Grave Sight

fourteen

I had to smile, even while I shook two Tylenol out of the bottle and swallowed them down.

He went to the windows to look outside. "Ah-oh," he said. "It's coming up a storm."

"That's why my head's beginning to hurt."

"Maybe, too, you're hungry?" he asked mildly.

"I ate a few hours ago."

"It has been a while."

"You ate half a sandwich. Let's drive to Mount Parnassus. We don't want to get into any more trouble."

"Sounds good. But you know, we could just pack up our stuff and start driving now," I said.

"Not with a storm coming on."

It was because of me we couldn't drive during storms, because sometimes I had a very bad reaction; another weakness on my part.

"We'll go to Mount Parnassus," he said. "It's just twelve miles north."

It was dark already, at least in part because of the oncoming storm. Tolliver was driving because of my headache, so I answered the cell phone when it rang. It was Tolliver's older brother, Mark.

"Hi," I said. "How are you?"

"Well, I been better," he said. "Tolliver there?"

I silently handed Tolliver the phone. He disliked driving and talking at the same time, so he pulled over to the side of the road. Mark Lang had been nearly old enough to leave home by the time my mother and his father started living together and eventually got married. He hadn't liked my mother, hadn't liked the situation in his home, and had gotten out as soon as possible. For Tolliver's sake, he'd checked in at the house about every two weeks. He'd also helped to feed and clothe us, and he'd gotten us medical help when we'd needed it and the adults had been too strung out to provide it. And Mark had been especially fond of Cameron, as Tolliver had been of me. The little girls just represented two more sets of needs and wants, to Mark. I could imagine how unhappy he was at being called about Mariella's disappearance, and I was sure that was his reason for calling Tolliver now.

"He found her," Tolliver told me now, leaning away from the phone briefly. "Took him an hour."

That wasn't bad. I had a few questions, of course, but I decided to let the conversation run itself to a halt before I asked them.

Tolliver hung up soon enough. "They were hiding in Craig's Sunday school building," he said briefly.

"What—where is she now?"

"She went home. Craig had run out of food, anyway, so there wasn't any more fun in it for her."

We fell silent. There wasn't any more to say about Mariella. Mariella had seen too much as a kid to ever be innocent, and she'd probably go down the same path as our mother as fast as could be, despite all the Sunday school lessons and hours in Iona's church, despite the moral teachings and the days of school. So their lives wouldn't be all work and no play, Tolliver and I had sent funds for extras for Mariella and Gracie: dance lessons, voice lessons, art lessons. All this was a familiar litany in my head, as I tried again to figure out what else we could have done. The court would never have left the girls' upbringing to Tolliver and me.

My head pounded harder, and I looked at the sky ahead of us anxiously. I knew soon I would see a flicker of lightning.

We turned on the radio to listen to the weather. Storms were predicted, with heavy downpour and thunder and lightning. What a surprise. Flash flood warnings—which you had to take seriously in a terrain that included roads that dipped so deeply before rising again—in an area where all the streams and ponds were already full from plentiful rainfall earlier in the season.

We reached a little chain restaurant within ten minutes and went in, taking our raincoats with us. Inside, there was an older couple sitting close to the kitchen door; there was a single guy reading a newspaper, a dirty plate shoved across the table. A young couple, in their early twenties, sat with their two children in a booth by the big window. They were pale and fat, both wearing sweats from Wal-Mart. He wore a gimme cap with his. Her hair was pulled back into a curly ponytail, and her eyelids were blue with makeup. The little boy, maybe six, was wearing camo and carrying a plastic gun. The little girl was a pretty thing, with lots of light brown hair like her mother's, and a sweet and vacant face. She was coloring.

A waitress in jeans and a blouse strolled over to take our order. Her hair was dressed in a formidable bleached bubble, and she was chewing gum. She told us she was pleased to help us, but I doubted her sincerity. After we'd looked at the menus for a minute, she took our orders and strolled over to the window to the kitchen to turn them in.

After she'd gotten our iced tea, she vanished.

The couple started arguing about whether or not to enter their daughter in the next beauty pageant. It cost quite a bit to enter a child in a pageant, I learned, and to rent a dress and take time off from work to do the girl's hair and makeup cost even more.

I raised my eyebrows at Tolliver, who suppressed a smile. My mother had tried to get Cameron to do the pageant circuit. At the very first one, Cameron had told the judges she thought the pageant system was very close to white slavery. She had accused the judges of many unpleasant perversions. Needless to say, that had ended Cameron's career as a beauty contestant. Of course, Cameron was fourteen at the time. The little girl across the room was maybe eight and didn't look like she'd say boo to a goose.

Our cell rang again, and this time Tolliver answered it.

"Hello?" He paused and listened for a moment. "Hey, Sascha. What's the word?" Ah. The hair samples. The DNA test.

He listened for a few moments, then turned to me.

"No match," he said. "The male is not the father. Female One is the mother of Female Two." That was the way I'd marked the samples.

"Thanks, Sascha. I owe you," he said.

He'd no sooner put down the phone than the phone rang again. We looked at each other, exasperated and I answered it.

"Harper Connelly," said a strained voice.

"Yes. Who is this?" I asked.

"Sybil."

I never would have known this was my former client. Her voice was so tense, her enunciation so jerky.

"What's wrong, Sybil?" I tried to keep my voice level.

"You need to come here, tonight."

"Why?"

"I need to see you."

"Why?"

"There's something I need to tell you."

"You don't need to talk to us," I said. "We've finished our transaction." I struggled to keep myself calm and firm. "I did what you paid me to do, and Tolliver and I are going to get out of town as soon as we can."

"No, I want to see you tonight."

"Then you'll just have to want."

There was a desperate pause. "It's about Mary Nell," Sybil said, abruptly. "It's about her obsession with your brother. I need to talk to both of you, and if you're leaving town tomorrow, it's got to be tonight. Mary Nell's talking about killing herself."

I held the phone away to stare at it for a minute. This sounded wildly unlikely. In my limited experience of Mary Nell Teague, she'd be more apt to be thinking of taking Tolliver hostage and bombarding him with love until he yielded to her. "Okay, Sybil," I said warily. "We'll be there in about an hour."

"Sooner, if you can," she said, sounding almost breathless with relief.

The waitress brought our food as I was relaying the conversation to Tolliver, who'd been able to hear most of it, anyway.

He made a face.

I wrote SO MO DA NO on an extra napkin with a tine of my fork. I looked at it while I picked at my salad, which was about what you'd expect at a diner in the middle of nowhere. I tried to think myself into the scenario. Okay, Dick's been making notes to himself while he goes through the family's medical records for the year, getting ready for tax time. Four separate notations. Four members of the family.

S could be Sybil, M could be Mary Nell, D could be Dell, then N could be... who? I'd already gone over the fact that Dick Teague had called his daughter Nelly. But if that took care of the N, what about the M? I stared down at the napkin, thinking about making little notes about myself and my family...

Oh, for God's sake! The M was for Me!

I put the fork down.

"Harper?" Tolliver said.

"Blood types," I said. "Stupid, stupid, stupid me."

"Harper?"

"It's blood types, Tolliver. Dick Teague was saying, ‘I have type O, Sybil has type O, Mary Nell has type O, but Dell has type A.' That was what Sally Boxleitner was looking up in her high school science textbook. She suspected right away when she found the note Dick left on the medical records right before his heart attack. Dick had discovered he could not have been Dell's dad. Two O's can't have an A."

"I can see where that might trigger a heart attack," Tolliver said slowly. He put down his own fork, patted his lips with his napkin. "But why would that lead to Dell and Teenie getting shot?"

"I'm thinking," I said.

The family of four had cleared out while we were eating, with the topic of the beauty pageant still unresolved. I would put money on the mother winning. The older couple ate in a leisurely way, and just as slowly paid and took their leave, exchanging pleasantries with the waitress. The single man was still reading the paper, and every now and then the waitress would top off his coffee cup. Tolliver paid our bill while I stared into space, trying to imagine what had happened next in the Teague family drama.

Okay, next Hollis's wife had been killed. Sally had figured out that Dell wasn't Dick's son. Who would she tell? She would be more likely to tell a woman.

I thought she would tell her mother. But there must be something else...

We were in the car going back toward Sarne when I told Tolliver what I was thinking. "Why wouldn't she tell Hollis?" he asked. "It would be natural to tell your husband."

"Hollis told me she didn't like to talk about her family troubles," I said. "I think to Sally, Dell's parentage would fall into that category. So, Sally told her mother. Her mother, rather than Teenie, because Sally was closer to her mother. Besides, the secret was about Dell, and Teenie would've told him."

"So what happened next?" Tolliver asked, as though I would surely know.

I did try to puzzle it out. "Helen," I muttered. "What would Helen do? Why would she care whose kid Dell was?"

Why, indeed?

Say Teenie and Dell don't know anything about this. And then Sally dies. Sally dies because... she told. Because she told her mother. But I remembered Helen's overwhelming grief, and I didn't think Helen had known why Sally died. Until I came along and told Hollis and Helen differently, they'd thought her death was an accident. As far as I knew, Helen had never questioned that. And she'd believed Dell shot Teenie. Why? Over Teenie's pregnancy, of course! And then, unable to face what he'd done, Helen believed that Dell had shot himself.

Only then, to clear his name, Sybil had hired me, and I'd told Helen that Dell hadn't shot Teenie. I'd told Helen that both her daughters had been murdered by someone else.

I didn't exactly feel like all these deaths were my fault, but I didn't feel good about them, either. I'd done what I'd been hired to do, with no idea what the consequences might be in a confused place like Sarne. I believed after she found out they'd been killed, Helen must have realized who would have wanted both her daughters to die. I believed she would have arranged to confront that person to verify her suspicions, and during that confrontation that person had killed her, watched by all those pictures of two dead girls, in the little box-like house.

"I don't believe Sybil," I said abruptly.

Tolliver looked over at me briefly before turning his attention back to the rain-slick road. There was a distant rumble. I shivered.

"Why?"

"I don't believe Mary Nell would ever threaten to kill herself," I said. "I don't believe she would resort to tactics like this to win your interest. I think she's too proud."

"She's sixteen."

"Yeah, but she's got her backbone in straight."

"So, why are we going?"

"Because Sybil wants us there badly enough to lie about it, and I want to know why."

"I don't know, maybe we should just go back to the motel. It's thundering, and you know there may be lightning."

"I got that." As a matter of fact, the Tylenol hadn't prevented the ferocious headache building behind my eyes. "But I think we should go to Sybil's." Something was pushing me, and I had a bad feeling it wasn't something smart.

I spotted a flash of lightning out of the corner of my eye and tried not to flinch. I was safe, in a car, and when I got out, I'd be very careful not to step into a downed electrical wire or hold a golf club or stand under a tree or do any of the myriad things people did that increased their chances of being electrocuted by lightning, either directly or indirectly. But I couldn't help ducking and hiding my face.

"You can't do this," Tolliver said. "We need to get inside."

"Go to the Teagues' house," I yelled. I was terrified, but I was driven.

He didn't say anything else, but turned in the right direction. I was ashamed of myself for yelling at my brother, but I was also strangely light-headed and focused on what lay ahead. A little part of my brain was still gnawing at the problem: Why would Dell and Teenie have to die, if Dell wasn't Dick Teague's son? What secret was so important that all those people had to die, the people who could reveal it?

The Teague house was mostly dark when we pulled up to it. I'd imagined it would be blazing with light, but only one window glowed through the darkness. None of the outside lights were on, which I thought was strange. If I'd been Sybil, I'd have turned on all the outside lights once I'd made sure company was coming, especially on an evening when bad weather was obviously imminent.

"This is bad," Tolliver said slowly. He didn't elaborate. He didn't need to. We parked at the front of the house. The rain drummed on the roof of the car. "I think you better call your cop buddy," he said to me. "I think we better stay out of that house until we have someone with authority here." He switched on the dome light.

"I can't count on him being the one on call," I said, but I dialed his home number on the chance that Hollis was snug and warm and dry in his little house. No answer. I tried the sheriff's office. The dispatcher answered. She sounded distracted. I could hear the radio squawking in the background. "Is Hollis on patrol?" I asked.

"No, he's answering a call about a tree being across the road on County Road 212," she snapped. "And I got a three-car accident on Marley Street." I could see that a personal call to a busy officer would not be priority.

"Tell him to come to the Teagues' house as soon as he can," I said. "Tell him it's very important. I think a crime's been committed there."

"Someone'll come as soon as they can get free from the ones we're sure about," she said, and she hung up the phone.

"Okay, we're on our own," I told Tolliver. He switched off the light, leaving us in a dark island of dry warmth. The cold rain was pelting down, drenching the lawn and rinsing off the car. The flashes of lightning were only occasional. I could stand it, I told myself. We'd parked at the end of the sidewalk that led directly to the main doors. The garage, with its door into the kitchen, was to our left on the west side of the house.

"I'll go in the front, you go in the garage door," I said. By the distant glow of the streetlights, I could see Tolliver open his mouth to protest, then close it again.

"All right," he said. "On the count of three. One, two, three!"

We leapt from our respective sides of the car and took off for our separate goals. I reached mine first, without being hit by anything except leaves and twigs snapped from a tree by the high winds.

The front door wasn't locked. That might not mean anything. I was pretty sure that in Sarne no one locked up until they turned in for the night. But the hair on my neck prickled. I pushed it open, but only a foot.

The door opened directly into the large formal living room, which was unlit and shadowy. The rain running down the big picture window and the streetlight shining through it made the room seem underwater in the glimpse I had before I crouched and rolled as I pushed the door wide open. A shot whistled past and above me. I scrambled to take cover behind a big chair. I'd never held a gun in my life, but I was regretting my lack of firepower at this instant.

There was a scream from somewhere else in the big house. I thought it came from the back, maybe from the family room.

Where was Tolliver? But he'd have heard the shot. He'd be careful.

For an unbearably long moment, nothing more happened. I wondered how many people were hiding from each other in these rooms, and I wondered if I'd survive to find out.

Gradually, my eyes became used to the faint and watery light. Though the drapes had been partially drawn, I could identify the furniture by shape.

There was another doorway directly opposite the front entrance, and I was pretty sure that was where the shot had come from. I took a deep breath and rolled from the armchair to a coffee table. Next step, the couch. That would put me within a few feet of the other doorway, which was the only way into the rest of the house, if I was remembering the layout correctly.

"Nell!" I yelled, hoping to distract the shooter from Tolliver's progress, wherever he was. "Sybil!"

There was an answering shriek from the second floor. I didn't know which one of them was yelling, and I didn't know the location or number of people in the house, but I did know all of them were alive. Not a buzz in my head.

I'd been feeling very determined, but now the storm kicked up a notch. The rain began lashing harder at the window and soaking the carpet through the open front door. The rumble of thunder became almost continuous, and the crack of lightning followed right after. I felt as though I was pinned on a map and the lightning could see me, was tracking me, getting closer and closer until it could hit me again. Then I'd lose everything. The unimaginable pain would arc through me for the second time, and I'd lose my sight or my memory or the use of my leg, or something else irreplaceable. I moaned in fear, covering my eyes, and when I took my hands away, a man was standing over me with a gun in his hand.

In a desperate attempt to save my life, I dove at him, grabbing him around the knees and bringing him down. The gun went off; he'd had his finger on the trigger, oh God oh God. But if I was hit I didn't know it yet, and when he swung the gun at my head I grabbed his wrist with both hands and clung to it, literally for dear life.

Maybe my intense fear made me stronger than usual, because I was able to keep my hold on him though he hit at me with his other arm and thrashed around to shake me off. He was trying to bring the gun to bear on me, trying to force his arm into a straight line so he could fire at me, and as we rolled around in a snarling heap I saw my chance and sank my teeth into the fleshy heel of his hand and bit down with all my might. He gave a cry of pain—yay!—and let go of the gun. I would like to say that had been my intent, but if it was, I'd made the decision on a level I'd never tapped consciously.

Then the lights came on in the room, blinding me, and a shape I thought was Tolliver leaped forward. All three of us were in the melee on the floor, crashing into tables and sending heavy lamps toppling to the pale carpet.

"Stop!" screamed a new voice. "I've got a gun!"

We all froze. I still had my teeth in the man's hand, and Tolliver had raised a heavy glass ornament shaped like an apple to bash in his head. For the first time, I unclenched my teeth and looked up at the man's face. Paul Edwards. He was a far cry from the suave lawyer I'd met in the sheriff's office. He was wearing a flannel shirt and khakis and sneakers, and his hair was completely disheveled. He was panting heavily, and blood was streaming from his hand where I'd bitten him. Most striking of all was the absence of that calm assurance he'd had, the certainly that his little world was his to rule and order. He looked more like a raccoon that had been treed—bared teeth and glinting eyes and hissing noises.

"Oh my God, Paul," Sybil said, the gun wavering in her hand. Dammit, why does everyone have a gun? Sybil's was smaller, but looked just as lethal. "Oh, my God." She was as struck by the transformation as I was, probably more. "How could you do this?"

I hoped she was asking him, not us. At least the light had made the storm retreat in my forest of fears. Tolliver gently set the glass apple on a table by the kitchen doorway.

"Sybil, I couldn't let them know." He was trying to sound reasonable, but it just came out weak.

"That's what you said before, when you made me call them. I still don't understand."

Tolliver and I might as well not have been in the room.

I noticed for the first time that Sybil had a scarf tied to one wrist, and the other wrist was deeply scored with a red line. He'd had her tied up.

"Where's Nell?" I croaked, but neither of them answered. They were so focused on each other, we weren't even on the same planet. I noticed that Tolliver silently bent to retrieve Paul's gun where it lay against the baseboard. The gun looked horribly functional in the expensive, feminine room, which right now was not looking its orderly best. Tolliver slid the gun under the skirt of the couch. Good.

"Sybil, we were together for so long," Paul said. "So long. You'd never divorce him. You'd never even agree to quit sleeping with him."

"He was my husband, for God's sake!" she said harshly.

"So when Helen divorced that bastard Jay, she..." Paul looked at the carpet as if it covered a secret he needed to know. "We got close."

"You had an affair with her," Sybil said, absolutely stunned. "With that low-class drunken slut. After you denied it to my face! Harvey was right."

I risked a look at Tolliver. He met my eyes and we exchanged looks.

"I knew Dell was really my son," Paul said. "But Teenie was mine, too."

"No," said Sybil, shaking her head from side to side. "No."

"Yes," he said. But his eyes were straying now and again to the gun. Sybil was holding it pretty steady, for now. Tolliver and I had edged away from Paul, naturally, not wanting to be in the line of fire, but now I wondered if we shouldn't have kept hold of him, and possibly Tolliver should have bashed him with the glass apple, just to be sure. The lawyer was getting his spirit back, the longer Sybil talked to him without shooting him.

"You could have just told them," she said. "You could have just told them."

"I did tell them," he said. "That day they died. I did tell them." His voice was unsteady, as shaky as Sybil's.

"You killed them? Why'd you kill your son, our son?" Tears were running down her cheeks, but she wasn't ready to crumple yet. I'd been right when I'd pegged her as stoic.

"Because Teenie was pregnant, you stupid cow," he said, retreating to a more comfortable emotion, anger. "Teenie was pregnant, and she wouldn't have an abortion! Said it was wrong! And your son, our son, wouldn't make her!"

"Pregnant! Oh! Oh, my God. How did you find out?"

"From me." A bedraggled Nell stood in the doorway. She had a letter opener in her hands, and her wrists held the same red marks that her mother's showed. "I'm the most stupid person in the world, Mama. I was so worried about Teenie being pregnant that when Dell told me, I thought I'd ask Paul to talk to her, tell her to give it up for adoption. Dell was too young to get married, Mama, and I just didn't want to be Teenie Hopkins' sister-in-law. So they died! He killed them, Mama, and it's all my fault!"

"Don't you ever think that, Mary Nell. It's his fault." Sybil gestured with the gun toward her longtime lover.

It seemed to me it was sort of Sybil's fault, too, but I wasn't going to raise any issues as long as she was holding the gun. While I was being ignored, I wanted to put a safer distance between me and Paul Edwards, so I was edging back to the far end of the couch. On Edwards's other side, Tolliver was shifting himself a little closer to the two women, but he was careful to keep the line of fire between Sybil and Paul free and clear.

"Yes, it's my fault," Paul gabbled. He was looking around the floor surreptitiously. He was looking for his gun. Paul Edwards was not down for the count.

"You need to tie him up," Tolliver suggested. "Call the police."

Nell began to move back through the doorway, presumably to go into the kitchen to call the police, but Paul made a sudden move and she stilled.

"No, don't call," Paul said. "Mary Nell, I'm your dad, too. Don't give me up."

Poor Nell couldn't have looked more horrified if he'd said he'd made an offer for her hand.

"No," Sybil hissed. "Don't listen, Mary Nell. It's not true."

"She's right," I said, very quietly. But no one paid attention. My brother and I were definitely the audience. The innocent bystanders. You know what happens to innocent bystanders.

"Did you kill my dad, somehow?" she asked Paul. "My real dad?"

"No," I said. "Your dad died of a heart attack, Nell. He really did." I didn't see any need to throw in the circumstances.

"You... you... asshole," she said to Paul Edwards.

Her mother opened her mouth to reprimand Mary Nell, then had the good sense to close it.

"You killed my son," Sybil said instead. "You killed my son. You killed his baby. You killed his girlfriend. You killed... who else did you kill? Helen, I guess. The mother of your daughter."

"You have yourself to blame for that," he said sullenly. "It was you hiring Helen, you having her around here cleaning that gave Dell and Teenie a chance to get to know each other."

"Gave you a chance to see Helen again, too, I guess," Sybil said in a very ugly voice. "Who else did you kill, Paul?"

"Sally Boxleitner?" I suggested.

Edwards gaped at me as if I'd sprouted another head. "Why do you... ?" he began, then trailed off, apparently at a loss.

"She figured it out, didn't she?" I asked. "Did she call you?"

"She called me," he admitted. "She said she, she..."

"What did my wife tell you?" Hollis asked from the open front door.

I wondered if Tolliver and I could just creep out through the kitchen and be gone. We could go back to the motel and grab our stuff, leave this town forever. I caught Tolliver's eye and tilted my head toward the doorway into the rest of the house. He shook his head slightly. We were just spectators at the showdown at the OK Corral, but that still meant some injudicious move might get us killed in the cross fire.

Hollis didn't look like the stoical cop I'd met when I'd come to Sarne, and he didn't look like the lover I'd joined in bed. His eyes were showing a lot of white. He was wearing a long shiny waterproof slicker, and his uniform hat had a plastic bag on it. His face was wet with rain, and his slicker dripped onto the carpet. He was wearing rubber boots over his heavy cop shoes, and he had a glove on his left hand. His right hand was bare, holding his own gun in a very businesslike way.

I wondered if Mary Nell had a firearm tucked in a pocket.

"I didn't kill her," Paul said. "She called me, told me she had some questions about blood types. I agreed to meet her, though at the time I didn't know what she was talking about."

"You killed Dell," Mary Nell said. "You killed Teenie, and the baby, and Miss Helen. How can we believe you didn't kill Sally, too?"

"Sybil," I whispered.

Only Tolliver heard me. His eyes widened.

"You can't pin that one on me," Paul Edwards said, beginning to pull himself to his knees. I thought it was strange that the charge would make him indignant enough to be defiant, with all that he'd admitted. "I think you can understand why I didn't want Teenie to bring a child into the world with a bloodline like that," and he half-smiled in a parody of a reasonable expression. "But I never laid a hand on Sally. Sally was a good girl. And definitely not mine, of course."

"Good," Hollis growled.

"But you know, since I thought she'd drowned in the tub by accident, like the coroner said, I'd never stopped to think. Sybil, I told you that Sally called me, said she had something to tell me about Dick's death. At the time, I thought Sally might be priming up to tell me a tale for some kind of blackmail. But when she died, too, it didn't seem to make any difference. Sybil, did you go talk to Sally?"

Mary Nell gave a choked laugh. "Don't you try to go blame that on her, you murderer! Mama, tell him..." The girl's voice trailed off when she saw her mother's face. "Mama?" She sounded lost. Gone for good.

"She said she'd looked up blood typing, and she knew Dell wasn't really a Teague," Sybil said dully. "She wanted me to ask Harvey to resign early. Sally wanted Hollis to have Harvey's job. She was scared Hollis would get restless without it, that he wasn't happy piecing together a living in a little town like this."

Hollis looked like someone had hit him in the head. His hand was wavering. He didn't know who he wanted to shoot most. I understood the feeling.

Sybil gulped. Her own gun was falling down to her side. "I couldn't do that. And I couldn't stand her lying like that. I made myself believe it was a lie. So I went by one afternoon. She'd left the door unlocked, which I figured, and I walked in with this gun, but she was in the tub, singing away."

Hollis looked sick.

"And I just stepped in the bathroom and I grabbed her heels and pulled," Sybil went on. "And after a minute, she stopped trying to get up." Sybil stood there, lost in the memory, the gun down by her side.

Mary Nell screamed in horror. Paul Edwards launched himself at Sybil's gun, and Tolliver leaped over to knock me down behind the couch, his arms wrapped around me. Of course, a bullet could pass through the couch like it could pass through butter, but at least we were out of sight and mind.

A gun fired, and there were more screams—I was pretty sure Mary Nell's was one of them. When there was a little period of silence, we stuck our heads around the end of the couch.

"You can get up," Hollis said, his voice heavy and about a million years old. Tolliver straightened first and helped me up. My bad leg refused to lock for a minute, leaving me wobbly.

Paul Edwards was on his knees, clutching his shoulder. Behind him there was a dent in the wall, and pieces of glass glinted on the carpet. Mary Nell was standing as if she'd been turned into stone, glaring at Paul. Sybil was looking at her daughter.

"You dislocated my shoulder," Paul wheezed, "you little bitch."

"I hit him," Mary Nell said in a disconcertingly childish voice. "I threw the glass apple and hit him."

"Were you trying to hit him in the head?" Hollis asked. "I wish you'd aimed higher."

Horribly, she laughed.

"Why don't you shoot me, Hollis?" Sybil's voice was deep and throbbing. "Come on, you know you want to. I'd rather you shot me now than go through a trial and sentencing."

"You're the selfish bitch," Hollis said. "Sure. I'm going to shoot you in front of your daughter. Hell of a way to give her another great memory, don't you think? Take a moment to think of someone besides yourself, why don't you?"

After a second, he said in a voice much closer to sane, "Tolliver, please call the sheriff's office." My brother patted his pocket. No cell. He slipped past the little group into the kitchen, and I could hear him punching buttons and speaking. The storm had stopped; the only traces of it were heard in the drip, drip, drip of water from the eaves.

I felt like I was looking at them through the wrong end of the telescope. These four miserable people. They looked far away, small, but clear-cut in their distress.

"Everything's lost, for you," I said to Paul Edwards. His eyes widened as he looked at me. "I'm not sorry. Besides all the other, more horrible things you've done, you had my brother thrown in jail—though you had a lot of help doing that. You shot at me in the cemetery, and I have to believe that was you all by yourself, right? Now, your life is over."

"What are you now, a seer?" Sybil said bitterly. "I wish I'd never asked you here, never tried to find out what happened to the girl."

"Then I'm glad you already paid me." It was all I could think of to say. She laughed, but not as if she really found it humorous. Her daughter was still looking from Sybil to Paul, from her mother to the man who'd been her mother's lover, and she looked sick and young and defenseless.

"You're going to be a great woman," I said to Mary Nell. She didn't look at me; I don't think she was any fonder of me at that moment than was her mother or Paul. Even as my brother came back in the room, we heard sirens approaching, and lights began to flash up and down the soaking suburban street.

"Why'd you do all that to me?" I asked Paul. "I don't understand."

"The baby," he said. "I never thought you'd find Teenie. When you did, I was sure you knew about the baby. I thought if I kept you scared, you wouldn't figure it out."

But the baby had left no bones. If Paul had left us alone, we'd have departed Sarne without a second thought.

We didn't get away until perhaps three in the morning. We had to tell many, many people what we'd seen and heard. We were too wired to sleep for an hour after we got back to our room, but once we did, we slept until noon.

We had our bags in the car an hour later. We settled with the front desk, and the odious Vernon practically did the macarena when he found out we were really going. I felt empty, hollow; but I wanted to leave Sarne so badly I pushed myself to do all the right things toward that end. We got gas and swung by the police station as we'd been told.

Hollis was there again, or maybe was still there. Harvey Branscom's office was empty, the door wide open. I was sure he'd been having a terrible night and a bad day since his sister was in the pokey for murder. I studied Hollis's face. He looked somehow younger, as if the solving of his wife's death had erased a couple of years and some lines of tension.

"You all shoving off?" he asked.

"Yes," Tolliver said.

"We've got your numbers and your lawyer's address, just in case?"

"Yes," I said. I knew Hollis would never call my number.

"Okay, then. We appreciate all your help." He was trying to keep this as brisk and impersonal as possible. But I could see Tolliver bristling for my sake. I put my hand on his arm.

"No problem," I said. "No problem."

"Well, then."

We both nodded at him, and he gave us a curt nod back, and we went out the swinging glass doors for the last time, I hoped to God.

Tolliver was driving, and after we'd put on our seat belts and picked a radio station, he took the car through the streets of Sarne to the highway that would take us east.

"Think we could make Memphis before tonight?" I asked.

"I'm sure of it," he said. "Will you—are you okay with saying goodbye like that?"

"Yes. What's the point of a sentimental parting?"

He seemed to acknowledge this with a tilt of his head. "But you liked him."

"Yeah, sure. But, you know, it just wasn't meant to be."

"Someday..." he began, and let the idea trail off.

"You know what, Tolliver? You remember when we did Romeo and Juliet in high school?" We might have studied it years apart, but our high school stuck to its course of study religiously.

"Yeah. And?"

"There was that line that Mercutio says, when he gets killed in the feud between the Montagues and the Capulets. He says it in his dying speech. You remember?"

"No," he said. "Tell me."

"He says, ‘A plague on both your houses.' And then he dies."

" ‘A plague on both your houses,' " Tolliver repeated. "That about sums it up."

I had a thought. "But of course, Paul Edwards had a foot in both houses—the Hopkins house and the Teague house."

"Somehow that seems like the right thing to say, anyway."

We were quiet for a minute. Then, as the last of Sarne fell behind us and we headed from the mountains to the delta, the flatlands that stretched on and on, I said, "You know, I keep thinking about Teenie, lying out there in the woods, all alone. No matter what happened, I did a good thing."

"Never doubt it. It was a good thing." He hesitated. "Do you think they know? When they've been found?"

"Oh, yes. They know," I said, and the miles to Memphis opened ahead of us.