Free Whispers from the Dead by Joan Lowery Nixon

her shoulders tightly. “In any move there’sbound to be a few new ways to get used to, but everyone in the department’s been friendly. Well, almost everyone.” He smiled. “I suppose there’s at least one stumbling block in every office—maybe to keep life from getting too routine.” He paused before he asked, “Did I ask too much? Is this move too hard on you, Dorothy?”
    “I’ve shed a few tears,” Mom said. She straightened and smiled at Dad. “But I’m a survivor. As soon as the house is put together, I’ll go job-hunting. As for tomorrow, I’m going to start hanging pictures.” She headed toward the kitchen, saying as she’d done for years, “I’ll check to see if the doors are locked.”
    Dad turned off the reading lamp next to his chair and walked toward the hall. He stopped and waited for me. “Coming, Sarah?”
    I realized that ever since I’d walked into the house I’d been waiting for another contact from the woman. A question suddenly popped into my mind. “Dad,” I asked, “that woman who was murdered—what was her name?”
    He sighed. “I don’t think we should get into that again.”
    “I’m not going to talk about it,” I said. “I only want to know the woman’s name.”
    He frowned, trying to remember. “It was Darlene. Darlene what? Let’s see … Garwood? No. That’s close, but it was something else, more rhythmic. Garwood, Garlin. That’s it—Darlene Garland.”
    “Are you sure? That name doesn’t fit someone who only spoke Spanish.”
    “I don’t know where you got the idea that she only spoke Spanish. She would have had to speak English tohold the kind of job she had—especially in this neighborhood, where most of the people speak English.”
    Dad looked at me with a kind of funny expression on his face, so I quickly said, “I guess I was confused. There was so much to think about.”
    “Yes,” he said. “There was.” He put an arm around my shoulder and kissed my forehead. “I’m proud of you, Sarah. If you’d been afraid to live in this house, I don’t know what we would have done. You even managed to reassure your mother with your sensible, practical attitude, and that took some doing.”
    I hugged him tightly, wishing I could tell him about the vision and the woman who had asked me for help. But I couldn’t. I wished we could be back in Missouri, but that was a stupid wish that wouldn’t come true.
    Mom returned and kissed me good night. I left them and took the stairs one slow step at a time, trying to sort everything out.
    Who was the woman who had contacted me? Was she someone who really needed my help? Or had the evil in this house twisted itself into demons who pretended to be what they were not? Nervously I turned on the light switch in my room before I turned off the light in the hall.
    With trembling fingers I closed my bedroom door and leaned against it, waiting for—no, actually
willing
—the voice to return.

Chapter
Six

    T he spirit chose her own moments to make contact. When I realized she wouldn’t come, I was free to think about Tony, who slipped from my conscious thoughts into my dreams.
    I woke to slotted ribbons of sunlight streaming through the mini-blinds and to a whisper:
“Trate de encontrarlo.”
    I sat up in bed, swinging my feet to the floor, and brushing my hair away from my face.
“Trate de encontrarlo”?
I said out loud. “What does that mean?” Had the words come from my dream?
    If I’d moved, I would have missed the slight hiss of a breath taken and held. Hugging my arms to keep from shivering, I whispered, “Are you there?”
    No one answered.
    Anxious to escape whoever was with me, I rummaged through my shoulder bag to find a scrap of paperand a pen and wrote down the words so I wouldn’t forget them.
    It didn’t take long to pull on shorts and a T-shirt and race downstairs to join Mom in the kitchen where she was still rearranging pans in the lower cabinets.
    She looked up at me in surprise.