A Judgment of Whispers

by Sallie Bissell

  “Real well. Gave him a bath, got him a new collar. I’m keeping him tied up for a few days, till he figures out the girls here aren’t dinner.”

  “Good idea.” Cochran looked at the six speckled hens pecking at their feed. “You get a lot of eggs?”

  “More than enough for the two of us,” replied Jack. “Wyandottes are good layers. My wife thinks they’re pets. She says nobody can stay sad watching chickens.”

  Jack smiled, knowing Cochran had not driven all the way out Azalea Road to discuss the antidepressant quality of chickens. This was all about those underpants and that tree. “Get anything back from the SBI yet?”

  “As a matter of fact, we did,” said Cochran. “The underpants were made around the time of Teresa Ewing’s death. The plastic bag was made in 2011.”

  “Teresa’s pants,” said Jack. “In a new bag.”

  “Right.”

  “Get any prints? Any DNA?”

  “They haven’t finished all the tests yet. The bag and the cigarette were clean. Somebody knew what they were doing.”

  “And you’re thinking maybe that somebody was me.”

  Cochran just looked at him, one eyebrow lifting.

  He knew this was coming, knew the minute the dog dug that thing up, he’d be on the griddle. But that was okay. Maybe his twitching thumbs meant he was supposed to be there. On the other hand, maybe he was just an old man at loose ends with his wife away from home. He didn’t know what to think anymore. He looked up at Cochran. “Would you like to see everything I know about Teresa Ewing?”

  Cochran gave a solemn nod. “I sure would.”

  “Then follow me.”

  He unhooked Lucky from the tether and led the dog and the sheriff inside his house. They walked through the kitchen and into the spare bedroom that served as his office/junk repository. Jan would be mortified at him bringing a stranger into such an ill-kept room, but he didn’t care. The sheriff wasn’t here to give him the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.

  He crossed the room and turned on the lamp, illuminating the framed commendations on his wall. As Cochran and Lucky watched, he unlocked the bottom drawer and pulled out the five red notebooks that had almost cost him his marriage.

  “This is everything I know,” said Wilkins. “I left the department copies of all my files on the day I retired, ten years ago.” He held up two more notebooks. “This is what I’ve gathered in the years since then. Have a seat if you’d like to look at it.”

  “Don’t mind if I do,” said Cochran, sitting down in an old rocking chair.

  “Would you like some coffee? A beer?” offered Jack.

  “Coffee would be nice,” Cochran replied.

  “Then you read and I’ll go brew a pot.”

  He cranked up the Mr. Coffee using the special gourmet blend his daughter had sent him from Minneapolis. As Lucky’s toenails clicked on the floor behind him, he got cups and saucers, found half a bag of Oreos in a cabinet, and put them on a plate. A few minutes later, he and Sheriff Cochran were eating cookies and drinking something called Bonecutter Brew.

  “Whaley tell you I was obsessed?” he asked as he turned his desk chair to face Cochran.

  “Whaley said you were a good cop who’d let this get under his skin,” replied Cochran.

  He nodded. “That’s true. It’s gnawed at me for years. My wife almost left me over it.”

  “Really?”

  “Almost. Then I came to my senses. Realized that I had taken my best shot at that case, and it was time to move on.”

  “Where’s your wife now?” asked Cochran.

  “Up in Minnesota. Our daughter just had our fourth grandchild. A little girl.”

  “Congratulations.” Cochran smiled. “Little girls are awfully sweet. I have one myself.”

  “Then you might understand how a case like Teresa Ewing can get to you.”

  “Is that why were you there poking around that old tree yesterday?”

  He shook his head. “I just woke up early—couldn’t go back to sleep. Weather was too bad to play golf,” he said, leaving out the part about his twitching thumbs and strange sense of dread. “Beyond that, I can’t say. I just wanted to see that tree again. Pay my last respects, I guess.”

  “Your last respects?”

  “It’ll be different once they start putting those new houses up. I know that tree’s important to the Cherokees and they’re building a little park around it, but it won’t be the same. New people will move in—people who will never have heard of Teresa Ewing.”

  “And you think that’s a bad thing?” asked Cochran.

  “I don’t know what I think. All I can tell you is that Logan and Whaley and I did our damnedest to find out who killed that child. It seemed her little life ought to have counted for something.”

  “So who do you think did it?”

  He shook his head. “Logan liked Big Jim McConnell’s boy, Devin. Whaley liked the retarded kid. I can make a good case for any of them. And we’re not even talking about Arthur Hayes or Two Toes McCoy.”

  Cochran said, “But you must like one more than the others.”

  “Well, since her underwear is showing up, I guess we can discount the late Mr. Hayes—he’s dead, as I’m sure you’ve discovered for yourselves. That leaves those kids and Two Toes. All were people she knew. They were in the neighborhood, had the opportunity, and managed to keep her hidden for three weeks.”

  “But where would kids hide a body? How could they keep a secret like that for nearly month?”

  Jack shrugged. “You scare a kid bad enough, they won’t talk. That’s where Logan blew it, coming on to those kids like one of the Gestapo. Whaley was almost as bad, until I got him reined in. Anyway, I’ve got another theory.”

  “What?”

  “The Eastern Band was having a big powwow that week. Indians came from all over the country. Vendors on the powwow circuit, roustabouts who put up tents and ran the pony rides. There were probably two or three hundred strangers in the area.”

  “And you think one of them killed her?”

  “I think it’s a possibility.”

  “But why would they come to Salola Street? And where would they keep her for a month?”

  “That tree means a lot to the Cherokees,” said Jack. “It would be like a pilgrimage. Look at this.”

  He got up, grabbed two maps from his desk, and unrolled them on the floor. The top one was a detailed map of Salola Street and three miles of the surrounding country to the south. “Here’s their little neighborhood. All the back yards are thirty feet away from the Quallah Boundary line.” He rolled up that map and showed Cochran the one underneath it. “This is an aerial map of that part of Quallah. Mostly thick woods, but these little lines here”—he ran one finger along a line that ran east to west—“are trails. Used for centuries.”

  Cochran frowned at the map. “So you’re thinking some stranger saw her, killed her, and took her back up into these woods?”

  “There are ten million places to hide a body up there,” said Wilkins. “You could turn a hundred cadaver dogs loose and still not find her. Here’s something else. You know that cigarette we found with the underpants?”

  Cochran nodded.

  “I’ve studied a bit on Indian culture. Tobacco is an offering to the Great Spirit. A peace offering, as it were.”

  Cochran was about to say something else when suddenly his cell phone chirped. He pulled it from his pocket, checked the screen, then looked at Jack. “Looks like we might need a bit more than a peace offering now, detective.”

  Jack frowned. “How so?”

  “They just found DNA on those underpants.”

  Ten

  Grace usually loved this time of day—daybreak, when the light was neither yellow nor blue but a soft, gentle gray. The various greens of trees emerged slowly from
the shadows, and the birds began their chirping—little wrens raspy around the feeders and, hidden away, the flute-song of a wood thrush. As she sat at the kitchen table drinking coffee, she could also hear Zack’s snoring, deep and rhythmic. She sighed. This was the longest he’d slept since Whaley showed up. For the past two days he’d paced in an endless circuit of the house, locking and relocking all the doors and windows, then washing the “cop germs” off his hands. Last night, when she thought she might scream if she heard the water at the sink come on again, she’d given him two Trazadones, the largest dose she’d ever administered. Fifteen minutes later, he clutched his toy dog Smiley and collapsed on his bed, asleep.

  She, however, had not fared so well. While he had slept she lay awake, tortured by a thousand devils of possibility. What if the newspaper found out about all this Teresa Ewing business? What would the people at Hillview Haven say? What if everybody still thought Zack killed that child? What if Zack had killed that child? What if they put him in the criminal ward at Naughton Mental Hospital? He would understand so little of it—all he would do was cry and beg to come home.

  “That won’t happen,” she’d told herself, fighting a moment of real panic. Mary Crow was supposed to be brilliant, and Cherokee as well. Mary wouldn’t let them take Zack away.

  But in the morning light Grace realized that not even Mary Crow could make a miracle. Sighing, she padded into the living room to make sure some bear hadn’t knocked over the bird feeder in the night. As two cardinals pecked at the safflower seed, she thought about how different her life would have been if Corrine Ewing had, that evening, simply taken the damn casserole over to Melanie Sharp herself. Teresa would still be alive. She and Mike and Zack might have made a go of it. The rest of her life would not have been just her and her son, convicted without trial, living in a penal colony for two.

  “Oh stop it,” she whispered, disgusted at her self-pity. “At least you have a job. Food on the table, a roof over your head. That’s more than a lot of people.”

  She returned to the kitchen and glanced at the clock. 7:32. Clara would be here at eight, then she would be free to go out to the garage and work. She wanted to tweak a couple of paintings before she took them to the gallery in Asheville. She had high hopes for this new show—she’d done well there last fall and was actually starting to build a following.

  Suddenly she heard a dull thump coming from the living room. “Oh no!” she cried. She’d heard that sound before. Usually a bird had lifted off the feeder and flown into the front window. Sometimes they were just stunned; other times they lay dead, their necks broken.

  She hurried back to the living room, hoping it wasn’t one of the cardinals. There was a smear of blood on the window, which was unusual for a bird strike. After fumbling with the front door lock, she stepped out onto the porch. A dead squirrel lay on the walk, bright red blood staining its white chest. She was staring at it, surprised to see such a thing, when suddenly she heard someone yell something from the street. She turned in time to see a beat-up black truck tear away from her mailbox, as someone in the passenger seat gave her the finger.

  For an instant she could make no sense of it—a dead squirrel on her walk, someone making obscene gestures as they hurried away. Then it all fell into place. Someone in the truck must have thrown the squirrel against her window, fleeing when they saw her come out on the porch. She sighed. The news must have gotten out. The Teresa Ewing nightmare was beginning again.

  She looked at the little creature, its tail still fluffy and waving slightly in the breeze. An hour ago, it had probably been alive. Just an hour ago. Tears came to her eyes, then she realized that she had to get it cleaned up before Zack got up. A dead animal might push him over some kind of edge after everything else he’d suffered in the past two days. She started to go back inside for the broom and dustpan when she heard another car pull into her driveway. She turned, wondering if the same bastard had come back to throw something else, but the car was different—big and white and sadly familiar. It stopped and a moment later, Detective Whaley emerged. As he lumbered toward her, she felt her hands closing into fists. She did not need to deal with Whaley right now.

  He ambled up the walkway, stopping when he saw the squirrel and the blood on her window. “Somebody swing from the wrong tree this morning?”

  “Somebody threw that at my window.” Grace crossed her arms.

  “Really.” Whaley looked mildly interested. “Get a make on the car? A plate number?”

  “Black truck, passenger with an active middle finger, heading west. You can’t see plate numbers from this front porch.”

  “Male or female?”

  “I couldn’t tell,” she replied. “I just hope they didn’t put a snake in the mailbox.”

  Whaley’s eyes grew sharp. “Excuse me?”

  “Snakes in the mailbox, detective. Business as usual here, every time Teresa Ewing gets resurrected.”

  His face darkened to the point that she feared he would hit her. Instead, though, he turned and walked back to the driveway and down to her mailbox. She watched as he tore off a long forsythia frond and looped it around the mailbox latch. Standing a good four feet away, he pulled the door open. Looking up at her with utter disgust, he stepped forward, stuck in his hand, and retrieved her mail. Tossing the forsythia frond to the ground, he walked back up to the front porch.

  “Thank you,” she said, not bothering to hide her sarcasm. Why should she be grateful for one act of kindness after so many years of abuse? He was a cop; he was supposed to fish snakes out of people’s mailboxes.

  “Here’s your mail.” He held out the usual array of bills and advertisements, then he pulled something from his back pocket. “Also a subpoena for Zachary Collier’s DNA. He needs to comply by Friday.”

  He turned and headed toward his car. She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Nobody had put a snake in her mailbox, but the police had delivered something far worse. Whaley paused to glare at her one more time, then he got in and sped away, tires squealing as loudly as the black truck full of hate. She flipped through the subpoena, then she went inside and got the broom and dustpan. First, she would bury the little squirrel under some leaves in the back yard. After that, she would go inside and call Mary Crow to tell her that business had picked up. The Teresa Ewing circus had once again hit town.

  Mary’s phone rang as she stood in Victor’s kitchen, spreading butter on a piece of toast. She’d just ceded the shower to Victor, who was singing an Argentinian soccer song as he bathed. “Es un sentimiento,” he bellowed, “no puedo parar … ”

  She closed the kitchen door against Victor’s yowling and answered her phone.

  “Mary Crow,” she said loudly, wondering if she ought to tell Victor to hush.

  “Mary? This is Grace Collier.”

  Mary took the phone outside to Victor’s tiny patio, finding a space between his bicycle and barbeque grill. As she listened to Grace, she was not surprised that Zack Collier had been served with a subpoena—Victor had been working in a white heat after every communication with the Winston lab. What did surprise her was the dead squirrel hurled at Grace’s window.

  “Nobody knows they’re reopening this case,” said Mary. “I’ve been watching the paper’s newsfeeds on the Internet—not a word of content about it.”

  “Well, somebody found out something.” Grace’s voice cracked. “When people start talking about Teresa Ewing, ugly things happen here. I’m sorry about the squirrel, but I’ll get over it. If Zack saw it, he would cry for months. He’s just now getting over Whaley’s last visit—I don’t know how he’ll react to giving DNA again.”

  “Let me make a few calls,” said Mary. “Maybe we can work out an easier way for Zack to comply.”

  She hung up from Grace, absently gazing at Victor’s nubby-wheeled mountain bike. With a significant piece of fresh evidence, she knew the state would try to retrofit thei
r old suspects to the new development. What needed to happen, if Zack Collier were to ever get off the hook, was for someone to find out who really killed that little girl. But how? Had the girl died a month ago, you could interview witnesses, talk to people who knew the child. As in all cold cases, most of the clues had vanished in the fog of memory, or were lost in evidence rooms of the police department.

  She went back inside the apartment. Victor had stopped singing, though the shower was still running. Must be shaving, Mary decided. It’s hard to sing and shave at the same time. She retrieved her toast and headed to the bedroom. She needed to get dressed and go to work. Not only did she have a Skype session scheduled with the squabbling Burtons, but now she also needed to call Jerry Cochran about Zack Collier’s DNA.

  She walked through the dining room, which Victor used as an office. Two computers, a printer, and several piles of different colored papers were spread out on a long table. Though she knew it was wrong, she couldn’t resist taking a peek at what Victor had been working on. The name Teresa Ewing appeared on all the sheets of paper. Mary walked along the table, quickly scanning the first pages of the documents. Mostly they were SBI reports, comprehensible only to SBI agents, but as she came to the end of the table, she found a thick manila file with a Pisgah County Sheriff Department stamp. Ewing, Teresa had been typed across the top. J. Wilkins and O. Whaley, dets. This was it! Exactly what she needed! The original file at the time of the girl’s death. She’d just turned to the first page when she heard the water quit running.

  She jumped away from the table. Victor always came out of the shower like a man on a mission. A second later the door opened and he appeared in a cloud of steam, a towel wrapped around his waist. He was on his way to the bedroom when he saw her out of the corner of his eye.

  “Hey,” he called. “Whatcha doing in there?”