The Case of the Sin City Sister

by Lynne Hinton

  “So, are you giving me a ticket or not?” she asked.

  He shook his head and smiled. “No, there’s no ticket.”

  She turned and headed toward her bike.

  “Get a helmet on your head,” he instructed as she walked away.

  “Okay,” she replied. “When I get home.”

  And she jumped onto her bike, cranked up the engine, and drove away, thinking that just like herself, Daniel seemed a bit bothered about something too.

  TWELVE

  After reading police files all evening, Eve slept fitfully. The Captain had retired to his bedroom before ten o’clock. She tried going to bed herself around eleven but was unable to quit thinking about what she had read and what had been on her mind all day, so she eventually got back up, threw on her old terrycloth robe, and headed for the kitchen. She took down her favorite mug, the one her mother had liked best, the thick one with a bear’s claw painted on the front that she had bought at a thrift shop. After filling it with milk, she stuck it in the microwave and waited. She leaned on the counter, her chin resting in her hand, and looked out the window above the sink. The night was a typical New Mexico night with a sky full of stars and an easy desert wind. When the microwave dinged, she walked over, retrieved the mug now filled with steaming hot milk, and headed back to the living room to continue looking over the contents of the box that Daniel had delivered to the Captain.

  She read more missing person reports filed in Santa Fe County in the year 1890 by concerned family members across the country, as well as the homicide reports filed in that decade. Based upon what she’d found, it seemed to Eve that there must have been lots of folks like Caleb Alford from everywhere in the country who came to New Mexico to strike it rich and who never returned to or contacted folks in the hometowns they had left.

  It surprised both Eve and Jackson that there was such a complete set of files from so many years ago. The Captain had commented that the box and the files therein were more thorough than the last bunch of reports he had worked on before retiring from the police force. Daniel had explained to them that there had been an entire collection of old reports from a century before that had been kept at the home of a history-buff sheriff named Tom Jaramillo in Santa Fe County. Jaramillo had come across them in the courthouse basement, and since they were old even when he found them in the 1940s, he was permitted to take them home, sort through them, and find a way to secure them. It had apparently become quite a project for the lawman, and the evidence of his meticulous care and work was clear.

  They learned that the files had originally been kept in a dry, cool, dark environment, the center storage area of the courthouse underground department, so they were in good shape when he first discovered them. And then, when he became their caretaker, he took extra precautions, filing the reports in low-lignin storage containers with corrugated acid-free spacer boards. He put them in chronological order, making the collection easy to read and easy to follow. Except for a bit of yellowing on the edges, the papers were in excellent condition.

  Reviewing them was like taking a step back in time, and the father and daughter had spent most of the evening reading some of the more interesting files to each other. It had been an enjoyable night for them both, a sort of crash course on the justice system in the western part of the country during a time when there wasn’t much federal assistance in the outlying areas like the territories of New Mexico and Arizona. There were still skirmishes between the Indians and the white settlers, still struggles between the Spanish landowners and the Americans coming down the Santa Fe Trail. It truly was a wild and raucous time in the nation’s history.

  The two learned that Sheriff Lawson Carson was the central lawman in Santa Fe County, taking office in 1886 and staying in the position until he was shot and killed by a band of bank robbers in 1910. This information Eve found on the Internet, hoping to uncover more about the writer and keeper of the files they had started reading. The reports kept in the files were mostly written by him. Each incidence of a homicide or violent death was documented in a one-page report; missing person reports were documented in the same way. Names, dates, short descriptions, and then a longer, more in-depth summary of what Sheriff Carson did in response to the incident or concern was the standard content of each file. Eve wondered out loud to the Captain if the sheriff did all of the police work in those days, if he was officer, prosecutor, and judge for those charged with criminal offenses since there seemed to be no other names on any of the files, both those that had been closed as well as those that had remained open and unsolved.

  Some of the missing person reports had the words Found Alive written across the top of the page. Others had Found Dead, all of them dated and signed by the sheriff. Some of the homicide reports had the word Hanged written across the entire page; others were left without a conclusion or follow-up report, appearing to Eve as if the punishment for criminals was swift and brutal or simply overlooked. All evening her mind was filled with the cowboy images from the many Westerns she’d watched as a child. She even remembered some of the stories she had heard of Kit Carson, who was known to have traveled extensively through Madrid and Cerrillos and Santa Fe County on many occasions, and she wondered if the sheriff was any kin to the brigadier general and Indian agent or if the last name was just a coincidence.

  Most of the missing persons, all men, were reported to have been working in the mines, and most of the homicides had to do with fights over stolen money and property or mineral rights. None of the files, those dealing with missing miners or those dealing with murder, cited the name Caleb Alford. Although the reading was interesting, it was not proving to be beneficial to the case. Even with all of the files from the year the North Carolina miner went missing, all of them easy to read and easy to follow, it didn’t appear as if there was any official report of the whereabouts of their client’s great-grandfather. They’d come up empty when it came to finding any information that would be helpful to the man trying to find answers about his family member.

  After going through the last files and finishing her warm milk, it was late, after midnight, and Eve tried once again to go to sleep. The milk did not help. She tossed and turned. And when she finally did fall asleep, her dreams were chaotic and overwrought with cowboys and saloons and fights and restless women searching for the men they loved and lost. Brothers, husbands, boyfriends, fathers, the images of family members trying to find someone filled Eve’s mind until finally she found herself in one of the dreams, searching and searching for somebody, for something.

  In the dream Eve was wearing a black scapular and her hair was short. She had just taken her first vows, and she was walking down a long hallway, opening doors on both sides, looking for something or someone. Behind the first door was a beautiful scene from her home in Madrid: Her horse from her early childhood stood at a stall window eating hay. She longed for the horse, longed to ride him again, but something else was calling her and she kept moving, opening doors and seeing people and things from her past, from before she became a nun, before she entered the convent in Pecos.

  A favorite teacher, several nuns praying, a room of books, stacks of gold and silver, her mother sewing, her father—the Captain—his back turned toward her, building or repairing something placed in front of him. She stopped for a second, just as she had at all the doors, almost entering, glad to see the people she loved, eager to speak to them, but still drawn to something else, something she couldn’t explain. She moved on. She opened and observed and then closed the doors, felt the delight at seeing her loved ones, felt curiosity at seeing the rooms containing money and books, and she kept moving down the hall, searching for something or someone she hadn’t yet found. She felt frustrated and a little anxious, even though she didn’t know what was missing.

  Finally, she arrived at the end of the hall. She stopped, took in a deep breath, and understood that there was only one last door standing in front of her. She reached for the doorknob and started to turn it, but she was
suddenly halted by a voice calling her from the other end of the hall.

  “Eve.” She heard the voice but could not tell who was calling.

  “Eve.” She heard it again.

  “Eve! Wake up!” And then she realized the voice belonged to the Captain, and he was standing at her bedroom door, the phone in his hand.

  “It’s Dorisanne,” he said as she finally tumbled out of bed.

  THIRTEEN

  “Hello,” Eve called into the proffered cell phone.

  There was no response.

  “Hello . . .” She waited. “Hello,” she called out again. “Dorisanne, are you there?”

  There was only silence from the other end and then finally a dial tone. Eve looked at her father, who was leaning against the doorframe. She wondered but didn’t have time to ask how he had gotten from his room to hers so quickly. His crutches were nowhere in sight. She only shook her head.

  “What, she’s not there?” he asked, a look of surprise on his face. “I just talked to her,” he added. “Let me see,” he said, and he reached out for the phone.

  Eve shook her head again as she handed the phone back to him. “She’s not there,” she said.

  The Captain took the phone and began calling out, “Hello, Dorisanne. Hello, are you there?” He held out the phone to study it and turned back to his daughter. “I swear she was just there. I talked to her.”

  Eve walked past her father toward his room. “Here,” she said when she returned, handing the crutches to him that she had retrieved. “Come into the kitchen. I need a glass of water.” She turned down the hall and he followed behind.

  In the kitchen, Eve took a pitcher of water from the refrigerator and poured herself a glass. Jackson sat down at the table. Trooper had joined them both and was lying next to his chair. The loyal companion dropped her head onto her paws.

  “You want something?” she asked Jackson.

  “No, I’m fine,” he answered.

  Eve drank some of the water and joined him at the table.

  He was shaking his head, still staring at the cell phone in his hand.

  Eve reached for it and he gave it to her. She scrolled through the recent calls but could not place Dorisanne’s number anywhere on the list. “Your last call was from Daniel,” she noted, handing the phone back to him.

  He looked at the list. The call from his former partner had come in at eleven thirty that morning; he had called just before he came into town for lunch. He snapped the phone shut. “Well, I don’t care what the phone says—she called, woke me out of a deep sleep. I heard it ring, picked it up, answered it, and she said, ‘Daddy, can I speak to Eve?’ And I got up, hopped over to your door, and got you.”

  Eve didn’t know what to think. Captain Jackson Divine was not one to make up tales of people calling who had not called. Even when he was in his worst state of confusion following the surgery, following too many pain medications, he had never hallucinated. This kind of behavior was like nothing she had ever experienced with him before. And yet, there was no record that Dorisanne had placed a call to him. Besides, Eve thought, she never called his cell phone, only the landline at home.

  “When did she get your cell number?” she asked.

  Jackson thought about the question. “I don’t know. I figured you gave it to her.”

  Eve shook her head. “No, when I got you the phone last year, you told me not to give out the number to anybody. You didn’t want it, remember, and then when I bought it I told you just to keep it for emergencies. I didn’t even know you kept it on at night.”

  “Well, of course I keep it on at night. How else would I use it for emergencies if I didn’t keep it on?”

  She didn’t answer. It was the middle of the night, and she was certainly in no mood to argue.

  “You don’t believe me?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. I was sound asleep, having some weird nun dream, when you yelled and woke me up. She wasn’t on the line when you handed me the phone.”

  “Well, that doesn’t mean I’ve made this whole thing up!”

  Eve leaned against the back of the chair.

  Neither one of them spoke for a few minutes.

  Eve rose and looked at the Captain again. “Tell me what she said one more time. And how many rings were there before you woke up and answered?”

  “I don’t know,” he replied. “It’s loud, though. I can’t believe it didn’t wake you. And there’s a stupid jingle instead of a normal ring. It sounds like a car horn.”

  Eve raised her eyebrows. “Could it have been a car horn?”

  “A car horn with your sister’s voice at the end of it?” He blew out a breath and shook his head. He started to get up from the table. “Well, this is a waste of my time. If you don’t believe me, I don’t need to try and persuade you.”

  “Sit down,” she pleaded. “It’s fine. I believe you. I just don’t know why she called your cell phone and why she called in the middle of the night and why she asked for me and why she hung up.”

  “You got a cell phone?”

  “Sure,” Eve answered. “You know that. I got ours at the same time. I bundled,” she added. “Or whatever they call it. It was cheaper that way.”

  “Your sister got your phone number?”

  Eve thought about the question and then nodded. “Yes, I gave it to her when we got them.”

  “But you didn’t give her mine?” He had stayed in his seat.

  She shook her head. “You asked me not to.”

  He placed the phone back on the table and scratched his head. “Do you think I’m going crazy?”

  She smiled. “I have thought a lot of things about you in my lifetime, but I have always thought I’d be the one going crazy long before you,” she said.

  She finished her glass of water and reached down and petted Trooper. “Did you help him out of bed?” she asked, not expecting an answer but wondering how Jackson had managed to get from his bed to her door without assistance.

  “I was dreaming about her,” he confessed. “I was dreaming that she was calling and I couldn’t get to her.”

  Eve suddenly thought of her own dream, wondering if that was what or rather who she was searching for as she opened and closed doors, walking down the dark hallway. What Jackson was saying somehow resonated with her, and she figured they must have been having the same dream. She was just about to ask him for details when a car horn started to sound.

  FOURTEEN

  “What was that?” Eve turned to Jackson. They both looked down at the phone and then toward the front window.

  “It’s not this thing, that’s for sure,” the Captain answered. “It’s out there.” He motioned with his chin. “It’s somebody out there.”

  Eve waited. She was still only half awake from the first disturbance of the night and was having some difficulty tracking what was going on.

  “Well, go see what it is,” Jackson bellowed.

  Eve shook her head, trying to get her bearings, and headed to the front door. She opened it and peered outside. The noise had stopped, and there was no one parked in the driveway or close enough on the street below to see. She was about to close the door when the horn sounded again. She pulled the door open wide and stepped outside onto the porch. After trying to determine the source of the sound, she was fairly certain that it was coming from the direction of their closest neighbors, Michael and Sarah Parker, artists who had moved to Madrid in the early nineties and who lived a couple of miles away.

  She turned and walked back into the kitchen. “It’s from up the road,” she announced. “Sounds like it’s at Michael’s.” She closed the door and locked it. “Should I call them?”

  The Captain cleared his throat. “No, don’t bother. He told me a week ago that the horn on his old truck was getting stuck, asked me then if it had bothered us.” He shook his head. “That’s all it is. Just that old truck horn.”

  Eve headed to the table and sat down across from her father. “It still could ha
ve been her,” she said, referring to the phone call and to her sister trying to make contact.

  “There’s no record that she called. You didn’t talk to her. You didn’t even hear the thing ring.”

  “I didn’t hear the car horn either; that doesn’t mean anything.” She started to reach out and take his hand but hesitated, thinking better of it. The Captain was not one who appreciated gestures of concern.

  “I’m going back to bed,” he announced and started to get up.

  “Wait,” she responded. “Let’s talk about this.”

  He sat back down. “Talk about what? That it’s finally happening, that I’m starting to lose my mind?”

  “Now you’re just being dramatic. I never said that. You heard something. You heard Dorisanne calling. Maybe that noise out there was just a car horn, but maybe you heard everything you say you did.”

  “You calling me psychic now?” He studied his daughter.

  “Is that better than crazy?”

  There was a pause.

  He shrugged. “Probably not.”

  “Tell me again what she said.” Eve wasn’t sure where she was going with this line of thinking, and she was mostly certain the Captain would have nothing to do with believing in telepathic communication, but it seemed important that he thought he’d had a call from his youngest daughter. It seemed important in a way she wasn’t able to articulate.

  “I picked up the phone and said hello and she said, ‘Daddy let me speak to Eve.’ ” He glanced down at the cell phone on the table in front of him. “It wasn’t her. I was just dreaming.”

  “Then tell me about your dream,” she said, suddenly thinking about her own.

  “I’m not telling you about my dream,” he replied.

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s of no concern to you. It’s just a dream, bad clams or something.”

  “When did you have clams?” She smiled, trying to lighten the mood.