Hush My Mouth (20 page)

Dad lives for something to fix, especially anything that involves grease and moving parts.

“You got something on your sleeve,” he said.

I raised my arm. Something crusty. “I ate lunch with Emma’s computer camp today.” No need to explain further.

“You coming for supper tonight?”

“Hadn’t thought that far ahead.” I paused. Maybe I should ask Dad about the window glass in the car. He’s an engineer. It would have to wait, though. Too much explanation for now.

He mistook my silence for hesitation. “Don’t feel you have to. Don’t even know what your mother has planned. She might be off saving the world somewhere this evening. You know how she is.”

“I’ll let you know, okay?” I smiled. The First Fruits Food Bank or the English as a Second Language Bible Study might not save the whole world, but they did save parts of it.

“Sure.” He smiled down at me, his blue eyes clear as he peered over the glasses that perpetually sat down on the end of his nose.

My dad’s natural lack of curiosity meant that he continued on his way without hanging around to see what business I had with Walter, conveniently saving me from having to answer difficult questions. His immunity to idle gossip made him the last person anyone expected to buy a newspaper to entertain himself in his early retirement.

Walter, his fringe-rimmed bald head gleaming and his perpetual scowl oddly welcoming, stood with both hands in his pockets.

“What’cha need, girlie?”

“You recognize this?”

I held the photo up in front of me, my fingers framing the edges.

He leaned closer, his head cocked back to study it through his bifocals. He tilted his chin down and pursed his lips, squinting at me with his fair-sky eyes, waiting for an explanation.

“Remember the Wenda Sims murder? In 1985?”

His attention wandered away from me and the photo, his gaze unfocused as he searched his mental file cabinet.

“Girl found dead in the graveyard. They never solved that one.”

“Might this be a news photographer’s photo?”

“No.” He shook his head, his mouth crinkled in distaste. “Wouldn’t have any reason to take a picture like that. Who wants to see that on the front page of their hometown newspaper? Parents want to see little Johnny’s name in the article about the church league game and that a good time was had by all. Not that.”

“But mightn’t a photographer have snapped it, just—because?”

“No.” His headshake grew more insistent.

“But how can you—”

“Be so sure? Because I was the photographer then. And the feature writer and layout guy and about everything else.”

Duh, of course
.

“Even if I’d been on the scene before the cops got there, I sure wouldn’t have spent film on something like that. That’s just not decent.”

No, it wasn’t decent. That was a good way to describe it.

“Disrespectful. If that were my daughter, I surely wouldn’t want someone capturing that on film.” More head shaking, slow and sad.

“You think maybe another newspaper took it?”

He pooched out his lips in a bowknot. “Anything’s possible, I suppose, but I don’t remember anybody else showing up until later. Especially back then, nobody could print something like that, so why shoot it?”

Good point.

“Any need in me asking how you came by that?” he asked.

“A client.”

“Someone with a kinky eye for keepsakes, if you ask me.”

I looked down at the picture, seeing it with some of his perspective. Somebody had a kinky eye, for sure.

“Was everything you shot then in black-and-white?”

“Yep. We developed our own film, of course. Didn’t have time to mail stuff off, even if it was just a weekly paper. Black-and-white was cheaper and easier.”

“That makes sense.” I couldn’t see Alice running to drop off film at the five-and-dime store. “Thanks, Walter.”

“Keep us in mind, you get a story you can tell.” He absentmindedly smoothed the front of his heavy black apron and turned back to his printing job.

I waved to Alice and stepped carefully down the canted granite block that served as the front stoop. Head down, I wandered along the narrow sidewalk across from the back of the courthouse, musing on the photo I carried in my file folder.

Made sense that news photographers in 1985 still used black-and-white film. I imagined police photographers used it for the same reason—more clarity and easier to process in-house. Wouldn’t want to freak out somebody at a commercial film developer with gruesome close-up crime-scene shots. I wanted to see Wenda Sims’s case file. I was certain the photos in that file had been stark black-and-white. Clinical. Not obliquely flash-lit with artistic angles.

I stopped, opened the folder, and stared at the photo. What was it that seemed so—demeaning, insulting? Even though it revealed nothing sexual, it felt obscene, like a violation. Walter had seen it, too. Something about the angle of the shot, looking at her from beyond her slightly parted knees up toward her slack face, her lips apart in a caricature of a breathless sex kitten. Maybe it was her half-lidded eyes, the unseeing half circles of her iris visible only because of the intimate angle.

In the sun, with the hazy heat thick in my lungs, I shivered. The most likely photographer? The murderer. Nobody else made sense. So how had Neanna’s gran gotten the photo? The questions circled around. For Neanna, had the answer been deadly?

Late Thursday Afternoon

I nodded at my stone-faced guardian angel as I poked up the sidewalk at the office. Wish she could fly me in some wisdom on her wings.

If I’d noticed the battered VW microbus parked on the street, I’d have hurried inside.

Melvin appeared as soon as the doorknob bells stopped jangling.

“Just in time, m’dear.” His tone carried a smirk.

“Huh?”

“Trust me, you’ll be mad if you miss this.” He used the same teasing invitation I’d offered him on the ghosters’ last visit as he ushered me into his office.

Colin, Trini, and Quint were back in their familiar spots. Colin had taken a seat on the sofa, flanked by his aides-de-camp.
The heavy brocade drapes that some interior designer from Greenville had dipped into Melvin’s wallet to have custom-made were once again drawn against the late sun, and Quint’s laptop sat open on the coffee table.

“Could you replay your footage for Avery?” Melvin asked, indicating nothing but sincerity, unless you knew him well enough to detect the teasing undertone.

“Sure.” Quint slid off the sofa onto his bony knees.

“Not our footage, exactly,” Colin said. “This is someone else’s. But we personally went out and captured the EVP.”

“EVP?” I asked.

“Electronic Voice Phenomenon,” Colin said, clearly proud of whatever that meant.

From a perspective in the middle of a railroad track, the computer screen showed a twin rail disappearing into the distance along a berm that sloped off with grassy sides. The two solid walls of dark trees merged with the tracks in the distance.

The sky and trees blended in shades of dark, the rails glistened as though absorbing all the available light. A beautiful tableau.

As I scanned the screen, wondering what I was missing, a pinprick of light appeared in the middle of the tracks. Not back where the tracks disappeared, and not close to the camera. Somewhere midway between identifiable and gone.

I expected it to move toward us. I expected a train. Logical, I thought. But it stayed put, swinging slightly from side to side, slowly, sending a signal.

Melvin leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, watching the screen. “Who gave you this film?”

“The two dudes. They said we needed to go out to the track, check it out ourselves.”

“What two dudes?” I asked.

Colin shrugged. “We started talking at lunch the other day.”

“We’ve had lots of people interested in our research,” said Quint.

Melvin and I exchanged glances.

“So you got some more film like this?” I asked.

“No-o, but watch here.”

Just then, the light blazed bright, fixed on the camera. Then clicked out. The screen showed only shadows of dark, now deeper as daylight faded.

“No visuals, but we got an audio recording.”

“Where was this filmed?” I asked.

“The train track heading south out of Dacus,” said Colin.

“Just the other side of the crossing, near the sawmill.”

“Pretty isolated there,” said Trini. “Just the little road that crosses the track, hardly even a two-lane.”

“What’s supposed to cause the light?”

“The guys said it was a switchman trying to warn the engineer that the switch is frozen, that he’s fixing to wreck,” Trini said in her breathless near-whisper.

“He keeps coming back because he was late that night, he was working on the switch and couldn’t repair it and he didn’t make it onto the track in time to warn the engineer. So it crashed.”

“When was this?” Melvin asked.

Colin shrugged and looked at the other two. “In the sixties sometime?”

“We haven’t had time to do the background research on it,” Quint said.

“But we did go stand in the spot, where these ties are thrown about,” Colin said.

Quint flipped to a still shot showing a jumble of old railroad ties strewn along the sides of the low embankment.

I snuck a glance at Melvin.

“We don’t know for sure if these were left over from the accident,” Quint said.

“But this is the spot where the dudes who made the tape told us to go. This is the spot where the light actually appears, where those other guys filmed it.”

“The ties looked burnt,” said Trini.

I didn’t ask if they knew what creosote looked like—or if they’d ever smelled charred wood. But from nothing more than the photo, I was sure I could tell the difference. The railroad company had been recently repairing sections of the track.

“What’s this audiotape?” Melvin asked.

I wasn’t certain why he was feigning interest: curiosity for the absurd? Melvin wasn’t one to string along the gullible just to be mean or make fun of them. The same did not apply to whichever good ol’ boys sent them in search of a haunted railroad, in a place that had never witnessed a train wreck, at least that I’d heard of. I’d certainly never heard of a lonely brakeman with an eternal flame. Somewhere in North Carolina, yes. Not here. Somebody was tweaking these kids—somebody besides Melvin.

Quint pulled a miniature digital gizmo from his backpack of tricks and held it aloft. As we sat in silence, he pushed a button with a dramatic flourish.

I recognized Colin’s voice. “Are you here? Can you hear us?” He sounded as if he were at a distance from the microphone.

Silence followed. Colin asked again, “Can you hear us? Are you here?”

Another silence. Quint held the recorder like a beacon lamp. The three listened, Trini’s eyes wide, watching Melvin for his reaction.

Then we heard it. A scratchy voice, like a pie tin scraping on metal. “Have you found it? Have you found it?” the voice pled.

On the tape, Quint’s voice said, “Did you hear anything?”

“I don’t know,” Trini whispered.

“Play it back and let’s see,” Colin said on tape.

“A spirit voice,” Colin interrupted the tape, matter-of-fact.

“I take it you couldn’t hear the voice when you were standing there?” Melvin asked.

“No.” All three chimed in.

“Not the words, really,” said Trini. “It was a total shock when we played it back.”

“There’s one more bit,” Colin said.

Quint hit the play button again.

“Tell us what happened,” Colin’s voice said, again at a distance.

“Get away! You’ll be killed!” the voice rasped.

The digital machine then went silent.

“We asked more questions, but that was the final reply,” Colin said.

“You called this what, an Electronic Voice Phenomenon?” asked Melvin.

“EVP,” Colin said with a nod.

“This is just a digital recorder, like a dictation machine?”

“Standard equipment these days for our kind of investigation,” Colin said. “Along with an EMF, a still camera, and video. I like to take Polaroids, too. Sometimes the old stuff works the best.”

Melvin stayed quiet, encouraging him to continue.

“Spirit voices can sometimes be captured on digital recorders or videotape. No one is sure why, but investigators often don’t hear anything during the site visit, only when the tape is replayed.”

“Sometimes you have to really listen to make it out, what with all the static,” Trini said.

“You’re saying you didn’t hear that voice when it spoke?”

All three shook their heads, more insistent this time.

“Not really,” Trini added. “We heard a noise, but we couldn’t make it out. But that’s what you do. Take it and listen to it until you can understand it.”

“Standard procedure,” said Colin. “We used the EMF—Electromagnetic Field Detector—to test the area. Ours isn’t very sophisticated, but we found a spike at one particular spot close to the ground. So we placed the recorder on the crosstie at that spot. Just like the guys who shot the video said, when we asked the question, we heard some faint rasping sound. So we played it back.”