The door opened to reveal Buck Whaley standing there, a sly grin on his face, a small paper bag in his hand. Of all Cochran’s detectives, Mary liked Whaley the least. He was an old-style holdover from Stump Logan’s administration, full of swagger and stubbornness.
“What can I help you with, Detective?”
“The DA sent me over. I’m afraid we neglected to include some evidence in the Stratton case.”
“Oh?”
“It’s not much, but Mr. Turpin said you should have it.” He stepped forward and handed her the paper bag, along with a folded copy of the Snitch. “Nice picture of you in the tabloids, by the way. Thought you might like an extra copy for your files.”
“What’s your evidence, Whaley?” she said, impatient with his snideness.
“Oh, just Lisa Wilson’s diary. And a couple of hundred pictures off her cell phone.”
She looked inside the bag and found a bound copy of the girl’s diary in a manila envelope and half a dozen contact sheets of photographs. “You’ve held on to this for nearly two weeks?”
He gave a helpless shrug. “Sorry. Sometimes we get busy.”
“You know I could go back to Judge Barbee and ask for a new trial date.”
“Do what you gotta do, Ms. Crow,” he said as he headed toward the door.
As his footsteps echoed down the stairwell, she considered filing a motion, but then decided to have a look at the stuff first. She pulled out the contact sheets and flipped through them quickly. Most were photos of Stratton, skimpily clad, either coming out of a swimming hole, or playing his fiddle.
“Taken by a girl in love” she whispered, tossing the photos on the desk and turning to the diary. “Let’s see what Lisa wrote to Dear Diary.”
She opened the envelope and pulled out certified Xeroxed copies of the pages of a small book. Neat blue writing spread across the pages, varying from print to script. The entries began May 24, the day Lisa arrived at the Raptor Center. Met Nick Stratton today—he is so nice! and went on to record Lisa’s impressions of her fellow interns. Ryan Quarles she found sweet, Rachel Sykes nice. Abby Turner is a pain in the ass tattletale. Chris Givens she detested, calling him an arrogant dickhead. Laughing at some of Lisa’s descriptions, Mary read on. The girl wrote about Jenkins pestering her about a job with her dad, how the mountains creeped her out at night, how Artie Slade had nailed up a shelf for her, even with most of his fingers missing. Then, on June 16, lightning struck both literally and figuratively. According to the diary, she and Nick were observing two young eagles on a hacking stand when a storm broke. Lightning struck close by, just as Nick kissed me, she wrote. He really knows how to use his tongue! After that, she barely mentions anything except intimate descriptions of liaisons behind waterfalls, quickies at the bird barn: I never dreamed anyone could make me come so fast! The last week of her life she recounts a breakup: I can’t believe he doesn’t want me anymore. And the day before she died she wrote, I’ll never leave Nick. I’m good for him, even if he doesn’t know it yet!
Mary put the diary down and took a deep breath, feeling as if she’d just read a volume of erotica. Though Lisa had included details only a lover would note (the scar on his thigh looks just like a crescent moon; his breath smells good, even when he drinks beer) Stratton had consistently denied any kind of sexual relationship with the girl. Mary shook her head. This was not good—before it was just Stratton’s word that nothing had happened. Lisa had told quite a different tale to her diary. Turpin could do some major damage with this in court.
She put the pages in her briefcase and grabbed her purse. Stratton needed to come clean about his relationship with Lisa Wilson. It was strategic not to admit to murder. To lie to your attorney over an affair was just plain dumb.
Half an hour later she sat across from him in an interview room. He asked her the questions that had become a standing joke between them.
“Any chance of getting my fiddle?”
“No,” she replied as usual. “Look Nick, we need to talk.”
“About?”
She opened her briefcase and pulled out the pages from Lisa Wilson’s diary. “This diary. Lisa writes that you two had quite an affair. There are passages in here that even made me blush … ”
He started shaking his head. “She lied. I never laid a hand on her.”
“Nick, it’s okay if you did. She was over twenty-one. Having sex isn’t illegal.”
He slapped the diary pages down on the table. “But I didn’t! At the very most, I put my arm around her shoulder.”
“What about the night she came to your bed?”
“I told you! She kissed me, I responded. I’d been drinking earlier, or I wouldn’t have even done that.”
Suddenly, Mary saw a crack in the wall he’d put up. “So you two did have intercourse?”
“No.”
“Nick, you can’t expect a jury to believe that a pretty, young girl comes up to your room, takes off her clothes, kisses you, whereupon you tell her to get lost.”
He closed his eyes, fighting some kind of battle within himself. “Okay. This is what happened. I was in bed—passed out. Lisa came in, woke me up, started taking off her clothes. She climbed on top of me and started kissing me. I got hard—I mean, sometimes your body just takes over. But I told her to get out before anything happened.” He stopped and swallowed. “I was pretty drunk—I honestly don’t remember much more after that.”
“And that’s the only time she came on to you?”
He looked at her, his gaze serious. “She kept flirting with me, but I avoided her. I don’t get off on college girls.”
“Are you gay?”
“No,” he said sharply, giving her breasts an appreciative glance. “I just prefer women to girls.”
She took back the diary pages and started thumbing through them. “Have you got a scar on your thigh?”
“Yeah.”
“Let me see it.”
He stood up and dropped his pants, revealing a crescent-shaped scar just above the hem of his boxer shorts. “A kid nailed me with his skate in a hockey game, back in junior high. Why?”
She ignored his question and asked another of her own. “Did Lisa Wilson get along with Rachel Sykes?”
He pulled up his trousers and sat back down. “Yeah, they were pals.”
“How about Ryan Quarles?”
“I guess they were friends, I don’t know.”
“What did she think of Abby Turner?”
He laughed. “The same thing everybody thinks of Abby. That she’s a bean-counting tattletale.”
“Chris Givens?”
“Lisa hated Chris, and the feeling was mutual.”
“Why?”
He shrugged. “Chris wanted to fly the eagles, but he didn’t have the chops. Lisa did. He hated her for that. She hated him right back. Givens can be an asshole.”
Mary looked up from Lisa’s writing. “Do you realize that you’ve just corroborated everything Lisa wrote about your interns?”
He frowned, not understanding. “So?”
“Nick, you can’t have it both ways. Why would Lisa write a totally accurate account of her fellow interns and then fabricate her relationship with you?”
He sat back, folding his arms across his chest. “The girl followed me around all summer—just because she wrote a lot of nonsense about me in her diary doesn’t mean we were lovers.”
“I guarantee you the DA will see this very differently.”
“I can’t help it,” he replied. “I’m telling the truth.”
With a deep sigh, she put the pages and the pictures back in her briefcase. This was a conundrum as old as humanity itself, she decided. He said, she said. The tragic thing about this was that the she was dead, and the he could well be hanged for her murder.
Twenty-Seven
Mary re
turned to her office, no less befuddled than when she’d left the jail. She climbed the stairs, dropped her briefcase on the floor, and flopped down on the sofa. Nothing about this Fiddlesticks case made sense. By Nick’s own admission, all Lisa’s descriptions were accurate, except the torrid pages about him. Those she had written with such detail that it raised Mary’s pulse, yet Stratton insisted that beyond the one encounter, nothing had ever happened between them. She wondered if perhaps they’d had sex the night he was drunk and he just didn’t remember it. If that was the case, then Lisa would have been a spurned lover the next day. Maybe that pissed her off. Maybe she threatened to tell her father, told Nick that the old man could ruin his career. Maybe Nick did kill her, in an effort to protect himself. Suddenly she was beginning to see Turpin’s logic in indicting Stratton. He was close enough, strong enough, had the most to lose.
“Maybe he felt trapped,” Mary said aloud. “Maybe it all boiled down to sex with the wrong person.”
“What do you mean, sex with the wrong person?” asked a disembodied voice, just outside her door.
Mary sat up as Ginger peeked into her office, dressed in her work outfit of beige linen slacks and a blue blazer.
“Jeez!” Mary clutched her chest. “You almost gave me a heart attack!”
“Sorry.” Ginger laughed. “Your door wasn’t shut all the way. I was just about to knock when I heard you say something about having sex with the wrong person.”
“I was just talking to myself,” said Mary, irritated.
“About sex?” Ginger lifted an eyebrow at the quilt folded on one end of the sofa. “What all do you do up here?”
Mary ignored her glance at the quilt. “I work on Stratton’s defense. Or I worry about Jonathan’s defense. They’re going to court tomorrow, you know.”
“I’ve got to tell you, Mary, all that worrying doesn’t sound like much of a life.”
She shrugged, embarrassed to admit that except for the Jonathan part, she liked this life. She enjoyed being totally consumed by a murder case. She would move in up here if she could figure out some way to shower on a daily basis. God help me, she thought, I must be a real sick ticket.
“You need to get out more.” Ginger grabbed her elbow. “Come with me.”
“Where are you going?”
“To the Thursday night Sacred Harp singing at the Sugartree Baptist Church. It’s the last installment of my mountain music feature.”
Mary shook her head. “No, thanks. I need to stay here and work.”
“Mary, lying up here talking to yourself about sex is not healthy. You need to get out, chat with non-incarcerated human beings.”
“Take Cochran with you.”
“Cochran’s at Lisa Wilson’s funeral, probably flirting with that horse-faced Jessica Rusk.” She jingled her car keys. “Come on and go with me. This church is out in the boonies, and I’m still a little creeped out over that fiddler who followed us the other day.”
Mary considered her options. Though she should keep working, it might do her good to breathe fresh, non-office air for a little while. “Okay,” she finally agreed. “But we can’t stay late. I’ve got a lot to do.”
For an hour they drove through a soft, late-summer evening dotted with fireflies, loud with the rasp of katydids, finally pulling into the parking lot of a small white clapboard church called the Sugartree Baptist Assembly. They entered a large, brightly lit hall attached to the sanctuary, where about thirty people had gathered, ranging from early twenties to well past social security age. The men bustled around arranging chairs in the middle of the room, while the women arranged punch and cookies on a long table covered with a red-checked cloth.
“Ms. Malloy?” A chubby little man with thick glasses came forward, offering his hand to Ginger. He wore a plaid sport shirt buttoned to the neck and jeans pulled just shy of his armpits. “I’m Dermot Munro.”
Ginger smiled. “So nice to finally meet you, Dr. Munro. This is my friend, Mary Crow. She’s my assistant tonight.”
“We’re so thrilled that you’ve come.” Munro included Mary in his broad smile. “People sing Sacred Harp all over the country, but we don’t get much press.”
“That’s why we’re here.” Ginger got out her reporter’s notepad. “So tell me about it.”
“Well, it began in the 1800s, in the rural south. People didn’t have printed music back then, so traveling music teachers had to invent different ways of teaching singing.”
“Interesting.” Ginger scribbled away.
“Our hymns are written in Walker’s notation system, which dates from 1866. The term ‘Sacred Harp’ means the human voice.”
Mary zoned out as Dr. Munro rambled on about shape note singing and how there were small but fervent shape-note societies in practically every state. Though her father had reputedly been able to sing like Elvis Presley, she had not inherited any of his musical DNA. She wandered over to the table, where a chubby, pink-cheeked woman in a long gingham skirt was stirring a pitcher of lemonade.
“Haven’t seen you here before,” she said sweetly. “This your first time singing?”
“I’m not really singing,” explained Mary. “I just tagged along with my friend.”
The woman poured Mary a glass of lemonade. As Ginger talked to Dr. Munro, more singers came up to welcome her. She met a woman who was doing her doctoral dissertation on Early American music, and an old tobacco farmer who wore coveralls over a starched white shirt. She’d just asked for a refill on her lemonade when Ginger came up.
“They’re going to start in a few minutes,” she said. “I’m going to look over my notes.”
“I’ll come with you,” said Mary.
They walked to one end of the room and perched on the edge of a small stage. As Ginger reviewed what she’d written, Mary’s thoughts drifted west, to Oklahoma. Tomorrow morning, Alex and Jonathan would go to court. Though Alex had sounded confident on the phone today and Jonathan reported that Lily was smiling more since her therapy, Mary still wondered how much damage the Moons had done to her family. If Jonathan did retain custody of Lily, what would they be like when they returned? Would Lily still smile in North Carolina? Would she and Jonathan ever crawl out from under the shadow the Moons had cast upon them?
She was sitting there, trying to foresee her own future when Dr. Munro walked over.
“Ladies, will you come join in the singing?”
“Thanks so much,” Ginger demurred politely. “But we don’t sing and anyway, I’m here to write a story.”
“But you really need to experience this music,” he cried, all enthusiasm. “At least come and sit in the cross. You’ll be amazed!”
Mary shot Ginger a pleading look. She had Jonathan to worry about, reasonable doubts to come up with for Stratton. The last thing she needed to do was join in a hymn.
“Well, just for a little while,” said Ginger. “We’ve both got deadlines to meet.”
“Stay for three songs,” chirped Dr. Munro. “And you’ll be hooked for life!”
Reluctantly, they followed Dr. Munro to where the chairs had been arranged in a cross formation—four sections in a kind of north, south, east, west configuration, all facing inward, toward a podium in the middle. As Mary and Ginger took seats on the back row nearest the door, Dr. Munro walked to the center of the cross.
“Good evening!” he called. “It’s good to see everyone again. Tonight, we have two special guests—Ginger Malloy and her friend Mary. Ginger’s a reporter who’s writing an article about us for the paper, so we need to be on our best behavior!”
Everyone laughed, turning to catch quick glances at the two of them. Mary suppressed a laugh of her own, wondering what connoted bad behavior for these people—an overdue library book? Twelve grocery items in the ten-item line? Dr. Munro went on.
“Okay, everybody. Let’s start with page 197.”
As we travel through the desert, storms beset us by the way.
But beyond the river Jordan, lies a field of endless day.
Though the lyrics were standard Southern gospel, the sound was nothing like Mary had ever heard before. Beautiful and powerful, Dr. Munro’s group sang in a raw, eerie harmony that lifted the hair on the back of her neck.
“Farther on, still go farther, Count the milestones one by one,” they sang, their song radiantly hopeful. “Jesus will forsake you never, it is better farther on.”
On they sang, the weird, compelling music filling the hall. Mary felt like God and Jesus might both, at any moment, descend from heaven and join in the chorus. When the song ended, she leaned over to Ginger. “Who are these people?”
Wide-eyed, Ginger shook her head. “I don’t know. But I’m covered in goose flesh.”
They’d barely recovered from the first tune when Dr. Munro called out another number. Again voices lifted in that strange harmony, this time singing a tune about friendship bands and parting hands.
It was an amazing, dazzling sound. Mary wanted to stay longer, but she had work to do, a final call to make to Jonathan before tomorrow morning. She was just about to whisper to Ginger that they needed to go when the woman in front of her turned around.
“Here,” she said excitedly, thrusting hymnals at the two of them. “You girls sing the next one. We’ve got plenty of books to spare.”
Mary started to explain that they had to leave, but the woman was too quick. She plopped the hymnals in their hands as Dr. Munro announced the next tune, on page 238.
“Come on,” whispered Ginger, flipping to the correct page. “Let’s not be rude. We’ll sing one, then go.”
Mary sighed as everyone did their do-re-mi run-through, then Dr. Munro lifted his arm and the singing began. She hummed along, only glancing at the lyrics. She hoped they might sing the song just once, but of course they launched into the second verse. Deciding that she may as well join in, she held the hymnal closer and began to pay attention to the words. As she began to sing, something about the musical notation caught her eye. Sacred Harp notes weren’t the regular dark circles dotting the lines of a staff, but odd little squares and triangles. Suddenly, Mary caught her breath. The shapes that comprised Sacred Harp notation were the same figures someone had carved into Lisa Wilson’s flesh!
Music of Ghosts Page 20