Music of Ghosts

by Sallie Bissell

  “Sorry, Lily,” she said as she hung up the phone. “He doesn’t answer. I imagine he’s pretty busy right now.”

  Her lower lip protruded. “I bet you could have talked to him if you’d called sooner. Now we’ll have to wait for him to call us back. The owl’s probably dead, anyway!” She started to stalk back out on the porch when Mary reached her limit.

  “Lily!” she called, her voice courtroom stern.

  The child turned. “What?”

  “I did the best I could for that owl. Last night I had a full day of work behind me, and a full day of work waiting for me today. I think right now, you should say ‘gee, Mary, thanks for all your help’.”

  Lily lifted her chin, defiant. “I don’t have to thank you for anything,” she said. “You’re not even my real mother. All you care about is yourself!”

  Mary stood there slack-jawed as Lily thundered past her, down the hall, then upstairs to her bedroom, slamming her door so hard the kitchen windows rattled.

  “What’s going on?” Jonathan peered into the kitchen from the screened porch.

  “You’ll have to ask your daughter.” Mary threw her damp dishtowel onto the counter. “Cause it sure beats the hell out of me.”

  She pushed past him, across the screened porch, and out into the field beyond. At that moment, she’d had it with the Walkingsticks. She needed to get away from their sour faces and hair-trigger tempers.

  Off she ran along the path that the cows had made—a foot wide swath of trampled dirt that circled the perimeter of her pastures. Though the sky was the color of a plum and the air crackled with electricity, she ran toward the farthest edge of her property, enjoying the scent of pine mixed with ozone. What did she care if it stormed? She wished it would. The rumble of thunder would be a relief from the unvoiced discontent at home.

  She ran past cows huddled under the trees, past the mended gap in the fence where a bear had broken through. When her breath came hot in her throat and her lungs felt close to bursting, she came to the weathered, silver-gray barn that Stratton said had been the owl’s likely home. She ducked into the old structure. Once the home of mules and plow horses, now it housed only field mice and swallows. She peered up into the shadowy hayloft, looking for any more owls, but she saw nothing but old rafters that disappeared into the darkness.

  When her breath came easier, she went back outside and picked up her run, her thoughts returning to Lily and Jonathan. This was her farm, left to her by her old mentor, Irene Hannah. Jonathan and Lily lived here at her invitation, yet ever since they’d come back from Oklahoma they’d treated her as if she were some kind of intruder in their private family circle.

  But why? she wondered as the thunder boomed like distant cannons. What have I done? Why on earth did Lily bring up the fact that I’m not her real mother?

  “A million reasons,” she said to herself. “She’s nearing puberty, she’s been with a bunch of whippy kids all day, she’s upset about the owl, she probably didn’t get nearly enough sleep last night.” That might explain Lily. But what about Jonathan? Why would he lie awake last night while they wrangled with the owl and not say a word? Why was he so distant, so uncaring?

  She stopped on a little rise, at the very end of her property. In the distance, she could see the house—sitting easily between two great stands of trees. In the front yard was the creek, the swinging bridge, the tire swing. They had lived here happily for years. Then Jonathan and Lily made that trip to Oklahoma. Nothing had been the same since.

  “It’s time to ask the question,” she told herself softly, knowing she could put it off no longer. “Whatever he says, it will be better than this.”

  She paused beneath an old oak tree to gather her courage, then she headed for home. Raindrops began to fall, fat as frogs, splatting on the leaves over her head. Keeping to the tree line, she ran to the house, pulling open the screened door as a fearsome clap of thunder broke overhead.

  “Hey.” Jonathan looked up from his new book on fly-tying. “I was beginning to worry about you.”

  “Oh, yeah?” She gasped, breathless and soaked as she brushed strands of wet hair from her forehead. She searched the porch and grabbed an old afghan they used on chilly nights. The only sign of Lily was her Kindle, lying next to Jonathan, its screen dark. “Where’s Lily?”

  “In her room, writing you a note of apology.”

  “At your suggestion?”

  “At my insistence.” He flipped the Kindle over. “She thinks we don’t care about the owl.”

  “Oh, I care about the owl. You’re the one who doesn’t care about the owl.” Mary remembered how angry he’d been, the night before.

  “I care about the owl,” he protested. “I just care more about other things.”

  She saw her opening; instinctively, she took it. “Do you care about me?”

  He looked at her and frowned. For the first time in weeks, she felt as if she had his full attention. “What did you say?”

  She swallowed hard, scared that this wasn’t the right time, that she hadn’t thought enough about what she wanted to say—but then she realized there would never be a time when she knew exactly what she wanted to say. She sat down beside him. “I asked if you cared about me. You have not been the same since you came back from Oklahoma. Neither has Lily.”

  His eyes were dark, unreadable. “How have we been different?”

  “Lily’s become a little brat. You treat me like I’m some tired old tire of a wife.”

  He shook his head. “That’s not true.”

  “Jonathan, we’ve made love once since you’ve been back.” She reached to touch his cheek. “If you’ve got somebody else in Oklahoma, then just tell me. I don’t want to go on like this anymore.”

  For a long moment he said nothing. Her heart thumped in her chest, a counterpoint to the rain pinging down on the roof above them. When she thought she would burst from the waiting, he spoke. “There is something in Oklahoma, but it’s not what you think.”

  Her mouth went dry. She seemed to float above her own body. Remember this, she told herself. Remember that you were sitting on this back porch in the middle of a thunderstorm when everything changed. “What is it, then?”

  He leaned forward and rubbed his hands together, as if trying to choose the proper order of his words. Finally, he got up and went into the kitchen, pulling a thick, official-looking envelope from the highest shelf in the pantry. “This came a couple of weeks ago,” he said, returning to the porch. “I don’t know how to tell you, except to tell you. The Moons have filed another suit.”

  “The Moons?” She wanted to weep with relief. It was only Lily’s grandparents! There was no other woman waiting; no other younger, more comely heart beating for him in Oklahoma. The Moons were nothing; she could conquer the Moons with her eyes closed.

  “What do the Moons want?” she asked, almost giddy.

  His voice was husky when he spoke. “Full custody of Lily.”

  Thirteen

  Cochran spent the rest of the day with Whaley in the war room. His dream of a rendezvous with Ginger vanished in an array of theories about the crime and its likely perpetrators, which Cochran diagrammed on a large whiteboard. Rob Saunooke and Tuffy Clark joined them around nine; Saunooke coming from working with the SBI, Clark hobbling in on one crutch, somehow managing to balance two pepperoni pizzas for supper.

  “Looks like you guys have actually been doing some work.” Clark glanced at the scribbled-on board and Whaley’s growing pile of soft drink cans. “Sheriff’s been dissecting the crime while Buck’s gotten all ginned up on Mountain Dew.”

  “So what the fuck have you been doing?” snarled Whaley.

  “Talking to Lisa Wilson’s college buds and fielding reward tips,” Clark replied.

  “Get anything?” Cochran asked.

  “According to her sorority sisters, Lisa was nur
sing a broken heart over a guy named Darren. Darren’s currently banding birds in Costa Rica, so he’s out of the picture. The tip line, though, was better than reality TV.”

  “Oh, yeah?” said Cochran.

  “Yeah. One guy insisted Big Foot killed her. Said Big Foot liked to mate with fertile blonde females. He could smell them from miles away. ‘You know they don’t mate like we do’,” Tuffy imitated a wheezy, slightly hysterical voice. “‘They’re wild! Rough! That’s what killed her!’”

  “I told that guy I’d turn in his tip,” Tuffy continued, grinning. “If he’d introduce Big Foot to my ex-wife.”

  Everyone roared. “So I take it today was a wash?” asked Cochran when the laughter finally abated.

  Clark put the pizzas in the middle of the long table. “I had a great time, but I think the governor’s jackpot is safe.”

  Cochran turned to Saunooke. “What did you and the SBI come up with?”

  “We staked a quarter-mile perimeter around that cabin and did a spiral search for evidence from daybreak to sundown. They brought dogs and a couple of guys on horseback.”

  “Find anything?” asked Whaley.

  “A few broken twigs and tramped-down grass, but nothing a bear couldn’t have made. Governor Wilson was mighty disappointed.”

  “He was up there?” Cochran was amazed at the old man’s seemingly boundless energy. Wilson had reamed him out, held a press conference, issued a reward, and then joined up with the SBI, all in one day.

  “He stood under that pine tree most of the afternoon,” Saunooke replied. “Staring at where we found her.”

  The three older cops looked at each other, their light-heartedness gone. A girl had been killed on their watch. Regardless of who her father was, they wanted to catch who’d done it. After they’d finished their pizza, Cochran walked over to the oversized computer monitor. “You guys have a look at what Whaley and I came up with today.”

  He turned the screen in their direction and increased the volume on the new speakers he’d sent Whaley out to purchase. “This is Chris Givens’s ghost movie. Welcome to the last night of Lisa Wilson’s life.”

  Saunooke and Clark watched, for the first time, the movie that Cochran and Whaley had studied frame-by-frame. First came the shots of the six kids exploring the cabin, then Cochran cut to the scene where everyone was settling down to go to bed. After that, he skipped to when the faint strains of fiddle music started to come over the speakers.

  “Are you kidding me?” Clark frowned, incredulous. “Am I actually hearing a fiddle?”

  “Just watch,” said Cochran.

  They watched, no one making a sound. The strange, haunting melody continued when suddenly, Lisa Wilson sat up in her sleeping bag. She looked out the window, then looked around the room. A moment later she tiptoed out the door, shoes in hand. Three minutes later, there was only silence.

  “We think she was killed shortly after that,” said Cochran, stopping the playback. “There’s nothing more on the video. The camera runs out of juice at 5:32 a.m.”

  “Whoa,” said Tuffy. “Play it again.”

  Cochran played it through twice more. He’d watched it so many times he could anticipate the girl’s every expression—fear turning to surprise, then turning to anticipation. He wondered if Clark and Saunooke were reading her the same way. “So what do you think?” he asked after the second run-through.

  “She looks like she’s trying to put something over on her friends,” said Saunooke. “Sneaking out like that.”

  “Yeah,” Tuffy agreed. “Like she was meeting someone.” He launched into a high falsetto. “‘Darling, I’ll come out when I hear you fiddling in the moonlight’.”

  Cochran walked over to the whiteboard, pleased that his staff was drawing conclusions similar to his own.

  “Okay, then,” he said, pointing to the first column on the board. “Have a look at this. We know from forensics that the killer wore jeans from Walmart, strangled Lisa with a smooth piece of leather-like material, and carved her up with a non-serrated curved blade less than three inches in length. She was not sexually assaulted, and the only item missing from her person was her mother’s gold wedding ring, which, according to Rachel Sykes, she’d left in her dorm room.”

  He pointed to a second column. “From Chris Givens’s movie, we’ve learned that fiddle music starts playing at 2:39 a.m., while all our suspects are supposedly asleep in that cabin. At 2:44, Lisa wakes up, looks outside. At 2:48, she tiptoes out the door, and at 2:54, the fiddle music becomes inaudible. The next thing we know of her is when Tony Blackman discovers her body, shortly before eight the next morning.”

  “Those are the facts.” Cochran stepped over to a third column that listed the interns’ names. “Whaley, tell us about our people of interest.”

  Whaley stood up like a kid in school and read from a sheaf of notes. “The interns don’t have much in the adult database. The Sykes girl has a lead foot on the gas pedal; Chris Givens has a D&D charge in Chapel Hill. Three of them wore jeans that night, but none were from Walmart. All carried camp knives, but none had hooked blades. All the boys wore smooth leather belts. None of them had any musical instruments with them.”

  “But you could dump a knife and a fiddle pretty easily, up there.” Clark frowned at the board. “Who put the star beside Givens’s name?”

  “I did,” said Cochran. “Only because he dreamed up the whole trip, talked the others into it, and probably planned on pocketing whatever cash he might have gotten for the movie.”

  Clark shrugged. “His fingerprints are on a lot of it.”

  “But let’s not ignore our other friends,” said Cochran, moving over to the column that included the raptor center staff—Nick Stratton, Artie Slade, and Willy Jenkins. “Saunooke, tell us about these guys.”

  Saunooke pulled a pad from his back pocket. “Willy Jenkins is a fifty-six-year-old former security guard, fired from two different companies—one for insubordination, another for ‘anger management issues.’ He works at the bird center on an as-needed basis.” Saunooke flipped to the next page. “Slade is seventy-two, works at the center full-time. He’s got a gimpy leg, and he lost most of the fingers on his right hand in a metal press machine. ”

  “They got alibis?” asked Whaley.

  “Stratton says he was at home alone all night. Jenkins claims he spent the night over in Tennessee, and he’s on the surveillance camera at Weigel’s gas station, near Knoxville shortly after midnight. Slade says he stayed at his brother’s house, in Slade Holler. I talked to his brother, and he swears the two of them played cribbage until ten o’clock, then went to bed.”

  “Can you play cribbage with one hand?” asked Whaley.

  “Sure,” said Tuffy. “You can do a lot of fun things with one hand, Whaley.”

  “You ought to know,” Whaley retorted.

  Saunooke went on. “But get this—Slade insists that some crazy mountain man hangs out up there.”

  “What kind of mountain man?” asked Cochran.

  “An old man dressed in shabby clothes. Slade says he’s come for years, usually when the trees leaf out. Claims he stares at him from the edge of the woods and steals road kill from their freezer.”

  “Happens to me every time,” said Tuffy. “Just put up a couple of squashed skunks and people beat a path to my door.”

  Though Cochran laughed, his memory flashed back to that wide-eyed face that scared him and Messer so long ago. “So that might corroborate the gray man the Blackman kid thought he saw up there that night.”

  “Except they decided it wasn’t anything but tree limbs and shadows,” said Whaley. “Plus they were half-drunk.”

  “Still,” said Cochran. “Lots of people roam through the woods.” He turned back to Saunooke. “So what do you think, Rob? Any of your guys warrant a second look?”

  Saunooke studied his no
tes “Maybe Jenkins. He could have driven back from Knoxville in time.”

  Cochran remembered the way Jenkins’s gaze had slid away from him, as if he were afraid to look him in the eye. “Anything else you like about him?”

  “He wanted out of the bird business. According to Abby Turner, he kept pestering Lisa to get him a job with her father. Said Stratton didn’t pay him shit.”

  “Anybody think somebody might have paid him to kill the girl?” asked Clark.

  “Like who?” asked Cochran.

  “Somebody who hated the governor. People take politics pretty seriously around here.”

  “I asked the governor that,” said Cochran. “But he didn’t think anybody hated him that bad.” He walked over to the board and circled Jenkins’s name. “I do happen to know this Jenkins character plays the fiddle.”

  “How do you know that?” asked Whaley.

  “Stratton told me. Stratton plays, too. Has a whole wall of fiddles in his house.”

  “Whoa, Sheriff!” cried Tuffy. “You’ve been holding out on us!”

  “It hasn’t been my turn at bat,” said Cochran.

  “So tell us about Stratton.”

  “He’s an academic from Seattle, adjunct faculty at Duke. He’s run the raptor center for seven years. He has no record, not even a traffic ticket. He seemed shocked when I told him that Lisa had died. He freely invited me into his cabin, where I saw those fiddles. I asked him if he played, he said he and Jenkins played fiddle, while the rest of the group played other instruments.

  “He said the other kids got along with Lisa but regarded her as an ass-kisser. Then he showed me her dorm room, where she had a hundred pictures of Stratton plastered above her bed.”

  Tuffy asked, “He didn’t know about them?”

  Cochran shook his head. “He claimed he’d never gone in there before. I’m inclined to believe him. He looked scared shitless when he saw them.”