A Judgment of Whispers

by Sallie Bissell

  “That would be great,” said Grace. “Zack and I will make it an outing.”

  Mary smiled. “If there’s an emergency or you need to get to a landline, there’s a neighbor—a Reverend Steele—who lives a couple of hundred yards down the road.”

  Grace nodded, then swallowed hard before she spoke. “Mary, if you get the test results back with Zack’s DNA, don’t send the cops, okay? Just call me at the regular time and say we need to come home.”

  “Okay. Just remember, Grace: if you run, they’ll only hunt you down.”

  “I know,” she said. “I promise we’re not going to run away.”

  “Good.” Mary gave her a hug. “Then hopefully I’ll see you soon.”

  “In Usuhiyi,” Grace said softly.

  “In the Twilight Land?” Mary laughed. “Surely before then. Call me if you need me, okay?”

  Grace nodded. “Wahdoe, Miss DA. Travel safely.”

  Thirty-Four

  At dusk Jack Wilkins pulled his truck into Grace Collier’s driveway. After Mary and Grace took off, he’d gone back home. He read Grace’s illustrated diary, took an afternoon nap, then fed the chickens, the dog, and himself. That done, he returned to the Collier house. He planned to stake out the place and see if any of the harassment Grace had written about would recur. He knew it might be a fool’s errand, but such was the nature of stakeouts. At least he had a whole house to move around in, instead of the front seat of some cramped patrol car.

  Punching the remote he’d taken from Grace’s kitchen drawer, he opened the garage door and eased his truck inside. Her clutter was not the typical array of rakes and garden tools, but easels, a molding joiner, and blank canvasses awaiting paint. He noticed someone had painted cartoon-like owls on the windows, and wondered if Grace had done that to maintain her privacy. If so, it fit in with his plan nicely—his truck would not be visible to anyone peering in the

  windows. To anyone driving by, it would look like Grace and Zack were in for the night.

  He made a quick reconnoiter of the house—the tape he’d placed high on the front and back doorjambs remained in place—nobody had entered the house in his absence. As he let Lucky out for a final pee, he noticed no new bullet holes by the front door, nor any more dead squirrels. As robins hopped on the lawn, it looked like a normal house on an ordinary summer evening, on an ordinary country road. Only the ghost of Teresa Ewing had a way of turning the commonplace into something sinister.

  He called Lucky inside and turned on the lights that Grace Collier said she left on—the porch light over the front door, the TV in the den, a light in her bedroom until around 11:30, which, according to her, was her usual bedtime. As he turned on that light, he paused to look around her room. Compared to his wife’s stacks of books and family photos, Grace Collier’s furnishings were almost Spartan—a bed and night table, a dresser, and a desk. Two framed pictures sat on the night table. In one an older Cherokee couple smiled stiffly at the camera. In the other, Grace and a man held baby Zack between them. Mike, Jack remembered. The husband who bailed. When they’d checked him out back in ’89, he’d had not one but two girlfriends he was hiding from his wife. Jack lifted the photo and examined it more closely. He could see the resemblance between father and son—Zack might have his mother’s coloring, but those downcast eyes were his dad’s.

  He replaced the picture and walked over to her desk. A school calendar lay open, her classes for the fall already written in. He sat down and eased open her lap drawer. It held pencils and pens and a lumpy eraser that looked like a wad of gray putty. When he reached to open her file drawer, it did not budge. She had locked it.

  “Wonder what she keeps in there?” he whispered. He looked at the drawer. He knew he could jimmy the lock in five seconds, but she would know it the moment she sat back down here. His snooping was what she feared; it was also the very thing Mary Crow promised wouldn’t happen. And yet here he stood, tantalized by a locked drawer. Had Grace Collier hidden evidence there for a quarter of a century? Some damning wisp of paper that would allow him to call that young Sheriff Cochran and say, “I know who killed Teresa!”?

  “You’re getting as crazy as Whaley,” he whispered. “If she’s clever enough to pull off that kind of cover-up, she wouldn’t keep the evidence in her bedroom.”

  Forgetting about the drawer, he went into Zack’s room. His bed was unmade, and his bath towel lay in the middle of the floor, topping a pile of cast-off clothes. On the wall hung clever caricatures of various birds, now blackened with spray paint. What stuffed animals remained among his bed sheets were missing their heads. Wilkins felt suddenly uncomfortable, as if he were looking at something both grisly and intimate.

  “Come on, Lucky,” he said to the dog. “Let’s get out of here.”

  After dark he closed all the drapes, maintaining the charade that Grace and Zack Collier were at home. He moved Grace’s landline telephone to the den, where he and Lucky settled down in front of the TV. Though he changed the channel from cartoons to a baseball game, he kept everything else the same. He opened the thermos of coffee he’d brought from home, muted the ball game, and started to listening to the house—familiarizing himself with the rattle of the air conditioning, the groan of the refrigerator as it began a new cycle. He was growing accustomed to the sounds when the telephone erupted with a loud ring. He jumped, almost grabbed the thing, and barked his name, then remembered—he was Grace tonight. He let it ring three times, then lifted the receiver to his ear. At first he heard only scratchy static, then a hoarse male whisper came through. “What are you doing Grace? Waiting for me? I’ve been watching you. Coming to see you soon.”

  Jack remained on the phone, listening for any background noise. There was a kind of piping, calliope sound, then the caller hung up.

  He took out his notepad and scribbled down the time and the caller’s exact words. His voice was raspy, his accent Southern. If he was at all smart, he was using a burner stolen from some stranger in Cleveland or Omaha, who was probably cursing the bastard who’d lifted their smartphone. Still, it did prove one thing: Grace Collier had not lied about the phone calls.

  “Okay,” he whispered to Lucky, “wonder what else is going down tonight?”

  Waiting for the next phone call made him edgy, so he tried to concentrate on the baseball game. It was a defensive battle, 2–2 in the eighth inning, the Pirates coming to bat. Both teams were so far out of first place that the managers were playing rookies, no doubt hoping they would gain some experience along with their new, Amish-looking beards. Jack yawned as the dog hopped up on the couch beside him. He wondered if he ought to make him stay on the floor, but given the mess in Zack’s room, he imagined far worse than Lucky had been visited upon this couch.

  He stared at the screen, the game droning on. His eyelids grew heavy as the eighth inning turned into the ninth, then the tenth. He watched, dimly, as the Pittsburgh catcher conferred with the pitcher, then he started dreaming about baseballs—fast balls, sinkers, then people tossing them like Frisbees. When one came straight at his head, he ducked, startling himself awake. He blinked at the TV set. The baseball game had ended; now some football player was yakking about new helmets. The dog, though, no longer sat beside him. Lucky was standing at the door, sniffing at the threshold. For the first time ever, Jack heard him growl. Something was on the other side of that door.

  Jack froze, watching the door as intently as Lucky. Slowly the doorknob began to turn. First to the right, then to the left, both times stopped by the lock. Jack reached for his gun.

  He got to his feet and crept to the door, careful not to jostle the curtain the covered the window. Pressing his ear to the crack, he listened. Somebody was walking along the deck; he could hear the squeak of the floorboards. It sounded as if they were moving toward Grace’s bedroom.

  Grasping his gun, he hurried down the hall, Lucky at his heels. Grace’s bedroom had two windows,
so turning off her light would let the intruder know he’d been spotted. Pressing himself next to the window on the backside of the house, he risked the barest peek behind the edge of the closed blinds. He couldn’t see much—just the tops of the zinnias, growing to the corner of the house, and the dark yard beyond. Then he heard a soft, muffled thump, as if someone had jumped off the deck. Holding his breath, he peered into the dimness. For a moment he saw nothing, then a shadow fell across the tops of the flowers and moved to the corner of the house.

  Quickly, he crossed the room to Grace’s other window. As Lucky jumped on her bed, Jack pressed his finger to his lips. Amazingly, the dog seemed to understand the need for silence. Together, they waited, Lucky staring at the window, Jack listening, his finger on the trigger of his gun.

  He heard nothing for so long he thought the intruder might have gone back to re-try the door in the den. Then, he heard something scraping against the window screen. Whoever was out there was standing no more than a foot away, on the other side of a thin pane of glass.

  Jack clicked off the safety on his gun. If whoever was out there tried to come in through the window, he would shoot them. Flat out, no questions asked.

  His gun raised, he listened. An owl hooted in the distance; katydids sawed to raspy crescendos. For a moment he wondered if the trespasser had sensed him and retreated into the darkness. Then he heard the soft scratch again, this time against the window screen, followed by a whispery, “Grace?” It reminded him of the voice on the phone—male, Southern, of indeterminate age.

  He clutched his pistol. He heard another long scratching noise, then suddenly a car horn blasted, loud. Rapid footsteps scuttled through the gravel, toward the front of the house.

  He raced out of the bedroom and into the hall. Just as he turned into the living room, the front window exploded. He dived for the floor as shards of glass rained down on him like needles. When they finally stopped pinging on the furniture, he crawled to the window frame. He peered out to see a car by the mail box, a dark figure running toward it. With the bottom of the shattered window providing cover, he fired three rounds. The first one missed, while the second one ricocheted off the back of the car. The third, though, was gold. It hit the runner, who gave a high scream, and fell. Jack raced to unlock the front door, hoping he could take out the car, but the punk he’d hit got up again. Limping to the car, he dived in the passenger seat. By the time Jack could take aim from the front porch the car had cut its lights and taken off, tires squealing, as it made a U-turn in the middle of the road. He emptied the rest of his clip, but he didn’t think he hit anything. A black car with no lights on a dark country road was a tough target.

  He stayed on the porch, his heart thudding, listening as the sound of the car’s engine grew fainter, then faded away. They won’t come back tonight, he decided. They weren’t expecting quite so warm a welcome. Holstering his gun, he walked back inside the house. To his horror, Lucky lay among the broken glass on the floor.

  “Aw, no!” Jack cried, hurrying over to him. “Not you,” he whispered. “Please not you.” The dog was still breathing, but unconscious. Jack ran his hands over his body, searching for wounds. But his fingers touched no blood—only a few small shards of glass from the window. Jack wet a paper towel with cold water and wiped Lucky’s mouth and eyes. Slowly he revived, trembling and shaking his head as if he had something in his ears. Jack checked them for glass, then he realized that he’d fired his weapon right beside the dog. Lucky was probably in shock from the loud report, his ears no doubt ringing from the blast.

  “I’m so sorry, buddy.” Jack held the dog close. “I should have kept you in the other room.”

  After a few moments Lucky perked up enough to lick Jack’s face, but he would come no farther into the living room. Probably just as well, Jack decided. Shattered glass covered everything, and the window was a gaping hole into the night sky. For now, he would hunker down and wait for them to come back. If he and Lucky were still alive in the morning, he’d go looking for a black sedan with a bullet hole near the left rear fender and a creep running around with a big bandage on his ass.

  Thirty-Five

  It was almost midnight when Mary returned to her apartment. Wilkins wasn’t answering his phone, so she’d grabbed a late supper with Victor. Afterward she’d invited him to her place. It was the first time he’d been there since their argument and she was nervous, as if her living room might hold bad karma for the two of them. “Would you like a beer?” she asked, remembering the three bottles still lingering from his last visit.

  “Sure,” he said.

  She fished two of the remaining bottles out of the fridge and returned to the living room. “I’ve got to speak at the UMW breakfast tomorrow,” she told him as she sat down on the sofa beside him.

  He frowned. “The United Mine Workers?”

  “United Methodist Women. Emily booked me in at the last minute. I suspect their scheduled speaker cancelled.”

  “I didn’t know the Methodist Women were into politics.”

  “I don’t think they are, necessarily,” she said. “But Emily sees everyone as a potential vote. I’m surprised she doesn’t have me handing out bumper stickers at the Burger King.”

  They clicked their beer bottles together and stretched their legs out on the coffee table, staring at the unlit gas logs. Victor again wore his flip-flops, the sandals that had made such an angry sound as he’d walked away before. Mary knew from some of her more wrathful clients how insidiously the embers of old arguments could rekindle into flames, so she decided to tackle the unbroached subject of work head-on. As deeply as she cared for Victor, if they couldn’t speak freely about their jobs, then they had no real future together. She turned to him.

  “So how’s it going at the SBI?”

  “They’re sending me to the Body Farm at the end of the month to study maggots. I’ll be in Tennessee for a couple of days.” He took a swallow of beer. “How about you?”

  She paused, wondering how much she could say and not start everything all over again. “Actually, I’ve just come back from Tennessee.”

  “The Body Farm?”

  “From someplace else. I relocated Grace and Zack Collier there.”

  He looked at her seriously, his playfulness gone. “What for?”

  She told him about all the things going on at Grace’s house—the harassing phone calls, the dead animals, and last night, a home invasion.

  “Does Cochran know about this?”

  She nodded. “He advised me to relocate them himself.”

  “Were the Colliers scared?” he asked, carefully not asking where exactly she’d taken them.

  “Very scared. But neither of them wanted to leave.”

  “How come?”

  “Grace didn’t want to take off work. Zack thrives on routine—same people, same things every day. They seemed satisfied with their new location, though. It has all the bells and whistles they need.” She pressed the cold beer bottle against her cheek and gazed at the dark fireplace, remembering her trip to Rugby. “Grace said the strangest thing when I left.”

  “What?”

  “See you in Usuhiyi.”

  “Where’s Usuhiyi?”

  “It’s Cherokee—means the Twilight Land.”

  Victor laughed. “Is that anywhere near the Twilight Zone?”

  “No, it means west—the place where Cherokees go when we die.” She frowned. “You don’t think she might be planning murder/suicide do you?”

  “Sounds more like she might go west in her car,” said Victor. “Doesn’t she have an ex-husband somewhere out there?”

  “Colorado,” said Mary. “And two brothers in Alaska.”

  “That’s about as west as you can get,” he said. “I hope she doesn’t lam out on you.”

  “I warned her about that. She gave me her word she wouldn’t.” Mary grew quiet, c
onsidering the possibility of returning to Rugby and finding Grace gone or, worse, dead. “Anyway, she seemed more concerned about what Wilkins would do in her house while they were gone.”

  “Wilkins?” Victor’s brows lifted. “Wilkins, the old nutcase?”

  She nodded.

  “I’m sorry, I must have missed a paragraph here. What’s Wilkins doing in Grace Collier’s house?”

  “I hired him as my investigator. He’s staking out the place to see if he can find out who’s behind all this harassment.”

  “Oh darling.” He flopped back on the sofa and looked at the ceiling.

  “Why? What’s wrong with Jack Wilkins?”

  “Whaley’s given me more of the skinny on Wilkins. The Teresa Ewing case drove a pretty big wedge between him and reality.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “According to Whaley, as the months passed and they kept coming up empty, Wilkins got obsessed—wouldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep, started spending his paycheck at the liquor store. They finally made him take a medical leave. That’s why Whaley has ridden Zack Collier so hard—he thinks eventually he’ll crack and admit to the murder. Then Wilkins can die knowing they finally solved the case.”

  “But he acts like a regular old man. Pictures of his grandkids, golf clubs in his garage.”

  “Have you seen his war room?”

  She nodded. “I’ve seen all his Teresa Ewing files.”

  “Didn’t you wonder why the former lead detective would show you, a defense attorney, his old files?”

  “I told him I’d been a prosecutor,” she said. “Nine capital cases, nine convictions. He seemed impressed.”

  “I’m sure he was. But I’m also sure he was using you. That old fart would give his left nut to be back on this case. Probably his right nut as well, if he could collar somebody for that crime.”