Anna Hocking’s little adobe house on County Road 19 was waiting for me…at least that’s the way it seemed. I drove out Bustos Avenue, now dark except for the sea of lights that illuminated the new car lot around Chavez Chevrolet-Olds. Across the road, Hamburger Heaven had been out of business now for almost two years, and just beyond the joint’s remains I turned onto County Road 19. Inside the village, the street was called Camino del Sol. At the county line, it lost that pretension.
The macadam turned to dirt with gravel kicked to the shoulders, roller-coastering through a series of dips and tight curves as it avoided the worst of Arroyo del Cerdo. When a summer flood in 1952 had turned the arroyo into a raging, crashing torrent, the brown tide took away most of Ellis Pacheco’s pig farm, carrying the squealers right into town where their bloated corpses decorated the town square.
If nothing else, the storm produced a name for the arroyo. And Ellis didn’t learn. He rebuilt his pens within a few feet of the newly cut arroyo edge.
At the top of a rise, I drove quietly past Valerio’s Mobile Home Park. When Consolidated Mining decided Posadas wasn’t worth another stick of dynamite, they shut down their copper pit without warning, putting 460 miners on the dole. Within a month, most of the miners had left for richer ore bodies. Trailers left parks like water through a busted dam. Valerio’s was down to the last three residents. A single sodium vapor light glared harshly at the entrance. Despite the December chill, I buzzed the window down. The place was dark and silent.
On the opposite side of the road were two acres of ministorage barns, empty for years and starting to crumble. A local contractor owned them and showed no interest in doing anything other than letting the property molder.
Just beyond the great blotchy plywood sail that had been a drive-in movie screen was another mobile home park. The berms of the drive-in, minus speaker poles, were all that remained of the former and a few bent and twisted utility boxes marked the remains of the park.
At one time, this end of Posadas had been bustling, growing so fast that folks were even talking about a mall. Now, not much holiday cheer radiated out Camino del Sol.
I passed an abandoned wrecking yard and yet a third mobile home park on the left. Two trailers remained there, both dark and silent. I saw one car in the driveway of Miriam Sloan’s trailer. Over the years the tires of Posadas County Sheriff’s Department cars had about worn arroyos to her door, cursed as she was with a little heller for a son and a boyfriend who had cornered the market on stupidity.
Finally, half hidden under elms gone to twig and brush, was Anna Hocking’s place.
I drove slowly past. Sixty-five years ago, before the junk moved in to fester along the county road right to this front doorstep, the tiny adobe had graced the bunch grass hills as headquarters for the Hocking ranch.
Abe Hocking’s place was nearly a thousand acres and four miles from the Posadas Village Square. He’d talked Anna Guilcrest into marrying him, sired a couple children, raised some of the finest Hereford stock in the southwest, and even talked about building a bigger, grander house up the arroyo a thousand yards near the summer shade of the mesa.
One summer evening in 1942, Abe Hocking sipped a little too much mescal, a drink of which he was inordinately fond, and drove his 1936 Ford pickup into the arroyo just about where the turnoff to the drive-in theater now scarred the sand. The truck wasn’t too banged up, but Abe’s window had been open and he was partly in and partly out when the truck rolled the second time. The young widow took up school teaching that fall and didn’t retire until 1979.
A half mile beyond the Hocking place I slowed, found a wide spot in the road and turned around. I switched off the headlights and let the Ford idle back down the road. A hundred yards from the adobe I stopped, buzzed down the passenger side windows, and turned off the engine.
In the distance a dog yipped and then fell silent. A mile southeast of Posadas and three miles from where I had parked, the interstate exchange was a sea of bright yellow vapor lights. I could see the running lights of trucks on the highway, but the breeze carried their constant drone away from me.
Anna Hocking’s house was a dark lump against the night sky, featureless and empty. After ten minutes I started the car and let it idle along the gravel. I didn’t pull into the driveway. When I got out of the car the December night was cold enough to make me wish I’d worn a heavier coat. I took my briefcase and flashlight and walked to the back porch.
This time when I jimmied the back door I let it swing open and didn’t enter. My flashlight beam shot down the narrow hallway and I could see into the kitchen to the left. I knelt and with the flashlight an inch from the linoleum let the beam sweep the hallway floor. The old vinyl was clean except for the dust filigree along the baseboards.
I ignored the kitchen and went to the utility room, turning on the ceiling light as I entered. The door to the cellar was closed tight, just as Bob Torrez and I had left it. I turned the knob and pulled it open. The same musty smell greeted me. With care I reached up and touched one of the cobwebs. I knew that some spiders, particularly house spiders and widows, were sloppy web spinners. These webs were both sloppy and profuse. A thick strand floated next to the wall on the right side of the stairwell, attached only to one of the ceiling rafters.
With care I walked down the stairs and stopped at the bottom. The cellar floor was dirt and our bootprints were clear. I counted four sets…mine, Emerson Clark’s, and the two EMT’s. None belonged to Anna Hocking. When she’d hit the floor she was either dead or too hurt to move.
I turned, examining the floor. There were no other footprints. I frowned. I wanted a photograph of the cellar floor but I was rapidly reaching the limit of my photographic expertise. Leaving the manual 35mm in the briefcase, I selected the little instant camera with auto everything. I held it down low, no more than a foot off the floor, and shot obliquely across the cellar. Maybe the wash of the flash would highlight the slight impressions left behind by the foot traffic.
I took several photos, including a series of the dust-covered jars on the shelves, then concentrated on the stairs and stairwell. Again the cobwebs fascinated me. None of them hung down low enough to touch Anna Hocking on the head had she been standing on the stairs at that moment. They hadn’t touched me either…and at five feet ten inches I was a head taller than Mrs. Hocking.
Having finished the roll of film I climbed back up to the utility room. I placed my briefcase on the washing machine, turned around, and folded my arms, leaning against the machine.
My pulse was beating a little faster but not because of exertion. I was trying to formulate some answers to impossible questions when I heard a car pull into the driveway. I stretched over and quickly flicked off the utility room light, the only one I had turned on.
Walking to the kitchen as lightly as my considerable girth would allow, I looked out the window. The low burble of the exhausts was familiar. When Bob Torrez opened the door of his patrol car I heard him say quietly, “You better stay there.”
I relaxed and went to meet the deputy at the back door, first turning on the utility room light again so it flooded out into the hallway.
Torrez grinned when he saw me. “Couldn’t sleep, sir?”
“No. And how’d you know I was here?”
“We were just cruising back up this way. We saw your car.”
“Come on in. I’ve got a couple of questions to ask you.”
Torrez closed the screen door behind him. “About what, sir?” he asked as he followed me back to the utility room.
“You said you were out here last week?”
“That’s right.”
“When the two of you were finished talking about ghosts and she offered you the jar of jam, did she already have it upstairs? Or did she go down and get it?”
Torrez shook his head and looked at me, puzzled. “I went down and got it.”
“You did.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Show me.”
“What do you mean?”
“Show me what you did. Do just what you did last week.”
The deputy glanced at the door to the cellar. “Well, I just walked over here—”
“Where was she?”
“In the living room. She didn’t get up out of her chair, even. She said she was feeling a little lame.”
“And you knew right where the cellar door was?”
“Yes. I’ve been here before.”
“Ever been down in the cellar before?”
Torrez shook his head. “No. But I fixed her washing machine for her once.” He saw the expression on my face and said quickly, “It was just leaking a little from the hot water fitting. I just tightened it. While I was doing that, she went down and got a jar.”
“You saw her do that?”
“Sure. But that was six months ago or so. She was getting around better then.”
“All right.” I gestured at the door. “Show me.”
He opened the cellar door and hesitated. “I hate these things,” he said, so quietly I almost didn’t hear him. He ducked down low, flinching away from the cobwebs. When he was halfway down the stairs I told him to stop. He did so, still scrunched. He turned his head to look back at me.
“Is that the way you went down there last week?”
“What do you mean?”
“All hunched over like that.”
He nodded.
“Don’t like spiders much?”
He made a face. The nearest web was almost three feet over his head.
“Go on down.” I followed him into the cellar. “Anything changed?”
He scanned the shelves and the jars and then shook his head. “No. You can see where the jar was that I took.”
“Uh-huh. Did you happen to notice the floor when you were down here?”
“No.” This time he did glance down.
“That’s one reason I came back out here. There were four sets of footprints in this nice, fine dust.” I knelt down and rubbed some of the dirt between my fingers. “Mine, Clark’s, and the two ambulance attendants.” Bob Torrez looked sideways at me. “And none of your size thirteens. You see how visible they are in places? You didn’t come down here earlier tonight.” I smiled. “And now I know why.
Las arañas
aren’t your favorite beasties, are they?”
He grinned sheepishly.
“But now tell me why your bootprints aren’t here from a week ago.”
When he was finished examining the dirt floor, he sat back on his haunches. “I don’t know, sir. Maybe she swept the place since then.”
“You don’t believe that and neither do I. Someone who doesn’t bother to dust off food storage jars isn’t going to bother with a dirt floor.”
“Maybe she’s got one of those volunteers from the Department of Human Services who does cleaning.”
“Sure. Including sweeping a dirt fruit cellar floor? I don’t think so.”
“What are you thinking, sir?”
“I don’t know. At first I got to wondering about the cobwebs. I didn’t have to sweep them aside. I figured that you did that a few days ago. But after I saw your performance just now—”
“They were practically in my face last week.”
“Yeah, but your face is about two feet higher than Anna Hocking’s.”
“Maybe she flailed her arms as she was falling.”
“Flail, Robert? She was eighty-six years old. I can’t picture it.”
“You’re saying that someone swept the tracks smooth? Even took a sweep at the cobwebs?”
“Maybe.”
“The doors weren’t locked and latched when you first came?”
“Yes,” I said, then thought better of it. “The ones that I checked were.”
Torrez looked toward the staircase. His right hand rested unconsciously on the butt of his service automatic.
“If someone was here and wanted Mrs. Hocking’s death to look like an accident, the doors would all have to be locked. From the inside. But there would have to be a way of getting out.”
We both went back upstairs. Old houses hide some secrets pretty well. But it’s just about impossible to make modern tampering blend in. Whoever had painted the inside of Anna Hocking’s windows years before had been sloppy. The three living room windows were painted shut—and locked.
The kitchen window was solid. So was the bedroom window.
“She wasn’t one for fresh air, was she?” Torrez said.
“A lot of elderly folks aren’t,” I said. We went to the bathroom. Only a ferret could have squeezed through the two inches that the rusty casement hardware allowed.
“I don’t think so,” the deputy said. We opened the door to the second bedroom. Mrs. Hocking had saved every cardboard box for the last decade. There was a path of sorts and I made my way to the window that looked out onto the back porch.
It hadn’t been painted shut. The brass swivel lock in the top center of the lower window’s frame was open.
“You think they went out this way?”
“Maybe. Don’t touch anything until you’ve dusted for prints. Then we’ll see how easily it moves.”
“If someone came here, she must have let them in.”
“Unless they jimmied the door as easily as I did earlier.”
“And then went out this way? I’m not sure I buy the cellar idea, sir,” Torrez said. “I mean, there’s a dozen ways that footprints can get obliterated. And the ones that we could see weren’t all that clear.”
I shrugged and ran a hand across the bristle brush of my gray hair. “Why don’t you get the print kit. Then we’ll see.”
My intuition told me I was right even if nothing else did. While Torrez went outside, I returned to the utility room. A broom was standing in the corner, almost behind the hot water heater. Farther back in the corner was an old dust mop that looked like one of those long-haired oriental dogs without legs.
I spread a black trash bag on the floor and then, using a paper towel, gently picked up the broom by the end of the handle. I held it two feet over the black plastic and dropped it straight down. Nothing. I made a face and put the broom away.
Just as carefully, I leaned around the heater, picked up the dust mop and repeated the performance. This time, when it hit the plastic, a fine spray of adobe brown dirt formed a halo around the mop.