He put her down.
'What's for breakfast?' she asked. 'Lizards and snakes. With bug milk.' She giggled again. 'No, really.' 'French toast,' he said.
'Goody!' She flashed him a missing-toothed gOn and sat down on the couch to watch TV.
He walked around the breakfast bar into the kitchen. If he ever did decide to leave Rio Verde, it would be because of Anna. He'd never had much sympathy for Corrie's complaints that the town was boring, since he himself was never bored, and he firmly believed that an intelligent person should be able to find something of interest no matter where he or she was located. But sometimes he worried about Anna. Rio Verde was a small town, and while he and Corrie tried to instill in their daughter their own intellectual values, and while cable television ensured that they were electronically connected to the cultural life of the rest of the world, he could not help feeling that she might be... well, missing out on something. He had complete faith in the abilities of the town's teachers--he knew many of them and liked most of those he knewN and he had no doubts about Anna's potential, but he still found himself agreeing with Corrie that their relative isolation would eventually put the girl at a disadvantage when competing with people from other parts of the country. Their isolation was geographical, not intellectual or cultural, but still the fear was there.
If anything could get him out of here, it would be Anna's welfare.
Then again, when he watched news reports of the daily murders in Los Angeles and Detroit and New York, when he read statistics about drugs and violent crime, he thought that a small town like Rio Verde might be the perfect place to raise a child, after all.
It was tough being a parent.
'Hey!' he called. 'You want to crack the eggs?'
'Yeah!' Anna said, hurrying into the kitchen. Cracking eggs was one of her favorite things to do.
He held the bowl, while she used both hands to hold the egg and smash it against the rim. Half of the egg white slid down the outside of the bowl, and bits of shell accompanied that portion which mad it inside, but he told her she did a great job. She grinned, then ran back into the living room to watch Sesame Street.
After breakfast, while Anna helped Corrie clean the dishes, Rich re dred to his study. The deadline for this week's paper had come and gone, and Marge Watson had missed it again. The world would survive without this installment of Social Scene, which chronicled the past week's worth of Ladies' Auxiliary news, but he still had a page-two space to fill, and now he was going to have to spend half of his Saturday writing some sort of observational feature.
He turned on his PC, put in the disk for his wordprocessing program, and watched the screen as the computer booted up. Sometimes he wondered what the point of all this was. He knew he didn't have the resources at his disposal to put out a top quality paper, but he worked hard and did the best he could with what he had. Unfortunately, there just weren't enough permanent residents of the town to provide him with a consistent readership, and the tourists who passed through only used the paper to start their campfires. To top it off, his own contributors didn't seem to give a damn if they missed 'their deadlines.
It got downright depressing sometimes.
In his more romantic moments, he liked to think of himself as a tough, hard-boiled reporter, a man whose role could easily be portrayed on the screen by Bogart or Mitchum or perhaps the young Brando. But that was a fanciful daydream, one that didn't hold up even to himself. Truth be told, he was closer to a secretary than anything else. His life wouldn't be worth dramatizing on screen, not even with a soap opera star.
The phone rang, a stereo burr sounding simultaneously from the cordless next to his desk and the wall phone in the kitchen. It rang again, but he waited a moment before picking up the receiver, hoping that Corrie would answer it. She did, and, a beat later, called his name:
'Rich!'
'Got it!' he called back. He picked up the phone. 'Hello?'
'Rich? It's me.'
'Robert?' He shifted the phone to his other ear, frowning. He could not remember the last time his brother had called this early on a Saturday. 'What's up?'
'What are you doing?'
'Talking to you.' He tried to keep his tone light, but he could hear the seriousness in Robert's voice.
'No, I mean this morning. Do you have any plans?' 'Not really.
Why?'
Robert cleared his throat. 'I want you to come out and look at something with me.'
'What?'
He cleared his throat again, a nervous habit he'd had since childhood and something he did only when he was under extreme pressure. 'We've found a dead body. Out by the arroyo. It's... Manuel Torres.'
'The old guy who worked at Troy's garage?'
Yeah. He's .. .' More throat clearing. 'You gotta come out here. You gotta see this.' ........ 'Murdered?'
'You gotta see for yourself.'
'All right. Let me grab my camera. I'll meet you... where?'
'The arroyo. But I don't know if you'll be wanting your camera. These aren't pictures that'll be suitable for the paper.' , : , 'What happened, Robert.> What is it?'
'You gotta see for yourself.'
There were two cars, a Jeep, and four men already at the arroyo. Steve Hinkley and Ted Thrall, two deputies, stood next to one of the vehicles, talking. Robert and Brad Woods, the county coroner, were at the edge of the oversize gully, looking down at something.
Rich pulled to the side of the dirt road and got out of the car, grabbing his camera from the passenger seat and slipping the strap over his shoulder. A cloud of red dust, kicked up by the braking tires, washed over him and continued on, carried by the warm morning breeze.
He coughed and spit, wiping his eyes, then glanced over at Robert, who waved him forward.
In a normal town, a real town, he and Robert would not have been able to maintain the professional relationship they now shared. There would have been charges of conflict of interest, allegations that the police and the press were far cozier than they should have been, and he would have had to assign someone else to cover the crime beat.
But Rio Verde was not a normal town. No one here gave a damn whether or not he was the police chief's brother or the mayor's cousin or the president's transvestite son as long as their garage sale ads came out on time--a fact that played hell with his journalistic ethics but sure as shit made his personal life a whole lot easier.
He walked' across the hard-packed sand, past the parked cars, to where Robert and Woods stood solemnly waiting. 'Hi,' he said, nodding to both.
Robert turned to the coroner. 'Would you excuse us for a sec?' he asked. 'I want to talk to my brother alone.'
The other man nodded and began walking slowly back toward the cars.
Robert looked at Rich for a moment but said nothing. His gaze was troubled. 'Is he down--?' Rich began. Robert nodded.
Rich moved closer, standing at the top of the arroyo and looking toward the bottom. His heart began thump 'Iesus ' he breathed. ing in his chest.. ,
There was nothing left of Manuel Tortes but a skeleton covered with skin.
He stared, unable to look away. Even from here, even from this angle, he could see the wrinkled parchment appearance of the man's face, the way his teeth, protruding between dark deflated lips, looked overlarge in his now shrunken head, the way his nose had collapsed in on itself, a crater between hard-bone cheeks. There were round black holes in the sockets where the old man's eyes had been.
Goose bumps popped up on Rich's arms. Manuel Tortes was sell clothed, wearing faded jeans and a greas Tshirt, but his shoes had fallen off, his pants were partially pulled down, and the thin covering of dried crinkled skin which now outlined the infrastructure of his waist and lower legs was clearly visible. i:'
Around the body, in an almost deliberate semicircle, were dead animals, similarly drained, similarly dried: a crow, a hawk, two jackrabbits, a roadrunner.
'What is this?' Rich asked. 'How did this happen?' Robert shook his head, looking toward the two deputies
