A Judgment of Whispers (13 page)

Eighteen

While Adam Shaw was
bidding Zack and Grace good-bye, Mary Crow was sitting at her kitchen table, poring over the old newspaper articles she'd printed a few hours earlier. In 1989 the paper had been photographed a page at a time, so reading the Teresa Ewing stories was like opening a time capsule. Tiananmen Square was the news of the day, along with a new cartoon show called
The Simpsons
and rock group named Milli Vanilli. Mary smiled, remembering how she'd loved Bart Simpson, then she turned to a picture spread on Teresa Ewing's murder. The paper showed pictures of the house, a diagram of Teresa's last movements, then several photos of Teresa—costumed as an orphan in a production of
Annie
, dressed in a junior cheerleading outfit, and the last school photo of her ever taken. Though the little girl was pretty, with dark curls framing a pale, heart-shaped face, what caught Mary's attention was her eyes. They conveyed a look both of promise and daring—a wink without winking. Mary had seen that look before, but usually in women far older than ten.

She scanned the article for quotes about the girl. Her teacher called her
imaginative
and said that she'd wanted to be an actress. “She was a lot of fun to be with,” said a classmate named Ben. The principal of her school said she was full of life, and everybody liked her. “Boys and girls both,” he added.

And yet somebody had bashed in Teresa Ewing's skull, and all that life and brightness along with it. It was beyond awful, the murder of a child.

Mary stared at the article, surprised at the depth of her own reaction. She'd prosecuted a boatload of homicides in her career, had seen the horrors that occasionally touched children. Yet something about Teresa Ewing tweaked a different chord inside her. She was trying to figure out what it was when the ringing of her phone split the silence of the room. She jumped and grabbed it.

“Mary Crow.”

“Mary? This is Emily.” On the phone her campaign manager was as direct as she was in person.

“Hey, Emily. Did you see all the signs in HairTwister's today?”

“They look great, but that's not why I called. I've got to tell you, Mary, I'm a little stunned.”

“Stunned?” Mary wondered if she'd heard the woman correctly. What had she done to stun Emily Kurtz? Her big adventure for the day was giving Buck Whaley a nosebleed.

“I understand that you're representing Zack Collier in the Teresa Ewing murder case.”

Mary had been half expecting this call, but she was still curious how the news had gotten out. “Where did you hear that?”

“From Harvey Pugh, Turpin's campaign manager. He could barely talk for laughing.”

Mary remembered her earlier encounter with Turpin and Pugh. That must have been why they both looked like two fat cats who'd just chomped a canary. “Well, Harvey got it right. I'm representing the Collier boy.”

“Seriously?” Emily's tone was acid.

“Yes.”

“Mary, you're running for DA—to prosecute crime. How can you possibly square that with defending someone accused of the most infamous murder in the county?”

“Zack hasn't been accused of anything, Emily. He's only a suspect, one who's cooperating fully with the investigation. I wouldn't be much of a lawyer if I couldn't handle that.”

“But don't you see how bad this will look? Pugh was practically orgasmic over this.”

Mary shuddered at the image of Harvey Pugh having a sexual release. “Look, Zack Collier's entitled to the best representation he can muster. And don't forget that his mother designed every bit of our campaign publicity. What was I supposed to say when she called? ‘Sorry, Grace, it won't look good if I represent your son'?”

“But couldn't you have gotten her another lawyer? David Loveman or Julie Burkhart?”

“Grace couldn't afford them. She would have been at the mercy of the public defender's office. This is no case for a kid just out of law school.”

“But what if you win the election? Could you indict a former client?”

“If I were the DA and had a case, I could and would. Then I would recuse myself. Change the venue to Asheville or Charlotte, where another prosecutor would take over.”

Emily sighed. “Look—I know how much we owe Grace. She was on board with us from the get-go. And I admire your loyalty. But you've got a real shot at this office, Mary. I'd hate to see you blow it by getting sucked into the Teresa Ewing quagmire.”

“I realize that. But it's just not in me to leave Grace in the lurch. Anyway, I'm going to take a new tack in this case.”

“Then please tell me you're getting a co-counsel. Couldn't your partner, Ravenel, step up?”

“No. Ravenel only defends things with feathers and fur. Listen, I've just read every shred ever written about Teresa Ewing. I think if I dig deep enough, I can figure out who killed that girl.”

There was a long silence, then Emily spoke gently, as if she were addressing someone delusional. “Mary. Do you realize how crazy that sounds? People have been trying to solve this case for twenty years.”

“But this is the first time I've ever looked at it,” Mary replied. “Sometimes a cold case needs a new pair of eyes.”

They went a few more rounds, then Emily clicked off in a huff. Mary stared at the phone, wondering if she'd just had the briefest political career in the history of North Carolina. She understood Emily's position, but she also knew she couldn't just drop Grace and Zack to better her chances at George Turpin's job. That wasn't what Judge Irene Hannah had taught her. She took another look at her Teresa Ewing notes, then she went into the kitchen and uncorked a bottle of Malbec. Maybe the Chilean grapes grown in 2009 might lighten her mood. She was letting the bottle breathe when her doorbell rang, loud and somehow angry sounding.

“Oh God,” she whispered, wondering if Emily Kurtz had driven over to harangue her further. But when she checked the peephole, she saw Victor standing there in his soccer uniform, a white 1 emblazoned on his red jersey. She opened the door.

“Hey!” she said, standing on tiptoe to kiss him.

“Where were you?” He marched past her into the living room. Though he was fully dressed for soccer, he'd taken his cleats off and was pattering around in flip-flops.

“Here,” she said, puzzled. “Where was I supposed to be?”

“My game?”

She looked at him, his black hair still wet with sweat, his face splotchy red with either exertion or anger. Then she remembered. Tonight was his big game. His club, the Rangers, were playing their arch rivals, the Growlers. She was supposed to have met him there.

“Oh Victor, I'm so sorry,” she said. “I came home and got involved in something else. I just totally lost track of the time.” Somehow that sounded better, she decided, than telling him she just forgot.

He let fly a stream of angry Spanish, then switched to English. “What other thing did you get involved with? I was going to introduce you to my friends. Everyone was going to McDougal's after the game.”

“A murder,” she replied, irritated by his anger. She'd never missed any of his games before. “And speak English. Don't go all Ricky Ricardo on me.”

“What murder?”

“Teresa Ewing.”

He frowned. “What do you have to do with that?”

“I'm representing one of the boys who was, and apparently still is, a suspect.”

“But I thought you were working on an estate. And running for DA.”

“I'm doing that too.”

“No wonder you forgot something as silly as a football game.”

“I'm sorry,” she apologized again. “I meant to come; I just got involved in the old newspaper articles.”

He walked over to the dining room table and looked at the stack of old clippings. “So who are you representing?”

There was no point to keep secret what everybody else in Hartsville knew. “Zack Collier. The autistic man Whaley likes.”

Victor stared at the papers for a long moment, then turned to her, his expression unreadable. “You looked at my files, didn't you? The other morning when I was taking a shower.”

Mary swallowed hard. She was guilty—he'd caught her in her one small transgression. “I just wondered if DNA reports had gotten any more comprehensible than when I was working your side of the aisle. That was the only thing I looked at.”

“Then how do you know who Whaley suspects?”

“Because I've talked to Zack Collier's mother. Whaley's harassed that boy for years. Plus I saw Whaley down at the police station today, when Zack gave his DNA. He was practically salivating.”

“But you looked at my case files,” Victor repeated, paling beneath his tan. “Do you know how much trouble that could get me in?”

“Zack Collier wasn't my client then, Victor. He wasn't my client until later that day, when Grace called me. I haven't been at your apartment since then. And I certainly wouldn't look at your case files now.”

“But we talked about that case. You asked me about going to Winston-Salem. I told you about the underpants the dog dug out from under the tree.”

“I remember you talking about the old detective,” said Mary. “You told me Cochran wondered if he'd planted those underpants.”

He looked at her as if he'd caught her naked with another man.

“Victor, I haven't done anything unethical here,” she cried. “Just peeked at a few incomprehensible DNA panels. I have no inside information on what you might have against Zack Collier. I didn't even know who Zack Collier was at the time.”

He said nothing.

She lifted the stack of papers. “These clips from the morgue have told me far more than your DNA report. Whaley liked Collier. Logan arrested the kid, only to have Cecil Earp blow that up in court. It was a circus!”

He looked at her another moment, then shook his head. “I can't believe you read my files,” he said softly. “You, of all people.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Because I thought if you were anything, you were honest.”

“Victor, I am honest. If I weren't, I wouldn't be telling you this now. I would have kept quiet or said, ‘Why no, Victor, I didn't look in your files.' And then I would have made love to you like crazy just to make sure you forgot all about it.
That's
dishonesty. What I did was just nosy. Go to the law board with a complaint if you want.”

He shrugged, the big white 1 on his jersey suddenly looking alone and forlorn. “I don't want to go to the law board. I want to go home.”

He walked toward the door. Mary dropped her clippings and hurried after him. “Seriously,Victor? You're leaving over this?”

“Yes,” he said as he opened the door. “I guess I am.” He gave her a brief smile, then he was gone, his flip-flops tapping angrily as he walked away.

Nineteen

Adam left the dinner
party earlier than he'd planned. He'd hoped to coax Zack into watching some of his old home videos, but Grace had been adamant about getting her son to bed by ten. “It's our routine,” she'd explained, as she pulled Zack away from the birthday party video to give him three big pills and a glass of chocolate milk. “He goes to sleep early, and I get a couple of hours to myself. At seven tomorrow morning, it all begins again.”

Wonder how she stands it?
he thought as he drove home, the headlights of his car slicing through the darkness. The same schedule, every day, year in year out. No trips, no time off, not even much company, judging by the dust on their beer glasses and her frantic search for a bottle opener. Just Zack's caregiver and regular visits from Detective Whale-Ass.

“I couldn't do it,” he whispered in admiration. He needed movement, new people and places, the feeling that he was reaching for something just beyond his grasp. He doubted he could last a day in Zackworld.

And yet he needed to visit Zackworld regularly, at least until he could get his videos back. Zack had purchased pieces of his childhood that he wasn't willing to give up—certainly not to a man entranced by the birthday partying of children he'd never met.

He turned onto Salola Street, then into his driveway. Nobody much had ever waited up for him—in New York his Aunt Jean had gone to bed early, and nobody gave a shit about him at boarding school. Yet tonight a light burned in their kitchen. His mother, no doubt. Pouring all of her stored-up maternal emotions over him as if he were sixteen instead of thirty-nine. He parked the car and let himself in the back door. As he guessed, Leslie Shaw was sitting at the kitchen table in a pink bathrobe, polishing off a bottle of Zinfandel as she squinted at a crossword puzzle.

“Hey, sweetheart.” She looked up, bleary-eyed. “How was Zack's?”

He shrugged. “Funny. Pathetic. A lot of things.”

“Did you get your tapes?”

“No. Zack had thrown them in a big box with about a hundred others. He was too caught up in some kid's birthday party. Grace says he can watch the same tape for weeks at a time.”

She tilted her head, as if she'd misheard him. “Grace says?”

“Yeah, Mom. Grace. Zack's mother.”

“When did you start calling her Grace?”

“Tonight. What was I supposed to do? Go over there and say ‘Please, Mrs. Collier, may I have some milk with my cookies?'”

“Of course not.” Flustered, she took a swallow of wine. “I'm sorry. I guess I still think of you as a little boy.”

“Whatever.” He opened the refrigerator and looked for another beer. “How's Dad's ankle?”

“Hurting. He's in bed, icing it. You won't forget about the shed, will you? He's depending on you to clean it out.”

“First thing tomorrow.” He opened an IPA as his mother rose from the table.

“I'm going on to bed,” she said, lurching over to give him a hug. “It was good of you to visit Zack. You're kinder than I am.”

“I hope it's less weird the next time,” he said.

She stifled a burp. “You're going back over there?”

“I want those tapes, Mom. They're important to me.”

“I'm so sorry I sold them. I can still call and explain that it was a mistake.”

“No, I can take care of this.”

“You be careful with those people, Adam,” she warned. “I know you like them, but I think they're trouble.”

He leaned against the kitchen sink as his mother shuffled down the hall. The sound of a late-night talk show briefly reached his ears as she opened her bedroom door, then the door closed and silence returned. As he sipped his beer his thoughts returned to Grace Collier. He'd had a monstrous crush on her the summer before Teresa died. One afternoon he'd cut through the woods in back of the Collier house and seen Grace swimming naked in their pool. Zack, he guessed, had gone somewhere with his father. With his heart thudding he'd dropped to the ground and slithered behind a tree. Through the branches he'd watched Grace dive cleanly into the deep end of the pool. Half a minute later she emerged from the shallow end, sleek as a seal, her light brown skin gleaming. Then she turned and he saw her in full—high, firm breasts, a flat stomach, a lush vee of dark pubic hair. It was the first time he'd ever seen a naked woman beyond the pages of a magazine. He'd felt the air go out of his lungs as his penis pressed into the ground so hard it hurt. A moment later he came in an expulsive rush that left him weak and shaking. Until that day, Grace had been nothing more than Zack's mother. From then on, she became something else entirely.

“And now I call her by her first name,” he whispered, thinking of how many times he'd replayed that swimming pool scene in his head—at his aunt's house when he was scared, at boarding school when he was lonely. Even today, when he was between women in New York or sharing a tent with some rich old farts, Grace Collier was the default lover of his dreams.

“You're really fucked up,” he said as he finished his beer. “But so is everybody else here on Salola Street.”

Adam woke up early, jarred to consciousness by the roar of construction equipment. He pulled the bedcovers over his head and tried to go back to sleep, but it was pointless. The grinding roars and shrill beepings went on unabated. He got up and pulled on his jeans, headed for the kitchen. He couldn't imagine how his parents slept through all the racket, but when he passed their bedroom, their door was still shut.

He poured a cup of coffee and gazed out the kitchen window. He could see the crown of the old oak tree as it presided over the mayhem below. On the other side of Butch's house, a bulldozer was about to shove a mound of dirt out of the way. Two men in white hard hats watched, studying the blueprint rolled out between them. Soon those same bulldozers would come over here and start leveling this place. The thought of it made him smile.

He ate a bowl of cereal, grabbed a plastic trash bag, and walked to the shed through dew-slickened grass. He was glad to be assigned this task alone. The shed had been his refuge when he was a kid, and he wanted to dismember it slowly savoring what memories he had.

It stood at the back corner of the lot, under the shade of a tulip tree, now nearly consumed by wild honeysuckle and Virginia creeper. It had been a potting shed, built by the original owners of the house. His family had used it as a storehouse for various items—toys that he and Mark had lost interest in, sleds awaiting snowfalls, his father's huge, state-of-the-art wheelbarrow. As he neared adolescence he'd claimed the shed for himself, setting up his camera there and using it as a set for his movies—an ersatz log cabin where he and Devin fought off marauding Cherokees (Butch and Zack), then a Transylvania hut where Teresa and Shannon fled screaming from Zack, who was supposed to be Dracula, but who acted more like Frankenstein, chasing them with stiff, outstretched arms while he growled like a dog.

Now he was amazed at how small the shed was. The brown paint had flaked off the clapboards years ago and its single window was covered in thick dust and spiderwebs. Climbing steps that felt spongy with rot, he turned the white metal knob and pushed open the door. The dank smell of mildew engulfed him like sour breath. He stepped inside, stomping his feet, in case any snakes had taken up residence. When nothing slithered away, he moved to the center of the dim space and looked around. The huge old wheelbarrow stood in one corner holding a flat basketball, a dog bed their old Lab Izzy had used, and a couple of tennis racquets with broken strings. To the right of the wheelbarrow were three dates scrawled on the wall in white chalk.
Cdt. Hartley, 2-15-89, Cdt. Boyer, 2-24-89, Cdt. Hartley, 3-1-89.
As he gazed at the scribblings, the hair lifted on the back of his neck. Those were the dates the police had searched in here, looking for Teresa.

“Cadets,” he whispered, remembering how they'd turned out everybody who'd ever worn or hoped to wear any kind of public servant's uniform. “Cadets from the police academy searched this shed three times.”

He stared at the notations a moment, remembering how scared he'd been back then, how even though he hadn't wanted to leave, he was secretly glad that morning when his father turned toward the airport instead of his school. “If I had a kid, I'd do exactly the same thing,” he whispered. “Nobody deserves to be bullied like that.”

He stepped over and with the side of his hand, wiped the chalk marks off the wall. Even though the shed would be kindling in a few weeks, he wanted those marks gone forever.

After that, he opened a plastic trash bag and began taking stuff off the shelf that ran along one wall. He dumped in a petrified box of Miracle-Gro, an old can of white enamel, a glass jar full of old fuses. He was working his way down the shelf, dumping everything in the bag when his fingers curled around a dog-eared paperback.
Cupid's Arrow
, read the title, above a picture of a man and a women in bed.
An Illustrated Guide to Sexual Pleasure.

A curious thrill went through him, as if he'd run into an old friend at some foreign airport. He opened the book, finding the photographs of the naked man and woman who'd instructed him—who'd instructed all of them—in their youth. He saw that the man's penis, which at the time had seemed impossibly large, was now not much bigger than his own. The woman had dark nipples, big as silver dollars. She reminded him of a translator he'd once slept with in Nepal.

He flipped through the book as they'd done so long ago, marveling at all the positions—the man doing it doggie-style, the woman with her feet waving over the man's shoulders, and most eye-popping of all, the woman sucking the man's penis while he tongued her twat. Somebody (the printing looked like Shannon's round, girlish hand) had drawn all through the book, pointing arrows at the models in the most amazing positions, giving them the initials of people they knew. AS + JM—that would be he and Jennie Mason. DM + MCF was Devin and Mary Catherine Frensley, a girl he claimed to hate. BR (Butch) had TE (Teresa Ewing) sitting in lap, his hands on her breasts. Only someone had later added
NO!!!!! HE'S TOO FAT!!!!
in bright pink marker.

“Those cadets really fucked up,” he whispered, “if they searched this place three times and didn't find this.”

He started to toss the book in the trash bag, but stopped. If that prick reporter was snapping shots through Zack's fence, what would keep him from going through their trash? The whole county would go crazy if a sex manual with Teresa Ewing's initials in it surfaced now.

He brushed the dust from the little book and put it in the back pocket of his jeans. He could take it up to the house and when his parents went out, burn it in the fireplace.

“Or I could do something else,” he said aloud, taking the book from his pocket and smiling at the photographs they'd found so fascinating. “I could keep it. Maybe show certain pages to Butch and Dev. Let them know I've leveled the playing field a little bit.”