A Question of Ghosts

by Cate Culpepper

  “It wasn’t your aunt, or you, or me, or Rachel Perry.” Jo set the recorder to maximum volume. She thought she had zeroed in on the right thread to enhance the second voice. She hit play. “Listen again.”

  Beneath Mitchell’s pedantic tone, between his words, after one breath and before another, a woman whispered.

  “…it’s a fact of life,” Mitchell Healy repeated.

  And a woman sighed, “He wanted me, Becca.”

  “Oh, sweet sonny Jesus Christ on a crutch,” Khadijah said softly.

  Jo tapped keys again, moving back into their circle. She sat on the floor carefully and played the recorded passage a third time. She heard the same message, muted and mournful but clear.

  “He wanted me, Becca.”

  Interpreting facial expressions still required study, but Jo had always been able to read the emotional nuance of voice. This one was infused with sadness. She looked up at Becca, who was staring at her in shock. “Can you confirm the identity?”

  Becca just nodded. “It’s her.”

  “That’s your mother, Rebecca?” Khadijah slid off her knees and sat hard on the rug. “Holy smokes. I’ve always believed in…but I never thought I’d…holy smokes.”

  Jo couldn’t believe her luck. This was rare in the literature, capturing a voice that had been homebound in a second location. Madelyn Healy had “left” this house and followed her daughter across the dark waters of Lake Washington last night. She didn’t expect Becca to share her excitement in this milestone, but at least she seemed to be recovering more swiftly than her friends.

  “Hey.” Becca frowned at Marty. “Are you going to faint?”

  Khadijah slid a protective arm around Marty’s waist. She was decidedly pale and she couldn’t take her eyes from the recorder in Jo’s hands, but she shook her head.

  “I’m not fainting, I’m just gobsmacked.” Marty swallowed visibly. “We just heard a ghost, Kaddy.”

  “We did. The ghost of a mother this girl loved very much.” Khadijah’s tone regained its natural warmth as she regarded Becca. “Are you all right, Bec? This must be pounding on all kinds of buttons.”

  “Well, I haven’t bolted from the room yet. That’s progress.” Becca’s hands trembled as she swept them through her hair. “I’ve already moved past the whole, she’s a talking dead person thing. I’m focusing on what she said.”

  “And you’re taking her literally?” Marty looked from Becca to Jo and back. “She said ‘he wanted me’ when your Uncle Mitchell was droning on. Are you thinking those rumors were true? He had a thing for your mom?”

  In the second it took Becca to clear her expression, Jo learned that’s exactly what she believed. She wondered if Becca had taken the next step in logic, and was afraid she had.

  “Messages received through EVP are rarely factually false.” Becca quoted Jo. “If Mitchell wanted my mother…did he come after her? And if she resisted him, is she saying he killed her, Jo? And my father?”

  They all looked at Jo with a solemnity she found disconcerting. She was neither an oracle nor a homicide detective. But she had studied these voices for years, and Becca deserved any insight her experience might offer.

  “Well.” She checked the recorder’s settings carefully before turning it off. “It’s true that ghost messengers rarely lie. But they’re still human entities, Becca. Death doesn’t make them suddenly omniscient or divine. Their communications can be incomplete—or factually accurate, but misleading.”

  “Incomplete, no woof.” Marty counted the words on her fingers. “Becca, the, person, who, shot, us, is, name-name. Nine words. Your mom could make things a lot easier on us if she’d just spit out those nine words.”

  “We probably shouldn’t count on that.” Jo wished she could give Becca a better answer. “If we understand your mother correctly, Becca, this is all we know so far. She may not have committed suicide. She believes you’re in some kind of danger. And a man, possibly Mitchell Healy, wanted her. Whatever that means. We can’t even be certain she was referring to your uncle.”

  “Or even if she did mean Mitchell, that doesn’t mean he killed your parents, Bec.” Khadijah nodded agreement. “If our Maddie’s going to be this vague, I guess we can’t jump to conclusions like that.”

  “Gaah, why can’t we?” Becca snatched a small cushion from the rug and pressed it to her face. “Let’s call Mitch the shooter, award Jo a Nobel, and let me pack my chobos. I have a life to get back to.”

  “You say the word, baby, and we’ll haul you out of here.” Khadijah patted Becca’s leg with the patience of a mother for a peevish child. “But I think you know you have to see this through.”

  Becca sighed with a harshness that told Jo to wait her out. Jo realized she had correctly interpreted an emotion-based cue, a noteworthy event.

  Becca lowered the cushion from her face and stared toward the kitchen, her features set in a mature, controlled anger. “What’s she expecting me to do, Jo? If we ever do find she didn’t kill herself, am I supposed to drag the real murderer to the police? What kind of justice does she think I can give them after thirty-five years?”

  “Maybe you’re the only one she needs to know the truth.” Jo watched the silent screen as Xena draped one arm across Gabrielle’s shoulders. “I don’t know of any homicides officially solved through EVP, Becca. Hamlet aside, murder victims don’t often speak up to demand justice. This communication feels more personal to me. This is one woman asking another for understanding.”

  Khadijah was watching her with a small smile, which Jo found puzzling. After a moment, she smiled back with mechanical courtesy. She guessed she couldn’t expect to understand every emotional nuance overnight.

  “Yeah, getting back to that whole, Becca’s mother thinks she’s in danger piece?” Marty sat up and rested an elbow on her knee, no humor in her now. “We need to talk about some other possibilities. You game, Becca?”

  “Sure.” Becca sagged back against the couch, looking as game as a wilted flower, albeit a lovely one. “Hit me.”

  Marty opened her mouth, then closed it and nudged Khadijah with her shoulder.

  Khadijah sighed. “We need to talk about John William Voakes.”

  “Okay.” Becca slapped the rug and rose smoothly to her feet. She lifted a hand at their startled looks. “Don’t worry. I’m still willing. But if John William Voakes is joining us tonight, we’re going to need fortification.”

  She stepped around them and went to the low bookshelf near the arched doorway. “Jo, get some glasses from the kitchen, please. Right-hand cupboard.” Becca opened the brown sack resting on the shelf and pulled out a bottle of wine. “I got this today so we could toast our ladies.” She waved the bottle at the television. “This is expensive stuff. I’d rather drink to Xena, but if we’re going to discuss mass murderers, in this house, after midnight—”

  “Jo, sit down,” Khadijah said.

  Jo had gotten to her feet to go to the kitchen, but she sat again promptly at Khadijah’s command. It had not been a request.

  “Becca, you sit down, too. And leave that bottle over there.” Khadijah’s tone was still friendly, but her broad features were unusually impassive.

  “Oh, come on. You’re kidding.” Becca seemed honestly puzzled. “Honey, it’s just wine.”

  “You shouldn’t be buying bottles of anything.” Khadijah took off her small granny glasses and stared at Becca. “You can’t drink, Rebecca, wine or anything else. And we won’t drink around you. You know that.”

  Becca glanced at Jo and set the bottle carefully on the bookshelf. “I’ve been clean since I was twenty years old, Khadijah.”

  “And you’ve stayed that way by complete abstinence, remember?” Khadijah pronounced the word distinctly. “No booze, no pot, nothing. Rachel would have your head, little girl. Now is surely no time to fool with this.”

  Marty was staring avidly at the television, and Jo followed her gaze. Xena was engaged in battle with a villainous blond vixen. Bot
h were spinning high above the ground on spindly ladders in a deadly ballet. The room was filled with an ominous silence, broken only by the soft purring of the static of the radios.

  “If you’re set on drinking that wine, I can’t stop you,” Khadijah said finally. “But I don’t have to sit here and watch. If you open that bottle, I’ll head home.”

  “Me too.” Marty lifted her hand wistfully to the screen. “I’d have to go too. Have a heart, Bec. It’s ‘Callisto.’”

  If anyone else in the room could read microexpressions, Jo knew her own face would reveal a strange combination of consternation, wariness, and sympathy. Becca had never struck her as someone with a history of serious substance abuse, but the strength of her friends’ sudden protectiveness was telling.

  “All right. No wine.” The mild defiance was fading from Becca’s posture. “You guys take the bottle home with you. But this only means I’m making a pot of double-chocolate cocoa after you leave.”

  Marty grinned in apparent relief, and Jo felt the palpable tension begin to ease. Becca looked embarrassed as she came back to them, but there was still a faint trembling in her hands. She settled on the rug again next to Khadijah, who leaned into her briefly.

  “So, Mr. Voakes.” Becca sighed. “Why must we have the distinct displeasure of his company this evening?”

  “Do you know who he is, Jo?” Khadijah asked.

  Jo nodded. John William Voakes was one of Seattle’s horror stories; she doubted any native could forget his name. “Back in the early eighties, correct? Mid eighties?”

  “Yeah, he was caught in eighty-three.” Marty folded her long arms around her knees. “He killed his first victim in nineteen eighty-one, the older lady. Broke into her house on Capitol Hill on a Sunday afternoon and shot her when she walked in on him. Shot and killed a married couple in their apartment in the University District. In eighty-two, a single woman, a college student, also in the U-District.”

  “And in eighty-three, that entire family, back here on the Hill.” Khadijah scratched Becca’s hair lightly, as if comforting a cat. “The Walmacs—the parents and two kids. They’re all buried right across the street. Were you living here back then, Jo?”

  “Yes, I grew up on the Hill.” Jo remembered little of the reports of the actual killings, or the spectacular news bulletins about Voakes’s eventual capture and trial. By her early teens, Jo’s parents couldn’t pry her from her bedroom and her books long enough to follow current events. “But all I really remember about Voakes is the public outrage when he ducked the death penalty.”

  “This dick kills eight people in cold blood, two of them kids.” Marty’s tone was flat. “He sexually assaulted two of the women. I can’t abide capital punishment, but the dude deserved hard labor for life. Not ‘life’ like a twenty-year sentence; I mean hard labor every day for the rest of his miserable life. No question.”

  “You would have made such a damn fine Amazon, Marty.” Becca looked at her with affection. “But when did you guys get this encyclopedic knowledge about serial killers? Why John William Voakes?”

  “Kaddy saw an article about him in the Times yesterday, so we looked him up in the archives.” Marty traced a pattern on the rug beneath her bare feet. “Voakes was ex-military. He was a sharpshooter. He killed all his victims with one or two shots, not easy with a handgun. And he moved to Seattle in nineteen seventy-eight, not long before he started his crime spree. He moved here the same summer your parents died, Bec.”

  Becca started to speak but looked at Jo instead.

  “You’re suggesting that John William Voakes shot Becca’s parents?” Jo slipped the recorder from her pocket.

  “Don’t jack the idea before we explain,” Marty said.

  “I’m not at all.” Jo checked the device carefully and laid it on the coffee table. “Please continue.”

  Marty frowned at the recorder. “Well, I would, except now I’m scared Becca’s mom is going to come ghosting out of that gadget at me.”

  Jo approved of “ghosting” as a verb. “Who knows? Perhaps we’ll get lucky. You’re saying Voakes may have committed a crime a year before his first known murder. A crime he never confessed to.”

  “He never confessed to any of them.” Marty scowled. “The asswipe claims he’s completely innocent, to this day. Mind you, this in spite of solid physical evidence, and getting caught fleeing the last damn scene with blood all over him.”

  “There’s never been any doubt the man’s guilty.” Khadijah sounded less adamant than Marty but equally invested in discussing this theory. “The police never considered him when it came to the Healys, but…”

  “The police never considered anyone but Madelyn Healy,” Becca murmured.

  “Right?” Khadijah nodded. “The deaths of your mom and dad were way off the cops’ radar by the time the Voakes thing broke.”

  “The police report on your parents’ shootings was not overly detailed.” Jo searched her memory. “The forensics back in the late seventies were still pretty rudimentary. Based on my very limited knowledge of crime investigations, the patterns drawn of the scene and the ballistics report could have been consistent with a murder/suicide. Given Madelyn’s history of mental instability and their history of arguing—”

  Jo broke off, appalled that she might have mistepped again, but Becca was watching her calmly.

  “So it’s feasible that the cops missed the possibility of an outside shooter.” Becca cleared her throat thoughtfully. “But wasn’t Voakes’s first known killing a robbery gone wrong? A house burglary or something?”

  “Yeah, he robbed his first two victims, ransacked their places,” Marty said. “After that, the cops think he just caught a taste for murder. No more robbery, just thrill killing.”

  “My nomination for the crappiest word coinage ever.” Khadijah grimaced and turned to Becca. “But that’s what we were wondering, baby. Is there any chance this maniac broke into your kitchen that night?”

  “Then why am I still alive?” Becca’s voice was dull. “No one robbed this place. Why would Voakes have shot my parents and left a witness? I was sitting right out here.”

  “This could have been his first time, if he broke in here,” Marty said gently. “Maybe just to rob the place. He sees your parents, freaks out, shoots them. Out the kitchen door he goes. He wouldn’t have even known you were in here. You wouldn’t have seen anything.”

  “I wouldn’t remember anything, if I had seen it.” Becca rubbed her eyes. “I don’t remember anything from that night, except my folks arguing, my mom handing me that damn doll.”

  “He raped two of the women, Becca. And your mother just said…” Marty looked away, and Jo remembered the last message with an uneasy chill.

  Becca rubbed her eyes hard. “Is Voakes even still alive? Maybe we can skip over to the state pen and ask him about all this.”

  “Well, here’s the thing.” Those bitter lines formed around Marty’s mouth again. “Voakes never spent a day in the pen. He was judged innocent by reason of insanity. He’s been hospitalized at Western State since nineteen eighty-three.”

  “No, here’s the thing.” Khadijah drew a deep breath. “Your mother said you’re in danger, Becca. There’s no way she could know this, but…Voakes won’t be at Western much longer. He’s getting out.”

  *

  The muted clicking of Jo’s laptop bothered her. The low purr of the static from the radios provided a partial cushion of white noise, but Jo didn’t like disturbing the cathedral quiet of the living room. Becca, Marty, and Khadijah were sprawled on the couch and the floor in various postures of oblivious sleep, and she didn’t want to wake them.

  Jo straightened her legs beneath the low table and stretched silently. The blue glow of the screen provided the only light in the dark space, save for the ongoing flicker of the muted television. Xena episodes played on in a constant loop, a welcome backdrop to Jo’s work.

  Dawn was probably two hours off, but she couldn’t sleep now if she tri
ed. Her blood still hummed with the thrill of this study. She had examined the recording of the dinner at the Healy house second by second, and picked up no other messages—or at least no other words. She would have to tell Becca about the almost subliminal sounds that surfaced briefly at random moments throughout the recording; a woman’s soft weeping.

  She looked down at Becca’s blond head, cushioned by the arm of the sofa a foot from her elbow. There was no need to dread telling her of those mournful sounds. Even relaxed in sleep, even given the harrowing nature of the last few days, there was a certain strength in Becca’s features. Jo knew there was courage in her, or she wouldn’t attempt this daunting project at all.

  She gazed at Becca’s sleeping profile pensively and turned back to the keyboard. She flipped past the graphs and charts mapping tonight’s whispered message, the readings from the Spiricom, to the narrative portion of her notes.

  RH continues cooperative.

  Becca’s conscious bond to her mother is ambivalent, given her anger at her perceived abandonment.

  Her father remains a cypher to me. It’s relevant that I have spent time in the company of Scott Healy’s daughter, his brother, sister-in-law, and therapist, and I’ve learned virtually nothing about the man.

  Jo glanced at the television and her fingers stilled on the keys. The episode was “Many Happy Returns,” a silly offering of the last season, but the ending scene was moving. The warrior and the bard seated together on the cliffs at sunset, Gabrielle reading aloud from the scroll Xena had given her. Jo reached for the remote and paused the image.

  Jo stared down again at Becca’s still face. She moved her hands slowly over the keys, tapping out the words to Sappho’s poem.

  Awed by her splendor

  stars near the lovely

  moon cover their own

  bright faces

  when she

  is roundest and lights

  earth with her silver

  Jo studied the verse, aware of the tears filling her eyes, but indifferent to them. She returned to her charts and worked methodically, the stilled image of the two women gold on the television screen.