“Okay, Erica, get up and go to the window. Look outside and tell me what you see.”
“Can’t.”
“Why not?”
“My wrist is stuck.”
“On what?”
“Ahhh …”
Clearly, she was stumped. “Okay, Erica, hold on.”
I ran from the office into the living room and grabbed my purse, fumbling for my cell phone with one hand. I hit speed dial for Ray’s cell.
Danny watched me from the couch, his brow furrowed.
I turned my back to him.
“Yes, Darlin’?”
“Ray, Erica called me from this number.” I checked the caller readout and repeated the incoming phone number to him. “She doesn’t know where she is. She’s completely out of it.”
I could hear him keying into a computer, looking for the address to go with the number.
“Keep her on the phone. I’m on my way.”
I clicked my cell phone shut. “Erica, honey, Ray is coming to get you. Just sit tight.”
Nothing. “Erica? Erica? ERICA?”
All I got in response was a dial tone.
____
Ray called twenty minutes later. “It’s a motel room. She’s not here. There’s no sign of her. The desk clerk says he didn’t see her, but four different guys checked in today. Glen Burton, Maurice Boor, Richard Scott, and Mickey Dean.”
“Mickey Dean’s is a restaurant.”
“I know. The names may all be aliases.”
I didn’t think so. “Is Boor spelled B-o-o-r?”
“Yes.”
“Erica went to high school with a Maury Boor. He used to put notes in her locker all the time. He freaked her out, always calling and asking her on dates.”
“I don’t know him.”
I pulled the phone book out of a drawer and thumbed through it. Maurice Boor wasn’t listed, nor anyone else with the same name. Just my luck, his family had moved away. “I think he was a year younger than Erica, so six years younger than us.”
“What does he look like?”
“I haven’t seen him in years. In high school, he was short and scrawny with dark hair and horn-rimmed glasses. Sort of geeky.” I would have to dig out Erica’s old yearbooks to find his picture.
“The desk clerk couldn’t remember which guy was which, but he said two of them were dark-haired, one balding, one with a gray ponytail. All of them were taller than him, and he’s around five-eight.”
Maybe Maury had a growth spurt after high school. “Are any of them in their rooms?”
“No. This is an hourly sort of motel, Darlin’. It’s about a mile from The Cat’s Meow. They draw their regular crowd.”
“Can you go see if she’s there?”
“No. I’m supposed to be looking for a one-armed woman, Jolene. I cannot chase your sister around town.”
“Ray, Erica was talking about butterflies. She spoke to Mom like she was in the room with her. She’s not well.”
“She hasn’t been well for a long time. There’s no sign of any foul play here, or any kind of play. I don’t know why she called you, but I have to get back to work. I’ll check and see if Maurice Boor has any priors.”
I couldn’t believe he hung up on me. I resisted the temptation to slam the phone on the receiver over and over again only because of Danny’s watchful eyes.
While it was true Erica had been sick for years and known to disappear for days at a time with men, her hallucinations usually involved someone being after her, making her afraid to leave home. She lost several jobs because she failed to show up for work, too afraid to drive there for fear someone would be in the back seat of her car waiting to attack her. I’d never really thought of her conversations with our mother as hallucinations, since Erica never said she saw Mom or heard Mom’s voice. She just quoted her, which I’d interpreted as Erica trying to garner support for her own ideas by attributing them to Mom. After today, I wasn’t so sure.
I tried to convince myself that, like so often in the past, I had no real cause for concern about Erica’s safety. But Erica had a thing for butterflies. She coveted their short life span. And images of the severed arm lying in the ice chest kept pushing their way into my mind. We might have a psycho killer running loose in our county, one who preyed on women from The Cat’s Meow. Erica had recently become one of those women. While not a dancer, she had been there the other night, offering herself to men in the bar. Had one of them decided to take her up on her offer?