The tape ran on for another eleven minutes. Judge Pickett did not speak at first. We heard only the creak of a leather chair and the tick of a clock, and then his voice, no longer friendly, no longer gravelly, but very low and very careful. “Vera,” he said, “you are an old woman and you are confused. I suggest you think carefully about what you remember.” “I remember Janie Hollis,” my mother said. “Fifteen years old. A red coat. The ninth of March, 1968, on Seymour Highway. I taught her Schumann, Billy Pickett. I know the sound of the car of your father.”
Brooke squeezed my hand so hard I thought the bones would crack. On the tape, my mother kept going, in the steady voice she had used for sixty years on children who forgot their scales. She said that she had stood in her garden on the night of the ninth and watched a car go past with a broken lamp and a boy at the wheel who did not stop. She said she told the sheriff the next morning, and the sheriff said it was a mistake, and drove the boy to Houston himself with a bus ticket. The girl was found in the ditch on Tuesday.
“I have kept quiet for fifty six years,” Mama said on the tape, “because the sheriff told me he would see to it that my husband lost his job at the oil company. We had two children and a mortgage. I am not proud of it. So I will say yes today, Billy. I will say yes because you have the address of my daughter on that paper. But I will say it on this tape, so that someone someday will know what a judge asked me, and what I answered.” Then there was a click, and silence.
Silence kept for the sake of a family is a heavy coat, and one old woman wore it for fifty six years before she set it down on a tape.
We drove straight to my house on Ninth Street and listened to the tape three more times. At midnight Brooke, who is nineteen and has a mind of fifty, said, “Grandma, we do not take this to the sheriff here. We do not take it to anybody who was born in this county.” She telephoned her professor at Midwestern State, a former Texas Ranger named Dale Ocampo, at his home. He answered on the second ring. By eight the next morning he was sitting at my kitchen table with a pot of coffee and the cookie tin in front of him.
The Texas Rangers opened an inquiry on Monday. The State Commission on Judicial Conduct opened another on Tuesday. By Friday, the file of 1968 had been requested from the basement of the courthouse in Wichita Falls, where a clerk found it in a box marked unsolved, with one page missing: the page with the name of a witness. Sheriff Roy Dunn had died in 1991, but his deputy, a man of eighty seven living in Burkburnett, agreed to talk. He talked for four hours. He had been waiting for someone to ask.
Judge William Pickett was arrested on a Wednesday in his chambers in Archer City, in his black robe, in front of the clerk. He was charged with tampering with a government record, official oppression, and the abuse of an elderly person. The old crime of 1968 could no longer be tried, because the years had run, but the new crimes could. The adoption order was vacated within the week by a judge from another county. Misty Rhodes was arrested at the house on Grant Street as she was packing the pearls into her suitcase. She did not say a word.
Misty, it turned out, had done this before. In Oklahoma, under the name Melissa Rhode, she had worked for two elderly women who died and left her small bequests. The Rangers took the checkbook she had hidden in her room and found sixty three thousand dollars in checks to a company that did not exist. She pleaded guilty to exploitation of the elderly and theft, and was sentenced to twelve years. The four hundred ten thousand dollars in the accounts of Mama had been frozen the day of the arrest. Every dollar of it came back.
Before the sentencing of the judge, a woman called me at home. Her voice was thin and old. “Mrs. Whitaker, my name is Peggy Hollis. I am the sister of Janie.” I sat down on the stairs. She told me she was seventy two, living in Burkburnett, and that for fifty six years she had told her children that someone had killed her sister on the highway and had never been found. “Your mother knew,” she said. “Then why did she never tell me?” I told her about the oil company, the mortgage, and the garden. She was quiet for a long time. Then she said, “She told me in the end.”
Judge Pickett pleaded guilty in March. At seventy three, with a lawyer at each elbow, he stood before the bench and said in a low voice that he had killed a girl on the Seymour Highway and had lived the rest of his life on the silence of others. He was sentenced to five years in prison. Peggy Hollis sat in the front row in her church dress, holding the photograph of her sister that I had printed from the yearbook of 1968, and when the sentence was read, she bowed her head and said, to no one, “Janie, they heard you.”
In June, Brooke played Chopin at the memorial for Mama in the church fellowship hall, on the baby grand that we had moved from Grant Street. She played the same piece that Mama had taught her over and over, the Nocturne in E flat, and when she struck the wrong note in the fourth bar, the whole room smiled, because Mama would have heard it from three rooms away. Brooke stopped, and found it again, and went on. I looked at the African violets along the windowsill, bright purple in the late light, and I could almost hear the voice of my mother. Again, darling. From the top.
