Music of Ghosts

by Sallie Bissell

  “Me neither.”

  “Damn,” said Alex. “I was hoping he’d called you. Have you tried to call him?”

  “Not since last night.” Mary shrugged. “You can only leave so many desperate messages.”

  Alex peered over her shoulder, her gaze falling on the computer, the papers strewn out across the bed. “So what have you been doing?”

  Mary felt sheepish, as if she’d been caught doing something wrong. “Working,” she finally admitted.

  Alex rolled her eyes. “On the Fiddlesticks case?”

  “It seemed better than pacing around the room all night.” Mary stepped back.

  “Mary, you don’t have to solve the case. If you’re playing defense, all you have to do is cast reasonable doubt on the state’s evidence.”

  “I know—but this is fascinating.”

  Sighing, Alex sat down on the bed while Mary gave her the short version of her night’s research.

  “My client Stratton is accused of a murder that occurred near a cabin where two other murders took place fifty years ago.”

  “Fiddlesticks,” said Alex. “Killed his wife and her lover with a razor.”

  Mary frowned. “How do you know?”

  “I read the Snitch, too, Pocahontas.”

  “Okay. Fiddlesticks, whose real name is Robert Thomas Smith, gets sent to death row in 1959. At the same time, another guy named Robert Thomas Smith is also sentenced to death row for killing a cop. Both are from North Carolina—one from Iredell County, the other from Pisgah.”

  “Okay.” Alex took a sip of coffee.

  “Somehow, Pisgah County Smith, aka Fiddlesticks, manages to switch places with the Iredell County Smith and was not executed as reported on May 8, 1971.”

  “How do you know?” asked Alex.

  “The autopsy photo is totally different from the mug shot.”

  “It’s a clerical error. Somebody must have gotten them confused when they digitized the records.”

  “I thought that, too,” said Mary. “Only there’s no autopsy report for Iredell County Smith.”

  Alex frowned. “Why not?”

  “First, the ACLU kept appealing his conviction on grounds of mental incompetence. Then, North Carolina got in a huge flap with the feds over the legality of the death penalty. A lot of death row sentences got commuted to life.”

  “Then Iredell County Smith is still in prison.”

  “No. In April of 1977, Iredell County Smith was transferred from death row to Naughton Mental Hospital,” said Mary. “As far as North Carolina is concerned, he’s still there. No death records for this guy, no transfers back to prison or to any other hospital.”

  “No online obits? Nothing in the Social Security death index?”

  Mary shook her head. “Nada.”

  “Well, shit, Mary.” Alex sat up straight on the bed. “If your Fiddlesticks somehow switched identities with this Iredell guy, he could still be alive. There’s your client’s defense, right there.”

  Mary grinned. “Why do you think I stayed up all night?”

  “Google the mental hospital,” said Alex, moving closer to the computer. “See if they have any records.”

  Mary Googled the place that warehoused most of Western North Carolina’s mentally ill felons. The computer hummed a moment, then a long list of hits came on the screen—one an official website that showed a pretty Victorian building in Morton, North Carolina, but gave little information about the place. Another whistle-blower website recounted a scandal where a caregiver had allegedly sat on a patient until he died from suffocation.

  “Wow,” said Alex, reading along with Mary. “This sounds like Texas. I thought North Carolina was more evolved.”

  “Not hardly,” said Mary. “They just amended their constitution to deny marriage to same-sex couples.”

  They read on, through nearly a hundred posts about the place. Former patients accused the staff of being negligent and abusive; former caregivers responded defensively, citing broken bones, missing teeth all due to unruly patients. Rape was an accusation levied at both sides; an undercurrent of rage and frustration seemed to flow darkly among all the posts.

  “Look!” said Alex. “There’s a woman from Texas, trying to find her brother.”

  “He was sent to Naughton in 1993,” read Mary, picking up the story. “‘We haven’t heard from him since. That place is a hellhole. I’m sure they’ve killed him.’”

  “Gosh,” said Alex. “Can you imagine not hearing from somebody you love for eighteen years?”

  “No,” said Mary softly, Jonathan and Lily flashing across her mind. “I hope I won’t have to find out.”

  Alex squeezed her shoulder. “You won’t, honey. Jonathan loves you. That much I know for sure.”

  “I know he does,” Mary said, staring at the bed they’d made love on just one night ago. “But children trump lovers, Al. And that’s as it should be. I should have realized that from the get-go.”

  “But it may not be an either-or deal,” cried Alex. “The judge hasn’t ruled yet.”

  “The judge hasn’t ruled, but I think Jonathan has.” Mary turned back to the computer. “Anyway, let’s look at this.”

  They returned to the Naughton Hospital website. Mary scrolled down, reading a few more distraught posts, then Alex said, “Naughton’s pretty closed mouth about their patients.”

  “Yeah—if they won’t tell that woman about her brother, they’re sure as hell not going to tell me about Fiddlesticks,” said Mary. “I’m nowhere near a relative.”

  “You could get a court order,” said Alex.

  “I don’t necessarily want them to know I’m interested,” Mary replied. “Once they see a court order, things get cleaned up, records disappear, patients become unavailable.”

  “You need someone to go undercover.” Alex sprawled back on the bed and laughed. “Get your partner to go over there. Ravenel would fit right in a mental institution.”

  Mary laughed at the notion of Sam Ravenel among the inmates. “Ravenel can’t do it—he’s settling some historic estate in Charleston. But I do know somebody who might just love to go over there.”

  “Who?”

  “Ginger Malloy. She’s the reporter who wrote about Fiddlesticks in the first place.”

  “In the Snitch?” cried Alex.

  “No, no,” said Mary, reaching for her cell phone. “In our local paper. If she could tie an old ghost story to a botched execution and a killer in a mental institution, she’d probably win the Pulitzer Prize.”

  Alex glanced at her watch. “Mary, it’s barely six a.m. in North Carolina.”

  “Trust me,” Mary said as she punched in Ginger’s number. “She won’t mind waking up for this.”

  Thirty-nine

  Ginger was snuggling against Cochran when the phone jarred her awake. She grabbed it quickly, hoping to cut it off in mid-ring. She and Cochran had gone to sleep late and she didn’t want him to wake up this early. Clutching the phone to her chest, she tiptoed into the bathroom and closed the door.

  “Ginger Malloy,” she answered in a whisper.

  “Ginger?” Mary Crow’s voice came over the line. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah,” Ginger replied, surprised. “Jerry’s asleep. I didn’t want to wake him up.”

  “I’m sorry to call so early, but this is important.”

  Ginger sat down on the edge of the bathtub. “Don’t tell me you’ve got bad news.”

  “No news at all—the judge hasn’t ruled yet,” said Mary. “Listen, last night I couldn’t sleep, so I read your Fiddlesticks article, and you won’t believe what I found out!”

  “What?” Ginger was both surprised and flattered that Mary Crow had taken the time to read her piece with everything she had going on right now.

  Mary then launched into a tale that
sounded like a Snitch article—about how the original Fiddlesticks had changed identities with another inmate, escaped the gas chamber, and was transferred to a mental hospital.

  “How did you find this out?” said Ginger, wondering if all this custody mess had pushed Mary over some kind of edge.

  “I hacked into the penal system database.”

  Instantly, Ginger pictured the story in the paper. Front page, above the fold, her name in the by-line. “Well, it’s a hell of a story.”

  “Why do you think I called you?” asked Mary. “I know just how you can get it, too.”

  Deciding that Mary was neither drunk nor hysterical, Ginger listened to her plan. She wanted her to go to Naughton Mental Hospital and look for a patient named Thomas Robert Smith from Iredell County. “But don’t go as a reporter,” said Mary. “They’ll claim patient confidentiality and clam up.”

  “What should I go as?” asked Ginger.

  “Say you’re an attorney trying to settle an estate. Tell them Smith’s been named in a will and has some money coming to him.”

  “Okay,” Ginger whispered. “I can do that. But what do I do if I find him?”

  “Just shoot the breeze with him. If he gets suspicious, then get out of there fast. Call me whatever happens.”

  “What if I don’t find him?”

  “Call me anyway. The story’s still there—it just won’t be quite as thrilling without Fiddlesticks.”

  “Can I have a look at your notes when you get home?” Ginger asked.

  “Absolutely,” Mary replied.

  “Okay,” she said hurriedly as she heard Cochran getting out of bed. “I gotta go … I’ll talk to you later.”

  She hung up the phone just as Cochran appeared at the bathroom door. “What’s going on?” he asked, yawning.

  “Mary called from Oklahoma.”

  “Did they get custody of Lily?” he asked, pulling her up from the edge of the bath tub.

  “They don’t know yet,” she answered, as he carried her back to bed.

  That had been three hours ago. Now Ginger was heading down the long driveway that led to Naughton Hospital. From the interstate, the place reminded her of one of those Victorian hotels in upstate New York. Red brick with sparkling white woodwork and tall turrets, the building commanded a long expanse of clipped lawn shaded by trees and dotted with flowerbeds. As she drove closer, she almost expected to see pale ladies in long white skirts, laughing as they played croquet. Only after she pulled into the parking lot did she realize that though the windows sparkled in the sun, a darkness hovered behind them, as if the building itself made a long practice of gazing inward, at its own shadowy corners.

  She parked in a space marked for visitors. As a couple of vacant-looking men raked the lawn, she grabbed her briefcase and went over her cover story. She was Virginia Malloy, from Asheville. She had a deceased client who’d left one Thomas Robert Smith a rather large bequest in her will. She was trying to find Mr. Smith, whose last known address was here. The ruse was perfect, she decided. The news was non-threatening for everyone involved. Nobody was accusing Mr. Smith of being a psychotic felon; nobody was investigating Naughton Hospital for patient abuse. All she was trying to do was brighten the life of a patient with a nice fat check from his recently departed sister.

  She got out of the car. A sudden breeze whispered through the leafy trees that surrounded the place. She glanced up at one of the turreted rooms above her head, feeling as if someone was watching her. Then she remembered where she was. Somebody probably is watching you, she told herself. Any number of people could be peering out those dark windows.

  Squaring her shoulders, she took a deep breath and walked toward the front door. The brick steps had been swept of leaves; the wide veranda freshly painted a crisp gull gray. Whatever went on inside Naughton Hospital, outside it was painted and groomed to perfection.

  She trotted up the steps and was about to enter the building when a face appeared in the windows next to the door. A young man with pale eyes sprayed cleaner on the glass. Their gazes met for a moment. Ginger smiled, but his expression did not change. He wiped the glass with a dull, robotic intensity, as if he did the chore a thousand times a day.

  She opened the door. A cloying smell of geraniums mixed with antiseptic greeted her. She stepped into a smallish waiting room, with upholstered chairs and a coffee table that held a few tattered magazines about North Carolina. Opposite the front door was a windowed reception area, where a gray-haired woman sat at a computer. She looked up over silver reading glasses as Ginger entered.

  “May I help you?” she asked, penciled-on eyebrows lifting.

  “Gosh, I hope so,” Ginger said, adopting the breezy charm that usually loosened even the most reluctant lips. She lugged the briefcase over to the desk as if it weighed a hundred pounds. “My name is Virginia Malloy,” she said, pulling out the fake business card she’d printed up this morning. “From Asheville? I’m Mrs. Edith Ellington’s attorney.” She said Mrs. Edith Ellington as if anyone would surely snap to attention at the mention of the name.

  “Yes?” The woman looked unimpressed with her or Edith Ellington.

  “Mrs. Ellington passed away this April. I’m the executor of her estate. She left a rather sizable gift to someone who was once one of your patients.”

  The woman looked at her with cold eyes.

  Ginger pulled out another fake form she’d downloaded off the Internet. “My research indicates that this gentleman has been here since 1977. Could you tell me if he’s still a patient here?”

  “I can’t give out that information,” the woman replied. “All patient records are private.”

  “I realize that,” said Ginger. “But this man was not young, even in 1977. It’s highly likely that he’s deceased, too.”

  “And you can’t determine that on your own?” the woman asked sharply.

  “I haven’t found him in the Social Security Death Index,” Ginger said, bluffing her way through a source she often used at the paper.

  Again, the woman shook her head. “I’m afraid I can’t help you.”

  “I understand.” Ginger smiled, playing her trump card. “I talked to Commissioner Hatch about this yesterday. Since this is a non-medical inquiry on a patient who is likely deceased, he told me to try on-site first. He said if you all were sticklers, I’d have to come see him in Raleigh. So,” she said, retrieving her business card. “I guess I’ll go east and have a chat with Charlie Hatch. Thanks for your time.”

  Ginger grabbed her briefcase and headed for the door, letting Commissioner Hatch’s name work inside the woman’s head. She figured this would go one of two ways—either the woman would do nothing, happy to let her drive east to Raleigh or she might decide that Commissioner Hatch would not be pleased to have such un-helpful sticklers working the front desk at Naughton. Ginger was halfway to the door when she got her answer.

  “Wait a minute,” the woman called huffily. “I guess I could pull up a name for you.”

  Good girl, thought Ginger, no point in wasting Charlie Hatch’s time. She turned back. “Thanks,” she said, smiling. “It would save me a lot of time.”

  Lips pursed, the woman turned to her computer. “What’s the name? Ellington?”

  “Actually, it’s Smith. Thomas Robert Smith of Iredell County. Mrs. Ellington’s baby brother.”

  “Hang on.” The woman pulled up a bright purple screen and typed in Smith’s name. For a moment, nothing happened, then the screen changed to a softer blue.

  “Smith, Thomas Robert, transferred from Central Prison in April of 1977?”

  “That’s him,” said Ginger eagerly. “The black sheep of the family. Mrs. Ellington still loved him, though.”

  “Well, he’s not here any longer,” said the woman.

  Ginger nodded, trying to hide her real disappointment. “I figured he might have
passed away.”

  “I’m not saying he’s dead.” The receptionist scrolled down a long list of categories. “He was re-diagnosed and transferred to Pine Valley Nursing home in Iredell County, in 1982. But he wasn’t that old,” she squinted at the computer screen. “Only forty-one.”

  “Which would make him around seventy today,” Ginger whispered, amazed at the twists this man’s life had taken.

  “Well, if he’s still alive, he should be at Pine Valley,” the woman said, turning away from her computer. For the first time she gave Ginger a tight smile, undoubtedly pleased that the Thomas Robert Smith affair was off her desk.

  “You don’t happen to know where that is, do you?” asked Ginger.

  She shrugged. “Somewhere in Iredell County. Once they leave here, they become their home county’s problem.”

  “Thanks.” Ginger smiled. “I’ll be sure to let Commissioner Hatch know how helpful you were.”

  She hurried back to her car, passing the young man who was still cleaning the same pane of glass. Amazingly, Mary’s fantastic theory seemed to be holding up—Thomas Robert Smith, who was really Robert Thomas Smith had, one way or another, traded places with a man on death row, gotten transferred out of prison to a mental facility, and then been released to a county nursing home. He was either the luckiest or the most devious man she’d ever heard of.

  She got back in her car. I should probably let Mary in on this, she thought. At least tell her what I’ve learned. But the story was huge—if she found the real Fiddlesticks wheezing around in some nursing home, it would be the scoop of her life. She would leave Jessica Rusk laboring in the tabloids forever. Buckling her seatbelt, she keyed Pine Valley Nursing Home into her GPS.

  An hour later, she pulled off I-40 and drove down a broad six-lane road flanked by fast food restaurants and strip malls. She passed a regional hospital, a Toyota dealership, and an amusement park called Carolina City. She’d just begun to think the smart-ass male voice on the GPS had totally screwed up when she saw a sign that read Pine Valley Heights Road.

  She turned right. Within half a mile the commercial development gave way to houses set far back off the road. A mile past that, she was driving through undeveloped land. Just as she began to doubt the GPS again, she saw a battered sign that read Pine Valley Home. She turned where it indicated and drove down a two-lane road that bordered acres of pasture land. Bright bluebirds perched on honeysuckled fencerows while cows chewed their cud beneath shady trees.