I Let My Sister Answer One More Call

Chapter 3 The Report

I started small, because that was all I could do.

The first thing was the dog. The barking dog. Our neighbor two houses down, Mrs. Calderon, walked her schnauzer past the end of Ridge Road every evening at six. The dog on Ridge Road would go insane. She had complained about it for years. In my first life, she had complained about it to the police a week before the cave was found, and they had gone out to the house and looked around and found nothing, because by then it was too late.

The next morning, I got up before my mother and went out to the curb where Mrs. Calderon was picking up her newspaper.

"Hello, Annie," she said. "You're up early."

"Your dog is afraid," I said.

She looked down at me. "Excuse me?"

"The dog on Ridge Road. He barks at your dog. But your dog is afraid of him. He knows something is wrong."

Mrs. Calderon went very still. She was an older woman, round-faced, with reading glasses on a chain around her neck. She had lived in the neighborhood for thirty years. She had a low opinion of busybodies and a high opinion of dogs.

"Annie," she said, slowly. "What do you mean?"

"There's a man in that house. He hurts people. The dog knows."

She stared at me for a long moment. Then she said, "Does your mother know you're out here?"

I turned and went inside before she could ask anything else. I did not know if it would work. I did not know if she would do anything. But I had learned something in my first life: information without a witness is just a feeling. You have to give somebody a reason to look.

Two days later, Mrs. Calderon called the police about the barking dog. It was a small, petty, neighborly thing. The kind of call the department gets a hundred times a week. But she mentioned that she had heard the man in the house shouting at someone, and that she had seen a woman's car in the driveway with the engine running at two in the morning, which was a lie, but it was the kind of lie that makes a dispatcher write the call down.

A patrol officer went out to Ridge Road. He knocked on the door. Martin Blakely answered. He was polite. He said the dog was his and the dog was fine and he was sorry for the noise. He said there was no woman in the house. He said his wife had left him six months ago and he had not heard from her since.

The officer asked if he could come in. Martin Blakely said no, and the officer, who had no warrant and no probable cause and a hundred other calls waiting, got back in his car and left.

I heard about all of this because Mrs. Calderon told my mother, standing at the fence the next afternoon, in the voice people use when they are not sure whether they are gossiping or confessing.

"They went out to check on him," she said. "And I felt like such a fool. But Annie said the dog was afraid."

My mother looked at me. I was sitting on the porch with my coloring book, pretending not to listen. I did not look up.

"Well," my mother said. "She's a strange kid."

"Strange in a good way," Mrs. Calderon said.

I colored the sky orange because I was six and the sky inside my head was not blue anymore.

The problem with getting the police to look at Martin Blakely early was that looking is not the same as finding.

There was a filing cabinet in his bedroom. There was a list. There was a storage unit in El Cajon. None of that would matter unless someone opened the cabinet, or the unit, or the cave, and nobody had a reason to do any of those things.

I lay awake at night in my six-year-old bed and thought about it. I remembered the layout of the house from the newspaper photographs. I remembered the timeline. The cave in the Cuyamaca hills had been sealed by a rockslide in the spring after Hannah's disappearance, which was why it had taken ten years to find her. The rockslide was the thing that had hidden her. But the rockslide had not happened yet.

I sat up straight in bed.

The rockslide had not happened yet.

If I could get someone into the hills before the slide, if I could get someone to look at the cave while it was still open, if I could get them there before Martin Blakely moved her into it, or after, either way, if the cave was open and someone knew to look at it, then Hannah's body would never be a mystery in this world. She would never have to be found ten years after the fact. She would never have to come home with black hair that had turned gray.

But I did not know where the cave was. I had read about it in the paper but the article had not given coordinates, because the reporter had not had them. I knew it was in the Cuyamaca hills. I knew it was near a trail that had been closed for years.

That was all.

I could not drive. I could not hike. I was six. But the embers of a plan were starting to glow, and the plan did not need a six-year-old to be the one who hiked.

The plan needed a reason for an adult to hike there.