Music of Ghosts (20 page)

Twenty-Seven

Mary returned to her
office, no less befuddled than when she'd left the jail. She climbed the stairs, dropped her briefcase on the floor, and flopped down on the sofa. Nothing about this Fiddlesticks case made sense. By Nick's own admission, all Lisa's descriptions were accurate, except the torrid pages about him. Those she had written with such detail that it raised Mary's pulse, yet Stratton insisted that beyond the one encounter, nothing had ever happened between them. She wondered if perhaps they'd had sex the night he was drunk and he just didn't remember it. If that was the case, then Lisa would have been a spurned lover the next day. Maybe that pissed her off. Maybe she threatened to tell her father, told Nick that the old man could ruin his career. Maybe Nick did kill her, in an effort to protect himself. Suddenly she was beginning to see Turpin's logic in indicting Stratton. He was close enough, strong enough, had the most to lose.

“Maybe he felt trapped,” Mary said aloud. “Maybe it all boiled down to sex with the wrong person.”

“What do you mean, sex with the wrong person?” asked a disembodied voice, just outside her door.

Mary sat up as Ginger peeked into her office, dressed in her work outfit of beige linen slacks and a blue blazer.

“Jeez!” Mary clutched her chest. “You almost gave me a heart attack!”

“Sorry.” Ginger laughed. “Your door wasn't shut all the way. I was just about to knock when I heard you say something about having sex with the wrong person.”

“I was just talking to myself,” said Mary, irritated.

“About sex?” Ginger lifted an eyebrow at the quilt folded on one end of the sofa. “What all do you do up here?”

Mary ignored her glance at the quilt. “I work on Stratton's defense. Or I worry about Jonathan's defense. They're going to court tomorrow, you know.”

“I've got to tell you, Mary, all that worrying doesn't sound like much of a life.”

She shrugged, embarrassed to admit that except for the Jonathan part, she liked this life. She enjoyed being totally consumed by a murder case. She would move in up here if she could figure out some way to shower on a daily basis.
God help me,
she thought,
I must be a real sick ticket.

“You need to get out more.” Ginger grabbed her elbow. “Come with me.”

“Where are you going?”

“To the Thursday night Sacred Harp singing at the Sugartree Baptist Church. It's the last installment of my mountain music feature.”

Mary shook her head. “No, thanks. I need to stay here and work.”

“Mary, lying up here talking to yourself about sex is not healthy. You need to get out, chat with non-incarcerated human beings.”

“Take Cochran with you.”

“Cochran's at Lisa Wilson's funeral, probably flirting with that horse-faced Jessica Rusk.” She jingled her car keys. “Come on and go with me. This church is out in the boonies, and I'm still a little creeped out over that fiddler who followed us the other day.”

Mary considered her options. Though she should keep working, it might do her good to breathe fresh, non-office air for a little while. “Okay,” she finally agreed. “But we can't stay late. I've got a lot to do.”

For an hour they drove through a soft, late-summer evening dotted with fireflies, loud with the rasp of katydids, finally pulling into the parking lot of a small white clapboard church called the Sugartree Baptist Assembly. They entered a large, brightly lit hall attached to the sanctuary, where about thirty people had gathered, ranging from early twenties to well past social security age. The men bustled around arranging chairs in the middle of the room, while the women arranged punch and cookies on a long table covered with a red-checked cloth.

“Ms. Malloy?” A chubby little man with thick glasses came forward, offering his hand to Ginger. He wore a plaid sport shirt buttoned to the neck and jeans pulled just shy of his armpits. “I'm Dermot Munro.”

Ginger smiled. “So nice to finally meet you, Dr. Munro. This is my friend, Mary Crow. She's my assistant tonight.”

“We're so thrilled that you've come.” Munro included Mary in his broad smile. “People sing Sacred Harp all over the country, but we don't get much press.”

“That's why we're here.” Ginger got out her reporter's notepad. “So tell me about it.”

“Well, it began in the 1800s, in the rural south. People didn't have printed music back then, so traveling music teachers had to invent different ways of teaching singing.”

“Interesting.” Ginger scribbled away.

“Our hymns are written in Walker's notation system, which dates from 1866. The term ‘Sacred Harp' means the human voice.”

Mary zoned out as Dr. Munro rambled on about shape note singing and how there were small but fervent shape-note societies in practically every state. Though her father had reputedly been able to sing like Elvis Presley, she had not inherited any of his musical DNA. She wandered over to the table, where a chubby, pink-cheeked woman in a long gingham skirt was stirring a pitcher of lemonade.

“Haven't seen you here before,” she said sweetly. “This your first time singing?”

“I'm not really singing,” explained Mary. “I just tagged along with my friend.”

The woman poured Mary a glass of lemonade. As Ginger talked to Dr. Munro, more singers came up to welcome her. She met a woman who was doing her doctoral dissertation on Early American music, and an old tobacco farmer who wore coveralls over a starched white shirt. She'd just asked for a refill on her lemonade when Ginger came up.

“They're going to start in a few minutes,” she said. “I'm going to look over my notes.”

“I'll come with you,” said Mary.

They walked to one end of the room and perched on the edge of a small stage. As Ginger reviewed what she'd written, Mary's thoughts drifted west, to Oklahoma. Tomorrow morning, Alex and Jonathan would go to court. Though Alex had sounded confident on the phone today and Jonathan reported that Lily was smiling more since her therapy, Mary still wondered how much damage the Moons had done to her family. If Jonathan did retain custody of Lily, what would they be like when they returned? Would Lily still smile in North Carolina? Would she and Jonathan ever crawl out from under the shadow the Moons had cast upon them?

She was sitting there, trying to foresee her own future when Dr. Munro walked over.

“Ladies, will you come join in the singing?”

“Thanks so much,” Ginger demurred politely. “But we don't sing and anyway, I'm here to write a story.”

“But you really need to experience this music,” he cried, all enthusiasm. “At least come and sit in the cross. You'll be amazed!”

Mary shot Ginger a pleading look. She had Jonathan to worry about, reasonable doubts to come up with for Stratton. The last thing she needed to do was join in a hymn.

“Well, just for a little while,” said Ginger. “We've both got deadlines to meet.”

“Stay for three songs,” chirped Dr. Munro. “And you'll be hooked for life!”

Reluctantly, they followed Dr. Munro to where the chairs had been arranged in a cross formation—four sections in a kind of north, south, east, west configuration, all facing inward, toward a podium in the middle. As Mary and Ginger took seats on the back row nearest the door, Dr. Munro walked to the center of the cross.

“Good evening!” he called. “It's good to see everyone again. Tonight, we have two special guests—Ginger Malloy and her friend Mary. Ginger's a reporter who's writing an article about us for the paper, so we need to be on our best behavior!”

Everyone laughed, turning to catch quick glances at the two of them. Mary suppressed a laugh of her own, wondering what connoted bad behavior for these people—an overdue library book? Twelve grocery items in the ten-item line? Dr. Munro went on.

“Okay, everybody. Let's start with page 197.”

Pages rattled as Munro blew a single note on a pitch pipe. The singers hummed the proper pitch, then started singing a cappella—not words, but the do-re-mi scale. When they sang the song through once, Munro lifted his right arm and they began again, this time singing the lyrics.

As we travel through the desert, storms beset us by the way.

But beyond the river Jordan, lies a field of endless day.

Though the lyrics were standard Southern gospel, the sound was nothing like Mary had ever heard before. Beautiful and powerful, Dr. Munro's group sang in a raw, eerie harmony that lifted the hair on the back of her neck.

“
Farther on, still go farther, Count the milestones one by one,
” they sang, their song radiantly hopeful. “
Jesus will forsake you never, it is better farther on.
”

On they sang, the weird, compelling music filling the hall. Mary felt like God and Jesus might both, at any moment, descend from heaven and join in the chorus. When the song ended, she leaned over to Ginger. “Who are these people?”

Wide-eyed, Ginger shook her head. “I don't know. But I'm covered in goose flesh.”

They'd barely recovered from the first tune when Dr. Munro called out another number. Again voices lifted in that strange harmony, this time singing a tune about
friendship bands and parting hands.

It was an amazing, dazzling sound. Mary wanted to stay longer, but she had work to do, a final call to make to Jonathan before tomorrow morning. She was just about to whisper to Ginger that they needed to go when the woman in front of her turned around.

“Here,” she said excitedly, thrusting hymnals at the two of them. “You girls sing the next one. We've got plenty of books to spare.”

Mary started to explain that they had to leave, but the woman was too quick. She plopped the hymnals in their hands as Dr. Munro announced the next tune, on page 238.

“Come on,” whispered Ginger, flipping to the correct page. “Let's not be rude. We'll sing one, then go.”

Mary sighed as everyone did their do-re-mi run-through, then Dr. Munro lifted his arm and the singing began. She hummed along, only glancing at the lyrics. She hoped they might sing the song just once, but of course they launched into the second verse. Deciding that she may as well join in, she held the hymnal closer and began to pay attention to the words. As she began to sing, something about the musical notation caught her eye. Sacred Harp notes weren't the regular dark circles dotting the lines of a staff, but odd little squares and triangles. Suddenly, Mary caught her breath. The shapes that comprised Sacred Harp notation were the same figures someone had carved into Lisa Wilson's flesh!

Mary thought fast. The hymn was ending; Ginger promised they would leave. But she had to take a copy of this music with her, preferably without Ginger knowing. She sang until halfway through the last verse, then she faked a coughing fit. Ginger looked over, frowning with concern.

“I'm going to the bathroom,” Mary rasped. “I'll be right back.”

Scooping up her purse along with the songbook, she walked toward the back of the room. The same woman who'd given her lemonade pointed to a small door in one corner. Mary nodded her thanks and opened it to find an empty bathroom. Hurriedly, she locked the door behind her and ripped five pages from the center of the hymnal.

“That's ten different songs,” she whispered. “Enough to figure out what's going on here.”

She listened at the door until the singing stopped, then she made her move. Unlocking the bathroom, she headed straight for Ginger.

“Are you okay?” her friend asked.

“Just a frog in my throat,” said Mary, trying to sound hoarse. “Are you ready to go?”

“Yeah,” said Ginger. “Let me tell Dr. Munro good-bye.”

“I'll go put these hymnals up.” Mary put Ginger's hymnal on top and went over and gave both books to the lemonade lady. She felt guilty about defacing the church's property, but she would replace the hymnal later. If she could match these notes up with the shapes carved into Lisa Wilson, it would be a total game-changer for Nick Stratton.

Finally, Ginger made her farewells. “We're done,” she said as they walked back out into the summer night. “It wasn't too horrible, was it?”

“It was great.” Mary smiled. “I had so much fun, I got all choked up inside.”

They drove back to Hartsville, Ginger going on about how weird but beautiful the music had been. She dropped Mary back at her office with another invitation to play tennis.

“Have you even bounced a ball on our new tennis courts yet?” Ginger asked.

“Not yet,” Mary replied.

“Then let's play sometime this week.”

“I'd love to,” said Mary, anxious to get busy on her stolen pages. “Check your schedule and call me tomorrow.”

She waited until Ginger drove away, then she hurried up to her office. She dug the pages from her purse, then rifled through the drawer that held the Wilson evidence files. Pulling out the photos, she spread them out in front of her fireplace. The police photographer who'd taken the close-ups of the body had numbered the shots sequentially, like a puzzle. In a few minutes an image of Lisa Wilson lay on Mary's floor, a grisly collage comprised of 8x10 glossy photos.

“Okay,” Mary whispered. “Let's see what we've got here.” She got out a magnifying glass, then compared the shape notes to the figures cut into Lisa Wilson's body. Discounting for blood smears and edema, the mutilations on the dead girl's skin and the musical shape notes were identical. The lampshade figure was do, the crescent moon re, the baseball diamond mi. Two triangles, an oval, and a rectangle made up so, fa, la, and ti. Eight repeating shapes for the eight notes of the scale.