Whispers from the Dead (14 page)

“Why are you doing—?” I didn’t finish the question, because I suddenly knew the answer. I dropped to my knees and shoved both hands into the folded clothes, my fingers frantically groping for Rosa’s packet.

It was no longer in the drawer. It was gone.

So angry that tears burned my eyes, I sat back on my heels. Whoever was in this house had stolen it!

Who would do such a thing?

My first thought was Tony, but I didn’t know why it would have been Tony. No. It couldn’t have been. He had even warned me to hide the packet.

Dee Dee knew about it. She’d seen Rosa’s things, even read the letter, but there was no way she could have left her lifeguard job to break into our house.

But Dee Dee couldn’t keep a secret. Tony had been concerned about this, and now I was too. I knew that she’d told Lupita about Rosa’s things, and I bet she told Eric.

Could Eric have been the thief?

I closed the drawer, which offered no resistance now,
and walked into the short hallway that led to both bedrooms. As I stood there, trying to sort out my thoughts, I stared ahead into the spare bedroom, watching a hot breeze ruffle the leaves of the tree outside the window. The curtain was caught in the sash.

My skin prickled as I realized what I was seeing. No one had opened this window—not with the air-conditioning on! Then how did the curtain get caught?

I rushed to the window and opened it, pulling the curtain aside. Below the window was a short ledge, and nearly touching the ledge was a long, thick branch of the tree that was centered in the narrow courtyard garden between this part of the front of the house and the garage.

I closed the window and tried to lock it, but the lock on top of the sash was loose and spun around. The metal piece into which it would have fastened was not on the sash. The minute Dad came home, I’d ask him to repair the lock. Until then— Frantically I looked around the room, trying to find something to wedge against the lower sash so the window wouldn’t open, but I didn’t see anything that would hold it.

My thoughts ran into and over each other so rapidly, it was hard to keep up. This had been Adam’s room. His father must have known the lock was broken. Maybe Adam had broken it on purpose. For how many years had Adam sneaked in and out of this window? Mr. Holt lied to me about the years in which Rosa had worked for them. Had he told Adam what I’d found? Had Adam come back to steal the packet?

Adam, the murderer! Had he been the one I’d heard in the house?

But Eric had said that Adam went to California to live with his mother. If it wasn’t Adam, it had to be Eric.

I ran toward the telephone in my room, sprawling across the bed. I flipped through the phone book with numb fingers until I found Eric’s number, then dialed it.

“Hello,” he said. I stared at the phone for a moment, unable to answer.

“Hello?” Eric said again. “Who’s there?”

“I—it’s me—Sarah.”

“Sarah who?” he asked in a mocking tone.

I put all my fury and strength behind my words. “Eric, where is Adam Holt?”

He hesitated for only a moment. “I told you. He’s living in California with his mother.” He slipped into the mocking tone again. “Oh, I see. You want the name of the town. Forgot it, did you? Well, it’s Cedar Creek.” Patiently he spelled, “C-E-D-A-R—”

I interrupted. “It’s a big joke to you, isn’t it?”

“Big joke? I wouldn’t know. I’ve never been there.”

“Eric! You know what I mean. Why are you treating me like this?”

His voice softened just a little. “You haven’t got much sense of humor, have you, Sarah?”

“Not when it comes to someone breaking into our house and scaring me to death.”

“You don’t sound dead. You sound extremely alive and healthy.”

I took a deep breath and tried to keep from screaming at him. “Eric, are you lying to me?”

“Lying? About what?”

“Cut it out! Are you lying about Adam being in California?”

“Of course not,” he said so smoothly, it was as though he were pretending to lie.

“I’m not going to get a straight answer out of you, am I?”

“Very few people do.”

“You’re covering up for Adam Holt, aren’t you? Why are you on his side?”

He bit his words off angrily. “Why shouldn’t I be? Adam wasn’t convicted. That means he’s free. So what’s he supposed to do for the rest of his life—live somewhere he doesn’t want to live, like an outcast?”

I tried to hold back a sob, but I couldn’t. “Did you break into our house?” I asked him.

“Why should I do a thing like that?”

“The police were here. Didn’t you see them?”

“No. I just got home. What happened?” He sounded more curious than concerned.

I rubbed furiously at my eyes with the back of one fist. “Someone was in the house when I came back from the pool.”

“That’s terrible. Did he steal anything?”

There was a false note in his voice, as though he were covering up. Covering what? I was determined to find out.

“Nothing was stolen,” I said. “I was afraid he was after Rosa’s things, but fortunately he didn’t find them.”

“But—!” His surprise slipped out before he could check it.

My trick had worked. Eric knew about Rosa’s possessions, and he knew who’d come after them.

Was it Adam? Or Eric?

“You’re no help. Thanks for nothing,” I snapped at him, and hung up before he could say another word.

One more thing to look up in the telephone book—the area code for Cedar Creek, California. Directory assistance gave me a telephone number for Mrs. Martin Holt.

She answered on the third ring, and I was almost too nervous to talk. My voice came out in a squeak as I asked, “May I please speak to Adam?”

I heard her suck in her breath. There was a long pause and her voice was suspicious when she asked, “Who is this?”

“My name is Sarah.”

“Do you have a last name, Sarah?”

“I’m sorry, ma’am. Sarah Darnell.” I tried to mumble the last word, hoping she wouldn’t hear it clearly and connect it with the buyers of her Houston house.

“Why do you want to talk to Adam?” she persisted. “Are you another reporter?”

“Oh, no!” Quickly I tried to reassure her. “I’m only sixteen. I’m in high school.”

I had thought she’d be reassured, but the suspicion was still in her voice as she answered, “Where are you calling from?”

“I didn’t mean to bother you,” I said. “Please, could I talk to Adam?”

Her voice was sharp. “I’m sorry. Adam can’t talk to you right now.”

“Will he be back soon?”

“How should I know? I don’t keep track of his hours,” she snapped. “You can leave your number, but I can’t guarantee if he’ll return your call. Just don’t keep calling and pestering me. Understand?”

“I understand,” I said and hung up. I was sure now that Adam didn’t live with his mother.

Slowly I walked down the stairs and sat on the bottom step, trying to sort out my thoughts. As I glanced at the window by the door I remembered how frightened I had been when I’d seen Dee Dee peering through it. “Anybody who comes to the door can see right inside the hall. It would be hard not to,” Dee Dee had said.

So when Darlene Garland had come to the door with her pizza delivery, what had she seen?

Suppose that Adam Holt hadn’t killed her because she resisted him, as he had claimed. Suppose he had killed her because she had witnessed something he hadn’t wanted anyone to see.

Rosa’s murder?

It seemed like a wild idea, but I became excited as it began to fit. I remembered that the woman who lived across the street from the Holts said she had heard screaming but had placed it earlier than the delivery girl’s arrival. Had she heard Rosa screaming, and not Darlene?

Adam’s parents hadn’t called the police and had been in the house for at least twenty minutes before the police contacted them. Why? Had they suspected that Rosa had been murdered and tried to get rid of any trace of the woman? That would account for the time. If no
one knew of Rosa’s presence, if she had come alone to the United States and had no family who knew her whereabouts, who would miss her? Who would know that she was gone?

I didn’t have all the facts I needed, but I thought I knew where I could get them.

In the morning I borrowed the car from Mom, telling her only that I needed to go downtown again. It was my dumb good luck that when I reached the police administration building on Riesner and asked to speak to the detective in charge of the Adam Holt case, he was there and agreed to talk with me.

His name was Mark Hardison. He was stocky and slightly balding, and his face looked like weathered leather. “Sit down,” Sergeant Hardison said, pointing to the chair across from his desk. “What can I do for you?”

I told him that we lived in Adam Holt’s house. He raised one eyebrow, and I wondered if he felt the way we did about living in a house where a murder had taken place. “I need to ask you some questions,” I said. “I’ve read all the newspaper accounts about Darlene Garland’s murder and—”

“Why are you dwelling on the murder?” he asked. “Wouldn’t it be a lot healthier to try to forget about it?”

“No,” I insisted, “because I think—” I didn’t want to tell him yet, and obviously I couldn’t tell him everything. “Please let me ask you a couple of questions, and then I’ll explain.”

He nodded briefly, so I asked, “When Adam Holt was arrested, was he cut? Was he bleeding?”

“Aside from a couple of scratches made by fingernails, he wasn’t hurt.”

“But at the trial the medical examiner said they had found two blood types.”

“That’s right.”

“How much blood of each type?”

He frowned. “We didn’t ask that question. Offhand, it didn’t seem relevant.”

“You tested Adam’s blood?”

“Of course. He’s type A, the same as one of the samples found by the medical examiner.”

“How do you know it was
his
blood, exactly? A lot of people are type A.”

“It was tested for type only, as far as I know.”

“Isn’t there any way to test blood to make absolutely sure it came from a particular person?”

“There is now. There’s a new way to match blood to a specific person through DNA, but we didn’t have the information or equipment to take the tests at that time.”

“Do you have the equipment now?”

“Not here in Houston. We can send samples to a lab in New York State.”

“Could a test still be made from the sample you have?”

He leaned back in his chair and smiled. “The people who invented the process claim it could even be done on a mummy.”

“On a mummy? I know I’m taking a lot of your time,”
I apologized, “but I’d really like to know what DNA is and how it works.”

“No problem,” he said. “It’s not hard to explain. DNA—deoxyribonucleic acid—is in each cell of our bodies and is unlike that of everyone else’s, so it’s as accurate as a fingerprint. If a body’s cells are badly decomposed, DNA can even be taken from bones or the pulp in teeth.”

“That blood sample from the house may have been Adam’s type, but I’m sure that it wasn’t his blood.”

“Just what are you getting at?”

“I think the blood came from a woman named Rosa Luiz.”

He sat upright, and his eyes drilled into mine as he said, “That name never came up. Who is she?”

I told him about the packet belonging to Rosa and that it had been stolen from the house. I explained who I thought Rosa was.

“I know that everything wasn’t in the newspaper stories, and that’s why I came to you—to get some answers. There are too many things that don’t add up. For instance, when I read the newspaper accounts of Darlene Garland’s murder, it didn’t make sense to me that Adam would have met her at the door with a knife and tried to force her inside. She was at the wrong address. He hadn’t been expecting her. It wasn’t as though he’d been lying in wait for her. But she would have seen him through the window when she rang the doorbell. She would have seen what was taking place in the entry hall.”

“Seen what?” He leaned forward, listening intently.

“I think Darlene was an eyewitness to another murder. I think that she saw Adam kill Rosa Luiz.” There! I’d said it! I let out a deep breath.

“I don’t know where you got your information, but I think you’re mistaken about this Rosa person. There was no sign that anyone besides the Holts was living in that house.”

“What were the parents doing during the twenty minutes they were home before the police arrived? They had time to get rid of any evidence that Rosa had existed.”

“We have no proof of that.”

“We have proof that Rosa had lived there. The calendar—” I stopped. “Oh, no. I forgot it was stolen.”

“We have only your word that those things exist.”

“My friend next door saw them too. She translated the letter.”

“Did you show these things to your parents?”

“No. I meant to. That is, I was going to show them after I added up all the facts and put them together.”

“Do you watch a lot of television?” he asked. “Private-eye shows? Cops-and-robbers stuff?”

“I’m not making this up,” I said. “Please take what I say seriously. There are other things that fit in. The woman who lived next door to the Holts heard the screams earlier than the time Darlene would have arrived at the Holts’ house. Those must have been Rosa’s screams.”