Read Twice Buried for Free Online

yellowed and brittle newspaper clipping from 1899 about a rubella outbreak. That story mentioned the infant Reuben as one of the fatalities. Even then, the media got their facts screwed up.
    As I drove through town, I reflected that getting the old man to travel south for his great-grandnephew’s christening was going to be a considerable challenge. Riding in a car with him for even those few miles was going to be worse.
    I frowned, curious now why a ninety-four-year-old man had started packing his iron again.

6
    Reuben Fuentes lived eleven miles west of Posadas. If Carla Champlin had called my office as soon as the old man had left the post office, then I was only fifteen minutes behind him. I’d seen him drive before, inching his old Bronco along the county roads as if it were an overloaded, fragile buggy. Fourth gear in that truck was damn near virgin.
    By the time I turned off State Road 17, trading the smooth macadam for thick gravel with rocks the size of baseballs, I had already let my mind wander. Sheriff Martin Holman was probably right to be skeptical. Pure mental gymnastics had concocted the entire Hocking affair.
    Over the years I’d seen circumstances far more suspicious or even bizarre surrounding what turned out to be an innocent accident. Hell, one icy January several years before, we’d spent two days looking for the car that had smacked old Efren Padilla while he was walking along the county road in front of his ramshackle place south of town.
    He’d been found by another motorist, bleeding profusely, his scalp all but torn off the right side of his head. His right arm was snapped in two places. For a few hours the emergency room doctor at Posadas General had had his hands full trying to keep Efren alive.
    We’d been so pissed that someone would run down an old drunk that we’d damn near torn the county apart looking for a vehicle with fresh damage to the front end.
    And then, after about fifty hours, Efren had regained consciousness and embarrassed the hell out of all of us.
    He had decided in the dark of night, he told us, that he wanted to have a talk with his horse. He had stumbled from the house nearly blind drunk and made his way to the little barn and corral. The horse hadn’t shared his enthusiasm for nighttime conversation and had kicked old Efren in the side of the head. The iron horseshoe had laid open the old man’s scalp from eyebrow to crown.
    Efren had fallen, yelling like a madman. His cries had spooked the horse and a thousand pounds of animal danced sideways, planting first one hoof and then another on Efren’s arm. The bone snapped like a dry twig.
    Efren told us that after that he didn’t remember much. He could vaguely recall stumbling back toward the house. Where he had actually stumbled was in the opposite direction. He collapsed on the shoulder of the highway, leaving it to the rest of us to assume the worst.
    In all likelihood, it had been even simpler for Anna Hocking. We’d found no hint of burglary, no hint of argument, no trace of a struggle. It had to be simple.
    She’d decided to check out the basement for whatever reason, stubbed an old toe on a torn fragment of linoleum, and pitched forward into blackness. That simple. The unlatched window no doubt had been unlatched since summer.
    I slowed the county car for the first of several cattle guards and gritted my teeth as the wheels jounced across. I glanced to my right at the first of what would be dozens of For Sale signs that Stuart Torkelson Realty had posted in the overgrazed pasture to the north.
    “Live in Rural Beauty” the signs promised. I grinned. Arid beauty, maybe. No electricity. No plumbing. No driveways. No nada . Torker had proven over the years he could sell anything to almost anybody. This patch of desert was going to challenge even his skills.
    Maybe he knew something about the potential of Martinez’s Tube that none of the rest of us did. Carlsbad Caverns they weren’t, but maybe Torkelson had