Music of Ghosts (3 page)

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 turned 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.

Whaley peered at the dead girl. “Holy fuck,” he whispered, his little pig eyes widening. “What the hell got hold of her?”

“A bear, according to her friends,” said Cochran.

“Yeah, and my granny's a Green Bay Packer.” Whaley studied her face for a long moment. “She anybody we know?”

“You might have heard of her father,” Cochran replied. “Jackson Carlisle Wilson.”

Whaley removed the toothpick that dangled from his lip. “Are you serious?”

Cochran nodded.

“How'd that old fart get a daughter this young and pretty?”

“I guess he had sex with her mother,” Cochran glanced at her driver's license. “Twenty-one years ago.”

“What the hell was she doing up here?”

“She worked at that raptor center. She and her pals hiked over here on a ghost hunt. One of them found her this morning.”

Whaley laughed. “Any of 'em see any ghosts?”

“Nobody saw anything.”

“What a pile of shit.” Moving closer, Whaley stood with arms akimbo, making a long, lingering appraisal of the girl's body. “Man, she's a peach.”

Again Cochran thought of Ginger. A sudden protective rush surged through him, and he had to struggle not to push Whaley away from Lisa Carlisle Wilson's nakedness. “I hadn't noticed,” he lied. “I was looking at everything carved on her body.”

“Yeah, right.” Whaley gave him a knowing wink.
You looked
, it said.
I know you looked. We all look, every time. We can't not look.

“You want me to take over?” Whaley glanced at his watch. “You leave now, you can get back to town in time to schmooze with the honorable Governor Chandler.”

“No,” said Cochran. “I'm taking this case.”

Whaley's brows lifted in surprise. “You?”

Cochran nodded. “Me and Saunooke and you and Clark, if he can walk. We'll work as a team. We've already got five suspects. You and Saunooke divide them up and take them downtown. You question the boys, let Saunooke take the girls. If Clark hobbles down there, he can help Saunooke out.”

“What are you going to do?” demanded Whaley.

“I'm going to wait here for the SBI. I'll meet you downtown later.”

Whaley opened his mouth to protest further, then, abruptly, changed his mind. “Okay,” he said still sounding vaguely miffed. With a final glance at Lisa Carlisle Wilson, he started to waddle off toward the cabin. Cochran called him back with a warning.

“Don't go ape, Whaley,” he said. “You work for me now, not Stump Logan. I don't want any black eyes or forced confessions.”

Whaley gave a deep chuckle. “You just be careful yourself, sheriff. I hear there's ghosts up here.”

Cochran remained under the tree, watching as Whaley conferred with Saunooke, then the two began to herd the suspects down the path to their cars. All of them, Cochran noted, walked with their heads down, their eyes averted from their fallen companion. When they disappeared from sight, he turned back to Lisa. Soon the SBI team would arrive with all their equipment. They would turn her into a number, a case, ultimately, a statistic. Right now, she still had a name, a face, was still a girl who people had loved. He would stay with her until that changed. It was the least he could do.

Stooping down, he looked closer. Her nails were unbroken, though a circle of paler skin around her left ring finger looked as if someone might have removed a ring. Her nipples were intact and her pudenda looked unswollen by sexual assault. The pine needles on which she lay were scattered and blood-stained, ranging from deep brownish to a vibrant red-orange.

“They killed you right here, didn't they?” he whispered, speaking to her as if she might sit up and answer back. “But who? And why?” He wondered if it was some kind of version of the choking game gone wrong, but carving someone up like that indicated a monstrous anger toward the victim. That led him again to suspect a romantic breakup. Had one of those boys choked her and mutilated her body while she was still alive?

“And then went back to sleep in the haunted house without waking a single soul?” he asked aloud.

No
, came the answer.
It was either all of them, or none of them
.

Taking a different tack, he disregarded the five kids en route to questioning, and began to consider other possibilities. The Appalachians had their share of psychopaths—backwoodsmen who slithered through the trees, stalking their prey along trails instead of truck stops, campgrounds instead of bars. Had one of them come across these kids at the cabin and decided to have a little fun? Possibly, he decided. But why kill one and leave five sleeping like babies? And why carve her up like a Dead Sea scroll?

He stood up and gazed down at the cabin. It cowered beneath the trees like some beaten dog, in the middle of three hundred acres of thick forest, miles away from anything remotely resembling civilization. Even after all these years—even with a Winchester pump at his side—the place still gave him the willies. He felt like somewhere, in the midst of those three hundred acres, a man was looking at him with pale, wide eyes, and laughing.

“Fiddlesticks killed her with his razor; slit her throat and then forgave her,” he repeated his mother's rhyme in a whisper, thinking that if some places were truly cursed, then this was one of them.

Three

Mary Crow looked up
as the huge eagle made a slow, sweeping circle of the amphitheater. Wings stretched wide, the bird glided over the large crowd of citizens who'd gathered for the grand opening of the new sports park. By Pisgah County standards, the festivities had been vast. Lige McCauley and his string band had fiddled, the Cherokee Drum circle had drummed, and the Hartsville High marching band had presented a mini-concert, complete with fire batons. Now upturned gazes followed Sequoia as he winged through the air. Of equal interest to Mary was the raptor's trainer, a man named Nick Stratton, whom she knew through three pre-festival phone conversations. From his crisp accent and straight-forward manner of speaking, she'd pictured him as a serious, bespectacled academic. That he was, in person, a rangy man who'd given her a funny little smile when he came out on the field, surprised her. Lately she was unaccustomed to any attractive man giving her any kind of smile, funny or otherwise.

She turned her attention back to the eagle, which made two complete circles of the amphitheater, then made a sharp turn and headed straight for the stage. Mary fought an urge to duck as the bird bore down toward her with talons extended, but at the last second Nick Stratton stepped forward and slapped his gloved arm twice. Sequoia instantly feathered his approach and landed gracefully on the man's arm.

“Our national bird in flight, ladies and gentlemen!” cried Mayor Tom Burkhart, the master of ceremonies. “Let's give Sequoia a hand!”

Everyone cheered. Stratton tossed Sequoia what looked like a bloody chunk of raw liver before the pair stepped forward and took their bows. As Stratton turned to acknowledge the dignitaries on stage, Mary was able to get a closer look at the man. Light brown hair streaked with blonde, deep set eyes, handsome except for a deeply scarred upper lip, Mary decided that either Nick Stratton had a deformity that had been surgically corrected, or Sequoia had, at some point, mistaken his mouth for another chunk of liver.

The dedication continued, with the Reverend Rosemary Brown of the First Methodist Church giving the invocation. As she asked the Lord's blessing on the park, Mary offered her own prayer of thanks, remembering what an uphill battle the Pisgah-Cherokee Sports Park had been. She'd spearheaded the project mostly to take herself out of a deadly dull stream of bankruptcies and estate planning, only to find that negotiating the project required the mediation skills of a diplomat. She'd had to wheedle and cajole tobacco farmers, land developers, swimming pool companies, and at one point, the governing body of the US Little League.

After the Reverend Brown ended her prayer, the mayor rose. He welcomed everybody in English, then Chief John Oocuma hopped up and said basically the same thing in Cherokee. Mary sneaked a quick glance at the crowd, looking for Jonathan and Lily. They promised they'd sit in the first row, but she couldn't find them anywhere. Suddenly, she turned, realizing that John Oocuma had switched from Cherokee to English.

“Now, I'd like to introduce someone whose hard work made all this possible—a true friend to both tribe and county, Mary Crow.”

She blushed as the crowd began to applaud. Usually she spoke only to juries in courtrooms. Never had she addressed a crowd of thousands, as a “friend to tribe and county.” Taking a deep breath, she clutched the notes she'd scribbled last night and walked to the podium.

“A year ago, our children had to pursue their sports dreams elsewhere. They had to go to Sylva to swim, to Swain County to play baseball, to Waynesville for their soccer and tennis matches,” Mary said. “Today, all that is history. Today, we of Pisgah County can swim and compete on our home turf.”

The crowd cheered. Someone blew a vuvuzela horn. Mary went on.

“Though I appreciate the credit Chief Oocuma gave me, this park would not have happened without the hard work of the citizens of Pisgah County, and the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Indians. But even beyond all our good efforts, this time we had an angel in Raleigh who loosened the state's purse strings and cut through several miles of red tape. We're lucky to have her with us today, to open the Pisgah-Cherokee Sports Park.” As the crowd began to clap again, Mary turned to the dignitaries seated behind her. “Ladies and gentlemen, it's my privilege to introduce the honorable Ann Chandler, governor of North Carolina.”

The cheering grew to a thunderous crescendo. The last governor to set foot in Pisgah County was Jackson Carlisle Wilson, back when Gerald Ford sat in the White House. That the current chief executive would take the time to come and open their sports park had the county bursting its collective buttons. Mary stepped back from the podium as a diminutive blonde in a white linen pantsuit rose from her chair. Chandler waved to the crowd as she came to the microphone. Mary was about to re-take her seat, when the governor pulled her close.

“Remind me again how to say ‘play ball' in Cherokee.”

“
Doyust uhlskult dah dahnay zohn.
” Mary whispered, hoping she could hear her above all the cheering.

“Got it.” The governor winked at her and smiled. “Thanks.”

Grateful to have finished her part of the program, Mary sat down. As the chief executive began her remarks, she again searched the crowd for Jonathan and Lily; again she could not find them. She guessed this was yet another example of Jonathan's recent strangeness. He'd spent the past month in Oklahoma with Lily, on a court-ordered visitation with his late wife's parents. She'd missed them terribly, and when they finally rolled back down the driveway, she assumed that their lives would go on as before. That had not happened. Lily had returned moody and petulant, and Mary had felt a coldness in Jonathan's kiss, as if something had disconnected his lips from his heart. As the weeks passed, she knew she should just ask him if he'd found someone younger or prettier in Oklahoma, but when an appropriate moment came, she always lost her nerve. She was thinking that today might be the day to ask that question when suddenly she heard the governor again call her name.

“Mary?” Ann Chandler smiled at her. “You're going to have to help me with this Cherokee again.”

Mary hurried to the podium, ready to whisper the words in the governor's ear, but Ann Chandler put an arm around her waist. “Let's just say it together.”

The two women leaned toward the microphone.
“Doyust uhlskult dah dahnay zohn,”
Mary said assuredly while the governor stumbled along.

“Play ball, Pisgah County,” the governor added, grabbing the last word for her English-speaking constituents. “Have fun!”

The biggest cheer yet went up from the crowd. The Hartsville High band struck up a spirited arrangement of “We Are the Champions.” Representatives from Harrah's Casino released a huge flock of green and white balloons. Children in various team uniforms scattered to the playing fields while their parents surged toward the platform, eager to shake the governor's hand. Mary returned to her chair, feeling hollow inside. Her family had apparently decided not to come.

She grabbed her purse, hoping she could get a ride back to town with Tom Burkhart when she heard her name. There, beside one of the loud speakers, stood Jonathan and Lily—Lily in her red soccer uniform, Jonathan carrying the picnic basket she'd packed that morning.

“Hey, you guys!” She smiled, surprised. “I was about to think you stood me up.”

“We got stuck in traffic,” Jonathan complained. “Everybody in Pisgah County decided to come to this thing.” His hair had grown long as his waistline had shrunk in Oklahoma, giving him a lean, noble savage appearance.
He looks incredible
, Mary thought.
He probably has a dozen women eyeing him up in Oklahoma.

“Did you hear my speech?” she asked.

He nodded. “Good job.”

“You pronounced
uhlskult
wrong,” Lily informed her. “It's
oolskult
.”

“Sorry,” Mary replied. “Next time I'll let you do the translating.” She looked over at the crowd around Ann Chandler. “Would you like to meet the governor?”

“I'd rather go see the eagle.” Lily crossed her arms, pouty in the way of nine-year-olds.

“Well, let's go meet the governor first,” Mary said. “And don't correct her Cherokee, Lily.”

After waiting until the swarm of people surrounding the governor subsided, Mary stepped forward. “Governor Chandler, may I introduce my family? Jonathan and Lily Walkingstick.”

“Hi, Jonathan.” Ann Chandler gave Jonathan's hand a practiced pump, then reached down to greet Lily. “How proud you must be of your mother, young lady.”

“She's not my mother,” Lily snapped defiantly, pushing her glasses back on her nose.

“
Ooyohee
!” Jonathan shushed her in Cherokee. Mary was stunned by the child's rudeness, but Ann Chandler didn't miss a beat.

“Well, I know you must be proud of her, anyway. If it wasn't for Mary, you wouldn't have that nice new soccer field.”

“If it wasn't for Mary, I'd … ”

“Lily!” Jonathan barked, his warning to the child clear. Lily stepped back, obviously re-thinking the comment she'd almost made.

“Mary?” called another voice. Mary turned to see Ginger Malloy bustling on to the stage, her red hair glowing like a lit match in the bright sunlight. An older man followed her, an impressive camera around his neck.

“Here comes our local press,” Mary laughingly warned the governor, grateful that Ginger had broken the awkward moment Lily had caused in their conversation.

“Hey, partner.” Ginger gave her a hug. “Great speech, great job on the park! I can't wait to hit the tennis courts with you.”

“Thanks,” Mary said. Though Mary gave most reporters a wide berth, Ginger had become a friend. They played tennis regularly, belonged to the same book club, had even hiked a couple of short sections of the Appalachian Trail. Still, she knew Ginger's present ebullience had less to do with the new tennis courts than getting an interview with Ann Chandler. “Something tells me this is not a strictly congratulatory embrace.”

Ginger turned to the governor. “I was wondering if we could get a shot of you for the paper?”

“I'd be delighted,” said Ann Chandler. She turned toward the photographer as Mary and Jonathan stepped back. “No, no,” she said, putting an arm around both Lily and Mary. “Everybody get in the picture. We're having a party today.”

They arranged themselves like stair steps—Jonathan, Mary, Ann Chandler, and Lily. Ginger stepped behind the man with the camera.

“On three,” called the photographer.

Mary smiled. He took three quick shots, then nodded at Ginger.

“Thank you so much,” Ginger said to the governor. “I'll send your press officer a copy.”

“My pleasure,” replied Ann Chandler. Her official duties finally finished, she shook hands again with Jonathan and Lily. “Nice meeting both of you. I know you'll enjoy this park for years to come.”

“Thanks,” said Jonathan.

Smiling, the governor turned back to Mary. “Could I possibly kidnap you for a few minutes?”

Mary looked at the governor, puzzled.

“My supporters are having a little reception for me. I'd love it if you could come. There's something I'd like to ask you about.”

Mary didn't know what to say. As badly as she wanted to put on her bathing suit and relax for the rest of the day, turning down the governor seemed not the thing to do. “Certainly,” she said. “I'd be happy to.”

“Then come with me.” The governor took Mary's arm and again smiled at Jonathan. “Don't worry. I'll have her back in time for the soccer game!”

Mary shot Jonathan a helpless look as the governor steered her toward a waiting bus. “See you in a few minutes,” she called. “Don't forget our picnic with Jerry and Ginger.”

She smiled, trying to convince herself that everything was all right between them. But she could tell by the expression on his face that it was a lie. Nothing was right between them at all. Lily's outburst had proved that something was dreadfully wrong with their little family. She started to thank the governor and tell her she would have to take a rain check on the party, but just then Tom Burkhart and John Oocuma came up to express their own congratulations. By the time she got a clear view of the podium again, Jonathan and Lily were gone.