Music of Ghosts

by Sallie Bissell

  Nick’s teasing me, she decided as the night sky darkened again and she felt her way into a thick stand of pines. He wants me, but he doesn’t want the others to know. Still, she thought, this is awfully far away. She couldn’t even see the cabin anymore.

  “Nick?” she called, growing nervous.

  Again he answered musically, with notes that were sometimes lush as velvet; sometimes sharp with little teeth. She peered into the darkness, but the trees grew too thick, too close together. Then, suddenly, the music stopped.

  “Nick?” She looked around. “I can’t see you. Please come out!”

  For a moment, everything grew silent. Somewhere behind her, she heard a twig snap. She caught a flicker of motion in the corner of her eye as she felt something go around her throat. She tried to pull it off, tried to scream, but it was too tight. All she could do was suck air into her lungs, flail against rough hands that seemed to be everywhere—pulling her hair, tearing her clothes. As brilliant fireworks exploded behind her eyes, she realized that this was the thing inside that cabin. Now it was here. She was the one it wanted.

  She was the one Fiddlesticks was playing for tonight.

  Two

  “Jerrrryyy!”

  His mother’s voice came so suddenly up the stairs that he jumped, nicking himself as he shaved. He winced when his razor sliced into his upper lip; in the bathroom mirror he watched as his white shaving cream turned pink with blood.

  “Damn!” he cursed, eyes watering from the sting of the cut. He rinsed his face and looked at the damage. A deep nick, just below his left nostril. When it scabbed over, he would look like he had snot on his upper lip. Terrific, he thought. The most important day of my life, and I’ll look like I’ve been picking my nose. As he pressed a small bit of toilet paper against the cut, his mother bellowed again.

  “Jerryyyyy!”

  He jerked open the bathroom door irritated, thinking he was probably the only sheriff in North Carolina who shared a roof with his mother. “What, Ma?”

  “Get the phone! Boots Gahagan’s on the line.”

  “Aw, shit!” he whispered. Boots Gahagan worked the day shift in dispatch and called him at home only in an emergency. Already he had the governor coming at noon to open the new sports park—now Boots was going to pile something else on his plate. He hurried down the hall, picked up the phone beside his bed.

  “Hey, Boots.” He answered matter-of-factly, as if it was no big deal that his mother had called him to the phone. Though Eleanor Cochran was a widowed economics professor currently recovering from breast cancer, he knew a few of his staff members secretly snickered about their boss’s living arrangements. “What’s up?”

  “Just got a 911 about a possible homicide.”

  “A homicide?” He sat down on the bed. He didn’t need any dead bodies today—he had every available officer in dress blues, providing snappy, spit-and-polish security for the honorable Ann Chandler. “Where?”

  “East side of Burr Mountain,” Boots reported. “A camper. Friends found her, in the woods.”

  “You’re sure it’s not an accident? Somebody didn’t take a header off a waterfall?”

  “Didn’t sound like it. A college boy called, crying like a baby. Said some thing tore up a girl at the old Fiddlesticks cabin.”

  He felt a little catch in his gut. People had gone ghost hunting at Fiddlesticks for as long as he could remember. He had gone there himself, back in junior high.

  “Who’s on the scene?” he asked.

  “Saunooke. He just called for a detective. Whaley’s still on vacation and Tuffy Clark’s on crutches, so I called you.”

  Cochran rose from the bed and re-hung his elegant black dress uniform back in his closet. “Okay. Tell Saunooke I’m on my way. And call Tuffy Clark. See if he can hobble down to the station in case this turns out to be something.”

  “Ten-four.”

  Sighing, he hung up the phone and walked over to open the little blue velvet box on his dresser. Inside, a diamond ring glittered with icy fire. Not huge, but of excellent quality, according to the jeweler. He’d bought it last week, the first truly romantic act of his life. He thought his second romantic act would take place later today, when he planned to kneel in front of Ginger Malloy and ask her to marry him. Now, he had a bad feeling that Boots Gahagan’s phone call had just put his romance on hold.

  He hid the ring in the top drawer of his dresser and hurried back to finish shaving. As he re-entered the bathroom, he saw that his mother had remained at the bottom of the stairs, unabashedly eavesdropping on his conversation. She’d taken up mystery writing since he’d been elected sheriff, and she spent most of her mornings scribbling about a mother-and-son detective team. Much to his chagrin, a small press in Charleston had published her first novel, touting her as “the author who lives with crime every day.”

  “What’s going on?” she called up the stairs, full of curiosity.

  “Some kid found a body up at the Fiddlesticks cabin,” he replied. He never told his mother anything that she wouldn’t read in the paper—he just told her a day before it came out in print.

  “Oh my God,” cried Eleanor. “A homicide?”

  He hated it when she used police lingo. “Don’t know yet.”

  Re-lathering his face, he started to scrape the whiskers from the other half of his upper lip and thought of his own trip to the Fiddlesticks cabin. Butch Messer had heard that some high school boys kept a stash of condoms up there, and he wanted a share of them. “Pearl Ann Reynolds let me feel her tits after the last football game,” Messer had confided, his tone both proud and nervous. “I’m gonna need some rubbers pretty soon!” They’d doubled up there on Messer’s Honda, their hearts brimming with the prospect of actually needing a condom. They’d approached the cabin cautiously, the tall dark pines around the place seeming to whisper all the old legends they’d heard growing up. They’d just inched their way inside the front door when a face popped up in one of the broken windows. It stared at them with hideously wide eyes, growling like a bear as it grinned a death’s head kind of rictus. Instantly, they forgot all about condoms and raced back to the Honda, terrified. When they finally got home, Messer got off his motor bike shamefaced, urine staining the crotch of his jeans.

  Cochran shook the memory away and called down the stairs. “Hey, Ma—what exactly went on up there?”

  “At the Fiddlesticks cabin?” Eleanor climbed the stairs to stand in the hall.

  “Yeah.”

  “Fiddlesticks was a man named Robert Smith, who came home one night and found his wife with another man. He cut them up with a knife and sat there fiddling while they bled out.” Pausing for a moment, she started clapping her hands in a kind of old jump-rope rhyme. “Fiddlesticks killed her with his razor. Slit her throat and then forgave her.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “The police caught him while he was putting flowers on her grave. He may have killed her, but he still loved her.”

  “When did all this happen?”

  “Well.” She frowned. “I was in the fourth grade, so it must have been about 1958. All the boys in my class were terrified—they said if you walked through the woods alone, Fiddlesticks would come and cut off your tallywhacker.”

  Cochran frowned. “Your what?”

  “Tallywhacker. Fourth-grade slang for penis.”

  Cochran leaned against the doorjamb, grateful that his tallywhacker was safe beneath his bathrobe. “So they didn’t catch him right away?”

  “He hid out in the hills a good while. We weren’t allowed to leave our yards for weeks.” She ran a hand through the white, down-like hair she usually concealed with a blue Duke cap. “That was the first time everybody started locking their doors at night. Aunt Frankie slept with a shotgun under her bed for the rest of her life.”

  “What finally happened?” asked Cochran
, trying to keep his mother on task. Gossip and memory could sidetrack her pretty easily.

  “They found him guilty of murder. Sent him to the gas chamber, as I recall.”

  Ninety minutes later, Cochran pulled in behind Saunooke’s squad car, parking on what was locally known as Fiddler Road. It was no more than two ruts that snaked through the trees, overgrown on both sides with wild grapevine and thick tangles of rhododendrons. He got out of his cruiser and gazed at the path. Narrow, it twisted so that you could never see more than ten yards ahead of you. But even beyond that, an odd stillness hung here, as if everything from the birds in the sky to the lascivious red blossoms of the trumpet vines stood silent, watching to see what he would do. Just like that afternoon with Messer, whispered a voice inside his head.

  He smiled at his edginess but still reached for the twelve-gauge pump Winchester that rode in the front of his car. “Up here, I guess I’m still thirteen,” he said quietly. “At least I’ve gotten past stealing condoms.”

  He kept the shotgun pointed at the ground as he hiked the last half mile to the cabin, watching for snakes and clambering over several trees that had fallen across the path. As the battered old place finally came into view, he made careful note of his first impressions. It was 11:41 a.m. and the sun had just begun to peek over the east side of the ridge, warming the cool, uncomfortably humid air. A family of crows perched high in a pine tree about fifty yards east of the structure, keeping a beady-eyed watch on Rob Saunooke, who stood talking to five young people clustered around the steps of the front porch. One girl wept into a boy’s arms, while another girl stood stony-faced between two other, taller boys. The college students all wore pricey outdoor clothing and kept their backs toward the crow-filled pine tree. Cochran observed them discreetly for a few moments, without announcing himself. Saunooke seemed to have everything under control, though he kept looking nervously toward the path. Deciding it was time to help the young officer out, Cochran made his presence known.

  “Saunooke,” he called.

  His most recent hire turned, looking relieved to see someone with a badge and a gun. “Yes, sir?”

  “A word.”

  Saunooke left the five standing in front of the cabin and hurried over to Cochran. “Hey, boss,” he said, wiping sweat from his forehead.

  “What have we got?”

  “Big trouble, I think.” Saunooke solemnly handed him a driver’s license.

  Cochran studied the laminated card. It belonged to one Lisa Carlisle Wilson, a twenty-one-year-old white female, from 2339 Cleveland Mews, Raleigh, North Carolina. Though Lisa was a pretty, curly-haired girl with a pert little kiss of a mouth, it was her name that caught his attention. It sounded alarmingly similar to Jackson Carlisle Wilson, the former governor who’d long ago dragged Pisgah and the other western counties of the state into a reasonable semblance of the twentieth century.

  Cochran frowned at Saunooke. “This girl isn’t kin to old Governor Carlisle Wilson, is she?”

  Saunooke nodded. “His daughter, according to her friends. Usually just goes with Wilson as her last name though.”

  Cochran frowned at the five standing in front of the cabin. “Which one is she?”

  “She’s the victim,” Saunooke replied.

  “Are you kidding?”

  Saunooke shook his head.

  “Dear God.” Cochran looked at the girl’s driver’s license again, but this time saw her father—an old style, ball-busting politician who had, on more than one occasion, convinced the entire state that shit was Shinola. Carlisle Wilson would eat Pisgah County for breakfast once he found out about this. This must be my lucky day, Cochran thought. Not one but two governors to contend with.

  He took a deep breath. “Okay,” he said to Saunooke. “Tell me what you know.”

  “She was one of six summer interns at that raptor center on the other side of the mountain,” he replied. “They heard about the Fiddlesticks cabin and hiked over here yesterday afternoon. They were making some kind of movie about spending the night at a haunted house.”

  Cochran winced, picturing the headlines in the paper. “Go on.”

  “Anyway, they stayed up late last night and woke up late this morning. One kid went to take a dump in the woods and found her body.” Saunooke pointed to the tall pine tree where the crows were perching. “Under that tree there.”

  “And nobody saw or heard a thing,” Cochran finished Saunooke’s account for him. He’d learned, over the past seven years, that whatever crime had transpired, never did anybody at the scene ever hear, see, or notice anything out of the ordinary.

  “Right. Well, they thought they might have seen someone last night, but they’d all been drinking.”

  Cochran again regarded the five who now huddled like refugees in front of the battered old cabin. “Did they sleep inside or outside?”

  “Inside. Lisa Wilson doubled up in her sleeping bag with one of the guys.”

  “Were they having sex or just sleeping?” asked Cochran.

  “Just sleeping, according to the boy,” said Saunooke. “He’s upset, but not girlfriend-upset, if you know what I mean.”

  Ginger Malloy’s strawberry-blonde hair flashed through Cochran’s mind. He knew well what girlfriend-upset meant. “Which one of them found her?”

  Saunooke glanced over his shoulder. “The dark-haired boy in the Duke sweatshirt.”

  “Is he the one she slept with?”

  “No, she slept with the blonde kid who looks like a wrestler.”

  “Okay.” Cochran looked at both boys, wondering if some love triangle had ended badly. “What else?”

  “I was trying to sort things out when you arrived,” said Saunooke “They’re all scared, talking at once. They think a bear got her.”

  Cochran turned away from the interns, eyed the pine tree, hoping this might turn out to be just some errant sow protecting her cubs. “And did a bear get her?”

  Saunooke shook his head. “No bear that I ever saw.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Cochran. Saunooke had come up through the ranks of the highway patrol—he’d seen plenty of death and dismemberment on the highways.

  “You’ll have to go see for yourself, sir.”

  “Okay,” Cochran said “You confiscate all cell phones, cameras, anything these jokers have that might contain evidence or corroborate alibis. Then call Boots and get another squad car and the State Bureau of Investigation team from Asheville. I’ll go check out the girl.”

  “Have you had breakfast?” asked Saunooke.

  “Just coffee,” replied Cochran.

  “Good,” said Saunooke, turning back to his little group of suspects. “You’ll probably be able to keep that down.”

  Cochran kept the shotgun and headed toward the pine tree, steeling himself to see God only knew what. If a former highway patrol officer was blanching, then it must be bad.

  The ancient pine trees stood like massive sentinels, their thick branches turning warm air cool, daylight into perpetual dusk. Little underbrush grew around them, and cast-off needles from countless autumns past had turned the ground into a spongy orange carpet. The cloying, metallic odor of blood engulfed him as he pushed his way through some feathery branches, then suddenly, he saw her.

  “Sweet Jesus,” he whispered. He stopped, realizing why Saunooke had been so undone, why Boots Gahagan’s initial report was that some thing had torn a girl up. She lay naked in a small clearing, her arms stretched out as if she’d been crucified. Ligature marks scarred her throat, bulging her once pretty eyes, protruding a darkened tongue. Gnats and flies were hovering in a cloud above her face; already a crow had pecked at one of her eyes. But the scavengers did not make Cochran gasp. What brought his coffee roiling back up his throat was the bloody mess some thing had made of Lisa Wilson’s body. Not only had the girl been stripped and strangled, but someone had t
urned her corpse into a scroll, carving hieroglyphic-like figures from her wrists all the way down to her pink-painted toes.

  For a moment he truly thought he might vomit. He turned his eyes away, looking into the trees, swallowing the saliva that flooded his mouth. When he looked back, he tried to focus on just one, single part of her. Piecemeal, he could pretend it was just a puzzle on puckered skin. If he looked at her whole body, he didn’t know if he could stand it.

  Brushing away the gnats and flies, he concentrated on the reddish brown characters carved into the flesh of her right shoulder. The first figure resembled a Greek delta, the second one, closer to her clavicle, looked like something from the Cherokee syllabary. Slowly, he read his way across her torso, trying to find some figure he recognized. When he dropped down to her breasts, he realized sickly that the lower figures were just as dark as the ones across her shoulders. The bleeding had continued for all the wounds. Which meant someone had sliced Lisa Wilson up while she was still alive.

  He backed away and began taking in deep breaths of the cool, pine-laced air. He’d seen a dozen homicides, a couple of real bear attacks. None of those came close to this. This was sick. This was territory he had no map for.

  Suddenly, he heard footsteps behind him. Tightening his grip on the shotgun, he turned. To his astonishment, Buck Whaley came wheezing up through the trees, a toothpick lodged in the corner of his mouth, gold detective badge glinting from his belt. Quickly, Cochran cleared his throat. He didn’t want Whaley to catch him on the verge of puking.

  “Hidy, sheriff,” Whaley greeted amiably, sweat glinting through his brush-cut gray hair. “I hear we’ve got some trouble.”

  “I thought you were on vacation,” said Cochran.

  “Got back last night. Heard Boots on the scanner and thought I’d come help out. What’s up?”

  “Take a look.” Cochran stepped aside, revealing Lisa Wilson’s body.