Murmurs in the Walls: The Intervention
Episode VIII
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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 currently free to read! Click here to read Beasts of the Field.
← In Episode VII: The Meeting, Judith attended a meeting at Brian’s school, intent on explaining that unintentional psychokinesis is not grounds for suspension.
The late afternoon sunshine seemed less glaring and more golden by the time Judith said goodbye to Tim and hung up the phone. As she bounced and rumbled down Kortney’s unpaved driveway and pulled up outside the little red house, her heart rate was back to normal, and her breaths came easily again. She had even laughed once or twice during their conversation, though she couldn’t remember that Tim had said anything particularly funny. They’d just talked.
Ernest Berry, with his overalls and his long, sorrowful young face, appeared at a respectful distance from her car. He clutched his cap in his work-worn hands, his mannerisms untouched by decades of lingering at the place of his birth and death.
Judith stepped out of her car, but Ernest hesitated beside the tree where he stood.
“You have a minute, ma’am?” he said.
“I have until Kortney gets here.” Judith closed the car door and leaned against it as Ernest approached with loping steps. With a deep breath of spring dampness, the musk of shady undergrowth, and the fresh tang of new flowers, Judith managed a smile for Ernest. Though he’d been dead for more than eighty years, Ernest still clung to a boy’s nervousness in talking to women, and one of Judith’s goals was to be more aware of how her facial expressions came across to other people. She wasn’t about to go through her day with a pasted, bare-toothed grin, but she was gradually learning that a small smile could go a long way toward making her appear more approachable, especially to shy, self-conscious people like Ernest. “What did you want to talk about?”
When Kortney’s car pulled up alongside Judith’s, Ernest vanished. But his face had been brighter, his shoulders less stooped. He’d lingered here in this place for so long, far longer than Autumn Hanson, the subject of Judith’s first cold case investigation in McFerrin County. But perhaps Ernest’s quiet, halting conversations with Judith were bringing him a little closer to letting go of whatever it was that he was still clinging to. She could wish that for him, at least.
“Everythin’ okay?” Kortney said as she climbed from her car.
“I’m –” Judith paused, struggling to think of a suitable half-truth. “Just getting some air.”
Kortney closed her car door. Her eyes were tinged with red, Judith noted, and her cheeks were splotchy. She sniffed, a slight tremor in her voice as she said, “I wasn’t sure if you were still plannin’ on comin’ here after the meetin’.”
“I don’t cancel plans without appropriate warning,” Judith said.
“I just mean – the principal –” Kortney clenched her mouth, cutting off the quivering in her chin. “Thanks for stickin’ up for Brian like that.”
“In my opinion, Mr. Griffin’s worldview is altogether too narrow, and I don’t find his personality appealing in the slightest.”
“Me neither.” Kortney led the way to the door and stepped inside, holding the creaky screen door open for Judith.
With a belated glance at the cars parked outside the house, Judith caught sight of a rusty brown sedan she hadn’t bothered to notice before.
Tucker, Kortney’s boyfriend.
With a frown creasing her face, Judith followed Kortney inside.
In the small living room just inside the front door, Tucker sat splayed in an armchair, scrolling on his phone.
“Brian doin’ okay?” Kortney said.
Tucker shrugged without looking up. “Ain’t hardly seen him.”
A faint shadow of consternation dashed across Kortney’s face, but she kept moving, hanging up her purse and heading for the kitchen. “You want anythin’?” she said over her shoulder to Judith. “Water? Tea?”
“I’ll take a beer,” Tucker called from the living room.
“No, thank you.” Judith glanced down the hallway toward Brian’s room as a small figure came barreling out of the doorway toward them. “I’ll just talk with Brian for a few minutes and then be on my way.”
“Mom!” Brian hurled himself into his mother with a force that nearly knocked Kortney from her feet.
“Hon, you gotta stop that,” Kortney said, exasperation snapping into her tone. “You’re gettin’ big; you can’t be runnin’ into me like that.”
“I got a new model ship,” Brian said, bounding over to Judith with a hug that was only slightly less painfully enthusiastic. Yet as he thudded into her, pinning one of her arms in place with a too-tight, high-speed embrace, she couldn’t find it in herself to be irritated. “It’s a pirate ship, and it has a jolly roger and everything.”
“Is this a historically accurate model?” Judith said.
“Some pirates would fly some other country’s flag when they saw a ship, and they wouldn’t hoist the jolly roger until it was too late for the ship to escape.”
“Well, pirates were criminals. That seems like an appropriately criminal tactic.”
“Calico Jack had two girl pirates on his ship.”
“I suppose that could be interpreted as progressive.”
“What did you wanna talk to Brian about?” Kortney cut in.
Pushing aside the topic of pirate gender roles, an idea to which previously she hadn’t given much thought, Judith indicated the chair beside her, and Brian clambered up.
“I consulted with a colleague,” she said. “He’s not able to be here himself, but –”
“Where’s that beer?” came Tucker’s voice from the living room.
Her movements suddenly hurried, Kortney snatched one from the fridge and scampered back into the other room. The smile dropped from Brian’s face, and his posture withered.
“My colleague provided me with a series of techniques which can be used to decrease RSPK,” Judith said, raising her voice over the coarse rumble of Tucker’s conversation in the living room. “It is unlikely that these techniques will cause the RSPK to cease immediately and completely, but –”
At the edge of her vision, Judith caught movement. Then a thud and shattering startled the words from her mouth, and Brian jumped in his seat. Judith stood, craning her neck to see the floor on the other side of the table.
The shards of a ceramic coffee mug lay in a pile of wreckage on the kitchen floor, and tiny, sharp pieces clung like dust to the wall where it had struck.
His hands clutching the seat of his chair, Brian’s shoulders sank further down.
In a breathless rush, Kortney ran into the room. “What happened? What was it?”
Judith pointed to the mess on the floor. “A coffee mug.”
Kortney’s eyes flitted to the cabinet from which the mug had flown, then to the wreckage, then to Brian, curled in his seat with his gaze on the floor. She moved forward, laying her hand on his unkempt hair. “It’s okay, honey,” she said, but her face was tight as she reached for a dustpan and broom.
“I was telling Brian that my colleague – he’s the man who referred you to me, as he was unable to look into this case himself - has worked on many RSPK cases and recommended several techniques that will help reduce symptoms over time. The phenomena won’t instantly go away, but with time and practice, the RSPK will disappear completely.”
“Was it just, like, schedulin’?” Kortney said as she emptied the dustpan into the trash bin. “Is that why he couldn’t be here?”
Judith hesitated. Images of Bob as she knew him – robust, big-voiced, too loud, too opinionated, and yet endearing in the way he barreled through life – flooded into her mind, juxtaposed with the frail man in a hospital gown she’d seen in her vision of him. He still hadn’t told her about his illness, had made no reference to it whatsoever. She wasn’t supposed to know. “I think scheduling may have had something to do with it. He was unavailable to travel. But he recommended some self-regulation techniques for Brian, particularly calm breathing and grounding. These will help counterbalance the feelings of stress which exacerbate RSPK. Now, Brian,” Judith said, turning to the boy, who slowly raised his eyes from his lap. “I want you to sit straight in your chair in a neutral, comfortable position. Close your eyes and take a deep breath in through your nose. Let your lungs fill up with air and expand your chest. Yes, like that. Then slowly blow the air out of your mouth, counting to seven as you do. Breath in for four counts and out for seven. Now, again.”
Brian followed Judith’s directions, though his counting was often quite faster than Judith’s as he blew out impatient breaths. Kortney watched, her head cocked, as the chatter of the television blared from the living room.
“Practice that every night,” Judith said, “and use it throughout the day whenever you notice yourself feeling angry, frustrated, or sad.”
“Is this all he has to do?” Kortney said.
“I also have grounding techniques which are designed to help in high-intensity moments,” Judith said, “using physical movement and engagement of the senses to disrupt stress. But the only actual cure for RSPK is time. It will diminish and eventually disappear as Brian grows up. Most RSPK cases last for months, not years. In the meantime, deep breathing and grounding techniques can mitigate symptoms. It’s likely that Brian won’t require any more in-person follow-ups from me, but I’ll give you my phone number and put you on Emergency Bypass so that you or Brian can get a hold of me quickly if the RSPK flares up. Otherwise, I’ll check in with both of you over the phone occasionally. Now, Brian, for this technique, I need you to look around yourself and notice five things you can see.”
“You,” Brian said, holding up one finger. “And the table and my mom and my shoes and that spider on the wall.”
“Now four things you can touch.”
“Like, that I’m touching right now?”
“Yes.”
“The chair and my shirt and my jeans and –” Brian paused, a glint sneaking into his eyes. “And my underwear.”
“Yes, it’s normal to feel your underwear on your skin,” Judith said.
“Brian Leroy Pickens.” Kortney rolled her eyes as she poured a glass of water.
Judith made eye contact with Brian, drawing his attention back to the task at hand. “Now three things you can hear.”
The sun was a buttery egg yolk floating in a sea of purple by the time Judith returned to Lexington and pulled into the parking lot of Mi Casa. The lot was nearly full, packed with the cars of patrons craving free tortilla chips and four-dollar margaritas.
Judith frowned at the coffee stain splattered down the lapel of her blazer, splashed there by a bumpy stretch of highway. She always kept a stash of just-in-case clothes in a duffel bag in the trunk of her car, but, if she recalled correctly, that stash was rather depleted at the moment.
Stepping out of her car, Judith strode to her trunk, opened it, and dug through the duffel bag, where she found exactly one item of clothing that could replace her coffee-stained jacket while still being seasonally appropriate for the cool spring evening. Judith held up the tan cowl-neck sweater, a hand-me-down from Constance, with its purposeless excess of fabric at the neckline. Because “fashion” made no logical sense to Judith without some type of metric to put it in context, she had spent a not insignificant amount of time researching the intersection of body type and clothing styles to determine why some clothes made her look well-dressed and put-together, while others made her look like a curveless teenager who had raided her mother’s closet. In her case, bulky fabrics and excessive decorative details were the culprits. She could handle tailored business wear as well as anyone, but a chunky sweater with an enormous, billowing neckline was exactly calculated to make her look like a walking box with stick legs. But she had no other options, aside from drinking margaritas in a stained blazer or a shirt that was too thin to withstand Mi Casa’s enthusiastic air conditioning.
With a resigned frown, Judith took the sweater back into the front seat of her car to change.
“Is that my sweater? You’re finally wearing it!” Constance had finagled a cramped table for two in spite of the Friday night four-dollar margarita rush, and her bright pink slushie of a margarita was already half gone, along with a sizeable portion of the tortilla chips and salsa. A second margarita – simple, standard, on-the-rocks – sat by the empty seat. “I ordered for you, since they’re so busy. I figured the waitress might not make it back around to us. But I’ll have to flag her down at some point, because I’m gonna need another one of these.”
“You’re not driving home, correct?”
“Not now that you’re here,” Constance said, taking another sip. “I left as soon as Steve started the bedtime routine. He can get the boys down just fine, but I can’t be there. I can hear all the splashing and naval battling in the bathtub, and all I can think about is the mess I’m going to have to clean up later. And Steve always somehow gets them absurdly wound up when he does bedtime. If I’m there, they spend the next two hours coming out of their rooms asking for water or another story or snuggles. It’s like whack-a-mole. But if it’s just them and Steve, he dumps them in bed, and they fall right asleep for him. But anyway.” Constance leaned her chin on her hands and aimed a bright smile at Judith. “How was your day?”
“I was kicked out of an elementary school suspension meeting and escorted off school property by a security guard.”
“Did you bring donuts?”
“And kolaches and coffee.”
“Hm.” Constance frowned and reached for another chip. “Was the principal a man or a woman?”
“A man.”
“The Don’t interrupt me type?”
“He used those exact words,” Judith said.
“Ah. Did you call me afterward? Sorry, we were at the zoo, and Matty decided to go exploring when my back was turned.”
“Presumably you found him?”
“He was trying to climb over the wall to the giant tortoise enclosure, and Sean thought that the best way to handle it would be to full-speed tackle his little brother off the wall.”
“I’m so thankful the worst Gabriel ever did was throw snowballs at us,” Judith said.
“Multiple boys is no joke.” With a wink, Constance pushed the untouched margarita closer to Judith, then leaned back in her seat. “So who was your second call?”
Judith paused mid-sip. “Second call?”
“Who did you call when I didn’t answer? Who was your go-to?”
“Oh.” Judith kept her eyes on her margarita. “Well, I had planned to meet with my clients after the meeting, so I drove toward their house.”
“But you called somebody else on the way, right? Who was it? You don’t call mom or dad when you’re upset, and Gabriel’s always busy.”
“The case is effectively closed now, aside from some follow-up phone calls.”
“Was it Tim?”
“That’s not relevant –”
“It was Tim!” With sudden alacrity, Constance flagged down a passing waitress and gestured to her nearly-empty margarita. “Could I get another one of these, please?”
“I may reach out to some of my parapsychology research contacts in the near future and inquire about assisting in RSPK field research,” Judith said, her words tumbling over each other in an anxious rush to distract her sister. “It’s a fascinating field, and after what I’ve witnessed in this case –”
“You need to cut the hand-wringing and marry that boy.”
Words fled from Judith’s mind, and her skin flushed and froze and flushed again as she stared at her sister. “What – I –” She tugged Constance’s margarita away. “You don’t need another one of these.”
Constance snatched it back. “You can’t leave him dangling. How long has it been since he asked you to dinner?”
“It-it’s been a few weeks.”
“Weeks? Judith Margaret Temple, you find a sweet, capable, good-looking man who adores you and who you’re clearly obsessed with, and you leave him dangling for weeks?”
“I’m not – He –” Judith spluttered, fighting the urge to flee to her car. “I’ve only had one long-term relationship, and it was not what I would categorize as successful –”
“Augie Lyons was a loser. Are you afraid of being with someone who’s actually comfortable in his own skin?”
“We’re friends.” Judith hugged her arms around herself, clutching the soft, bulky ridges of the knitted sweater. “And colleagues. Altering the relationship could destroy that.”
“Or,” Constance said, shooting a bright smile at the smirking waitress as she set a second margarita on the table. Constance’s progression when imbibing alcohol, Judith knew from experience, went from loud, bubbly, and opinionated to sleepy in very short order, and parenthood had only decreased the amount of alcohol it took to thrust her sister through that process. With a swig of the second margarita, Constance raised her voice over the din of the noisy restaurant. “Or you could fall in love and get married and grow old together while making lots of babies.”
“Constance!” It took a moment for Judith to realize that she had pulled the loose fabric of the cowl-neck sweater over the lower half of her face like a cherry-colored turtle retreating into its shell. So the excess fabric did serve a purpose after all.
“What? You two would make adorable babies.”
“All he did was ask me to dinner!”
“Yes. And dinner is the first step toward getting married and having babies.”
“He didn’t say anything like that.”
“Well, of course not,” Constance said. “Most people don’t lead with that. But he totally does want to get married and have lots of babies.”
“Would you stop saying that so loudly?”
“I can’t hear you when you’re talking through your sweater. When’s that wedding you’re both going to?”
“Melissa Sloan’s?” Judith lowered the sweater from her face. Her skin hot and her fingers tingling, she took a shallow breath and latched onto the change in topic. “It’s – let me check my calendar – What day is it? Well –” Judith frowned at her phone screen, baffled by how quickly the week had flown by. “I suppose it’s tomorrow.”
“I’m helping you get ready.” Constance leaned against the small table, a dangerous gleam lighting in her eyes. “You’re gonna wear a nice dress, and you’re gonna give him an answer tomorrow.”
“We’ll be busy watching the ceremony and doing other –” Judith faltered, trying to recall the last wedding she’d attended. “Other wedding guest things.”
Constance raised her eyebrows. “You’re giving him an answer tomorrow.” Her eyes falling on Judith’s barely-sipped margarita, she shoved it toward her. “Seriously, finish that. I’m gonna ask for some water.”
Judith had the lights off, the curtains closed, the thermostat set to her ideal sleeping temperature, and white noise playing quietly in the background, but she still couldn’t fall asleep. Her body was exhausted, but her mind itched, restless and rolling and relentless, while she rumpled her sheets turning fruitlessly from side to side.
“…fall in love and get married and grow old together while making lots of babies”
What a ridiculous thing to yell in the middle of a cheap Tex-Mex restaurant. She needed to be more careful when going out for margaritas with Constance.
“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 –”
No. Not a helpful memory.
Tim lifting steamed broccoli from her stove, his sleeves rolled up to his elbows.
With a frustrated sigh, Judith sat up, turned on her bedside lamp, retrieved her laptop from the small desk in her room, and brought it back to her bed. Her usual excellent sleep hygiene was doing nothing for her tonight; surely one night of bringing her laptop into bed wouldn’t make her sleep any more disrupted than it already was.
Judith threw herself into a search of Kortney’s home’s previous owners. She’d gone through the basics before, finding their names, previous addresses, obituaries. She knew the murderer’s name.
Gerald L. Murray.
A lawyer. Owner of a home in Lexington and a cabin in coal country. A cabin where he’d sold drugs and weapons, where he’d killed a man.
A glinting knife swooping down, slicing into her shoulder in the dark –
Judith pressed her lips together, forcing herself to breathe. Now was not the time.
A soft whine came from beside her, and Judith opened her eyes to find Orwell suddenly beside her bed, his wet nose nudging her hand. She reached both hands toward him, massaging her fingers into his coarse fur as she ruffled his ears.
Orwell lifted one paw to her bed, then the other, standing up on his hind legs until his head reached higher than Judith’s, and he pressed his skull into the head scratches. Then, with sudden agility, he leapt onto the bed and slipped beside Judith, nuzzling into her arm as he laid his head in her lap.
“Don’t get used to it,” Judith said. Then, still scratching Orwell’s ear with one hand, she turned back to her laptop.
Gerald Murray had dropped off the radar years ago. His last known address had been a small house outside Lexington, which had been bought by someone else over a decade ago. She couldn’t even find a death certificate, though if he were alive, he would have to be over ninety.
Judith took a breath and closed her eyes, steeling herself for a jolt of pain.
When it came, it was a dull ache that faded quickly, and an image shimmered into Judith’s mind.
Off-white walls, a sharp chemical scent. Crown molding, oddly out of place in the hard, straight lines the boxy room. A bed, surrounded by monitors and bags of liquid. A painting of a soft-eyed woman, a veil slipping from her dark hair.
Tubes leading from the liquid to the bed, to a shrunken form buried in blankets. Thin arms with the scraggly remnants of hair, wrinkled skin folded like collapsed bread dough. A face lined and bitter, thin streaks of steel-gray hair sticking, flat and greasy, to the scalp. Wide, fragile ribs that once had been broad as a barrel expanded, shifting the blanket, then sank again with a heavy wheeze.
The door swung open, and a red-faced woman in purple scrubs strode to the beeping machines and tapped on their screens. The man’s eyes opened, then shut again with a resentful grimace, a cold, unspoken disdain.
The image dropped away to blackness, and Judith opened her eyes to her bedroom, twice the size of the sterile hospital room where Gerald Murray lay dying.
But what hospital, which one?
Judith typed hospitals near me into the search bar. Gerald Murray had lived in or near Lexington for years; there was a good chance his waning days would be spent here as well.
Baptist Health Lexington – No, those walls were a sage green.
Good Samaritan Hospital – Off-white walls, yes. Crown molding, no.
Albert B. Chandler Hospital – Its nurses wore dark blue, not purple.
Judith stretched her back, shifted her hand to rub Orwell’s exposed tummy, and moved on to the next hospital in the list.
Somewhere, whether in or out of Kentucky, a murderer lay dying. And, if she just looked hard enough, she could find him.
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 IX: The Wedding
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Tomorrow!! Judith! She's fortunate she has Constance there...
I've loved seeing Judith warm up to other people and make more connections despite her barriers. Even over things like Principal Don't Interrupt Me.
It's murderer-finding time - but not before a wedding, I'm sure. 😉 I have to say, Judith and the whole tone of the story reminds me of Monk or Psych, which I used to love watching!