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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 available in paperback and e-book. You can get your own copy here! Season 2, Beasts of the Field, is free to read until June 21st! Click here to read Beasts of the Field.
Thank you so much for your patience with this episode! Over the course of writing Murmurs in the Walls, we had several family emergencies pop up, but I managed to get all the other episodes out on time or no more than a few hours late. This week, however, between hosting family during the week, hosting friends on the weekend, and enduring the Chigger-pocalypse of 20251, I had to admit defeat. But here, at last, is the finale of Judith’s third mystery, Murmurs in the Walls!
← In Episode XI: The Poltergeist, Judith and Tim rushed to Brian’s aid.
“Gerald Murray?”
It wasn’t a question, really. Judith recognized the curve of the crown molding, incongruous in the stark room. She recognized the painting on the wall, a dark-haired woman with a translucent veil. She recognized the old man’s skin, flaky and wrinkled as deflated bread dough. When he opened his eyes, she recognized his knife’s-edge gaze, sagging with resentment and disdain.
And, even if she had harbored any doubt about the man’s identity, when she’d asked to talk to Gerald Murray the charge nurse had pointed an impatient finger at this room.
Last night as Judith had sat in an exhausted daze in the lobby of the Bayton County Medical Center Emergency Room, waiting for Kortney and Brian to be sent home, she had almost missed the crown molding that softened the room’s edges.
When she had grabbed Tim’s arm and gasped, “Crown molding!” he had been, to say the least, confused.
She had spent hours looking for hospitals in Lexington, where Gerald Murray had had his law practice. But apparently the bitter old lawyer with his secret criminal life wanted to die close to the woods and the mountains.
Judith took a few steps into the room, but, aside from fixing a thorny stare on her face, Gerald Murray did not acknowledge her.
“My name is Judith Temple. I’ve been investigating a cabin you used to own outside Queensburg.”
Closing his eyes, the old man turned his face toward the window, where the rich sunlight was threatened by towering rain clouds in the distance.
“Do you prefer to be addressed as Mr. Murray or Gerald?” Judith said, striding to the edge of the bed.
He didn’t answer, his eyelids resting shut, though twitching slightly.
“Since you don’t seem willing to express a preference, I’ll address you as Gerald. It has fewer syllables and is easier to say.” Grabbing a chair covered by a flaky plastic cushion, Judith pulled it closer to the bed. It squeaked across the floor, making a high pitched groan as she sat. “I don’t have much energy today, and I doubt that you do either, so I’ll be brief. I know that you used to use your Queensburg cabin to conduct illegal activities, and I know that several decades ago you murdered a young man named Michael Reed.”
Gerald’s eyes snapped open like firecrackers before he took control of himself once again, dropping disdain over his face like a curtain.
“I have not contacted the police yet,” Judith said. “I wanted to talk to you first.”
Gerald sucked in a breath, and the air rattled in his lungs, his skin tightening with effort. The scent of the room suddenly forced itself on Judith: the stale odor of unwashed skin, the harsh tang of chemicals, the stink of deterioration, of death.
“Not to be blunt, Gerald, but you won’t live long enough to face legal justice for his murder. You could, however, provide some closure to his family –”
“What kind of investigator?” Gerald’s voice scratched from his throat in a sharp rasp as though forced out in one breath from his failing lungs.
“I’m self-employed. I also work as a software developer –”
“What kind of –” he took a quick, shuddering breath, “self-employed investigator?”
Judith pressed her lips together and straightened her posture. “I’m a psychic detective and paranormal investigator. But –”
A wheezing bark of a laugh erupted from Gerald. Then, as though a giant hand had squeezed his chest, he started to cough. Spasms racked his body, seizing the sunken muscles of his chest, and his withered hand gripped the handle of the hospital bed as he flailed, struggling to straighten himself.
Judith jerked out of her chair. Bumbling and unsure, she took his arm and tried to leverage him into a more upright position, but his body was frail as a flower petal under her hands. Any touch seemed enough to shatter his brittle bones.
A machine started beeping, and moments later a nurse bustled into the room. She stabbed a button on the bed, which whirred and jerked into action, sitting Gerald at a more upright angle. Slowly, in waves of stertorous breathing, his coughing slowed.
“That better, Gerry?” she said, leaning down and hollering into his ear. “All better? Get some ice chips, now.”
The nurse turned on her heel and left with the same rigid efficiency with which she had entered, and, hands shaking, Judith sank back into her seat.
Rubbing her palms on her jeans, letting the texture of the fabric slide against her skin, Judith took a quiet breath. Should she have been yelling to make herself heard? He’d seemed to understand what she’d been saying. “You’re not hard of hearing, are you, Gerald?”
Gerald sharpened his gaze on her again. “You gonna say –” he gasped, every word requiring breath support he didn’t have in his shriveled lungs, “some spirits – told you I – killed somebody?”
“No, not spirits, technically,” Judith said. “It was a haunting, or place memory, left in your old cabin. But I really don’t need to go into the minutiae of paranormal investigation. I merely wanted to give you the opportunity to provide closure for yourself and the mother of Michael Reed. She’s currently living in –”
“You have nothing –” he wheezed. “Nothing – to back up these – ridiculous – unfounded claims – you’re making.”
“That’s partially true,” Judith said. “But the field of forensics has advanced in leaps and bounds since you killed Michael, and I can say with almost absolute certainty that whatever clean up you did at the time would not be sufficient to remove all forensic evidence that modern technology could trace back to you.”
His breathing short and shallow, Gerald kept his flinty eyes on Judith, but he said nothing.
“Law enforcement in small counties like this typically doesn’t have the resources of more populated areas,” Judith said, “but they also tend to have a lower crime rate. If they receive a tip or new evidence in a cold case, even one that is decades old, they will investigate it.”
Gerald released a noisy sigh, and his sunken body sank further into his pillow. “I ain’t got nothin’ worth blackmailin’ me for.”
Judith’s eyebrows drew together, and she cocked her head at him. Unless her memory was faulty, up to this point he’d been using impeccable grammar and pronouncing his g’s. Apparently he wasn’t above using the good-old-Kentucky-boy routine. “I highly doubt that, seeing as you were a successful lawyer with at least two homes and no family. But I’m not blackmailing you. Or, actually –” Judith paused, chewing on her lip. This was not the route she had envisioned this conversation taking. “I suppose I am blackmailing you, technically. But not for money. I will give you an ultimatum: Either you turn yourself in to the Bayton County Sheriff’s Office, or I will provide an anonymous tip that will lead law enforcement to your old cabin.”
Squeezing her hands together in her lap, Judith pressed her fingernails into her palms and watched Gerald’s expression.
The shield of iron resentment did not slip, but it didn’t tighten either, didn’t withdraw. He simply looked at her, and something that was not quite respect but close to it seeped into the set of his jaw.
“You probably would not have to leave this hospital,” Judith said. “If you were taken into custody, law enforcement would likely keep you here under supervision. Criminal suspects have a right to medical care, and, based on your current appearance, I doubt that you will be leaving this hospital under your own power.”
A raspy noise resembling a chuckle squeezed from Gerald’s throat. “You’re a blunt instrument.”
“If you’re alluding to my preference for direct and accurate communication over subtext or subterfuge, then yes.”
Gerald’s face didn’t change; the disdainful resentment that nestled in every fold of his skin didn’t lift. When going through this conversation in the shower earlier that morning, she had prepared an approach that combined an emotional appeal with a healthy amount of rational leverage. For whatever reason, she had expected to encounter a dying old man weighed down with guilt, and a quiet, hopeful part of her had predicted that he would deflate and confess the moment someone accused him of his crimes. But Gerald Murray was more bitter and less brittle than she’d foreseen. Now that the man himself was in front of her, Judith decided that a sympathetic reference to his short time left on earth or a tasteful mention of his immortal soul, to appeal to his Catholic schoolboy childhood, would fall flatter than pancake batter on a hot skillet.
Turning his face a fraction of an inch, his eyes swiveling to the painting of the veiled woman, Gerald let out a slow sigh that deflated his once-wide chest to a jumble of frail bones. His fragile shoulders lifted in what Judith could vaguely interpret as a shrug. “Call the police, then.”
Judith’s eyes flitted to the painting, then back to Gerald. “Because you – think I’m bluffing? Or because you want to turn yourself in?”
“And call a priest too – while you’re – at it.” Gerald shifted, his feathery form rustling the sheets with his small, weak movements.
“You want to make a confession?”
“Bedside confessions –” Gerald gasped, wheezing with effort, and thick, chest-deep mucous seemed to coat his voice. “Soften the jury.”
“I see.” Judith pulled out her phone. “Thank you for being honest, I suppose, about your lack of contrition.”
His wizened fingers gripping the handle of the bed, Gerald squirmed to raise himself higher. With a grunt, he aimed his piercing eyes again at Judith. “Blunt. Instrument.”
The Appalachian Mountains were older than the dinosaurs. They had watched single-celled microbes transform to little swimming creatures, then had observed those soft-bodied creatures develop hard shells that left impressions in the ocean floor when they eventually withered and died. The Appalachian Mountains had once been as tall as the Rockies, as tall as the Alps, but they were older now, their hard, towering shells giving way to the soft underbelly of ancient earth.
When she was young, the vastness of the mountains, and the vague knowledge of their former glory, had terrified Judith. Being a pinprick in time, a blip in the geologic history of the world, had made the child Judith cringe with the weight of insignificance. But now, with another vast stretch of reality always revealing itself before her, the enormity of the mountains and their long, long history didn’t trouble her anymore. There was more than the mountains, vast as they were, and there was more than her and her strange, unpredictable visions.
Between the summer-green thickness of the trees, Judith caught glimpses of the mountains rolling into the distance. Once the spring thunderstorms passed, the scorching sun would wither the leaves to a yellowed green by August, and then the other colors would begin to push in, swathing the mountains and valleys in warm colors just as a chill crept into the autumn evenings.
Then, so quickly she wasn’t sure quite how her mind had traveled there, Judith’s thoughts strayed to Michael Reed’s mother, the cantankerous, slippery Georgia Jean, causing drama in the Spring Gulch Assisted Living Center. What would it do for her, to know with certainty what had happened to her son, to know that her own choices and example had played a role in his death? Would that knowledge weigh her down, destroy her? Would it change her life at all?
But that was above Judith’s paygrade. It was not for her to decide how Georgia Jean would take the knowledge of her son’s death. Judith had done what she could, had done what needed to be done, regardless of the outcomes that scattered outside of her control.
Thick mountain roads thinned to farmland, then to pockets of mobile homes. Then, at last, to a driveway that shot off the main thoroughfare, leading back to a little house with fading red paint.
A black SUV with McFerrin County Sheriff’s Department printed on the side sat in front of Kortney’s house. Kortney, her face still puffy and bruised, with bandages clinging to her forehead and chin, sat on the top step of the tiny porch, a glass of iced tea in her hand. In the overgrown yard, Tim stood at one edge of the woods, his arm drawn back and his hand clutching a football. He let it go in a long, spinning arc, and it soared like a corkscrew straight to Brian, whose small hands fumbled it. As it set of on an erratic bounce, Brian scampered after it, his body seeming to finally catch up with his mind while he darted off on his quest.
Tim raised his arm in a wave as she pulled into the yard, a smile breaking over his face, and Judith’s cheeks warmed. She would get used to it, surely. She wouldn’t always turn a burning strawberry red every time he looked at her.
A few figures gathered at the outskirts of Kortney’s property, their clothing and hairstyles spanning decades. She recognized most of them, and they hovered at the edge of the property, their posture not pressing and pleading as before but merely present, as though bidding her goodbye. Ernest Berry was not among them.
Judith suspected that neither she nor anyone else would be seeing Ernest Berry again.
She didn’t for a moment believe that Ernest had lacked bravery. He had registered for the draft as soon as he was able, had been brimming with reckless, youthful courage to serve his country, but his life had been cut short before he ever had the chance to leave Bayton County. It was not strength or bravery he’d lacked, but merely the understanding of it.
At least, that was Judith’s conjecture. There was no hard-line set of data she had found that could perfectly make sense of the movement of souls from one state to another. More data points might someday provide a clearer answer, but she had a growing suspicion that more data would also create more questions, more mystery.
Judith opened her car door to step into the yard just as the football thunked against her tire. Brian darted up a moment later and snatched it up in his arms. She sat in the car for a moment, her feet on the swaying grass, and Brian shifted on his feet in front of her, his eyes dropping to the ground.
“Sheriff Tim came to check on me,” he said at last. “And my mom.”
“How are you and your mom doing?”
Brian was silent for a few moments, squirming out from under the question. “He’s showin’ me how to throw a football. My mom can kinda throw one, but it doesn’t spin good. Are you good at throwin’ footballs?”
Standing up, Judith closed her car door and moved with Brian across the grass toward Tim. “Based on my general lack of hand-eye coordination, I highly doubt it.”
“Can you catch one?”
“Possibly, if I were in exactly the right place and the angle were ideal –”
“Catch!” Brian ran off at full speed.
“I was speaking theoretically!”
But Brian had already turned and lobbed the football in a decidedly-less-than-ideal arc toward her general location.
Judith started forward, hands outstretched, but the football tumbled to the ground centimeters from her fingers, then bounced at an illogical angle, thumping her in the chest before catapulting off in another direction, forcing her to scurry after it with the tattered shreds of her dignity. By the time she scooped up the errant ball, Tim was laughing, taking far too much enjoyment in the situation, and Brian was waving his arms in the air, gesturing for her to throw him the ball.
Grimacing, Judith hurled the ball toward Brian with a graceless arc that tumbled on the wrong axis and fell far short of where Brian stood. Nevertheless, the little boy rushed after it with enthusiasm, and Judith escaped toward Kortney, excusing herself from the game.
“You want some iced tea?” Kortney said, her voice hesitant, as Judith approached and stood beside the small concrete stoop.
“No, thank you.” Judith wasn’t quite sure what to do with her hands, so she crossed her arms across her chest to keep them occupied. “I merely came to check in. And to meet up with Tim – with Sheriff Morrissey.”
Kortney cleared her throat and stared at the sweat dripping down the sides of her chilled glass. “I really can’t thank y’all enough for – for last night.”
Judith uncrossed her arms and alternated placing her weight on each foot, her fingernails digging into her palms. “We’re glad you’re both unharmed. Well, relatively speaking –” She broke off, her eyes jumping to Kortney’s face, bruised purple-blue and punctuated by bandages.
“You took a bit of a knock too.”
Judith reached up to the bandage, small in comparison to Kortney’s, that covered the thin gash beside her eye, where the vase had shattered against her head. “I’ve had worse.”
“I don’t know what would have happened if you two –” Kortney faltered, her voice taking on the shaky quality of imminent tears, and an urge lying somewhere between concern and panic spurred words into Judith’s head.
“My colleague, Bob Theodorakis, would like to do more research on Brian,” she said, throwing out the change of topic like a lifeline.
“Who?” Kortney sniffed, swallowing the wetness in her voice.
“He’s a professor and paranormal investigator. He primarily focuses on parapsychological research.”
Kortney’s eyes were wide and wary.
“I spoke to him this morning about Brian’s case, and he is interested in coming to meet Brian. He said it’s very unusual for RSPK cases to manifest as strongly as Brian’s, and he would like to see if Brian would be open to participating in some of his research.”
Bob might just be able to make it happen, too. When she’d called him earlier, another vision of Bob had pressed into Judith’s brain, revealing a man who was healing. A shriveled and emaciated version of the man she’d known in her student days, but alive and overflowing with plans, for now.
Alive, for now.
“I don’t know.” Kortney frowned at her glass as Brian whooped and yelled, watching Tim leap up to catch a too-high throw. “I just don’t know. I haven’t even thought past today. And Brian’s social worker is really pushin’ for him to go to therapy, which I think would be good if we can get him in, and maybe good for me to look into myself –”
“Of course,” Judith said, squeezing her hands tighter and fighting down her pressing desire to escape back to her car. “It’s merely an option, as most RSPK cases last only a few months. Dr. Theodorakis is an expert in the field.”
Kortney’s thumb moved up and down on the wet glass, carving a path in the beaded condensation. “Maybe it’d be okay, then.”
The late-spring sunshine seeped down through the canopy of trees, soaking into the humidity in the air and cocooning the world in hazy warmth as Judith stood beside Kortney, unsure where to next steer the conversation. Kortney’s eyes roved to Brian as he laughed and chased a football as though the previous night had never happened, and she showed no signs of taking the reins of conversation.
“I’ll be visiting McFerrin county fairly regularly,” Judith blurted into the quiet. “Brian appeared to enjoy interacting with my dog Orwell when I brought him along, and McFerrin isn’t far from here. I could bring him to visit sometimes, if you and Brian would like that.”
Faint as a whisper, the hint of a smile crossed Kortney’s face. “Brian would love that.”
“Tim would be happy to come along too.” Really, it had been as much Tim’s idea as Judith’s, making time to visit Brian. The night before, while the two of them had sat in the emergency room lobby – holding hands, which Judith was not accustomed to in a public setting but suspected she would get used to over time – a hollowness had crept into Tim’s eyes as he stared at the floor. With a pang in her forehead, a vision had bloomed in Judith’s mind.
Brian’s gaze landing on Tim with terror.
The thunk of the knife block tipping onto the counter.
Blades swishing from their places, dagger tips turned toward him.
A patter of piercing thuds as they sliced into the wall the moment after he’d ducked.
“I don’t think that kid’s ever met a man he felt safe around,” Tim had said, his voice barely audible in the chatter of the lobby.
And Judith had known somehow, without a vision, without an explicit statement, that Tim’s own father, who had died so suddenly when Tim was still growing into manhood, was looming large in his mind.
“Brian would love to keep in touch with you,” Kortney said, tugging Judith’s thoughts back to the present. “Both of you.”
“Hey.” Coming up alongside them, Tim put his arm around Judith – so quick, so casual that she felt silly when her face started burning. “You about ready?”
“You gonna come back soon?” Brian darted up to Judith as if from nowhere, a healthy pink flush in his cheeks.
“Miss Judith said she can bring her dog sometime,” Kortney said with a whisp of a smile.
“Really?” The enthusiastic brightness of Brian’s eyes as he looked back and forth between Tim and Judith, after all he’d been through the night before, for some reason made Judith’s throat tighten.
“Orwell enjoys interacting with children,” she said, her voice coming out flat as she forced it through her constricted throat.
With a force that knocked her back a few inches, Brian launched himself into her and embraced her in a tight, sudden squeeze. Then, more hesitantly, he shook Tim’s hand before retreating to the steps and sitting close beside his mother.
As Tim walked Judith back to her car, his arm moved down to hold her hand. “Where to?”
“You’re supposed to go back to the office, aren’t you?”
“I should check in, yeah. Do a little bit of paperwork, see how Duffy’s getting along. It’s been a pretty quiet day. Not a lot of calls. Wanna come?”
“To your office?”
“Well, at first, sure. It doesn’t have to be the final destination. The ice cream shop is way too close to my office for my own good. And there’s the Swingin’ Bridge,” he said with a smirk.
“I’m curious how you got the impression that I enjoyed the Swinging Bridge.”
“Swingin’ Bridge. No final g.”
“My general stance is to uphold proper grammar and pronunciation whenever possible,” Judith said.
“The final g makes it incorrect, though.” Tim opened her car door, then shut it behind her as she slid into the driver’s seat. “There’s gotta be some wiggle room for local parlance, right?”
“For regional dialects, perhaps. That’s a fair point.”
Before she had time to assess what he was doing, Tim leaned through the open car window and brushed a quick kiss across Judith’s cheek. “See you in a bit.”
He tapped the hood of her car as he passed around her car toward his own, and Judith took a deep breath to clear away the redness she was sure had flushed her face.
Casual public displays of affection were something she was going to have to get used to, it seemed. She likely just needed more practice. Exposure therapy, of a sort.
She suspected there was a good chance she would enjoy the process.
Starting up her car, Judith waved a quick goodbye to Brian and Kortney, who sat scrunched up together on the steps, Kortney’s arm around her son and his head on her shoulder. Then she eased into motion, navigating through the opaque figures who lined the driveway, their hands raised in goodbye. In the golden warmth of the near-summer sun, Judith turned onto the winding old country highway toward McFerrin, and behind her in the rearview mirror, Tim’s SUV rumbled down the old driveway, kicking up dust that shimmered in the light, mingling with the figures that only she could see.
Thank you so much for sticking through the ups and downs of Murmurs in the Walls and for being patient with this week’s final episode! If you enjoyed it, please let me know with a like, comment, or restack!
→ Next week we’ll finish out the series with a brief behind-the-scenes look at Murmurs in the Walls. If you have any questions about the story or the inspiration behind it, feel free to let me know in the comments!
→ Murmurs in the Walls: Behind the Scenes
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Thank you again so much for reading!
My daughter and I went wild blackberry picking, which was as delightful as it sounds until we came home with 100+ chigger bites each. We both spent the rest of the weekend in a haze of anti-itch cream and antihistamines. It turns out that it’s very difficult to write when I’m squirming with itchiness!
And then it turned out that the berries were full of fruit fly larvae. Protein, I guess?
Finale?? I can read it now? ^0^
Killed it, and stuck the landing. Excellent.