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.”
“You’re a nun. You’re supposed to believe that stuff.”
“Well, you’re a parent. You’re supposed to believe that stuff too.”
“That was your mother’s role in the family.”
“See there, you do believe it then, don’t you?”
“I believe your mother had those kinds of connections with the two of you. She always seemed to know when you were bothered or upset, always seemed to know when something was wrong.”
“So maybe now it’s you that has the connections.” She looked over at her father.
He glanced
Mari Carr and Jayne Rylon