Grave Sight

eleven

"WHY aren't you one of those computer hackers?" I asked Tolliver. "Then I could tell you all this, and you'd have some brilliant idea, and you'd hack into the law enforcement system, or the Teagues' home computer, and find out some critical information, and I'd put it to brilliant use."

"You need to stop reading mysteries for a while," Tolliver said, braking gently for one of the town's numerous four-way stops. "Or get a new sidekick."

"Sidekick?"

"Yeah, if you're the brilliant sleuth, I must be the slightly denser but brilliant-in-my-own-useful-way sidekick, right?"

"Yes, Watson."

"More like Sharona," he muttered.

"That'd make me Monk?"

"If the shoe fits."

Actually, that hurt a little bit, the way a joke does when it's just a tad too close to the truth.

"Of course, you're a lot cuter," he said in a judicious voice, and I felt better. A little.

"Listen, did that sound like Helen Hopkins to you, all those things Sybil said?"

"No," he said promptly. "By the way, where are we going?"

"To Helen Hopkins' house. Jay Hopkins wants to meet with us."

"Why?"

"I have no idea."

"Well, it sounded like neither of them really wanted to make the effort to talk to each other, despite the fact that one was the mother of a dead teenager, and the other was the mom of a missing teenager. And those two kids loved each other. But it must have drenched them with a bucket of ice water, finding out Teenie was pregnant."

"Yeah. And evidently, she hadn't told her mom. And Dell hadn't told Sybil, that's for sure. But he had told his little sister. Don't you think that's strange?"

"No. I'd tell you anything before I'd tell my dad or your mother."

I felt warmer immediately. "But those were our circumstances. These two were brought up normal."

"Normal? Helen was an alcoholic, and she divorced her husband because he drank and beat her. Sybil Teague is one of the coldest women I ever met, and if she didn't marry that poor guy to get his money... well, it seems to me that what she loves is one, her son Dell, two, herself, and running a long third, Mary Nell."

"Okay," I said. "Okay." Sometimes Tolliver astonished me, and this was one of those times.

We drove around town, taking in the limited sights and sounds of Sarne. With the weekend over, the town had returned to its own preoccupation with battening down for the winter. The banners were being taken down from the ornamental streetlights. No one was wearing a cute costume. Aunt Sally's had a "Closed for the Winter" sign in the window. The horses and carriages were gone from the square.

Our cell phone rang as we made our way once again to the little house on Freedom Street. I answered it since Tolliver was driving.

"Hello," I said, and a remote voice asked, "Harper?"

"Yes?"

"It's Iona. Tolliver's aunt."

"Iona," I whispered to Tolliver. I put my mouth back to the receiver. "Yes, what do you want?"

"Your sister's run off."

"Which one?"

"Mariella."

Mariella had just turned eleven. Tolliver and I had sent a card, enclosing money. Of course, we hadn't gotten a thank-you of any kind, and when we'd called—okay, I'd called—on the actual day, Iona had told me Mariella was out. I'd been sure I heard her in the background, though.

This seemed horribly like Cameron's history. I made myself say, "Did she run off with someone, or did she just disappear?"

"She ran off with a little boy who's thirteen. Some delinquent named Craig."

"And?"

"We want you to come back and look for her."

I held the phone away to give it the look of incredulous amazement her statement deserved.

"You told her for years how awful Tolliver and I were," I said to my aunt Iona. "She wouldn't come back with me if I found her. She'd run the other way. Besides, I only find dead people. You look for her. Call the police, of course. I bet you haven't." I pressed the button to end the conversation, if you could call it that.

"What?" Tolliver asked. I recounted Iona's words.

"Don't you think you were a little hasty?" His words were mild, but they stung me.

"We're due in Memphis and Millington, and we've been delayed here already. There's no telling where Mariella is, or this Craig either. How far could they be? They can't drive. They're right down the road from Iona, I bet. She hasn't gone to the police because she's too proud to let them know Mariella's run away."

"You remember what Cameron was like at eleven?" Tolliver asked. "I didn't know her then. But I bet she ran off, too, huh?"

"No," I said. "We were still safe when Cameron was eleven." Though probably the signs of our parents' dissolution had been there by then, we'd just been too young to interpret them. We'd still been cocooned in upper middle class assurances. "Maybe Mariella and her friend went to join the circus," I suggested. "Or travel with a rock band."

"I think you're being old-fashioned," Tolliver said. "Girls now want to be fashion designers or supermodels."

"Well, Mariella will never make it," I said. The last time we'd seen our sister Mariella, she'd been on the short and plump side, and models notoriously aren't. It was a little early for her to have gotten her growth spurt.

"They'll call Mark next," Tolliver said. His older brother lived not too far from Will and Iona.

"Poor Mark," I said. He always helped other people, and he needed a break himself. His first marriage had failed spectacularly and quickly, and he'd been dating a string of losers ever since. Mark was a nice guy, and he deserved better, but he always sought worse. "We should call him tonight."

"Good idea. Well, here we are again."

The little house seemed drenched in gloom today. Jay Hopkins might have a hard time selling the place, though the paint was fresh and the yard in good condition.

Jay Hopkins was as thin as his ex-wife had been. I had a fleeting image of their skeletons clacking together during sex, an image I was quick to banish from my mind. He was sitting on the front steps, so I was able to get a good look as we crossed the yard. Helen's ex had the malnourished face of a longtime drinker, and he could have passed for anywhere between his probable age—which would be in his early forties—and sixty. His hair was sparse and silver-blond, and he smoked with quick jerks of his hand.

"Thank you all for coming by," he said. "You must be the psychic lady."

"I'm not psychic," I explained, for maybe the thousandth time. I started to add I wasn't a lady, either, but that would become evident, and the topic bored me. "I just find bodies."

"I'm Tolliver Lang, Harper's brother." Tolliver extended his hand. "I'm sorry for your loss."

"My whole family is dead now," Jay Hopkins said, matter-of-factly. "Both my daughters, and my wife. You couldn't get a much bigger loss than that."

I groped around mentally for something to say, but came up speechless. Maybe there just wasn't anything.

"Have a seat," Jay said, when the pause became painful.

"Before I do," I said abruptly, "I have a question for you. Did your wife leave Teenie's room just like it was?"

"Yes, because she always expected her to come back," he said unsteadily. "Sally and Teenie shared that room until Sally married Hollis, and then Teenie had it all to herself. What are you wanting to know?"

"May I see it?"

"You said you weren't psychic. What are you hoping to find out?" Jay Hopkins was sharper than I'd given him credit for. Maybe he hadn't started drinking for the day.

I hesitated. "I want to see if some of her hair is left in her hairbrush," I said finally.

"For what reason?" He lit another cigarette. It was his house, I reminded myself.

"I want to have it tested," I said.

"To find out what?"

Now he'd asked one question too many.

"I think you know," Tolliver said unexpectedly. "I think you wonder, too."

Jay stubbed out the cigarette with vicious jabs. "What're you talking about, mister?"

"You wonder who her father was."

Jay froze in position, I guess amazed that someone had actually been rude enough to say it out loud. "She was my daughter," he said finally, in a final voice.

"Yes, in every way that mattered. But we need to know whose daughter she was in the biological way," Tolliver said.

"Why? I'm burying that child. You can't take that away from me." This was the voice of a man who had lost many things, though I was sure he'd tossed some of it away himself.

"If her father hasn't made a sound toward claiming her yet, he's not going to now," I said reasonably.

"There's every chance I could be Teenie's father. I don't want anyone thinking bad of Helen."

Too late for that. "I think everyone knows Helen was human," I said gently. "I think the shame would be on the father, for not owning up to his responsibility." I was thinking, Tolliver can hold him down and I'll run back to the room...

"All right, then," Jay Hopkins said. He sounded defeated, beaten down, and I knew caving in to my request was one more item in a line of items that marked his unmanning. But at the moment, his sense of self was not too high on my list of things to preserve. I doubted he had much self left, anyway.

"What'll you do with her hair?" he asked.

"Send it to a lab, have it tested for her DNA."

"How?"

I shrugged. "Via UPS, I guess."

"Her room's on the left." His elbows were propped on his bony knees, and he bent his head over his clasped hands. There was something smug about him, now. I should have been warned.

The house was so small there was little question of which room he meant. It still held twin beds, with a nightstand jammed between them. The walls were covered with posters and memorabilia. There were dried corsages and party invitations, notes from friends and buttons with cute sayings, a big straw hat and a napkin from Dairy Queen. Little things like that would only evoke a memory for the one who saved them; and now those memories did not exist anymore. I was willing to bet that all Sally's memorabilia had come down when she married. All these items were Teenie's. There wasn't any hair in the brush on the shelf under the small mirror. I wondered if the police had taken it when she'd vanished, to get a DNA sample. I spied a purse was on top of the battered chest of drawers. I dumped it out on the nearest bed and was rewarded with a smaller hairbrush choked with Teenie's dark hair. I put the brush into a brown envelope I'd brought with me and glanced around the crowded space. I was sure various people had already searched this room thoroughly—the police and Helen, of course. I would search my daughter's room if she went missing. I would tear up the floorboards. There didn't seem to be any point in me combing it for clues.

I got a hair sample from Jay Hopkins, who made a wry joke about how little of it he had to spare. Now I had hair samples from both Teenie and Jay, and a fat lot of good it would do me. But I would send them in, nonetheless.

Tolliver had a friend in a big private lab in Dallas. He could get things done that I couldn't. His friend was a woman, and he had to give her a certain amount of sweet talk, but that never killed anyone. Well, it made my stomach clench, but I wouldn't die of it.

I was anxious to leave, but Jay wanted to know about our last talk with Helen, and I felt obliged to recount it just as I had to the police. He gave me permission to get hair from Helen's brush, too, and he suddenly seemed more interested than upset by the idea that now he could find out if he was Teenie's biological father.

"And you're paying for this?" Tolliver asked as we drove away. We went to the UPS pickup spot, which was in an auto parts store many blocks from the square. Small businesses in Sarne—in the south in general—had to diversify, but I was used to that and kind of enjoyed it. I got some mailers and followed the advice of Tolliver's friend at the lab in packing the samples I had.

"Yes, I am," I said. "I'm paying for this."

"Why, in God's name, are you doing this?"

"I don't really know. I want to leave. I want justice done. I feel terrible that Helen lost both her daughters to a murderer."

"Or is this all about Hollis?" Tolliver asked, his voice sharp. "Is this about you wanting to impress a law man?"

I felt like slapping Tolliver, or screaming. But I stared up at him and did neither of those things. After a long moment, he said, "Okay, I'm sorry."

"She said it would take three days to get a preliminary answer?" I responded.

"Yes. Longer for a definitive answer, but three days for a quick yes or no. Since it's from hair follicles, and not blood samples."

We were leaving the store when a patrol car pulled up beside ours. A deputy got out, a man I hadn't seen before. He was tall, thin, and middle-aged, his colorless hair shaved close to his head. He wore ugly glasses and he was tense as a coiled snake. He stalked to the rear of the car and looked at our Texas license plate like it was in German.

"I run your license plate," he said. "You got a warrant out for your arrest in Montana."

"No we don't," I said, but Tolliver gripped my arm.

"And you got a busted out taillight back here." He pointed, but I wasn't fool enough to get close to him to look. He waited for a reaction from us, seemed a little disappointed when he didn't get one. "You, sir, you're the legal owner of this car?"

"Yes," Tolliver said carefully.

"Lean up against your car with your hands on the hood. I'm going to have to take you in."

I felt a humming start up in my head, just a distant little humming. I stood frozen while my brother silently, almost casually, complied. Tolliver had seen the tension in the deputy's body, too.

"What..." I had to clear my throat. "What are you doing?"

"Outstanding warrants, he's got to go to jail while I clear this up."

"What?" I couldn't understand him because the humming felt louder.

"Judge'll come to town soon. If there's any mistake, he'll be out quick as a New York minute."

"What?"

"Ain't you understanding me?" the tall man said. "Can't you speak English, woman?"

"You're arresting my brother," I said.

"You got it."

"Because you say there's a Montana warrant out for him."

"Yes'm."

"But that's not true. The charges were dismissed."

"That's not what the computer says. And, ma'am, aside from that, there's the matter of the taillight." And he pointed. While Tolliver stayed where he was, I edged carefully around the car, keeping a safe distance from the deputy. The taillight was smashed.

"It was okay when we went in the store," I said.

"You'll excuse us if we can't take your word for it," the deputy said, smirking. He walked around the end of the car, taking care to stay as far from me as I wanted to be from him, and he patted Tolliver down. I could see shiny pieces of the broken light scattered on the street.

"When can I get him out?" I asked, pretending with all my might that the deputy didn't exist. This was sheer bullshit, but there was nothing I could do about it.

"After the judge sets the fine for the taillight, and we get this warrant thing settled," the deputy said. "We don't have a sitting judge here; have to wait for the judge to come around."

I gasped. I couldn't help it. Every fearful reaction I gave fed the deputy's sense of power and gloating, but there was nothing I could do about it. I was on the teetering edge of panic, and I was scrabbling around in my head for some way to put this right, right now.

"What's your name?" I asked.

"Bledsoe," he answered, not too happily.

"Harper," my brother said. He was handcuffed now, and the humming level rose higher and higher as I looked at the metal around his wrists. The deputy was looking at me uneasily. He'd quit grinning. "Just call Art. He'll recommend someone." Art Barfield was our lawyer. His office was in Atlanta, which was where we'd been the first time we needed an attorney.

The deputy looked even more jittery as he absorbed the implication that we had a high-powered lawyer at our backs (which wasn't exactly true), and he began to say something. Suddenly he thought the better of it and stopped, a word half out of his mouth. Then he made up his mind again. "Don't go crazy about this, young lady. Nothing's going to happen to your brother in our jail."

I hadn't even thought about that. My focus had been on my own selfish need for Tolliver, my panic for fear of how I'd manage without him. I had been frightened of the wrong thing, I saw immediately. I realized Tolliver would be in the hands of this deputy, who was a fool with power.

Tolliver began trying to make his way around the car to me, and the deputy yanked him back by his cuffed wrists.

I had to pull myself together. I concentrated, completely, on pushing the terrified child inside me back into her hole. I breathed slowly, deeply. I had to focus on Tolliver now, not myself and my trembling hands. My brain began to function again; maybe not well, but it began to produce thoughts.

I looked directly into Bledsoe's eyes. "If anything happens to Tolliver in your jail, it would be very, very unfortunate." That wasn't a threat, was it? I didn't want to give him any excuse to lock me up, too.

"I'm going to get our cell phone from my brother, now. It's in his pocket," I said, in a voice barely above a whisper. I put my purse on the hood of the car so that I was obviously unarmed and unencumbered. No one moved as I held up my hands and walked very slowly over to Tolliver. I wanted the deputy to die. I wanted to stand on his grave. I never lowered my stare from his eyes, which were narrow and watery blue. His lids fluttered, and he looked away at his patrol car, pretending to be fascinated by the querulous voice coming over the radio.

I slid my hand in Tolliver's pocket, pulled out the phone.

"Proud of you," he murmured, and I smiled up at him, as much of a smile as I could manage. I lay my head against his shoulder for a second, and then I straightened, widening the smile as much as I could, while the deputy shoved Tolliver into the back of the patrol car. The policeman climbed in, and while I watched him, he backed out and drove Tolliver away.

I stood there until the man inside the auto parts store came out to ask me if I was all right.