A Judgment of Whispers

by Sallie Bissell

“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, Ada
m 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.”

  Adam could tell by his parents’ acidic tones that they were still in the ranks of those convinced that Zack Collier had killed Teresa Ewing. Though nobody could prove it, it was the only theory that made sense. The boy had been a teenager playing with much younger children. With a hair-trigger temper and his hormones in full flower, Zack Collier simply had to be the one who killed that girl.

  “He’s not a monster, Dad,” Adam replied, defending his childhood friend. “Or at least he wasn’t when I left.”

  His mother huffed up. “We didn’t say he was a monster, Adam. He’s just so big and—I don’t know—strange. You should have seen him going after those tapes.”

  “He always liked to watch tapes,” said Adam. “Movies, cartoons, anything you could put on a screen.”

  His mother refilled her wineglass, sloshing a little on the table. “Do you want me to call his mother and buy them back?”

  “No, I might stop over there. I’d like to see Zack again.”

  “There’s no need for that,” said his father.

  Adam shook his head. “I want to see everybody
once more. Butch, Kevin, and Zack.”

  “What on earth for?” cried his mother.

  “Just to say hello,” he replied, wishing that his heart was brave enough to say why he really wanted to see them. I want to tell them I’m sorry. I want to tell them I’m not the chickenshit they think I am. I want to tell them that I didn’t even know I was leaving town until we were halfway to the airport.

  Twelve

  Grace Collier’s hand shook slightly as she held out the pills for her son. Sertraline for depression, Geodon for seizures, and Abilify for anxiety. Zack scooped them from her hand and gulped them down with a glass of orange juice. “Where’s Clara?” he asked. “She usually gives me the pills.”

  “She took the day off,” said Grace. “Remember? You and I are going downtown today.”

  “To the bakery?” Zack never forgot any place that dished out sweets.

  “Sure, we can go there.”

  She’d agonized over telling him the real reason for their trip and had decided to spool out the information, slowly chumming him along with treats. By the time he was scheduled for the DNA test, the Abilify would have taken effect. He would be nervous, but not terrified. And Mary Crow said she’d arranged for him to get special treatment at the police station. Grace could only pray that was true.

  “Ready!” Zack finished his juice.

  She held out his escape from the world, a portable DVD player. “You want to watch a cartoon or just talk on the way?”

  “Cartoons,” he said, plugging in the ear buds. “You smackertalk too much.”

  She nodded. Sometimes his hearing was so acute that he couldn’t tolerate even the sounds of vocalization—the hissing of s’s, the percussive smacks of b’s and p’s. Though the enforced silence of their life often made her want to scream, today she was relieved. She could listen to a podcast on her iPhone and not think about what was to come.

  Amazingly, she found a parking space in front of the bakery. As she turned off the engine, she looked up and saw the Palladian windows of Mary Crow’s office. She knew Mary was waiting for them, but she had to stop by the bakery first. Reneging on a promise to Zack was never a good idea.