The Case of the Sin City Sister (9 page)

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 have 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.

He glowered at her. “You know what I mean. It was just something I ate or just the stuff we were going through, those files. It’s nothing. It was a silly dream, and I thought it was real but it wasn’t.”

“Just tell me about the dream,” she repeated.

He blew out a breath. “She was little, ten or eleven, had those pigtails she always wore. And she was stuck in some cave, a well, or probably a mine, since that’s what I’ve been thinking about. And I heard her calling and I couldn’t get to her, couldn’t find her.”

“Who was she calling?” Eve wanted to know, though not sure why it mattered.

“For me,” he answered, glancing down at the phone. “She was calling for me, calling out ‘Daddy,’ which she hasn’t called me since she was about that age.”

“And then you heard the phone ring?”

“And then, apparently, I heard Michael’s truck horn.”

“Whatever,” Eve responded. “But then you heard the noise and then she said for you to get me?”

He nodded. “Then I answered the phone and she said, ‘Daddy, let me speak to Eve.’ ”

“And then you got out of bed and jumped to the door and called for me?”

“Yes, Detective Divine, that’s exactly how it went down.”

Trooper raised her head and then lowered it back to the floor.

“Don’t call me that,” Eve said. “And don’t be so grouchy. I’m just trying to understand what happened.”

“There’s nothing to understand,” he explained. “I had a dream. I got carried away in my dream and confused my subconscious ramblings with reality. It’s not that complicated.”

“Why do you do that?” Eve asked.

He seemed confused. “Do what?”

“That,” she replied. “That way you have of blowing off anything other than what you can prove. Why couldn’t this have been a call from Dorisanne? Why couldn’t this have been some way of her trying to reach out to you, to get your attention? Why does everything have to be so scientific and factual with you? What happened to believing in hunches and intuition?”

“I believe in hunches and intuition. I don’t believe in people contacting me through dreams.”

“Well, I do,” Eve noted. “I believe that people are connected to each other on many levels and in many ways, and sometimes those connections are not the ones we expect. Sometimes we are connected in our spirits or in our thoughts.”