Whispers from the Dead (10 page)

I dropped the first envelope and medal into my lap and opened the second. Inside was a small pocket calendar, two years out-of-date. The names of the months and days of the week were in Spanish, each day crossed off with a tiny black
X
up through March second. From March third there were no markings on the calendar.

Dee Dee gasped. “March third is the day the murder took place! What do you think that means?”

“I don’t know. Whoever owned these things must have left this house the day before.”

“Or on the day of the murder.”

“You mean that the person might have seen what happened?” I shivered, thinking of how terrifying that would be.

“What else have you got there?” Dee Dee asked.

With the calendar was a small envelope, addressed to Rosa Luiz at a post-office address someplace in Mexico called El Chapul, and there was a canceled Mexican stamp on the envelope.

Rosa? Is that your name?
I felt a shiver of recognition. I turned the envelope over and stared at it. “This is a personal letter,” I said. “I don’t think we should read it.”

“Sure we should!” Dee Dee demanded. She was practically leaning into my lap. “It’s been opened, hasn’t it? Besides, we need to know who owns these things, don’t we?” She paused and added, “And if they have anything to do with the murder.”

From the envelope I took out a small, rough sheet of paper. It was dated about four years ago and was addressed to Rosa Luiz with a formal heading.

“Can you read Spanish?” Dee Dee asked me.

“No.”

“Then stop staring at the letter and give it to me. I’ll read it.”

Almost reluctantly I handed the sheet of paper to her, and she studied it. “Oh, dear,” she said.

I reached over and shook her shoulder. “Read it aloud! I want to know what it says too!”

Dee Dee complied, translating as she went along, with only a few stumbles.

Sorrow wrapped itself around me, its weight bending my shoulders. “Poor Rosa,” I murmured. “She was all alone.”

Dee Dee’s glance was curious. “How do you know that?”

I was puzzled too. “I don’t really know. I just—” I took a deep breath and tried to cover by saying, “I just took it for granted that if she were her uncle’s only relative, then
he
must have been
her
only relative.”

“Wrong,” Dee Dee said. “She might have been married. She might have a dozen children, parents, brothers, sisters-in-law, who knows?” She paused. “The real question is who is this Rosa Luiz, and what are her things doing in this closet?”

“She probably worked here,” I answered.

Dee Dee fingered the bills. “Poor thing. She worked hard for this money. She wouldn’t have wanted to leave it behind. Maybe we could find her and get it back to her.”

“We can’t do that!”

“Why not? You sound so positive.”

The presence who had contacted me was Rosa. I was sure of this. But I couldn’t tell Dee Dee about it. How could I explain?

“I know what we can do,” Dee Dee said. “We can telephone Mr. Holt. Maybe he’ll know where Rosa is.”

“No!” I insisted, but Dee Dee handed me the letter, jumped to her feet, and ran into the kitchen.

I hurried after her. “Dee Dee, wait a minute. I don’t think telephoning Mr. Holt is a good idea.”

But Dee Dee had already bent over the Houston telephone directory and was thumbing through the pages. “I know where Mr. Holt works,” she said. “Yes, here’s the number. I’ll dial. You talk.”

“We shouldn’t …” I began, but Dee Dee had already finished dialing.

“Here,” she said in a stage whisper, thrusting the receiver at me. “It’s ringing!”

“Hello?” a masculine voice was saying as I reluctantly took the receiver from Dee Dee. “Hello?”

I tried to sound very businesslike, but I felt strange talking to a man whose son was a murderer. “My name is Sarah Darnell. Is this Mr. Martin Holt?”

“Yes, it is.”

I plunged right in. “Mr. Holt, we’re living in your former house on Fair Oaks Lane. We’ve found something
that belongs to a Rosa Luiz, and I hope you can tell me how we can get in touch with her.”

For a moment there was silence. “Mr. Holt?” I asked. “Are you still there?”

“Yes,” he said, his voice so thick with suspicion that it dropped a notch. “What do you want? I don’t understand the reason for this call.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Maybe I didn’t explain it right. I was cleaning up, and I found a few possessions belonging to a Rosa Luiz.”

“What possessions?”

I don’t know why, but something kept me from telling him everything. “A small amount of money and a religious medal. Her name was with them.”

“Oh,” he said, the tension leaving his voice. “Well, somehow they must have gotten tucked out of sight and she forgot about them. Obviously they didn’t mean much to her.”

“You know her, then.”

“Yes,” he said.

“Did she work for you?”

“A long time ago. It must have been ten years, at least. I remember it was when we first moved into that house. We only employed her for a few months. She didn’t work out.”

I took a deep breath and tried to sound calm. “Do you know where she went?”

“No,” he said. “Probably back to Mexico.”

“I’d like to return these things to her.”

“Forget it,” he snapped. “She was one of the many illegals. She’s probably somewhere back in Mexico, and
you’d never find her. Keep the money. Count it as an unexpected gift.”

“That’s all you can tell me about her?”

“That’s more than enough. I scarcely remember her—” He broke off, his tone almost angry. “I have a business appointment. There’s really nothing more we need to discuss, is there?”

“No,” I said. “Thank you very much.”

As I hung up the receiver Dee Dee leaned across the counter, asking eagerly, “Well? What did he say? Tell me!”

I tightly gripped the envelope that held Rosa Luiz’s few possessions. “He said he barely remembered her, that she worked here for just a few months when they first moved into this house.”

Dee Dee looked disappointed. “So that’s that.”

“Let’s keep this to ourselves,” I told her. “At least for now, I’d just as soon no one else knew about it.”

Dee Dee tried to look innocent. “Sure, if you want. I can keep a secret, no matter what Eric says about me. But I don’t understand why—”

“No real reason. Just humor me. Okay?”

But I did have a reason. The dates Mr. Holt gave me were years before the dates on the letter and on the calendar.

Martin Holt had lied to me, and I wanted to know why.

W
hen Dee Dee left for lifeguard duty, I was glad. I needed time to think.

Mom handed me a folded newspaper. “Do me a favor and take this out to the garage,” she said. As I glanced at the newspaper the front-page headlines gave me an idea.

“Do you think that the
Houston Post
or the
Houston Chronicle
would let me look up back copies of their newspapers?” I asked Mom.

“You can find back issues of local papers on film in any city’s downtown library.” She straightened, a hand at the small of her back, and leaned against the kitchen counter, studying me. “You want to read about the murder, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

Her forehead puckered. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“Everyone else knows all the details. I think it will be easier to know what happened here than to guess at it.” I had to learn as much as possible about what really happened.

Mom hesitated. “Maybe we should ask your father for his opinion.”

I walked over to face Mom, resting my hands on her shoulders. “Mom, you’ve got to stop worrying about me. I need to be independent. I have to make my own decisions.”

Mom took a deep breath, closing her eyes. She opened them, looked right into my eyes, and said, “All right, Sarah. I trust your judgment. If you want to go to the library, you can take the car. I won’t need it until late this afternoon.”

“Thanks, Mom.” I gave her a hug, then paused. “Do you happen to know how to get to the downtown library?”

She laughed. “Call them up, O Independent One. Ask
them
for directions.”

“Let’s try this one first,” the librarian said as she snapped the first roll into place in one of the microfilm readers and showed me how to fast-forward and reverse. “As far as I remember, the issues that first tell about the murder are included in here. The stories about the trial are in the roll on the bottom of the stack I brought you.” She studied me. “We haven’t had anyone ask for these dates in a long time.”

I just nodded. As she walked away I began to forward
the tape from page to page, rapidly scanning the front pages. The fast-forward made me sick to my stomach, and every now and then I had to pause, closing my eyes to give them a rest.

I found the story close to the middle of the film. It was under a top-of-the-page banner headline:
DELIVERY GIRL BRUTALLY MURDERED
;
TEENAGER CAUGHT
,
CONFESSES
.

The picture of Adam Holt was not very clear, and one arm was across his face, so a school photo from the year before was run next to it. Adam was blond and pudgy and looking away from the camera, unsmiling, so it was hard to tell about his eyes.

Basically there was not much more information in the news stories than Dad had told us. The murder victim, Darlene Garland, apparently came to the Holts’ door with a pizza delivery. Adam Holt met her there with a knife. He attempted to drag her up the stairs, she bolted and tried to run, and he stabbed her.

The follow-up stories covered the same information. Adam told his story to two police officers while being driven to headquarters, but refused to give a written or taped confession after his parents hired an attorney.

I rewound the film, according to instructions, and put on the last roll—the one with the accounts of the trial. This one had some information that hadn’t come out in the earlier stories. A woman who lived across the street from the Holts testified that she had been gardening in her backyard when she heard screams coming from what she thought was the Holt house. According to her
testimony, she ran inside her own house and locked the door.

“Did you call the police?” the prosecuting attorney asked her.

“Oh, no,” she answered. “At first I was afraid, but then I thought how I’ve never heard anything like that around here, and it had to have been—well, I thought it was kids just chasing around and acting silly. If that’s all it was and I called the police, I’d look like a fool.”

I stopped reading. If only she’d called the police, they could have placed Adam at the scene of the crime. I rubbed my eyes, which were beginning to ache, and went back to reading the newspaper stories.

The woman told the court that she thought she had remembered glancing at her kitchen clock, and she was pretty sure that it read one-fifteen. The defense attorney discredited her testimony, which must not have been hard to do, because the delivery girl couldn’t have arrived on the scene much before one-thirty.

The medical examiner testified there were two kinds of blood found in the Holts’ hallway, type A and type O. Darlene Garland had type O blood, and Adam had type A.

The discussion about the oral confession took up half a newspaper page. The judge allowed it, even though the defense attorney reminded him that under Texas law an oral confession was not admissible.

In a later issue I read that the jury had found Adam Holt guilty of murder in the first degree and that he was sentenced to life imprisonment. But his attorney filed an
appeal, based on the wrongful admission of the oral confession.