The Case of the Sin City Sister

by Lynne Hinton

  Eve stuck some dollar bills in the tip jar and walked over and poured herself a cup of coffee, topping it off with some milk. At the table in the far corner of the café, she sat down and opened the folder. She took a long sip from her coffee as she gazed out the window in the direction of her house, southwest from Twila’s and the other downtown businesses. She watched a hummingbird flit around a feeder and thought about Twila’s latest news, wondering what or who she would find, how it would be for her to be reunited with a sister. This made her think of Dorisanne again, and when she felt herself start to worry, she pulled out the miner’s letters. She clearly needed a distraction. The first one was dated May 19, 1889:

  Dear Claire,

  It is one month today since I left you. I wonder if the baby was born, whether it’s a boy or a girl, and how it is for you. I wish I had not left you. I see now that I should have waited and traveled when we could all come together.

  It’s cold in New Mexico, but I have the wool coat and I have purchased a few things to keep me warm. You were right to tell me to pack as if it were still winter because it is still winter here.

  I have met some other miners, and there are several companies that have already claimed certain parts of the hills for mining. I am still trying to find out how to stake a claim and how to proceed in finding the stones. It is not as easy as I thought.

  I will write again in a few days. Know that I am thinking of you and love you. I am making a place for you and our family. When you are able, write me and let me know our baby’s name. You can send your letters to this post office station. They give out mail to all the miners and people in town.

  Yours,

  And it was signed, Caleb.

  Eve drank some of her coffee and pulled out another. This one was dated June 21, 1889:

  My Dear Claire,

  I have taken work with the Tiffany Miners. They own a lot of the mineral rights to the hills and mountains where we have been told that there is silver and turquoise. Right now, the blue-green stones like the one I showed you are becoming more and more valuable, just like the old man said, but most of the miners are still trying to find gold and silver.

  I rent a room above one of the general stores in Cerrillos. I share it with a man from Oregon who is a little older than me and knows a lot more about mining than I do. He says we need to put our money together and then we can make our own claim. I’ve told him all about you and the baby and the folks back home. He never seems to talk too much about himself. All I know about him is that he’s called Red. I guess that’s because he’s got a head full of red hair.

  I am glad you named our son Jessie Ray Alford. It is nice that both of our fathers are honored in the naming. I hope that in a few months, maybe after this summer, I will have money to pay for your trip here and the room for our family but everything seems to cost more here. I am trying to save as much as I can, but I had to buy new tools, pay a mining tax, and there’s the rent and food. So far, I have not found out how to make more money but I’m working on it.

  I long for the day we can be together again. Thank you for the letter and for the beautiful handkerchief. I only use it on Sundays when I go to church.

  Always yours,

  Caleb

  Eve pulled out a couple more letters and glanced over them while she drank her coffee. They all seemed to say the same kind of things, how expensive it was to be in Madrid and Cerrillos, how the mining was mostly governed by the big companies who had rushed in and bought up a lot of the mineral rights, how much he longed for his wife and son, and how he hoped they would soon be able to join him. He occasionally mentioned the roommate from Oregon, Red, but there wasn’t much about him either.

  So far, Eve thought, there was not much there to explain what had happened and why he was not able to send for his family to join him in New Mexico. In the few letters she had read or looked over, there had been no mention of the danger of his work or any illness to which he might have succumbed. All she could see was news from a young man writing to his wife every two weeks, longing for his home, and still searching but not finding the break he was looking for.

  She pushed the letters back into the folder and finished her coffee. The loneliness of the missing miner had only worsened Eve’s mood and caused her to ask the question that had been bugging her for days: What if Dorisanne was gone like the miner, leaving no trace behind?

  TEN

  Sister Evangeline knew what would help her sour mood. She drove the truck back to the house, parked, and headed to the garage for her bike. She needed to take her mind off Dorisanne, the missing miner, and the imminent date for her upcoming conversation with Brother Oliver at the monastery, and taking a drive on her bike was just the thing that would help her do that. Riding on the Harley always calmed her, always relaxed her, always helped her think more clearly; and after the unaccommodating conversations with her sister’s colleague and boss, the Captain’s questions about whether or not Eve was going back to the monastery or staying in Madrid, and the double dose of caffeine she had just enjoyed at Twila’s, she needed a little calming. She needed a little relaxation. She needed to think a little more clearly. She needed a ride.

  Eve’s first great love had been horses, and she’d competed in barrel racing and rodeo events from the time she was tall enough to reach a pair of stirrups. She was a natural, they had said, and she enjoyed the competitions, enjoyed riding the horses. She won a number of ribbons and awards. She was comfortable and relaxed in her rides.

  But when she was a young teenager, the Captain had bought a small motorcycle as a gift for his daughters, and from that moment on, Eve left the horses and the stables and the rodeos and started racing in motocross events. Dorisanne never got a chance to try out the bike, but it hadn’t really mattered. She was more of the girly-girl and Eve was the tomboy.

  Right away Evangeline seemed addicted to the speed and the way it felt to take a curve or drive along the barren desert hills. She loved the motor and the weight of a bike, the control she felt gripping the handlebars and changing the gears. She had not won as many awards in the sport as she had with the horses because her mother made the Captain put a governor on her bike’s speedometer, and Eve was never able to push the bike enough to get ahead of the other competitors. She complained about this her entire time racing, but her mother would not budge from her position. It was enough, she had told her daughter and husband, that she let Eve ride the motorcycle, let her race. She was not about to let her child manage her own speed. And no matter how hard Eve or her father fought, claiming this restriction put her at a terrible disadvantage, her mother toed that line. It was racing with the censored speed or no racing at all.

  Eve still managed to win from time to time. Even though she wasn’t the fastest, she learned skills the other riders didn’t. She knew how to maneuver easily around the obstacles on the path and how to move in and out of the race traffic without being in or causing an accident. What she lost in speed she made up for in her reaction times and in her ability to veer from trouble. Still, her inability to move as quickly as she wanted in a race remained difficult for her. Oddly enough, this lack of patience showed up in other areas of her life as well.

  No matter what she dealt with, Eve always felt like there was some governor on her emotions, on her spirit, that was curbing her, holding her back. It was one of the reasons she had trouble at the convent, one of the spiritual lessons she was forever forced to learn. Slow down, she had been told by her mother. Show patience, she was being taught as a nun. And riding her Harley in Madrid, away from Pecos and the monastery, away from a mother and a priest’s watchful eye, finally old enough to set her own speed, go her own distance, free and out on the road, was the one place where she felt unbridled and uncensored.

  Eve cranked the engine and took off. She was glad winter had finally passed and she could ride comfortably with just a jacket and jeans. She rode year-round, but it wasn’t as much fun in the cold.

  She started up Highway
14 and headed west toward the little town of Cerrillos. She thought she might drive around the Silver Cross Corral, up the old mining trails where John Ewing took his riders and where the body of the movie director Charles Cheston had been found. She hit fifty miles an hour, settled into her ride, and thought about her first case working with the Captain, how much she’d enjoyed digging for information and finding clues about the murderer.

  She breathed in the fresh air, felt the afternoon sun on her face, the breeze in her hair stirred by the bike’s speed, and remembered how it had been for her solving the mystery, how it was to have felt so alive, so passionate about something; and she remembered that it had been those feelings that had eventually led her to take this second leave of absence.

  “You seem so engaged in life,” Brother Oliver had first commented when she talked to him about the murder investigation in which she had been involved. “I see that your relationship with your father has deepened and become more satisfying for you both; but this time away that you have had, this medical emergency that took you home for all these weeks, has been more than just an opportunity to care for your parent.”

  Eve was taken aback at the time. Her own animation in her conversations about the private detective work surprised her. It wasn’t until Brother Oliver made mention of her passionate descriptions of her work in Madrid that she came to realize that the search and the mystery and the solutions and the analyzing and the data gathering, even the relationships, fed her in a way that her vows and her life in the community had not. And once this had been brought to her attention, she had been deeply bothered. She went back to the monastery and secluded herself from everyone. Although Brother Oliver had not chastised her about it, Eve had felt ashamed of her excitement, disappointed that she had been lured into the things of this world so easily, troubled that she had made such a confession to her superior and to herself.

  How could she have a desire to leave the monastery? It was her home. The church had been her constant companion. Falling in love with her father’s profession was an accident—an unintended consequence of her stepping in to help. Now she realized that this work, this life outside the monastery, had to be considered, had to be looked at more closely. If she intended to stay as a nun, she must work through this discernment process honestly and truthfully. It was difficult work, however, unnerving to her; and even halfway through this leave of absence she had been given, she was still trying to understand what was happening with her, trying to figure out what she truly desired and felt called to. She knew as she drove along the desert highway that she was just as confused as she’d been when she and Brother Oliver made the decision that she should come back to Madrid and be with her father a while longer.

  In the beginning, the call to the order, the decision to enter the monastery and become a nun, had not been difficult at all for Eve. Once she had spent some time as a novice, learning the rules and the expectations, once she had become accustomed to the gentle routine of prayer and work and worship, the hours of silence and the services that arranged the days and nights for the monks and nuns, it all had felt so natural, so right. Only in these latter years, she thought, only in the seasons since her thirty-fifth year, had she become bothered and unsettled, suddenly longing for something she had not ever felt she had missed before.

  She was making the turn into Cerrillos when she saw the blue lights in her rearview mirror. She recalled seeing a police car when she’d passed the turnoff to Galisteo and had slowed down. Since she hadn’t been followed, she had believed in the power of her good luck and sped up. Now, as she turned left and pulled into the parking lot of the Cerrillos Clinic, she realized her luck wasn’t all that good, and she hoped that—with all the interpersonal skills she had learned from both the superiors at the convent and the Captain—she still remembered how to talk herself out of a ticket.

  ELEVEN

  Eve grinned as she saw the officer get out of the car and walk in her direction. It appeared that she wouldn’t need any special skills to handle this after all. She wouldn’t have to say a word.

  “Sister Evangeline, if I have told you once I have told you a thousand times, wear your helmet!”

  Eve jumped off the bike, kicked out the stand, and hurried over to the officer. Daniel was her friend and the Captain’s former partner. He was tall, broad-shouldered, and Eve had to step up on her toes to embrace him. She felt his strong arms around her and it made her smile. He was the brother she never had and she cared deeply for him.

  “Daniel, it’s so good to see you! What are you doing out here?” she asked.

  “Slumming,” he answered, adjusting his belt after the hug.

  “Yeah, well, you must be if you’re having to drive that old cruiser.” She motioned with her chin toward the police car he had just exited.

  “Hey, she looks big and slow on the outside, but there’s some muscle under that hood.”

  Eve laughed.

  “I caught up with you, didn’t I?”

  “Only because I slowed down when I saw you a couple of miles back,” she noted. “I helped you out a lot.”

  Daniel shook his head. “You were going seventy,” he said and pulled out a small leather pad from the inside of his coat jacket.

  It looked as if he was going to write Eve a ticket. She pulled back and watched as he reached for a pen and clicked the top, acting as if he was starting to write out a summons. He put the pen to paper and glanced up.

  “Gotcha,” he said, flashing his wide, perfect grin.

  She punched him hard in the arm. “That’s not funny.”

  Daniel put away the pen and pad of paper.

  “Seriously, what are you doing out here?”

  “Came out to the country to see the old man,” he answered. “Things are slow at the office, so I decided I’d drive out and take him to lunch. He called about some old files yesterday. I did a little digging and came up with some stuff. I thought he might like to hear it in person and have a green-chile burger at the same time.”

  “He’ll like that,” she responded. “What was he having you look for?”

  “Murders from the 1890s. I assume you’re working a cold case.”

  “A real cold case. A man came in the other day who is trying to find out what happened to his great-grandfather, a miner from North Carolina.”

  “This guy think his family member was that skeleton those boys found in the mines? He think the guy was murdered?”

  Eve thought about the questions. “He is interested to see if the skeleton is his kin, but nah, I think the murder idea comes from the Captain. You know how he always heads down the dark path first.”

  “Well, it may be the right one. Seems like there were lots of murders in those days. I guess there’s something to calling this the wild, wild West.” He glanced into the car. “I got a box from the 1890s, homicides, most of them never tried. Looks like it was a crazy time.”

  “They needed good lawmen like you,” Eve said, winking.

  “I suspect a black man wouldn’t have had much luck arresting white folk back then,” Daniel said. “But your daddy”—Daniel smiled—“he’d have a jail full of those outlaws.”

  Eve laughed.

  There was a pause. Eve could feel Daniel’s eyes studying her.

  “You troubled?” he finally asked.

  Eve shook her head, even though she was well aware that her father’s former partner knew her as well as anyone. He knew she liked to ride when she needed to clear her mind.

  He studied her, appearing as if he didn’t believe her or was waiting for more.

  “Okay, a little, yes,” she confessed.

  Daniel waited.“The Captain acting up?”

  She shook her head. “No, he’s actually behaving himself these days,” she replied. “Takes his insulin, comes to the clinic in Cerrillos, eats pretty good. He hasn’t even picked a fight in two weeks,” she added.

  Daniel reached up and rubbed his chin as if he were perplexed. “Your father?” he a
sked. “In two weeks?” He paused. “You slipping him something in his sugar-free milk shakes?”

  “Nah. I know,” she responded, “doesn’t sound like him, but he’s mellowing.”

  “Well, I’m glad I came today to see this. I’d say you’ve got your own hometown miracle out here. You think the Pope will come and bless him?”

  “I didn’t say he was a saint, just that he had mellowed. He’s still the Captain.”

  “Right,” Daniel agreed.

  He waited.

  Eve shrugged. “It’s Dorisanne,” she said.

  He frowned. “What’s little sister gotten herself into now?” He leaned against the car.

  Eve moved next to him. “I just can’t reach her is all.”

  “Well, from what I remember, your sister was never one to make herself easily available. Wasn’t she missing her entire senior year of high school?”

  Eve smiled. “Yeah, I know. That’s what the Captain says too. But I’ve just got a bad feeling about her. I’m worried something’s wrong.”

  “You try the Rio?” He knew where Dorisanne worked.

  Eve nodded. “They said she called in last week. She fell about a month ago, sprained her ankle. She’s been out of work since the accident.”

  “But somebody’s talked to her?”

  “Yeah,” Eve answered.

  There was no response and she stood up away from the car. “I know. I know. She’s fine. She has never been good about staying in touch. She’ll call in a couple of days.”

  “She will. I’m sure,” Daniel responded.

  Eve was not convinced, but she didn’t say as much. “Enjoy your time with the Captain, and don’t let him get dessert,” she said. “I know how he likes the pie at the Tavern.”

  “Green-chile burger, fries, no pie,” Daniel noted.

  There was a pause as the two friends watched a few cars travel past them on the highway, most of them slowing down when they saw the police car.