I took Pickles to the office of the sheriff in Hendersonville on the fifth day, wrapped in a quilt in his travel cage, and the deputy at the desk looked at me as if I had brought a ghost. Detective Moretti met me in the lobby. He was a lean man of fifty with a gray mustache and the careful patience of a person who has heard every sort of confession. “Mrs. Whitford,” he said, “I want to be honest. I cannot bring a parrot into a courtroom. But I can bring a man to an interview. And I would like to see how he behaves when he hears the voice of Doug.”
So we planned it. I called my brother in law on a Tuesday, and I used my best voice, the one I use for frightened patients. I said that I was sorry for how I had left things, that I wanted to bring peace to the family, and that I would like to return Pickles to the cottage, where he belonged. Would Doug and Karen join me for tea on Saturday? There was a pause. Then Doug said, with a warmth that curdled my stomach, “Of course, Gail. We would love to.” I hung up and sat on the kitchen floor with my head between my knees.
Saturday came with a thin gray rain. The cottage was as it had always been, with the piano in the corner, and the afghan on the sofa, and the smell of lavender and old paper. Pickles sat in his big cage by the window, wearing his best feathers. The detective and two deputies were in the kitchen with the door ajar. A recorder sat on the mantel, running. Doug and Karen arrived at three, in raincoats, bearing a coffee cake. Karen hugged me. Doug did not. He looked at the cage, and Pickles looked at him.
A bird that has heard the worst day of a house will repeat it faithfully to the first honest listener.
It took four minutes. Doug sat down in the armchair across from the cage, cup of tea in his hand, and began to speak about the weather, and the price of firewood, and the traffic on the interstate. Pickles tilted his head. His orange eye widened. And in a flat, hard, perfect copy of the voice of my brother in law, the bird said: “Sign it, Mabel.” Doug froze. The cup stopped halfway to his mouth. “Sign it or nobody comes.” A long pause. Then, very softly, in the voice of our mother: “Doug, please. I am thirsty.”
Doug dropped the cup. It broke on the hardwood with a small sound. Karen stood, crying out, “Doug, what is that?” But he was not looking at her. He was looking at the bird. He was breathing like a man who has run up a hill. And Pickles, who has always had a sense of timing, went on: “Nobody is coming, Mabel. Karen is not coming. Gail is not coming.” Then a door slam, perfect. Then the thin voice of my mother, “Lord, help me.” I felt the room tilt. I had planned for it, and I was not ready.
Doug said one word. “Shut that thing up.” He said it low, with such hatred that I felt it on my skin. Then he lunged for the cage. Detective Moretti was through the kitchen door before the cage swung. Two deputies took Doug by the arms. He thrashed, shouting that it was a trap, that the bird was nothing, that nobody could prove a word. The detective said calmly, “Mr. Ledford, you have just said it was a trap, in front of a witness and a recorder. I think you should stop talking.” Karen sank onto the sofa, put her face in her hands, and did not stop screaming.
The report of the medical examiner came in November, confirming dehydration. The second witness to the will, a man named Gerald Bascom, broke down in his first interview and admitted that Doug had paid him five hundred dollars to sign a paper he had never watched anyone sign. The July will was set aside. Doug was convicted of elder abuse and murder in the second degree. Karen, who cooperated, received twelve years. Jimmy, who had known nothing, stood in the hallway of the courthouse and wept, and I put my arm around him, and we stood there a long time like children.
I kept Pickles. Of course I kept him. He rode home with me in the front seat of the car, in a quilt, wearing the haughty look of a bird who has done his duty. Dr. Ellis, the animal behaviorist who testified for the state, came to dinner that week. He said, “Mrs. Whitford, I have studied parrots for thirty years. I have never known one to be a witness to a murder.” I said, “He was the only one in the room who did not look away.” Pickles, from his perch, said clearly, “Good morning, sunshine.” We all laughed, and nobody quite stopped.
The estate was divided between Jimmy and me. We used most of it to start the Mabel Whitford Music Fund, which gives free piano lessons to the children of Henderson County. The cottage became a studio. On Saturdays there are eight children on the piano bench, one at a time, with their sheet music and their sticky fingers, and Pickles sits on the perch in the corner and supervises. He has learned to say Again from the beginning, and Lovely, dear. These are, I am convinced, the first words he ever heard from my mother, long before the others.
In the evenings, when the last child has gone home, I turn out the lamp and sit at the piano. I am not a pianist. I play the one tune I know, badly, with two fingers. And the old bird, on his perch in the dark, whistles along, a half step flat, just as my mother used to. I think of her. I think of the small cracked voice that asked for water. And I think that love is a sound that lingers in a room long after the speaker has gone, waiting for someone patient enough to listen.