Welcome Back to Pie Town Page 3

  Trina tried to get away, moving first near the sink and then over toward the hallway.

  “Come back here,” he said, reaching for her, and when she found herself trapped in front of the stove where the water was boiling for spaghetti, he grabbed her by the arms.

  “Raymond, stop!” she screamed. “You’re hurting me.” But her plea had done no good.

  She had tried to pull away, and when she did he let go and she fell back into the pot of hot water, knocking it over and spilling the contents onto her back and down her legs. When she tried to run away, he reached for her again and then slipped and fell, hitting his head on the edge of the counter. Trina managed to flee to the rear of the house, grab Alexandria from her crib, and run to the bathroom, knowing it was the only room in the house that had a lock on the door.

  She knelt down by the sink, her lower back and legs still burning from the hot water spilled on her. Cradling Alexandria, she listened as he came to the door, trying to unlock it, begging for forgiveness, saying he was sorry.

  Trina had stayed in that position for over an hour, maybe two, trying to understand how it was that she had landed in that place, landed in that predicament, how she had missed the signs of impending violence. After a childhood spent living with a heavy-handed father and seeing her mother’s scars, her mother’s brokenness because of domestic violence, Trina had always guarded herself against abusive men. She had known the signs, the patterns, and had stayed away from any man who resembled her father; she had always avoided the controlling kind of boyfriend. She had been smart and alert and had promised herself that she would never be a victim, that she would never find herself landing in the place where she was. As she felt the burns on her back and her legs, as she sat crouched behind the door, she could not understand how the one thing she had promised herself had come to pass after all.

  She glanced down at Alexandria. The baby, having been grabbed from her crib and awakened so frightfully, had finally cried herself to sleep. Being a mother herself now had made her even stronger, even more unwilling to be in an abusive relationship, and even though she didn’t think Raymond was like her father, a violent and misogynistic man, she knew she had to take care of her daughter; she had to make sure Alexandria was safe. After this incident, Trina was no longer sure whether it was possible to live in the same house with Raymond.

  Trina thought she had heard the back door open and close, then the sound of Raymond’s dirt bike pulling out of the driveway not long after he had come to the bathroom door, but she had been too afraid to look out and see. Finally, when the lights went out and there were no sounds for what seemed to her to be a very long time, after she found her courage and recognized her resolve not to be victimized by anyone, she quietly stood up, opened the door, and peeked out into the hallway.

  It was dark, and she took a breath and headed out beyond the bathroom. When she made it to the kitchen, she could see that the back door had been left open. She glanced out, Alexandria asleep in her arms, and saw that the dirt bike was gone. She and the baby were alone.

  PART TWO

  SIX

  When the phone rang, Roger couldn’t tell what time it was. The light on the alarm clock was blinking, evidence that the power had come on sometime while he and Malene had been sleeping. He rubbed his eyes and reached for the phone. He blinked and could see it was not yet light outside.

  “Sheriff Benavidez,” he answered.

  “Sheriff,” came the voice on the other end, “it’s Danny.” The caller waited for an acknowledgment.

  “What’s wrong?” Roger asked, glancing at his watch. It was just before seven o’clock in the morning.

  “We got a robbery,” Danny reported. “Figured it happened sometime last night or early this morning. I’m at the scene.”

  Roger sat up. Malene stirred.

  “Where?” Roger asked.

  “Datil, the Silver Spur,” came the reply.

  Roger knew the location. It was a bar where a lot of the folks from the county liked to hang out. He knew the owners, Gilbert and Oscar Diaz. The brothers ran a legitimate business, and there was usually not much trouble at the local watering hole. He had just checked on them earlier the previous day when he drove the federal officers over to Alamo. The bar was on his way back to Pie Town.

  “Gilbert called it in,” Danny added. “He’s pretty hot. Wants you to come down here. He says he knows who did it and he wants you to take care of it.”

  “Can’t you handle it?” he asked, glancing over at his wife and wondering if he should wake her.

  “He says he deserves to have the sheriff handling his complaint, doesn’t want to deal with me,” Danny replied. “He wants you to come down here and then go out and get the guy he says did it.”

  Roger sighed. “You see any evidence to support his identification of the thief?”

  “I haven’t seen anything that looks like evidence,” Danny answered. “Except I did find a gun in the Dumpster.”

  “A gun?” Roger asked, sounding surprised. “What kind of gun?”

  “Small pistol, Model 10.”

  Roger paused.

  “You wearing gloves?” The sheriff was concerned about compromising the scene.

  There was no immediate answer.

  “Got ’em on right now,” Danny replied sheepishly.

  Roger shook his head. He understood what just happened. “How does Gilbert know who did it?” he asked.

  “He says there was some trouble here last night, and he’s convinced that the troublemaker came back to steal from him.”

  Roger dropped his head on the pillow. It was not how he wanted to start his day. “Give me about half an hour and I’ll be down there. Try and keep everybody away from the crime scene. Tell Gilbert he’s going to have to close today.”

  “Yeah, I already did that. He wasn’t too happy,” Danny explained. “Today is pay day, you know.”

  Roger rubbed his eyes again. He remembered it was the last day of the month, and usually that was a banner day for bar and lottery business.

  “Don’t you want to know who Gilbert is accusing?” Danny asked.

  “Sounds like you’re going to tell me.” Roger waited. “I’m listening.”

  Malene rolled over and stretched. She peered at the clock, the numbers blinking, and then at her watch. When she realized the time, she jumped out of the bed. She was going to be late for work.

  “Raymond Twinhorse. He and some other guy got in a fight. Gilbert threw them both out, but he says Raymond didn’t want to go. He says he had to physically push him out the door, and when he did Raymond promised he would be back, made some lame threats. He also says it was Raymond’s gun in the Dumpster, had it with him last night waving it around.”

  Deputy White stopped, and Roger could hear somebody talking in the background. “I told him,” Danny said to whoever was at the scene listening to the conversation. More than likely Gilbert, Roger thought.

  Roger rolled out of bed and sat on the edge. This was news he didn’t want to hear. He had been concerned about his friend Frank’s son ever since Raymond got home from the hospital. He could see the boy was changed by whatever happened to him in battle. Roger had noticed that cold, distant look in Raymond’s eyes as soon as he got home, even at the homecoming party. Malene had tried to dismiss it, said Raymond was just medicated for the pain, tired from the weeks in the hospital, but Roger knew it was much more than that.

  He recognized what was going on from the look he had seen in the eyes of lots of other veterans over the years. Shrinks and doctors had finally come up with a name for what was causing that look, PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder, but Roger had seen the violence and despair, the trauma and the consequences, long before there was a name for this mental illness.

  He had arrested and driven violent, traumatized men to the VA Hospital in Albuquerque ever since American troops had pulled out of Vietnam in the late 1970s. Since the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, he had seen an escalation of all kin
ds of problems across New Mexico among the young people who had been discharged from the military, including drugs, domestic violence, and suicide.

  Because he had been worried about Raymond as soon as he first laid eyes on him, Roger had warned Trina about the risks of moving in together before giving Raymond a chance to settle back home on his own. Even though he had agreed to let them rent his house, he had not thought it was a good idea for them to live together. He worried about his young friend and her daughter, and he had told her so.

  “You still there?” Danny asked.

  “Yeah, I’m still here,” Roger replied. “Look, I’ll be there in a little while. No need trying to find Raymond just yet.”

  “All right, Sheriff, your call. I’ll go ahead and seal the area and try to keep Gilbert from selling beers to the onlookers.”

  “Thanks, Danny. Oh, and don’t go broadcasting this information until I’ve had a chance to review everything. I don’t want every business owner in Catron County thinking we got a thief running loose or somebody making the decision that they ought to go find Raymond on their own. Hearing this kind of information just makes people crazy.”

  “Got it.”

  “I mean it, Danny. No calls to your buddies.”

  “Got it, Sheriff, over and out.”

  Roger reached over and hung up the phone. He heard Malene in the shower and stood up, grabbing his uniform from the chair next to the bed. He dressed, already resigned to the fact that it was going to be another long day.

  SEVEN

  Father George awoke early. Glancing at the battery-operated clock on the nightstand, he could see that it was a few minutes after seven in the morning. The sun was just rising. He considered staying in bed a bit longer, thinking he might go back to sleep, but then decided, after counting the hours he had already been sleeping, that he had had enough rest and wanted to begin his day. He had a sermon to write, a premarital counseling session to plan, and a few visits to make before the noon Mass.

  He got out of bed and headed to the kitchen to heat the water for his morning tea. As he walked to the stove, he was thinking about breakfast, wondering if there was enough milk for cereal or whether he should just boil an egg, when he glanced out the window that opened onto the parking lot that stretched between the rectory and the Holy Family Church. A truck was parked near the front door of the church, the entryway that opened into the narthex and led into the sanctuary. He immediately recognized it as Trina’s vehicle, the truck given to her by Frank when she started working with him at the garage earlier in the year.

  It was an old pickup, broken down and worthless to the rancher who had towed it over to the garage, but valuable to the garage owner. Frank had tinkered with it for months, rebuilding the engine, rewiring the whole system, getting it a new paint job, new tires, and he had created a decent-looking vehicle. Father George remembered how pleased Trina had been with the gift. The day Frank surprised her with the truck’s title she had driven over to the rectory, insisting that the priest was to be her first passenger. She was very proud of that truck because she had also been involved in getting it to run again. The truck had been her classroom while she learned about auto mechanics. Frank had used the opportunity to rebuild the engine and get it working again to teach his young apprentice everything he knew about cars and trucks.

  George glanced around the church parking lot, the area around the rectory, and could see no other vehicles. The church doors were closed, and there were no lights on inside. He couldn’t figure out what Trina was doing at the church and where she was at that specific moment since he could see the truck was empty.

  Had Trina driven over last night? Had she just parked and then walked home? Had someone stolen her truck and abandoned it in the church parking lot? And what about Alexandria? Who was with the baby if Trina was at the church that early in the morning? All kinds of questions filled his mind, and he started to feel a bit anxious as he found some clothes, dressed, and made his way over to the church.

  The congregation had decided as soon as the new Holy Family Church was built that there would be no locks on the doors. Even though the first building had burned down after trespassers broke in, lit some candles, and left them burning, it became a matter of principle, of hospitality, to the people of Pie Town to keep the doors unlocked at all times. They did put visible signs on the front and rear doors reminding visitors to extinguish any candles they might have lit and to turn off the lights before leaving, but they didn’t want to restrict the availability of the town’s sacred gathering space. They wanted Holy Family Church to be a place of respite and solace and worship at anytime for anybody.

  For the first year the open-door policy had been in place, no one had abused the church’s hospitality. There had been no more fires and no misuse of the building. George knew that a few people drove or walked from town to use the church for meditation and prayer, and other people came and went as well, all throughout the daylight hours and the evenings. However, no one George knew of had been in the sanctuary overnight or at that hour in the morning. He found himself hurrying across the parking lot as he headed to the church.

  He opened the front door and stepped inside. It was dark and quiet, and he hesitated to turn on any lights for fear that he would disturb whoever might be there. He stood at the door and waited until his eyes adjusted to the darkness. Then, as he panned across the sanctuary, he could see the body of someone lying near the altar. The figure was small and appeared to be a woman; apprehensive about her condition, he switched on the overhead lights.

  Instantly, he could see it was indeed Trina, and it seemed something was terribly wrong. She struggled to lift herself up.

  “My God, what happened?” He hurried to the young woman’s side, and as he came closer to her he glanced over and saw the baby wrapped in blankets, carefully laid on the first pew. He made his way to the young woman, but when he reached out to her she started to pull away from him. She began shaking her head, but didn’t explain why she was in the sanctuary and what was wrong.

  “What happened?” he repeated, trying to understand what she was doing there. “Are you okay? Is something wrong with Alexandria?” He peered over at the baby, but she seemed to be resting comfortably, unharmed. He turned again to Trina, who had stood up. He couldn’t see any physical evidence that anything was wrong.

  “She’s fine,” Trina finally answered. “I didn’t know where else to go.”

  “Did something happen?” he asked.

  She waited and then, without explanation, turned away from him and lifted her blouse. Immediately he could see the injuries. The skin across her back and legs was dark and red.

  “Trina,” he said, staring at the burns, “what on earth . . . ? What happened?” And then, “Let me call an ambulance,” he said. “Let me call 911.” He started to head to his office.

  Trina reached out, grabbing George by the sleeve. “No,” she said. “No calls.”

  Father George was at a loss. He stood, watching Trina, trying to understand what was going on and what he should do. He could see she had been hurt, and it appeared as if something had spilled on her: the hair on the back of her head was damp and matted, and her clothes were stiff. He knew that her injuries needed to be assessed and tended to by a medical professional, but he also knew that she had come to the church for protection and that for whatever reason she did not want to contact the authorities.

  “Can you tell me what happened?” he asked. “How long have you been here?”

  She didn’t answer. And without pressing her any further for information, Father George led her to the front pew, sat down with her, and waited until the morning light began to pour through the windows.

  Finally, the priest spoke again. “Trina, I think we need to get you to the hospital. These burns on your back, they may be serious.” He pulled away from her, hoping she would let him get a better look. When she didn’t, he simply touched her forehead, smoothed down her hair, and held her face in his hands.r />
  “What happened? Did you have an accident?”

  And then, as soon as he asked that question, he noticed something about the way she wouldn’t look him in the eye, and that led him to have another thought, to ask another question.

  “Trina, did somebody hurt you?” he asked, his voice breaking. “You have to tell me so I can help you,” he added.

  Tears fell down the young woman’s cheeks, and she turned aside, making sure the baby was still safe, still unharmed, and then turned again to face Father George. She swallowed and finally spoke with a clarity the priest could hear and understand.

  “He didn’t mean it” was all she could say.

  EIGHT

  A lizard, a small one, darted across the top of Raymond’s hand. He stirred, feeling around where he lay, touching the hard place beneath him where he had spent the night. He blinked a few times and then sat up. Glancing around, he tried to recall what had happened, and where he was.

  He was in the desert, but upon first waking, he was having a difficult time remembering exactly which desert he was in. Was he still in Afghanistan? Was he still in battle? He reached for his gun, which wasn’t there, and peered down to see what he was wearing. He was not dressed in fatigues. He tried to remember, but his mind was foggy. He shook his head, hoping to gain some clarity. He looked around again, gathering clues.

  The mountains surrounding him were familiar. That was Horse Peak to the east, he thought. Eagle Peak stood to his south. He recognized them, knew them by name. A coyote barking in the distance, the hawks flying overhead, juniper bushes, mesquite . . . he counted the things that he knew, that he remembered, and finally concluded he was at home; he was stateside, outside somewhere in Catron County.

  His mouth was dry. His head hurt. His back was sore, and his knee, still healing from the surgeries, ached. He felt in his pockets and realized he had no water or pain pills with him. He took a breath and slid over to a large rock near his head and leaned against it. How did I ever get here? he asked himself.