I went to Miguel Sanchez’s funeral on Tuesday afternoon. The Catholic church was packed with Hispanic people, and it would have been hard for me to blend if they hadn’t all been focused on the funeral mass, said in Spanish, and on their mourning.
The only person who didn’t appear to be stricken almost to paralysis by grief was Elena Sanchez. She was sober and regal as she passed up the aisle, a black lace scarf draped from her head to her shoulders. Perhaps the loss hadn’t hit her yet, but I doubted that was it. She’d known that day at the market that Miguel was already gone. I just wanted to know what was holding her up now and moving her forward.
One thing I did know: it was not revenge. Not from her or anyone else in that church. The sense of deep resignation I felt there was not behind the bomb and the note. The family and friends of Miguel Sanchez were devastated, maybe even confused. But they weren’t angry.
Except Cecilia Benitez, who, with the well-dressed man beside her I assumed was Bob Benitez the blogger, looked ready to organize a demonstration.
I left before the service was over, specifically to avoid her. But I was only halfway down the steps when she called to me. I didn’t stop moving as I glanced over my shoulder at her.
“I have someplace to be,” I said. Which was true. Dan was meeting me at the jail to see Jake before soccer practice.
“You know you’re the reason for all that, don’t you?”
I stopped on the bottom step and dragged my hand through my hair. Dear God, please, not today.
Cecilia caught up to me, tossing the ubiquitous scarf over her shoulder. “They had to put the overflow crowd in the parish hall and show the service on closed-circuit TV,” she said. “And we have you to thank for that.”
I didn’t even try to pretend I knew what she was talking about. “Your online article about the colonia,” she said. “It was spot-on, Ms. Alexander. Bob thought so too—he blogged about it—everyone read it.” She stretched her arm up toward the church. “And that’s the kind of crowd we’re going to see at the courthouse when this goes to trial.”
I put my hand to my mouth. She nodded at my tears.
“You don’t have to say anything. I just wanted to thank you—for the whole community. We’ll see justice done.”
She returned to the church before I had to answer.
When I arrived at the jail, Dan was already standing at the check-in counter talking to the officer behind the glass window.
“I can’t get an appointment,” he said.
“You gotta call ahead,” said the officer, whose face hung over his collar like a muffin top. He punched the button of his ballpoint pen several times. “You want the one I have for Thursday or not?”
“Take mine for today, Dan,” I said.
He stared at me. If I could have, I would have stared at myself. I had counted every minute that had stood between me and my son so I could see for myself that he hadn’t been devoured by the monsters behind these walls, and now I was giving away the chance to see him.
The officer clicked his pen again. “Y’can’t do that. It’s—” He glanced at a sheet on his side of the counter. “It’s Ryan Coe or nobody. Who’s it gonna be?”
“Go,” Dan said. “You’re what he needs.” He pointed to the tears starting to flow from his eyes. “He doesn’t need this.”
The officer stood up and jerked his head toward a steel door. As the door buzzed and clanked open, I looked back to say, “Don’t leave. Please,” but Dan was already nodding.
I was handed a visitor’s badge, which I dropped as I tried to walk and clip it on at the same time. The floor was gray and smelled like sour Clorox, and we had to pass through two sliding steel doors before I was finally told to sit on a long bench that ran the length of a fluorescent-lit room. Another bench faced it, and between them was a narrow table with a foot-high divider.
“Read the sign,” said Officer Number Two and sauntered off.
NO TOUCHING, KISSING, REACHING ACROSS THE DIVIDER, it said. At the other end, a skinny man with missing teeth and an infested-looking goatee was following those rules with a man in a suit who was taking notes. It made me wonder if Uriel Cohen had been to see Jake. She’d said she would when I talked to her the day before and begrudgingly apologized for sending her packing. She told me it happened all the time. It was all routine for her.
For me it was all surreal. I flattened my palms against the spasms in my thighs as the door before me slid open and Jake stood there, blinking, as if he’d just stepped out of a dark closet. The deputy had to point him to the bench. I stood up but was frowned back to my seat. Jake sank into his place and stared at the divider between us.
“Jake?” I said. “Son, are you all right?”
He clearly wasn’t. All the progress he’d made in our week together had been erased in less than seventy-two hours, leaving him unwashed, pulled in, and bleeding from his cuticles. The one thing that hadn’t disappeared was the shame and it yanked me from my own paralysis.
“Look at me,” I said.
“I can’t.”
“Then just listen. I love you, Jake, no matter what you did or didn’t do. Miguel’s death doesn’t change that. Nothing changes that. Do you understand?”
Jake did look at me then. I was crying—and he had never seen me cry.
“They won’t let me hug you in here,” I said, “but I would if I could. I should have done it a long time ago. I should have been there for you no matter how hard you tried to push me away. But I’m here now. Your dad and I aren’t going anywhere—no matter what you tell us about what happened—and you have to start talking now, Jake.” He planted the heels of his hands against his forehead and rocked back and forth. “She said there was a bomb.”
“Who said?”
“That lawyer.”
I clenched the edge of the table. “Uriel Cohen told you about the bomb?”
“It’s real, Mom,” he said, still rocking. “That’s why I can’t talk. Because it’s real.”
I sat still. “You know who planted it? You know who wrote the note?”
“I can’t tell you. I was gonna tell you everything before she told me that. Now I can’t.”
“Jake.”
“Just let it go, Mom. Please. Or somebody else’ll get hurt.”
“It was the same person who made you run over Miguel, wasn’t it?”
“I can’t—”
“Jake.” I leaned as close to the divider as I dared, and even then the deputy took a step forward. “Was it Ian?” I whispered. “Did you do it for him?”
Jake pulled his hands from his forehead and searched my face. “No, Mom,” he said finally. “I didn’t do it for Ian.”
I stopped breathing. Jake couldn’t lie, and he was telling me a truth I didn’t want to hear. I was still staring at him when the deputy tapped him on the shoulder.
“Time’s up,” he said. “Let’s go.”
Jake stood up, but he didn’t take his eyes from mine. They were waiting for something. Something I’d promised him only moments before.
“I still love you, no matter what,” I said. “I love you, and I’m not giving up on you. Do you believe me?”
The deputy took him by the arm, pulled him toward the barred door. Still Jake watched me. As the door slid open, he nodded.
Sully had already pulled into the plaza in the center of Old Mesilla when he realized he’d left his cell phone on his desk at the clinic. He glanced at Tess, who was tucking her hair up into a ponytail. The only person he wanted to talk to anyway was right here with him. Unless Porphyria called, of course. But Porphyria knew he was on what was hopefully the final leg of his journey and wasn’t expecting a call from him until tomorrow.
“You’re turning green, Crisp,” Tess said.
“Maybe I’m hungry,” he said.
She surveyed him with those eyes. “On the off chance that you’re not lying right now, let’s go to the Café don Felix. That’ll be a good place to start asking around anyway.”
She turned to open the passenger door, but Sully touched her arm. “Listen, thanks.”
“For what?”
“For coming with me. I’m a little nervous about this.”
“Crisp, you are not a little nervous. You are scared to death. I don’t need to know the details, but it’s quite obvious that if you do find this woman, it isn’t going to be pretty. Maybe you should tell me what my role’s going to be when this goes down.”
At least he’d thought that much through. “All I want to do today is locate her,” he said. “Then I’ll come back alone and—talk to her.”
Tess nodded, never moving her eyes from his. “I don’t know what she did to you, but I wouldn’t want to be her.”
“You could never be her,” Sully said.
Tess nodded as if she didn’t see him turning red from the collar up.
“I’m glad,” she said.
The Café don Felix was on the southeast corner of the plaza and oozed as much natural charm as the authentic old Mexican square itself. It had a good feel, which Sully needed. He was sweating profusely, and not just from the promise of jalapeños that arose from the salsa a little girl of about nine placed on the table between Tess and him.
“What can I get you?” she said. She had enormous blue eyes and wore a miniature apron with straws and an order pad in the pocket.
“Tell us what’s good,” Tess said. There was no wink to Sully, no isn’t-she-cute in her voice.
“All our tortillas are homemade and served hot, and our burritos and chimichangas are the best in Dona Ana County.” The girl pointed to the list of Mexican entrées on a white board. “I personally like the gorditas. They’re small, but very tasty.”
“Fix me up with an order of those, would you?” Sully said.
She lowered her chin at him. “You’re going to want two—unless you have rice and beans on the side.”
Sully knew he couldn’t eat any of it, but he couldn’t disappoint that face, either.
“How about if you make it two, and we’ll share,” Tess said. “With some french fries.”
“Oh, those are good too,” Mini-server said. “And what can I get you to drink?”
Tess shot a glance at Sully and said, “What do you have that’s disgustingly sweet?”
“That would be our fruit punch. I know because my mom won’t let me drink it.”
When she had skipped off, Sully let go of the grin he’d been holding back. “She was about half-cute.”
“She’s amazing. That girl is going places.”
“You’re good with kids.”
“You’ve seen me with one kid, Crisp.”
“I can tell, though.”
“And you want to know why I’ve never had any of my own.”
Sully paused, a chip midway between the basket and the salsa.
“We’ve already established that you’re translucent,” Tess said, but she laughed. “I’ve never had any kids because I never found anyone I wanted to have them with.”
Sully liked that answer. A lot. It made him able to eat the gordita Mini-server brought, as well as half the french fries. The only thing the child couldn’t do was handle the bill, for which they had to go to the woman at the register, presumably her mother.
Tess widened her eyes at Sully and nodded toward the woman.
Sully was immediately nauseated again. It was time to do what he’d come here to do.
The woman counted out his change and smiled. “Anything else I can help you with?”
“Well, yeah. We’re actually looking for someone, and we heard she works around here.”
“She’s probably been in, then.”
“Her name is—she’s known as Zahira.”
“Doesn’t ring a bell. I don’t know everyone’s name—I’m better at faces.”
Sully hesitated. He suddenly felt like someone posing as an FBI agent. “Belinda Cox?” he said.
She shook her head, and her eyes drifted to the woman coming in the front door. “Sorry. But I bet Angelina knows her. Ange—” She motioned to a robust woman with gray hair twirled to the top of her head and held in place with chopsticks. “These folks are looking for somebody named Zahira.”
Angelina’s eyes hardened. “She a friend of yours?”
“No,” Sully said.
“She’s not a friend of mine, either, just so we’re clear. She has a—well, I don’t know what to call it—a place down on Guadalupe Street. I don’t know what it was she was doing in there. She called herself a healer.”
“Oh, was that The Dark Mind?” the owner said. “I thought she was a psychic.”
Angelina grunted. “Psychics try to pump you up with this great future you’re going to have. All she talked about was how Satan was out to take everybody down.”
“You actually went in there?” Café Lady shuddered. “I thought it was kind of creepy.”
The front door opened again, and she picked up a stack of menus and left Sully and Tess with Angelina, who just seemed to be getting warmed up.
“So you say her place is on Guadalupe?” Tess looked at Sully. “I know where that is.”
“It was there,” Angelina said. “Landlord closed her down. She poured wet cement into the toilet to stop evil spirits from coming in through the plumbing.” She crossed her chest with a weathered hand. “I’m serious. He’s a friend of mine. Now, he could tell you stories.”
“So she’s left town?” Sully said, heart sinking.
“Not yet. She’s still in her house, which unfortunately is right across the street from mine, on Calle de Santo. Looks like she’s trying to sell it, although who knows what she’s done to that place. It’s got an eight-foot concrete wall all the way across the front yard.”
“Listen, thanks,” Sully said and edged toward the door.
“If you’ve come to get her out of town, more power to you,” Angelina said heartily. “This is a sweet little place. We don’t like her kind here, if you know what I mean.”
Unfortunately, Sully did.
As they crossed the patio, Sully could feel Tess looking at him curiously. He’d have been beyond curious if he’d been her. But at the moment, everything he ought to tell her was caught in his throat with the gorditas and the anxiety.
When they climbed into the Mini Cooper, she simply said, “If you turn right here and then right again, we’ll be on de Santo. You can do a drive-by.”
Could this woman get any more perfect?
He did what she said, slowing down after he made the second right.
“The way she was pointing, I think she meant it was beyond the plaza,” Tess said. “A house with an eight-foot wall in front of it shouldn’t be hard to miss.”
The neighborhood was quaint and clean, its pastel adobes warm and inviting in the afternoon sun. Some of them had hay bales stacked with pumpkins and gourds on their porches. Others beckoned with padded wood benches and windows reflecting fireplace flames from within. Belinda Cox didn’t belong here, just as Angelina said.
“There,” Tess said.
She pointed to a long, high wall on the right, which had been sloppily stuccoed and was interrupted only by a burnt-orange door sporting carved sunbursts. It might have been striking at one time, but the sun and the brutally dry air had blistered it beyond repair. A few feet of straggly weeds separated the wall from the road, so that if Sully had wanted to pull over and stop, even the Mini Cooper would have stuck out in the road.
“Looks like Angelina’s going to get her wish,” Tess said.
Sully nodded at the For Sale sign planted next to the door. A slat that read Pending hung from it, and it gave Sully a renewed sense of urgency.
“I’ll wait here if you want to try to see her now,” Tess said.
Sully shook his head and took his foot off the brake. “I’ll come back tomorrow. How about some dinner?”
“Crisp, we just ate.”
“I know. I just want to sit at a table with you and talk.”
“Then that’s what we’ll do. I can always eat.”
No, she couldn’t, and he knew it. She was just being progressively more perfect. And he wanted to tell her everything.