Music of Ghosts (7 page)

“So that's it?”

Stratton nodded. “That's it. We'll just have to wait and see.”

“Well.” Mary peeled off the long buckskin gloves. “I can't tell you how much we appreciate this. How much do I owe you?”

“Nothing. As a federally licensed rehabilitator, I don't charge for this.”

“Can I at least make a donation?” Mary took her purse from Lily. “I know we got you up in the middle of the night, after a very long day.”

“If you'd like to help out the Pisgah Raptor Rescue Center, that would be great. But it's really not necessary.”

“No, I want to.” Mary wrote a check for a hundred dollars and handed it to Stratton. “With many, many thanks.”

“Thank you.”

“Will you call us about the owl?” asked Lily.

“Sure,” said Stratton. “What's your number?”

“Here.” Mary dug a business card out of her purse. “You can reach me at my office.”

Stratton's expression brightened as he took her card. “Are you kidding me? You're an attorney? I thought you worked for the mayor.”

“No,” said Mary. “I'm a lawyer. You need a will or a deed filed, give me a call. I'll give you the barn owl discount.”

Abruptly, Stratton started laugh. “This is too good. A lawyer shows up with a barn owl. Don't tell me you defend people on murder raps?”

“I've defended capital charges before,” Mary replied, wondering why Stratton found this so amusing.

“Then I'll put your card on my refrigerator,” he said, still laughing at some private joke as he put her card on the door of the freezer. “You just never know when you might need a good lawyer.”

Eight

Three hundred miles to
the east, former governor Jackson Carlisle Wilson stood staring out at a hard rain that pelted the windows of the state police airplane hangar. The water dripped in rivulets down the glass, smearing the runway lights into streaks of electric blue.

“Are you okay, Governor?” asked a perky young blonde in a North Carolina Highway Patrol uniform.

He turned toward the girl. She looked a lot like Lisa—blue eyes, freckled face, a wide smile. Sweet Patootie, he and Marian had called their late-in-life daughter, singing her that old Fats Domino tune.

“Would you like to sit down?” The girl took his elbow. “Can I bring you some coffee, or a Coke?”

“I'd rather stay on my feet.” That much he knew; that much he remembered from his high school football days. If you keep moving, you've got a chance, Coach Peebles had told them. Once you're down, it's all over.

“Well, if you need anything, just let me know.” Squeezing his arm, she whispered, “We're all so sorry about your daughter, sir. If there's anything we can do to help … ”

He nodded his thanks. Her words rang strange in a terminology new to him. He'd had people express sorrow over a bill that foundered in the legislature, or that his first wife had died much too early from cancer. But sorry about his daughter? His Tootie? The thought of it made him sick to his stomach. He turned away from the woman and strode over to a huge map of North Carolina that covered one wall.
Keep moving
, he reminded himself.
Keep moving and you've got a chance
.

He was staring at the map, thinking how the blue highway lines resembled the veins on the back of his hands when his wife emerged from the bathroom.

“Carlisle?”

He turned, looked at her. For a horrible moment, he couldn't think of her name. Was it Tootie? Marian? No, those were the women he loved. This woman was something else. She began walking toward him, preceded by the scent of coconut suntan lotion. He struggled hard, desperate for her name, then finally, blessedly, it came to him. Pauline.

She came over and put her arm around his waist. “Honey, are you all okay? You look awfully pale.”

“I'm okay.” Christ, how did she think you were supposed to look when some hayseed sheriff called to tell you that your daughter was the victim of a homicide?

She looked up at him, her nose slightly sunburned, a tiny dot of red lipstick on her front tooth. “Do you want anything to eat?”

“No.”

“How about a drink? They can get you something from the airport bar.”

“No.”

“Then why don't you take one of my pills.” She started digging in her purse. “It'll help you relax … ”

“Because I don't want to relax!” He jerked away from her, hating her touch, hating her smell, hating her for everything she was not. Not his Marian. Not his Lisa. Not anybody, really, except a marginally acceptable fuck. “I want to find out what the hell is going on!”

“I understand, sweetheart,” she said, talking to him as if he were a two-year-old. “I'll be right over here if you need me.” Smiling at the young blonde officer behind the flight desk, she retreated to the other side of the waiting room, her sandals hitting the floor in a strident tattoo.

He turned back to the map, staring at the county lines, the cities, the little airplane symbols that indicated where a state chopper could land. Thirty years ago, this state had been his—a fiefdom that stretched from the Atlantic Ocean to the Appalachian Trail, with loyal lieutenants from Manteo to Murphy. He'd been the first governor since Zeb Vance to do anything more than wave at the western counties on his way to Raleigh.

“You're wasting precious time, going over there,” his old mentor, Judd Thompson warned. “Everybody knows the state ends at Charlotte.”

But he knew if he carried the western mountains along with his native eastern shore, then the fancy fat middle—the Charlotte bankers and the Raleigh pricks—could go fuck themselves.

So he'd gone and stumped at their Baptist churches, feasted on their fried chicken, winced as he sipped their moonshine. And on election day, the folks of Watauga and Buncombe and Pisgah counties pulled him through.

“Little Pisgah,” he whispered, tracing the outline of the county with a liver-spotted finger. Of all of them, he'd liked Pisgah best. Half of the residents were fair-skinned Scots, the other half dark-eyed Cherokees. Most were poor, only a few well educated, but they weren't stupid. When they promised him their vote, they delivered it. In 1972, Pisgah County put him in Raleigh.

For that, he'd rewarded them nicely. Built them a new high school, three access roads to I-40, got the Cherokees a casino. Pisgah County was working now, staying in school. Hell, even the sheriff who called about Lisa sounded like he'd graduated from Harvard.

“And this is how you pay me back?” He whispered, his vision growing blurry again. “This is what you do to my little girl?”

He stood there with his hand on the map, swaying like an old tree in a windstorm. As awful as he'd felt when Marian had died, this was worse. With Tootie gone, he would now die alone, without any of the people who loved him. Softly, he began to cry.

“Sir?”

He heard a voice behind him. Wiping his eyes, he turned. Three young patrolmen stood at attention, uniforms spotless, brass buttons shining. They saluted him at once, snappy as a color guard.

“Sir, we've just received clearance from the tower. We can leave anytime you're ready.”

He looked at the three young men, soldiers here to do his bidding. Suddenly he realized: he was not some washed-up old geezer. He was Jackson Carlisle Wilson, twice governor of North Carolina. He'd put books in the schools, money back in the taxpayer's pockets. He'd dragged Pisgah County off its mules and into the twentieth century. How dare they hurt his little girl?

“Okay, boys,” he said, straightening his shoulders, feeling the old starch returning to his spine. “Let's go find out what the hell happened in Pisgah County.”

As Carlisle Wilson boarded a plane, Jerry Cochran sat at his desk, studying the interns' interviews. While the two girls had been weepy and scared, they'd told basically the same story—that the group had changed their usual Asheville club plans to spend the night at the haunted cabin. They'd hiked up there, explored the place, listened to Chris Givens's account of the Fiddlesticks legend. After dark they built a campfire and passed around a bottle of tequila. Tony Blackman claimed to have seen somebody in the woods, but when the boys gave chase, they'd found only an old tree that gave the impression of a person when viewed from the right angle and aided, they admitted, with a fair amount of liquor. When it started to rain, they'd retreated to sleep inside the cabin.

“Lisa hated every minute of it,” said Rachel Sykes, tears rimming her dark eyes. “The woods, the cabin, everything. She was just counting the minutes until she could get back to the dorm. And Nick.”

“Did she and Nick have a special relationship?” asked Saunooke.

“Her old boyfriend had dumped her right before finals. So she glommed onto Nick as soon as she got here. She was really into him.”

The less pretty Abby Turner corroborated the story. “The Fiddlesticks story really spooked Lisa. Then when Tony claimed he saw somebody up there, I thought she was going to run back down the mountain right then.”

Two thoughts occurred to Cochran as he listened to the girls' interviews. The first was that Stratton wasn't admitting the full extent of his relationship with Lisa. The second was, in a way, more troubling: What if the Blackman kid had seen somebody up there? Somebody with hideously wide eyes and a rictus of a smile?

“Oh, come on,” Cochran said to himself as he ejected the girls' disk and reached for the one with the boys.

The first track was Ryan Quarles, a muscular blonde who fought to keep his chin from quivering. He told the same story as the girls, adding that he and Lisa had slept in the same sleeping bag. “But we weren't into each other,” he explained quickly. “It was just really cold, and
we were both a little freaked out.”

Next came Tony Blackman, a handsome boy who had the stunned look of someone who'd walked away from a train wreck. His narrative was disjointed, always returning to Lisa Wilson's corpse. “I've never seen anything like that … she didn't look human … flies were crawling inside her mouth.”

“When did you see her?” asked Whaley.

“I found her first—I walked up there to go to the bathroom. She had things carved all over her body.”

“And didn't you claim to see someone up there the night before?”

“I saw someone hiding behind the trees, I really did. It looked like a man, watching us. We chased him, but nobody was there.” Roughly, he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “I think some bird had pecked at her eyes.”

“They do that,” Whaley said matter-of-factly. “Crows usually get the juicy pieces first.”

Blackman completed the rest of the interview in tears. When it was over, Cochran stood up and paused the machine. “That one's going to need a little therapy,” he whispered as he headed to the break room.

He poured a cup of coffee and grabbed a slice of the pound cake Geneva had brought in. When he came back and inserted the last disk, Chris Givens's face appeared on the screen. The boy sat slouched in his chair, lank brown hair combed back, his gaze insolent and sly.

“I'm Christopher Andrew Givens,” he replied churlishly to Whaley's first question. “And I want a lawyer. I've been here since noon, with nothing to eat.”

“Well, sure,” Whaley replied agreeably. “It'll probably take us a few hours to get one off the golf course.” He looked at his watch. “But we should be finished by midnight.”

“Midnight?” Givens cried. “What the fuck kind of police department is this?”

“The kind that has your little hiney in jail,” Whaley replied. “This ain't
Law & Order,
son
.
You're on our clock now.”

“Where are my friends?” the boy asked.

“I think they're eating pizza. They just gave their statements, no big deal.” Whaley shrugged. “They didn't have anything to hide.”

“I don't have anything to hide, either.” Givens snapped the bait like a bass hitting a grasshopper.

Whaley smiled. “Then I don't see that we have a problem. All I'm asking for is your version of what happened last night. No lawyer tricks here.”

Givens squirmed in his chair for a moment, then he caved in. “Okay. Let's go ahead and get it over with.”

Whaley turned to a fresh page on his legal pad. “Let her rip, buddy.”

Cochran watched as Givens recounted his version of the story. They usually went up to Asheville for the weekend, but it was going to be a full moon and he wanted to film this haunted house.

“Why did you want to do that?” asked Whaley.

“There's this ghost show on TV. You can make a lot of money if you send them some good film.”

“So you'd given this little expedition some thought,” said Whaley.

Givens shrugged. “I've got a low-light video cam for shooting owls. The moon was going to be full that night, so I figured, what the hell.”

“And you talked the others into it?”

“I didn't have to twist any arms.”

“Not even Lisa Wilson's?”

“Actually, I was kind of surprised she came.”

“How come?”

“She was into Nick. I figured with the rest of us gone, it would be fuck-a-rama time for them.”

Cochran sat up straighter. This was the third person to mention Nick Stratton by name. He backed the scene up, played it again. Something in Givens's eyes made him think the kid looked jealous.

“That piss you off?” Whaley asked the boy, apparently sensing the same thing as Cochran.

Givens gave an oily smile. “Not enough to kill her, if that's where you're going.”

Whaley backed off. “So tell me what happened next.”

Givens told the same story as everybody else—he'd videoed them exploring the cabin, building a campfire, running after the figure Tony claimed to have seen lurking in the woods. “That really spooked the girls,” he said.

“But not you?” asked Whaley.

“No, I figured Tony was just bullshitting. By the time everybody calmed down about that, it started to rain. So we went inside the house.”

Whaley gave the boy a cold-cop stare that even chilled Cochran's blood. “Where you conveniently set up your camera.”

“Yeah. Everybody spread out their sleeping bags. I put the camera up on the mantel, then I went to bed. The next thing I knew Tony was yelling that something terrible had happened to Lisa.”

“That's pretty sound sleeping for people on a ghost hunt. Aren't you supposed to stay awake all night, listening for chains being rattled?”

Givens rubbed the stubble on his chin. “I tried to stay awake. But I guess I was too tired. We'd worked all day, and it took us four hours to hike up there. Plus we'd killed a bottle of Cuervo.”

Whaley pressed on. “What did you do when you heard Tony yelling?”

“Honestly, I thought he was playing another joke. I tried to go back to sleep but everyone else was awake. The girls said Lisa had vanished, so I went outside to see what was going on. Tony was at the fire pit, pointing to a big tree, screaming his head off. I ran up there to see.”