Prolonged Exposure Read Online Free PDF

fireproof things. A couple of stout kids could have moved it easily enough.”
    I watched her for a few more minutes, then got up. “I need to move around,” I said. “I get stiff just sitting. And I miss my wheelchair.”
    Camille put up a last armful of books and brushed off her blouse. “I bet. Come on, I’ll walk out back with you.”
    It might have been easier to walk around my lot, taking Guadalupe Terrace north to Escondido Lane and then east, but instead we wound our way right through the grove of wild and snarled trees, a collection of stunted piñon, juniper, elm, sumac, and several massive cottonwoods.
    It was anyone’s guess where the undergrowth was sucking water from. Posadas County was dry as bleached bone most of the time, and I sure as hell didn’t do any watering. If something wanted to thrive in my yard, it had to have the proper attitude. Maybe the roots had all bored northward, invading the village water lines.
    After several minutes crisscrossing the northeastern quadrant of my property, we located the grave site. If someone from the Posadas County Sheriff’s Department had actually been here, they’d left no trace. They certainly hadn’t stretched any yellow tape, and that was just as well. There wasn’t much to protect, and the yellow would be an attractive nuisance for neighborhood busybodies and kids.
    Before we saw the grave, we saw the work of the industrious youngsters who’d reported Florencio Apodaca’s clandestine work. They had nailed a series of short, mostly rotten boards up the wide flank of a cottonwood tree as a crude ladder. Using that, they’d carried more lumber up into the spreading limbs, managing to create a mess even a pair of ravens would have been ashamed of.
    I could understand the attraction. From the tree platform, Escondido Lane was just a stone’s throw away, literally.
    Sometime in their work, the little contractors had looked down into the brush. A sharp pair of eyes had caught sight of the fresh earth and the carved cross.
    The grave itself was a neat mound of the loose reddish sand, gravel, and clay mix that told geologists that most of Posadas had once been the bottom of a prehistoric lake or wandering streambed.
    Standing at the foot of the grave, I could look through a screen of elm saplings, past a utility pole, and see Florencio Apodaca’s front door.
    “Nice spot,” Camille said. She stood by a runty juniper that had lost half of its trunk fork to an ax, and not long ago. She shoved her hands in the pockets of her baggy chinos.
    “Elegant,” I said. “He could find the place by lining up with that utility pole.”
    The marker was a crude but sturdy cross made from two pieces of juniper, and the shavings and chips still littered the ground. The crosspiece, notched tightly into the upright, was further secured with a leather thong.
    The wooden cross wasn’t plunged into the ground quite straight, but tipped artistically, looking as if it’d been there for generations. He’d made the vertical piece about three feet tall, and I bent down to read what he’d carved into the crosspiece.
    The wood was a rich reddish brown, and Florencio had taken some time to rub off the bark and polish the natural sheen of the juniper.
    “‘Gloria Espinosa Baker Apodaca,’” I read.
    “No dates?”
    “No date. Just the name. I wonder who Baker was.”
    “Florencio would know,” Camille said helpfully.
    “And no Willit,” I muttered. I shook my head.
    “And who’s Willit?”
    “Some character who’s pestering our good sheriff. Marty passed him along to me.”
    “You don’t need to talk to them, do you?”
    “I suppose not,” I said. Camille stepped closer and inspected the cross. “That’s really very nice,” she said. She reached out and rubbed the smooth wood. “Kinda sad, in a way. Two old folks so close that when the end comes, he can’t bear to have her somewhere else.”
    I chuckled. “But she is somewhere else, my dear. This is my