew the cause of Patsy Burke’s death—she’d been strangled. She tossed the fax into the recycling bin and went over to Tommy Martinez’s desk. Tommy was on the phone, so she stood