After reading police files all evening, Eve slept fitfully. The Captain had retired to his bedroom before ten o’clock. She tried going to bed herself around eleven but was unable to quit thinking about what she had read and what had been on her mind all day, so she eventually got back up, threw on her old terrycloth robe, and headed for the kitchen. She took down her favorite mug, the one her mother had liked best, the thick one with a bear’s claw painted on the front that she had bought at a thrift shop. After filling it with milk, she stuck it in the microwave and waited. She leaned on the counter, her chin resting in her hand, and looked out the window above the sink. The night was a typical New Mexico night with a sky full of stars and an easy desert wind. When the microwave dinged, she walked over, retrieved the mug now filled with steaming hot milk, and headed back to the living room to continue looking over the contents of the box that Daniel had delivered to the Captain.
She read more missing person reports filed in Santa Fe County in the year 1890 by concerned family members across the country, as well as the homicide reports filed in that decade. Based upon what she’d found, it seemed to Eve that there must have been lots of folks like Caleb Alford from everywhere in the country who came to New Mexico to strike it rich and who never returned to or contacted folks in the hometowns they had left.
It surprised both Eve and Jackson that there was such a complete set of files from so many years ago. The Captain had commented that the box and the files therein were more thorough than the last bunch of reports he had worked on before retiring from the police force. Daniel had explained to them that there had been an entire collection of old reports from a century before that had been kept at the home of a history-buff sheriff named Tom Jaramillo in Santa Fe County. Jaramillo had come across them in the courthouse basement, and since they were old even when he found them in the 1940s, he was permitted to take them home, sort through them, and find a way to secure them. It had apparently become quite a project for the lawman, and the evidence of his meticulous care and work was clear.
They learned that the files had originally been kept in a dry, cool, dark environment, the center storage area of the courthouse underground department, so they were in good shape when he first discovered them. And then, when he became their caretaker, he took extra precautions, filing the reports in low-lignin storage containers with corrugated acid-free spacer boards. He put them in chronological order, making the collection easy to read and easy to follow. Except for a bit of yellowing on the edges, the papers were in excellent condition.
Reviewing them was like taking a step back in time, and the father and daughter had spent most of the evening reading some of the more interesting files to each other. It had been an enjoyable night for them both, a sort of crash course on the justice system in the western part of the country during a time when there wasn’t much federal assistance in the outlying areas like the territories of New Mexico and Arizona. There were still skirmishes between the Indians and the white settlers, still struggles between the Spanish landowners and the Americans coming down the Santa Fe Trail. It truly was a wild and raucous time in the nation’s history.
The two learned that Sheriff Lawson Carson was the central lawman in Santa Fe County, taking office in 1886 and staying in the position until he was shot and killed by a band of bank robbers in 1910. This information Eve found on the Internet, hoping to uncover more about the writer and keeper of the files they had started reading. The reports kept in the files were mostly written by him. Each incidence of a homicide or violent death was documented in a one-page report; missing person reports were documented in the same way. Names, dates, short descriptions, and then a longer, more in-depth summary of what Sheriff Carson did in response to the incident or concern was the standard content of each file. Eve wondered out loud to the Captain if the sheriff did all of the police work in those days, if he was officer, prosecutor, and judge for those charged with criminal offenses since there seemed to be no other names on any of the files, both those that had been closed as well as those that had remained open and unsolved.
Some of the missing person reports had the words Found Alive written across the top of the page. Others had Found Dead, all of them dated and signed by the sheriff. Some of the homicide reports had the word Hanged written across the entire page; others were left without a conclusion or follow-up report, appearing to Eve as if the punishment for criminals was swift and brutal or simply overlooked. All evening her mind was filled with the cowboy images from the many Westerns she’d watched as a child. She even remembered some of the stories she had heard of Kit Carson, who was known to have traveled extensively through Madrid and Cerrillos and Santa Fe County on many occasions, and she wondered if the sheriff was any kin to the brigadier general and Indian agent or if the last name was just a coincidence.
Most of the missing persons, all men, were reported to have been working in the mines, and most of the homicides had to do with fights over stolen money and property or mineral rights. None of the files, those dealing with missing miners or those dealing with murder, cited the name Caleb Alford. Although the reading was interesting, it was not proving to be beneficial to the case. Even with all of the files from the year the North Carolina miner went missing, all of them easy to read and easy to follow, it didn’t appear as if there was any official report of the whereabouts of their client’s great-grandfather. They’d come up empty when it came to finding any information that would be helpful to the man trying to find answers about his family member.
After going through the last files and finishing her warm milk, it was late, after midnight, and Eve tried once again to go to sleep. The milk did not help. She tossed and turned. And when she finally did fall asleep, her dreams were chaotic and overwrought with cowboys and saloons and fights and restless women searching for the men they loved and lost. Brothers, husbands, boyfriends, fathers, the images of family members trying to find someone filled Eve’s mind until finally she found herself in one of the dreams, searching and searching for somebody, for something.
In the dream Eve was wearing a black scapular and her hair was short. She had just taken her first vows, and she was walking down a long hallway, opening doors on both sides, looking for something or someone. Behind the first door was a beautiful scene from her home in Madrid: Her horse from her early childhood stood at a stall window eating hay. She longed for the horse, longed to ride him again, but something else was calling her and she kept moving, opening doors and seeing people and things from her past, from before she became a nun, before she entered the convent in Pecos.
A favorite teacher, several nuns praying, a room of books, stacks of gold and silver, her mother sewing, her father—the Captain—his back turned toward her, building or repairing something placed in front of him. She stopped for a second, just as she had at all the doors, almost entering, glad to see the people she loved, eager to speak to them, but still drawn to something else, something she couldn’t explain. She moved on. She opened and observed and then closed the doors, felt the delight at seeing her loved ones, felt curiosity at seeing the rooms containing money and books, and she kept moving down the hall, searching for something or someone she hadn’t yet found. She felt frustrated and a little anxious, even though she didn’t know what was missing.
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.