Murmurs in the Walls: The Call
Episode I
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Murmurs in the Walls is a serial paranormal mystery novella featuring Judith Temple, psychic detective. This is Season 3 of Case Files of a Psychic Detective.
While Murmurs in the Walls can be read as a standalone story, you may appreciate the characters and their interactions more if you are familiar with Judith’s previous adventures, Down in the Holler and Beasts of the Field.
Season 1, Down in the Holler, is now behind a paywall but will soon be available in paperback and e-book. Season 2, Beasts of the Field, is currently free to read! Click here to read Beasts of the Field.
Judith Temple had one reason for renting a coworking space in downtown Lexington: the mental health benefits of having distinct home and work locations. She didn’t rent a space so that she could interact with other humans. She didn’t do it for the office ambiance, which, with its floor-to-ceiling windows and gaudy orange couch, was trying too hard to appeal to the young tech crowd. And she certainly didn’t do it to have vaguely familiar fellow software developers prying into her personal life.
“Who was your visitor?” The pink-and-blue-haired woman across the table leaned toward Judith, lowering her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Y’all go out for coffee or something?”
Catching herself hunched over her laptop, Judith took the interruption as an opportunity to straighten her shoulders. “Yes.”
“He’s cute,” the woman said, repositioning the bangles on her wrist with a jangling shake. “Are you two, like, a thing?”
Slang was not Judith’s forte, but even she knew what the over-decorated young woman meant by a thing. And she had no interest in dropping gossipy tidbits for someone whose name she didn’t know and who had never exchanged a word with her beyond the basic pleasantries. “That’s a very ambiguous term.”
“Are y’all, like, benching, or you’ve got, like, a sneaky link thing going on?”
Judith stared at the woman, trying to ascertain if she was having a stroke or merely speaking in some type of obscure code.
“You know,” the woman said, undeterred, “are you two, like, just casual?”
Judith noted with irritation that her heart rate had increased and her skin was warmer than it had been thirty seconds ago. She could rule out heat exhaustion, dehydration, and hyperthyroidism as potential causes. Toxic shock syndrome was possible, though unlikely. The most likely cause, though she was loath to admit it to herself, was simply that the conversation was affecting her emotions more than the average verbal exchange. “He’s a friend,” she said, turning back to her laptop.
“Oh.” The pitch of the young woman’s voice rose from a low whisper to a peppy squeak. “So is he, like, available?”
Judith’s tongue stuck in her throat when she tried to swallow, and her chest squeezed as though clamped by a giant, clenching hand.
Snippets of conversation rolled through her, vivid as if she were living them again.
“Would you be open to it?” Coffee cup in hand, Tim walked more slowly than he usually did with his long-legged stride, but Judith still had to quicken her pace as they made their way along the intricate brickwork and tall, swaying grasses of Lexington’s downtown walking trails.
She hesitated, her heartbeat loud and unruly. “What would it entail?”
Tim shrugged. “People do dinner together all the time. I’m a pretty decent cook; when you come down to McFerrin sometime, I can make some food.” He smirked in the way he always did before saying or doing something that launched Judith into a puzzling cocktail of exasperation and amusement. “I’ll make something with sauce, because that’s what movies tell you to do, and, naturally, at some point it will splatter all over my shirt. Of course, then, I’ll have no choice but to take off my shirt, and it will take me a little bit to find a new one. So I’ll have to walk around shirtless for a minute, as is tradition –”
Judith wasn’t naturally prone to bursts of hilarity, but a sound, which only her pride prevented her from acknowledging as a giggle, escaped her. Tim look inordinately pleased with himself –
“He’s not married, is he?” The young woman’s voice broke into Judith’s memories. “I didn’t see a wedding ring, but you never know –”
“He – No, he’s not married.” A slight tremor in her hands, Judith reached for her headphones, the universal sign of being unavailable for further conversation.
But apparently it was a code with which her conversational partner was unfamiliar.
“Do you think I could have his number?”
Judith froze, still clutching her headphones. The other woman leaned her elbows on the table, her bright white teeth bared in an expectant, nonchalant smile.
“He –” Her skin flushing like her laptop’s overheated CPU, Judith scrambled through the recesses of her suddenly nonfunctioning brain to find a plausible explanation for why there was nothing on earth or in Hell that would induce her to give Tim’s phone number to this predatory, pink-and-blue-haired, slang-spewing woman. “He doesn’t have a phone.”
“Can I have some time to think about it?”
It wasn’t an unreasonable request. Disrupting a well-functioning friendship to embark on a risky, untested romantic relationship wasn’t something to be taken lightly. But at the memory of her nervous response to Tim’s invitation, Judith had the sudden, irrational urge to stop her car and curl up in a ditch on the side of the road. But instead she kept driving, plodding along the familiar road from downtown Lexington to her home, nestled just between the outskirts of historic old town and the swelling suburbs.
Judith wasn’t adept at reading facial expressions, but she could interpret Tim’s micro expressions better than most other people’s. Other than a twinge of disappointment, she hadn’t detected any sadness or anger or even frustration in his face. He’d seemed unperturbed. Confident, even. How did he go through life untroubled by things that sent her spiraling into confused emotional crises?
Why couldn’t things be simple for her, like they were for other people? Constance hadn’t wrung her hands in worry over starting a relationship with Steve. As far as Judith could tell, from the moment their lives had collided in college, they had merged immediately into a single unit and set off for a shared life. Judith’s few close friends had either stumbled into their future partners by random chance or gone through a slurry of painful online dating experiences before, like a random lightning strike, suddenly finding someone. They all seemed to “just know” that they were compatible with their spouse. But Judith couldn’t “just know” anything. Weren’t there metrics for these situations? Spreadsheets, algorithms? Surely she wasn’t the only numerically-minded person to ever struggle with romantic decision-making.
As Judith slowed behind a line of cars at a red light, a blazing rod of pain shot from her temple through the back of her head, and with a gasp she squeezed one eye shut.
Unexpected migraines, sudden piercing headaches – since her car accident the previous autumn she’d been living in dread of their unpredictable appearances. They’d recently eased in intensity, but they still cropped up without warning, often when she was trying to do a psychic reading or was picking up an impression or premonition.
Judith had always been healthy, with no health problems more serious than the occasional sinus infection or minor injury, but after her most recent case with the McFerrin Sheriff’s Department, things had changed.
She’d survived, barely. Broken and ragged, but alive. She’d healed well, though her body would forever after bear the scars of knife wounds, of shattered glass. She was a little more careful now with her ribs, a little more hesitant to drive after dark. She still had the disruptive headaches, and she couldn’t focus on a task with the same obsessive energy that she’d always had available to her. Now, if she tried to concentrate when she was tired or had been working for too long, she wound up in bed for the rest of the day with a crushing ache in her skull. But she was managing. She was fine.
As she waited behind an impatient line of homeward-bound commuters, her car’s dashboard lit up with an incoming call.
Bob Theodorakis
A faint tingle of excitement broke through Judith’s anxious, spinning thoughts. Bob wasn’t one to call just to chat. He only called with a purpose, and that purpose was usually a case.
“Hello?”
“Judy!” came Bob’s boisterous voice over the car’s speakers.
Judith, she insisted in the confines of her mind. Bob knew that she went by her full first name. But her corrections had been ignored so many times that even she, stubborn as she was, had eventually given up. Once Bob mentally connected a face to a name, it was immutable.
“How’s it going?” Bob continued. “You still in Lexington? Doing your computer stuff?”
“That’s correct.”
“Any gigs on the side?”
“I regularly do private readings, yes,” she said, “and I’ve worked two cases with the McFerrin County Sheriff’s Department.”
“Murder cases?”
“Yes.” Judith realized that one of her hands had strayed to the crooked scar that jutted out slightly from the soft, sensitive flesh between her neck and shoulder, and she pushed away a shiver. Most psychics didn’t wind up as collateral damage when they consulted on murder cases, but she had almost been silenced permanently. Twice. She wasn’t eager to jump back into murder investigations just now.
“Well, if you’re available,” Bob said, skimming past the mention of murder, “I got a case that looks promising. Not too far from where you are. Paranormal investigation. You done any of that recently?”
“Only the ones I’ve consulted on with you. I’ve never led an investigation.”
“Oh, you’ll be fine. Knowing you, you’ll be even more thorough than I would. You’ll wanna hold off on the psychic stuff at first, though, until you’ve talked with the owner and gotten some baseline data on the house.”
“Bob,” Judith cut in, “the impressions aren’t always under my control.”
“Well, sure, sure, but just focus on the data at first. You’re good at that. Talk to the owner, hear what she’s been experiencing, take a tour of the house, the whole shebang. I can drop off an EMF meter for you to borrow. Then, once you get a baseline, you can do your psychic readings and go from there.”
“Why aren’t you working this one? I’d feel more comfortable just consulting with you as a psychic.”
“Well –” Bob paused, taking a noisy inhale.
A fiery spasm flared behind Judith’s eyes, and she clenched her teeth in pain as an image of Bob fluttered into her mind.
Bob in a blue gown, tied at the waist and shoulder, sitting in a bright, sterile room while a white-coated man with a bright, sterile face gestures at a scan.
A quick incision, and then there is a lump below his collarbone, providing easier access to his veins.
Liquid flooding his body, eating away at the greedy, invasive cells. Shriveling him until he is an old man, a husk.
Sore mouth, heaving stomach, exhaustion, the impenetrable white fog like cotton muffling his thoughts.
Bob in a blue gown, tied at the waist and shoulder, now hanging loosely over his gaunt, atrophied frame.
Judith’s awareness of the world came back to her in a chaotic whirl of honking car horns and an empty lane ahead of her. Pressing on the gas, she hurried through the intersection.
“I’m real busy these next few weeks,” Bob said, and for the first time Judith noticed that his voice was thinner, raspier. “It’s just not gonna work with my schedule.”
Pulling onto a shady residential street, Judith stopped her car. Bob was loud, pushy, booming, a bull in a china shop. He wasn’t fragile, sickly. And yet she’d just seen him, withered to a hairless, skeletal wraith of the man she remembered.
“I should be free,” she said, her breath coming hard. “You said something about the owner. Is this for someone’s home?”
“Yeah, yeah. Owner’s reported a lot of the usual stuff: cold spots, weird feelings in certain rooms, lights flickering, stuff not being where she left it, things moving on their own, seeing a man and then he disappears, that kind of thing.”
“Don’t tell me any more than that, please,” Judith said. “I don’t want to clutter my thoughts with preconceptions.”
Over her car’s speakers, Bob chuckled. “Yeah, you’ll be great. I always thought you could be an ace investigator if you let yourself try.”
“I’d be more willing to try if my psychic impressions were less intrusive. They’re not very helpful, considering that the goal of a paranormal investigator is to be objective.”
“That does complicate things,” Bob said. “Just remember: natural explanations first. People who’re hell bent on seeing ghosts and finding weird stuff going on in their house can imagine a haunting out of anything.”
“Where is the house?” If it was within easy driving distance, Orwell could come along for the day. The weather forecast was the ideal early-spring blend of cool breezes and warm sunshine, so even if he had to stay in the car for a little while with the windows rolled down, he would be comfortable and content to curl up and take a nap.
“Southeast from you, kinda out in the middle of nowhere. Tiny town out in Bayton County.”
Judith pressed her lips together. Bayton County – smashed up right next to McFerrin County, where there was a sheriff who’d just asked her a question she didn’t know how to answer.
But it was fine. She was fine. She could handle this.
“I–I can do it,” Judith said, pulling up her phone calendar. “I’ll take the case.”
Thank you so much for stopping by the read Murmurs in the Walls! If you enjoyed this episode, please let me know with a like, comment, or restack!
→ Keep reading! Episode II: The Tour
The paragraph with Judith trying to figure out how to explain why she didn't want to give out Tim's phone number to Pink and Blue Lady was just brilliant, and hilarious. And man, the scene with Bob. I don't remember him showing up before, but I feel like I know him now already, and I'm sorry for him. This is a fantastic opening.
I love that she didn't bring up Bob's cancer. For someone who struggles with emotions, she is learning and using empathy, which is such great character growth. Fantastic first episode! I can't wait for more.