Grave Surprise

one

I didn't like Clyde Nunley the first time I met him face-to-face in the old cemetery. There was nothing wrong with the exterior of the man: he was dressed like a regular person would dress for the mild winter weather of southern Tennessee, especially considering the task at hand. His old blue jeans, work boots, shapeless hat, flannel shirt, and down vest were reasonable attire. But Dr. Nunley had a smug, smooth, air about him that said that he'd brought me here to be an object of derision, said he'd never believed I was anything but a fraud.

He shook my hand, standing right in front of me. He was having a great time, scanning the faces of my brother and me, as we waited side by side for his directions.

Offered under the aegis of the anthropology department of Bingham College, the course Dr. Clyde Nunley taught was titled "An Open Mind: Experiences Outside the Box." I noted the irony.

"Last week we had a medium," he said.

"For lunch?" I asked, and got a scowl for my reward.

I glanced sideways at Tolliver. His eyes narrowed slightly, letting me know he was amused but warning me to play nice.

If it hadn't been for the presence of that asshole of a professor, I would have been brimming with anticipation. I drew in a deep breath as I glanced past Dr. Nunley at the tombstones, worn and weathered. This was my kind of place.

By American standards, the cemetery was an old one. The trees had had nearly two centuries to mature. Some of these hardwoods could have been saplings when the denizens of St. Margaret's churchyard had been laid to rest. Now they were tall, with thick branches; in the summer, their shade would be a blessing. Right now, in November, the branches were bare, and the grass was bleached and strewn with dead leaves. The sky was that chill, leaden gray that makes the heart sad.

I would have been as subdued as the rest of the people gathered there if I hadn't had a treat in store. The headstones still upright were uneven, both in lodgment and in color. Below them, the dead waited for me.

It hadn't rained in a week or two, so I was wearing Pumas rather than boots. I would have better contact if I took the Pumas off, but the students and the professor would doubtless interpret that as further evidence of my eccentricity. Also, it was a bit too cold for going around barefoot.

Nunley's students were there to watch my "demonstration." That was the point. Of the twenty or so in the group, two were older; one, a woman, was in her forties. I was willing to bet she'd arrived in the minivan now sitting frumpily among the other vehicles pulled up to the wire strung between white posts to separate the gravel parking lot from the grass of the churchyard. Her face was open and curious as she evaluated me.

The other "nontraditional" class member was a man I placed in his early thirties, who was dressed in cords and a heathery sweater. The thirties man was the shining Colorado pickup. Clyde Nunley would be the ancient Toyota. The four other cars, battered and small, would be those of the traditional students who formed the bulk of the little crowd here to watch. Though St. Margaret's was actually on the campus grounds, the old church was tucked far back into the reaches of Bingham College, beyond the little stadium, the tennis courts, the soccer field—so it wasn't surprising that the students who could, had driven, especially in the chilly weather. The kids were in the typical college eighteen-to-twenty-one age bracket, and with an odd jolt I realized that made them only a bit younger than me. They were wearing the usual uniform of blue jeans, sneakers, and padded jackets—more or less what Tolliver and I were wearing.

Tolliver's jacket was from Lands' End, bright red with a blue lining. Red looked good with his black hair, and the jacket was warm enough for most situations in the South. I was wearing my bright blue padded jacket, because it made me feel safe and soft, and because Tolliver had given it to me.

We were spots of color in the overall grayness. The trees that surrounded the old church, its yard, and its cemetery gave us a feeling of privacy, as if we'd been marooned at the back of the Bingham campus.

"Miss Connelly, we're all anxious to see your demonstration," Dr. Nunley said, practically laughing in my face. He made an elaborate sweeping gesture with his arm that encompassed the gaggle of headstones. The students didn't look anxious. They looked cold, bored, or mildly curious. I wondered who the medium had been. There weren't many with genuine gifts.

I glanced at Tolliver again. Fuck him, his eyes said, and I smiled.

They all had clipboards, all the students. And all the clipboards had diagrams of the old graveyard, with the gravesites neatly drawn in and labeled. Though this information wasn't on their clipboards, I knew there was a detailed record of the burials in this particular graveyard, a record containing the cause of death of most of the bodies buried in it. The parish priest had kept this record for the forty years he'd served St. Margaret's church, keeping up the custom of his predecessor. But Dr. Nunley had informed me that no one had been buried here for fifty years.

The St. Margaret records had been discovered three months ago in a box in the most remote storeroom of the Bingham College library. So there was no way I could have found out the information the registers contained beforehand. Dr. Nunley, who had originated the occult studies class, had heard of me somehow. He wouldn't say exactly how my name had come to his attention, but that didn't surprise me. There are websites that connect to websites that connect to other websites; and in a very subterranean circle, I'm famous.

Clyde Nunley thought he was paying me to be exposed in front of the "An Open Mind" class. He thought I considered myself some form of psychic, or maybe a Wiccan.

Of course, that made no sense. Nothing I did was occult. I didn't pray to any god before I got in touch with the dead. I do believe in God, but I don't consider my little talent a gift from Him.

I got it from a bolt of lightning. So if you think God causes natural disasters, then I suppose God is responsible.

When I was fifteen, I was struck through an open window of the trailer where we lived. At that time, my mother was married to Tolliver's father, Matt Lang, and they had had two children, Gracie and Mariella. Crowded into the trailer (besides that lovely nuclear family) were the rest of us—me, my sister Cameron, Tolliver, and his brother Mark. I don't remember how long Mark was actually in residence. He's several years older than Tolliver. Anyway, Mark wasn't at the trailer that afternoon.

It was Tolliver who performed CPR until the ambulance got there.

My stepfather gave Cameron hell for calling the ambulance. It was expensive, and of course, we didn't have any insurance. The doctor who wanted to keep me overnight for observation got an earful. I never saw him again, or any other doctor. But from the Internet list I'm on, a list for lightning strike survivors, I've gathered it wouldn't have done me a lot of good, anyway.

I recovered—more or less. I have a strange spiderweb pattern of red on my torso and right leg. That leg has episodes of weakness. Sometimes my right hand shakes. I have headaches. I have many fears. And I can find dead people. If their location is known, I can diagnose the cause of death.

That was the part that interested the professor. He had a record of the cause of death of almost every person in this cemetery, a record to which I'd had no access. This was his idea of a perfect test, a test that would expose me for the fraud I was. With an almost jaunty air, he led our little party through the dilapidated iron fence that had guarded the cemetery for so many decades.

"Where would you like me to begin?" I asked, with perfect courtesy. I had been raised well, until my parents started using drugs.

Clyde Nunley smirked at his students. "Why, this one would be fine," he said, gesturing to the grave to his right. Of course, there was no mound, probably hadn't been in a hundred and seventy years. The headstone was indecipherable, at least to my unaided eyes. If I bent down with a flashlight, maybe I could read it. But they didn't care about that part of it; they wanted to know what I would say about the cause of death.

The faint tremor, the vibration I'd been feeling since I'd neared the cemetery, increased in frequency as I stepped onto the grave. I'd been feeling the hum in the air even before I'd passed through the rusted gate, and now it increased in intensity, vibrating just below the surface of my skin. It was like getting closer and closer to a hive of bees.

I shut my eyes, because it was easier to concentrate that way. The bones were directly underneath me, waiting for me. I sent that extra sense down into the ground under my feet, and the knowledge entered me with the familiarity of a lover.

"Cart fell on him," I said. "This is a man, I think in his thirties. Ephraim? Something like that? His leg was crushed, and he went into shock. He bled out."

There was a long silence. I opened my eyes. The professor had stopped smirking. The students were busily making notations on their clipboards. One girl's eyes were wide as she looked at me.

"All right," said Dr. Clyde Nunley, his voice suddenly a lot less scornful. "Let's try another one."

Gotcha, I thought.

The next grave was Ephraim's wife. The bones didn't tell me that; I deduced her identity from the similar headstone positioned side by side with Ephraim's. "Isabelle," I said with certainty. "Isabelle. Oh, she died in childbirth." My hand grazed my lower stomach. Isabelle must have been pregnant when her husband met with his accident. Hard luck. "Wait a minute," I said. I wanted to interpret that faint echo I was picking up underneath Isabelle's. To hell with what they thought. I pulled off my shoes, but kept my socks on in a compromise with the cold weather. "The baby's in there with her," I told them. "Poor little thing," I added very softly. There was no pain in the baby's death.

I opened my eyes.

The group had shifted its configuration. They stood closer to each other, but farther from me.

"Next?" I asked.

Clyde Nunley, his mouth compressed into a straight line, gestured toward a grave so old its headstone had split and fallen. The marble had been white when it had been situated.

As Tolliver and I went over to the next body, his hand on my back, one of the students said, "He should stand somewhere else. What if he's somehow feeding her information?"

It was the older male student, the guy in his thirties. He had brown hair, a thread or two of gray mixed in. He had a narrow face and the broad shoulders of a swimmer. He didn't sound as if he actually suspected me. He sounded objective.

"Good point, Rick. Mr. Lang, if you'd stand out of Miss Connelly's sight?"

I felt a tiny flutter of anxiety. But I made myself nod at Tolliver in a calm way. He went back to lean against our car, parked outside what remained of the cemetery fence. While I watched him, another car pulled up, and a young black man with a camera got out. It was a dilapidated car, dented and scraped, but clean.

"Hey, y'all," the newcomer called, and several of the younger students waved at him. "Sorry I'm late."

The professor said, "Miss Connelly, this is Clark. I forgot to tell you that the student newspaper wanted to get a few shots."

I didn't think he'd forgotten. He just didn't care if I objected or not.

I considered for a moment. I really didn't care. I was ready to have a good fight with Clyde Nunley, but not a frivolous one. I shrugged. "I don't mind," I said. I stepped onto the grave, close to the headstone, and focused my whole attention on ground below me. This one was hard to decipher. It was very old, and the bones were scattered; the coffin had disintegrated. I hardly felt my right hand begin to twitch, or my head begin to turn from side to side. My facial muscles danced beneath my skin.

"Kidneys," I said, at last. "Something with his kidneys." The ache in my back swelled to a level of pain that was almost unbearable, and then it was gone. I opened my eyes and took a deep breath. I fought the impulse to turn to look at my brother.

One of the youngest of the students was white as a sheet. I'd spooked her good. I smiled at her, trying to look friendly and reassuring. I don't think I achieved it. She took another step away from me. I sighed and turned my attention back to my job.

Next, I found a woman who'd died of pneumonia; a child who'd died of an infected appendix; a baby who'd had a heart malformation; a baby who'd had a blood problem—I suspected he was the second child of a couple with conflicting Rh factors—and a pre-teen boy who'd had one of the fevers, scarlet, maybe. Every now and then I heard the photographer snap a picture, but it really didn't bother me. I don't care much about my physical appearance when I'm working.

After thirty or forty minutes, Nunley seemed almost won over. He pointed to a grave in the corner of the cemetery farthest from the gate. The plot he indicated lay right by the fence, which had collapsed almost completely in that area. The headstone was partially obscured by the overhanging branches of a live oak, and the light was especially bad. This is a draining process, so I was beginning to get tired. At first I attributed my extraordinary reading to that. I opened my eyes, frowned.

"It's a girl," I said.

"Ha!" Nunley chose to regard himself as vindicated. He kind of overdid his glee, he was so happy to be proved right. "Wrong!" he said. Mr. Open Mind.

"I'm not wrong," I said, though I really wasn't thinking about him, or the students, or even Tolliver. I was thinking about the puzzle under the ground. I was thinking about solving it.

I took off my socks. My feet felt fragile in the chilly air. I stepped back onto the dead grass in line with the headstone to get a fresh outlook. For the first time, I noticed that though an attempt had been made to level this grave—it bore the flattened spots that blows with a shovel on soft dirt would have produced—the earth had been recently turned.

Well, well, well. I stood still for a moment, the implications working their way through my brain. I had the ominous creeping feeling you get when you just know something's right outside your realm of knowledge—a bad piece of future poised to jump out from behind a door and scream in your face.

Though the kids were muttering to each other and the two older students were having a low-voiced conversation, I squatted down to decipher the headstone. It read, JOSIAH POUNDSTONE, 1839-1858, REST IN PEACE BELOVED BROTHER. No mention of a wife, or a twin, or…

Okay, maybe the ground had shifted a bit and the body buried next to Josiah's had sort of wandered over.

I stepped back onto the grave, and I squatted. Distantly, I heard the click of the camera, but it was not relevant. I laid my hand on the turned earth. I was as connected as I could be without lying full length on the ground.

I glanced over at Tolliver. "Something's wrong here," I said, loudly enough for him to hear. He started over.

"A problem, Miss Connelly?" Dr. Nunley asked, scorn lending his voice fiery edges. This was a man who loved to be right.

"Yes." I stepped off the grave, shook myself, and tried again. Standing right above Josiah Poundstone, I reached down again.

Same result.

"There are two bodies here, not one," I said.

Nunley made the predictable attempts to find an explanation. "A coffin gave way in the next grave," he said impatiently. "Or something like that."

"No, the body that's lower is in an intact coffin." I took a deep breath. "And the upper body isn't. It's much newer. This ground has been turned over recently."

Finally interested, the students quieted down. Dr. Nunley consulted his papers. "Who do you… see… in there?"

"The lower body, the older one…" I closed my eyes, trying to peer through one body to another. I'd never done this before. "Is a young man named Josiah, like the headstone says. By the way, he died of blood poisoning from a cut." I could tell from Nunley's face that I was right. However the priest had described Josiah's death, modern knowledge could recognize the symptoms. What the priest may not have known, however, is that the cut had come from a stab wound, inflicted in a fight. I could see the knife sliding into the young man's flesh, feel him staunch the blood. But the infection had carried him off.

"The upper body, the newer one, is a young girl."

There was sudden and absolute silence. I could hear the traffic rushing by on busy roads just yards away from the old graveyard.

"How recent is the second body?" Tolliver asked.

"Two years at the most," I said. I tilted my head from side to side, to get the most accurate "reading" I could. On the age of the bones, I mostly go by the intensity of the vibration and the feel of it. I never said I was a scientist. But I'm right.

"Oh, my God," whispered one of the female students, finally understanding the implication.

"She's a murder victim," I said. "Her name was… Tabitha." As I heard what my voice was saying, an awful sense of doom flowed over me. The boogeyman jumped out from behind the door and screamed in my face.

My brother moved across the intervening ground like a quarterback who could see the end zone. He stopped just short of the grave, but he was close enough to take my hand. Our eyes met. His echoed the dismay in mine.

"Tell me it's not," Tolliver said. His dark brown eyes were steady on mine.

"It is," I said. "We finally found Tabitha Morgenstern."

After a moment, in which the younger people in the group turned to look at each other with inquiring faces, Clyde Nunley said, "You mean… the girl who was abducted from Nashville?"

"Yes," I said. "That's who I mean."

two

I'D been standing on two murder victims, one ancient (at least to me), and one modern. There were differences in the reading I got from the older one, in addition to the shock of finding Tabitha. I stowed Josiah Poundstone away to ponder later. No one here in St. Margaret's cemetery was concerned with him today.

"You got some explaining to do," the detective said. He was putting it mildly. We were at Homicide, and the carpeted partitions and the ringing phones and the flag tacked to the wall made the floor seem more like a modest company with a burgeoning business than a cop facility.

Sometimes I faint when I find a body that has passed in a violent way. It would have been good if I'd fainted this time. But I hadn't. I'd been all too conscious of the disbelief and outrage on the faces of the police, uniformed and plainclothes.

The initial skepticism and anger on the part of the two uniforms who'd rolled up on the scene had been understandable and predictable. They didn't imagine anyone would dig up a centuries-old grave on the say-so of a lunatic woman who made her living as a con artist.

But the more Clyde Nunley explained, the more they began to look uneasy. After a lot of comparison of the grave's surface with the others around it, the larger black cop finally radioed in, calling a detective to the scene.

We'd gone over the whole sequence of events again. This took a lot of time. Tolliver and I were leaning against our car, getting progressively colder and wearier, while the slow and repetitive questioning went on and on. Everyone was angry with us. Everyone thought we were frauds. Clyde Nunley grew more defensive and loud with each amazed reaction he got from the cops. Yes, he conducted a course during which students "experienced" people who claimed they could communicate with the dead: ghost hunters, mediums, psychics, tarot readers, and other paranormal practitioners. Yes, people actually sent their kids to college to learn stuff like that, and yes, they paid a rather high tuition for it. Yes, the papers about the old cemetery had been kept quite secure, and Harper Connelly had had no chance to examine them. Yes, the box containing the papers had been sealed when the library staff had discovered it. No, neither Tolliver nor I had ever been a student at the college. (We had to smile when we heard that one.)

To no one's surprise, we were "asked" to come to the police station. And there we sat, answering all the same questions over and over again, until we were left to vegetate in an interview room. The garbage can was full of snack wrappers and stained Styrofoam coffee cups, and the walls needed a new coat of paint. In the past, someone had thrown the chair I was sitting on. I could tell, because one of the metal legs was slightly bowed. At least the room was warm enough. I'd gotten chilled down to my bones in the cemetery.

"You think it would look bad if I read?" Tolliver asked. Tolliver is twenty-eight now, and he likes to grow his black hair out, wear it long for a while, and then cut it drastically. At the moment, it was long enough to pull back into a short ponytail. He has a mustache and acne-scarred cheeks. He's a runner, like me. We spend a lot of hours in cars, and running is a good way to counteract that.

"Yes, I think it would look callous," I said. He glowered at me. "Well, you asked me," I said. We sat in dreary silence for a minute or two.

"I wonder if we'll have to see the Morgensterns again?" I said.

"You know we will," he said. "I bet they've already called them, and they're driving over from Nashville right now."

His cell phone rang.

He checked who was calling, looked as blank as a man can look, and answered it. "Hey," he said. "Yeah, it's true. Yes, we're here in Memphis. I was going to call you tonight. I'm sure we'll see each other. Yes. Yes. All right, goodbye."

He didn't look happy as he snapped the phone shut. Of course I wanted to know who his caller had been, but I didn't say anything. If anything could have made me gloomier, it was the idea that sooner or later we'd have to see Joel and Diane Morgenstern again.

When I'd realized whom the bones belonged to, my dismay was more overwhelming than my feeling of triumph. I'd failed the Morgensterns eighteen months ago, though I'd tried as hard as I could to find their daughter. Now I'd finally come through for them, but the success was bitter.

"How'd she die?" Tolliver asked very quietly. You never knew who was listening, in a police station. I guess we're the suspicious sort.

"Suffocated," I said. Another silence. "With a blue pillow." We'd seen so many pictures of Tabitha alive: on the news broadcasts, pinned to the walls of her room, in her parents' hands, blown up to illustrate the fliers they'd given us. She'd been a very average girl of eleven, to everyone but her parents. Tabitha had had bushy reddish-brown hair she hadn't yet learned to deal with. She'd had big brown eyes, and braces, and she hadn't begun to mature physically. She'd liked gymnastics, and art lessons, and she'd hated making her bed and taking out the trash. I remembered all this from talking to her parents; or more accurately, listening to their monologues. Joel and Diane had seemed to believe that if they made Tabitha real to me, I would work harder at finding her.

"You think she's been down there since she was missing?" Tolliver asked, finally.

It had been the spring of the preceding year when we'd been summoned to Nashville by the Morgenstern family. By then, Tabitha had been gone a month. The police had just cut back on their search, since they'd looked everywhere they could. The FBI had scaled back its presence, also. The extra equipment that had been installed to trace phone calls had been removed, because there hadn't been any ransom demands. By then, no one was expecting such a demand.

"No," I said. "The ground was too freshly disturbed. But I think she's been dead the whole time. I really hope so." The only thing more awful than a murdered child was a murdered child who'd been subjected to prolonged torture or sexual abuse.

"There was no way you could have found her," Tolliver said. "Back then."

"No," I agreed. "There wasn't."

But it hadn't been for lack of trying. The Morgensterns had called me when they'd exhausted all the traditional methods of finding their lost child.

Yes, I had failed; but I had given it my all. I'd been over the house, the yard, the neighborhood, into the yards of anyone with a police record who lived in the surrounding area. Some I'd done at night because the homeowner wouldn't consent. Not only was I risking arrest, but injury. A dog had almost gotten me the second night.

I'd toured nearby junkyards, ponds, parks, landfills, and cemeteries, in the process finding one other murder victim in the trunk of a junked car (a freebie for the Nashville police—they'd been so pleased to have another murder victim on the books), and one natural death, a homeless man in a park. But I hadn't found any eleven-year-old girls. For nine days I'd searched, until the time came when I'd had to tell Diane and Joel Morgenstern that I could not find their child.

Tabitha had been snatched from her yard in an upscale Nashville suburb while she was watering the flowers in the beds around the front door of the house on a warm morning during spring break. When Diane had come out to go to the grocery, she'd discovered Tabitha was nowhere to be found. The hose was still running.

Daughter of a senior accountant with a firm that handled lots of Nashville singers and record people, Tabitha had had a blessed childhood. Though she had a stepbrother because Joel had been married and widowed previously, Tabitha had obviously enjoyed a well-regulated home life centered on maintaining her health and happiness, and incidentally that of Victor, her half sib.

My childhood, and Tolliver's, had not been like that—at least, after a certain point. That was the point where our lawyer parents began using drugs and drinking with their clients. After a while, the clients had ceased to be clients, and had become peers. That downward slide had brought me to the moment in time when I'd been standing in the bathroom in that trailer in Texarkana and the lightning had come through the window.

Trips down memory lane aren't happy jaunts for me.

I was almost glad when the detective—Corbett Lacey was his name—came back with cups of coffee for both of us. He was trying the soft approach. Sooner or later (probably later) someone else would try the hard approach.

"Tell me how you came to be here this morning," suggested Corbett Lacey. He was a burly man with receding blond hair, a large belly, and quick blue eyes like restless marbles.

"We were invited by Dr. Nunley to come to the old cemetery. I was supposed to show the students what I do."

"What exactly do you do?" He looked so sincere, as if he would believe any answer I gave him.

"I find the dead."

"You track people?"

"No, I find corpses. People call me in, and I find the bodies of those who've passed on." That was my favorite euphemism. I have quite a repertoire. "If the location of the corpse is already known, I can tell you the cause of death. That was what I was doing at the cemetery today."

"What's your success rate?"

Okay, that was unexpected. I'd assumed he'd sneer, at this point. "If the relatives or the police can give me a bead on the location, I can find the body," I said matter-of-factly. "When I find the body, I know the cause of death. In the case of Tabitha Morgenstern, when the family called me in, I could never find her. She'd been taken from her yard and put in a car pretty quick, I guess, and her corpse just wasn't there for me to sense."

"How does this work?"

Another unexpected question. "I feel them, like a buzz in my head," I said. "The closer I get, the more intense the buzz, the vibration, is. When I'm on top of them, I can reach down and tell how they died. I'm not a psychic. I'm not a precognate, or a telepath. I don't see who killed them. I only see the death when I'm near the bones."

He hadn't expected such a matter-of-fact reply. He looked at me, leaning forward on the other side of the table. His own cup of coffee was forgotten in front of him. "Why would anyone believe that?" Lacey asked wonderingly.

"Because I produce results," I said.

"Don't you think it's quite a coincidence? That you were called in by the Morgensterns when they were looking for their little girl, and now, months later, in a different city, you say you've found her? How do you think those poor folks are going to feel when the area's dug and there's nothing there? You should be ashamed of yourself." The detective regarded me with profound disgust.

"That's not going to happen." I shrugged. "I'm not ashamed of anything. She's there." I glanced at my watch. "They should have reached her by now."

Detective Laceys cell phone rang. He answered, "Yeah?" As he listened, his face changed. He looked harder and older. His eyes fell on me with a look I've seen often—a stare compounded of distaste, fear, and a dawning belief.

"They've reached some bones in a garbage bag," he said heavily. "Too small to be an adult's."

I tried very hard to look neutral.

"A foot below the garbage bag bones, there are wood remnants. Probably a coffin. So there may be another set of bones." He breathed heavily. "There's no trace of a coffin around the upper bones."

I nodded. Tolliver squeezed my hand.

"We'll get a very preliminary identification in a couple hours, if it's the Morgenstern girl. The dental records have been faxed from Nashville. Of course, a solid ID will have to wait on a full exam of the body. Well, what's left of the body." Detective Lacey set his own personal coffee mug on the battered table with unnecessary force. "Nashville police are sending the X-rays by car, and the car should be here in a couple of hours. The local FBI office is sending someone to witness the full autopsy. The Fibbies are offering their lab for the trace stuff. You are not to say anything about this to anyone until we've talked to the family."

I nodded again.

"Good," Tolliver said, just to goose the silence.

Corbett Lacey gave us a steady glare. "We've had to call her parents, and if this isn't her, I don't even like to think about what they'll feel. If you hadn't broadcast her name to the whole group standing there, we could have kept this quiet until we had something solid to tell them. Now, we've had to talk to them because it looks like the damn television will have it on the air soon."

"I'm sorry about that. I just wasn't thinking." I should have kept my mouth shut. He had a good point.

"Why do you even do this, anyway?" He gave me a puzzled face, as if he really couldn't figure me out. I didn't think he was completely sincere, but I was.

"It's always better to know. That's why I do it."

"You seem to make quite a bit of money, too," Corbett Lacey observed.

"I have to make a living, same as anybody else." I wasn't going to act ashamed of that. But, truly, I sometimes wished I worked at Wal-Mart, or Starbucks, and let the dead lie un-found.

"So, I guess Joel and Diane started out right away," Tolliver said. He was right; a change of subject was in order. "It'll take them how long to get here?"

Detective Lacey looked puzzled.

"The Morgensterns. How long a drive is it, Nashville to Memphis?" I said.

He gave us an unreadable look. "Like you didn't know."

Okay, I wasn't getting this at all. "Know… ?" I looked at Tolliver. He shrugged, as bewildered as I was. A possibility occurred to me. "Tell me they're not dead!" I said. I'd liked them, and I didn't often have feelings for clients.

It was Lacey's turn to look uncertain. "You really don't know?"

"We don't understand what you're talking about," Tolliver said. "Just tell us."

"The Morgensterns left Nashville about a year after the little girl was abducted," Lacey said. He ran a hand over his thinning blond hair. "They live here in Memphis now. He manages the Memphis branch of the same accounting firm, and his wife's pregnant again. Maybe you didn't know that he and his first wife were both from Memphis, and since Diane Morgensterns family lives overseas, back here was where they needed to be if they wanted the support of family during the pregnancy and birth."

I suspected my mouth was hanging open, but for the moment I didn't care. I had so many thoughts I couldn't a minute. "It's only a matter of time before they come up to the room and knock on the door."

I should have thought of that already. "This will generate a lot of publicity," I said, and the ambivalence was clear in Tolliver's face, as I'm sure it was in mine.

"You think we need to call Art?" Art Barfield was our attorney, and his firm was based in Atlanta.

"That might be a good idea," I said. "Would you talk to him?"

"Sure." Tolliver pulled out his cell phone and dialed, while I went to the sink to wash my face. After I turned off the water, I could hear him talking. I was combing my hair in the mirror—my hair was almost as dark as Tolliver's—when he hung up.

"His secretary says he's with a client, but he'll call soonest possible. Of course, he'll charge an arm and a leg if we ask him to come. That is, if he can get away."

"He'll come, or he'll recommend someone local. We've only asked him once before, and we're his most… lurid clients," I said practically. "If he doesn't come, we'll be swamped."

Art called us back about an hour later. From Tolliver's end of the conversation, you could tell Art was not too excited about the prospect of leaving home—Art was not young, and he liked his home comforts—but when Tolliver told Art about the reporters gathered at the police station, the lawyer allowed himself to be persuaded to get on a plane right away.

"Corinne'll call you with my plane information," Art said to Tolliver, but I could hear him clearly. Art has one of those carrying voices, which is really useful if you're a trial lawyer.

Art likes publicity almost as much as he loves his remote control and his wife's cooking. He's had a taste of it since he became our lawyer, and his practice has increased exponentially. His secretary, the middle-aged Corinne, called us within minutes to give us Art's flight number and his ETA.

"I don't think we'd better meet Art at the airport," I told Corinne. I watched another news van enter the parking lot. "I think we're going to have to go to a hotel, one with more security than this."

"You'd better make the change now, and I'll book Mr. Barfield a room at the same place," Corinne said practically. "I'll call him on his cell when he lands. In fact, I'll make a phone call or two, find the right place, and book the reservation for all of you. One room or two, for you and Mr. Lang?"

The hotel was sure to be very expensive. Normally I'd be inclined to share one room with Tolliver, as we were doing now. But if the newspapers were checking, better to err on the side of the Goddess of Rightness.

"Two," I said. "Adjacent. Or if we can get a suite, that would be good."

"I'll do some quick research, and then I'll confirm with you," the efficient Corinne said.

She called back to tell us we were booked into the Cleveland. It was, as I'd feared, way too expensive for my taste, but I'd pay the money to ensure the privacy. I didn't like being on television. Publicity was good for business, but only the right kind of publicity.

We left our motel, as disguised as we could be without looking ludicrous. Before strolling out one of the side doors and making a beeline to our car, we had bundled to the teeth. Because we looked so humble, Tolliver lugging the ice chest and me carrying our overnight bags, we managed to escape the attention of the news crew until we were pulling out of the parking lot. The newswoman, whose lips were so shiny they looked polyurethaned, made a flying leap to land right beside the driver's window. Tolliver couldn't see to turn left into the traffic flowing the way we needed to go, so we were more or less trapped. He rolled down the window and put on an agreeable smile.

"Shellie Quail from Channel Thirteen," the shiny woman said. She was the color of hot chocolate, and her black hair gleamed like it had been polished. It was in a smooth helmet style. Shellie Quail's makeup was equally warlike, lots of bright colors and definite lines. I wondered how long it took her to get ready to leave her house in the morning. She was wearing a tight pantsuit in a brownish, tweedy material, flecked with orange. The little flecks made her skin glow. "Mr. Lang, are you Miss Connelly's manager? Have I got that right?" the shining woman said.

"Yes, you do," Tolliver said agreeably. I knew the camera was rolling. But I had faith in my brother. He has a lot of charm when the occasion arises, especially if it arises in the presence of a pretty woman.

"Can you comment on this morning's happenings in the old St. Margaret's cemetery at Bingham College?" she asked. The microphone she'd been clutching was thrust at Tolliver's chin in what I considered a very aggressive way.

"Yes," he said. "We're waiting to hear if the body we discovered can be identified." I admired the way he kept his voice so level and calm—but serious, and worthy of being taken seriously.

"Is it true the police are considering the possibility that the skeleton may be that of Tabitha Morgenstern?"

Well, that hadn't taken long to leak out.

"Our thoughts and our prayers are with the Morgenstern family. Of course, like everyone else here, we're very anxious to hear some news," Tolliver said neutrally.

"Mr. Lang, is it true your sister stated that the body just exhumed from the cemetery is definitely that of the missing girl?"

We weren't going to get by with anything. "We believe that to be true," he said, indirectly.

"How do you explain the coincidence?"

"What coincidence?" Tolliver asked, which I thought was maybe a little over the top.

Even Shellie Quail looked disconcerted. But she got back on her roll. "That your sister was hired to look for Tabitha Morgenstern months ago in Nashville, and then hired to look at the graves in the old St. Margaret's cemetery here in Memphis. And that a body reported to be that of Tabitha Morgenstern is found in that cemetery."

"We have no idea how this came about, and we're looking forward to hearing the explanation," Tolliver said sternly, as if we'd been mightily put-upon. Baffled, Shellie Quail paused to think of another question, and we took the opportunity to make our left turn.

three

THE Cleveland was beautiful. The Cleveland was discreet. I was not going to want to see our credit card bill when it came next month.

A valet took our car, and we rolled into the lobby in a flurry of baggage and desperation, anxious to get away from the reporters who'd actually followed us to the new hotel. The staff was as courteous as if we'd stayed at the Cleveland four times a year. We were upstairs and out of reach of anyone in the twinkling of an eye. I was so glad to have time to regroup in relative safety and privacy, I could have cried.

The suite had a central living room with a bedroom on each side. Going directly to the bedroom on the right, I took off my shoes, lay down on my very own king-size bed, and surrounded myself with pillows. That's something I love about really good hotels: the abundance of pillows.

Once I was padded and quiet and warm, I closed my eyes and let my thoughts drift. Of course, they drifted right to the little girl I'd found in the cemetery.

I'd assumed Tabitha was dead from the moment I'd read about her disappearance, weeks before the Morgensterns had asked me to find her body. Based on the information in the newspaper accounts and even more on my own experience, that was a logical assumption. In fact, I'd been fairly sure the child had been dead since scant hours after her disappearance.

That didn't mean I was happy to be right. I'm not callous about death; at least I don't think I am. I think of myself as more… matter-of-fact. And I'd seen the Morgensterns' anguish first-hand. Because of my sympathy for them, I'd persisted longer in the search than I'd thought was reasonable, and certainly long enough to cut into our profit very severely. Tolliver didn't even charge them the full amount; he didn't say anything to me, but when I went over our profits and expenses at the end of the year, I'd noticed.

Since Tabitha had been dead all this time, I thought it would be better for Joel and Diane to know what had happened to their daughter.

I could only hope that the sentiment I'd sprouted so glibly to the detective was valid. I could only hope that knowing for sure what had happened to Tabitha gave the Morgensterns some relief. At least they would know she wasn't in the hands of some madman, actively suffering.

I found myself wishing I'd had longer with the body. I'd been so startled at the identity of the grave's unauthorized inhabitant that I hadn't spent enough energy evaluating the girl's last moments. I'd only seen the blue cushion, a flash of the long seconds as Tabitha slipped into unconsciousness and then passed away—as she passed from the imitation of death to death itself.

I don't believe that death and life are two sides of the same coin. I think that's bullshit. I'm not going to say Tabitha was at peace with God, because God hasn't let me know on that one. And there'd been a strange feeling to my connection with the body; a sensation I'd seldom experienced before. I tried to analyze the difference, but I didn't come up with anything. That would bother me until I understood it.

I have seen a lot of death—a lot. I know death the way most people know sleep, or eating. Death is a fundamental human necessity, a solitary passage into the unknown. But Tabitha had made her passage years too early, at the end of a painful and frightening ordeal. I was sorry for the manner of her death. And something about it had marked her during that transition, in a way I had yet to understand. I filed it away to consider later; maybe another trip to the cemetery would help. It was hardly likely I'd be in contact with the body again.

I turned onto my side and stretched back to prop a pillow against my shoulders. I turned my thoughts down a mental path so familiar that it had ruts worn in it. That path led to my sister Cameron. Her face was fuzzy in my memory now, or it took on the contours of her last school picture, which I carried in my wallet.

Somehow, discovering Tabitha's corpse in such an indirect and unexpected way gave me hope that someday I might find my sister Cameron's remains.

Cameron has been gone for six years. Like Tabitha, she was snatched out of the stream of her life, leaving her backpack behind on the shore as witness to her departure. When Cameron had become way overdue at home that day, I started looking for her. I'd roused my mother enough to feel she could watch Mariella and Gracie for at least a little while, and I'd trudged through the sweltering heat, following the route Cameron took when she walked home from the high school. It was getting to be twilight by then. Cameron had stayed at school later than I because she was helping to decorate for a dance; the senior prom, I think.

I'd found her backpack, fully loaded with the school-books, notebooks, notes passed to her in class, broken pencils, and small change. And that was all that was left of Cameron. The police had kept it for a long time, gone through its compartments, asked me about the content of every note. Then we'd asked for its return. Today, we carried that backpack in the trunk of our car.

When Tolliver came in, I was still lying on my bed. I'd rotated again, to lie flat on my back as I gazed at the ceiling, thinking about my sister.

"The car from the hotel's going to pick up Art at the airport," he said. "I got it all arranged."

"Thanks," I said, moving over to give him room. He lay on the other half of the vast king bed, shoes properly off. I let him have a pillow. Then I gave him another one.

"Looking back on the cemetery thing this morning," he began, and gave me a moment to fix my attention back on the nearer past.

"Okay," I said, to let him know I was ready to listen.

"Did you notice that man mixed in with the kids?"

"Yes, the guy who looked to be about thirty-five or so?"

"Dark brown hair, five ten, medium build."

"Right. Yes, of course I noticed him. He stood out."

"You think there was something fishy about him?"

"There was another older student," I said, not really protesting Tolliver's direction, but testing it out.

"Yeah, but she was a regular person. There was something off about this guy; he was there for a purpose, not because he had to be. You think he was some kind of professional debunker? There to spot how we did it, and expose us?"

"Well, I think that was Clyde Nunley's goal in teaching the course, don't you? Not an inquiry to stimulate students' minds to seriously consider spiritualism and the people who practice it, but to prove that it's all claptrap."

"But not as… I don't know, this guy seemed to have an agenda. He was purposeful."

"I know what you mean," I said.

"You think we've been set up?"

"Yes, I sure do think so. Unless this is most amazing coincidence in the history of coincidences."

"But why?" Tolliver turned his head to look at me.

"And who?" I countered.

The worry in his face mirrored my own.

My business would die without word of mouth. But it has to be a quiet word. If I brought a trail of newspaper and television reporters with me, half the people who use my services wouldn't want to see me coming. There are a few who'd love nothing better, but only a few. Most clients are embarrassed at hiring me at all, because they don't want to seem gullible. Some are desperate enough to be just that. But very few of them want any outside scrutiny.

So restrained coverage from time to time is okay. Once, a really good reporter wrote a story on me for a law enforcement journal, and I still get business from that exposure. Lots of officers clipped that story; when all else fails, they may get in touch with me through my website. My prices scare off some of the people who apply for my services. I'm not a lawyer, and no one asks me to do pro bono work.

Well, that's not true. People do. But I refuse.

However, I've never left a body unreported. If I find one in the course of a job, I'll report it, and I never ask for extra money for that.

If I got into the news too much, I'd be absolutely grabbing at pro bono work, just to get the good press. I didn't want to have to do that.

"Who do you think would hire such a person? Someone I didn't satisfy?" I asked the ceiling.

"We've found everyone since Tabitha," Tolliver said.

Yes, I'd had a long string of successes: cases with enough information to go on and enough persistence on my part. Bodies found, causes of death confirmed. Money in the bank.

"Maybe someone connected with the college who wanted to check on what the class was being exposed to?" I guessed.

"Could be. Or someone connected with St. Margaret's, who felt the cemetery was being used in some irreligious way."

We both fell silent, puzzled and unhappy about too many things at once.

"I'm glad I found her, though," I said. "No matter what."

My brother, who had followed my thoughts as he often did, said, "Yeah."

"Nice people," I said.

"You never thought what the police suspected—?"

"No," I said. "I never believed Joel did it. These days, everyone looks at the dad first. Did he molest her?" I did my television announcer voice. "Were there dark secrets in the house that seemed so normal?" I smiled with a twist of my mouth. People sure loved believing there were dark secrets—they love discovering happy normal families are anything but. Truly, sometimes there were plenty of secrets, more than enough to go around. But Joel and Diane Morgenstern had struck me as truly devoted parents, and I'd seen enough of the kind of parents who weren't to recognize the ones who were.

"I never believed it," I repeated. "But—here they are. In Memphis." We looked at each other. "How the hell could it have happened that her body turned up here, the city where her parents are living now? Unless there's a connection."

There was a tap at our suite door.

"The troops are here," Tolliver said.

"Well. The troop."

Art was missing a lot of his hair. What remained was curly and white. He was very heavy, but he dressed very well.

So he looked like an eminently respectable, sweet-natured grandpa—which just goes to show how deceptive appreances can be.

Art maintains the fiction that he is my father substitute.

"Harper!" he cried, throwing open his arms. I stepped in, gave him a light hug, and backed away when I could. Tolliver got a clap on the shoulder and a handshake.

We asked about his wife, and he told us what (but not how) Johanna was doing: taking art classes, keeping the grandchildren, remaining active in their church and several charities.

Not that we'd ever met Johanna.

I watched Art grope, trying to think of someone he could ask us about in return. He could hardly ask about our parents: my mother had died the previous year, in jail, of AIDS. Tolliver's mother had died years ago, of breast cancer, before we'd even met Art. Tolliver's dad, my stepfather, was in the wind since he'd gotten out of jail, having served his time on drug charges. My own father was still in big-boy prison, and would be for maybe five more years. He'd taken some money from his clients to support the drug habit he and my mother had developed. We never saw our little half sisters, Gracie and Mariella, because my Aunt Iona, my mom's sister, had poisoned the girls against us. Tolliver's brother, Mark, had his own life, and didn't much approve of ours, but we called him at least once a month.

And of course, there was never any news about Cameron.

"It's great to see you two looking so healthy," Art said in his heartiest voice. "Now, let's order some room service, and you can tell me all about this." Art loved it when we ate together. Not only did it make the meal billable, but it also reassured Art that Tolliver and I were normal people and not some kind of vampires. After all, we ate and drank like the rest of the world.

"It should be up in a minute," Tolliver said, and Art had to go on and on about how amazed he was that Tolliver had been so farseeing.

Actually, I was pretty impressed myself.

Art made notes throughout the meal as we told him everything we remembered about our previous search for Tabitha Morgenstern. My brother got out his laptop and checked our records to be sure of how much the Morgensterns had paid us for our fruitless search. We assured Art that we had no intention of charging them anything for finding her today—in fact, the idea made me sick. Art looked kind of relieved when I told him that.

"There's no way we can leave here without seeing the Morgensterns or talking to the police?" I asked, knowing I sounded cowardly.

"No way in the world," Art said. For once, he sounded as hard as he actually was. "In fact, the sooner you talk to them, the better. And you have to issue a press statement."

"Why?" Tolliver asked.

"Silence is suspicious. You have to say clearly that you had no idea that you would find Tabitha's body, that you're shocked and saddened, and that you are praying for the Morgensterns."

"We already told Channel Thirteen that."

"You need to tell everyone."

"You'll do that for us?"

"Yes. We need to write a statement. I'll read it on-camera for you. I'll take a few questions from the press, just enough to establish who you are. After that, I think questions will just muddy the water, especially since I won't be able to answer them."

I looked at Art, perhaps with a certain skepticism; he gave me big hurt eyes. "Harper, you know I wouldn't put you all in a spot hotter than the one you're in already. But we have to set the record straight while we can."

"You think we're going to be arrested?"

"Not necessarily. I didn't say that. I meant, highly unlikely." Art was backpedaling to firmer ground. "I'm saying this is our chance to get in our licks with the public, while we can."

Tolliver looked at Art for a minute. "All right," he said, when he reached his conclusion. "Art, you stay here while Harper and I go in the other room and write the press statement. Then you can look it over."

Leaving our lawyer no chance to offer another plan, we retreated to Tolliver's room, with his laptop to act as our secretary.

Tolliver settled at the desk, while I flung myself across the bed. "Dr. Nunley never said anything to you, did he, about Tabitha? When he asked us to come here?" I asked.

"Not a word. I would have told you," Tolliver said. "He just talked about the old cemetery, about how it would be a true test, since you really had no idea who was buried there and there was no way you could find out. He wanted to know if you'd be comfortable with that. Of course, he thought I'd make some excuse for you, trying to back out. Nunley was really surprised when I emailed him back, told him to expect us. He'd just had Xylda Bernardo, the psychic. She lives in this area, remember?"

I'd met Xylda once or twice, in the line of duty. "How'd she do?" I asked, out of sheer professional curiosity. Xylda, a colorful woman in her fifties, likes to dress in the traditional stage-gypsy style—lots of jewelry and scarves, long messy hair—which immediately makes people distrust her. But Xylda has a true gift. Unfortunately, like most commercial psychics, she embellishes that nugget of talent with a lot of theatrics and made-up flourishes, which she thinks lend her visions credibility.

Psychics—honest psychics—do receive a lot of information when they touch something a crime victim owned. The bad part is, quite often they receive information so vague it's almost useless ("The body's buried in the middle of an empty field"), unless you have a good idea what you're looking for to begin with. Even if there are a few psychics who can see a clear picture of, say, the house where a child's being held hostage, unless the psychic can also see the address, and the police find an identifiable suspect lives in that house, the building's appearance is almost irrelevant. There are even some psychics who can achieve all that, but then they have to get the police to believe them… since I've never met a single psychic who was also up on SWAT tactics.

"Oh, according to Nunley, Xylda did her usual," Tolliver said. "Vague stuff that sounded really good, like 'Your grandmother says to look for something unexpected in the attic, something that will make you very happy,' or 'Be careful of the dark man who comes unexpectedly, for he is not trustworthy,' and that's flexible enough to cover a lot of circumstances. The members of the class were pretty weirded out, since Xylda insists on touching the people she's reading. The students didn't want Xylda holding their hands. But that's the way it's done; for Xylda, touch is everything. You think she's for real?"

"I think most of what Xylda tells clients is bullshit. But I also think she actually has a few moments when she knows stuff."

Every now and then, I wonder: if the lightning had hit me a little harder, if I'd gotten a few more volts—would I have become able to see who caused the deaths of the people I find? Sometimes I think such a condition would be wonderful, a truly valuable gift. Sometimes it seems like my worst nightmare.

What if the lightning had entered through my foot, or my head, instead of jumping from the sink to the electric hair curler I held in my hands… what would have happened then? I probably wouldn't be around to know. My heart would have stopped for good, instead of for a few seconds. The CPR wouldn't have worked.

By now, Tolliver might be married to some nice girl who liked to be pregnant, the kind of girl who enjoyed going to home decoration parties.

Carrying this stream of supposition to an extreme length—if I'd died that day, maybe, somehow, Cameron would not have been on the road on that day at that hour, and she would not have been taken.

It's stupid and profitless, thinking like that, of course. So I don't indulge in it very often. Right at this moment, I needed to force myself to throw off this train of thought. Instead of daydreaming, I needed to concentrate on helping Tolliver compose the press release. What he'd said to Shellie Quail had been the gist of our public policy. We began embroidering on that. It was hard to imagine that anyone would believe us; after all, what were the odds that the same people who had failed to find the body in Nashville would find it in Memphis? But we had to try.

We'd just finished printing out our statement when I had to answer the phone. The manager said, "Ms. Connelly, there are some people down here who want to come up to talk to you and Mr. Lang. Are you receiving guests?"

"Who are they, please?"

"The Morgensterns. And another lady."

Diane and Joel. My heart sank, but this had to be done. "Yes, send them up, please."

Tolliver stepped into the living room to update Art while I printed out the statement. Art read it and made a few minor changes while we waited. In two or three minutes a hand rapped on our door.

I took a deep breath and opened it, and received yet another shock in a day that had already been full of them. Detective Lacey had told us Diane was expecting another baby, but I hadn't gotten a visual with that fact. Seeing her now, there was no mistaking it. Diane Morgenstern was really, really pregnant—seven months along, at the least.

She was still beautiful. Her bitter-chocolate hair was smooth and short, and her big dark eyes owed nothing to makeup. Diane had a small mouth and a small nose. She looked like a really pretty lemur of some kind. Just at the moment, though, her expression was simply blank with shock.

Her husband, Joel, was maybe five foot ten and stocky, powerful looking. He'd been a wrestler in college. I remembered the trophies in his study in their Nashville house. He had light red hair and bright blue eyes, a ruddy complexion, and a square face with a nose like a knife blade. How did all this add to up to a man women could not ignore? I don't have the faintest idea. Joel Morgenstern was the kind of man who focused on the person to whom he was speaking, which might have been the secret of the magnetism he exuded. To Joel's credit, he didn't seem to be aware of this; or maybe he took it so for granted that he didn't even think of the effect he had on women.

In Nashville, even under the circumstances I'd noticed how the female representatives of the media clustered around him. Maybe they'd been thinking the father is always a likely suspect, maybe they'd been trying to pick holes in his story, but they'd hovered around him like hummingbirds at a big red blossom. Not too surprisingly, the police had checked over and over to see if Joel was having an affair. They hadn't found a trace of such a thing; in fact, everyone who knew Joel commented on how devoted he was to Diane. For that matter, it was universal knowledge how caring he'd been during his first wife's terminal illness.

Maybe because lightning had fried my brain, maybe because my standards of judgment were completely different, Joel just didn't affect me like he did most women.

Felicia Hart, whose sister had been Joel's first wife, trailed in after Diane and Joel. I remembered Felicia from my first encounter with the family. She had been trying hard to be a good aunt to Victor, the son that first marriage had produced. She'd been aware that Victor was a suspect in Tabitha's disappearance, and she'd been at the house constantly, perhaps imagining that the loss of their daughter had meant that Diane and Joel would not be able to focus on Victor's needs and on his legal position.

"You found her," Joel said, taking my hand and pumping it ferociously. "God bless you, you found her. The medical examiner says there's a long way to go before an official identification, but the dental charts do match. We have to keep this to ourselves, but Dr. Frierson was kind enough to let us know in person. Thank God, we can have some peace."

This was such a different reaction from the one I'd expected that I was unable to respond. Luckily, Tolliver was more collected.

"Please, Diane, Joel, sit down," he said. Tolliver is very reverent toward pregnant women.

Diane had always seemed the frailer partner in the couple, even when she wasn't so obviously carrying a child.

"Let me hug you first," she said in her soft voice, and she wrapped her arms around me. I felt her distended belly pressing against my flat one, and I felt something wiggle while she was hugging me. After a second, I realized it was the baby, kicking against her stomach. Something deep inside me clenched in a mixture of horror and longing. I let Diane go and backed away, trying to smile at her.

Felicia Hart was no hugger, to my relief. She gave me a firm handshake, though she did put her arms around Tolliver. In fact, she muttered something in his ear. I blinked at that. "Glad to see you," she said a bit loudly, addressing an area somewhere between us. Felicia was a single woman. I placed her in her early thirties. She had jaw-length glossy brown hair that curved forward, and her expertly cut bangs stayed where they were supposed to be. As a professional woman on her own, she could spend all her money on herself, and her clothes and makeup showed it. If I remembered correctly, Felicia was a financial adviser employed by a national company. Though I hadn't talked to her at any length, I knew Felicia would have to be both intelligent and bold to hold down so responsible a job with such success.

When we were all seated, Joel and Diane on the love seat, Felicia perched on one arm of it by Diane, and Tolliver and I in wing chairs on the other side of the coffee table, with Art settled uncomfortably on a chair set a bit aside, I realized I had to somehow proceed with a conversation.

"I'm so sorry," I said finally, since that was the truth. "I'm sorry I found her so late, and I'm sorry the circumstances make life even more difficult for you." It made life a hell of a lot more difficult for us, too, but this didn't seem like the moment to dwell on it.

"You're right, this doesn't look good for us," Joel said. He took Diane's hand. "We were already under suspicion. Not Felicia, of course, but Diane and I and Victor, and now that…" He had trouble going on. "Now that her body has been found here—of all the places on earth—I think the police are going to decide it was one of us all along. I almost don't blame them. It just looks bad. If I didn't know how much we loved Tabitha…" He sighed heavily. "Maybe they think we conspired together to kill our daughter. They're paid to be suspicious. They can't know it's the last thing in the world we'd do. But as long as they're focusing on us, they won't be looking for the son of a bitch who actually took her."

"Exactly," Diane said, and her hand rubbed her stomach in a circular motion. I yanked my gaze away.

"How long have the police suspected you?" Tolliver asked. When we'd been there, Tabitha had been missing for several weeks, and the police hadn't been around so much any more. But we'd been impressed at how cordial the relationship that had formed between Detective Haines, who'd been the Last Man Standing on the case, and the Morgensterns had seemed. I should have realized that the other cops might have developed other suspicions. Haines had actually gotten to know the Morgensterns a lot better than her associates.

"From the get-go," Joel said, his voice resigned. "After nosing around Vic for a while, they got the idea that Diane was guilty."

I could almost see why they'd suspect Joel, even Victor. But Diane?

"How could that be?" I said incautiously, and she flushed. "I'm sorry," I said instantly. "I'm not trying to dredge up bad memories. I was sure, always, that you and Joel were telling the truth."

"Tabitha and I had a fight that morning," Diane said. Big fat tears ran down her cheeks. "I was mad because we'd just given her a cell phone for her birthday, and she'd already exceeded her minutes. I took her cell away from her, and then I told her to go outside to water the plants around the front door, just to get her out of the house because I was so angry. She was furious, too. Spring break, and no way to communicate with her three hundred best friends. She was just into that 'Mo-THER!' stage, the eye-rolling thing." Diane wiped her face with Joel's handkerchief. "I didn't think we'd get to that until she was fifteen, and here she was, eleven years old, giving me the whole routine." She smiled in a watery sort of way. "I hated to tell the police about this really trivial conversation, but one of my neighbors overheard us arguing when she came over to ask if we were through with our paper. So then I had to relate the whole thing to the police, and they turned hostile so quickly, as if I'd been withholding important evidence from them!"

Of course, to the police, this was important evidence. The fact that Diane couldn't see that only proved what I'd suspected about her when I'd met her: Diane Morgenstern was no rocket scientist. I was willing to bet that she never read crime fiction, either. If she had, she'd have known that any such revelation would make the police suspicious.

All the incident really proved was that Diane was out of touch with popular culture, in the reading-and-television-watching category.

"When did you move to Memphis?" Tolliver asked.

"About a year ago," Joel said. "We couldn't wait there, in that house, any longer." He sat up a little straighter, and as if he were reciting a credo, he said, "We had to accept the fact that our daughter was gone, and we had to leave that house ourselves. It wouldn't be fair to the new family we're starting, to have the baby there. I actually grew up in Memphis, so it felt like coming home, to me. My parents are here. And Felicia was here, along with her parents, my first in-laws. She and Victor are very close, and we figured the move would be a good thing for him. He's had a very tough time."

So everyone was happy here, except possibly Diane. It hadn't been coming home for her. It had been a move to a strange city that held many memories for her husband, memories of his first wife.

"We'd had a lot of therapy, the whole family," Diane said softly.

"We all went, Diane and I and Victor," Joel said. "Even Felicia drove over to Nashville from Memphis to go to some of the sessions."

I'd been to therapy, too.

The high school guidance counselor had been horrified when Cameron's disappearance had exposed the conditions under which we lived. "Why didn't you come to me?" she'd asked, more than once. And one time she'd shaken her head and said, "I should have noticed." I didn't blame her for not noticing; after all, we'd gone to great efforts to conceal our home life, so we could stay together. Maybe a part of me had hoped that our substandard parents would be taken away and we would be given good parents, instead; but that hadn't happened.

"When is the new baby due?" Art asked in the cheerful voice parents used when they weren't going to be having any more babies themselves.

"In five weeks," Diane said, an involuntary smile curving her lips even under the circumstances. "A healthy boy, the doctor says."

"That's great," Tolliver and I said, more or less in unison. I eyed Felicia Hart, who'd risen to stand behind the love seat. Felicia was looking less than ecstatic, perhaps even impatient. Maybe she thought the new baby would mean even more attention was diverted from Victor. It was also possible the childless Felicia was even more creeped out by pregnant women than I was.

"Today, we have to deal with Tabitha," Diane said, to give us an easement back into the grim reality of the body in the cemetery. "How… you know how she died?"

"She was suffocated," I said, not knowing any other way to say it. Severely deprived of air? Terminally oxygenless? I wasn't trying to tell myself jokes, but there are only so many ways to talk about the COD of any individual, even a child, especially to the mother.

The couple did their best to take the news on the chin, but Diane couldn't suppress a moan of horror. Felicia looked away, her face a hard mask concealing deep emotion.

There were many worse ways to die, but that would hardly be a consolation. Suffocation was bad enough. "It would be over in seconds," I said, as gently as I could. "She would be unconscious, after a tiny bit." This was an exaggeration, but I thought Diane's condition called for as much cushioning as possible. I was terrified that she would go into labor right in front of us.

Art had the strangest expression as he looked at me. It was like he'd never seen me before; like the reality of me, of what I did, had just hit him in the portly belly he carried in front of him like an announcement of his own importance.

"We should call Vic," Joel said, in his warm voice. "Excuse me for a moment." He brushed at his eyes and groped in his pocket for his cell phone. Vic, Joel's son by his first marriage, had been a sullen fifteen-year-old at the time of Tabitha's abduction. I'd glimpsed him trying hard to be tough and contained in the face of an overwhelming situation.

Diane, who had seemed very fond of the boy and in fact had largely raised him—she'd married Joel when Victor was very young—said, "If he needs to talk to me, I'm okay," as Joel rose to walk a few feet away, his back to the room, to punch in the number.

"How's Victor done here in Memphis?" I asked Felicia, just to be saying something. Victor and I had shared a strange moment when I'd been trying to find his half sister. The boy had come into the living room of the Morgenstern home and begun to curse a blue streak, evidently thinking he was by himself. When I'd moved, he'd clutched me, crying on my shoulder, having to bend a little to do so. People weren't given to touching me, and I'd been startled. But I knew grief, and I knew release, and I'd held him until he was through. When he'd done crying and my blouse was a blotched mess, Victor had drawn back, appalled at his breakdown. Anything I said would have been wrong, so I'd just given him a nod. He'd nodded back, and fled.

Felicia was giving a surprised look. I supposed she was astonished that I remembered Victor at all. "He's done… middling," she said. "Diane and Joel have sent him to a private school. I help them out a little. He's such a fragile kid, hanging in the balance. At that age, they can go either way, you feel, at any moment. And with this new baby coming…" Her voice trailed off, as if she couldn't imagine how to finish the sentence without criticizing Joel and Diane for their ill-timed fertility.

Joel came back and sat down by his wife, and he was frowning. "Victor isn't holding together very well," he said to us in general. Diane's face simply looked exhausted, as if she had no energy to spare for maintaining someone else's spirits when her own were so fraught with misery. "He came home from school early, after we called. We didn't want anyone to see it on the news at noon and tell him when they got back to campus," he explained.

We all nodded wisely, but my mind was on something entirely different.

"We never knew you moved," I said, wanting to get that absolutely clear, "so we were astonished when the police said they were contacting you. You don't have anything to do with the faculty at Bingham, do you? You're not an alumna, Diane?"

"No, I went to Vanderbilt, and Joel did, too," she said, bewildered. "Felicia, didn't you go to Bingham? With David?"

Felicia said, "More years ago than I care to remember. Yes, David was in my class. I don't believe you met him in Nashville, Harper. Joel's brother."

"Felicia's parents are here in Memphis, too," Diane said. "They both went to Bingham. And so did Joel's. It was quite a scandal when he decided to go to Vanderbilt. Why are you asking?"

"Just trying to think of some connection between you and the school. Someone put Tabitha's… Tabitha there, and someone made sure we were hired for this job."

The couple sat and looked at me wide-eyed. I had the uncharitable thought that this increased Diane's resemblance to a lemur. Though the pregnant woman looked as though she were about to bolt, Joel was alert and intense. The man had an overabundance of energy, and it boiled around him, even under these circumstances. Behind them, Felicia was staring at me with an incredulous face.

"Surely it's just a coincidence," Felicia said, finally, looking at me as though I were delusional. "You don't think… you can't imagine that someone created such an elaborate plot? How could someone have put Tabitha there, and then find you, get you here, make sure you found Tabitha? That's just incredible."

We all spent a second or two staring at each other. Art was looking from me to Felicia, as if we were playing Ping-Pong.

"I agree," I said. "But I can't make sense out of any other scenario. Actually, there's not much sense in that one."

"We have to issue some kind of statement to the press," Art said, when he realized the conversation had reached a stalemate. "It has to be a statement that treads a fine line. We can't rule anything out, like Diane just did. We can't make any fantastic claims, like Harper did. We have to regret everything and admit nothing about our personal feelings about what might have happened."

Tolliver was the only one who nodded his head in agreement.

"You know, our own lawyer is downstairs," Diane murmured.

At the same moment Joel erupted. "No!" he said. "No! We have to condemn whoever did this to our daughter in the strongest possible terms!" Diane and Felicia both nodded their agreement.

"Oh, of course," Art said. "Naturally, that, too."

four

WE turned on the television in the living room of the suite to watch Art meet the news cameras. There were three stations in Memphis, and all three had sent representatives to the press conference, which was held on the sidewalk outside the Cleveland. By that time, the Morgenstern family lawyer, a chic fortyish woman named Blythe Benson, had arrived on the scene. Joel and Diane had told us that Benson had insisted on the Morgenstern family issuing their own separate-but-equal statement. The local lawyer and Art made an impressive duo. Art had that older-man gravitas thing going, and Blythe was cool and blond and WASP-y to the nth degree.

Blythe had consulted with the Morgensterns at their home about what she was going to say on their behalf, Diane told us. Felicia shot me a glance as Diane said this, and I wondered what was coming. Felicia Hart, as I've said, seemed way smarter than Diane. It made me wonder what Felicia's sister, Joel's first wife, had been like.

Downstairs and outside, Blythe Benson prepared to make the first statement. The family was most important, we had all agreed.

"Diane and Joel Morgenstern are devastated at the news that the body that may be that of their child, Tabitha, has been found in St. Margaret's cemetery. Though closure is something they have sought for many months, Diane and Joel Morgenstern had hoped that closure would come with the return of their living daughter. Instead, they have recovered what may well be her body." The blonde lawyer paused for effect. The newscasters were fairly quivering with the desire to ask questions, but Blythe plowed on. "The Morgenstern family would like to urge anyone who may have knowledge of the disappearance of Tabitha to come forward at this time. Though the reward for the discovery of her body is most likely out of consideration now, there is still a reward standing for the submission of facts about Tabitha's abduction."

I wasn't sure what that meant. I hadn't known there was a reward, since we hadn't maintained contact with the Morgensterns (naturally) after our failure to locate their daughter in Nashville.

Thinking that was the end of the statement, I'd turned to look at Tolliver to get his reaction when I heard Blythe Benson's precise voice continue. I looked back at the screen.

"As to what police have termed an 'amazing coincidence'—that the psychic Diane and Joel Morgenstern hired to find Tabitha's body actually did find the body, though in a different location…"

She's losing control of that sentence, I thought.

"The fact remains that there are coincidences in life, and this is one of them. Diane and Joel Morgenstern did not hire Harper Connelly to come to Memphis. They have not seen her or her manager since Miss Connelly arrived in Memphis. They did not know that Miss Connelly was scheduled to give a demonstration at the old cemetery of St. Margaret's this morning. Neither of the Morgensterns attended Bingham College. Neither has ever been connected with the college department that arranged Harper Connelly's visit to St. Margaret's cemetery. In fact, no member of the Morgenstern family has contacted Harper Connelly or her brother and manager, Tolliver Lang, since her unsuccessful attempt to find Tabitha over eighteen months ago. Thank you."

Though Art hadn't moved physically, the cameras caught him staring at Blythe Benson as though she'd just sprouted horns, and I didn't blame him for the look.

Just for openers, Benson's voice had emphasized "psychic" and "giving a demonstration" as if they were words for something far nastier and more disreputable. Then she'd gone on to sever her clients from us in every possible way. She'd all but said we were implicated somehow in the death of the girl.

We'd been hung out to dry.

As one, Tolliver and I turned to look at the couple on the couch. The Morgensterns seemed oblivious to the implications of the speech Blythe Benson had just read. They were staring at the television, waiting for Art's speech, in a kind of numb silence. Behind them, Felicia gave us a significant look that meant, "Ha! I told you so!" I exchanged a look with Tolliver, a look of sheer incredulity. He half-opened his mouth, and I reached over to touch his arm. "Not now," I said, very quietly.

I wasn't sure why I chose to be quiet, rather than confront Joel and Diane. God knows, even Diane was smart enough to realize that they'd just dumped us publicly, while sitting in our very own (temporarily) living room. They'd said, in effect, "Whatever these people claim, we're not responsible for it. We don't know them, we haven't seen them, we'd never collaborate with them, and they failed the first time we asked them to find our child."

Art took his place before the microphones. It's just strange seeing someone you know on television, not that it's an experience I've had often. The fact that the person who was just in the room with you is now on-camera, for the moment an icon, is weird and unsettling. It's as if they've become translated by the screen into another being—someone less flawed and more knowledgeable, someone smoother and smarter.

Art had our statement, the one Tolliver and I had written, but he was doing yet another rewrite in his head at just this minute; a hasty and public one. I could see it in the long downward focus of his eyes before he began speaking.

"My client, Harper Connelly, is astounded and grieved by the events of the day. At this moment Ms. Connelly is with Tabitha's parents, who came here to thank Harper, from their hearts, for her part in the discovery of a body we believe to be that of their missing daughter."

Ha! Ball in your court, Blythe!

"Ms. Connelly is deeply saddened by the tragic end to her search for Tabitha Morgenstern. Though she did not maintain any contact whatsoever with the family during the months since her original employment, and though she had no knowledge that the Morgenstern family had moved to Memphis, Ms. Connelly is glad that circumstances brought about the discovery of the long-lost child the Morgensterns have been seeking. Perhaps, thanks to my client, the Morgensterns' long time of uncertainty has come to an end."

"When will Harper Connelly meet with us?" said a reporter, in a voice that was not awfully loud, but extremely piercing.

Art gave the reporter a wonderful look; it combined reproof with resignation. "Ms. Connelly does not talk to reporters," he said, as if that were a well-known fact. "Ms. Connelly lives a very private life."

"Is it true…" began a familiar voice, and the camera swung around to frame the shining Shellie Quail.

"For God's sake," I said. "She's everywhere."

Tolliver smiled. He thought the reporter's doggedness was a little funny, maybe even admirable.

"… that Miss Connelly charges a fee for finding bodies?"

"Ms. Connelly is a professional woman with an unusual gift," Art said. "She does not like to be in the spotlight of media attention, something she has never sought."

That's true enough, I thought. Evasive, but true.

"Is it true that your client will be claiming the reward for finding Tabitha's body?" asked Shellie Quail, and Tolliver's smile vanished in the blink of my eye.

"That's not a subject we've discussed," Art concluded. "I have no more to say at this time. Thank you for coming." And he turned to pace back inside the Cleveland's front door. The Morgensterns' lawyer was nowhere to be seen. Blythe Benson had slipped away in the preceding moments, apparently.

I hoped she didn't plan on coming up to the suite.

The cameras cut back to the scheduled program, and in a moment Art returned to the room, in actual reality. Again, I felt that curious jolt.

"That went well," Joel said without a touch of irony. Tolliver and I had to struggle to keep our faces neutral. "And of course, you'll get the reward." Joel got up, checked his watch. "Diane, we have to get home. We have people to call. I wonder how long it will take for them to be sure they've got… Tabitha's remains. When we can have them."

Felicia picked up her purse and Diane's, ready to help the pregnant woman return to their car.

With a heave, Diane got to her feet. She was absently rubbing her hand across her gravid stomach, as if to keep its contents calm. I remembered my own mother's pregnancies with Mariella and Gracie. I also couldn't help recalling Rosemary's Baby, Tolliver and I had watched it the week before on an old-movie channel.

"Thanks, Felicia," Diane said.

"Let us know how Victor's doing," Tolliver asked out of the clear blue sky.

"What?" Felicia turned, and her eyes pinned Tolliver to the wall. "Why, of course." There was a bite to her voice that I simply didn't understand. I looked from her to Tolliver, but didn't get an explanation.

"This has been harder on Victor than just about anyone," Joel said. "Kids can be so cruel."

"Victor's what, now? Sixteen?" I asked brightly, trying to ease the atmosphere. I don't know why. I should have stood in absolute silence until the party left.

"He's just turned seventeen," Diane said. Suddenly her face lost its Madonna-like sweetness. She had struck me, even when I'd first met her after the abduction, as a woman fed up to the teeth with her stepson's moody teenage behavior, and now her jaw had a certain set that gave her simple words a real edge. "I love that boy, but everything they say about teenagers is true, as far as Vic's concerned: he's been secretive and sullen or talking back for the past three years. When Tabitha began to show signs she was entering the same phase, I just wasn't ready for it. I overreacted."

Victor had been a spotty—but athletic and attractive—boy eighteen months before. I remembered him always skulking on the edge of any group of adults in the Morgenstern home, his face tight with suppressed—rage? Fear? I hoped for the boy's sake that his complexion and his attitude had cleared up now. I was willing to believe Victor had feelings and thoughts that were complicated and dealt with something besides himself, but only because I tried to believe that of all people.

"How can you say that, Diane?" Felicia asked, but without much real indignation. "He's been yours since he was a baby. You have to love him, like I do."

"I do love him," Diane said, sounding as surprised as an emotionally exhausted pregnant woman can. "I've always raised him as my son. You, or all people, should know that. Even if he were my own biological child, I'd be having a hard time with him right now. It's not him, it's his stage of life."

"He doesn't like school here very much," Joel said. He sounded just as tired as his wife, as if dealing with Victor wore him out. "But he's great on the tennis team."

"Poor Victor," my brother said, somewhat to my surprise.

"Yes, the whole thing's been very hard on him, too," Joel said. "Of course, he was sure he was going to be arrested and executed instantly, the drastic way teenagers decide things, when the police questioned him very… persistently."

"They thought he might resent his little sister, the attention she got as the child of the second marriage." Then Diane went absolutely still, and I had a moment of panic, thinking something was happening with the baby. But it was just one of the moments when anguish comes sweeping down like an eagle from the air, to tear at you with cruel talons.

"Oh, Tabitha," Diane said, in a low voice that contained profound grief. "Oh, my girl." Large tears began to roll from her beautiful dark eyes.

Her husband put his arm around her and together they left to return to their new home. Felicia trailed after them, her face heavy with unhappiness.

I looked at the closed door a few minutes after they'd passed through it. I wondered if the baby's room was ready yet. I wondered what they'd done with all Tabitha's things.

With their departure, the tension eased out of the room. Art, Tolliver, and I looked at each other with some relief.

"That's great news, about the reward. Last I heard, it was up to twenty-five thousand dollars. Before taxes, of course." Art was reviewing the afternoon mentally, I could tell from the way he was drumming his fingers on the occasional table. "I'm glad I went second, after all," Art said next. "I've heard of Blythe Benson. She said a few things I took issue with."

"Yeah, we noticed." Tolliver got a crossword puzzle book out of his laptop bag and began rummaging around in the bottom of the pocket for his pencil.

Art looked irritated. "You think I could have handled it differently, Tolliver, you say so."

Tolliver looked up, apparently surprised. "No, Art, no problem. You, Harper?"

"I noticed you didn't say Tolliver was your client, too, Art," I said.

Art did his best to seem surprised; though I thought his only real surprise was that we'd noticed the omission. "Tolliver 's name hadn't been brought into the mix at that point, I was just trying to keep it that way," he said. "You want me to call all the reporters and correct myself?"

"No, Art, that's fine," I said. "Just, for future reference, be more thorough and include that little detail."

"Message received," Art said brightly. "It's been a long day for an old man, kids. I'm going to my room, call the office, catch up on my work."

"Sure, Art," Tolliver said, his attention on the puzzle open before him. "If you're not flying back to Atlanta until tomorrow, you'll have to join us for dinner."

"Thanks, we'll see how much work I have to do tonight. I may just get room service. But give me a call when you're ready to head out."

"See you later," I said.

When he was safely gone, I said, "What do you think he's heard?"

"I was trying to figure it out. Maybe the police think I had Tabithas body all this time and moved it into the cemetery to prove you were a genuine sensitive."

I gaped at him and then laughed. It was just too ridiculous.

Tolliver put down his pencil and focused on me. "Yeah, right. I don't know where I'm supposed to have stowed the poor girl's body for eighteen months, or whatever."

"The trunk," I said, deadpan, and after a second he smiled at me. It was a real smile, something he didn't give me that often, and I enjoyed seeing it. Tolliver hadn't been struck by lightning, and his mom hadn't tried to sell him to one of her drug buddies for sexual use, it's true, but Tolliver has his own scars, and he's not any more fond of talking about them than I am.

"Tabitha was somewhere for eighteen months," Tolliver pointed out. "That is, her body was either in that grave, or in some other hiding place."

"Was she there all the time?" I asked, but I was just thinking out loud. "I don't think so. The earth was disturbed. The rest of the ground in the cemetery was smooth, but this ground had an uneven feeling, and there wasn't any grass on the grave."

"Well, we know she was buried somewhere during the last eighteen months," Tolliver pointed out reasonably.

"No, she could have been alive for part of that time. Or she could have been dead in a freezer, or a meat locker, or a morgue. Or buried somewhere else, as you say." I thought about the possibilities I'd raised. "But I don't think so. I still believe she's been dead since she was abducted, or very nearly the whole time. But she wasn't lying in St. Margaret's all that time. I just don't understand why she was put there, and how it happened that I was the one to find her. It's so strange."

"In fact, it's almost… unbelievable," Tolliver said, his voice quiet and thoughtful.

five

THE morning didn't start on any more of a positive note. I turned on CNN while I drank my morning coffee, the complimentary newspaper folded open to the page that featured an old picture of Tabitha, a recent shot of the Morgensterns, and a picture of me taken when I was at a crime scene about two years ago.

The TV coverage was just as hyper as the newspaper article. The FBI had definitely had a presence at the initial crime of Tabitha's kidnapping. Now, they'd put their expertise at the service of the Memphis police, including the resources of their lab.

"We are confident in the ability of the Memphis police to conduct this investigation," said an agent who looked like he ate nails for breakfast. "We'll have an agent in place who participated in the investigation of Tabitha's abduction, and he'll make available any service he can offer to local officials. All we want is to get justice for this little girl and her family."

I wondered if we'd be allowed to leave for our apartment in St. Louis—though it would be better yet if we could slip away to some unexpected destination, so we'd be harder to track. We weren't in residence at our apartment often, true, but it was our address of record, and the news media would definitely find us there.

I didn't remember what the next job on our list was, or even if we had one. Tolliver managed that side of our lives. I was already restless and bored, having finished the one book I'd brought in from our car. Ordinarily, I'd go out for a run.

There was no point whatsoever in trying to run today. Though I still felt a bit shaky from yesterday's discovery, I was definitely in the mood to get in a couple of miles, or more. But if I ran today, I'd be followed, and that was no fun.

Tolliver knocked at the connecting door, and I called to him to come in. He was toweling the wetness out of his hair.

"I went running on the treadmill in the health club," he said, in answer to my unspoken question. "It was better than nothing."

I hate running on treadmills. It just makes me feel stupid. I'm not really going anywhere. But this morning I was willing, since I needed activity in the worst kind of way. While he poured his own cup of coffee, I was on the elevator in my running shoes and my shorts and my T-shirt.

There were several treadmills. One was already occupied by a man who was probably in his forties, dark hair just beginning to turn silvery at the edges. He was pounding along, his face set and remote. He gave me an absent nod, which I barely returned.

I studied the control panel and the instructions, since I couldn't imagine anything that would make me feel stupider than flying off the back of a treadmill. When I was confident I understood what I was doing, I started off slow, getting used to the feel of the rubber under my feet. I thought of nothing, just the feeling of my shoes hitting the treadmill, and then I reached down and pressed the control to increase the speed. Soon I was going at a good clip—and though I was indoors and not going anywhere and the damn scenery never changed, I was content. I began sweating, and gradually I began to feel that welcome exhaustion that tells you you've gone just about your limit. I slowed the pace a bit, and then slowed again, and finally I walked for about five minutes.

I'd been vaguely aware Mr. Silvertip was still in the room, moving from weight station to weight station, one of the hotel towels around his neck. I headed for the stack on a table by the door as soon as I was through, and while I was patting my face dry, a voice said, "It's good to run in the mornings, isn't it? Helps you to start your day on a good note."

I lowered the towel to appraise the speaker.

"FBI?" I asked.

He couldn't control his jerk of surprise. "You're really psychic," he said pleasantly after a moment.

"No, I'm not," I said. "Or only in the most limited way. Were you down here when Tolliver ran, too?"

He had dark blue eyes, and he examined me with them very carefully. I was exasperated. He'd had plenty of time to look me over while I was running. This wasn't about him deciding I was a hunkette of burning love. This was about something else.

"I decided you were more approachable," he said. "And you're the more interesting, of the two of you."

"You're wrong there," I said.

He looked down at my right leg. The top part of the leg is marked with a fine spider's web of red lines. My Lycra running shorts stopped at mid-thigh, and the web was clearly visible if you looked at the right leg with attention. That's the leg that gives out, every now and then. That's another reason I need to run, to keep that leg strong.

"What happened to you?" he asked. "I've never seen marks like that." He was quite clinical.

"I was hit by lightning," I said.

He made an impatient movement, as if he'd read that and just recalled it. Or maybe he simply didn't believe me. "How'd it come about?" he asked.

I explained the circumstances. "I was doing my hair. I had a date," I said, remotely remembering that detail. "Of course, I never went out with that boy. The blast blew my shoe off and stopped my heart."

"What saved you?"

"My brother, Tolliver. Gave me CPR."

"I've never met anyone before who was hit by lightning and lived to tell about it."

"There are plenty of us around," I said, and I went out the glass door, towel still clutched in my hand.

"Wait," he said behind me. "I'd like to talk to you, if I may."

I turned to face him. A woman stepped past us, ready for her own workout. She was wearing old shorts and a T-shirt dingy with age. She glanced at us curiously. I found myself glad to have a witness.

"What about?"

"I was there, in Nashville, for a while. That's why I got this assignment."

I waited.

"I really want to know how you knew ahead of time that Tabitha was in the graveyard."

"I didn't."

"But you did."

"If you're not in charge of the investigation, I don't have to talk to you, do I? And I can't think of any reason I'd want to."

"I'm Agent Seth Koenig." He said that as if I should have heard the name.

"I don't care." And I got into the elevator before he could, pressed the door close button, and smiled as he took a surprised step toward me, realizing I was actually leaving.

After I showered, I knocked on the door to Tolliver's room and told him what had happened.

"That bastard. That was an ambush," Tolliver said.

"That's putting it a little strong. It was more like a strategic approach," I said.

Tolliver recognized my description of Seth Koenig. The agent had been in the exercise room when he was, sure enough. "He thought you would recognize his name, huh?"

Tolliver said thoughtfully. "Well, let's see." Tolliver's laptop was already plugged in. He Googled the name and got several hits. Seth Koenig had been present at a few hunts for serial killers. Seth Koenig had been a heavy hitter.

"But all those are in the past," I said, reading the dates. "Nothing in the last four years or so."

"That's true," Tolliver said. "I wonder what happened to his career?"

"And I wonder why he's here. I haven't heard any suggestion that Tabitha's abduction and death was part of any serial killer's pattern. And I think I'd remember if another girl had shown up buried in a cemetery, miles away from her abduction site, buried on top of somebody else, right?" I thought that over. "Actually, other than her burial, there's nothing distinctive about Tabitha's case. That in itself is pretty awful, when you think about it."

Tolliver wasn't in the mood to discuss the degeneration of American society as exemplified by the emergence of the serial killer as common occurrence. He just nodded.

"He's different," I said. "Seth Koenig."

"Define."

I shook my head. "He's pretty intense, pretty deep. Not your regular law enforcement type."

"You hot for him?"

I laughed. "Nah. He's too old for me."

"How old?"

"Probably in his early forties."

"But in good shape, you said."

There are times when I just don't appreciate Tolliver's teasing. "I'm not talking about his body. I'm talking about his head."

"Can you pin that down a little?"

"I think…" I hesitated for a long moment, uneasy about putting my idea into words. "I think he's more than professionally interested. Maybe obsessed."

"With you," Tolliver said, very levelly.

"No, with Tabitha. Not her personally." I struggled to express what I felt. "He's obsessed with the puzzle of it. You know, how some people spend a large part of their lives rehashing the Lizzie Borden case? How futile that is, because all the people involved are dead and gone? But there are still books appearing all the time about it. I think that's how Seth Koenig is about Tabitha Morgenstern. Look at his work record. He hasn't done anything newsworthy since he worked her case. And here he is, Johnny-on-the-spot, when she's found. Not because of Tabitha as a person, or because of Joel and Diane, but because of the mystery of it. Like some of the law enforcement people in Colorado are about that little girl who was killed in her own home."

"The little beauty queen. You think Seth is as fascinated with Tabitha as some people are with her?"

"Yes, I think that's possible. And I think it's dangerous," I said.

I sat beside him on the end of his bed and found myself looking at the picture he'd stuck in the mirror frame, a picture he carried with him on the road. It was a snapshot of Cameron, Mark, Tolliver, and me. We're all smiling, but not genuinely. Mark's looking down a little, his stout build and round face distinguishing him from the rest of us. Cameron's to my left, in profile, looking away. Her light hair is pulled up in a ponytail. Tolliver and I are in the center, and his arm is around my shoulders. At first glance, you might assume that Tolliver and I were the brother and sister; we're both dark-headed and pale and slim. But if you spend any time with us, you notice that my face is longer and narrower than Tolliver's, which is practically square. And his eyes are a rich dark brown. Mine, though also dark and often mistaken for brown (since people see what they expect to see), are actually gray. Tolliver's mouth is thin and fine-lipped; mine is full. Tolliver had acne as a teen that went untreated, and he has scars on his cheeks as a result. My skin is smooth and fine. Tolliver has a lot of attraction for the opposite sex, and I don't seem to have much of that.

"You just scare them," Tolliver said quietly.

"Was I talking out loud?"

"No, I could just follow what you were thinking," he said. "You're the only psychic in this family." He put his arm around me and gave me a hug.

"You know I don't like to be called psychic," I said, but I wasn't really angry.

"I know, but what else would you call it?"

We'd had this discussion before. "I am a corpse-finder," I said, with mock hauteur. "I'm the Human Geiger-Counter."

"You need a superhero outfit. You'd look good in gray and red," Tolliver said. "Tights and a cape, maybe some red gloves, high red boots?" I smiled at the picture. "After this media hoopla is over, we can go to the apartment for about a week," Tolliver said. "We can catch up on our laundry and our sleep."

The apartment in St. Louis wasn't great, but it beat living in a hotel, no matter how fancy. We could open our mail (what little we got), wash our clothes, cook a little.

The constant travel was getting increasingly old. We'd been at it for five years now, at first making almost nothing; in fact, we'd gone into debt. But the past three years, as the word spread, business had started becoming regular, and we'd even turned down a job or two. We'd paid back what we owed, and we'd saved a lot.

Someday, we wanted to buy a house, maybe in Texas, so we wouldn't be too far from our little sisters—though the chances were slim that we'd get to visit with them much, thanks to my aunt Iona and her husband. But we would be on hand when we were needed, and maybe seeing us from time to time would waken better memories for Mariella and Gracie.

When we had a house, we would buy a lawn mower, and I would mow every week. I would have a big planter, one of those that looked like a truncated barrel, and I'd fill it with flowers. Butterflies would perch on them, and bees would lumber in and out. I wanted one of those big Rubbermaid mailboxes, too. You could get them at Wal-Mart.

"Harper?"

"What?"

"You had that dazed look again. What's up?"

"Thinking about a house," I admitted.

"Well, maybe next year," Tolliver said.

"Really?"

"Yeah, our bank account is healthy. If we don't have any catastrophes…"

I sobered immediately. Of course, health insurance is hard to get for people like us, since we don't have what you'd call regular jobs, and the lightning strike was always classified as a pre-existing condition. That meant I couldn't claim coverage for anything that the insurance people could classify as resulting from the lightning strike. We had to pay an outrageous amount for the most basic policy. It made me angry every time I thought about it. I did everything I could to keep healthy.

"Okay, we won't wreck the car or break a bone or get sued," I said. We did a lot of doctoring on each other for the everyday sprains and cuts, and we'd spent a week in a motel in Montana when Tolliver had had the flu. But the only persistent health issues facing us were my continuing problems from the lightning strike.

You'd think after you'd recovered from the initial effects, that would be it. Most doctors believe that, too. But that's not the truth. I talk to other strike survivors on the Internet. Memory loss, severe headaches, depression, burning sensations in the feet, ringing in the ears, loss of mobility, and a host of other effects can manifest in the years afterward. Whether these are a result of the neuroses of the victims—which is what most doctors say—or a result of the mysterious reaction of the body to an almost unimaginable jolt of electricity… well, opinions vary.

I have my own set of problems, and luckily for me they're pretty consistent.

As far as I know, there is no other strike survivor who has become able to find dead people.

I'd had plenty of time to shower and dress and wonder what we were going to do with our day, when that problem was solved for us. The police came by again, to ask more questions.

Detective Lacey had a chaperone this time, another detective named Brittany Young. Detective Young was in her thirties, and she was a narrow-faced woman with short tousled brown hair and glasses. She had a huge handbag and comfortable shoes, clothes that were no higher-end than Sears, and a gold band on her left hand. She looked around the hotel room curiously, and then she examined me with even more curiosity.

"Do you always travel in this kind of style?" she asked, while Detective Lacey was talking to Tolliver. I sensed they had a plan. Why, gee, what could it be?

"Not hardly," I said. "We're more Holiday Inn or Motel 6 people. But we had to have the security."

She nodded, as if she really understood that and didn't think we were pretentious. Detective Brittany Young was establishing a rapport with me. She grinned at me. I grinned back. I'd done this dance before with other partners.

"We really need all the information you can give us," she said earnestly, still with the smile. "It's very important to our investigation to figure out how the body got here and how you came to find it."

No shit. I tried not to look like I thought she was an idiot. I said, "Well, I'll be glad to tell you everything I know. But I believe I covered it all yesterday." I added more sincerely, "I'm really sorry for the Morgensterns."

"Would you consider, say, that you and your brother are religious?"

Now she had actually surprised me. "That's a very personal question, and one I can't answer for my brother," I said.

"But you would describe yourself as Christians?"

"We were raised Christian." Cameron and I had been, at least; I didn't know what kind of faith education had taken place in the Lang household. Certainly by the time Tolliver 's dad had married my mother, religious training for their children had not been a high priority. In fact, toward the end of our life as a family, my mother hardly knew when it was Sunday. While we'd thought of taking Gracie and Mariella to Sunday school—though they were very young—the thought of what the sharp-eyed church ladies might be able to tell about our home life had stopped us.

We tried so hard to stay together. It had all been for nothing.

"Did your parents have some reason to be prejudiced against Jews?"

"What?" Where had that come from?

"Some Christians don't like Jews," Brittany Young said, as if that would be news to me. But she was making a huge effort to keep her voice neutral. She didn't want to scare me off from offering her my true opinion, just in case I was a closet anti-Semite.

"I'm aware of that," I said, as mildly as I could. "But I really don't care what people are." Then everything clicked. "So the Morgensterns are Jewish?" I said, genuinely surprised. I just hadn't thought about it, but now I recalled seeing one of those special candleholders in their home in Nashville. I might have missed a lot more symbols and signs. I don't know much about Judaism. The few Jewish kids I'd known in high school hadn't been interested in parading their differences in a Bible-belt area.

Detective Young gave me a look that was full of so much skepticism it almost stood and walked by itself.

"Yes," she said, as if I was funning with her. "As you know, the Morgensterns are Jewish."

"I guess I was too busy wondering where their child was to think about their religion," I said. "Probably I had my values backward."

Okay, maybe I'd overdone the sarcasm, or I was coming off as self-righteous. Detective Young eyed me with scorn. Or, that was the pose she was adopting, to see if it got a rise out of me.

I glanced around for Tolliver, and found that Detective Lacey had maneuvered him over to the other side of the room.

"Hey, Tolliver," I said. "Detective Young says the Morgensterns are Jewish! Did you know that?"

"I figured they were," he said, drifting over to us. "One of the men I met at their house in Nashville—I'm not sure you met him, you were talking to Joel—I think his name was Feldman… anyway, Feldman introduced himself as the Morgensterns' rabbi. So I knew they must be Jewish."

"I don't remember him." I really didn't. I still didn't get the relevance of the Morgensterns' faith. Then the lightbulb in my brain clicked on. "Oh," I said, "does that make it worse? That she was buried in a Christian cemetery? The St. Margaret's cemetery was Catholic or Episcopal, right?" All I knew about Jewish burial customs was that Jews were supposed to be buried quicker than Christians traditionally were interred. I didn't know why.

Both the officers looked startled, as if their original baseline for questioning had been completely misinterpreted.

"I would think," Tolliver said, "that the fact that it really was Tabitha would kind of overwhelm the religious consideration, but maybe not." He shrugged. "That's more important to some people than others. Are the Morgensterns really religious? Because I've got to say, they've never mentioned anything about Judaism to us. Have they, Harper? Said anything to you?"

"No. All they said to me was, 'Please find my child.' They never said, 'Please find my Jewish child.' "

Tolliver sat by me on the love seat, and we presented a united front to Young and Lacey.

"Our lawyer is right next door," I remarked. "Do you think we should call Art in here, Tolliver?"

"Do you feel you need protection?" Detective Lacey asked quickly. "Have you received any unusual messages or phone calls? Do you feel threatened?"

I raised my eyebrows, looked at my brother. "You scared, Tolliver?"

"I don't think I am," he said, as if he were surprised by the discovery. "Seriously," he said to Detective Young, as if we'd just been playing up till then, "Has there been any kind of anti-Semitic demonstration against the Morgensterns? I guess I kind of thought society was past that. I love the South, don't get me wrong; but it does lag behind the times in social developments. I'm sure I could be mistaken." We waited for her to answer, but she just looked at us, an all-too-familiar expression of deep skepticism on her narrow face. Lacey looked more disgusted than anything else.

"Detectives," I said, getting tired of the dance, "let me point some things out." We were on the love seat the Morgensterns had used yesterday, and the two detectives were in the wing chairs we'd occupied. Though Brittany Young was at least ten years younger than Lacey, and a woman, at the moment her expression was identical to his. I took a deep breath. "The Morgensterns hired me after their daughter had been missing for several weeks. Though I'd read the newspaper stories about Tabitha, I'd never met Diane or Joel or any other member of the family. I had no idea they'd call me to work for them. I couldn't have had anything to do with her disappearance, it stands to reason."

I thought the atmosphere eased a little.

Detective Lacey took the lead. "Who, specifically, called you? Felicia Hart? Or Joel Morgenstern's brother, David? Or maybe Joel's father? None of them will claim responsibility."

The direct question stopped me short.

"Tolliver?" I never talked to clients directly until we got to the site. Tolliver thought it added to my mystique. I thought it made me very anxious.

"That was a while ago," Tolliver said. He went into his room, came back with a three-hole binder filled with computer printout pages. He'd been messing around with his computer more in the evenings, I'd noticed, and he'd designed some forms for our little business, Connelly Lang Recoveries. He'd been going back and entering all our past "cases" into the new format. This notebook was labeled "Case Files 2004" and the first page in each file (a green page) was headed "First Contact."

He scanned the page, refreshing his memory. "Okay. Mr. Morgenstern senior called us, at the request of his wife, Hannah Morgenstern. Mr. Morgenstern…" Tolliver read the page for a couple of minutes, then looked up to tell the cops that the older Mr. Morgenstern had told Tolliver about his missing granddaughter, and had asked Tolliver if he thought his sister could help.

"I explained what Harper does, and he got kind of angry and hung up," Tolliver said. "Then, the next day, the sister-in-law called."

"You're saying Felicia Hart called you?"

Tolliver checked the name on the page, quite unnecessarily. "Yes, that's who called me." He looked blank—deliberately blank. "She said no one else would face the truth, but she was sure that her niece was dead, and she wanted Harper to find Tabitha's body so the family could find some closure."

"And what did you think of that?"

"I thought she was probably right."

"In your experience, are families often willing to admit that they think their missing loved one is dead?" This was addressed to me. Detective Young seemed to be simply curious.

"This may surprise you, but yes. By the time they call me in, quite a few of them are. They have to have reached some kind of realistic place to even think about hiring me; because that's what I do, I find dead people. No point asking me to come if you think your loved one's alive. Call in the tracking dogs or the private detectives, not me." I lifted my shoulders. "That's common sense."

I can't say the detectives looked horrified. It would take a lot more than that to horrify a homicide detective, I would think. But they did look just that little bit harder around the eyes.

"Of course," Tolliver chimed in, "when people's loved ones are missing, most often the family isn't exactly navigating on common sense."

"Of course," I echoed, seeing that Tolliver was trying to dilute the bad taste I'd put in their mouths.

"Don't you care?" Detective Young blurted. She leaned forward, her hands clasped, her elbows on her knees, her face intent.

That was a difficult question. "I feel a lot of different ways about finding a body," I said, trying to be truthful. "I'm always glad to find one I've been looking for, because I've done my job if I locate it."

"And then you get paid," said Detective Lacey, an edge to his voice.

"I like getting paid," I said. "I'm not ashamed of that. I deliver a service for the money. And I give the dead some relief." The two detectives looked blank. "They want to be found, you know."

It seemed so evident to me. But judging by their expressions, it didn't seem so obvious to Lacey and Young.

"You seem so normal, and then you say something just totally nuts," Young muttered, and her older partner gave her a stare that snapped her into the here-and-now.

"I beg your pardon," she said formally. "This is a subject I don't believe I've ever discussed with anyone, and it… strikes me as peculiar, I guess."

"It's not the first time I've heard that, Detective," I said matter-of-factly.

"No, I guess not."

"We'll be going now," said Detective Lacey, running his hand over his short hair in an absent gesture, as if he were polishing a favorite ornament. "Oh, wait, I have one more question."

Tolliver and I looked up at him. Tolliver put his hand on my shoulder and exerted a slight pressure. But it wasn't necessary; I knew this was the crucial question.

"Have you talked to any family member since you were in Nashville to search for the Morgenstern girl? Any phone conversations?"

I didn't even have to think about it. "Not me," I said, and turned to look at Tolliver, fully expecting him to echo my words.

"Yeah, I talked to Felicia Hart a couple of times," he said, and I used all my self-control to keep my face and body still.

"So, you had conversations with Felicia Hart besides the initial one when she asked you to come to Nashville to look for her niece."

"Yes, I did."

I was going to kill him.

"What was the nature of these calls?"

"Personal," Tolliver said calmly.

"Is it true that you and Felicia Hart had a relationship?"

"No," Tolliver said.

"Then why the phone calls?"

"We'd had sex," he said. "She's called a couple of times after that, while my sister and I were on the road."

I could feel my fingers curl into fists, and I made them straighten out, made my face remain calm. If it was also sort of fixed and rigid, well, I couldn't help that. I was doing my best.

Tolliver had a lot of appeal, and though we hadn't ever discussed it, he obviously enjoyed sex, judging from the way he tracked down opportunities to do it. I did, too, but I was way pickier than Tolliver when it came to selecting a partner. Tolliver viewed sex, as far as I could tell, as a sport he could play well, with any number of the people on his team. I thought of sex a little more personally. You revealed a lot of yourself during sex. I wasn't willing to let many people see that much of me, literally and figuratively.

Maybe these were typical male-versus-female attitudes about sex.

"So what did she want to talk about?" Detective Young asked. She had a narrow-eyed look that I didn't like, as if she felt she'd caught Tolliver out in a guilty secret.

"She wanted to blow off steam about the family situation, about Tabitha's being missing for so long, about how the stress was affecting Victor," Tolliver said easily, and I thought, You're lying. I looked down so my face wouldn't be so easy to read.

I thought of acting strange and making the detectives so nervous that they would leave, but I was really angry with Tolliver. He could make his way out of the tangle as best he could.

"What did she say in these conversations?"

He shrugged. "I don't recall specifics. After all, it's been months, and it wasn't that memorable." Aware he sounded less than gallant, Tolliver amended that to, "I didn't know I'd have to be telling anyone what she'd said. She was worried, of course, and not just about Victor. She was concerned about Diane and Joel, and about her own parents. After all, they're Victor's grandparents, even if they're not Joel's in-laws anymore. And—let's see—she said kids at school were accusing Victor of having something to do with Tabitha's disappearance, because a couple of times he'd mouthed off to his friends about his dad preferring Tabitha to him because Tabitha was Diane's daughter, and he wasn't Diane's son."

"What was your response?"

"I didn't have much of a response," Tolliver said. "I wasn't on the spot, and I didn't know the people involved that well. I felt she mainly wanted to vent to someone who didn't have a vested interest, and I happened to come along at the right time."

"Did she want you to return to Nashville?"

"We couldn't," Tolliver said. "We had a schedule to stick to, and any downtime we have we spend at our apartment in St. Louis. We're on the road pretty much year-round."

"You have that much business?" Detective Young said. He seemed startled.

I nodded. "We stay pretty busy," I said. I noticed that Tolliver had dodged answering their original question, but I sure wasn't going to point that out. I was ready for them to be on their way.

Lacey and Young gave each other a look, and a communication seemed to pass between them. The middle-aged man and the younger woman made good partners, somehow. They'd had a meeting of the minds somewhere back in their professional history, and they'd made it work for them. Until this moment, I'd thought Tolliver and I had had the same thing working for us.

"We may need to ask a few more follow-up questions," Detective Lacey said, making an effort to sound pleasant and as though any further questions would be inconsequential—no problem, no sweat, don't worry, be happy.

"So, you'll be here?" Young asked, pointing at the floor to indicate she meant right here at this hotel, don't leave town.

"Yes, I suppose we will," I said.

"Of course, you'll want to go to the funeral," Young said, as if something she should have known was just now popping into her head.

"No," I said.

She cocked her head as if she couldn't have heard me correctly. "Say what?"

"I don't go to funerals," I said.

"Not ever?"

"Not ever."

"What about your mother's? We heard she died last year."

They'd been making phone calls. "I didn't go." I didn't want to feel her presence again, not ever, not even from the grave. "Goodbye," I said, standing and smiling at them. They were definitely disconcerted, now, and exchanged one of their glances again, without the certainty.

"So you'll stay in town until we contact you again," Detective Young said, tucking her hair behind her ear in a gesture oddly reminiscent of that of her partner.

"I think we've established that," I said, keeping my voice sweet and even.

"Of course we will," Tolliver said, without a trace of irony.

six

AFTER the departure of the police, the silence that fell was the noisiest silence we'd ever shared. I didn't even want to look at my brother, much less discuss what had just happened. We didn't move. Finally, I threw my hands up in the air, made a sound that came out "Arrrr," and stomped into my bedroom, slamming the door behind me. It immediately opened, and Tolliver strode in.

"All right, what did you want me to say?" he said. "Did you want me to lie?"

I'd thrown myself down on my bed, and Tolliver chose to loom over me, his hands on his hips.

"I didn't want you to say anything," I said, in as neutral a voice as I could manage. But then I bounced to my feet to glare at him. "I didn't want you to say anything today. What I would have wanted, if I could have had it, was for you to have shown a little discretion, a little common sense, months ago! What were you thinking? Was your upper brain involved in this process at all?"

"You just… can't you cut me some slack?"

"No! No! A waitress here or there, well, ick, but okay! You meet someone in a bar, well, okay! We all have needs. But to have a relationship with a client, someone involved in a case… come on, Tolliver. You should keep your pants zipped! Or can you?"

Since Tolliver was so in the wrong, he got even angrier. "She was just a woman. She isn't even a member of the family, at least not the direct family!"

"Just a woman. Okay, I'm seeing it now. Just a hole for you to sink into, is that what you're saying? So much for being selective. So much for thinking every time you have sex, 'Is this the woman I choose to have a baby with?' Because that's what it means, Tolliver!"

"Was that what you were thinking when you screwed that cop in Same? How you wanted to have his baby?"

There was another silence, this one charged with other tensions.

"Hey," he said, "I'm sorry I said that." The anger drained away.

"I don't know if I'm sorry or not," I said. "You know you did a wrong thing. Can't you just say it? Do you have to justify it?"

"Do you have to ask me to?"

"Yes, I think I do. Because this wasn't only personal, this was business, too. You've never done that before." Okay, at least I didn't think he had.

"Felicia wasn't paying us. She's not really a member of the family."

"But still."

"Yeah, yeah," he said, crumbling at last. "You're right. She was too close to the action. I shouldn't have." He smiled, that rare, radiant smile that almost made me smile in return. Almost. "But she made a real pass at me, and I guess I was too weak to turn it down. She was offering, she was pretty, and I couldn't think of a real reason why not."

I tried to think of something to say, but I couldn't. Actually, why not? Exactly for this reason, that's why not—because this time, Tolliver's sex life had backfired on us. I thought we were in even more trouble than we'd been before, and that hadn't been inconsiderable.

Tolliver hugged me. "I'm sorry," he said, and his voice was quiet and sincere. I hugged him back, inhaling the familiar smell of him, laying my cheek against his hard chest. We stood like that for a long minute, with the dust motes floating in the sun coming through the hotel window. Then his arms loosened, and I stepped back.

"This is what the detectives should have asked you: who called you about the cemetery?" I asked.

"Dr. Nunley. And in Detective Lacey's defense, he did ask me that at the station."

"Did Nunley say who'd asked him to call? Or did you get the impression it was just his idea?" I went back out into the living room area to get a drink. Tolliver trailed after me, lost in thought.

"I thought someone had drawn you to his attention, because he asked a lot of questions. If he'd been the one who'd originated the invitation, he would have known more about you. That's my opinion."

"Okay. So we need to talk to him." I sympathized when Tolliver made a face. "Yeah, me, too. He's a jerk, all right." Tolliver pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and checked a number on a folded piece of paper. Tolliver always has bits of paper in his pockets, and if he didn't do his own laundry I'd have to be searching his pants all the time. He finally found the right piece of paper and the right number and punched it in. From his stance, I could see that he was listening to the phone ringing on the other end. Finally, a recorded message came on, and when the beep sounded, Tolliver left a message. "Dr. Nunley, this is Tolliver Lang," he said briskly. "Harper and I need to talk to you. There are some things left unresolved after yesterday's unexpected discoveries. You have my cell number."

"Now he'll think we want our money."

Tolliver considered this. "Yes, and he'll call back about that," he said finally. "Come to think of it, if he doesn't pay us, we won't get anything for this. I can't help but be glad we're getting the Morgenstern reward money."

"I don't really want to have earned it, you know?" He patted me on the shoulder; he knew exactly what I meant. Of course, he also knew that we would take it. We sure deserved it. "I can't help feeling that we've been yanked into this. I just hope we haven't been shoved right under a ladder or some other bad luck thing. I'm scared we might end up taking someone else's fall for this."

"Not if I can help it," Tolliver said. "I know I've slipped up, but you can be sure I'll do everything in my power from now on out to make sure no one can connect us with the Morgensterns' mess. And it's a simple fact that we didn't take Tabitha, a provable fact. In fact, what date was she taken?" We looked it up on the Internet. Tolliver checked our previous year's schedule. God bless computers. "We were in Schenectady then," he said, relief in his voice, and I laughed.

"That's plenty far enough," I said. "I'm glad you keep such good records. I guess we've got receipts to back that up?"

"Yes, on file at the apartment," he said.

"Not just another pretty face," I said, and cupped his chin in my hand for a second to hold him still while I gave him a kiss on the cheek. But my happy moment didn't last longer than a few seconds. "Tolliver, who could have done this? Killed the girl, and put her there? Can it possibly be true that it's a massive coincidence?"

He shook his head. "I don't think that's even remotely likely."

"You and I both know that massive coincidences usually aren't. But I just can't imagine a conspiracy so elaborate."

"I can't either," he said.

Oddly enough, the next person we heard from was Xylda Bernardo.

We'd just finished lunch. It was an uneasy meal. Art had shared it with us, and since he ate a completely different kind of meal from us (he had a major lunch, and we like a light lunch), and he liked to talk business while he ate, I can't say we enjoyed it a whole lot. Art was about to catch a flight back to Atlanta, since he couldn't think of anything else to do in Memphis. The police weren't prepared to charge us with anything that he could discover; and he'd made many, many phone calls to everyone he knew in the justice system in Memphis to try to find out. We'd basically paid a whole hell of a lot for Art to fly over here first class to stay at a great hotel, make a lot of phone calls, and hold one press conference; but we'd known it had been a gamble when we'd called him.

Our lawyer was downing a huge salad, garlic bread, and veal ravioli, while Tolliver and I were having soup and salad on a smaller scale. I was watching Art chew hunks of bread and trying to remember my CPR lessons. Art was explaining what we should expect.

"You'll probably need to produce a record of your travels during the time since you met the Morgensterns," Art said.

I glanced at Tolliver and he nodded. We were covered on all that. During the years we'd been traveling, Tolliver and I had learned to keep every single receipt, every single credit card slip, every single piece of paper that crossed our paths. This past year, we'd been especially diligent. We had a cheap accordion file that was always on hand in the back seat of the car, and the laptop; we kept good records. We sent off regular packets to our accountant, Sandy Dierdoff, who was based in St. Louis. She was a broadly curvy blonde in her forties. "Crap," I said. She'd only raised her eyebrows and given a bark of laughter when we'd explained what we did for a living. She'd seemed to enjoy our unusual lifestyle. In fact, she'd given us more good advice in our meetings with her than Art had ever even thought of sharing. Sandy had already emailed us about making our annual appointment; fall was fast turning into winter.

I was thinking about Sandy, and by extension our apartment in St. Louis, while I said goodbye to Art. We saw him leave with a mutual feeling of relief. Art was kind of proud of having us as clients, as if we were show business people; but at the same time, he wasn't at his easiest or most relaxed when he was alone with us.

After he left, and the staff had removed the lunch things, I asked Tolliver if he thought we could go out for a walk. I still hadn't forgiven Tolliver his huge error in judgment, but I was willing to put it on the back burner until I'd calmed down. A good walk might restore our sense of companionship.

Tolliver was shaking his head before the sentence even got out of my mouth. "We ran this morning in the gym," he reminded me. "I know you don't want to be cooped up in this hotel, but if we go anywhere, someone'll spot us and want a statement."

I called down to the front desk to ask if there were still reporters waiting outside the hotel. The deskman replied that he couldn't be sure, but that he suspected some of the people loitering in the coffee shop across the street were members of the press. I hung up.

"Listen, put on your dark glasses and a hat and we'll go to the movies," he said. He found the complimentary Commercial Appeal we'd gotten that morning and looked up movie times. I found myself looking at my own picture on the front page of the Metro section. I'd only looked at the front section this morning, on purpose. There I was: thin, dark-headed, with big deep-set eyes and an erect posture, arms wrapped across each other under my breasts. I thought the picture made me look quite a bit more than twenty-four and that made me a little shivery. Tolliver, right beside me in the photo, was taller, darker, and more solid.

We both looked desperately troubled. We looked like refugees from middle Europe, refugees who'd fled some kind of persecution, leaving behind all they held of value.

"Want to read it?" Tolliver asked, extending the paper. He knew I didn't like reading the few stories in the press about us, but since I'd been staring at the picture, he offered it to me.

I put out my own hand in a "stop" gesture.

He handed me the movie section instead, and I began scanning the ads. We liked space movies and action movies. We liked movies with happy families. If they got threatened with danger, we liked them to get out of it more or less intact, maybe shooting a couple of bad guys in the process. We didn't like movies about miserable people who became more miserable, no matter how brilliant they were. We didn't like chick flicks. We didn't like foreign movies. I didn't want to go to the movies to learn a damn thing about human nature or the state of the world. I knew as much as I wanted to know about both those things.

There was a movie that fit our profile, which wasn't too surprising, I guess.

I put on a knit cap and my jacket and my dark glasses, and Tolliver bundled up, too. We got the doorman to call a cab instead of bringing our car around. We actually got a silent cab driver, my favorite kind. He could drive well, too, and he got us to the multiplex in time to buy our tickets and walk right in.

I love going to big multiplexes. I love the anonymity, and all the possibilities. I loved the teenagers who kept it clean, in their bright matching shirts and silly hats. Tolliver had had a night job in such a place in Texarkana, and he used to slip me in so I could hide in the darkened theater for a while, forgetting what waited for me at our home.

When the previews started running, I was as content as I could be. We sat together in the dark, passing the popcorn (no butter, light on the salt) back and forth.

We watched our pretty-pathologist-in-danger movie quite happily, knowing that everything would be okay in the end (more or less). We poked each other in the ribs when she was having a lot of trouble determining the cause of death of a very handsome guy. "You could have told her in a second," Tolliver said, in a whisper only someone as close as I could have deciphered. The theater wasn't empty, but there was plenty of room at this weekday afternoon showing. No one was talking out loud, and no child was crying, so it was a good experience.

When the movie was over, the bad guy killed several different ways after we thought he was dead initially, we strolled outside, chatting about the special effects and the probable future of the main characters. That was our favorite game. What would happen to them after the action of the movie was over?

"She'll go back to work, even if she said she wouldn't," I told Tolliver. "Staying at home will be too boring after all that shooting and chasing. After all, she bashed that guy in the head with her iron."

"Nah, I think she'll marry the cop, stay home, and devote herself to making her family supper every single night," Tolliver said. "She'll never order Chinese takeout again. Remember, she tore down the menu that was tacked to the wall by the phone?"

"She'll probably just order pizza instead."

He laughed and fished the receipt from the cab out of his pocket so he could call for another one to take us back to the hotel.

Suddenly, my left arm was seized in a strong grip. To say I got a scare would be a large understatement. I turned to stare at a woman holding me. She was wearing a voluminous coat with a loud plaid pattern. She had dyed red hair pulled up on one side of her head to cascade over to the other side in a waterfall of curls. Her lipstick was not exactly within the lines of her actual lips, and her earrings were huge chandeliers with glittery stones that caught the afternoon sun.

Tolliver had swung around and his free hand was heading for her throat. "I just have to talk to you," she said, in a hurried, abstracted way.

"Hi, Xylda," I said, trying for that calm, level voice you use when you're talking to someone you know is over the edge.

"Xylda," Tolliver said, almost in a growl. He'd been ready for action, and now he had to be tolerant. With more force than necessary, he shoved his phone back into his pocket. "What can we do for you today? How'd you come to be here?"

"You're in such danger," she said. "Such terrible danger. I felt I had to warn you. You're so young, dear. You can't know how terrible this world can be."

Actually, I thought I had a pretty good idea. "Tolliver and I aren't young in experience, Xylda," I said, trying to keep my voice gentle. "Look, there's a restaurant over there. Shall we go have a cup of hot chocolate, or some coffee? Maybe they have tea?"

"That would be good, really good," she said. Xylda was as different from me as she could be: shorter, bulkier, and at least thirty years older. She'd been in the psychic business ever since she'd quit prostitution, which had been her first profession. Xylda's husband, Robert, had been her handler, and his death the year before had thrown Xylda for a real loop. I didn't know how she was going to survive unless someone else took her in hand. She sure didn't look or behave like someone I'd want to employ if I were in the market for a psychic. Then again, maybe I was overestimating the public. Some clients actually believed that Xylda's odd manner and dress reinforced the fact that she was a living, breathing psychic.

I disagreed. I knew that a lot of psychics, both real and fake, were also emotionally unstable or out-and-out mentally ill. If you're born psychic, you're going to pay a price, a high one. It's a terrible gift.

Only two of the psychics I'd met managed to live just like ordinary people, but those two were exceptions. And neither of them was Xylda, of course.

Looking gloomy but resigned, Tolliver led Xylda into the cafe and helped her take her awful coat off. He left to get our drinks, while I settled Xylda in at a little table as far from other patrons as I could manage, given that the coffee shop wasn't a large business. I took a deep breath and tried to fix an understanding smile on my face.

Xylda clutched my hand, and I had to bite my lower lip to keep from yanking it away. Casual touching is not comfortable for me, and she'd already held onto me twice; but I reminded myself that Xylda must have a reason for the deliberate contact. As I knew from her own account at a previous meeting, Xylda was being bombarded with images from me. She'd explained it to me once when she'd been having a good day, back when Robert had been alive. "It's like watching a very fast slide show," she'd said. "I see pictures, pictures of the life of the person I'm touching, some from the past and some from the future and some…" She'd fallen silent and shaken her head.

"Do they all come true?" I'd asked.

"I have no way of knowing. I know they might come true." Xylda looked at me now, and her blue eyes really saw me. "In the time of ice, you'll be so happy," she said.

"Good," I said, having no idea what she was talking about. But that was the way of conversations with Xylda, if you could call this a conversation.

"You can't keep lying," Xylda said gently. "You have to stop doing that. It won't hurt anyone."

"I think I'm truthful," I said, surprised. Many things I could be accused of, and my accuser would be right. But not this.

"Oh, you're truthful about the things that don't matter."

"Did someone come to Memphis with you, Xylda?"

"Yes, Manfred did."

"Where is Manfred?" I wasn't completely sure who Manfred was, but learning someone had charge of Xylda was a relief.

"He's parking the car. There wasn't a space."

"Oh, good," I said, relieved to hear such a prosaic explanation. Tolliver arrived at the table with our drinks. Xylda seemed glad to get the coffee, which was redolent of vanilla and sugar, and she swirled in even more sugar with the little brown plastic stirrer. Mine was regular coffee, and Tolliver had gotten hot chocolate. "Tolliver, Xylda says Manfred is with her."

He raised his eyebrows in query, so he didn't know who that was, either. I shrugged. "She says he's out parking the car."

Tolliver stood and stared out the glass windows, then began waving vigorously to someone. "I think I spotted him." he said, sinking back into his chair. "He's coming in." Tolliver was smiling broadly.

"He's a good boy," Xylda said. She smiled at us. "Listen, I hear you found the Morgenstern girl." Suddenly, she sounded completely practical and all present and accounted for, mentally.

"Yes," I said.

"You know, they called me in."

"Yeah?"

"It wasn't the boy," Xylda said. "There was passion involved. But there was no sex with the little girl."

"Okay," I said. "Then why was she killed?"

"I don't know," Xylda said. She looked down into her coffee cup.

See what I mean about psychics being very little help?

"But I know you'll find out," Xylda said, and she looked up at me very sharply. "I won't be there to see it, but you'll find out."

"Are you going to a different city? Have you got another booking?"

"Yes," she said quite definitely. "I have another booking. You know, I'm the real thing, and people know that when they meet me."

"Yes, they do," Tolliver agreed, and then a thin young man came up to us, dressed all in black. This was Manfred, I assumed.

"I saw her surprise you," Manfred said cheerfully. "Sorry about that. Are you her friends? She said she had to meet some friends here."

Amazing. Xylda's psychic ability had led her to meet with us outside a Cineplex. Manfred was a narrow-shouldered young man in his late teens or early twenties. He had a narrow face and slicked-back peroxided hair, a matching goatee, and at least one tattoo visible on the side of his neck. He had a face decorated with many piercings and his hands were covered with silver rings.

He matched Xylda, in an odd sort of way.

"I'm Tolliver Lang and this is Harper Connelly," Tolliver said. "Are you related to Xylda?"

"This is my grandson," Xylda said proudly.

I was willing to bet that few grandmothers would be able to look at Manfred's extreme facial embellishment without wincing, much less with Xylda's simple pride. There was much to Manfred that met the eye, and quite a lot that didn't—and his grandmother was certainly psychic enough to sense that.

We told the young man we were pleased to meet him, and we explained that we crossed paths with Xylda professionally from time to time.

"She jumped up this morning, right at the breakfast table," Manfred said. "She said we had to go to Memphis. So we got in the car, and here we are." He seemed proud of having taken his grandmother so seriously, of having gotten her here on time to keep her self-appointed rendezvous.

"You know the body was found," I said to Xylda, who'd finished her coffee before the rest of us had begun to sip at ours.

"Yes, and I knew it was going to be found in a graveyard," Xylda said. "I just didn't know which one. I'm glad you found the girl. She's been dead a long time."

"Since the day she vanished?" I asked.

"No, not quite," Xylda said. "She lived a few hours. Not more than that."

I was actually relieved to hear this. "That's what I thought. Thanks for telling me," I said. I wondered if I should relay this bit of information to the police or to Tabitha's family. After a moment's consideration, I realized that was a very bad idea. If it had been hard for the police to believe me, it would be impossible for them to give Xylda any credence. If you could say anyone looked like an ex-hooker turned professional psychic, Xylda would be the picture you'd come up with. Police aren't inclined to trust either one, and Xylda reinforced that distrust with every sentence she uttered.

"I Saw it," Xylda said. I could hear the capital letter in her voice. Her grandson Manfred smiled at his grandmother, the epitome of pride. It was obvious Manfred simply didn't care that almost everyone in the shop had taken a moment or two to stare at our little group. I thought that was extraordinary, especially for a young man hardly out of his teens, if indeed he was. I realized that Manfred and Victor Morgenstern were very close in age. I wondered what the two would make of each other, and found the idea of their conversation almost unimaginable.

"Xylda, have you caught a glimpse of who took her?" Tolliver asked. He spoke very quietly, almost inaudibly, because there was no doubt people were listening.

"It was for love," Xylda said. "For love!" Xylda spoke right out.

She smiled at each of us, a distinct and separate look, and then she told Manfred it was time for her nap.

"Sure, Granny," he said. He stood and pulled her chair back for her. I hadn't seen a man do that in years. As Xylda picked up her purse and began to shuffle toward the door, the fascinated gaze of the other patrons following the progress of the enormous plaid coat, Manfred bent to take my hand. "A pleasure to see you," he said, and he suddenly sounded older than his years. "If you ever need a buddy to hang with, Harper, I'm willing to jump in there."

The look in his eyes told me that no matter how old Manfred was chronologically, biologically he was a fully developed male. Suddenly I felt very self-conscious and ridiculously flattered.

"I hear you," I said, and Manfred kissed my hand. Because of the piercings, the effect was strange. I felt a little tongue, a little brush of soft hair from the goatee, and surely a cold metallic touch from a stud in his mouth. I didn't know whether to laugh, or shriek, or pant.

"Just think of the kids we would have," Manfred said, and I opted for smiling.

"That's a step too far, there," I said. "You were doing great, up until the kids."

"I'll remember," he said, smiling back. "Next time I won't make the same mistake."

When they left, I turned to Tolliver to ask him what he'd gotten out of Xylda's tangled contribution. Tolliver was staring after Manfred with no friendly face.

"Oh, get real," I said. "Tolliver! He's years younger than me!"

"Right, maybe three," Tolliver said, and I remembered that Tolliver was three years older. "He's got balls, I'll give him that."

"Probably pierced ones," I said, and Tolliver gave me a startled look and an unwilling laugh.

"What would you say if I got a tattoo and a ring through my eyebrow?" he said.

"I'd definitely want to watch," I said. "And it would be interesting to see what kind of tattoo you picked." I looked at him for a moment, trying to imagine Tolliver with a silver hoop in his eyebrow or nostril, and I grinned. "And where you put it."

"Oh, if I ever got one, I'd get it on my lower back," he said. "So I could cover it up almost all the time."

"You've put thought into this."

"Yeah. A little."

"Hmmm. You've picked out the tattoo?"

"Sure."

"What?"

"A lightning bolt," he said, and I couldn't tell if he was serious or not.

seven

DURING our cab ride back from the suburban Cineplex to the downtown hotel, I had a little time to think. Xylda was nuts, but she was a true psychic. If she said Tabitha had lived a few hours after the abduction, I believed her. I should have asked different questions, I realized. I should have asked Xylda why Tabitha's abductor had kept her alive for that long. A sexual reason? Some other purpose?

"Did it seem to you that Xylda was nuttier than usual?" Tolliver asked, echoing my thoughts to an eerie degree.

"Yes," I said. "The kind of nutty that made me wonder how old she really is."

"She couldn't be over sixty, right?"

"I would have said younger, but today…"

"She looked okay."

"As okay as Xylda ever looks."

"True. But she seemed to walk just fine, and maneuver all right physically."

"But mentally, she was quite a bit more off… so vague. 'In the time of ice, you'll be happy.' What the hell does that mean?"

"Yeah, that was weird. And the part about being truthful."

I nodded. " 'The time of ice.' She could have told us things that would have been a hell of a lot more to the point. Maybe it's the loss of Robert that's thrown her for such a loop? Not that she was ever Miss Stability. At least Manfred seems to be taking good care of her, and he respects her talent."

"Think we should mention that guy we met in San Francisco to the Morgensterns? Think they'd be open to a clairvoyant?"

"Nah," I said instantly. "Tom will make something up if he doesn't get a genuine reading."

"So would Xylda."

"But only when it didn't matter, Tolliver." He looked at me as if he couldn't see the difference.

"Like if it was some teenager visiting her on a dare, wanting to know if she'd be happy in the future, Xylda might make up stuff so the kid would leave confident and cheerful. That kind of thing, that can't hurt. But if a lot depended on it, if the client took her seriously, Xylda wouldn't say, 'Oh yes, your missing son is really alive,' unless she got a true vision. Tom will tell you something under any circumstances, whether or not he really knows anything. He'll just make it up."

"Then I won't mention him," Tolliver said, though he sounded a little huffy. "I was trying to think of some way to help them get through this, and I think the only way they're going to come out the other side of it is to find out who did kill Tabitha. That is, if it really wasn't one of them."

"I know," I said, surprised at his irritation.

"What did you get from her yesterday? When you were standing on the grave?"

I was very reluctant to return to that moment. But then I thought of the faces of Diane and Joel Morgenstern, and the cloud of suspicion surrounding them, and I knew I had to return to Tabitha's last resting place.

"You think we could go back to the site?" I asked. "I know there's no physical remains there, but it might help."

Tolliver never questioned my professional judgment. "Then we'll go," he said. "But I think we better go tonight, so no one'll follow us. We won't want to be in a cab for that."

I agreed, especially after I caught our current cabbie's curious look in the rearview mirror.

"You want him to drop us off on Beale?" Tolliver asked. "Maybe we could go listen to some music before supper?"

I glanced at my watch. It seemed unlikely that there would be good blues playing at five in the afternoon. "Why don't you go?" I suggested. "I'll go back to the hotel and take a nap."

So Tolliver got out at B.B. King's Blues Club on legendary Beale Street, and reminded the cabbie where he was to drop me off. The cabbie made a face, said, "Sure, man, I little on the protective side," the man said when I was paying him. "Your man is a worrier."

"Yes," I said. "My brother."

"Your brother?" The cabbie looked at me, half-smiling, sure I was pulling his leg.

I told him to keep the change because I was kind of rattled, and I scrambled out of the cab and into the hotel without looking around me, which was stupid.

For the second time that day, someone seized hold of me. But this time it was a man, an angry man. He grabbed me as I walked into the lobby, and he marched me over to a chair before I could even be sure who he was.

Dr. Clyde Nunley was slightly better dressed than he had been the morning before. This afternoon he looked like a typical college professor in his sport jacket and dark slacks. His shoes needed shining.

"How'd you do it?" he asked me, still gripping my arm.

"What?"

"You've made a fool out of me. I was standing right there. Those records were sealed. I watched over them. No one else had read them. How did you do it? You make me look like an idiot in front of the students, and then your damn pimp calls me to ask me for my money."

I was disgusted, and I realized Dr. Nunley had been drinking.

I tried to yank my arm away. He'd scared me, so now I was proportionately angrier.

"Drop my arm and stand away from me," I said, and I said it sharply and loudly.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw that the three (very young) staff members at the counter were buzzing around nervously, unsure of what to do. I was so glad when someone else stepped forward and clamped a hand on Dr. Nunley's shoulder.

"Let go of the lady," said the man who'd been in the class the day before. He had that stillness about him that says, "I know what I'm doing and no one messes with me."

"What?" Clyde Nunley was very confused by the interruption of his bullying session. His grip on me didn't loosen. I had a wild impulse to grab the arm of Mr. Student, so we'd all be standing there holding on to one another. We must look ridiculous.

"Dr. Nunley, let go of me or I'll break your fucking fingers," I said, and that worked like a charm. He looked startled, as if I'd finally become a real person to him. Mr. Student kept hold of the inebriated professor, and his mouth moved in a very small smile.

By that time, one of the staff members had hustled around the desk and was striding over to us, trying to hurry without looking like he was hurrying. It was the pleasant-faced man in his twenties who'd checked us in. "Problem, Ms. Connelly?"

"Don't say a word," hissed Dr. Nunley, as though that would be sure to shut me up. He must normally deal with the well-mannered children of the privileged.

"Yes, there is a problem," I said to the young man, and Clyde Nunley's face twisted with surprise. He just didn't think I'd complain about him; I don't know why. "This man grabbed me when I came into the lobby, and he won't leave me alone. If this gentleman hadn't helped me out, he might have hit me." Of course, I didn't know that, but Dr. Nunley had definitely been spoiling for a confrontation, and if he thought I was going to forget he'd called my brother a pimp, he had another thought coming.

"Do you know him, Ms. Connelly?"

"I don't know him," I said firmly. In an existential sense, this was the truth. Do any of us know each other, really? I was sure the staff would back me up with no qualms if they thought Dr. Nunley was a stranger off the street, out to harass me. The minute I said the words "Doctor" and "Bingham College" I'd lose some of my own stature as a wronged female.

My new assistant, Mr. Student, said, "In that case, mister, I think you should leave. And in view of the fact that you seem drunk, I'd call a cab if I were you."

The clerk made a courteous gesture toward the door, as if Dr. Nunley were an honored guest. "One of our bellmen will be happy to call a cab for you," the clerk said in a sunny voice. "Right this way."

And before Dr. Nunley could regroup, he was out onto the sidewalk and under the watchful eye of the two bellmen who stood there waiting for cars to pull up.

"Thanks," I said to Mr. Student. "I didn't get your name yesterday."

"Rick Goldman."

"Harper Connelly," I said, with a little nod. I shook his hand, though my own was not steady. "How did you come to be on the right spot at the right moment, Mr. Goldman?"

"Rick, please. 'Mr. Goldman' makes me feel even older than I am. Would you care to sit and talk for a minute?" There were two brocaded wing chairs at a comfortable angle and distance for conversation.

I hesitated, tempted. I wasn't as calm and steady as I was making out. In fact, I was still shaking. I'd been taken by surprise, and in a bad kind of way. "For a minute," I said carefully, and sank down as gracefully as I could manage. I didn't want Rick Goldman to know exactly how shaky I was.

He sat opposite me, his square dark face carefully blank. "I'm an alumnus of Bingham," he said.

That told me absolutely nothing. "So are lots of other people, but I don't see them here now," I said. "What's your point?"

"I was a cop on the Memphis force for years. Now I'm a private investigator."

"Okay." I wished he'd cut the circling around and arrive at the point.

"The board of trustees is pretty sharply divided right now," Rick Goldman said. Okay, I was getting bored. I raised my eyebrows and nodded encouragingly.

"There's a liberal majority and a conservative minority. That minority is very concerned with Bingham's public profile. When that conservative faction of the board found out what Clyde was doing in his class, they asked if I would oversee the visiting speakers."

"Keep your fingers on the pulse," I said.

He seemed quite serious. I had a feeling Rick Goldman was a serious kind of guy. "Clyde didn't suspect you?"

"I paid my money and signed up for the class," Rick Goldman said. "Nothing he could do about it."

"The older lady in the class, she a monitor, too?"

"Nah, she just likes to take anthropology classes."

I thought about this for a second. "So, you just happened to be standing in the lobby here this evening?"

"No, not exactly."

"Following Clyde, were you?"

"No. He's boring. You're a lot more interesting."

I wasn't exactly sure how the private detective meant that.

"So have you been following me and my brother?"

"No. But I have been waiting here for you. I wanted to ask you some questions, after watching you in action yesterday."

I owed him the Q&A, after his timely intervention in the Clyde Nunley incident. "I'll listen," I said, which was more than I usually did.

"How'd you do it?" He leaned forward, his eyes fixed on my face. If the circumstances had been different it might have been a flattering moment. But I was afraid I knew what he meant, and that wasn't flattering at all.

I looked back at him with the same intensity. "You know I couldn't have learned any of that ahead of time," I said. "You know that, right?"

"Were you in cahoots with Clyde? And now you've had a falling out?"

"No, Mr. Goldman. I'm not in cahoots with anyone. I don't think I've ever heard anyone even say that phrase out loud, by the way." I broke eye contact, sighed. "I'm the real thing. You may not want to believe it, but eventually you'll have to. Thanks again." I got up and walked very carefully over to the elevators. My leg was still not steady, and it would be too embarrassing if I fell down.

I punched the up button with a quick stab of my finger. The elevator obligingly opened, and I stepped in, punching our floor number with a quick sideways motion of my hand. I stood with my back to the door so I wouldn't have to see him again.

I was ashamed that I had needed help. If I were as tough as I wanted to be, I could have thrown Clyde Nunley to the floor and kicked him. But that might have been a slight overreaction. I found myself smiling at the back wall of the elevator. I guess I'm the kind of woman who smiles when she thinks about kicking a man when he's down; at least, that man.

I told myself to stiffen my spine. After all, I'd handled that okay. I hadn't screamed or cried or lost my dignity. I'm not a weak person, I told myself. I just get rattled sometimes. And then there was the physical stuff left over from the lightning strike. One of those symptoms struck now, a headache so vicious I had trouble fitting my plastic key into the slot and getting into my room.

I opened my medicine bag and took a handful of Advil, and then I yanked off my shoes. I knew from experience how comfortable the bed was, and I knew in ten minutes I would feel better. I promised myself that. Actually, it took more like twenty minutes before the pain subsided to a bearable level, and then I looked at the ceiling and thought about Dr. Nunley and his temper until I fell asleep.

Tolliver woke me up a couple of hours later. "Hey," he said gently. "How are you? They told me when I came in that you'd had a problem with a man in the lobby, and some knight in corduroy had shown up to rescue you."

"Yeah." It was taking me a minute to gather up my senses. Tolliver had turned on my bathroom light, and he was a silhouette sitting on the edge of my mattress. "Nunley was waiting for me, and he was all 'How did you do this, you imp of Satan?' and so on. Well, he didn't go into the evil stuff so much. He just thought I was dishonest. But he clearly thought I was a big fraud, and he was mad you'd called him, and he wasn't nice about it."

"Did he hurt you?"

"Nah, grabbed my arm, but that's all. You remember that older man in the class, the one we were wondering about? He was in the lobby, too, waiting for me to come back. He stopped Nunley, and the guy from the desk sent him on his way. Then he told me some interesting information. The only thing is, after that I got a hell of a headache, so I took some medicine and dropped."

"How's the leg?"

One problem often triggered another. We'd been to maybe ten doctors, and they all said that my problems were psychological—whether or not we told them about the body-finding thing. "The effects of a lightning strike are over when you leave the hospital afterward," one particularly pompous jackass had told me. "There are no well-documented long-term effects." Sadly, the problems I had with the medical community were common among lightning strike survivors. Very few doctors knew what to do with us. For some of us it was much harder—the ones who couldn't go back to work and were trying to get workmen's comp or disability payments, for example.

At least I didn't have tinnitus, which affected so many survivors, and at least I hadn't lost my sense of taste, another common problem.

"The leg's a little shaky," I admitted, feeling the muscle weakness as I tried to achieve a leg lift. Only the left leg rose. The right one just quivered with the effort. Tolliver began to massage it, as he often did on the bad days.

"So, tell me the interesting information about the man from the class."

"He's a private detective," I began, and Tolliver's hands stopped moving for second.

"Not good," he said. "At least, depending on his goal."

I tried to recall everything Rick Goldman had said to me, and Tolliver listened to it all with absolute attention.

"I don't think this really has anything to do with us," Tolliver said. "He may not believe you're a genuine talent, but since when did that matter? Lots of people don't. He just hasn't needed you yet. As far as the board of trustees, or whatever, you've already been paid a retainer by the college. It wasn't much, anyway. This was more for the good buzz than anything else."

"So you don't think Goldman can hurt us?"

"No. And why would he?"

"He didn't seem really angry or upset," I admitted. "But he might think we were defrauding the college."

"So, what's he gonna do about it? He's not the guy who writes the checks. We were hired to do something, we did it."

I felt a little better about Rick Goldman after that, and I decided not to think about Clyde Nunley any more, though I knew Tolliver had a slow burn going about the professor being rough with me. Maybe we wouldn't run into him again. To change the subject, I asked Tolliver how his Beale Street jaunt had gone.

While his long fingers worked on my leg muscles, he told me about Beale Street, and his conversation with a bartender about the famous people who'd come to the bar to hear the blues. I grew more relaxed by the moment, and I was laughing when there was a knock at the door. Tolliver looked at me, surprised, and I shrugged. I wasn't expecting anything or anyone.

A bellman was there, holding a vase of flowers. "These came for you, Ms. Connelly," he said.

Who doesn't like to get flowers? "Put them on the table, please," I said, and glanced at Tolliver to see if he had the tip. He fished out his wallet, gave me a nod, and handed the bellman some bills. The flowers were snapdragons, and I didn't think anyone had ever sent me snapdragons. Actually, I didn't think anyone had ever sent me flowers before, unless you counted a corsage or two when I was in high school. I said as much to Tolliver. He pulled the little envelope from the plastic prongs in the foliage and handed it to me, no expression on his face.

The card read, "You have given us peace," and it was signed "Joel and Diane Morgenstern."

"They're very pretty," I said. I touched one blossom lightly.

"Nice of Diane to think of them," Tolliver said.

"No, this was Joel's idea."

"Why do you say that?"

"He's the kind of man who thinks of flowers," I said positively. "And she's the kind of woman who doesn't."

Tolliver thought this was foolishness.

"Really, Tolliver, you've got to take my word on this," I said. "Joel is the kind of guy who thinks about women."

"I think about women. I think about them all the time."

"No, that's not what I mean." I tried to think of how to put it. "He doesn't just think about wanting to fuck women, when he looks at them. I'm not saying he's gay," I added hastily, since Tolliver was looking incredulous. "I'm saying that he thinks about what women like." That still wasn't quite it, but it was as close as I could come. "He likes to please women," I said, but that wasn't exactly right, either.

The phone rang and Tolliver picked it up. "Yes," he said. "Hello, Diane. Harper just got the flowers; she says she loves them. You really shouldn't have done it. Oh, he did? Well, thank him, then." Tolliver made a face at me, and I grinned. He listened for a few moments. "Tomorrow? Oh, no thanks, we'd feel like we were intruding…" Tolliver looked acutely uncomfortable. "That's too much trouble," he said next. His tone was carefully patient. He listened. "Then, all right," he said reluctantly. "We'll be there."

He hung up and made a face. "The Morgensterns want us to come to their house tomorrow for lunch," he said. "They've had a lot of people bringing food by, they can't eat it all, and they're feeling guilty that we're stuck in Memphis because of them. There'll be other people there," he assured me when he saw my face. "The focus won't be on us."

"Okay, good. That would have crossed a line, after the flowers. There's such a thing as overdoing the gratitude. After all, it was an accident. And we're getting the reward. Joel said so. You should have asked me before you said yes. I really don't want to do that."

"But you see that we pretty much have to."

"Yes, I see that," I said, trying not to sound resentful. I thought that my brother wanted to see Felicia Hart again.

Tolliver nodded, a sharp gesture to close the subject. I wasn't quite sure I was through whining, but he was right. No point in discussing it any longer. "You ready to go back to the cemetery?" he asked.

"Yes. How cold is it?" I stood up, experimentally stretched the leg. Better.

"The temperature's dropping."

When we were all bundled up, I called downstairs to have our car brought around. A few minutes later, we were making our way back to St. Margaret's. The weekday nighttime traffic in downtown Memphis was not heavy. Nothing was going on at the Pyramid, and Ellis Auditorium looked dark, too. We drove east through depressed areas, shopping areas, and old residential areas until we got to the streets around Bingham College. The few people on foot were bundled up like urban mummies.

I began to recognize a few landmarks from the morning before. This time we didn't take the main drive through the college, as we had previously. Tolliver drove around the campus to reach a small road at the back of the college property. It had those white barriers that you pull back across the entrance, and yesterday they'd been pulled shut but unlocked, he'd noticed.

The same was true tonight. Rick Goldman, private eye, should tell Bingham their security had a few holes in it.

We passed between the open barriers. The crunch of gravel under our tires sounded especially loud. After a short stretch of landscaped lawn all around us, we entered the wooded corner of the campus. Though the city lay all around us, it felt like we were miles from nowhere. We drove slowly through the trees surrounding the old site, our headlights catching on the branches and trunks as we passed. Nothing moved in the cold stillness. We reached the clearing of the church and its yard. In the small graveled parking lot, we drove up to the low posts connected with wire that kept cars from pulling onto the grass. There was a security light on a high pole at the rear of the church, and one on the far side. They provided just enough light to make the shadow of the dilapidated iron-railing fence obscure the graveyard.

"If this was a horror movie, one of us would be a goner," I commented.

Tolliver didn't respond, but he wasn't looking any too happy. "I thought the lighting would be better than this," he said. We made sure our coats were buttoned and zipped, gloves on, flashlights ready. Tolliver loaded some extra batteries into his pockets, and I did, too.

There was not even a night-light on in the old church.

When we shut the car doors behind us, the slams sounded loud as gunshots. Tolliver shone his flashlight on the wire so I could step over it, and I returned the favor. Then we opened the gate, which creaked loudly in approved horror-movie fashion.

"Just great," Tolliver muttered. I found myself smiling.

The ground, which had seemed fairly level in the daylight, was rough walking at night. At least, it was for me. I negotiated it slowly, worried about my faltering right leg. But I didn't ask Tolliver for help. I could manage.

From the entrance gate, we needed to work our way southeast to reach the secluded corner where I'd found Tabitha in Josiah Poundstone's grave. Of course, that was the darkest place in the whole cemetery.

"It feels bigger tonight," Tolliver said. His voice was just one step up from whispering. I almost asked him why. Then I realized I didn't want to talk out loud, either. As we neared the open grave, I wondered if they'd dug up poor Josiah, too—and if so, what they'd done with him. The familiar vibrations of the dead began to sound louder and louder in my head.

"Have we ever been to a cemetery at night?" I asked, trying to shake off the uneasy, prickling feeling that was riding my shoulders. There was no definite reason for me to feel anxious. In fact, I usually felt alive, alert, and happy in graveyards.

Certainly, no one else was around. The cemetery was surrounded on two sides by thick stands of trees, on the third side by the parking area (beyond which were more trees), and on the fourth by the old church. It wasn't too far off a busy, modern street, but I'd noticed on our previous visit how isolated the graveyard felt. Bugs and birds had sense enough to keep silent and lay low.

"There was that time the couple in Wisconsin wanted you to do a reading at midnight on their son's grave," Tolliver said in my ear. It had been so long since I'd spoken, I had to recall the question I'd asked.

I was immediately sorry to be reminded about Wisconsin. I'd been trying to forget, to stuff that night into the closet where I kept horrors. Just to add to the weirdness of the couple and their request, they'd requested Halloween night. Plus, they'd invited about thirty best friends. I guess they'd figured if they were going to pay us that much money, they were going to get some mileage out of the event. They'd been mistaken about what I could do, though I'd never tried to mislead them. Right out there, in front of all their friends, I'd blurted out what had really happened to the child. I shuddered, remembering. Then I made myself shake off the memory. Focus on this night, this dead girl, this grave, I told myself. I took a deep breath, let it out. Then another.

"I know the body is gone," I said, almost in a whisper. "The body's always been my connection, but I'm going to try to recreate what I got from her yesterday."

"We're in an isolated graveyard in the dark," Tolliver muttered. "At least you're not wearing a long white nightgown, and at least we're together. And believe me, my cell phone battery is fully charged."

I almost smiled. Usually, I felt most comfortable in a cemetery; but not this one, not this night. I stumbled again. Cemeteries are tricky going, especially the older ones. So many of the new ones have the flat headstones. But in the older ones, there are broken headstones in the grass, which is often uneven and tufted with weeds. In more secluded cemeteries, the living often leave trash on top of the dead—broken liquor bottles and crushed beer cans, condoms, food wrappers, all kinds of stuff. I can't count the times I've found underpants suitable to both sexes, and once I found a top hat set jauntily upright on a stone.

St. Margaret's graveyard was free from debris of that sort. It had been mowed and trimmed at the end of the summer, so the grass was fairly low. Our flashlights bobbed through the darkness like playful fireflies, sometimes crossing their beams and then floating away.

The still air was cold, a cold that bit through my gloves and made me shiver. I had on a knit cap and scarf, but my nose felt especially chilled. Tolliver, some steps ahead of me and to my left, made the beam of his flashlight dance as he rubbed his hands together.

The night had a thick, waiting quality that made the hair on the back of my neck prickle. I tried to identify the swoosh of the traffic on the road off through the trees, but there was an absolute silence. I felt a stab of alarm. Surely, at night, I should be able to see the lights of those cars, even through the trees? I slowed down, feeling suddenly disoriented. The flashlight beams seemed dimmer. I was very close to the right spot, but somehow I couldn't pick it out. The buzzing of the bodies around me seemed extraordinarily clear and strong for such old corpses. I started to say my brother's name, but I couldn't speak. Suddenly, Tolliver gripped my lower arm with both hands, very tightly, bringing me to a complete standstill. "Look at your feet," he said in a very strange voice. I shone the light directly downward.

In one more step I would have fallen into the open grave.

"Ohmygod. That was close. Thank you. Do you hear anything?" I whispered. One hand slid down to mine, squeezed it, and released it. There was something odd about the feel of that bony hand.

And then I realized Tolliver's flashlight was shining at me from the other side of the grave, with Tolliver holding it.

My heart pounded so fast I thought the vibrations might tear my chest apart. I sank down to my knees on the soft, freshly turned earth.

"See?" said the voice, though I couldn't have said where it had come from. With an increasing sense of dread, I directed my flashlight down into the grave.

There was another body in it.

eight

TOLLIVER didn't seem to be able to move from his side of the open grave, and we both shone our flashlights down at the body.

"At least I didn't fall in," I managed to say, and my voice sounded hoarse and strange to my own ears.

"He stopped you," Tolliver said.

"You saw him? Clearly?"

"Just his silhouette," he said, and even Tolliver's voice was strained and breathless. "A small man. With a beard."

This was the first time such a thing had happened to us. It was like being an accountant for five years, and then suddenly being presented with a set of alien numerals that had to be balanced in five minutes.

Tolliver stumbled around the grave to kneel beside me, put both his arms around me, and we held each other fiercely. We were shivering, shivering intensely—not from the cold, but from the nearness of the unknown. I made a little noise that was horribly like a whimper. Tolliver said, "Don't be scared," and I turned my head a little to tell him I wasn't any more scared than he was; which was to say, quite a lot. He kissed me, and I was glad for his warmth.

I said, "This is a thin place."

"What's that?"

"A place where the other world is very close to this world, separated only by a thin membrane."

"You've been reading Stephen King again."

"It felt strange from the moment we got here tonight."

"Did you feel anything different when we were here the first time? Yesterday?"

"The old ones always feel a little different from the new ones. Maybe I saw the dead more clearly, with more detail." I held him tighter. Now that I'd gotten over my startled reaction to the ghost, I had plenty of other fears to cope with. We had a situation on our hands. "What will we do about the body, Tolliver? We shouldn't call the police, right? We're already under enough suspicion."

My feelings about the law were, at best, ambiguous. I couldn't blame the Texarkana PD for not knowing what was going on in our household when I was a teenager. After all, we'd struggled so hard to conceal it. I hardly blamed them for not finding Cameron; I, of all people, knew how hard it could be to find a dead person. But now that I was grown, the thing I valued most was the ability to shape my life as I wanted. The law could take that away from me in a New York minute.

"No one knows we came here," Tolliver said, as if thinking out loud. "No one's come out here since we got here. I bet we could leave and not get caught. But someone's got to get this body out of the grave. We can't just leave him."

I was beginning to feel calmer. "Who is it?" I asked, and my voice was steadier. After all, bodies were my area of expertise. I was not at all worried about being this close to a corpse. I was worried about the police suspecting I'd made him a corpse.

"I'm not sure." Tolliver sounded a little surprised, as if he should have known who was in the hole from the brief glimpse we'd had.

"Let's look again," I said practically. I was feeling a little more like myself.

We pulled apart then, and deployed our flashlights.

If my heart could sink any lower, it did. Since the body was on its stomach, I couldn't identify its face, but the clothes were familiar.

"Crap. It's Dr. Nunley," I said. "He's still wearing the clothes he had on when he grabbed me at the hotel." I pressed the button on my watch, and the dial illuminated. It looked as though I had a fairy perched on my wrist. "It's been three hours since that happened. Just three hours. The lobby staff had to talk to Dr. Nunley to get him to leave, and they'll remember it. This couldn't be worse."

"Not for him, anyway," my brother said, his voice dry. But he had a slight smile on his face. I could just see the edge of his mouth in the cast-back light. I felt like punching him in the arm, but I wasn't sure I had enough muscle control to manage it. "And it's not so good for us, you're right," Tolliver admitted.

"Have we left footprints? Has it rained since we got here yesterday?"

"No, but the dirt here around the grave has been turned over, and I'm sure we've left traces somewhere. On the other hand, so many people have come through the cemetery since you found Tabitha… and we're both wearing the same shoes we wore out here yesterday."

"But there wasn't this loose dirt then. I don't know how we would explain coming out here tonight. Oh, I'm so sorry I got you into this."

"Bullshit," he said briskly. "We were doing what we do. You wanted to see if you could get some other bit of information from the grave. Well, we found out more than we wanted to know, huh? But it's not your fault." He hesitated. "Do you want to try to talk to him, the—the ghost? And what about getting a reading from the body?"

Tolliver's suggestion was as bracing as that brisk slap detectives give hysterical women in old movies. "Yes," I said. "Sure." Of course, I should have thought of that. I had to calm myself first, and center myself. Not too easy, since I was already buzzing like crazy just from being so close to a fresh body.

The closest I could get to Clyde Nunley's corpse without climbing down into the grave—which might have destroyed or damaged evidence—was to hang over the edge with my hand extended to him. I lay down on the ground and wriggled forward. Tolliver held on to my legs. The hole wasn't so deep, and I managed to touch the shirt on Dr. Nunley's back.

His death was so recent it was like a continuous droning in my head, almost drowning my reason, and I had to wait for that to subside before I got a sense of his passing. "Hit on the head," I mumbled, caught up in the sheer astonishment he'd felt. "On the back of the head. So surprised." The shock of it was still lingering around him. He absolutely had not expected the attack.

"Here?"

"Yes," I said, straining to extract the pictures of the end of his life. He was so fresh, so recently translated into this lump of flesh that could neither act nor reason. I saw the darkness around him, the tombstones, everything like it was now: the cold, the rough ground, the upturned earth. "Oh, it hurts! Oh, it hurts! My head!" And the hole coming at me, couldn't throw out my hands to take the fall, grayness… blackness.

I was close to that blackness myself when Tolliver hauled me up and braced me against him.

"Here, open your mouth," he said, and then he repeated it. "Open!"

I parted my lips, and he pushed a piece of peppermint into my mouth.

"Come on, you have to have some sugar," he said, and his voice was sharp and commanding.

He was right. We'd found that out, by trial and error. I made myself suck on the candy, and in a few minutes I felt better. Next came a butterscotch.

"It's never been this bad," I said, my voice weak. "I guess it's because he's so new." I was worried I couldn't make it across the cemetery back to our car without a lot of help from Tolliver.

"He's absolutely gone, right? That… who stopped you—wasn't him? I did think I saw a beard."

Every now and then, we'd found a soul attached to a body. That was rare, and until this night I had thought that would be the eeriest thing we could find. Now we knew there was more.

"Clyde Nunley's soul's gone," I said, not willing to commit myself further than that. "And we should be, too." I gathered myself to make the attempt.

"Yeah," Tolliver said. "We got to get out of here."

I paused, halfway to my feet. "But we'll be leaving him by himself."

"He's been by himself for a hundred years," Tolliver said, not pretending he didn't understand. "He'll have to be by himself for a while longer. For all we know, maybe he's got company."

"Does this qualify as the strangest conversation we've ever had?"

"I think so."

"I couldn't have anyone else but you here, no one else would understand," I said. "I'm so glad you saw him, too."

"And that's never happened before, right? You've never mentioned anything like that."

"Never. I've known when souls were still attached to the body, and I've wondered if those would be ghosts if they didn't detach. I've always wondered if I would see a ghost sometime. I've always been a little disappointed that I haven't, in a way. Oh my God, Tolliver. He saved me from falling right into that grave on top of the corpse. The first time I see a ghost, and he saved me."

"Were you scared?"

"Not that he would hurt me. But I was afraid because it was spooky and I didn't know what to do for him. I don't know why he can't or won't go on, I don't know how he experiences time, I don't know his purpose. And now all his people are gone, I guess. No one could visit him or…" I shut up, afraid of sounding maudlin.

They all want to be found, you know. That's all they want. Not vengeance, or forgiveness. They want to be found. At least, that's what I'd always thought.

But Josiah Poundstone—I was sure he was the ghost—had been firmly located since the moment of his death. Someone had erected the "Beloved Brother" headstone. And someone had murdered him, if that was part of his awareness. When I'd stood on his grave in the daylight, I'd felt only the faintest flutter from him, so overwhelmed had I been with the thrumming from the most recent corpse. I'd assumed Josiah Poundstone was gone for good. Apparently, I'd been wrong.

nine

WE made our way back to the car, taking our time. I had to hold on to Tolliver here and there, and I don't think he was sorry to hold onto me. We dusted dirt off my jacket, and stomped our feet to remove bits of soil.

"If there were an emergency room for psychological shocks, we could go there," he said, unlocking the car.

"I've never left a body unreported," I said, remembering how proud I'd been of that fact only a day before. "Never." I shuddered. "I wish I could put my brain in a warm bath of something scented," I said. "And give my nervous system some aromatherapy."

"That mental picture is just disgusting," Tolliver said.

He was right, but that didn't stop me from wanting some way to soothe my emotional self. I took a deep breath and tried to put the frivolous thoughts on the back burner.

We still had decisions to make, and they wouldn't be easy ones.

"Did you get anything from the… did you get anything?" Tolliver asked.

"Yeah," I said. "Yeah, Dr. Nunley was really taken by surprise. I don't know why he was out there, but he never expected the person with him had any evil intent."

"Do ordinary people expect to be attacked, ever?" Tolliver asked reasonably.

I gave him a disgusted look. "No, they don't, smart aleck, and that's not what I meant. What I mean is—he wasn't with a stranger. He was with someone he knew, and he had no idea that the other guy wished him ill."

"You just using 'guy' for the ease of it?"

"Right."

"We can't tell the police."

"Sure we can, but they won't believe us. I don't know what else we can do. And I absolutely don't think we should tell them we were at the grave site again."

We argued back and forth all the way to the hotel—and with time out for discretion in front of the staff, resumed our argument when we were alone in the elevator.

When we stepped out, we were struck speechless to see Agent Seth Koenig waiting outside our room.

If the management had cast glances at us on our way through the lobby, we'd been too engrossed in our own problems to pick up on it. Certainly not a psychic, I thought ruefully. /// ever claim to be one, strike me dead. We were completely taken by surprise. As one, we stopped in our tracks and stared at him.

We weren't alone in the staring department. He was laying one on us.

"What have you two been up to?" he asked.

"I don't believe we need to talk to you," Tolliver said. "My sister tells me you're an FBI agent, and we don't know anything of interest to you."

"Where have you been?" Koenig asked, as though we would be compelled to tell him.

"We went to the movies," I said.

"Just now," he said. "Where were you just now?"

Tolliver took my hand and led me past the agent, who was surely persistent.

I repeated what Tolliver had said. "We don't have to talk to you."

"If it was anything to do with Tabitha Morgenstern, I need to know it." His voice was rough and hard.

"Fuck off," I said. Tolliver gave me a startled look. That's not my usual style. But I wanted to get away from this guy. Tolliver got the door unlocked and whisked me inside at top speed. We slammed the door behind us.

"He's obsessed with his failure," I said, as I began to shed all my outerwear. I noticed my shoes were stained with dirt from the cemetery, despite my efforts. I reminded myself that I had to clean them later. At the moment, I couldn't summon the energy. I felt awful: exhausted, weak, upset. "I have to shower and go to bed. I'm sorry I'm not more help."

"Don't say that," Tolliver said. He hated it when I apologized.

I often thought, and sometimes said, that Tolliver would be better off if he hadn't undertaken the role of my backbone. But when I tried to imagine myself going on the road alone, I felt a huge hole in my middle that refused to fill with anything. I tried to keep myself fit and did everything I could to ensure my health, but the fact remained that sometimes I was just overcome by the physical problems that plagued me. And the job itself drained me, though I loved it.

What Tolliver got out of accompanying me, I wasn't able to figure. But he did seem to want to do it, and he accused me of self-pity when I tried to get him to do something he might find more fulfilling.

In the meantime, we shared everything: the money was our money, and the car was our car, and the planning and execution of the itinerary was ours.

"Come on," Tolliver said, putting an arm around me helping me to my room. "Hold up your arms." Like a child, I held my arms up and he pulled off my sweater. "Sit on the bed." I did, and he pulled off my shoes and socks. I stood, and he unzipped my jeans.

"I'm good," I said. "I got it from here."

"Sure? Need candy? Need a drink?"

"No, just a shower and bed. I'll be okay after some sleep."

Tolliver said, "Call if you need me," and went back out to the living room. I heard him turn on the television. I couldn't even remember what night it was, so I didn't know if one of his shows was on. We could never count on being able to keep up with episodes, and we'd discussed learning more about TiVo for the set in our apartment. I thought I heard Tolliver's cell phone ring while I was in the tub, but I simply didn't care who was calling. I soaked in hot, scented water, then scrubbed myself bright pink. After I dried off and put on my pajamas, I was disgusted to find out I still hadn't unwound enough to sleep. I turned on my own television to have background noise while I painted my nails. I decided on a nice dark red, which looked autumnal, and I had a lovely peaceful half hour to myself. You can't be said to have any worries if your fingernails are the center of your universe, and it gave me time to decompress.

I couldn't settle down to read when that was done, though Tolliver had brought a box of paperbacks up with us. We pick them up here and there, and leave them for other people when we're done. We love secondhand bookstores, and we'll go a mile or two out of our way if we've heard of a good one in the area. I'd been reading a biography of Catherine the Great, who may have become an empress but also managed to have a messy life. Maybe all empresses did. I just couldn't get into her tonight, and I was still jangling too much inside to get in the bed. I wandered into the common living room to see what Tolliver was up to.

He was fuming; there was no other word for it.

"The TV screen is going to break if you keep glaring at it like that," I said. "What's up?" Tolliver didn't do a lot of brooding and mulling, so I never thought twice about asking.

"Personal," snapped Tolliver.

I was shocked for a minute, and then gave myself a piece of good advice. Treat this casually, and don't get all tearful and hurt.

"Okay," I said calmly. "What's the score in the game?" Tolliver was watching football, which I couldn't care less about, but the question did knock him out of his funk and redirect his irritation. He was off and running on the failure of his favorite team, the Miami Dolphins, to get a first down. Since I know about as much about football as I do about quantum physics, I tried to look sympathetic while keeping my mouth shut. Sleep was out of the question until this was resolved, one way or another.

"We could use some food," I said, and called room service. I got a hamburger for Tolliver, and a grilled chicken sandwich for me.

By the time I'd done that, Tolliver had calmed down and was wearing his usual expression of good humor. "That phone call was from Felicia Hart," he said.

I tried to keep my face still and receptive. I tried very hard not to twitch.

"I've told you I'm sorry for being… for starting something with her," he said. "I'm not going to say it again."

"I didn't ask you to," I pointed out.

"Right." He shook his head. "Residual guilt," he said, by way of explanation. "She wants to see me again. I said it wasn't a good time."

"She saw you today, and she was reminded of how fine you are," I said, careful to be smiling when I said that. "I bet she wants to start up again."

He shook his head. "That seems really unlikely."

"I wonder if she'll be at the lunch tomorrow," I said, trying to sound innocent. "I'll run interference for you if you need me to. She'll probably try to get you by yourself."

"I don't think so," he said, refusing to be drawn.

"She's very protective of Victor," he said after a long pause. I wondered if he'd seen any of the action on the television screen. "Do you remember what Victor's alibi was when Tabitha was abducted?"

"Well, it was spring break, so he wouldn't have been at school," I said. "Nope, I don't recall. Why don't we look it up?"

Tolliver set up his laptop and hooked up to the hotel's Internet service. We began to do a little research into the crime that had led to us being in this room at this moment.

I sat by Tolliver, my arm around his shoulders, as he brought up the familiar story and the images from eighteen months ago. I had forgotten some of the details, and now that I knew all of the people involved, the pictures had much more impact.