A Judgment of Whispers (8 page)

“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 their 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?”

“Got a call from work,” she answered truthfully. “You were singing ‘Go Argentina' so loudly I went outside to talk.”

“‘Play Argentina,'” he corrected, looking at the papers spread out on the table. “Sorry about the mess. I'm taking all that to the office today.”

“Don't on my account,” she said. “I'm accustomed to work files at home.”

“Yeah, but the SBI doesn't like it. They're pretty touchy about their cold case files.”

He turned and headed for the bedroom. She followed him, but not before she sneaked a final glimpse at Teresa Ewing's case file.

J. Wilkins and O. Whaley
she repeated the names to herself. Buck Whaley would die before he told her anything about this case. But this J. Wilkins might be more willing to talk. “Wouldn't Turpin just love that,” she whispered with a soft chuckle. “I might find out as much about the case as he does.”

Eleven

Adam Shaw gazed down
at the Appalachians from 15,000 feet in the air. From this height the old mountains looked like lumpy green carpet. Though they lacked the muscularity of the Rockies or the awesome majesty of the Himalayas, the Appalachians were a soupy, mysterious world unto themselves. Down there, he guessed, the cops had found a clue that might reveal Teresa Ewing's killer. How odd that it had turned up just as his parents were about to leave the place that had almost destroyed them. It was as if the mountains weren't going to let Mr. and Mrs. Richard Shaw go without a fight.

He sat back in his seat and closed his eyes, remembering the call from his mother. “The police came by today,” she'd whispered, sounding like a creature afraid to come out of its burrow. “You need to come home.”

He'd been asleep—newly arrived from a photo shoot in Vancouver—and at first thought he might be dreaming. Then his father came on the line, his voice crisp as a general assuming command. “Adam, the police have found something under that godforsaken tree. Bob Meyers says you need to give them a cheek swab.”

“I was coming next week to help you guys with the move,” he told his father. “Should I get an earlier flight?”

“Get here as soon as you can, so we can put this lunacy behind us for good.”

So he changed his flight and here he was, coming back to the home he'd left twenty-five years ago, remembering his long-ago words.
We were playing by the tree. Then Butch's mother called him and we all went home. I was eating supper when Mrs. Ewing called …

He'd told that story so many times it was like a speech he'd learned by rote. He recited it first to the uniformed officers, then to the detectives. Endlessly. Before school started, then again when he got off the bus. Saturdays after basketball practice; Sundays after church. Always the same questions, the same two detectives. One reminded him of his science teacher, the other a football coach.
We've heard you guys wanted the girls to play strip poker that afternoon. Did you make Teresa take off her clothes? Did anybody touch her, try to kiss her? Was Zack there? How soon did he leave after Teresa? Which direction did he go? He claims you're his best friend. What does that mean? Tell us what really happened, son. We want to help you. We understand how things can get out of hand. We know you don't want to rat out a friend, but in this case it's okay. A little girl has been murdered.

He wondered, as the airplane began its final descent, if the cops would ask him the same questions this time. Some new sheriff had probably gone through the cold case files, he told himself. Decided to make his mark by solving the great mystery of Teresa Ewing. Still, a request for new DNA was like a registered letter from the IRS—vaguely troubling and always mysterious.

He rented a car at the airport, amazed at the speed of the transaction. At Heathrow or JFK it would have taken at least an hour; here he was driving toward Hartsville just minutes after he got off the plane. As the highway made pleasant, banked curves through the mountains, he thought back to his childhood friends. He figured Zack Collier, the autistic kid, was probably dead by now. He knew Shannon and Janie had moved, but that Butch Russell and Devin McConnell still lived in Hartsville. He'd never reconnected with them on Facebook or Twitter. Being suspects in a murder case was nothing you wanted to post on your timeline. Still, he wanted to look them up, take them out for a beer. He felt like he owed them that. He'd gotten to leave and live in New York while they'd had to stay and eat shit at Pisgah County Junior High. None of the cool kids wanted to hang out with anybody who might be accused of murder.

He reached the city limits of Hartsville and cut his speed to thirty-five. Though the streets were familiar, the town itself looked strange. Video Land had morphed into a tattoo gallery. The Foto-Mat had vanished and the land was now part of the Olive Garden's parking lot. The hospital now had a helo pad and the police station, where he had spent a number of unpleasant hours, had expanded from a fieldstone building heated by a woodstove to a sprawling complex with a fleet of black-and-white squad cars, sleek as Orcas.

“Whoa,” he whispered. “Looks like there's some serious crime-detection going on here.” He gazed at the police station for a moment, then he turned toward Salola Street. Tomorrow he would give his DNA. Today he just wanted to go home.

If the new Hartsville had surprised him, then Salola Street left him amazed. Most of it was gone—the houses, the back yard barbecues, the vegetable gardens and swing sets. All had been replaced by mounds of earth and little orange stakes in the ground that marked off the lots in the new development
.
The only familiar thing left was the oak tree, presiding regally over all the upturned earth. He squinted up at the top of it, looking for a glint of the fabled Spanish helmet. Two Toes had told them if your heart was brave, you could see it, in the very top branches. Never had he seen it. He figured his heart wasn't brave enough.

Adam drove on, turned into their cul-de-sac, and found the last three remaining houses. They huddled together, a Custer's last stand against progress. The Russells, the Fergusons, and the Shaws. His mother had wanted them all to move to New York, but his father had drawn a line in the sand against Sheriff Logan and Detective Whale-Ass.
No cop is going to railroad me
had become his mantra, words he'd lived by for the past quarter century.

He pulled into their driveway, the memory of his father's voice so clear that it stunned him. Then another voice caught his attention.

“Oh my God!” His mother burst out the front door. “You're home!”

She ran to him, her arms outstretched, her heavy breasts jiggling. His father followed in tennis shorts, then his brother Mark and Mark's wife, Sharon.

He'd barely gotten out of the car before his mother engulfed him. “I can't believe this! I can't believe you're here!”

“Mom, I just saw you guys at the beach in June.”

“I know,” she cried. “But it's just so nice having you here.”

His father clapped him hard on the back. “Welcome home, Adam.”

Three years his junior, Mark was now a Charlotte banker who played golf and wore rep ties. He gave Adam a brusque hug while Sharon smiled, holding his little nephew Owen in her arms. “Yo-bro!” said Mark. “Welcome to the last dance on Salola Street! You're just in time to take over the packing.”

He endured their exuberant welcome, then he stepped back to get a better look at the home he'd left so long ago. Though they'd painted it gray and planted azaleas in the front yard, his mother's bird bath still stood on the lawn and his old basketball hoop still hung over the garage. How many games of Horse had he played there? Hundreds, at least. Even now he could see them all—Butch's face as red as his hair, Devin with his Notre Dame cap backward, Zack usually missing the hoop entirely, throwing the ball either into the bushes or over the backboard.

“Come on in, honey.” His mother pulled him toward the door. “I've made spaghetti for dinner. We can have a drink while the pasta cooks.”

As Mark grabbed Adam's knapsack from the car, Adam allowed his mother to pull him inside the house. Again, he was shocked as he stepped through the front doorway. The home he'd remembered as being decorated with military precision was cluttered with books and clothes and furniture half-covered in bubble wrap. “Where's all our old stuff?” he asked.

“Either waiting to get packed or sold,” his mother said.

He frowned, not understanding. “Sold?”

“We had a garage sale last Saturday,” she explained as she hurried into the kitchen. “Got rid of all our junk and made almost a thousand dollars.”

“Wow.” He looked around the foyer, the living room stuffed with chairs and two sofas. “It looks so different. Smaller, somehow.”

His father handed him a bottle of beer. “You recognize those pictures, don't you?”

He looked in the dining room. All the pictures on the wall were photographs he'd taken. A sunrise in Tibet, a mist-shrouded ferry in the San Juan Islands, Japanese lanterns floating out to sea. They'd been enlarged to gallery-sized prints and matted in expensive metal frames.

“They look terrific.” He didn't know what else to say. In twenty years his father had never commented on his choice of profession—outdoor adventure photography. Even though he'd had pictures in
Outside
and had worked on every continent, his father only ever asked if his traveler's health insurance was up-to-date.

Mark came and stood beside him. “We hung your shot of that beach in Thailand in our living room. What are you going to do next?”

“Gorillas in Rwanda.” He caught his father's frown. “But only after we get everything to Hilton Head.”

An odd silence fell. He felt suddenly as if he were some non-English-speaking stranger his family was desperate to make feel welcome. Soon they would start pantomiming their conversation.

“Come on, Adam,” his father finally said, “let's get you settled in.”

While Mark went to rejoin Sharon, his father led him down the hall to the last door on the right. He stepped inside his boyhood room with a sense of relief. This, at least, seemed familiar. Though his basketball team pictures and his letter for junior high track were gone, his bed and his dresser and his desk all stood in the same place. He stepped over to the window. He could still see the back yard and the shed where they'd played.

“Look familiar?” His father dropped his knapsack on the bed.

“This does.” He took a sip of beer. “Everything else sure has changed.”

Typically, his father cut to the chase. “I called Bob Meyers. He said it's best to get the DNA thing over with. He'll go with you down to the police station first thing tomorrow.”

“I'd rather go by myself, Dad. I've handled Turkish border guards and the Moscow cops. I think I can manage the Pisgah County police.”

“I know.” For an instant, his father's eyes grew watery behind his glasses. He seemed to want to say something else, but instead he reached again to clap him on the back. “It's good to have you home, Adam. Just relax and I'll go help your mother.”

After his father returned to the kitchen, he went over to his old closet and opened the door. It held only flattened packing boxes, waiting to be filled. He ran his hands along the top shelf, wondering if any remains from his childhood lurked there, but the shelf was empty of everything but a thin layer of dust.

He wandered down the hall. All the other bedrooms looked as impersonal as motel rooms—they held beds and dressers but were empty of pictures, photographs, or books. Crossing the living room, he went downstairs, to the basement rec room where he and Mark had once reigned supreme. The Ping-Pong table was gone, along with the dartboard. The only thing left was the big entertainment center where they'd watched endless movies—stopping, rewinding, and showing their favorite scenes in slow motion. For his tenth birthday, he'd asked for his own video camera and tripod. A year later he was filming everything—bears with their cubs, Mark riding his skateboard, once a scripted drama about the Civil War, starring Devin as a Yankee, Zack as a slave, and Teresa in an old prom dress, playing a rebel spy. He turned and opened the cabinet in the bottom of the bookcase, looking for those old tapes. All he found were empty shelves. He stood there, unbelieving. Had they already packed those up? He'd planned on taking them home with him. Suddenly he heard his mother call, “Adam! Dinner's ready!”

He closed the cabinet and went upstairs to the kitchen. Though his parents had added a food processor and a juicer to their array of appliances, the same Tiffany lamp hung low over the wide oak dining table, and his mother's cookbook collection spilled from the shelf above the stove. He sat down between baby Owen and his father.

“I just can't believe you're home,” his mother said, spooning marinara sauce over a plate of pasta.

“I can't believe how everything's changed,” he replied. “What's this new development going to be?”

“Lone Oak Acres,” his father replied. “Energy-saving homes—water furnaces, underground utilities, bike paths. They'd have gone solar, except they didn't want to cut any trees.”

“Particularly the haunted one in the middle,” Mark joked. Everybody just stared at him, not laughing.

“You'll like Hilton Head.” His mother changed the subject. “It's nice—relaxed and homey.”

“Tennis courts for Dad, 24/7,” said Mark, trying to make amends for his regrettable joke. “They even have a pro who'll video all your strokes and tell you what you're doing wrong.”

Adam took a bite of spaghetti. “Speaking of videos, what happened to our old tapes?”

His father said, “What tapes?”

“Our VHS tapes. You know, the ones we kept in the bottom of the bookcase downstairs.”

His brother twirled pasta around his fork. “God, I haven't watched a tape since high school.”

“I found those old things when I was cleaning up,” said his mother. “I put them in a box and sold them at the garage sale.”

“All of them?”

She nodded.

“But they were hilarious. Don't you remember Mark's skateboard show? My Civil War movie?”

She shrugged, apologetic. “I'm sorry, but I don't. But I can tell you who bought the whole box.”

“Who?”

“Zack Collier. Spent every dollar he had. All fifteen of them.”

“His lawn-mowing wages,” said his father, giving a bark of a laugh.

His mother went on. “You should have seen him at the sale. He practically salivated over those tapes.”

Adam frowned. “I'm surprised he's still alive. A lot of autistic people die young.”

“He still lives with his mother.” His father grunted his disapproval. “How she manages that I'll never know. He's big as an ox.”