Double Prey by Steven F. Havill Read Free Book Online Page B

But
Padrino
was wondering about the date.”
    “Don’t lose those. The first one is all before the war anyway. You don’t need that one.”
    “Mother, please,” Estelle laughed. “I won’t lose them. And neither will
Padrino
. ” She kissed the old woman on the forehead.
    “Irma is coming over for lunch,” Teresa said. “What are we going to do without her?” She raised an admonishing finger. “But she needs to go, you know. She has her own life.”
    “That’s right,
mamá
. ”
    “But that doesn’t mean I have to like it.” Teresa Reyes smiled. “You be careful out there. That’s not your car you’re driving. What are you two up to?”
    “I don’t think we know. I’ll stop by for lunch if I can.”
    “You do that. Bring
Padrino
.”
    Back out in the SUV, Estelle passed the three volumes to Gastner. Bound in red and black imitation leather with raised welts on the spines, the books were designed to look like old world masterworks. He opened the first volume.
    “January 7, 1916 to…” and he gently fingered to the last page. “June 1, 1936.” He glanced across at Estelle. “He moved here from Mexico in 1940, so that’s in volume two.” The second volume opened with an entry for June 11, 1936. “This is where to start, then.” Estelle heard the excitement in Gastner’s voice.
    “He wrote each evening, I remember,” Estelle said. “He always had to have just the right black pen.” Gastner leafed through the pages, shaking his head slowly. The handwriting was angular, bold, easy to read, so uniform that it almost appeared to have been printed.
    “You’ve read through these?”
    “Skimmed,” Estelle said. “That’s a project I keep promising myself.”
    He chuckled. “No more promises for me. I’m going to indulge myself now.”
    As she drove south on Grande toward the intersection with State 56, she could see that Gastner was already hooked.
    “I knew you had these, but I never looked at ’em,” he murmured. “Not a single entry in English.”
    “Reubén used to say that English was not the proper language for written records. He used to talk about all the records that exist in Spain for the various voyages back in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, about how he would like to go to Spain and spend a year, just reading.”
    “Who wouldn’t.”
    “I guess lots of people don’t share an enthusiasm for the past.”
    “Unfathomable.” He closed the volume and selected another. “Might as well start at the end and work backward. His last entry was September 12, 1996. It’s hard to read.”
    “By then, he was so arthritic that he could hardly hold a pen.” Estelle let the big SUV creep up to seventy on the state highway. She scanned the vast, tawny prairie, watching for the plume of dust that would mark passage of a truck or ATV.
    “I knew Reubén as a stonemason,” Gastner mused. “You need a fireplace, Reubén was the one to call. A fancy fence, facing on a house, whatever. I don’t recall that he spent much time hiking and exploring. That about right?”
    “He wasn’t a hiker,” Estelle said. “I lived with him for almost four years, and I don’t remember anything beyond a walk to the shed or to the truck. He was fascinated by the night sky, and once in a while we’d go outside with binoculars and see how many constellations we could name. The nearest night light was miles away, and the sky could be so
black
. And meteor showers—when those happened, it turned him into a little child again.”
    “So…he didn’t spend a lot of time hiking in the mountains.”
    “No. To him, the San Cristóbals were something to create the weather. He watched them, watched the clouds form, enjoyed the winds. A couple of times, Bobby tried to get him to go hunting with him. He’d just laugh.”
    “Then the odds that he saw the big cat over in the Cristóbals are pretty slim.”
    “I would think so.”
    “Huh.”
    Estelle glanced over at Gastner. He was frowning not at