Chapter Nineteen
Gabriel
Tuesday
Reaper had arrived to pick up Whiskey, but instead of collecting her lead, he shut Gabriel’s office door and slid onto the chair. “Do you have a minute? I needed to check in with you about something.”
Gabriel glanced up at the wall clock before focusing back at Reaper. “If it’s another search and rescue, I can do it, but I'm going to be here at least another couple of hours,” Gabriel said. “I’ve got something on my desk.”
“This isn’t about a rescue, but it is about Whiskey,” Reaper said. “I’ve solved the mystery of Whiskey’s howling.”
“Ghost possession?” Gabriel pushed back in his chair with a grin.
Reaper held out his phone to show Gabriel a video that opened with the image of a thirties-something woman from the shoulders up, dressed in what he imagined continued down to become an old-fashioned, romantic dress.
Her hair swept across her cheek, giving just the suggestion of her features.
A mahogany music stand in front of her, she stood next to a window surrounded by classical books, and on the shelves were the kinds of shiny objects that a raven might bring as gifts—rocks and twigs, and little silver trinkets.
She was singing opera. A song that Gabriel had come to know well.
Just a few notes into the song, she was suddenly accompanied by howling.
The video switched to a doorbell camera.
In the foreground, the image was framed with foliage on the right.
To the left was the graveyard under a full moon.
And there in the background, a silhouette under a streetlight, Gabriel stood with Whiskey at his feet, her nose in the air, singing a half-note behind the woman.
“Well that’s damned disappointing.” Gut punch, if Gabriel were being honest. “Not everyone gets to have a brother haunt them from the grave. And here I thought I was one of the lucky ones,” Gabriel said, marking the name, Mourning Notes, and handing the phone back to Reaper.
“I went back in the feed and looked at this account from the beginning. Apparently, this woman has had this thing up since about the time we were up on Sweet Gum. So that was a couple of weeks after Daniel died.”
“The first time Whiskey howled was the day I brought her home. I got custody of Whiskey the day we went on the search. ”
“When we were on the trail, you asked me the difference between baying and howling, and you were telling me that Whiskey started howling at the graveyard—”
And Gabriel said, “Still does. Not every time, when I take Whiskey for a walk, sometimes she chooses the direction of the park. If we go to the graveyard, she’s going to sit and sing.”
“Certain time of day?” Reaper asked.
“There’s no rhyme or reason as far as I can tell, say from pre-dawn to after midnight. From the angle of the camera that’s on us, this is from the house across the street from the church. What are the chances that she sings the songs that Whiskey knows?”
“She posts under Gothic hashtags. It may be her vibe, but I think it’s more likely that she was inspired by the full moon and the graveyard and was singing a song that was in that general theme. When Whiskey started howling, and she caught it on tape. Did she sing the same song the next few times?”
“She did.”
“Then she would have already been posting, and I bet she made a list of other songs in that same thread that Whiskey might know. Did Whiskey ever howl and it not sound as song-like as at other times?”
“Whiskey has, as a matter of fact. Well, she started that way, sort of sounding like a warm-up howl, then she’d start singing.”
“Or, it could be Mourning Notes tried a song that Whiskey didn’t know, and Whiskey howled randomly. When Whiskey wasn’t following her notes, she might have switched to a different song, so Mourning could have the singing on tape. She’s calling you Graves, and Whiskey is Goth-hound, by the way.”
Gabriel pressed the pads of his fingers together, steepling them as he looked at the ceiling, running through the different times they’d been out there. “That works,” he said. “Not ‘the grave’ … Graves as a name? I’m not talking about Graves and the Goth-hound but the explanation of the songs.”
“I figured that this house she’s in is somewhere nearby, but not so near that you can hear her singing, right?” Reaper asked.
“When I’m at that stop sign, I can’t hear a thing, but Whiskey can because Whiskey’s got Whiskey ears?”
“My guess,” Reaper said, watching the video on silent.
“Why doesn’t Whiskey walk up to the house? She never does. She gets to the stop sign, sits and sings. And, of course, we’re standing almost straight across the street from Daniel.”
“There’s a good question. And I don’t have an answer for you. It could have been that you trained her that that was her singing spot.”
“How would I have done that?” Gabriel asked.
“Could be that she was walking you toward the sound, and you interpreted it as going to see Daniel. If you pictured Daniel’s grave and that was, in your mind, the destination, that’s the image that Whiskey would have seen. If you put those thoughts on repeat, you trained her.”
“Wishful thinking. His grave was still fresh.”
“You loved your brother,” Reaper said gently.
“Who wouldn’t have a glimmer of hope that they could stay close?
And I’m not discounting the possibility that this wasn’t orchestrated by Daniel.
It’s his sense of humor. But he would be working within the realm of physics, so he’d have to figure out a lot of moving pieces. ”
Gabriel sat silent. Yeah, Cathy wasn’t the only one; he still wanted to believe Daniel was somehow involved.
“Brother, I have seen some crazy shit in my life. I have a dear friend who can do things that transcend belief. One of my old teammates comes from the Louisiana Bayou, and he has woo-woo skills that freak me out on a regular basis. I’ve even met some of the men who were involved in the military psychic experiments back in the eighties.
To hear them tell it, there is no such thing as time, and there is no such thing as the end of our existence.
By showing you that video, I don’t mean to redefine your own experience.
I’m merely trying to give it more context. ”
“OK, thanks for letting me know, Reaper,” Gabriel said.
“You know, I don’t want to interfere in how you do things,” Reaper said.
“But you need a couple pieces of information. You do geolocation for a living. And you know this, but it wouldn’t take much to find out where this is.
Mourning Notes posts on all the major social media sites, and she gets a lot of interaction and followers.
A couple of the videos have gone viral.”
Gabriel clenched his jaw. Reaper was leading him somewhere with all this.
“Look, Whiskey is famous in our area. Somebody put it together that Goth-hound and Whiskey were probably one and the same.”
Whiskey waddled over to sit between Reaper’s knees to get her ears rubbed.
“More than one somebodies,” Reaper said. “Enough somebodies that Kate got tagged.”
“That’s not great news,” Gabriel said.
“One of the comments is a link to the newspaper article on the search when the children were found on Sweet Gum.”
“With Whiskey’s name?” Gabriel asked.
“Her name, your name, Daniel’s name. Your photo with Whiskey.”
“Nobody asked my permission to put my name in the paper,” Gabriel said.
“They don’t have to ask your permission,” Reaper said.
“You were there; it was in the public eye, as part of a public safety event. And it wasn’t emergency management that gave out your name.
That’s policy. But there were plenty of people talking about Whiskey.
The search-and-rescue community is pretty tight.
Everyone knows everyone. Someone could have seen Whiskey and shared news about Daniel’s death.
Someone else could have mentioned that you’re his brother.
Some reporter could have been sitting there taking notes.
It’s not hard to imagine how that article was written. ”
“It’s quite the leap that in all the world of howling dogs that someone landed on Whiskey, though.”
Reaper tipped his head. “It is, and it isn’t.
First, this woman has friends, and those friends will share it with their other friends.
The group that started following this woman knew her or knew someone who knew her.
They’re from this area. If they were doing an Internet search for D.C.
bloodhounds, they would have found that article. ”
“Agreed.”
“And how many dogs are there that sing like Whiskey?” Reaper asked.
Gabriel shook his head.
Reaper was scrolling his phone. “Yeah, this woman back here asked if bloodhounds were popular dogs, and this other one said she saw one in the paper that saved the kids. There’s the article. That conversation continues. Down below that’s where Kate got tagged.”
“And Kate showed you.”
“Kate’s reaching out to the person who tagged her to ask her to take the comment down. Granted, Kate’s social media contacts are friends and family only. That doesn’t mean that this is safe for her.”
“How would Kate be unsafe over Whiskey singing?”
“I’ll get to that in a second. About the howl-singing, unless you know the woman who mentioned that along with Whiskey’s name, it had to be someone who knew Daniel.”
“Dead end,” Gabriel said.
“I talked to Kate about the video you showed me out on the Sweet Gum search, and she said that she knew about Whiskey howling songs. Daniel had taught Whiskey to sing along with him when Whiskey was a puppy, long before his diagnosis. Kate said Daniel used their duets to pick up women.”
“That shithead. He did what?”
“Kate painted the picture for me. Daniel out on the Potomac with his guitar, singing along with Whiskey. The women would flock over. Kate was impressed with the imaginativeness.”
“So some past flame saw this and thought of Whiskey.”