Music of Ghosts

by Sallie Bissell

  “Okay.” Alex nodded. “Now tell me about Lily.”

  His rage grew hotter. Fred Moon was one thing—Fred Moon’s damaging affect on Lily was what really let the monsters loose inside him. “Until Lily went to Oklahoma, her major concern was making a goal in soccer. Now she’s worried that Mary might kill her.”

  “Kill her?” Alex looked up, stunned. “Why would she think that?”

  “Moon showed her some kind of newspaper clipping he keeps in his wallet. Lily insists it says that Mary was jealous of Ruth and killed her to get rid of her. Moon told her we’d lied to her all these years because we’d gotten away with murder.”

  “So now Lily thinks Mary might kill her because she knows the truth.”

  “I guess.” Jonathan hunched forward. “It’s just crazy. Can you see why I don’t want my child to go live with this bastard?”

  Alex nodded. “That is a lot to lay on a nine-year-old.”

  “I told her that Fred Moon was lying, that Mary loved her. I pointed out all the things Mary did for her, every day. But she doesn’t believe me.” He got up and walked over to the balcony. Lily and Cecilia were now sunning on two bright green towels. Oddly he thought again of Alex and Mary, that long-ago day when they’d stopped by Little Jump Off before their hike into the woods. How incredible Mary had looked. Even the memory of it sent a ripple of desire through him. “But you know what the worst part of this is?”

  “What?”

  “Lily doesn’t trust either one of us anymore.”

  “Because Fred Moon beat you to the punch about her mother?”

  He nodded. “We were going to explain it, but she was so young. Telling a child her mother died struggling over a pistol is a lot tougher than revealing that Santa Claus is really your mom and dad.”

  “Refresh my memory,” said Alex. “What happened that night?”

  “We were in Atlanta, staying at Mary’s grandmother’s house. Lily was four months old. I think being on Mary’s turf pushed Ruth over some kind of edge—she made an herbal tea that laid me out cold. Then she came after Mary with a gun. They wrestled downstairs in the kitchen. One shot was fired. Mary was the one who got up, alive.”

  “Any witnesses?” asked Alex.

  “No. Gabe Benge and the APD rolled up about five minutes later.”

  “Well,” said Alex. “I can see why you wouldn’t want to go into that with a nine-year-old.” She flipped to a new page on her pad. “So what do you think Lily wants to do?”

  Here comes the hard part, he thought. Here comes the part she and Mary won’t laugh about, on the phone at night. He turned away from the window. “Lily doesn’t want to live with Mary ever again.”

  Alex looked up from her notes, her blue eyes wide. “Does Mary know that?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t have the heart to tell her.”

  “I don’t blame you,” said Alex. “Mary adores Lily.”

  He gazed at the floor, thinking of Mary while Alex studied her notes. In a moment, she asked him a question that seemed to hang in the air between them. “What do you want, Jonathan?”

  “For things to go back to the way they were before.”

  “Before what?” she pressed.

  “Before Fred Moon.”

  “I think that horse has already left the barn, sugar,” Alex said gently.

  “I know.” He turned back toward the balcony. He didn’t want Alex to see how scared he was.

  She was silent for a moment, then she walked over to stand beside him. “I’ve got to tell you, considering her history, the court may give some weight to Lily’s wishes.”

  “You mean they’ll put Lily on the stand? Make her repeat all that garbage about Mary?”

  “I won’t call her, but the judge might want to talk to her, in cham-

  bers.”

  Jonathan closed his eyes and pressed his forehead against the cool glass of the window. This just gets worse and worse, he thought. I should have gotten some fake passports in Memphis and headed south to Mexico.

  Alex put her hand on his arm. “There’s no need to panic, but I’ve got to know how you want me to proceed.”

  He frowned. “I’m not sure what you’re asking.”

  “If you go for sole custody, they might ask Lily to testify. If we make a deal for joint custody, then I’ll make sure she never gets called to the stand.”

  He looked down again, at the little girl swimming in the pool. He had no good options here. If he fought for Lily, she’d have to repeat every lie Fred Moon had ever told about Mary. If he made a deal with the Moons, he’d wage an unending war with Fred Moon for the heart and mind of his own child. Suddenly he remembered something his Aunt Little Tom had once told him: fight hard to fight only once.

  “Shared custody with the Moons is not an option,” he finally replied. “I will see Fred Moon dead before I see him with Lily Walking-

  stick.”

  Twenty-Three

  Mary Crow sat at her desk, eating a sandwich from Sadie’s coffee shop. She’d spent most of last night and much of the morning going over Turpin’s evidence. She’d watched the ghost movie three times. It started off as a bunch of college kids explored an old cabin, then ended as strangely beautiful fiddle music lured Lisa Wilson out the door, to her death.

  She knew it would be a fascinating case, and as much as she would love to take it, her old promise to Jonathan had begun to niggle at her. No murders, they’d agreed, as long as Lily lived with them. Reluctantly, she closed Turpin’s evidence file and sent fellow attorney Dave Loveman an email, asking if he’d take the case. A couple of hours later he replied, saying he’d be happy to, if she could work on the preliminaries of a defense until he got back from vacation. I’m in Israel with my family until August 15. Just piss on their evidence until then. Remember—all we need to create is a reasonable doubt.

  Okay, she wrote back, laughing. I’ll start pissing immediately.

  Happy to have something to take her mind off everything in Oklahoma, she started re-checking the notes she’d made. The most damning bit of physical evidence against Stratton was Lisa Wilson’s ring beneath Stratton’s bed. Beyond that, the cheap denim and mountain soil under Lisa’s fingernails could have pointed to practically anyone in Pisgah County. The interns had opportunity, and motive if any were truly pissed about her brown-nosing. Same for Stratton’s hired hands, particularly Jenkins, the one who’d asked for a job with her father. The fiddle music was a little more problematic, but not much. Who was to say it wasn’t one of the interns who’d sneaked out underneath range of the camera? Who was to say one of them hadn’t brought recorded fiddle music and played it to lure Lisa out of that cabin? Who was to say it wasn’t some Appalachian loony tune who saw the kids and decided to have a little homicidal fun? Hell, plenty of drifters roamed these mountains—she’d run up against one of them once, though he’d communed with a pet snake instead of a musical instrument.

  “Still,” she admitted. “None of that explains the figures carved on the girl’s body.”

  That was the most troubling aspect of this case. Strangling someone connoted deep-seated rage. Strangling someone and carving them up while they lay unconscious veered off into an evil Mary had no name for. When she first saw the crime scene photos she feared the killer was Cherokee and had carved characters from the syllabary into the girl. But closer examination revealed that the figures weren’t Cherokee, or any other alphabet she knew. They were more like shapes than letters—rectangles, ovals, something that resembled a crescent moon, a trapezoid that looked like a lampshade. Had the figures all been geometric, she would have guessed it was some kind of mathematical language. But the crescent moon and the lampshade were whimsical—variables that didn’t fit in with the geometry hypothesis. Yet the figures repeated, made a pattern. Somebody was trying to communicate something.

  “Figure that out and yo
u’ll find the real killer,” she whispered.

  But finding the real killer was not her problem—like Dave said, all she had to do was come up with enough reasonable doubt to get Stratton off the hook. She put the evidence files aside, got out her Rolodex, and started flipping through her expert witnesses. Two hours later she had an Asheville psychiatrist lined up to interview Stratton, a retired ME who agreed to go over Lisa Wilson’s autopsy results, and for the interns, Omer Peacock of China Grove, North Carolina, ex-SBI agent and her go-to private eye.

  “You want the helicopter special?” Omer asked, sounding as if he were talking through a chaw of tobacco.

  “What’s that?” asked Mary, envisioning the little man rappelling down from the sky.

  “It’s for parents who want to know what their little college darlings are up to.”

  “Sounds perfect.” Mary laughed. “Give me five helicopter specials to go.”

  “You got it, sweetheart. I’ll be in touch.”

  She hung up the phone. Though she had set all the proper wheels in motion, she went through Cochran’s evidence again and realized that it wouldn’t be a bad idea to see inside the Fiddlesticks cabin. Her student-intern killer theories looked good enough on paper. Now she ought to find out if they worked in real life.

  She stood up and stretched, surprised to find that it was nearing four o’clock. She checked her voicemail, on the outside chance that Jonathan might have called, but the only message was a call from Ginger Malloy. They’d spoken yesterday after the arraignment and had made tentative plans to play tennis, which she was now going to have to cancel. Quickly, she punched in Ginger’s number.

  “Ginger Malloy.” Ginger always answered her phone breathlessly, as if the caller might be phoning in some hot news item.

  “Hi Ginger, this is Mary. I—”

  “Are we still on for this afternoon? Save me from working on this feature about mountain music?”

  “I’m sorry, I can’t. I’ve got to go out to the Fiddlesticks cabin.”

  “Don’t waste your gas. Cochran’s keeping a tape around it.”

  “I can go under the tape,” Mary assured her.

  “Oh, yeah? What makes you so special? I’m sleeping with Cochran and I can’t even get under the tape.”

  “I’m counsel for Nick Stratton. Remember?”

  “But I thought you were turning Stratton over to Dave Loveman.”

  “Loveman’s on vacation.” Mary replied. “I’m going to do Stratton’s legwork until he gets back.”

  “Really?” Ginger sounded as if she sensed a story. “Gosh, Mary, Fiddlesticks is a lot more interesting than mountain music. Maybe I’ll come with you.”

  “I’d love that, Ginger, but I don’t think it would work. I’m a defense attorney, you’re a reporter, plus you’re sleeping with the sheriff. That’s a conflict of interest on about ten different levels.”

  “But I’m also your tennis partner. And your friend. And I do fair and balanced reporting. Hell, I’ll even drive. We can use the paper’s SUV.”

  Mary considered that. Ginger had always been even-handed in her coverage, and given Hartsville’s current vengefulness, Stratton might need a local reporter with a halfway open mind. “Can you leave right now? It gets dark fast back in those coves. I’d like to have the light for as long as we can.”

  “I’ll honk for you in five minutes,” she replied.

  They drove high into the mountains, the Herald’s SUV chugging up twisting roads that had known more traffic in the past two weeks than they had in the past two decades. As they drove they drank Cokes and indulged in one of Ginger’s guilty pleasures, a bag of barbecued potato chips.

  “Did you ever come up here when you were a kid?” asked Ginger, downshifting into low gear.

  “Once.” Mary gazed into the summertime forest, thick with dog hobble and wild tangles of blackberry bushes. “In high school.”

  “Did you see any ghosts?”

  Mary shook her head, remembering how she and Jonathan and three other couples had come up here full of anticipation over seeing a ghost. They left, however, after just a few minutes in the dank little house. Something about the place just hadn’t felt right.

  “Did you know that a number of girls have come up here and later vanished?” Ginger asked, a low hanging limb thwacking against the windshield.

  Mary frowned. “I’ve never heard that.”

  “Didn’t you read my feature? I wrote a whole flipping section on the Fiddlesticks cabin not a week ago!”

  “Sorry,” said Mary. “Lately I’ve been reading Oklahoma custody law. What did you write?’

  “That every decade since 1986, at least one girl who’s recently visited the Fiddlesticks cabin vanishes and is never heard from again.”

  “How old were these girls?” asked Mary.

  “The three I wrote about were nineteen, sixteen, and almost twenty.”

  Mary shook her head. “That’s ripe runaway-from-home age, Ginger. And three teenagers over three decades sounds more like coincidence than pattern.”

  “That’s what Jerry said.” Ginger licked orange barbecue salt from her fingers. “But I still think it’s odd. And I haven’t stopped investigating it.”

  A couple of bone-jarring miles later, the road narrowed to a mere footpath that led deep into towering pines. Ginger pulled over and parked in some weeds as a damp, November-like coldness raised goose bumps on their arms.

  “In the pines, in the pines, where the sun never shines,” Ginger started singing, then stopped, embarrassed. “Sorry. I’ve been writing about mountain music all day.”

  “And you shiver when the cold wind blows.” Mary finished the old song with a shudder. “They probably composed those lyrics up here.”

  They got out of the car, Mary shouldering the backpack she’d brought from her office. As they walked toward the cabin, trumpet vines crowded the path, dangling lush red blossoms, lurid as tongues. They walked deeper into the woods, then suddenly, there it was: Fiddlesticks. Behind yellow crime scene tape crouched the most notorious cabin in Pisgah County. Mary stopped, studied it. It was smaller than she remembered. Meaner. A sour little runt of a house, so inconsequential it was hard to believe such evil had transpired here.

  Ginger came up behind her. “Can you imagine spending the night there?” She shivered. “Even with all your friends?”

  “No,” said Mary, though when she’d come up here before she would have gladly spent the night, if Jonathan had asked. But the mood had not lent itself to romance—that part had come later. She put the memory away. “Come on. Let’s go have a look.”

  Ducking under the tape, Ginger followed her up the rickety steps. “Just so I’m clear—what exactly are you looking for up here?”

  “I want to take some measurements, see if any of my theories hold up.”

  “Theories of?” asked Ginger

  “Alternate versions of Lisa Wilson’s murder.”

  They crossed the sagging porch and entered the house. The front room was as Mary remembered—a low-ceilinged structure pungent with mold and mildew. Graffiti was splattered across the walls and the floor was covered with a fine, silt-like powder.

  “Cochran’s dusted for prints,” said Mary.

  “What are those red X’s for?” Ginger pointed at six tape marks, spread around the room.

  Mary pulled out her iPhone and began snapping pictures. “That’s where the interns were sleeping.” She pointed to another red X, on the mantel. “Givens set up his video cam there.”

  “At least the kid did his homework,” said Ginger. “Most people think the ghost haunts the bedroom, but Fiddlesticks’s wife, Bett, and Ray Hopson were killed in here.”

  “Oh, yeah?” said Mary.

  “Performing an act of sexual perversion, as the DA so quaintly put it.” Ginger shook her head. “You sh
ould read the transcript of that trial sometime. They said Hopson’s male member was excised from his body with a single stroke of a knife.”

  “Jeez,” said Mary. “What was he doing?”

  “Getting a blow job from Fiddlesticks’s wife. I guess in ’58, they considered that perverted.”

  Mary walked over to the mantel and started shooting pictures of the room from the same angle as Givens’s video cam. As she looked through her viewfinder, she pictured the scene the tape showed—Lisa Wilson and Ryan Quarles sleeping at the red X nearest the front window, while Tony Blackman and Rachel Sykes had slept on the other side of the front door. Abby Turner had bunked down with her head at the entrance to the kitchen. Those three X’s were clearly visible in Mary’s field of vision. Chris Givens, by his own admission, had slept opposite Abby, around the corner of the fireplace, conveniently out of camera range.

  Ginger stood in the middle of the living room, watching as Mary took pictures. “Anything I can do to help?”

  “Yeah,” said Mary. “Go lie down under the front window. Put your head on that red X.”

  “I get to be the dead girl?”

  “Just for a minute.”

  “Gee, thanks.” Ginger walked over and stretched out beneath the window, while Mary went and lay down on the red X where Givens had slept.

  “Can you see me?” she called to Ginger.

  “I can see you from the waist down. The fireplace hides the rest of you.”

  “Thanks.” Mary sat up and looked out the window nearest Givens’s position. Though it was an easy jump to the ground outside, the panes had been shattered years ago, and long shards of glass extended like daggers toward the center. Damn, Mary thought, her theory imploding. It would take a skinny contortionist to get out of that jagged hole. Givens was at least six feet tall, already sporting a beer-and-cheeseburger waistline.

  “Can’t pin it on Givens, can you?” Ginger got up from the floor.

  Mary frowned. “What makes you say that?”

  “I’ve done my homework, too. I’m guessing you’re trying to get Givens out of that window and into the woods, so he can kill the girl. You’re pissed because you can’t do it.”