The air had a fallish nip the next morning at seven thirty when I pulled up to the Milagro Coffee House—the only place in Las Cruces anybody wanted to go to, apparently. I’d always loved Midwestern autumns, but New Mexico was different, with only the gold of the occasional aspen and the burnt red of the ubiquitous chile peppers to break up the monotonous brown. I hugged my tweedy jacket around me as I hurried across the parking lot.
Victoria and J.P. were already at a heavy wooden table in the middle of the café, Victoria looking sleepy-eyed but otherwise no more dazed than usual. J.P. appeared to be on her second sixteen-ounce cup of caffeine. Either that or she was the ultimate morning person. For once her hair was scooped tidily into its ponytail, and she wore fresh lipstick that hadn’t even bled onto the rim of her cup. It probably wouldn’t dare.
I waved to them and joined Poco at the counter, where she almost had to stand on her tiptoes to be seen over it.
“I’ll have a café mocha vodka Valium latte, please,” she said to the bespectacled twentysomething male at the register.
He didn’t even blink. “Rough morning?”
“I think I have too many children, Ben,” she said.
“You only have two, Poco. That’ll be $3.99.”
Poco smiled her enigmatic smile at me as she pulled out a five and slid it across the counter.
“And for you?” the guy named Ben said to me.
“I’ll have what she’s having,” I said.
“It’s a decaf, sugar-free, nonfat café mocha.”
I looked at Poco. “That’s dessert, for Pete’s sake. No—I need a black coffee, extra hot.”
“There’s your trouble, Poco,” Ben said. “You start drinking it like she does, and you’ll have those kids whipped into shape in no time.”
Poco took her change and shook her head, as always setting her bangs into a small frenzy.
“$2.95 for you,” Ben said to me.
I handed him my debit card and studied Poco, who simply stood smiling beside me. It struck me that I knew little about her. About any of them. Far less than they knew about me, unfortunately.
Poco and I took our cups to the table, where J.P. was waiting with legal pad and pen. She’d already made four columns on it, with one of our names at the top of each. I could already feel my neck hairs bristling. Was I about to get an assignment from her?
“I assume everybody is still in for tomorrow night,” she said before my buns even touched the seat.
Poco and Victoria nodded. I sipped. My jury was still out until I heard the whole plan.
“We need to leave my place no later than five. Sunset is at six thirty, so that should give us plenty of time.”
“Everybody go potty before we leave,” Poco said. “J.P. doesn’t make bathroom stops.”
“It’s only a one-hour trip,” J.P. said.
She looked at each of us as if to make sure nobody was going to dispute that. I just kept sipping. They did make good coffee there at Milagro. At least that part wouldn’t be a bust.
“We’ll do the sunset/moonrise thing in the park,” she went on briskly. “You’ll enjoy it.”
Or else.
“Then we’ll sign in at the camping check-in.”
“Did you reserve a campsite?” Poco asked.
J.P. shook her head. Tendrils were already making their escape from her ponytail and hanging fretfully on either side of her face.
“It’s first come, first serve,” she said. “But this isn’t their busy time of year.”
I wondered if they had a busy time of year. It still mystified me that people traveled for miles to see that endless expanse of nothing but white sand. It actually still somewhat mystified me that I’d agreed to this trip myself.
I looked up from draining my coffee cup to see J.P. surveying me over the top of her glasses.
“You know we have to backpack in, right?” she said.
“You mentioned that,” I said.
“We have to carry everything we’re going to need.”
“You mentioned that too.”
“Including water.”
I scratched a nonexistent itch on the side of my face. “When are we going to get to the part I don’t know? I have to be somewhere at nine.”
“I just wanted to make sure you understood that this is not a glamour gig, in case you want to change your mind.”
Now I remembered why I’d agreed to this. No way was I walking away from the dare in her eyes.
J.P. broke the stare first and wrote something in Victoria’s column. “I’m putting you down for that picnic set you have with the plastic plates and mugs.”
“If there’s no water, why don’t we use paper?” I said.
“Because we care about the environment.” She tossed me a glance that excluded me from the we. “We’ll wash our dishes with sand.”
“You’re going to show us how to do that, right?” Poco gave her signature nervous laugh.
J.P. jotted in Poco’s column. “You can bring hand sanitizer and toilet paper.”
Victoria pulled her nose up from her coffee mug. “They have toilets?”
“No,” J.P. said.
Victoria blinked behind her round glasses and went back to the cup. J.P. continued to dole out the duties—including food preparation —until she came to me. She poised the pen over my column.
“Well?” I said.
“I don’t know what you can do.” Her shrug clearly indicated that she didn’t think I could do much of anything that mattered. She put down the pen and bobbed a tea bag up and down in her cup. All this edge, and she was drinking Earl Grey?
A silence fell, awkward as an adolescent. “Ryan could be our official photographer for the trip,” Poco said into it, voice straining toward chipper.
“We have yet to see the ones she took of the Alamogordo game,” J.P. said.
“She doesn’t appreciate being talked about in the third person when she is sitting right in the room,” I said. “But I have your pictures right here if you want to see them.”
I pulled out my laptop, turned it on, and pulled up the photos. The screen filled with the El Milagro woman sitting on her sagging front porch with her splashing children in the foreground.
Victoria shook her hair away from her face and craned her neck to see. “Whose mother is that?”
“Sorry,” I said. “I took these yesterday for an assignment. Let me find—”
“What’s the assignment?” Poco said.
It was another valiant attempt to make me look good for J.P., which I had no desire to do. Still, Poco was the most decent one in the group, and I didn’t want to be snitty with her. “It’s on the lives of the people up at El Milagro,” I said, still clicking forward and coming up with nothing but the faces that had smiled so bravely for me.
“I don’t get it,” J.P. said.
Now, her I could be snitty to all day and it wouldn’t bother me a bit.
“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “Let me just find those soccer shots.”
“Wait.” Poco put her hand on my arm and pointed to the picture on the screen, of a woman who had come by to check on the little girls sleeping in the back of a car. “I know her. That’s—” She stopped. Her top teeth clamped on her lower lip.
“She looks familiar to me too,” J.P. said.
As she slanted forward for a better look, Poco gave a starched laugh. “You know what they say. All us Hispanics look alike.” She squeezed my arm again, in much the same way she was squeezing out her words. “You need to watch your time—we should let you get to the soccer pictures.”
I did a double take. She shook her head at me so slightly her bangs didn’t move.
“Okay,” I said.
I set up a quick slide show and sat back while the three of them bent their heads over my laptop. There is something about viewing photos of people you adore that evens out the playing field. Even J.P. made motherly noises and nudged Victoria over the midkick shot of Bryan with his blond hair flying about his face. The nut never falls far from the tree.
Poco insisted that I give them a second showing, slower this time, and J.P. wrote the numbers on a clean sheet of the pad so they could place orders with me.
“How much will you charge per print?” she asked. She produced a calculator from her purse.
“I won’t charge anything,” I said. “Just tell me what you want and what size and I’ll print them at home.”
“Yes, but we’ll want them on photo paper. That’s expensive.”
“I have plenty.” I patted the pad with my hand and gave her my best squint. “It’s what I do.”
I left right after they all placed their orders and J.P. wrote out another copy, for her records. I got the feeling if I didn’t come through, she wanted evidence for a civil suit.
Halfway to my car, Poco caught up with me and tugged at the strap on my computer bag.
“I hope you didn’t think I was being rude in there,” she said.
I laughed out loud. “You would have to take some serious lessons to come close to rude.”
“I know a lot of those people in the pictures you were showing us from the colonia.”
I stopped at the driver’s door to my Saab and leaned against it. She was talking fast and glancing back toward the café.
“I don’t talk about my volunteer work in front of J.P.,” she said. “She’s always asking me to help out at the church, and I tell her I don’t have time, which I don’t because I’m doing other things, but she thinks stuffing envelopes for the capital funds campaign should take priority, and I think I’m more useful elsewhere. I’m not going to win that argument with her, you know what I mean?”
Before I could even formulate an answer, she shook her head, and this time the bangs did fly. “No, you don’t know what I mean because you aren’t afraid of what anybody thinks. I wish I could be more like that.”
I shifted my bag to my other shoulder. Hopefully there was a point to all this.
“Anyway—two days a week I volunteer at the CDC.”
“Which is?”
“The Colonias Development Council. It’s a nonprofit. They do, well, everything to try to get environmental justice, farmworker rights—it’s huge. But what I wanted to tell you is that I know the woman in that one picture—the last one you showed us.”
“By the car?” I said. “With the two little girls?”
“Yeah.” Poco took a step closer to me. “That’s Elena Sanchez.”
I formed the name soundlessly with my lips.
Poco nodded. “Miguel’s mother. I’ve known her for a long time.”
I felt the strap to my bag slide down my arm, and I almost let it dump to the ground. Poco and I grabbed for it at the same time, and in the process our foreheads nearly touched.
She didn’t move away when she said, “She’s upset and confused. She doesn’t know why someone would do this to her boy. But—”
“Not just someone,” I said. “She thinks it was my son—just like everyone else does.” I pressed my thumbs against my temples. “And there I was taking her picture.”
“Isn’t that why you’re up there?” Poco said.
“Excuse me?”
“I don’t know how these things work, but why did you pick that story unless you wanted to know about Miguel’s family?”
I could only stare at her, mouth hanging open, so that I not only sounded like a lunatic, I probably looked like one as well.
She gave a tiny shrug. “If I were in your situation, I would want to know who they were, what they were like.” She squeezed my arm a final time. “If I can do anything to help, say the word. But just so you know, I won’t say anything to anyone else about it.”
I mouthed a thank-you and watched her start to walk away. But I couldn’t let her go. “Poco,” I said.
She turned without missing a beat, as if she’d known I’d call her back.
“Elena Sanchez,” I said. “How is she holding up?”
“She’s strong.”
“What about Miguel?”
Poco came back toward me. “He’s still in a coma. The longer that goes on, the less likely it is he’ll make a full recovery. But they’re praying for a miracle. They haven’t lost hope.” She pressed her palms together as if she herself were praying. “You shouldn’t lose hope either, Ryan.”
I nodded. Not because I had any hope. Because I didn’t trust myself to speak.
Poco took a few steps backward. Just as she swung around to go, she added, “She works in the coffee shop at the Ocotillo Bookstore on the mall at lunchtime. It’s in the back.”
Sully set the phone down and put a check mark next to the last item on his list: Call Better Business Bureau and lodge a complaint against Zahira.
“What is the nature of the complaint?” the woman had said in brisk formalese.
“Bad psychology,” Sully told her.
“Pardon me?”
“She’s a bad psychologist,” Sully said. He’d already had his finger on the End Call button by that time. He was pretty sure she did too.
“I think you want the PCMFT board for that. Let me give you their number . . .”
“She doesn’t have a license with them.”
“They can handle that for you too.”
She’d rattled off the number and hung up, leaving Sully licking a bad taste out of his mouth. He reached for his cell phone and dialed Porphyria’s number. It was the only way he could think of at the moment to get rid of it.
The voice that answered was faint, almost fragile. Sully hesitated and was about to apologize for a wrong number.
“Are you waiting for me to start this conversation, Dr. Crisp?” the voice said.
It was stronger now, and Sully grinned into the phone.
“It didn’t sound like you, Dr. Ghent,” he said.
“Who did it sound like?”
Actually, it still sounded like a weaker version of the voice he depended on to shoot sense into his craziness. The verve was still at the center, but the edges were frayed.
“It sounded like somebody who isn’t feeling up to par,” Sully said. “What’s going on?”
There was no queenly comeback. Sully felt his grin fade. “Porphyria?” he said.
“I’m here. I’m just trying to decide how to put this so you won’t think you have to get on the next plane and come on back here.”
“Don’t decide,” Sully said. “Just say it.”
“We’re discussing the possibility of replacing the old pacemaker with a new one.”
“What’s to discuss? If it needs to be done, let’s do it.” Sully clicked back onto the Internet. “I can get a flight out tonight.”
“And you would do that for what reason, Sully? This is not major surgery.”
He heard the rich chuckle.
“And I am not a delicate patient. I’ll come through it just fine. You are not the only doctor who knows anything.”
Sully wasn’t buying the jocularity. Porphyria never forced anything, but there was something lurking behind the laughter, and she wasn’t about to tell him what it was. He got up and paced behind the desk. “You’re going to keep me posted every step of the way, right? And if you can’t, then Winnie will.”
“Mm-hmm. Just like you’re telling me everything.”
Even without her old-soul eyes looking into him, Sully felt himself color up. “Do you have my phone tapped?” he said.
“No, just your mind. Where are you with Belinda Cox?”
It was a clear ploy to change the subject, but Sully followed her anyway. To do anything else was futile. And it was, after all, why he’d called.
“I’m at a dead end at the moment. Maybe I’ll give it a rest for a while.”
“Don’t you use me as an excuse to walk away from what you know you’ve got to do, Sully. I’ll be here when you’re done. Don’t you worry about that.”
There was no point in arguing with her. If he showed up at her hospital room tonight, she’d order him out before he got in the door. Besides, she was right. As always.
“I’ll tell you what I do want from you,” she said.
“Anything,” Sully said.
“I want you to find that woman, and I want you to have a come-to-Jesus with her until she is on her knees, and then I want you to call me and give me every delicious detail. That’s what I want you to do.”
“Done,” Sully said.
Only he knew as he hung up that the account he gave Porphyria wasn’t going to happen over the phone. He was going to deliver it in person, the minute he was finished with Belinda Cox. If he ever found her.
He knew it was finality that lurked behind Porphyria’s laughter, and it frightened him to the core.