“I’m in my office right now,” I said. “Why don’t you come on down and we’ll talk about it?”
“Let me read it to you.”
“Leona,” I interrupted, “I don’t want to talk about this on the phone. I really don’t. Come on down and I’ll buy you a cup of coffee.”
“Well, now…maybe it could wait until morning.”
“If something’s on your mind, let’s get it cleared up,” I said pleasantly, and then I heard the unmistakable sound of water sloshing as a body changed position. The woman was lying in the goddamn bathtub, talking to me. “I’ll throw in a doughnut with the coffee. Or I can run over there, if you like. It’s about a minute away.”
“Not…just…now,” she said, and I could hear the smile. “Tell you what. Give me half an hour. I’ll be down.”
“And I’ll be here,” I said, and hung up. “Christ,” I muttered. Leona Spears was an engineer in the state highway department’s district office, and how she’d managed to wrangle the Democratic Party’s endorsement for the third time to run in the sheriff’s race I didn’t know.
Before that she’d unsuccessfully chased a county commissioner’s spot a couple of times and before that had lost a narrow race for a seat on the village council. Mixed in with all those disappointing election nights was an attempt or two at the school board. I wasn’t sure what the voters didn’t like about her, but evidently there was something. We had damn good highways, though.
And whoever was writing the notes about Thomas Pasquale considered her a candidate serious enough to be included in the little game. One thing I did know about Leona Spears-and maybe the author of the notes did, too-she was a regular contributor to the “Letters to the Editor” column in the Posadas Register, eager to vent her opinions on everything from child care to foreign policy.
I glanced at my watch again, hesitated, and dialed long-distance. It was almost 11:00 p.m. in Minnesota, but both Estelle and her physician husband were night owls. The phone rang five times with no response from either human or answering machine, and I was beginning to imagine the young couple sitting out in the backyard of their neat two-story house in Westridge, watching the display of northern lights while their two kids snoozed in the upstairs garret, their bedroom curtains hanging limp in the humid air.
What Estelle and Francis probably didn’t need just then was an interruption from New Mexico or anywhere else, and on the seventh ring I had started to put the receiver back in the cradle when I heard the familiar voice, clipped and efficient as always.
“Hello.”
“Francis, this is Bill Gastner.”
“Hey, hey, padrino,” Francis Guzman said, and then I could hear a hand muffle the receiver as he turned and shouted, “Estelle…it’s Bill!” The hand was removed, and he added, “It’s good to hear your voice, you know that?”
“Thanks. I hope I didn’t haul you out of bed, but I was returning Estelle’s call. How are you folks doing?”
“Well…OK, all things considered. It’s been hot and muggy. I’m not sure we’re used to the muggy part yet. I keep checking to make sure I don’t have mold growing in my armpits.”
“Green chili is the cure for everything, Doctor. That’s a scientific fact.”
“Yep, I suppose. And by the way, that last CARE package you sent was appreciated.” I heard the mumble of another voice, and Francis said, “You been all right?”
“Well, as you say…all things considered, which I’d rather not do at this point.”
“No sleep, too much food from the Don Juan, and lots of stress. Is that about right?”
I laughed. “Close enough, Doctor. It seems to be the magic combination for me.”
“We should fly you up here so folks at the clinic can study you,” Francis said. “Find out how you do it.”
“I’ll pass, thanks.”
There was more mumbling in the background that brought a chuckle from Francis. “Here’s Estelle. She keeps trying to pull the receiver out of my hand. Take care of yourself, Bill.”
“You, too.” I leaned back in the chair, making myself comfortable.
“Sir.” Estelle’s voice was soft and alto. “I hope things are going better for you than what Ernie Wheeler described.”
“They’re not. In fact, probably a good deal worse. But what else is new, sweetheart? How are you doing? How’s your mother?”
Estelle laughed, and I found that was the easiest expression of hers to bring to mind-the way her face lit up around those enormous dark eyes. “Remarkable might be the best word,” she said. “She’s not using the walker anymore. And the humidity doesn’t seem to bother her as much as the rest of us. Who knows why?”
“Maybe she got so desiccated living those eighty years in the Mexican desert that she can soak up more humidity than the ordinary person,” I said.
“Now that’s an interesting theory.”
“My only one. But let me get right to the ‘it’s none of my business’ part. I noticed the sign was down over on Twelfth Street. Maggie Payson tells me that you guys took it off the market.”
“Yes.” The one word carried more than just a simple nod of the head, and I got the sense that Estelle was weighing carefully just what she wanted to say. “We did that last week, sir.”
“You’re keeping an old man in suspense, Estelle.”
“How so?”
“Well, my razor-sharp detective’s mind leaps to a logical conclusion. If a family doesn’t want to sell their house, maybe it means that they want to live in it. Again. Sometime.”
Estelle sounded amused. “Or that they have a poor relative who wants to use it. Or they want to use it for rental property.”
“You don’t have any relatives in this neck of the woods, poor or rich. And owning a single-family rental from two thousand miles away doesn’t make any sense, either, unless someone else is going to manage it for you. What’s up?”
“Nothing yet, sir. Really. We’re just not sure right now. It’s going to take some time. Maybe in a month or two, we’ll know more.”
I frowned, not liking the sound of that. “Cheer up,” I said. “In four months, the snow will be stacked up so deep around your front door that you’ll long for some Posadas dust. That’ll make up your mind for you.”
“It’s not really that, sir.”
“Then what is it?” I said with a trace of impatience. “You sound like something’s wrong.”
There was a short silence, and I could hear Estelle take a deep breath-more of a sigh of resignation. “I guess in part it depends on how Francis’s hand heals up, but in the past few days we’ve been thinking that isn’t it, either, really.”
“His hand?”
“I guess I didn’t tell you, sir.”
“No, I guess you didn’t.”
“Francis has been riding his bike to work. He enjoys that. Some klutz driving a van cut him a little close and smacked him in the shoulder with the wing mirror.”
“Ouch.”
“He lost his balance and crashed into a parked car. His left hand got cut up pretty badly. There was some tendon damage.”
“For God’s sakes. Permanent, you mean?”
“We don’t know for sure yet. The clinic has been wonderful, as you can imagine.” She made a little sound that was half laugh, half hum of reminiscence. “But what got us talking was something Mama said one evening, not too many days after the accident. We were talking about just the sheer number of people in a place like this. We’re six miles from where Francis works and our house here would probably be considered rural by most eastern standards, but there are always people. People, people, people. At any intersection it seems like there’s always a car or two, you know what I mean? And of course, downtown Rochester is a different universe altogether.”