Whispers from the Dead by Joan Lowery Nixon

pulled into the driveway. “I’m ready to work,” she said, and tugged one of the large grocery bags from the car. Spying the cat carrier, she said, “Hey! She’s pretty.”
    Dinky looked at Dee Dee with a little more friendliness than she’d shown me, but once inside the house, Dinky went exploring, ignoring both of us. I watched her carefully to see how she reacted. Weren’t cats supposed to sense things people couldn’t see? But not a hair raised on Dinky’s calico back.
    Mom and Dee Dee greeted each other a little awkwardly.
    “I’ll put away the groceries,” Mom said. She nodded toward the maid’s room. “I’d appreciate it if you girls would do a really good job of wiping down the floor in there—especially in the little closet. It’s a hands-and-knees job, and my back is beginning to give out.”
    Dee Dee and I equipped ourselves with soft old towels and the wood cleanser. “I’ll begin in the closet,” I said.
    The closet was so small that I couldn’t get completely into it. I attacked the baseboards, scrubbing hard. I was so intent on my work that at first I didn’t notice that the air had changed. It grew warmer, and it touched my face in rhythm, as though someone were breathing.
    I heard the words in my head.
Trate de encontrarlo.
    ¿Qué?
I demanded.
¿Qué, qué, qué?
    There was no answer, but the breathing became more rapid.
How can I help you if you don’t tell me what you want?
I asked. Stubbornly I scrubbed even harder at the baseboard, working faster, trying to break the rhythm that surged against me. It was like an excited heartbeat, a gasping, a trembling, and it wouldn’t leave me alone.
    Suddenly a piece of the baseboard came away in my hands. “Oh, no!” I said. “I think I broke something.” But I realized that I hadn’t broken it. The board must have been loose. It pulled away too quickly.
    The breathing stopped.
    “What did you break?” Dee Dee was right beside me, peering over my shoulder.
    I picked up the small piece of board—about eight or ten inches in length—to see if there were nails I might drive in a little deeper in order to fasten it in place, and I glimpsed a shallow, hollowed-out place, a rough gap in the Sheetrock. Inside this hollow was a bundle of papers with a thin silver chain wound around them.
    “Move back, Dee Dee. I’m coming out.” I squirmed backward into the room.
    She plopped down beside me as I sat cross-legged on the floor, examining the small packet in my hands.
    “What is it? Where did you find it?” she asked.
    “It was tucked behind a loose piece of baseboard.”
    “That’s a religious medal!” she said as I unwound the chain and exposed a round, silver medal, so small that I hadn’t noticed it at first.
    The envelope on top was unsealed. Inside was a wad of currency, both United States money and Mexican pesos. “Ohhhh!” Dee Dee said. “How much money is in there?”
    I thumbed through it. “About a hundred and fifty dollars in U.S. bills. I don’t know how much the pesos would be worth.”
    “Is there a name somewhere in there?”
    I dropped the first envelope and medal into my lap and opened the second. Inside was a small pocket calendar, two years out-of-date. The names of the months and days of the week were in Spanish, each day crossed off with a tiny black
X
up through March second. From March third there were no markings on the calendar.
    Dee Dee gasped. “March third is the day the murder took place! What do you think that means?”
    “I don’t know. Whoever owned these things must have left this house the day before.”
    “Or on the day of the murder.”
    “You mean that the person might have seen what happened?” I shivered, thinking of how terrifying that would be.
    “What else have you got there?” Dee Dee asked.
    With the calendar was a small envelope, addressed to Rosa Luiz at a post-office address someplace in Mexico called El Chapul, and there was a canceled Mexican stamp on the envelope.
    Rosa?