The Case of the Sin City Sister (6 page)
“What?” he asked, as if he knew something was wrong.
“I don’t know. It’s just a feeling,” she answered.
“What kind of feeling?”
“The bad kind, you know, the kind you can’t shake.”
He blew out a breath. “Okay, tell me again when you talked to her last.”
Eve smiled and sat up, grateful to be able to talk about her concerns. “You talked to her last. It was May 14. You wrote her a check that afternoon. Remember?”
Jackson appeared to be counting. “It’s a little over a month,” he acknowledged. “That’s not a long time for her.”
“I know,” Eve replied. “It’s just that she’s not returning any of the calls I’ve made this week. She may not call us regularly, but she’s always called me back when I’ve left a message.”
“Are you sure she’s getting the messages?”
“What do you mean?”
“Doesn’t she change out her cell phones all the time? Isn’t that one of the bills she can never pay?”
Eve considered this. “Yeah, but why would it still be her voice, her message, if they discontinued the number?”
“Maybe they don’t turn it off right away; maybe they hold on to the number expecting payment.”
Eve shook her head. “That just doesn’t make any sense.”
He waited. “Check the bank records,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“Check the bank statement, see if she cashed the check.”
Eve sat up. “That’s a great idea. At least that will tell us if she got the money.”
She hurried into the kitchen and picked up the phone. She had called the bank before to check on outstanding checks. It was an automated system, and even though she didn’t recall the check number, she did remember the date it was written and the amount. She was sure that was enough to see if it had cleared.
She dialed the number written on the phone book she kept in the top kitchen drawer and pulled out the account information she kept in her wallet. After punching in a series of numbers and having answered more than a few questions, the check numbers were
called out. They were all in sequence and all of them had cleared. All but one. Check number 2052. The one written on May 14. The one written in the amount of two hundred dollars. The one written to Dorisanne Divine Miller.
She hung up the phone and walked back into the den.
The Captain looked up from the television program he had turned on. He didn’t have to ask because he knew the answer just by reading his daughter’s face. He switched off the remote. “We’ll call her boss first,” was all he said.
“Right now, I’m short three waitresses. One is pregnant, the other got a job at the Poker Table, and Dorisanne with her bum foot. She said it’d be four weeks, this makes the fifth. You tell her to call me when you see her.”
“Haven’t you talked to her?” Eve asked.
“She called a week or so ago, just to say she was going to need the whole medical leave, the whole month. At first, she thought she might be able to be back, but she called then to say she was still on the crutches. That was before Jackie and Harriet left me. You tell her I need to hear from her right away.”
“I can’t get in touch with her,” Eve tried to explain. “That’s why I called you, to see if you’ve talked to her recently.”
There was a pause.
“The staff here doesn’t tend to call me just to chat. This ain’t one of those kind of places. I hear from them when they’re pregnant, when they’re hung over, and when they’ve sprained their ankles. They don’t even call when they ask for a transfer to the
gambling tables. I get to hear that from the supervisor. So, no, I haven’t talked to your sister since she first called to say she couldn’t come in. She left a message with the bartender a week ago to say it would be another week before she came back.”
“Did he say she sounded okay?” Eve wanted to know.
She could hear the sigh pouring across the phone line. “She said she needed another week before she could come back. That was the message. I didn’t get no mental health report.”
Eve waited. It certainly seemed as if the manager didn’t have any additional information, but she was not satisfied. She still didn’t know where Dorisanne was and if everything was fine with her. “Can you give me his name?”
“Whose?”
“The bartender’s. Can you give me his name and maybe I can talk to him?” Eve realized that some of the skills she had observed in the Captain were actually quite useful in getting information. She’d learned by watching that he would never hang up on a call until he at least had been given another contact.
“Jason, can you talk to this woman?”
Eve heard shuffling noises as if the phone was being moved, and then there was another voice on the other end.
“Hello?”
“Is this Jason?” Eve asked.
“Yep,” came the answer.
“Are you a bartender there?”
“Yep,” he replied again. “What’s this about?” he asked.
“Jason, I’m Dorisanne’s sister, and I haven’t been able to get her on the phone lately. I’m worried. The manager said she called the
bar last week. I’m not sure if you answered that call or not. But I assume since he passed the phone to you that you did. Was that you? Did you talk to her?”
“You the nun?”
The question surprised Eve a bit. “Um, yeah, I’m in the Benedictine Order. She told you about that?”
“Yeah. We talk some.”
There was a pause.
“So last week when she called, did you talk to her?”
“Yep, she called while I was on.”
“Did she sound okay? Is her phone still working?”
“She sounded like Dorisanne.”
Eve waited.
Surely
, she thought,
that can’t be all he has to say
.
He continued. “She just said her ankle was still swollen and she couldn’t be on her feet for an eight-hour shift and to tell Darrell. So I did.”
Another pause.
“I think she got that whole money thing sorted out.”
“What money thing?”
“Oh,” was his only response.
“Was she in some kind of financial trouble?”
He seemed to hesitate. “I think she and Robbie got it worked out. You should probably talk to her.”
“Well, that’s what I’m trying to do,” Eve explained. “I just can’t reach her.”
“Yeah, she got a new phone,” was the reply.
“Do you have a number?” Eve picked up a pen. She couldn’t help herself, she felt a little hopeful.
“Nah, I don’t have that.”
She put down the pen and dropped her forehead into her hand.
“But when I talk to her, I’ll tell her you called. I’ll tell her you’re looking for her.”
“Thanks, Jason.” She waited. “Do you think she’ll call?”
“Look, I gotta go. I got three customers sitting here waiting for their vodka tonics. I’ll let her know.”
And Eve heard the phone line go dead. She sat for a second just holding the receiver in her hand, halfway expecting Jason or Darrell or someone from the bar at the Rio to pick it back up again and tell her what she wanted to know. After a couple of minutes, she hung up.
She glanced across the room at her father, who had been watching the entire exchange. He was still sitting on the sofa.
“She talked to someone at the bar a week ago.”
He nodded.
“They said she asked to be out of work another week because her ankle is still swollen,” she said.
He waited.
“He said he thought she had gotten the whole money thing sorted out.”
The Captain reached up and scratched his chin. This meant nothing to him either.
“She got a new phone.” Eve shrugged. That was all the news she had to report. “What?” She noticed the way he was eyeing her.
“You sounded like a detective.”
The comment surprised her. “Is that bad?”
He smiled. “Not to me,” he answered. “But I’m not sure what
your Brother Oliver will say when you go back to the convent and he hears you answer the phone. You don’t sound like the kind and gentle nun anymore.”
Eve didn’t respond. She walked over to the kitchen sink, grabbed the dishrag, and began wiping off the counter.
“Speaking of professional leaves and calling in . . .” He didn’t complete the sentence.
“I have a couple more weeks,” she said. She retrieved the letters written by the missing miner from the far corner of the coffee table and walked down the hall. “If you need me, I’ll be in my room, reading.”
The next day Eve dropped the Captain off at the office and then drove his old truck to her favorite coffee shop, the Java Junction, to finish reading the letters. She pulled into a parking place in front, put the gear in Park, and turned off the engine while glancing around at the shops on the main street in Madrid. She couldn’t help but smile. It felt good to be there, good to be driving the truck, good to be getting a cup of coffee in the morning, good to be home. She got out and headed inside.
“Good morning, Sister Eve.” Twila was washing dishes at the sink that faced the door. She wiped off her hands, turned behind her, and grabbed a mug that read “Life’s too short to drink bad coffee.”
“We’ve got the French roast today,” she announced, handing her customer the cup. She was accustomed to Eve dropping by for coffee in the late morning hours. “You and the Captain got a new case?”
Eve took the cup. “Not sure I’d say it’s new, Twila. Missing miner from the 1800s. Came from North Carolina to dig for turquoise. Never made it home.”
“That skeleton they found?” Twila glanced down at the folder Eve was carrying under her arm but didn’t ask about it.
“Yeah, starts there,” she replied. “But even if the skeleton isn’t his family member, our client wants to know where he is.”
“Well, he ain’t here.” She winked. “You got the place all to yourself. But if he stops by later, I’ll tell him you’re looking for him.” She handed Eve the pitcher of milk and pointed her to the coffee carafe on the table next to the counter. “By the way,” she said as Eve was pulling out cash from her pocket, “I finally did it. I e-mailed the adoption agency that handled my case.”
Eve waited. She knew her friend had been on a search for her sister. Apparently the two siblings had been separated when they were very young, both of them having been given up for adoption by their mother.
Twila hadn’t even known she had a sister until a few months before when a family member had visited her in New Mexico and happened to mention it. Twila, excited about the possibility of having a sister, asked the Captain for help in searching for her not long after hearing the news. Eve had also assisted. After a few weeks they’d finally tracked down the name and location of the adoption agency that had handled Twila’s adoption, but for some reason, after she received that information, Twila seemed to lose interest. After asking her several times how she wanted them to proceed and receiving no reply, the Captain and Eve just backed off and were giving her the space and time she seemed to need before continuing
the search. It had been so long since working on it, Eve had almost forgotten about the search for Twila’s sister.
“I think I just got nervous for a while, started worrying about what it could mean to find a family member I never knew, a sister of all things . . .” She shook her head. “But then I decided I was being stupid. I want to know what happened to her. I want to know who she is. So I sent the e-mail yesterday.”
Eve nodded. She wasn’t sure what to say to her friend.
“It’s good to have a sister, right? I mean, how could that be bad?”
Eve forced a smile. She wanted to tell her how bad it could be, how having a sibling could cause you worry and sleepless nights, how she was spending endless hours trying to find her own sister, and she wasn’t sure whether to keep searching for Dorisanne or just do what the Captain said and wait to hear from her. She didn’t say any of those things, however; she just kept that smile in place. “That’s good, Twila,” she finally responded. “Will you let me know when you hear back from them?”
“You betcha I will,” Twila agreed. The phone rang in the back and she left the counter to answer it. “Duty calls,” she yelled as she walked away.
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: