“So nice to meet you,” Madelyn said, and offered her hand. “I’m Madelyn Bolles.”
Betty eyed the laptop, impressed. “I read your magazine, every single issue. I think it’s just wonderful,” Betty gushed, then wagged a finger. “You do a good job with that article, now. We all know this young lady, and we’ll all be reading between the lines.”
Madelyn smiled broadly. “That’s the kind of readers we like, Mrs. Contreras. I’ll do my best. And your bread smells scrumptious.”
“Come back for more.”
“I may just do that.”
As Estelle backed the car out of the driveway, Madelyn Bolles once more folded up her portable office. She patted the top of the bread loaf.
“Bribery, eh?”
“Absolutely,” Estelle replied. “And I hope you didn’t mind being introduced. I allowed myself to be trapped.”
“That’s hard to believe. Was it a productive chat?”
Estelle sighed. “Maybe. Maybe it was.”
Chapter Twenty-five
“No,” Sheriff Torrez said, with a curt shake of the head. Madelyn Bolles held up both hands in surrender. She had followed Estelle down the hallway behind Dispatch, toward Sheriff Robert Torrez’s office, but the sheriff would have none of it. He let the one word suffice, offering no explanation.
“I’ll be out in Dispatch,” Madelyn said.
“You can wait in my office,” Estelle said. “I shouldn’t be long.”
The reporter shook her head. “I don’t want to intrude. I’ll be outside.”
In the sheriff’s minimal office, Ricardo Ynostroza sat on one of the metal folding chairs, his back against the filing cabinet. His hands were still handcuffed behind his back, and he leaned forward uncomfortably. He looked from Estelle to Bob Torrez and then to Deputy Jackie Taber, who had eschewed the hard folding chairs and instead stood with her back against the windowsill, two steps from the young man. As Estelle closed the door, the deputy stepped forward and unlocked the handcuffs, and the young man rubbed his wrists gratefully.
“So,” Estelle said, and opened her notebook. “Señor Ynostroza. We’re a little confused by your behavior today.”
He sat motionless and silent. Deputy Taber had reported that Ynostroza hadn’t said a word on the ride from Regál to Posadas. “The authorities in Buenaventura tell us that you had a little trouble last week,” Estelle said. He didn’t answer but shifted a bit in his chair. “They say that they’d like to talk to you about the theft of a 1987 Chevrolet Caprice,” she said. Jackie Taber’s notes said that the car had been targeted by the car thief less than a week after its purchase.
“I gave it back,” Ynostroza said.
“Well, that’s okay, then,” Torrez said.
“Not entirely in one piece, however,” Estelle added, and Ynostroza hunched his shoulders with contrition. “So, talk to us.” She handed him the photograph of his woodcutter companion, and he promptly dropped it as he bent sharply forward, face buried in his hands. “Tell us what happened that day,” she said. “This past Thursday.”
“That is how I left him,” the young man whimpered. “I could do nothing.”
“Tell us how it happened.”
“We were cutting the wood,” he said. “Up the tree, so…,” and he straightened up enough to swing his hands back and forth, mimicking the motions of nicking the limbs off the trunk. “It…,” and English failed him. He slipped into Spanish, the words a torrent. Estelle let him wind down.
“The saw kicked back,” she said for the benefit of the others. “And then he lost his balance when it was still running. He couldn’t get away from the chain.” She knew that Jackie Taber didn’t speak Spanish and Bob Torrez’s facility had grown rusty over the years. “Where were you when it kicked back?” she asked.
“I went…I had went…to the truck for the gasoline. He said he was nearly ready. Then I hear his cry. He…he is tambaleándose?”
“He staggered?”
“Yes…he hold himself, but the blood…madre de Dios.”
“What did you do?”
“I ran to him and tried…I ran to him and he is this stagger, and I help him away. Nothing he does can hold the blood, agente,” he said, looking beseechingly at Estelle. “I want to go to the truck, but he is crying, presa del pánico. It is like he is trying to escape? He is trying to escape from this thing. He is all white, and fights like the madman. Finally I am able to make him sit down, and I see what the saw has done.”
He bent forward once more, both hands clamped on his mouth.
“Jackie, get a towel. I don’t want him pukin’ on my floor,” Torrez said.
Estelle retrieved the photo of the dead woodcutter as the deputy stepped around her. “And that’s where he died, leaning against the tree?”
“Yes.” The voice from behind the hands was small and hopeless.
“Why did you run away, Ricardo?” she asked.
“How can I stay? We have no papers. If I stay, when they come, they will ask. And I know that I can do nothing.”
“You had no phone, I suppose? No way to call for help.”
“No, agente.”
“Why didn’t you take the truck for help?” Torrez asked.
“I have no papers, and it is not my truck,” the young man said again. “I knew there could be trouble.”
“We don’t mean steal the truck, Ricardo. But you could have driven for help.”
“But I see Felix is unconscious in just a minute or two. I see…there is nothing that I can do that will help him. Even if the help come that very moment, there would be no time. The hospital is so very far away.…I see that it is hopeless. And I cannot move him to the truck by myself. He cannot walk.”
Deputy Taber returned and handed Ynostroza a white towel. He wiped his eyes and then clutched the wadded towel in his lap. “If I take the truck, they will look for me. If I just go…” And he held out a thumb. “Then they won’t look.”
“So you walked out to the highway and caught a ride?”
“Yes. That is what I did.”
“You didn’t tell anyone about Felix? That he was lying out there all by himself, bleeding to death?”
Ynostroza flinched as if Estelle had slapped him. “Señor Zamora had says that he was going to stop by, maybe five o’clock?”
“What time did the accident happen?”
“Maybe thirty minutes after four? I am not certain. It was late in the afternoon. We were both tired. Señor Zamora had taken out two full loads with the big truck that day, one just then. We were to fill the pickup, and that would be the end. We had work since Monday afternoon.”
“And this was Thursday afternoon?”
“Yes.”
“Where did you go, Ricardo? When you left Felix, where did you go?”
“No one came right away. Then I think I hear the sirens, and I went down to the river. I walk along it until dark.”
“Which river is this?” Torrez asked.
“I don’t know what it is called.”
The sheriff reached to the small metal bookcase to the right of his desk, and pulled out a battered paperbound state atlas. In a moment, he spun the open book around on his desk and beckoned Ynostroza to look. “This is Reserve,” he said, tapping the map. “You were somewhere in here?”
Ynostroza frowned, bending awkwardly over the desk. “Yes. Now I see what I did.” He pointed to a spot on the map.
“So you walked down along the Tularosa,” Torrez said. “That ain’t easy.”
“It was very hard,” Ynostroza said fervently, as if his efforts to follow the winding little creek were somehow heroic.
“If you’d stayed along the river, you’d still be up there,” the sheriff said. “Where’d you go?”
“I knew where the road was, agente, far to the west. So just before dark, I walk to the highway, and then through the town. A woman offered me a ride south, but she was going to Mogollon. I did not want to go there.”