A Judgment of Whispers

by Sallie Bissell

  Half an hour later, he pulled up at Zack’s house, parking beside a yellow Volkswagen that sported a faded Obama sticker on the rear bumper. He went to the back door, just as he’d done the night before. He was lifting his hand to knock when a young, dark-haired woman cracked it open.

  “Are you Adam?” she whispered. He could only see a sliver of her face, a smear of pink lipstick at the corner of her mouth.

  Nodding, he held up the little sack from the pharmacy. “I’ve got Zack’s medicine.”

  “Thank God.” She unchained the door and opened it wide. “Come in. He’s in the living room.”

  Adam stepped past her. “What’s this with dead animals?”

  “They’re all over the front yard. Zack found them when he went to fill the bird feeders.” She rubbed her arms. “Then he just went nuts.”

  “I’ll go talk to him,” said Adam. “I’ve known him a long time.”

  He went into the living room. It looked as if a small tornado had vented its fury within the walls. End tables were overturned and paintings hung crooked on the wall. Zack paced in front of the window, mumbling to himself in a constant, low tone. He kept shaking his head, as if trying to erase the memory of the dead animals. His heavy footsteps thudded as he stomped up and down the room. Adam stared, slack-jawed. He’d never seen him like this before.

  “Hey, buddy,” he called softly. “What’s going on?”

  Zack turned. His eyes were flat black orbs. Tears streamed down his face. “They’re dead! They’re all dead!”

  “Who’s dead?” Adam asked, keeping his distance from this hulk of a man. Zack was a half a head taller and probably had seventy pounds on him.

  “The animals.”

  “What animals?”

  Zack pointed to the window. “Out there!”

  Adam grew curious. “Can I go have a look?”

  Zack did not reply. He just gave a long sniff and continued his pacing.

  Adam crossed the room, stepping over a shattered lamp and one of Grace’s oil paintings, torn from its frame. He let himself out the front door and scanned the yard, looking for the animals Zack was talking about. At first he saw nothing but Grace’s flowers, a riot of purples and yellows. Then, as he stepped off the porch and walked toward the bird feeder, he found them. Positioned like the numerals on a clock, were a dozen little carcasses. Squirrels, mostly, with a couple of rabbits and some mangled thing that might have once been an opossum. All were laid on their backs, their fur stained red with blood. Though the opossum thing looked like roadkill, all the rest had bullet holes, either in their chests or their heads. No wonder Zack had gone crazy. This was sick. Butch and Devin came immediately to mind.

  He heard the door open behind him. He turned to see Zack coming down the porch steps, hiccupping with sobs.

  “See?” he said, triumphant. “I told you so.”

  “I know, buddy,” said Adam. “Somebody did a real bad thing here.”

  “But why?” asked Zack, his forty-two-year-old chin quivering. “The squirrels didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “I know. Some people are sick jerks.” Again, Adam thought of Devin and the rifle leaning in the corner of his office. He’d said he wanted Zack to take the fall. Maybe this was part of his plan—scare Zack bad enough to confess to anything. He stepped in front of the animals, trying to hide them from Zack’s view. “I brought some medicine for you. How about you go take it and I’ll bury these little guys.”

  Zack shook his head. “I want to help.”

  “Take your pills first,” he said, trying to speak with Grace’s tone of authority. “Then you can help.”

  Zack stared at him darkly for a moment, but then said, “Okay.”

  Adam waited until Zack went inside to take his medicine, then he walked over to the garbage. There he found two pairs of work gloves and a shovel. He grabbed some newspapers from their recycle bin and returned to the front yard. Zack was waiting for him.

  “Take your pills?” asked Adam.

  He nodded. “Clara gave me two.”

  “Good.” Adam handed Zack the newspaper. “Let’s wrap these guys up. Then we’ll dig a little grave for them in the back.”

  “Can we have a funeral?” the big boy-man asked.

  “Sure,” Adam said, wondering if Zack had gone totally off the rails. “If that’s what you want.”

  Somehow, Grace managed to start her next class. She set up an uncomplicated scene of peaches spilling from a fruit crate on a blue checked tablecloth. Her older students could have fun with the old-fashioned label on the crate and the folds in the material. But even the rookie painters would see the vivid relationship between the orange of the peaches and the blue of the fabric. It wasn’t the tableau she’d planned, but neither had she expected Zack to find a bunch of dead animals in their front yard.

  Again she worked her way around her students, trying to concentrate on her teaching. Just when she thought she might scream from the not knowing, her phone vibrated with a new message. Everything’s okay, wrote Clara. Zack and Adam are having a funeral. The notion of a funeral shocked her, then she remembered how distressed Zack got over the smallest animal’s passing. A funeral might help him deal with this, she decided. Adam had probably suggested it.

  Silently, she offered a prayer of thanks for Adam Shaw. He’d saved the day yet again, maybe even saved her job in the process. As far as she was concerned, whatever duty he felt he’d shirked when Teresa died, he’d made up for many times over.

  Keeping an eye out for Alice Richards, she taught her class, correcting drawings and offering suggestions on color and composition. When the students began to clean their brushes, she felt a weight lift. Now, she thought as they packed up their supplies, if I can just get out of here with my job and my sanity.

  When the last student left, she gathered up her things and turned off the lights. She half expected Alice to be waiting for her in the hall, termination papers in hand, but she saw only students, ambling to and from classes, hooked up to their smartphones. As she walked toward the faculty parking lot, she passed two girls who pointed and started whispering, but she ignored them. Stares and whispers did not bother her; she’d gotten used to them years ago.

  A half hour later, she rolled up in her own driveway. To her surprise, Clara’s yellow Bug was gone, replaced by Adam’s white Toyota. A new panic gripped her. Where was Clara? Had she quit? That would just be the horribly perfect end to a wretchedly imperfect day.

  She pulled into the garage and hurried into the kitchen. The house was silent. She went down the hall to Zack’s bedroom. The door stood open; she peeked inside and saw a tangle of sheets, but no Zack. Returning to the kitchen, she glanced in the living room. Someone had made an attempt to straighten up the wreck Zack had made—the furniture was mostly in place and only a couple of paintings were beyond re-hanging on the wall. But everything was just so silent. Zack liked things quiet, but not tomb-quiet like this. She wondered if they were even there. Had they all gone somewhere in Clara’s car?

  Running to the den, she searched the last room in the house. There, she found the reason for the strange silence. Zack lay asleep on the couch, his mouth gaping open. Adam sat at the television, headphones on, watching an old videotape.

  “Hey!” she said softly, switching the overhead light on and off. “I’m home!”

  Zack didn’t move, but Adam leaped to his feet, startled and looking somehow guilty.

  “I’m sorry,” said Grace. “I didn’t mean to scare you!”

  “It’s okay.” He gave a nervous laugh, his face pale. “I didn’t hear you come in.” Quickly, he turned off the VCR. “Zack fell asleep, so I decided to watch some tapes.” He looked at the box overflowing with old cassettes. “I’m trying to catalog them for him.”

  “Where’s Clara?” asked Grace.

  “I told her she could go home,”
Adam said. “She was pretty upset.”

  “Did she say she’d be coming back tomorrow?” Grace imagined the girl calling DSS, asking her supervisor for another case. Please ma’am, I’d like a client who hasn’t been accused of murder and doesn’t try to tear the house apart.

  He nodded. “She said she would.”

  “Thank God.” Grace slumped against the door, knees wobbly with relief. “I don’t know what I’d do if she quit.” She looked at Zack, sprawled on the couch, now beginning to snore. His meds, thank God, were working.

  “He had a pretty rough day too,” Adam reminded her.

  “I guess we all have.” She turned her gaze from Zack to Adam. “Would like a drink? God knows you’ve earned it.”

  He gave his funny, one shoulder shrug. “I’ve got time for one.”

  They went into the kitchen, and Adam opened one of his beers from the night before while Grace uncorked a bottle of Cabernet. She found a can of cashew nuts in the cupboard and poured them into a bowl. As they sat at the kitchen table, she broached the subject she hadn’t even wanted to think about. “Tell me about the animals.”

  He pulled out his cell phone, pushed it across the table. “Have a look.”

  She looked at the picture he’d taken. A circle of little creatures, arranged around the bird feeder like the monoliths of Stonehenge. Sacrificed to some god she couldn’t imagine. As she handed his phone back, her eyes welled up.

  “Zack and I buried them in the back yard,” said Adam. “He wanted to have a funeral.”

  “Zack wanted to have a funeral?”

  He nodded. “He recited something. It sounded like Cherokee.”

  “The Twenty-third Psalm,” said Grace. “My mother taught him that before she died. It’s the only Bible verse he knows.” Sighing, she rubbed the nape of her neck. “I think we may be in for a bad stretch here.”

  “How so?”

  “You’ve been here what—two days? Already we’ve had a bullying detective, a pushy reporter, a sneaky photographer, and now some creep dumping dead animals in the front yard.”

  He took a swallow of beer. “Bully, Pushy, Sneaky, and Creepy. Sounds like four of seven evil dwarves.”

  “I imagine we’ll have more than seven before it’s all over. As long as little Teresa keeps selling papers, Zack and I are fair game for every nutcase in the county.”

  “And the police don’t help?”

  “I call them, but we aren’t exactly high priority.”

  He frowned at his beer, then said, “Do you have a smartphone?”

  She nodded. “Two months ago I got the latest model from Cupertino. It makes calls and takes great pictures. That’s about as far as I’ve gotten with it.”

  “Let me see it. I might be able to rig something up for you.”

  She handed him her phone, told him her password. As she sipped her wine, she watched his slender fingers fly over the touchscreen, with an expertise that would always elude her. She was old-school, growing up with rotary phones and black-and-white TV sets that only showed three channels.

  “You call Mary Crow a lot?” he asked.

  “I have lately.”

  “And Bell’s Pharmacy?”

  “Them too. Why? How do you know?”

  “I’m looking through your recent calls.”

  He continued his clicking while she poured herself another glass of wine. When she’d drained half of that, he gave her phone back. “Punch that little button there,” he told her.

  She did. All the numbers she called regularly appeared—Clara, the drugstore, Mary Crow, and the Pisgah County Police. “What did you do?” she cried.

  “I made you a favorite list,” he explained. “So you can call these people faster.”

  “Cool!” she cried. “I never knew you could do that. Thanks!”

  He drained his beer. “I guess I’d better get going and see what my parents have added to my to-do list.”

  “Listen, I can’t thank you enough for all your help,” Grace said. “If it hadn’t been for you, I would probably have lost my job.”

  “No thanks necessary,” he said. “Do you teach again tomorrow?”

  “No, not till Friday.”

  “Then I might go see Devin McConnell. I’ve got an idea he may have had something to do with these animals.”

  “Oh leave him alone, Adam. He’s a scary guy. He and Butch both.”

  “Devin doesn’t bother me,” he said, his tone bitter. “Neither does Butch. A thousand things scare me more than those two guys.”

  Twenty-Six

  Whatever else Jack Wilkins might be, he wasn’t the washed up old codger of a cop that Victor had described. As Mary followed him back into town, she noted that he even drove like a cop—straight, sure, and about twenty miles over the posted speed limit.

  “Hope he’s still got some friends on the force,” Mary whispered as he zoomed into the entrance of Lone Oak Acres. “He’ll need them if he keeps driving like this.”

  Construction had ended for the day, so Wilkins pulled up at the far end of the park that now surrounded the old tree. The developers had landscaped a long oval of common space with the tree at one end and a silly-looking Victorian bandstand at the other. Mary felt an odd sense of grief for the old tree. Though she doubted that it had ever saved the Cherokees from any Spaniards, it stood strong and noble, reflecting a vital part of her people’s spirit. Surrounding it with band shells and eco-friendly cottages seemed demeaning, like putting a party hat on an elephant.

  She got out of her car and walked over to Wilkins, who was standing next to his truck, rolled up map in hand. The dog wagged his tail as she approached. “Want to go have a closer look?” Wilkins asked.

  “Sure.”

  “Then I’d better hook Lucky up,” he said, reaching in the truck for his leash.

  They went over to the tree. Mary had a vague memory of coming here once, with Jonathan, to see if they could spot the Spanish helmet hidden somewhere in the branches. She never found it, but back then she was far too busy gazing at Jonathan to have much interest in an old piece of armor. Still, as they drew closer to the oak, her sense of awe grew. The leaves broke the sunlight into small twinkling emeralds dancing among the dark limbs.

  “They found Teresa Ewing there.” Wilkins unrolled his map on the ground. “This is a survey, drawn in 1985.” He pointed to a mark toward the right margin. “The tree’s here. A wet spring had eroded several little caverns beneath it. Neighborhood kids hid out and played here for years.” He pointed to a slight depression between two huge roots of the tree. “They found Teresa there. Everything intact except her skull. I’ll never forget it.”

  “Who owned the tree then?”

  “It was in the back of Albert Wood’s two-acre lot. Mr. Wood was eighty and crippled, so he wasn’t a viable suspect.” Wilkins pointed over Mary’s shoulder. “The Ewing house was over there, across from Devin McConnell’s house. Everybody’s back yard ended at this tree.” He pointed in the other direction. “If that mound of dirt wasn’t in the way, you could see Adam Shaw’s and Butch Russell’s houses. Janet and Butch Russell still live there, as do the Shaws, though they sent Adam to live with a relative in New York.”

  “He’s back now,” said Mary. “I met him yesterday.”

  Wilkins frowned. “Really?”

  “I went with Zack Collier for the DNA test. Adam came in right behind us.”

  “Wow,” said Jack. “Things must be hopping down at the station.”

  Mary turned in a slow circle. “So where was the Collier house?”

  “Two doors down from the Shaws.” He pointed to a churned up chunk of earth marked off with stubby orange stakes. “Grace sold it and moved after her husband left. For a long time it was a rental. Now they’re going to build something new on the lot.”

  “Let’s walk over th
ere. I’d like to see what the tree looks like from there.”

  They went over to the flattened piece of earth that had once been Zack and Grace Collier’s yard. It was impossible to tell what their house had looked like back then.

  “So how far were they from the tree?” asked Mary.

  He looked through another folder he’d brought with him. “Sixty yards.”

  “So you guys think Zack got mad, killed her, then ran back home with her, where his parents helped him cover it up?”

  “Whaley thought that. It was dusk. Most people were sitting down to supper. The kids roughhoused a lot with Zack Collier, because he was so much bigger than they were. If anybody had seen him carrying Teresa, they would have thought they were playing some kind of game.”

  “That’s quite a theory, Detective.”

  “I know.” He gave her a hard look. “And it’s still the one people like best.”

  Lucky began sniffing the ground, pulling Wilkins toward the bushes at the back of the lot. “Come on,” said Jack, stumbling after the dog. “I think he needs to pee.”

  Mary followed the pair over to a thick undergrowth of weeds. With intense focus, Lucky sniffed every bush, inhaling whatever information was there. Finally after several moments, he lifted one leg against a patch of pampas grass. Mary was about to comment on how discerning Lucky was in his urinating when Jack touched her arm.

  “Don’t say anything. Just turn real slow and look up at the tree.”

  She did as he told her. At first she saw nothing—then her eyes caught a motion behind the tree. Someone was walking down the pile of dirt between the tree and the Shaw house. She saw that it was a man, long-haired, wearing jeans. She could also tell the stranger was schooled in the old Cherokee way of walking, heel to toe, all tracks in a single file. And yet something about his gait didn’t look right—even walking slowly there was a hitch to his stride.

  “That’s Two Toes McCoy,” whispered Jack Wilkins. “Kneel down and let’s see what he’s up to.”

  They crouched down, hiding behind the weeds, Lucky between them. As they watched, Two Toes made his way down the pile of dirt and over to the tree. He walked not stealthily, but with quiet purpose. When he reached the tree, he dropped to his knees and lifted his arms to its huge expanse of branches. Mary could hear the faint sound of a chant rising high and ghostly, raising gooseflesh on her arms. Then, abruptly, Two Toes grew silent. He sat like a statue for a moment, then he began to dig beneath the tree. A moment later Mary saw the flash of a long knife blade as he held up something, cut it, and plunged it into the hole he’d just dug. He re-sheathed his knife, made another open-arm gesture to the tree, and got to his feet. Quicker than Mary thought possible, he was walking back up the pile of dirt, stepping in the footprints he’d already made.