Detective Moretti called on the sixth morning, while Pickles was eating a walnut and whistling Amazing Grace from the perch by my kitchen window. “Mrs. Whitford,” he said, “the second witness on the will of your mother was a man named Gerald Bascom.” I wrote it on my notepad. “He is the brother in law of Doug, and he signed an affidavit that he saw your mother sign the document in July, of sound mind.” He paused. “Mr. Bascom was in a hospital in Charlotte for heart surgery on the day he claims to have been there.”
I put down the phone. Pickles looked at me with one orange eye and said, in the voice of my mother, “Good morning, sunshine.” I wanted to weep. Instead I picked up the phone again and called Dr. Raymond Ellis at the university. Together, in the next week, we built what he called a chain of evidence for a bird. We recorded Pickles forty times, with a calibrated microphone, in a quiet room. Dr. Ellis wrote a report, eleven pages, with spectrographs that matched the voice of Doug and the voice of my mother down to the pitch of their breaths.
The medical examiner agreed to the exhumation on a Tuesday in November. I stood at the edge of the cemetery in a long black coat with my brother Jimmy beside me, who had not spoken to me since the day I took the parrot. A backhoe lifted the dirt. A gray van drove away. For three days I could not eat. On the fourth day the examiner called me. “Mrs. Whitford, your mother had severe dehydration at the time of death. There was no water in her system for what we estimate was two days. That is not natural causes.”
A voice that is heard over and over in love and in fear will one day carry its truth out of the dark.
I wept then, at last, in my kitchen, with my hands over my face. Pickles, from his perch, began to sing in a small cracked voice a hymn that Mama used to play at the piano, one note at a time. I sat on the floor beside his cage. “I am sorry,” I said to the parrot, as if he could understand. “I am sorry I did not come sooner.” He cocked his head. And in the voice of Mama, clear as a bell, he said, “Gail. Good girl.” I do not know how long I stayed on that floor.
Doug and Karen were arrested on the second of December, at the cottage, in their coats, preparing to list it for sale. Doug said nothing. Karen talked for three hours. She said that money had been so tight, and the medical bills, and Doug had said they would just keep Mama comfortable, and make her sign, and she would not suffer. She said that she did not know about the water. She said that she had never opened the bedroom door. “She was so quiet,” Karen said. “I thought she was asleep.”
At the trial, in the spring, the prosecutor played the parrot for the jury. It took two days of argument for the judge to admit it, with Dr. Ellis on the stand for six hours explaining mimicry and memory and the spectrographs. When the recording played, the courtroom heard the voice of Doug, and then the small, cracked voice of an eighty nine year old woman begging for water. Two jurors cried. A third, a man in a work shirt, put his face in his hands. The jury took under three hours.
Doug was convicted of elder abuse and second degree murder and sentenced to thirty years. Karen received twelve, after she testified. Gerald Bascom lost his notary commission and paid a fine. The will of July was set aside, and the earlier will, from 2015, which divided the cottage and the savings equally among the three children, was reinstated by the judge. Jimmy, who had known nothing, wept in the hallway and asked my forgiveness. I gave it. I also asked him to apologize to the bird.
He did. In my kitchen, on a Sunday, my brother stood before the cage with his hat in his hand and said, “Pickles, I am sorry I tried to give you away.” And Pickles, who has a sense of drama, said in the voice of Doug, “Sign it, Mabel.” Jimmy went white. Then Pickles laughed, a rattling, human laugh, and added in the voice of Mama, “Oh, Jimmy.” We both burst into laughter, and cried, and laughed again. It was the first time we had laughed together in a year.
The share of Karen was returned to the estate, and Jimmy and I used the money to establish the Mabel Whitford Music Fund, which gives free piano lessons to children in Henderson County. The cottage became its studio. On Saturdays eight children come with their sheet music, and on the piano bench of my mother sits a small boy with a cowlick who has not yet learned to be afraid of the keys.
Pickles sits on a perch in the corner of the studio and supervises. He has learned to say Again from the beginning, and Lovely, dear, and Mind the fingering. He does not say anything else. I like to think he has finally set down the voices he was never meant to carry, and kept only the ones that were hers. On quiet evenings, when the last child has gone home, I turn out the lamp, and the old bird whistles Amazing Grace in the dark.