The Replacement Child - By Christine Barber Page 0,93

a manila folder out of a tall wooden filing cabinet. “Here it is. It was about a month ago. The students had just gotten back from Christmas break. And the officers who came were …” He hesitated. “I only have last names but it looks like Officers Valdez and Cordova.”

Sandra Paine lay on her bed, waiting for her mother to come home to drive her to Santa Fe’s airport so they could ship her off to Denver. They still hadn’t told her how long she would be exiled for. She gave them a week before they caved and took her back. All she had to do was call her father “Daddy” and talk to her mother incessantly about college.

She picked up her cell phone and for the fourteenth time—she had been counting—played the last message from her boyfriend. “Sandra, I need to talk to you right away….” The message cut off after that. She played it again. She loved listening to his voice. He had left the message yesterday, but she hadn’t called him back. That had been Lacey’s idea. “Sandra, men only want women they can’t have, so play aloof,” Lacey had said. “Don’t talk to him. Make him really sweat.” They decided that she would call him from Colorado but only leave a message. They called it “denying him access.” As Lacey had said, “He’ll be pining away.”

Sandra started biting her nails. She wished she still had the Polaroids they’d taken together. They would make her miss him less. She especially liked the ones she had taken of him. But her father had confiscated those in the “second incident.” That had been a week ago and it was completely her mother’s fault.

Her mom had come home crazed from some party disaster she had been in charge of and decided that Sandra’s room needed to be inspected. The inspections usually meant rumpling through Sandra’s closet until her mother broke down crying and left. But this time Mommie Dearest had been deranged. She threw things out of drawers and sent stuffed animals flying while Sandra watched. She found some of the Polaroids taped under the bottom shelf of Sandra’s entertainment center. But she didn’t find the other ones, taped under the TV.

Mom slapped Sandra hard but said nothing, then went to her room, turned off the lights, and closed the door. Her father came home a few hours later. Sandra heard them yelling at each other. She wasn’t worried. After the “first incident,” a month ago, when she got busted with the vodka, she had been grounded for three weeks. Two days later she was at the mall, shopping for shoes with Lacey.

The parents came in to give her the verdict a few minutes later. Her father opened her door without knocking and said, “What did you do with him?”

“Like I’m going to tell you,” Sandra said.

“You are going to tell me, young lady.”

Sandra ignored him and, with a sly smile, turned her back on them and started typing on her computer.

“Sandra, why won’t you tell Daddy what he wants to know?” her mother asked. God, but she was annoying.

“Because it’s none of his business.” Sandra started typing faster.

That’s when they told her that they were sending her to her aunt’s in Denver. That got her attention. She cried and threatened, but they didn’t give in. Her mother sat in the corner and said little. She wasn’t normally that quiet.

“You are going, and that’s all there is to it,” her father said, sounding old, not angry.

“Thank you ever so,” Sandra said. A second later, her mother slapped her. That was more like her mom. As soon as they left her room, Sandra pulled the rest of the photos from their hiding place. She was going to put them in her school locker in case Mommy decided on another inspection.

But once at school, she’d just had to show them to Lacey. That’s what she’d been doing when Miss Baca caught them.

Sandra stopped biting her nails when she heard her mother’s Explorer drive up. She ran downstairs with her suitcase, suddenly excited to be going on a trip.

Gil said good-bye to Principal Strunk, leaving the way he’d come in. As soon as he reached the driveway, he opened his cell phone and called the station. He needed confirmation quickly that Manny Cordova had been Sandra Paine’s arresting officer. It now made sense that Ron Baca had never told anyone about the photos of Sandra Paine that Melissa had shown him the day