"Understandable."
In the main room, bedsheet curtains had been ripped down. Shafts of dust-moted light sliced across an old television set, a bare plywood bookshelf, a beanbag chair that had been cut open, its polyfoam guts spread across the cement floor. The tiny kitchen had been ransacked. Bathroom likewise, even the top of the toilet tank removed.
The first bedroom was filled with antique furniture too solid to destroy. Against one wall was a teak sideboard with the glass removed. A sewing table charred from the long-ago fire, an old foot-pedal Sears machine on top. A stripped bed frame. A basket of faded quilt remnants. Hung on the wall was a small cross studded with silver milagro charms. Men's clothing was heaped in the corner — sweats, tank tops, running shorts, the kind of clothes Hector Mara wore. The room smelled of old perfume and sweat. Neither the clothes nor the smell of sweat went with the rest of the room. It looked as if Hector had moved in after his grandmother's death and never bothered to redecorate.
There was a second bedroom down the hall at the end of the L.
Despite the police ransacking, I knew whose room it was the moment I entered — Sandra Mara's.
A young woman's clothes that hadn't seen the light of day in years were now disgorged from a closet in the corner — Jordache jeans, fuzzy sweaters, moccasin shoes, the kind of pastel tourist T-shirts you get from Solo Serve and La Feria. The upturned dresser drawers had spilled silver bangles, random stud earrings, a few sparse items of makeup. Not much for a teenage girl. There were no CDs, no magazines, few personal effects. Most notable was the ankle-deep pile of books and loose papers that had been swept off the shelves against one wall.
I toed through some of the book titles — Heller, Marquez, Vonnegut, Bronte. An African American poetry anthology, a Latin American one, Sylvia Plath. Good assortment. Very good for a high schooler.
I picked up the Sylvia Plath. The library pocket pasted to the inside cover said JUDSON ISD. The book had been due May 12, seven years ago. Hell of a late fee. Of course, before Sandra Mara had checked it out, the book had been borrowed exactly once, in 1975. Probably JUDSON ISD hadn't missed it yet. The loose papers looked like pages of high school essays — double-spaced cursive, most dated spring, 1992. One was on "The Wife of Bath." I scanned half a paragraph and was depressed to find it better than most of the college papers I'd been looking at that morning.
I picked up another book — this one with a gold marbleized cover, no title. A writing journal. The first half of the book was filled with tiny cursive handwriting, distinctly feminine. I read a line or two.
When I looked up again, Ana DeLeon was standing at the window.
On the sill next to her were three porcelain mugs, all shaped like grotesque sailors' faces with long noses and cherry cheeks and glazed rum-sodden smiles. Ana DeLeon was circling her finger absently around the rim of one.
"Mind if I check this out?" I asked.
It took her a while to focus on me. "What?"
"This journal. Hector's sister's. I thought I would borrow it."
"Let me see it."
DeLeon flipped some pages. She looked at the words without reading them, traced the edges of the cover.
She handed the journal back to me. "I should tell you no. But I can't see that it'll be missed."
"No photographs."
"What?"
"No photographs anywhere," I told her. "None of Sandra. None of anybody else, for that matter. Did you find any during the search?"
"I don't recall any."
I looked out the window. Under a stand of cedars, half a dozen chickens were clucking and pecking around the feet of some SWAT guys.
One of the men, an assault rifle on his knee and greasepaint under his eyes, glanced in my direction. I smiled. He didn't smile back.
I looked down at the grinning sailor's-head mugs. The mugs didn't offer any advice.
I looked toward the closet.
"What?" DeLeon asked immediately.
I walked over to the closet, crouched down, tugged the tiny glinting piece of red and gold paper from the crack in the cement.
DeLeon stood over me. "What is it?"
I kept the paper wrapper curled in my palm while my finger traced the almost invisible seam on the closet floor — the square outline I would've missed if not for the paper. "Trapdoor."
DeLeon said, "Stand back."
DeLeon yelled out the window for some assistance, somebody with a crowbar.
Thirty seconds later the little room was filled with cops.
A minute after that the excitement was over. DeLeon and I were alone in the room again, staring down at a crawl space that smelled of cool damp earth and was absolutely empty.
"So much for that," she said.
"Let me call Ralph."
"No."
"In another twenty-four hours, Mara will be gone. An APB won't accomplish anything and you know it."
"I said no, Tres."
The use of my first name caught me off guard as much as the tone of her refusal.
"Ana, I want to see you win on this. Let me help."
She turned away. After a ten-count she surprised me. She said, very softly, "Let me think about it."
I didn't push it. I walked to the window and looked out at Hector's smashed garden, the apple tree with the muddy tracks of his Ford Galaxie still fresh underneath, the white mobile home in the field of spear grass. I tried to imagine a young woman, Sandra Mara, at this bedroom window every day — looking up from a book of poetry or from a journal she was writing in, being surprised every time that the scene outside was not the asphalt-and-brick housing of the Bowie Courts.