The Replacement Child - By Christine Barber Page 0,69
the house. You know how it is. We’ve tried to find another recording of her voice, but no luck so far. We’ll keep trying.”
Before hanging up, Garcia promised to call her back when he found out more. She thought, Like I believe that, before she could help it. She rolled her eyes, reminding herself that she was supposed to like him now.
Lucy noticed that the voice-mail light on her cell phone was blinking. She called in for her messages and cringed as she heard Gerald Trujillo’s voice reminding her that they were meeting at the fire station later in the day for more medic training. She quickly deleted the message.
Down the street, the crow over Patsy Burke’s house had gone, but Lucy could see the top of the cell tower in the distance. If Patsy Burke had been home, she could have heard Lucy’s entire cell-phone conversation with Garcia over her police scanner.
Gil was sitting at his desk, having just hung up with his mother, when he heard someone call his name. He looked up to see Maxine Baca standing with an old jewelry box in her hands. Joy had one like it that she kept her “secrets” in—old birthday cards, valentines from boys, and a small ring that Gil had given her when she was five.
Mrs. Baca hadn’t slept, he was sure. Her hair was un-brushed and pushed up on one side, making her look off-kilter. She shoved the jewelry box into his hands.
“I found that under her dresser last night. I didn’t know what to do with it so I … You can have it and people can say what they want.” Gil opened the box and looked inside. He expected to find heroin and needles. Instead, he found himself staring at a stack of Polaroids.
The ice-skating rink at the Genoveva Chavez Community Center doubled as a cool-down room for Lucy. Her arms ached, and she knew that she had overdone her workout, trying to weight-lift out her stress. She hunched over on a cold metal bench and peered at the kids’ feet as they skated, trying to figure out how they balanced on the blades. Lucy had grown up mostly in L.A. and Florida, where ice skating was not a popular pastime.
Before moving to New Mexico, she’d had a Clint Eastwood fantasy of the state—filled with cactus and dust and cattle. But Northern New Mexico was nothing like that. In the summertime it was green, its fields filled with wildflowers. In the fall the aspens turned bright yellow, cutting a stripe of gold across the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. In the winter the snow came.
New Mexico was now in a drought; it hadn’t snowed in a month. Everyone wanted snow—they prayed for it. But Lucy had a secret: she hated snow. She liked the idea of snow. It was pretty, and she loved how it looked like white icing when it coated the tops of the mountains. But she had no idea how to walk in it, drive in it, or deal with it. When she met her first snowfall in Santa Fe, she wanted to call in sick to work so that she wouldn’t have to figure out how to maneuver her car in it.
She’d tried to learn to like it—had even taken skiing lessons with Del last year. But her instructor had pulled her aside, saying, “You really don’t have the knack for this.” After that, she’d given up trying to live with the snow and decided to hate it. It was more honest than pretending. If it never snowed again, she’d be happy.
The metal bench was getting cold, so she took her towel and headed out the door. The sweat had dried, and her face felt like it was coated in dust. She glanced at the newspaper racks next to the door. A headline in the Santa Fe Times caught her eye: WOMAN STRANGLED, POLICE SAY. At first Lucy thought the story was about Melissa Baca, that the Santa Fe Times had managed to get hold of her autopsy as well. But the article was about Patsy Burke. Lucy felt a burn of guilt. If only she’d somehow been able to tell Tommy Martinez that Patsy Burke had been strangled. Damn ethics rules. Now, the Santa Fe Times had scooped them on the cause of death.
Lucy fished out fifty cents and pulled out a paper. The first paragraph of the article on Patsy Burke was wordy. It needed about ten words taken out. That