Grave Surprise

What I noticed, first of all, was how many pictures included Agent Seth Koenig. He was in the background of most of the pictures that had appeared in relation to the disappearance. In all of the pictures, whether he was in the foreground or talking to someone in the background, his face was absolutely serious. He was a man absorbed in his mission.

It was shocking to see how much the Morgensterns had aged since Tabitha's abduction. Even Victor looked more adult now—though at his age, that was maybe only to be expected. In the pictures, Diane looked more like five years younger, and Joel looked… lighter. He was still charismatic and handsome now, but he walked more heavily, as if he were carrying a burden on his shoulders. I hated to sound all corny about it—but it was true.

We combed through the stones, refreshing our memories.

On that warm spring morning in Nashville, only Diane had been home with Tabitha. Joel had gone to work two hours before. Spring is always a busy time for accountants, and Joel went in most Saturdays until after the tax deadline. That Saturday, he'd gotten in to work so early that no one had seen him arrive. Joel told the police that several other accountants had come into the office after he'd been there an hour. Though he hadn't been under continuous surveillance from the time the other workers had begun arriving until after Tabitha's abduction, he'd been seen at fairly frequent intervals. That time frame made it seem unlikely he could have managed the crime, but it was a possibility.

As for Diane, she'd told us what she'd been doing—arguing with her daughter, talking on the phone, getting ready to go to the store. She'd been unobserved for most of that time.

So much for the parents.

Tabitha's stepbrother Victor had also gotten up early that morning. Victor had driven to his tennis club for an 8:00 A.M. lesson, which had lasted an hour. And then, Victor said, he'd just stayed around the tennis courts to bat some balls against the wall and talk to some of his friends. The friends, apparently, had remembered seeing Victor, but they weren't sure what time that had been. After that, Victor said, he'd stopped at a gas station to fill his car and buy a Gatorade. The gas station cashier had verified the episode. Victor had arrived home about 11:00 a.m. to find his house exploding with the beginnings of panic. Again, there was no way to pin down times more accurately. If Victor had planned ahead, he could have abducted his half sister.

According to one of his friends, Victor hadn't been especially fond of Tabitha. But this "friend" couldn't think of anything specific Victor had ever said about Tabitha, just that Victor thought she was a spoiled brat.

That seemed like a perfectly ordinary thing for a big brother to say about his sister, whether she was his full sister or his half sister. On the other hand, Victor was at a volatile age.

Were there other suspects? Sure. The articles we read brought up the fact that Joel was a CPA for Huff Taichert Killough, a firm that handled accounts for lots of music industry people. This fact opened the door to vague allusions to shady record company accounting, as if Joel was possibly mixed up in some dubious financial dealings that might have earned him some enemies. But no facts were ever produced to back up that intriguing possibility. And, in fact, Joel continued to work for the same firm. Now he worked for the Memphis branch instead of the Nashville branch, but of course the newspapers didn't specify whether the change of locale had included a change of job description, or not. If some money-laundering scheme had become an investigative reality, I was sure the reporters would have caught wind of it, since they were all over the abduction like white on rice.

I studied the pictures that had been included with the articles: Victor, looking sullen and lost; Diane, looking wasted; Joel, his face bleached of feeling. There was Felicia, looking angry and fierce, her arm around Victor, and by her side was Seth Koenig, the FBI agent who'd been waiting in the hall for us this evening. Hmmm. He was saying something to her in the picture, caught forever in mid-sentence, his face serious behind a pair of dark glasses. The caption read, "Felicia Hart, aunt of the missing girl, comforts her nephew, Victor Morgenstern, as she discusses the case with an FBI agent. The FBI offered their lab facilities or any other assistance the local police might deem necessary."

"Look," said Tolliver, sounding amused. The next picture was one of us. We both had on dark glasses, too, and I had my head turned away. That was a habit of mine when I saw cameras. I don't mind being photographed, but that doesn't mean I like it, either.

There was a brother of Joel's, too, a near-clone but a bit older, named David. I didn't recall seeing him at the Morgenstern house, but maybe by the time we'd been called in, he'd returned to his work and his life. People had started drifting back into their normal orbits about that time, when it seemed as if the situation was not going to be resolved quickly.

"I don't think we know a damn thing more," I complained.

"No, probably not," Tolliver said. "We haven't called the police, either."

"They'll find out it's us calling, if we do," I said. "They'll find him. He'll be missed soon. I don't think we can risk it." Okay, that might seem the last word in callousness from me, and believe me, I wasn't happy about it. I was very aware that Clyde Nunley was lying out there dead in the dark and the cold. But you know, the dead don't feel a thing. They're just waiting.

If he wasn't found the next day, maybe I could "find" him a second time. No one would be surprised if we happened to go out to the old cemetery the next day, I figured. It was our choosing to go there in the middle of the night that would seem extraordinary; and now that I came to think of it, it had been an extraordinary thing to do. And foolish, too.

But now we were stuck with it, and we'd have to take the consequences if our presence was discovered.

As I climbed into my bed that night, I was more confused about what had happened to Tabitha Morgenstern than I'd been before I found her bones. And the presence of the ghost at the grave site was forcing me to rethink all my suppositions about the dead. I had plenty to worry about; but my body was exhausted, and before I knew it, I was asleep.

I don't dream much, but that night I dreamed of holding hands that had been reduced to bones. I wasn't frightened in my dream. But I knew it wasn't right.

THE next morning, there was a knocking at the door while Tolliver and I sat over breakfast, reading the morning paper. Tolliver was working the crossword. I'd reread everything I could find on the abduction of Tabitha, and I'd worked my way up chronologically to the new articles about the recovery of a body that might be hers. I'd reached the stories that were wringing the dregs out of the discovery of the child's body. This included an article on the main subject—the very tentative positive identification based on dental work—plus a rehash of the abduction, the family's plans for a memorial service the following week, quotes from the grieving grandparents; a companion story about Memphis's "hidden" cemeteries; and an article about child abduction in general, with statistics on the number of children found alive, the number found dead, and the number of those who were never found. Cameron had plenty of company.

There's not much that's more frightening than the idea of a child vanishing, gone for good. I thought of my little sisters, and shivered. Mariella and Gracie were pretty formidable kids when I'd lived with them in the trailer. I didn't know what they were like now, since my aunt and her husband kept telling us the girls didn't want to see us. That might or might not be true, but if it was so, Iona and Hank had been feeding them a load of untruths about us that I wanted a chance to rectify. The girls might not love me, but I loved them.

My mind had wandered, but the knock recalled me to the here and now.

We looked at each other. Tolliver rose. He looked through the peephole.

"It's the FBI guy again," he said.

"Shit," I murmured. I was wearing a hotel bathrobe and nothing else, since I'd showered again this morning after doing my time on the hotel treadmill.

"You'd better let me in, I've got news for you," the voice on the other side of the door said.

Tolliver glanced back at me.

We considered.

"Okay," I said. "Better find out what he wants."

Tolliver opened the door, and Seth Koenig stepped in at once and closed the door. His eyes flashed to my legs, and then away. "I taped the news this morning, since I thought you two might not have seen it," he said. He waited for us to respond, and we both shook our heads. We don't turn on the television as a matter of course. From the expression on his face, I felt pretty bad about what was coming.

He strode over to our television and popped the tape in the hotel player. He used the remote to turn on the set. After a moment of sports scores, Shellie Quail filled the camera. She looked resplendent in a bright fall suit and her usual gleaming makeup. Shellie had on her sober newscaster face. Clearly, she was going to deliver Grim Tidings.

"A groundskeeper at Bingham College made a shocking discovery early this morning. Dennis Cuthbert was sent to the site of the old St. Margaret's church and cemetery to make sure the garbage had been picked up after the discovery, two days ago, of Tabitha Morgenstern's remains interred in an ancient grave in the cemetery. What Cuthbert found was just as shocking. Inside that same grave, he found another body."

They sure did love the word "shocking."

The camera cut to a husky black man wearing a dark blue uniform. Dennis Cuthbert looked mighty upset. "I got here, and I see the car parked in the parking lot," he said. "Wasn't anyone supposed to be here, so I began looking around a little."

"Did you think at that point that there was anything wrong?" Shellie asked, her face in a sober mask.

"Yeah, I did wonder," said Dennis Cuthbert. "Anyway, I started walking around, and soon I notice that the grave look a little different."

"How?"

"The edge look a little collapsed. So I go over there and look down, and there he was."

Good. He'd walked over the area where I'd lain to touch the corpse.

The camera swung back to Shellie, who said, "Inside that grave, Cuthbert found the body of a man, tentatively identified as Bingham College professor Dr. Clyde Nunley. Dr. Nunley was dead."

Switch to the outside of an older home probably dating from the 1940s, the kind yuppies bought and restored. "Dr. Nunley's wife, Anne, told the police that her husband had left their home for the second time between six and seven o'clock last night to check something out, he said. He didn't give any details. When he hadn't returned home at his usual time, she went to bed. When she woke this morning and found him still missing from the home, she called police."

Evidently, Anne Nunley had declined to be interviewed, because she didn't appear on the screen. Smart woman.

Close-up of the gleaming Shellie. "Police aren't saying how Dr. Nunley died. But a source close to the investigation said his death could have been an accident, or could have been murder. Apparently suicide has been ruled out. Back to you, Chip."

The picture turned into gray lint right after that.

I didn't dare to look at Tolliver. I didn't want to look at Seth Koenig, either. He stepped forward to turn off the machine, and then he faced me. "What do you make of that, Miss Connelly?"

"I think it's very strange, Agent Koenig."

"Please call me Seth." He waited a beat to see if I'd return the courtesy, but I didn't. I wondered what to do now. I wanted the agent to leave with a fervent desperation, because I needed to discuss this very puzzling development with Tolliver.

"The groundskeeper noticed a car in the parking lot," Seth Koenig said. He waited for us to respond.

"That's what the reporter said," Tolliver said. He sounded as cool as ice. I envied my brother his composure and wished I could match it.

Of course, there'd been no other car there when we'd parked in the parking lot. Dr. Nunley hadn't committed suicide, and he hadn't died by accident. He'd been murdered. We knew it without a doubt.

"There were rocks in the grave," Seth Koenig said.

I did look up then, and met his eyes. "What kind of rocks?" I said.

"Big ones. They'd been aimed at his head."

"But…" My voice trailed off as I thought that through. Granted, we hadn't had sunlight or much time or inclination to examine the inside of the grave. But I was sure the "big rocks" hadn't been there. This might be a clumsy attempt to make the death look accidental; the scenario would be that Dr. Nunley somehow slipped and fell into the open grave, hitting his head on the rocks that lay in the bottom. The killer wanted the police to think it was such an accident; or in an alternative version, that Dr. Nunley had indeed been murdered, but there at the site, by someone who got him to climb down into the grave and then pelted him with large rocks until he expired. Oh, that sounded likely.

Seth Koenig sat on the coffee table in front of me. His eyes met mine. His were a peaty brown, warm with a golden undertone. His whole face was craggy and lined and attractive, and right at the moment, he was concentrated on me.

"I don't know what kind of person you are," he said. "But I know you have a gift. Right now, I want you to use that gift. I want you to go see Clyde Nunley's body in the morgue, and I want you to tell me what happened to him. Something tells me you'll let me know."

Now here was a poser. What could I say?

"Why are you here?" Tolliver said. He stood behind me, leaning over so his elbows were resting on the back of the couch right by my head. "What is your involvement with this case? I know the FBI is no longer actively involved. But you're offering your lab facilities to the police, right?"

"Right," Koenig said. His eyes had turned their high-beam stare on Tolliver, which was a relief to me. "But I'm also here to lend whatever help and support they need, and I'm staying until…"He couldn't finish the sentence.

"You were called in at the beginning," I said, making my voice gentle. "You were in Nashville."

He took a deep breath. "Yes, I was. Our paths never crossed there, but I was sent there when Tabitha was first missing. I talked to the mother, the father, the brother, the aunt, the uncle, the grandparents. I talked to the crossing guard who'd admonished Tabitha about jaywalking, I talked to the teacher who'd threatened to send a note to her parents about Tabitha's talking in class, and I talked to the lawn man who'd told her dad that Tabitha was going to grow up to be real pretty." He took a deep breath. "I went with the police to talk to the moms who drove in the car pool with Diane, I talked to Victor and his friends, I talked to Victor's ex-girlfriend who'd sworn she was going to get even with him, and I talked to the maid who said Tabitha hated to pick up her room." He sat silent for a long moment. "I never learned a thing from any of them. I never discovered a single reason anyone would want the girl out of the way. She wasn't perfect. Even people who loved her had a problem with her every now and then. So, Tabitha wasn't all sweetness and light. No kid is, especially no kid in that in-between age. But as far as I can tell, her mom and dad loved her no matter what she did or said. As far as I can tell, they were trying hard to be good parents. As far as I can tell, they didn't deserve what happened to them because of Tabitha's disappearance."

"Why Tabitha? Why are you so wrapped up in this? You must have investigated other disappearances," I said. "Some of them children, I'm sure."

He rubbed his face with both hands, hard, like he wanted to erase some of the lines in his flesh. "Lots of sevens," he said. "Too many."

Tolliver and I glanced at each other. Tolliver didn't understand the reference, either.

"Sevens?" I tried to keep my voice very quiet. This man was going through a lot, and I didn't want to sway his balance.

"Kidnapping. That's the program designation for kidnapping," Koenig said.

"There was never a ransom demand for Tabitha," Tolliver said. He was leaning forward, his elbows on his knees. "The FBI can come in even when there's no crossing of state lines? When there's no ransom demand?"

The agent nodded.

"Any suspicious disappearance of a child under eleven," he said. "We've offered all our facilities to the Nashville police and the Memphis police. We've got forensic experts examining the body. Our guys already went over the grave. Thank God whoever killed Nunley didn't dump him there before our team had finished. And the same team has been all over the grave this morning since the body was found."

I shut my eyes and leaned back in my chair.

"Of course, Nunley was here last night grabbing you by the arm, Ms. Connelly. But we know he left after that. He wouldn't let the hotel staff call him a cab. They saw him get in his car and leave. Did he contact you again last night?"

"No," I said. "He didn't."

"Why was he so angry?"

"He thought I'd cheated somehow. He was having trouble accepting my ability as real. He was trying to find a rational explanation for something that's just unexplainable." I wondered if I needed to call Art Barfield.

Seth Koenig looked thoughtful, as if he was making a very large mental note.

"And where were you, Mr. Lang?" Koenig asked.

"I was walking down Beale Street, trying to find some good blues to listen to. Doing a tourist thing."

"What time did you get back to the hotel?"

"About seven, I think. Harper had been asleep."

"I was upset after the little scene with Dr. Nunley," I explained. "I had a terrible headache. I took some medicine and lay down."

"Did anyone see you here during that time?"

"I didn't have room service, and no one called." Dammit.

"And you, Mr. Lang?"

"It's possible someone will remember me in some of the places I stopped in on Beale." Tolliver listed the places he'd visited, and told Agent Koenig he'd had a beer at one bar. "It's also possible no one will recall me. The street wasn't crammed with people, but it was busy enough."

"And you were on foot?"

"Yes, we took a cab to the movies."

"You saw what movie?"

We went all through our afternoon, including our meeting with Xylda Bernardo and her grandson Manfred.

"I've met Ms. Bernardo," Koenig said, a slight smile on his lips. It was the first time I'd seen him smile, and it looked good on him.

He stayed another hour, taking us over the afternoon and evening over and over. Just when I was beginning to think we were home free, Koenig said, "And now we come to an interesting point. Who was the man in the lobby with you last night, the man who sent Dr. Nunley on his way?"

I'd wondered when he was going to get around to Rick Goldman. "His name is Rick Goldman. He's a private detective, he told me," I said carefully. "He was in the class at the cemetery, so he was there two mornings ago. According to him, he signed up for Occult Studies because the—well, a faction of the governing board, whatever it's called—was a little uneasy about Dr. Nunley's class. According to him, they'd asked him to take the courses, observe what happened, and report back to them."

"You got his card?"

"We aren't on those terms."

Koenig snorted. He'd taken a couple of notes. Now he put his little notebook back into his pocket. I was a bit surprised that he didn't use something higher-tech, like a BlackBerry.

"One more question," he said, wanting me to relax so he could spring something on me. I refused to take his unspoken invitation to breathe easier. "When you two went out last night, why'd you return to the St. Margaret's cemetery?"

ten

I'D been waiting, like a cartoon character with a piano hoisted over its head, for the big collapse of the conversation, and here it was.

Tolliver and I glanced at each other. We had a choice to make. Did Koenig know we'd been there because he had solid evidence of our presence? Was this sheer conjecture, a stab in the dark to see if he hit a nerve? Or did he only know we'd taken our car out?

Tolliver tilted his head slightly. Up to you, he was saying.

"We went for a long drive. We had cabin fever," I said. "We just looked at Memphis. We've never been here before. But we avoided anywhere we might be recognized. We don't want any more media attention. We want to be out of here, and out of the public eye."

"You're one of the few people I could hear say those words without wanting to laugh in their face," Koenig said. He passed a hand over his crisp dark hair. "And I can't impress on you how lucky you are that it's me investigating this case, instead of…"

"One of your colleagues who wouldn't believe I can do what I can do?" I said.

His mouth snapped shut. After a second, he nodded.

"No one knows, right? Where you work? That you're a believer."

He nodded again.

"How long have you realized there's more to this world?"

"My grandmother could see spirits," he said.

"You have a big advantage over people whose minds are closed," Tolliver said.

"Most days I don't think so," the agent admitted. "Most days, I'd be happy to be like the other people I work with. Then I could just dismiss you people, all of you. But I believe you have exceptional abilities. That being said, I don't think you're telling me the truth. In fact, I think you're lying." Koenig looked at us with a kind of profound disappointment. I almost felt guilty.

"We didn't kill him," I said. That was the important truth. "We don't know who killed him, or why."

"Do you think the Morgensterns killed Clyde Nunley? Do you think they killed their daughter?"

"I don't know," I said. "I hope to God they didn't." I hadn't realized how much I hoped that the Morgensterns were innocent of their daughter's death. And if they hadn't killed Tabitha, I couldn't imagine why they would kill Clyde Nunley. I was assuming that the same person or persons had killed both victims.

That assumption might not be true. "Tolliver and I have been invited to their home for lunch today," I said, just to change the subject. "We'll see more of the family then, I guess."

"Do you want to see what you can get from the body?" Koenig asked as casually as if I'd been a fiber expert or a pathologist. "That is, if I can arrange it."

This was kind of exciting, being taken seriously by a law enforcement professional.

"I'll do Nunley if you let me do Tabitha," I said.

He looked genuinely surprised. "But you've already, uh, 'done' Tabitha."

I didn't really want to review Nunley. Been there, done that. I'd do it, though, if I could have another chance at the little girl. "That day, I was so upset and shocked when I realized there really were two sets of bones in the grave. Maybe I could get more."

"It may take some time, but I'll see what I can do," Koenig said. I couldn't help but notice his eyes flicked over my bare legs again. Well, he was a male, after all. I didn't think Koenig was particularly interested in the person who used those legs.

"It drains her to touch a body," Tolliver said, trying to force Agent Koenig to acknowledge that I was making a generous offer.

"Interesting," he said, and that was his only comment. "Let me know when you return from the Morgensterns' house, would you? Maybe you'll pick up some impressions from someone there."

"Hey, once again, not psychic. The only time I get impressions is when I touch a corpse, and I'm not planning on there being any at the Morgensterns' house. In fact, I'd just as soon this case get solved so quickly I wouldn't have to locate another body until we travel to our next job."

"Assuming you get to," Koenig said pleasantly.

There was a significant pause, while Tolliver and I absorbed the threat.

"If push comes to shove, we once did a favor for the governor, " I said, very quietly. I was very willing to shove.

I loved the expression on Koenig's face. I'd really surprised him, and that was a true pleasure. Childish, I know, but I never said I was adult all the way through. I don't ever reveal who my clients have been, but in this case, I felt that I had to take a stand.

"You mean you can call the governor of this state, maybe get him to come down on me or on the Memphis police, let you leave Memphis?"

I didn't say anything. I let what I'd said reverberate a bit.

"That's an unexpected threat," Koenig said. His face had gotten colder and harder. "Of course, any threat from you two is unexpected. I kind of think you won't be ringing that bell."

We looked at each other. "You'd be surprised what we'll do," I said. Tolliver nodded.

Koenig gave us his best tough-guy stare.

"Whose car was it?" Tolliver asked.

It took Koenig a second to change mental gears.

"Whose car? You mean, the car left at St. Margaret's?"

Tolliver nodded.

"Why should I tell you?"

"After all we've shared, and you're not going to let us know?" My tone may have been a wee bit mocking.

"I think we can take it that the car was Dr. Nunley's own vehicle," Tolliver said. "Just a guess on my part."

"Yeah," Koenig admitted. "It was Nunley's car. It wasn't there at nine last night, but it was there early this morning."

We tried not to look too startled. We'd been there earlier; the body had been in the grave, but the car hadn't been there, for sure.

"How do you know that?" I asked, and was proud that I sounded so unconcerned.

"The campus police take a turn back there every night about nine, and no one was parked in the St. Margaret's parking lot. Since they're campus cops, they just cruise through the lot. They don't even get out of the car, much less check the inside of every grave. The strange thing is, Nunley was probably in the open grave already. The time of death was way earlier than that. He couldn't have died after nine. The body temperature indicates he was dead by seven at the latest, and the stomach contents tend to bear that out. Of course, the lab results aren't back, and there's a lot more to be learned from the body."

Tolliver and I exchanged a glance. It took all my self-control to keep from covering my eyes with my hand. We hadn't known how lucky we were. If the campus police had caught us there with the corpse, no way in hell would anyone have believed we were innocent.

"So, Agent Koenig, why do you think the killer drove the car away and brought it back?" I asked. "Let me put on my thinking cap." I held a finger to my cheek in a parody of concentration.

Actually, I already had a pretty good idea. Or rather, three ideas. One, the killer wanted to get the car cleaned to erase any forensic traces. Two, the killer had to fetch something and take it back to the cemetery to complete the picture he was trying to paint. Three, the killer heard us coming and wanted to get the car out of there while we were approaching, so we wouldn't see who was driving.

Seth Koenig looked from me to Tolliver with a stony face, not amused in the least. He said. "That man is dead. If you can't take that seriously, you're just not human."

"Playing the not-human card," I said to Tolliver.

"As if we hadn't heard that one before," he said.

"I know what you're doing," the agent said. "And you're good at it, I'll give you that. Were the rocks in the grave when you saw the body?"

"We didn't see the body," I said flatly.

"They were big rocks. Big enough to crack a skull," Koenig said. "I think that's why the killer had to come and go. He had to go get a couple of big rocks. He threw them down in the grave so they'd land on Nunley's head—might have taken a couple of tries. The killer wanted the scene to look as though Nunley might have tripped and fallen into the open grave. But we're pretty sure that just didn't happen. Dr. Nunley was almost certainly murdered."

"Dum-dum-dum," I said.

"I know you're not laughing inside about this," Koenig said. "I know you want me to leave so you can talk about it. I'm letting you know I'm available for further conversation. And if you remember anything, you're smart enough to realize we need to know about it." He rose, in an easy motion that made me envious.

"We understand," Tolliver said, getting up at the same time. He stood between Koenig and me. "We'll be talking to you." He hesitated. "I appreciate that you're doing your best with this case. It's bothered Harper a lot, too." He looked back at me, and I nodded. Though we were ready, past ready, for Koenig to leave, this had been a much more amicable interview than we usually had with anyone who carried a badge.

When the door shut behind Koenig, Tolliver didn't move for a long moment. Then he turned to me with raised brows.

"That was different," I agreed.

"The bad thing about him being halfway nice is that I almost don't like lying to him," my brother said. "The good thing is, he gave us a lot of useful information." His face darkened. "Like the time of death."

I nodded. "That's pretty scary, huh? That we got there at just the right moment not to run into the murderer?"

"I wonder if we were that lucky. I wonder if the murderer wasn't parked somewhere, watching us—to see if we'd find the body and call the cops. If we didn't, he'd know he needed to do something different, because there'd be no point in bringing the car back if there'd be a police officer standing there saying, 'And what are you doing in the deceased's automobile?'"

I shivered, picturing someone lurking in the dark coldness of the old graveyard, someone watching and waiting to see what we made of our discovery. I'm no good at detecting the presence of living people. But the awful image faded after a moment. That didn't hang together.

"No, no one was there," I said. "Because someone did bring the rocks—thought it was of use to try to cover up the murder. So it stands to reason that the killer didn't know we'd found the body in the meantime, that we could testify that there wasn't anything in the grave but the corpse when we saw it."

Tolliver thought that over, nodded. It made sense. "Assuming we tell anyone. Assuming people believe us," he muttered.

"Yes, always assuming that." I stood and stretched. Because of my bad leg, I couldn't stand as smoothly as the FBI agent, who was way older. I tried not to resent that. I moved carefully, loosening the muscles. "And we just missed the campus cop patrol. We thought it was so deserted out there! They should put in a traffic light." There was a lot more thinking to do about what Seth Koenig had told us, but we had a social engagement I was dreading. "I'm going to get ready for the lunch. I guess we have to go."

Tolliver blew out a deep breath. He was as reluctant as I was, and he had the added complication of Felicia Hart's probable presence. "I think the Morgensterns feel guilty because we can't leave Memphis," he said. "They feel kind of like they're our host and hostess."

"But their daughter is dead, and they should be free to think about that, concentrate on that."

"Harper, maybe they don't want to. Maybe we're a welcome distraction."

I shrugged. "Then at least we're serving some useful purpose." But I couldn't even feel good about that. "I think this is a bad idea."

"I'm not exactly looking forward to it myself. But we have to do it."

I held up my hand, because his tone was definitely on the testy side. "I get that. And I'll stop sulking in a minute. Okay, you shower. I'll get dressed." I glanced at my watch. "We've got an hour and a half. Do we have directions?"

"Yeah, I got them over the phone from Joel. I'm sure Felicia is going to be there." He gave me a stern look. "Do I have to ask you to be nice?"

"Of course I will be." I gave him just enough of a smile to make him anxious. We didn't talk much during the long drive across the city. I drove, Tolliver navigated.

The Memphis home of the Morgenstern family was not unlike their Nashville home, though it was located in a somewhat more modest neighborhood. Diane and Joel liked upscale suburbs, not old city neighborhoods. They liked the kind of place where the trees are only partially grown and the lawns were rolled out in strips, where people jog in the early morning and the late evening and there are always service trucks circling the houses like remoras seeking sustenance from sharks.

The Morgenstern house was pale brick with dark red shutters and doors, a yard that would be beautiful in the spring, and a curving doublewide driveway that already contained a few shining cars, including a pearly Lexus, a dark red Buick, a green Navigator, and a candy-apple red Mustang. We parked and got out. I don't know about Tolliver, but I felt I was on alien ground. There were Thanksgiving decorations out at some of the homes, and Diane had put a couple of hay bales in the front yard, topping them with pumpkins and squash and cornstalks and other fall paraphernalia.

Maybe, when we have a house, I'll do the same thing, I thought, and knew right away that was total bullshit. I'd just been trying to tell myself I could live in as nice a place as the Morgensterns and not feel strange and out of place.

Tolliver smiled at me over the top of the car. "You ready?" he asked. "You look great today, you know."

I was wearing a rust-colored long-sleeved sweater over dark brown corduroys and leather high-heeled boots. I had a dark brown suede jacket on. At the last minute, I'd thought about jewelry and added a plain gold chain. I seldom wear jewelry, but this had seemed a good time to add a little gleam. Tolliver had stretched himself to wear a button-up shirt and khakis. I wondered if he had dressed for Felicia Hart's benefit. He said he didn't want her attentions, didn't understand her… but I wondered.

I went up the sidewalk, picking up my feet with an effort. I felt more like dragging them. As I rang the doorbell, I noticed a sort of decorated plaque hanging by the right side of the door, brass and turquoise and shiny stones combined in a really interesting way, with etched symbols of doves and Stars of David. I thought it looked as though it was a door, and the depth of the case indicated there might be something inside. I raised my eyebrows at Tolliver, who shrugged. He didn't know what it was, either.

Diane answered the door. She wasn't looking good; I guess that was to be expected. Her pregnancy was laying into her hard, giving her large rings under her eyes, and she'd lost all grace, moving heavily and with ponderous deliberation. But she'd fixed a hostess smile on her face, and she said she was happy we'd come. Joel came next, and shook our hands. He looked in my eyes and told me how glad he was to see me.

Even a non-Joel fan like myself could feel a twinge. And yet, I didn't think there was anything behind his personalization of a commonplace greeting; I didn't imagine he wanted to have an affair with me. It was just his way.

"We're in the family room," Diane said, her voice limp. "It's been the nicest quiet morning, with the telephones turned off and the computers shut down. No one's even watched the television." Her face crumpled for a moment, then came back with a pleasant social smile. "Come say hello to everyone."

"Everyone" turned out to be Felicia and her father, Joel's parents, Victor, and Joel's brother, David. Also on hand were a couple of friends of Diane's from Nashville, who'd driven over for the day. The two women were named Samantha and Esther; they were about Diane's age and extremely well groomed, which made me feel sorry for Diane. There was a little conversation going on, of the low-level and subdued variety. Joel waved a hand to gather everyone's attention.

"For those of you who don't know her yet, this is the woman who found Tabitha," Joel said, and the faces all went absolutely blank.

This was a very strange reaction, one I hadn't foreseen. I'd never been announced like this. The introduction was odd enough; especially considering the dad of the murder victim was doing the introducing. And it was like I'd done them a great and grand favor, instead of being paid for a service that (as far as I was concerned) had borne fruit months too late. Naturally, when I'd worked for them in Nashville, the Morgensterns had paid me for my time. I had a sudden notion: maybe I should turn down the reward money, or donate it to charity, since I'd taken their money before and not given them back the location of their daughter. I put that away to mull over later, but my initial reaction was "Hell, no." I never promised anyone I'd find anything; only that if I did, my COD (cause of death) would be accurate. I'd spent days of my time and lots of my energy searching for Tabitha; she just hadn't been there to be found.

I realized another thing as I stood there in the unwanted spotlight. No one in this house knew about the body in the grave in St. Margaret's cemetery; the newest body, that is. They'd been incommunicado all morning, by Diane's own testimony. I opened my mouth to share the news, and then I shut it. They would find out soon enough. I glanced at Tolliver , and he nodded. He'd arrived at the same point.

The older Morgensterns, who were only in their mid-fifties, rose to their feet and slowly made their way to me. Mrs. Morgenstern was the one needing the help; she had Parkinson's, I could see. Mr. Morgenstern looked as strong as his sons, and his handshake was firm. In fact, if he'd been single and he'd asked me out, I'd have thought about accepting, because Mr. Morgenstern was as good-looking as his sons, too. "We're so grateful that we can finally take care of Tabitha," Mrs. Morgenstern said. "You've performed a great service for our family. Now that they've learned for sure about their girl, maybe Diane and Joel can welcome the little one to come with a clear mind. My name's Judy, and my husband's name is Ben."

"This is my brother Tolliver," I said, in turn, having shaken hands with the couple.

"This is Felicia's dad, Victor's grandfather, Fred Hart," Ben said. Fred Hart didn't look as hale and hearty as Ben Morgenstern, but again, for a man in his fifties, he looked good: a bit thick around the waist and gray on top, but still a man you'd reckon with. He had a drink in his hand. I was pretty sure it wasn't soda or tea.

"Good to meet you, Fred," I said, and he shook my hand without comment. Fred Hart's square face was set in an expression I thought must be habitual. He was serious and grim, and his mouth was a compressed flat line that seldom curved in a smile. Of course, he'd lost his daughter to cancer, and he had probably gone through another emotional wringer when his step-granddaughter had been taken. He took another sip from the glass in his hand, and his gaze returned to his living daughter. Maybe he thought she would vanish, too.

The three grandparents were standing in front of built-in shelves that were clogged with framed family pictures and other memorabilia.

"Look, they still have Tabitha's menorah up," Judy said, pointing to a candlestick. I did recognize that particular symbol of Judaism. There was another menorah right by Tabitha's, but it was radically different in concept.

"Each kid has their own?" I guessed.

"Some families do that," Judy said in her gentle voice. She pointed with a trembling hand. "There's Victor's. Of course, his had to be different." She gave me a conspiratorial smile that said all teenagers were difficult. Victor's menorah was like a little stage or shelf with the eight small candles on it, behind it a little backdrop, a mirror topped with an elaborately worked brass header. If both menorahs hadn't been designed to hold candles, I wouldn't have recognized them as the same religious object.

Fred Hart reached out to point at a picture. His finger was shaking. "My daughter," he said, and I obediently looked at the snapshot, which was a happy one. A very attractive woman with short auburn hair and big brown eyes had been photographed sitting on a white-painted wrought iron chair in a garden at the height of its beauty, probably in May, I thought. She was holding a baby on her lap that must be Victor, a little boy in a sailor suit. His hair was fiery, too—not too surprising, with both parents being red-headed—and he was grinning at the camera. I figured he was about two years old, though I'm not good at pegging baby ages. Mr. Hart touched the frame of the photo with a kind of stern tenderness, and then he silently turned away to stand at the window, looking out.

Judy and Ben took me over to meet their other son, Joel's brother, David, a slighter, less magnetic version of his brother. I'd seen David in pictures, but the man in the flesh made little impression. David had the same reddish coloring and blue eyes as Joel, but he was built along sleeker lines and his eyes didn't have the draw of Joel's. David Morgenstern didn't seem particularly glad to meet me. From the distant way he touched my hand instead of actually shaking it, I gathered that he couldn't fathom why Tolliver and I should be invited guests in his brother's home.

I was kind of wondering the same thing, so I didn't blame him for his coolness. Oddly enough, on our previous job we'd also been invited to the client's home for a lunch. But that was hardly the normal procedure. Normally, we were in and out of the town as quickly as we could manage. I didn't like this social fraternizing with clients; it seemed to lead to deeper involvement in their problems, and that meant trouble. I promised myself on the spot that I wouldn't do it again.

Though Fred Hart remained aloof from the little crowd, the older Morgensterns had decided I was in their charge. Since Ben and Judy were persistently dragging me (and Tolliver, too) around the room from guest to guest, there was no way I could dodge the next person on the route.

"This is our son Joel's former sister-in-law, Felicia Hart," Judy said, and her voice had taken on a distinctly cool tone. "Fred's daughter."

"Joel's first wife, Whitney, was just a dear," Ben said, which was one way of saying Whitney's sister was not. There was definitely some bad blood there. I wondered what could have happened to make the older Morgensterns dislike Felicia so heartily.

I said, "We know Felicia," at the same moment Felicia said, "Of course, I saw Tolliver and Harper the other day at their hotel," and shook hands with us both with perfect aplomb. But her eyes weren't as neutral as her manner. I hadn't expected her to care about seeing me today, but I had expected her to have a strong reaction when she saw Tolliver. I'd expected that it would be a pleasurable reaction.

I'd have to classify it more as smoldering, or maybe volcanic.

Not "take me in your arms and let's jump into the volcano of love," but more "let me push you into the molten lava."

I began a slow burn. What was up with her? Maybe she imagined Tolliver would refer to their past relationship in front of her father, or maybe, like David, she didn't think we belonged at a family gathering (though surely she didn't have that much claim on Joel's present family). If that was the case, shame on her. If Tolliver was good enough to be her bed partner, he was good enough to break bread with her nearest and dearest. But just as I was tensing up and looking for a moment to say something barbed, Tolliver squeezed my hand. I relaxed. He was sending me a clear message that Felicia was his problem.

After I'd chatted for a brief moment with Diane's friends Esther and Samantha, I tried to find a spot to hole up. Not only were the emotional crosscurrents a little draining, but my leg was hurting. It tingled and felt weak, as though it might decide to give way on a whim.

I found an empty chair right by that of another person who seemed to be feeling like an outsider: Victor, Joel's son by his first marriage. The boy the young man was hunched in a chair in a corner, defiantly apart from the rest, and he eyed me with apprehension as I walked over and sank down in the soft chair beside his. Victor gave me a brief look of acknowledgement, then fixed his gaze on his hands.

I was sure that Victor, like me, was remembering our encounter in another living room, in Nashville, and how he'd lost all his restraint and wept on my shoulder. It had made me feel good, actually, to be trusted like that.

For all I knew, Victor was recalling his breakdown with profound regret.

What I could be sure of was that Victor thought this gathering sucked. He was trying to get as far away from the grown-ups as he could. He'd had good manners ingrained in his character, and he'd gotten taller and more mature in the past few months—but he was still a teenager; a teenager who would far rather be out with his buds than hanging around with his family on this dismal occasion.

I didn't blame Victor for that, either.

So the room was full of people who didn't particularly want us there; some of them were pretending to be pleased, some of them weren't. Even our host and hostess were acting sheerly out of an imagined obligation.

I could see their point of view. I could even share it. Yet here we were, with no graceful way to get out of this uncomfortable situation. The only exit laid through a blatantly transparent excuse, such as a sudden illness, a phone call summoning us elsewhere, or something equally lame. I couldn't think of how to arrange such a thing without causing even more unhappiness.

In silence, Victor and I watched Samantha carry a glass of iced tea to Joel, watched him accept it with a pleasant nod, watched the woman's eyes as she stood by him hoping for another crumb of his attention.

Victor looked at me and snorted. "My dad, the babe magnet," he said derisively, including me in his age bracket so it would be okay to talk to me. Victor didn't sound envious, which I thought would be the case with most teenage boys. He sounded like the babes were the objects of his scorn, right along with his father. Now that he'd overcome his reluctance to speak, he seemed to feel we'd renewed our bond. He leaned closer. Victor said, "You're not Jewish, are you?"

"No," I said. That was easy.

"Victor, honey!" Judy Morgenstern called. "Go out to the Buick and get my cane, please." The boy looked at me intently. I wondered if there was something specific he wanted to say to me. He gave me a dark glance as he heaved himself up out of his chair and strode off to fetch the cane. I thought I might have a little recovery time, but no. To my surprise, Felicia took his place. I have to admit, I was curious. Not only did I wonder what she wanted to talk about, after her chilly greeting earlier, but also I wanted to discover why Tolliver had ever been attracted to this woman.

At the moment, my brother was talking to David, and he shot me a questioning glance, a little on the concerned side, when Felicia seated herself beside me. But he was too far away to hear our conversation, so I could say what I liked.

"You live here in Memphis, also?" I asked politely. I rubbed my right leg, which was aching, then forced my hand to be still.

"Yes, I have a condo in midtown," she said. "Of course, you have to have security there. My dad had a cow when I bought in the Towers. 'It's midtown, you're going to get attacked and mugged!' " She smiled at me in a conspiratorial way, as if the concern of one's parent was a silly thing. "The parking garage is completely enclosed; you can only get in if you have a sticker. And there's no pedestrian walk-in; entrance only through the building. There's a guard at the car exit, twenty-four/seven. It's expensive, but I couldn't live with my father anymore. Way past the age to move away." Her dad had a fresh drink in his hands; I'd watched him disappear into the kitchen and return with it. He resumed staring out the window. Felicia followed my gaze and flushed.

"You're very security conscious," I said, to deflect the moment.

"You have to be, when you're by yourself," she said. "Joel is always trying to get me to move out to east Memphis somewhere." She shook her head with a smile, inviting me to share her amusement with Joel's concern. The implication was that she and Joel were close; I got that. "And my dad would like me to move back with him. He lives in this huge house, all alone." Again, message received; her background was stuffed with money. "But as this family's situation proves, you can be in much more danger in the suburbs than you have to be in midtown, if you take precautions."

"Of course, they were in Nashville then," I said.

"Same difference. Everyone feels too safe in the suburbs. They take security for granted."

Diane, Samantha, and Esther left the room, and I figured they were heading to the kitchen for food preparation. I wondered if I should volunteer, but I decided they'd be much more comfortable with each other if I wasn't there. I turned back to Felicia.

"I'm sure they don't take security for granted anymore," I said, very quietly, and a shadow crossed Felicia's narrow, elegant face.

"No, not anymore. I'm afraid they'll always be looking over their shoulders, with this baby that's coming. Victor is old enough to take care of himself, at least to some extent. Vic is a typical teenager." She shook her head, smiling. Typical teenagers, evidently, were stupid. "They think they're immortal."

"Victor, of all teenagers, should know that's not true."

Felicia looked abashed. But she plowed ahead with the conversation. "It's strange; Victor's physically healthy as a horse, like I am. His mom—my sister, Whitney—she was the sickly one in our family. Whitney had all these allergies when we were kids. My parents would have to sit up with her all night, she'd be wheezing and coughing." Felicia's face looked grim. I wondered what kind of nurturing Felicia had gotten while Whitney's heath crises were front and center in the Hart household. "She got pneumonia when we were in junior high, and mono, and tonsillitis, and when she was in college she had a ruptured appendix, after she'd started dating Joel. I've never been in a hospital." She looked over at her former brother-in-law. "You should have seen the care Joel took of her. He'd hardly let anyone else in the room during the final stages of her last illness. He wanted her all to himself. Second in hovering was my dad." She looked across the room at Fred Hart, who'd suddenly decided to talk to Joel. I didn't know what the conversation covered, but Joel was looking politely bored.

"I guess Victor was too young to visit the hospital much."

"Yeah, we didn't want him to remember Whitney like she looked toward the end. I stayed at their house and took care of Victor. He was so little, so cute."

"He's a handsome young man," I said politely.

"I still keep an eye on him for my sister's sake. It's been great, having them here in Memphis. Victor stays with me sometimes if things get too tense at home."

She was dying for me to ask her why things would be tense at home. Surely, the abduction and disappearance of a little girl was reason enough? "He's lucky to have such a conscientious aunt," I said, selecting the least weighted of responses. "I saw your brother a couple of times," Felicia said suddenly, as though tossing a pebble into a pool to see what happened.

"That's what he told me," I told her in a completely neutral voice.

She seemed stymied when I didn't continue. After a pause, Felicia said, "I think he took it a bit hard when the distances between us made me think we'd be better off apart."

I had no response to that, but I was angry, you can bet on it. This was totally not the story Tolliver had told me. So, of course, she was lying.

"It must be difficult to find someone to date, when you're at that in-between age," I said.

Her eyes narrowed.

"I mean," I continued, "men are either married, or they're on their first divorce, and they may have kids and all kinds of entanglements."

"I haven't found that a problem," she said through clenched teeth. "But I suppose since you travel all the time, it's very hard to meet eligible men."

Oh, ouch—not. If she thought it would bother me to be reminded that I was always in Tolliver's company, she was wrong. Besides, why should I cross swords with this woman? Tolliver was an adult, and he could handle her mixed signals, all on his own.

"Do you know Clyde Nunley?" I said, looking anywhere but at her face.

"Well, we went to Bingham together," she said, which gave me a jolt. I'd been so sure she'd say she'd never met him. "He's a couple of years older, but we know each other. Clyde and David are actually fraternity brothers."

She nodded at David. He looked questioning, and when she smiled at him, he came over, though a bit reluctantly. David Morgenstern would not want to be president of my fan club. But he shook my hand civilly, and when Felicia said, "Harper was asking about Clyde Nunley."

David rolled his eyes. "What an asshole," he said. "He was a wild guy in college, lots of fun, but he decided he was the establishment as soon as he became a professor. Smarter than mere mortals, cooler than dry ice. I don't see him socially, but I do catch a glimpse of him at alumni meetings."

Not any more.

"Look, Diane wants us to come into the dining room," Felicia said, and I rose to follow the others. David excused himself and went down the hall to a door I assumed was a bathroom's. Tolliver was having a serious talk with the older Morgensterns, but from the few words I caught, he was talking about the Memphis city government. I thought they looked a little relieved, maybe glad not to have to be talking about Tabitha, just for a few minutes. I trailed in the direction Felicia indicated. We were both glad to have an end to our tête-à-tête, I think. I didn't know what Felicia had thought she needed to convey to me, but I'd missed it. "Why'd you ask about Clyde?" Felicia asked suddenly.

"He came to our hotel last night, kind of irate," I said, after a moment.

She looked astonished. "What on earth about?" "I don't know," I said, not wanting to talk about it any longer.

Diane had simply made a buffet out of all the food the neighbors had brought over. She and her two Nashville friends had arranged the dishes on a long counter in the spotless kitchen. There was an eat-in area at one end of the room, and the gray winter sky loomed through the large windows around that table in an unpleasant way. There was also a breakfast bar with high stools forming a right angle to one end of the counter, and I'd passed through a formal dining room. This house was focused on eating.

Some of the dishes were hot, some were cold, and there were a lot of casseroles. Some of the flowers and plants the family had received were arranged in with the food and on the two dining tables, formal and informal. This attractive presentation was a talent of Diane's I hadn't expected. I wondered if her friends had done it all, and then chided myself for not giving her enough credit. I'd never seen the unstressed side of the woman.

While the guests were milling around, I eyed the room. The kitchen was simply beautiful, like something that could be photographed for a magazine. White cabinets, dark marble counters, a center island. Beautiful china stacked at the beginning of the spread, and shining silver. The sinks and appliances gleamed with stainless steel—not a fingerprint in sight. If the Morgensterns had a maid, she was invisible. Maybe Diane was the kind of woman who cleaned when she got upset.

At Diane's urging, Joel's parents went through the line first, with Diane herself holding Mrs. Morgenstern's plate while the older woman selected what she wanted to eat. Diane got them settled at the table in the formal dining room and told the rest of us to please go ahead. I lined up behind Felicia and David.

As I waited, I watched Fred Hart shake his head when Diane urged him to get in line. Felicia observed the encounter with a curiously blank face, as if she had no emotion left for her father. After a long moment, she went over to him and said something to him in a low voice. He flinched away from her and left the room. As I picked up a plate and silverware, I wondered if I should go out searching for a happy family. Maybe it was my line of work that threw me in the path of so many unhappy ones.

Esther attracted my attention with a little wave of her hand. It was my turn to begin serving myself, and I'd been standing immobile, holding up the line. I gave myself a mental shake.

Some generous soul had brought a thinly sliced roast, but I passed it by, and instead got some broccoli, a fruit casserole baked in some kind of curry sauce, a roll, and a cold three-bean salad. There was the dining table in the dining room, a set of barstools at the kitchen counter, an informal family table, or we could go back in the living room, Diane told us. I got my utensils (rolled up in a bright napkin) and sat at the kitchen counter, since I was spry enough to climb up onto the high stool. When I'd been settled there approximately ten seconds, Esther put a glass of tea by my plate, her bright toothy smile as ferocious as a shark's.

"Unsweetened," she said. "Okay?" Her voice hinted that it better be.

"Good, thanks," I said, and she swam away.

To my surprise, Victor sat beside me. I assumed he'd gotten his grandmother's cane and delivered it. His plate was invisible beneath a truly amazing array of food, very little of it involving vegetables, I noted. He had a can of Coke that he popped open with a defiant hiss.

"So, what you do, it's just weird, right?" was his opening conversational gambit.

"Yes, it is."

Maybe he'd meant to offend me. If so, my matter-of-fact reply took him off base. I was actually glad to get a dose of sincerity.

"So, you travel all the time?"

"Yeah."

"Cool."

"Sometimes. Sometimes I wish I had a nice house like this."

He glanced around him contemptuously. He could dismiss the value of a beautiful and cared-for home, since he'd never lacked it. "Yeah, it's okay. But no house is good when you're not happy."

An interesting and true observation—though in my experience, comfort never hurt whether you were depressed or whether you were cheerful.

"And you're not happy."

"Not much."

This was a pretty intense conversation to be having with someone I didn't know at all.

"Because of Tabitha's death?" Since we were being blunt.

"Yeah, and because no one here is happy."

"Now that she's been found and she can be buried, don't you think things will get better?"

He shook his head doubtfully. He was eating all the while we were having this incredibly doleful conversation. At least he shut his mouth when he chewed. Suddenly I realized I was closer in age to this boy than anyone else in the house, and I knew that was why he'd sought me out.

"Maybe," he said grudgingly. "But then we gotta get ready for the baby to come, and it'll cry all night. Tabitha did," he added, almost inaudibly.

"You really were fond of her," I said.

"Yeah, she was okay. She bugged me. But she was okay."

"The police gave you a hard time when she was taken."

"Oh, yeah. It was intense. They questioned me, Dad had to get me a lawyer." He was a little proud of that. "They couldn't get that I wouldn't have anywhere to put her. Why would I take her? Where would I take her? We fought, but even real brothers and sisters fight. You fight with your brother, right?"

"We grew up in the same house," I said, "but he's not really my brother. My mom married his dad." I was surprised at my own words. Sentences just kept coming out of my mouth.

"That would be freaking weird, living in the house with someone your own age you weren't even related to. Especially if you're not the same, you know, sex."

"It took some getting used to," I admitted. It hadn't taken long before Cameron and I and Mike and Tolliver had bonded against the common enemy. I took a deep breath. "Our parents used drugs," I said. "They used a lot of cocaine. Weed. Vicodin. Hydros. Whatever they could buy. They used alcohol to fill in the cracks. Did your parents ever have a problem like that?"

His mouth literally dropped open. Not as sophisticated as he'd thought himself, Victor. "Geez," he said. "That's awful. Kids use drugs, not parents."

If that wasn't the most naive thing I'd ever heard, it was pretty damn close. But it was kind of nice, too, that he still had illusions like that. I waited for a direct answer.

"No," he said, having gathered himself. "My folks would never. Never. Use drugs. I mean, they hardly even drink."

"That's good," I said. "I wish all parents were like that."

"Yeah, Dad and Mom are okay," he said, trying to sound tough and careless. But he'd been shaken. "I mean, you can't tell them stuff. They don't know anything. But they're there when you need them."

He even called Diane "Mom," and that reminded me how young Victor had been when Diane had married Joel.

"You've been around a lot," Victor said, running a hand through his auburn hair. "You've had a real life."

"I've had more than my share of real life," I said.

"But you would know…" His voice trailed off, just when the dialogue was turning in an interesting direction.

I didn't try to prod Victor to pick up the conversational thread. I'd covered all the bases I could with this kid, without getting into the realm of questions too strange to ask him. I hadn't initiated this conversation, but I'd learned a lot from it. I knew, as I watched Victor check out the dishes left on the kitchen counter that he hadn't yet sampled, that this boy had a secret. It might be a big secret, it might be a small one, but I needed to know it, too. I thought maybe he would come to me with it; though teenagers could spin on an emotional dime.

The kitchen had one of those little televisions mounted below the cabinet, presumably so the cook could watch Ellen or Oprah while she did her job. Though Diane had boasted that televisions were off and phones were off the hook, someone had turned this one on, maybe to catch the weather or some sports scores.

Though the sound was turned down in deference to the occasion, something caught Victor's attention, and he stood squarely in front of it, plate still in hand. The expression on his face grew startled, puzzled, alarmed, all at once.

It wasn't hard to figure out what he was seeing.

Well, we'd known the news would reach the Morgensterns sooner or later, and the moment was now.

"Dad!" said Victor, in a voice that brought his father to his side at a good pace. "Dad! They found that college guy dead, in Tabitha's grave!"

I sighed, and looked down at my plate. I hadn't thought of it quite that way. After all, it had been Josiah Pound-stone's for much longer. It was a much-used grave.

Quite a hubbub ensued, with the big television in the family room getting switched on, and everyone gathering in front, plates still in hand or discarded where the eater had been perching. I consulted Tolliver silently. He looked at the food regretfully, so I guess he hadn't filled up while he could. He nodded. We needed to be gone.

So as not to be hopelessly rude, we quietly thanked Diane, who hardly knew we were speaking to her. That done, we let ourselves out of the house. I wondered if they even realized we'd slipped out.

"If we go back to the hotel, someone'll want to come talk to us," Tolliver predicted gloomily.

"Let's go to the river."

I don't know why moving water is soothing, but it is, even on a cold day in November in Tennessee. We went to a riverfront park, and even though I was wearing my high-heeled boots, we enjoyed strolling through the nearly empty area. The Mississippi flowed silently past the Memphis bluffs, as it would do long after the city crumbled, I supposed—if the world didn't get destroyed altogether. Tolliver put his arm around me because it was so chilly, and we didn't talk.

It was good to be silent. It was good to be away from the crowd at the Morgenstern house, and alone with Tolliver. I discounted the two middle-aged homeless guys that passed a bottle back and forth when they didn't think we were looking. They were as happy avoiding us as we were avoiding them.

"That was a strange interlude," Tolliver said, his voice careful and precise.

"Yes. Pretty house. I loved the kitchen," I said.

"I had a talk with Fred. He's got an outstanding lease on the Lexus." Tolliver is jonesing for a new car. Ours is only three years old, but it does have a lot of miles on it. "Saw you talking to Felicia," he continued.

"Felicia brought up the fact she'd seen you socially," I said, which was the nicest way I could put it. "She seemed to think you all had had a conversation about not seeing each other."

"Interesting, since she keeps calling me," he said, after a moment. "I can't figure her out. No house in the burbs for us."

Though his voice was light and ironical, I realized he'd been at least taken aback. A woman he'd been to bed with, a woman who'd actively pursued him, had shown no desire to speak to him when she was with her family. Yeah, that would make anyone feel pretty bad, whether or not the relationship was desirable. My ill feeling against Felicia Hart began to congeal into something quite solid. I changed the subject.

"Victor has a secret," I said.

"Maybe he's got jerk-off magazines under his bed. Babes with big boobs."

"I don't think that's his secret. At least, not the secret that interests me."

We walked a moment in silence.

"I think he knows something about one of his family members, something he's trying not to connect to the murders."

"Okay, confused."

"He's a pretty innocent kid, all things considered," I said. I was trying hard not to sound overly patient. "And he's had some big blows in his life."

"Working hard not to draw parallels, here."

"Me, too. But the point is, I think Victor can connect some member of that family to…"

"What, exactly? His half sister's death? Clyde Nunley?"

"Okay, I don't know. Not exactly. I'm just saying, he knows something, and that's not healthy for him."

"So what can we do about it? They won't let him hang around with us. They won't believe us. And if he's not talking… besides, what if the subject of the secret is one of his parents?"

Another silence, this one a little huffy.

"Speaking of Joel," Tolliver said, "how come you're not panting like all the other women?"

"All the other women are panting?"

"Didn't you notice that the woman detective practically drooled whenever she said his name?"

"No," I said, quite surprised.

"Didn't you see the doe eyes his wife makes at him?"

"Ah… no."

"Even Felicia sits up and takes notice when he speaks. And his own mom looks at him about twice as much as she looks at her other son, David."

"So, I gather you've been watching Joel pretty closely," I said cautiously. Understatement.

"Not so much Joel himself, as the way people react to him. Except you."

"I see that he's a man that women like to be around," I said, by way of acknowledgment. "But he doesn't really do anything for me. The snapdragons, I knew those were his idea, and I did tell you then that he was the kind of man who noticed women, who knew how to please them. But I don't think he's really interested in anyone but Diane. I don't think he really understands his own magnetism, to tell you the truth. Or maybe he just accepts it as part of his world, like if he had green eyes or a great singing voice, or something."

"So, he's got charisma for women that he doesn't use," Tolliver said.

"More or less."

"And you're saying it doesn't affect you, like it does other women." Mr. Skeptical.

"I'm saying… yes, that's what I'm saying."

"If he weren't married to Diane, if he asked you out, you wouldn't jump at the chance?"

I gave that more thought than it deserved.

"I don't think so."

"You're impervious?"

"It's not that. It's that I don't trust men who don't have to work for what they get."

Tolliver stopped, and turned me to him with a hand on my arm. "That's ridiculous," he said. "You mean a man should have to work for the love of a woman?"

"Maybe," I said. "Maybe I'm saying that Joel has probably come to accept this automatic king position as the norm, as his due. Without working for it."

"You don't think he's a virtuous man?"

"I think he is. I don't think he's a crook, or a secret addict, or a cheater."

"So, your sole objection is that he doesn't have to work for love?"

"I'm saying, there's something wrong about getting so much invested in you without setting out to earn it."

Tolliver shrugged. "I'm still not sure I understand," he said.

I couldn't explain it any better. I'm not real good at explaining things, especially emotional things. But I knew what I meant. And I didn't entirely trust Joel Morgenstern.

eleven

WHEN we got back to the hotel, Rick Goldman was waiting for us, sitting in the same chair in the lobby he'd used before.

"I should've figured he'd show up, considering the scene last night," I told Tolliver. "I wonder if he's told the cops yet."

I introduced Rick to Tolliver as politely as if Rick had come to ask us to tea. But there was a muscle jumping in the private detective's jaw, and his whole body was tense.

"Can we have this talk somewhere a little more private?" he growled at me.

Tolliver said, "That would be best, I think. Come with us."

The ride up in the elevator was silent and ominous.

The maids had been in, and the room looked clean and welcoming, I was glad to see. There's something kind of seedy in having guests in your hotel room when the evidence of your stay is strewn all around you in disorderly heaps; room service cart, crumpled newspapers, discarded books, a shoe here and there. I'd been enjoying having a sitting room at this hotel, though I never forgot I was paying for it through the nose.

"You didn't have to kill Nunley," Rick Goldman said. "I know he was an obnoxious drunk, but he didn't hurt you." He switched his level gaze to Tolliver. "Or were you so angry he manhandled your sister that you tracked him down after I left?"

"I might just as well suspect you," I retorted, not a little pissed off. "You're the one laid hands on him. You can leave right now if you're going to sit there and accuse us of stuff without having the slightest bit of evidence that we ever saw the man again."

I took my jacket off and walked over to the door of my room, tossing it inside. Tolliver unbuttoned his more slowly. "I take it you've been to the police already with your little story about what happened in the lobby," he said.

"Of course," said Rick. "Clyde Nunley was an asshole, but he was a professor at Bingham. He had a family. He deserves to have his murder solved."

"I saw he was married, on the news," I said. "Though, come to think of it, he didn't wear a wedding ring."

"Lots of men don't," Rick said.

"Not in my experience," I said, surprised.

"He had a metal allergy," Rick said.

"You knew him a little better than I thought."

"I read his personnel file," the private detective admitted.

"I'm betting the weird content of Clyde Nunley's classes wasn't the only reason he was being investigated," Tolliver said. "I'm betting he had some affairs, maybe with a student or two? And the college decided they'd better check him out. Am I right?"

"There was a certain amount of talk on campus."

"His wife wasn't so amazed when he didn't come home at night," I said. "She didn't even call the police until the next morning." I sat on the couch and crossed my legs, lacing my fingers together in my lap. Tolliver was still hovering around the room, too restless to perch. Our guest had thrown himself down into one of the wing chairs without waiting for us to ask him to be seated.

"Rick, do you still have a lot of friends on the force?" Tolliver asked.

"Sure."

"So you won't mind when they ask the staff what they saw last night?"

"Of course not."

"Even when they tell your former colleagues that they watched you throw a guy out of the lobby, while my sister was absolutely passive?"

I made my eyes look all big and tearful. I look frail anyway, no matter how tough I actually can be.

"I wonder who they'll remember being violent and forceful, you or Harper?"

"Damn. And I was helping her out." Rick Goldman looked at us as if he could not believe people like us were walking the earth unjudged. "You people!"

"I did appreciate your helping me, right up until the time you insulted me," I said. "But Clyde Nunley was a pest, not a danger. Now he's dead, and I had nothing to do with it. We were just over at the Morgensterns', and they heard the news while we were there. Pretty upsetting."

"They asked you to their house?" This, again, got a big reaction.

I said, "Some people don't treat us as if we were frauds and murderers."

He threw up his hands, as if I'd stepped over a dearly held boundary. "I give up," he said.

A little drama on the part of the old Rickster.

"You two are no better than scam artists," he said. "It makes me crazy that I can't figure out how you do it. You were right on the money about those deaths, right on the money. How'd you get the documents ahead of time? I really want to know how you did it!"

There's no convincing someone who's not open to reason, or to anything else, for that matter.

"You're not going to believe I'm the real thing, anytime soon," I said. "There's no point in talking to you. Besides, the police will be coming, and I want to shower before they get here." That wasn't true. I'd already showered. I just wanted Rick Goldman to leave, right away.

twelve

MANFRED Bernardo called us from the lobby about three o'clock, asking if he could come up. I smiled when I imagined what the staff was making of Manfred, with his metallic face.

"I wonder what happens when he goes through airport security detectors?" I said to Tolliver. He'd been reading a Robert Crais mystery, one of the earlier ones featuring Elvis Cole, and he'd been smiling to himself from time to time.

"I don't think that's a problem Manfred confronts often," Tolliver said, but not as if he cared one way or another.

Manfred enjoyed touching people. When I answered the door, I observed that he was perhaps only an inch or two taller than I, but even as I was registering that, he leaned over to give me a kiss on the cheek.

I didn't give him one in return, because casual kissing's not my way. But I think I was smiling as I showed him into the room.

"Hello, Tolliver," he said, as Tolliver rose to shake his hand. Tolliver just goggled at Manfred for a second. Manfred was wearing all black again; this time he was encased in leather pants, a sheer black T-shirt, and a leather jacket. He was wearing heavy boots and a small fortune in silver on his hands, face, and neck. His platinum hair had been touched up, and his goatee matched. I wondered if all this was for my benefit, or if Manfred just loved looking remarkable for its own sake.

"Please, have a seat. I hope your grandmother's well?" I asked. I sat on the love seat, expecting Manfred to take the wing chair next to Tolliver's, but he sat down beside me.

"She's not doing real good," Manfred said. His smile faded, and I could see he was worried. "She's having bad dreams about people in graves they weren't supposed to be in."

"Have you been watching the news? I don't know how close you live to Memphis, but you get the Memphis news in the evening?"

"We don't watch television," Manfred said simply. "Grandma thinks it interferes with her brain waves. If I want to catch a program, I go over to a friend's."

"Then let us show you what an FBI agent brought us today," Tolliver suggested, and after he turned on the television, he ran the tape.

Manfred watched silently. He had taken hold of my hand, which was odd, but it didn't seem sexual. It seemed as if he was trying to connect with some emanation I was giving off. The Bernardo family must have some very interesting family reunions if they were all as sensitive as Xylda and Manfred.

"No, we're the only ones," Manfred said absently, still focused on the television. His many silver rings were just now warming to room temperature after his walk into the hotel.

My eyes widened for a moment, and Tolliver glanced at me as if to ask me what was wrong, but I shook my head. He looked at Manfred's hand on mine, and raised his eyebrows to ask if I was uncomfortable. I shook my head, letting him know it wasn't a problem.

After the tape had run, Manfred said, "The man in the grave was the man who asked you to come here to do the reading?"

"Yes," I said.

"So there was an old burial first, when the church was still open, am I right?"

I nodded. Manfred's eyes were very blue, and though they were focused on me, they weren't seeing me.

"And then the little girl was in there?"

"Right."

"Then you found the man last night, when you were in the cemetery?"

I jumped, but Manfred's hand kept mine prisoner, gently but firmly.

"Yes," said Tolliver slowly. "We found him last night."

"My grandmother was doing a reading for you, at the time you found him, and she knows you saw the visitor."

Manfred said. I had the uncomfortable feeling his eyes were looking right through me.

"Visitor?" I asked.

"That's what she calls ghosts," Manfred said, and suddenly he was just a very young man again, holding hands with a woman he thought was cute, and giving her a big grin. The stud in his tongue winked at me. "Grandma uses a lot of her own terminology."

This was a most interesting boy. He seemed not to have had much experience of the world, and yet he knew some unexpected things. I had the feeling Manfred would not be overawed or even impressed by riches or sophistication.

"Not a boy," he said, smiling, looking directly into my eyes. The sexual tone was back with a roar. "I'm definitely a man."

I didn't know if I was a bit excited, or if I wanted to run screaming into my room. I smiled at him.

"Grandma wanted me to tell you you'll see Tabitha's first grave," he said. "I didn't understand when she gave me the message. Her hip is acting up too bad for her to leave home today, so she asked me to come see you. She likes you a lot, you know. She wanted to warn you. Watch out for that grave."

As he had in the coffee shop, he bent and kissed my hand, making sure I got the gamut of sensations for the second time. He looked up at me from his bent posture. "Makes you think, doesn't it?" he said softly.

"Thinking isn't doing," I said practically.

"Not yet," he said. He stood, shook Tolliver's hand, and left as suddenly as he'd arrived.

"What was all that about?" Tolliver said, looking distinctly suspicious.

"Evidently, when he's touching you, he can read your mind, sort of," I said, feeling a little uncomfortable that some of my thoughts had been fairly graphic. "I don't know if that applies to the populace in general, or to people who have some kind of psychic talent, or what."

"But Xylda is the only one who makes predictions," Tolliver said. "And she's added to them today. You'll be happy in the time of ice, whatever that means, and you'll see Tabitha's original grave."

"I don't think I want to hang around Xylda anymore," I said. "And if she reads the cards for me, I don't want to know about it. It just creeps me out."

"What about Manfred? You want to hang around him?" At least Tolliver was smiling when he said it.

"Oh," I said deprecatingly. "You know, he's more than a little different. I mean, you can't help but wonder, when you see someone so extreme…" Then I couldn't figure out how to finish the sentence.

Tolliver had mercy on me. "If I knew a girl with that many piercings, I'd wonder, too," he said.

"Well, it's already mid-afternoon, and we've had a helluva day. What could we do next that would make it just one round of fun?"

"I could balance the checkbook."

"Big whoop."

"We could see what the in-room movie service has to show."

"I'm sick of this room, and I'm ready to do something a little more active than watch a movie."

"You got an idea?"

"Yeah. Let's go down to the riverfront park to run."

"What about the reporter?"

"We'll sneak out the back."

"It's cold and it looks like rain."

"Then we better run fast."

thirteen

WE avoided the reporters, but not the Memphis police. Detectives Young and Lacey were less than thrilled at our choice of activity when they tracked us down. I'd been wondering when we'd be hearing from them. I was only surprised they hadn't called the hotel and told us to get our asses down to the station.

They had on their London Fogs, their gloves, and their scarves. Lacey looked morose but resigned. Young looked resentful. Come to find out when we jogged over to them, Young had a cold. In the middle of her narrow face, her reddened nose stood out like a reindeer's, and she had a tissue clutched in the hand not occupied with an umbrella.

"Are you nuts?" she snarled. "Out here in your skintight whatevers, when it's freezing!" She made a vague gesture toward my running pants. I ran in place for a minute, slowing down gradually. I felt cold and wet, but I also felt exhilarated, as if the chilly damp air had blown away some of the cobwebs in my head.

"I guess you want to talk to us about something?" Tolliver was doing some stretching, and I saw that Detective Young's eyes had strayed to his ass. Lacey said quickly, "Yes, ma'am, we sure do. Do you two want to come down to the station with us? At least it's dry and warm."

"I definitely don't want to go to the station," I said. "Isn't there a coffee shop somewhere close? Unless you're going to arrest us, going to a cafe would be a lot nicer. Maybe they'd have hot chocolate?" I was deliberately tempting poor Young, who sneezed twice in succession and applied her damp wad of tissues to her raw nose.

"There's that place on Poplar," she said to her partner, who looked indecisive. "Remember how good their pie is?" she said, in a heavy-handed attempt at a bribe.

It worked like a charm.

Thirty minutes later we were in a restaurant so warm that the windows were steamy, with coffee in front of the men, hot chocolate in front of Detective Young and me. Lacey was happy as a pig in a wallow with a piece of pecan pie with whipped topping on a plate in front of him, and Young was almost weeping with relief at being indoors.

"Agent Koenig tells us you've heard the news about Clyde Nunley," she said, her voice sounding nasal but at least human.

We nodded. "He came by our room this morning and told us," I said, wanting to be as honest as possible. I always try.

"Rick Goldman came by the station, too," Young said, after he swallowed. He looked blissful. "Rick was telling us that he had a run-in with Nunley in the lobby of your hotel, Ms. Connelly."

"Yes, that's true. He ended up propelling Dr. Nunley out the door. Truthfully, I think Dr. Nunley was drunk. He was very belligerent." I hoped I looked as frank and open as I was trying to be.

"You're not the only person who's commented on that. We'll find out what his blood alcohol level was. What beef did he have with you?" Young asked. Maybe her cold medication was making her blunt, or maybe she was just tired of do-si-doing around.

"He thought that somehow, despite all his precautions, I'd gotten into his precious private records and memorized the COD on all the burials. Goldman accused me of the same thing."

"And did you do that?"

"No, I don't need to. I'm the real deal."

There was a moment of silence, while the detectives either thought that over, or dismissed it as another piece of chicanery on my part.

"Did you two go out again last night?" asked Young directly. "After Mr. Lang here came back from wandering Beale Street?" Detective Lacey put down his fork and gave us a look that might have penetrated steel.

"Yes, we did," Tolliver said. After all, we'd gotten the car from the valet. There was no way we could deny it.

"Where did you go?"

"We drove down to look at Graceland," Tolliver said. I blinked. What a good lie. Almost any tourist in Memphis would want to at least drive by Elvis's home. And since we'd just told Koenig we'd been looking at the sights of Memphis, this tied right in. Actually, we'd looked up Graceland on the laptop this morning after Koenig had left, so we'd at least have an idea what we were supposed to have seen.

"At night?"

"Yeah, we didn't have anything else to do. And we weren't sure if we'd ever be back this way again. So we drove down to Whitehaven, and we took a couple of passes in front of it. That's some place. You gotta love the gates."

"And you're not going to go back and see it in the daylight, tour the house?"

"He's buried on-site, right?" I asked.

"Uh… yeah. And Vernon and Gladys, his mom and dad, and Minnie May, his grandma."

"No." I shook my head definitely. "I really, really, wouldn't want to do that."

Detective Young sucked at her teeth. She looked as though she were feeling a bit better, now that she was warm and had finished her hot chocolate. Her short brown hair still looked lank and tired, but her eyes were showing a spark of spirit. Her partner had that happy look that sugar-loving men get after they've had something especially rich. But the pie hadn't made him smarter.

"Why not?" he asked now. "Why not go see the place they're buried?"

"You know, I connect with bodies. It might kind of ruin the Graceland experience for me." On the other hand, it might answer a few questions. Tolliver was looking amused.

"So you see why we just drove by," Tolliver said, picking up the thread of the narrative. "We'd already cruised around the Pyramid and Beale Street. So, we went back to our hotel."

I was glad I'd washed my shoes off this morning, and that the hotel laundry had our jeans.

"And the Fibbie came to see you first thing this morning," Detective Young said. I was glad we'd mentioned it, since it seemed Young already knew about Koenig's visit.

"Yes. He wanted us to know right away about the body found in the grave. I'm guessing he wanted to get our first reaction."

"And what reaction did he get?"

"Well, of course, we were sorry Clyde Nunley had been killed, or had fallen into the grave and hit his head, or whatever really happened to him. It's never good to hear someone's dead." Though with some people it's less bad than with others. "But it's not like we had any reason to want him dead."

"You might have been a little upset, Mr. Lang, him manhandling Ms. Connelly like that. Specially in a public place. Specially since someone else had to help her, since you weren't there."

Oooh. Low blow. But I thought Tolliver could stand up to it, and he seemed to be coping, if his slight smile was any indicator. "Harper can take care of herself," he said, which pleased me. "Even if Goldman hadn't been there, she would have been okay."

Since that hadn't worked, Lacey tried something else. "Agent Koenig says he wants your reading of Nunley's body, and that you would like access to Tabitha's body."

"That's not exactly what I said," I told him. "It wasn't my idea. He thought I might get more of a reading if I tried again, and I agreed that might be so. Of course I don't want to be around the child's body again—but if you have any idea I'd be a help, I have to make myself do that."

"I have no idea what to believe about you," Lacey said, his small blue eyes examining me again for maybe the twenty-fifth time. "I never met anyone like you, and I swear I don't know if you're a fraud or a—I just don't know what you are."

"Lots of people feel that way," I said, because he seemed so uncomfortable. "Don't worry about it. I'm used to it."

"You two have kids?" Detective Young asked suddenly.

Tolliver and I stared at her blankly.

"Us?" he said, after a long pause.

She seemed to realize she'd put her foot in it. "Sorry, I just assumed you two…"

"We've lived together since we were teenagers," I said. "Tolliver's dad married my mother. He's like my… brother." For the first time, I hesitated before I said those words.

"I have two," she said, obviously wanting to get off the subject as quickly as possible. "I have a boy and a girl. If my child went missing, I'd want every stone turned to find that child. I'd deal with the devil if I had to. I'll ask the Morgensterns how they feel about you… visiting Tabitha's body again. We'll see what they say."

I wondered what the two cops would say if I told them I'd talked to a ghost the night before. I wondered how fast they'd write us off as charlatans. I thought again of the hard hand gripping my arm, and I had to close my eyes for a minute. How could it be that Josiah Poundstone's ghost was there? I had thought I had the whole thing straight in my mind, the whole life-after-death procedure, but now I stood on shaky ground.

I noticed the traffic outside was getting heavier, and the sky was getting darker. As we sat in the diner with the two detectives, the afternoon had drawn to a close. I had an almost irresistible urge to go back to the cemetery, to see if the ghost was still there, what it was up to. What did ghosts do? Were they there when a human wasn't there to react to them? Did they materialize when they wanted to communicate, or were they always…

"Harper," Tolliver said gently. "Are you ready to go?"

"Oh, sure," I said, hastily pulling my jacket back on. The detectives were standing, their coats zipped and buttoned, and from their expressions, they'd been waiting for me to respond for some time.

"Daydreaming," I said. "Sorry." I did my best to look alert and normal, but that's not always my best thing anyway, and I don't think I was very successful. "Maybe our run tired me more than I thought."

Given a valid-sounding reason for my distracted state, the two cops looked a bit happier, though Lacey would never be my best friend. "You need to go back to the hotel and get some rest," he said. "Don't go getting into any more trouble while you're here in Memphis. We'll get back with you after we've talked to the Morgensterns."

"Right, thanks," Tolliver said. After their car had left, we paid our part of the bill and left the diner. "What was that all about?" Tolliver asked when we were in the car and trying to make a left turn into traffic to go back to the Cleveland.

I told him the questions I'd been asking myself.

"I can see where that's interesting, and I would like to know the answers, too," he said. "But from now on, you should have your thinking sessions when you're safe in bed, or something. You had a pretty strange expression on your face."

"Did I look weird?" I asked, oddly hurt.

"Not strange-ugly," he said instantly. "Strange, as in, 'not there.'"

"Oh," I said.

Finally, he took advantage of a hole in the ever-swelling traffic going out of downtown. We were headed back toward the river before I spoke again. "You know who I'd like to talk to again?"

"Who?"

"Victor. But you talk about peculiar, it would seem real peculiar if we called him and asked him to come to see us."

"Yeah. No way we can do that."

"You think since they treated us to a meal, we could invite them to a meal at a restaurant?"

Tolliver thought it over. "They're in mourning right now, and they've probably got all kinds of arrangements to make. Plus, what reason would we give? Yeah, we could insist we owe them a meal, but what are we gonna talk about? The only connection we have is the death of their daughter. That's just not enough to carry an evening, Sis."

He hadn't called me that in a long time. I wondered if Young's comment had shaken him up, too.

"Maybe not," I admitted. "But as long as we're stuck here, and I guess we are… hey, I wonder what would happen if we left?" There was a moment of silence. "We'd probably get called right back," I concluded, "until they've decided what happened to Clyde Nunley. Why would he get killed? I just don't understand. The only thing he knew was—what could he have known?"

"What's the only connection between Clyde Nunley and Tabitha Morgenstern?" Tolliver asked. He was definitely guiding me to a conclusion. I hate it when he does that.

"They shared a grave."

"I mean, besides that."

"There was no connection."

"Yes, there was."

It was almost full dark now, and the mass of lights in the eastbound lanes was almost bumper-to-bumper. We had much easier going in the westbound lanes. It began to rain again, and Tolliver turned on our windshield wipers.

"Okay, I give." I threw up my hands in exasperation. "What was the connection?"

"You."

fourteen

THIS hit me with an impact about equal to a bag of cement.

"So you're saying Clyde Nunley was murdered because he knew who had recommended me for this little gig at the college." I felt cold all over. I may be used to death, and I may know better than anyone how inevitable and ordinary a state it is, but that doesn't mean it's easy to feel you contributed to it. It's like sleet; you know if the atmospheric conditions warrant, there's going to be sleet, but you don't have to be happy about it.

"That's what I think—and I thought about this a lot, last night. I couldn't accept the giant coincidence that Tabitha's body was here. If it wasn't a coincidence, we were steered to find it. We were used. And the person who did that had to be the person who killed Tabitha. Clyde Nunley asked you to read this cemetery. So someone must have whispered your name in Clyde Nunley's ear. I don't know if that person held something over Clyde, or made a friendly suggestion. 'Hey, you're having this class about the occult, you have this cemetery just laying there, let's get a weird woman who specializes in finding the dead to come have a look.' "

"So, you think that Clyde balked when Tabitha's body was found?"

"I think he did. Or else he couldn't swallow the coincidence any more than we can, and he figured that whoever had talked him into inviting you to Memphis had to have some kind of inside knowledge about the girl's death. Just because he was a jerk doesn't mean he was dumb."

"True," I said absently. "Well, I guess that narrows down the field, right?"

"How do you figure that?"

"Couldn't be Victor."

"Why not? I'll bet he's pre-enrolled at Bingham. This is his senior year in high school, right?"

"Oh. Well, could be. That seems kind of thin, but okay. What I was thinking—both Felicia and David went to Bingham. And the older Morgensterns, Judy and Ben, would surely know a lot of people who went there, if they didn't themselves, since they live in the city and paid for David's tuition for four years. I bet the same holds true for Fred Hart."

After all, the older Morgensterns weren't so darn old. "Judy has Parkinson's too badly to have gotten Tabitha to the grave, but her husband is really fit," I said. "Fred Hart looks pretty strong, too." and talk to Iona, we did Rock, Scissors, Paper. As always, I made the wrong choice, which is pretty funny when you come to think of it. If I were actually psychic, as I'm so often accused of being, I think I could manage to win a simple game like that.

I speed-dialed Iona's number. Iona Gorham (née Howe) was my mother's only sister. She'd been married to Hank Gorham for twelve years, twelve long and childless and God-fearing years. She'd taken charge of Mariella and Gracie when my mother and stepfather went to jail, after the investigation into Cameron's abduction exposed some of their worst faults as parents. I'd had nothing to say about it, because I was underage then. I'd gone into a foster home myself. Iona and Hank hadn't wanted me, which was probably just as well, I guess. At seventeen, they thought my lifelong association with my mother would have irrevocably tainted me. I had a senior year in the high school I'd been attending, a year that was weirdly pleasant despite my shattered emotional system. For the first time since my childhood, I lived in a clean house with regular meals I didn't always have to cook myself. I could do my homework in peace. No one made suggestive comments, no one used drugs, and my foster parents were simple, nice, strict people. You knew where you were. They had two other foster kids, and we got along if we were very careful.

Tolliver, who was twenty then, moved in with his brother, Mark, so he was okay. He came by as often as he could, as often as the Goodmans would let him.

"Hello?" The man's voice yanked me back to the here and now.

"Hank, hello, it's Harper," I said, making sure that my voice was even and level and uninflected. You had to be Switzerland to talk to Iona and Hank. Neutral, I told myself repeatedly. Neutral.

"Hello," he said, with a total lack of welcome or enthusiasm. "Where are you, Harper?"

"I'm in Memphis, Hank, thanks for asking."

"I guess Tolliver's with you?"

"Oh, you bet," I said, cheerful as all get-out. "It's cold and wet here. How about in Dallas?"

"Oh, can't complain. In the fifties today."

"Sounds good. I'd like to talk to Mariella, if she's around, and then Gracie."

"Iona's gone to the store. I'll see if I can track the girls down."

What a stroke of luck. I held the phone to my chest while I told Tolliver, "The Wicked Witch isn't there." Iona had a deep fund of excuses to keep us from talking to the girls. Hank was not as resourceful, or as ruthless.

"Hey," said Mariella. She was nine now, and she was a lot of trouble. I never told myself she'd be an angel if she lived with us, because I knew better. For their first few years, Mariella and Gracie had never had the care and attention of parents who were in their right minds. I'm not saying my mother and stepfather didn't love their girls, but it wasn't the kind of love that would prompt them to become sober and responsible. At least we older kids had had that, once upon a time. We knew what was right and proper. We knew what parents should be like. We knew about fresh sheets and home-cooked meals and clothes that only we had worn.

"Mariella, it's your sister," I said, though of course Hank had told her who was on the phone. "What's happening with you?" I had tried so hard, and so had Cameron and Tolliver. Even Mark had stopped by with food from time to time, when he'd had extra money.

"I got on a basketball team," Mariella said, "at the Y."

"Oh, that's great!" Actually, it was. It was the first time Mariella had given me anything besides a sullen grunt. "Have you started playing yet, or are you still practicing?"

"We have our first game in a week," she said. "If you were here, you could come."

I widened my eyes at Tolliver to let him know this call was not going as usual. "We'd love to," I said. "We have to check our schedule, but we'd be really glad to watch you play. Is Gracie playing, too?"

"No, she says it's stupid to get out there and sweat like a pig. She says boys don't like girls who sweat. She says everyone will call me a lesbo."

I heard a shocked exclamation from Hank in the background.

"Gracie's wrong," I said immediately. "She just doesn't want to play basketball herself. Maybe you can play basketball a little better than Gracie, huh?"

"You bet," said Mariella proudly. "Gracie can't come within a mile of the hoop. I hit it twice last practice."

"I'm sure there's something Gracie can do that's special to her," I said, floundering to be diplomatic and yet reinforce the positive stuff that was going on with Mariella.

"Huh," said Mariella derisively. "Well, anyway."

"Have you all had your school pictures taken this year?"

"Yeah. They should be back soon."

"You both save us two, you hear?" I said. "One for your brother Tolliver to carry in his wallet, and one for me to carry in mine."

"Okay," she said. "Hey, Gracie joined the chorus."

"No kidding? Is she around?"

"Yeah, she's coming in the kitchen right now." Sound of a scuffle.

"Yeah?" This was Gracie, all right. Gracie was deep into hating us.

"Gracie, I hear you're in the chorus at school."

"Yeah, so?"

"Are you a soprano or an alto?"

"I dunno. I sing the melody."

"Okay, probably a soprano. Listen, we were thinking of coming to one of Mariella's games. Do you think you could sit with us if we did?"

"Well, I might be there with my friends." Whom she saw at school, every day, and talked to on the phone half the night, if Iona was to be believed.

"I know that's important," I said, back to being Switzerland, "but we don't get to see you too often."

"Okay, I'll think about it," she said unenthusiastically. "Stupid basketball. When she runs down the court, her cheeks bounce up and down. Like a hound dog's."

"You need to be a good sister," I said, maybe not as neutrally as I could have wished. "You need to cheer for Mariella."

"Why should I?"

Okay, not neutral at all. "Because you're damn lucky to have a sister," I began, my voice hot, and then I heard myself and backed off. I took a deep breath. "You know why, Gracie? Because it's the right thing to do. Here's your brother." I handed the phone to Tolliver.

"Gracie, I want to hear you sing," Tolliver said. That was exactly the right thing to say, and Gracie promised to find out when the chorus would be singing for the first time so Tolliver and I could put the date on the calendar. Then Gracie evidently handed the phone off.

"Iona," said Tolliver, with the faintest pleasant intonation. "How are things going? Really? The school called again? Well, you know Gracie isn't stupid, so there must be some other problem. Okay. When's she going for testing? It's good the state's paying for it. But you know we'd…" He listened for a while. "Okay, call us with the results. You know we want to hear."

After a couple more minutes of listening to this broken conversation, I was delighted when Tolliver finally hung up. "What's going on?" I asked.

"A couple of things," he said, frowning. "That was almost a good conversation with Iona. Gracie's teacher thinks Gracie may have ADD. She recommended testing, and Iona's taking her this week. The state will pay for the testing, evidently."

"I don't know anything about that," I said, as if I could have been prepared for this. "We'll have to look it up on the net."

"She would have to take the drugs if she's got it, Iona says."

"What are the side effects?"

"There are some, but Iona was more concentrating on the benefits. Evidently, Gracie's been pretty disruptive at school, and Iona wants some peace."

"Don't we all. But if the side effects…"

We spent the rest of the evening on the Internet, reading articles about Attention Deficit Disorder and the drugs used to treat it. If this seems excessive or odd, consider this: Tolliver and Cameron and I had raised those girls from birth. My mother had been roused to try to take care of them when they were infants, but if it hadn't been for us, Mariella and Gracie wouldn't have eaten, or been changed, or learned how to count, or been read to. When Cameron had been snatched, Mariella had been only three and Gracie had been five. They'd gone to a preschool together for a few mornings a week, because we'd enrolled them and then told my mother they had to go. We'd gotten them to the preschool before we went to our own school, and all Mom had to do was remember to pick them up, which she usually did if we left her a note.

Here I was remembering, when that was the last thing in the world I wanted to do.

"Enough of this," Tolliver said after a while, when we felt we knew a little bit about the disorder and the drugs used to treat it. "We'll learn more when we know if she has it or not."

I felt like I was drowning. I'd had no idea there were so many things that could go wrong with a child's learning processes. What happened to kids in the years before all these things were identified, and a course of treatment laid out?

"I guess they were labeled slow or difficult," Tolliver said. "And that was the end of it."

That made me feel sad for all the kids who'd never had a fair shake, because their problems hadn't been understood. At the same time, we'd just read two articles about how parents were overmedicating their children for those same problems, so that even children who really did just have some disruptive personality traits were being dosed with drugs that shouldn't have been given them. It was just scary. I wondered if I'd ever have the nerve to have a baby myself. It didn't seem too likely. I'd have to trust my partner completely, to bring his child into the world. The only person I'd ever trusted that much was my brother Tolliver.

And the strangest thing happened as I had that thought. The world seemed to freeze for a minute.

It was like someone had thrown a giant switch in my head. Tolliver was turning away to go to his room, and I was getting up out of the chair I'd pulled over to the desk so I could read the screen on the laptop. I looked at Tolliver's back, and suddenly the world slid sideways and then realigned itself in a new configuration. I opened my mouth to say something, and then I closed it. I didn't know what I wanted to say to him. I didn't think I really wanted him to turn around.

He started to turn, and I bolted for my room.

I shut the door behind me and leaned against it.

"Harper? Is something wrong?" I heard his anxious voice on the other side of the door. I was in a total panic.

"No!"

"But you sound like something's wrong."

"No! Don't come in!"

Tolliver's voice was a lot chillier the next time he spoke. "All right." And he moved away, going to his own room, I supposed.

I sank down to the floor.

I didn't know what to say to myself, how to treat someone as idiotic as me. I was poised in a perfect position to ruin the only thing I had in my life. One word, one wrong act, and it would all be gone. I would be humiliated forever, and I would have nothing.

I had one black moment in which I wondered if I should just go on and kill myself and have done with it. But my strong survival instinct rejected the fleeting notion even as it ran across my brain. If I'd lived through being hit by lightning, I could live through this new knowledge.

He must never know. I crawled across the floor to the bed; pulled myself up, lay prone across it. I planned the next week of my life in a few painful minutes, appalled at my own monstrous selfishness as I did so. Keeping Tolliver with me for one more minute was an awful thing to do.

But I couldn't let go, I argued with myself. If I suddenly shooed him away, he'd suspect something as sure as shooting. I just couldn't do it. In a week or so, when I could figure out the right way. Until then, hold myself carefully; guard my every action.

Life, which had seemed like such a rich crazy quilt laid out before me, suddenly assumed a grayer prospect. I climbed into the hotel bed, as I had climbed into hundreds of hotel beds.

I stared at the ceiling, at the bar of light from somewhere below that crossed it, at the bright red eye of the smoke detector. For hours I tried to remap my life. But I didn't have a clue which direction to go.

fifteen

I was more like a zombie than a person when I came out of my room the next day. Tolliver was eating breakfast, and he poured me a cup of coffee without a word. I went over to the table cautiously, sinking into my chair with as much relief as if I'd negotiated a minefield. He glanced up from his paper, gave me a horrified look.

"Are you sick?" he asked. "God, you look like something the cat dragged in!"

That actually made me feel much better. If he'd said something sweet, I'd have lost it then and there, grabbed hold of him, and sobbed all over his shirt front.

"I didn't have a good night," I said, very carefully. "I didn't sleep."

"No shit. I can kind of tell. You better get out your makeup."

"Thanks for the boost, Tolliver."

"Well, I'm just saying. We don't want the coroner mistaking you for the corpse."

"Okay, enough." Somehow, I felt much better after this exchange.

Tolliver had been reading the paper, and he shoved it over to me. He was not going to say anything about my strange behavior of the night before, apparently. "Not much about Tabitha today. I guess it's getting cold."

"About time." I picked up my coffee cup with a shaking hand, managed to get the edge of the cup to my lips without spilling anything. I took a long sip, set the cup down with just as much care. Tolliver had kept the sports section, and he was involved with a basketball story, so he didn't witness this embarrassing weakness. I exhaled, felt some relief, and took a steadier drink. Okay, caffeine was a good thing. I got a croissant out of the basket, knew I'd regret it later, and ate the whole thing in about forty-five seconds.

"Good," was Tolliver's only comment. "You could use some body fat."

"You're just a bundle of compliments this morning," I said tartly. I felt much better now. Suddenly I felt a surge of optimism, with even less ground than I'd felt my deep depression of the night before. I'd been overly dramatic, right? This was okay. We were all right. Everything would be the same.

I ate another croissant. I even buttered it.

"Are you going to run?" Tolliver asked mildly.

"No," I said.

"You're just a party animal today. Croissants and no running! How's the leg today?"

"Fine. Just fine."

There was a long pause.

"You were acting kind of weird last night," he said.

"Ah. Lot to think about," I said vaguely, waving the last piece of croissant in an arc to indicate the breadth of my thought.

"I hope that worked out for you," he said. "You scared me a little."

"Sorry," I said, trying to keep my voice light and airy. "A sudden attack of thoughtfulness will do that to you."

"Um-hum." He stared at me, his dark eyes full of his own thoughtfulness.

The cell phone rang when he'd gone back to his newspaper story, and I reached over to answer it. Somehow his hand was there before mine, and I wondered what was happening with him. We were sure being mysterious with each other, these days.

"Tolliver Lang," he said.

"All right," he said, after a moment.

"Where is that?" he asked next.

"All right, we'll be there in forty-five minutes," he said, before folding the phone shut.

He looked at me, somehow harder and sadder than before.

"The family gave permission," he said. "We can go see the body now."

I got up and walked into my room to get dressed without another word.

When I came out twenty minutes later, I was clean and my clothes were fresh, but that was about all I could say. Despite Tolliver's advice, I didn't fool with makeup, and I only ran a brush through my hair. I wore it short, since I couldn't have dealt with a lot of hair to arrange, some days; today was definitely one of those days. I'd pulled on the top sweater in my suitcase, which was cream-colored, and the top pair of jeans, and the top pair of socks. Luckily, I only carry things that can coordinate, because otherwise I would have looked like I'd dressed in the dark.

Tolliver was about on par with me sartorially, and he hugged me when I emerged, ready to go. I was so surprised that I hugged him back for a moment, feeling thankful and grateful for him, as I always did. Then I realized what I was doing, and I froze, every muscle in my body going tense. I could feel the change in him when he realized that something was wrong between us.

"What have I done?" he asked, pulling away, looking down at me. "What have I done to you?"

I couldn't meet his eyes. "Nothing," I muttered. "Let's just get this over with."

The car was full of an uneasy silence as we followed the directions Tolliver had been given. Before I had time to calm myself and prepare mentally, we were at the morgue. There were so many dead inside, and they were so fresh, that the vibrations gathered in intensity and strength. When I got out of the car, I was already feeling a little light on my feet. I know we went in, and I know we talked to a few people, but later I remembered nothing. By the time we walked down a corridor I was humming from my head to my toes. I could hardly note my physical surroundings as we followed the very heavy, very young woman leading us to the body we'd come to see. Her big rear swayed in front of me as she walked, and her lank dark hair switched from side to side. She hadn't bothered with makeup, and her clothes were strictly thrift shop. This must be a job that sucked the hope out of you.

The young woman knocked at a door that looked no different from any of the other doors. She must have heard a reply, because she held the door open and we went inside. A sandy-haired man in a lab coat said, "Hi." He was standing against the wall. There were two gurneys in the room. The lump on one of them was far bigger than the lump on the other. Tolliver gasped and coughed from the smell. Even through the heavy plastic covering the bodies, the odor was pervasive.

I said, "Tolliver, you can go," but I knew he wouldn't.

I introduced myself and Tolliver.

"Dr. Lyle Hatton," the man said. He was very tall and gawky, and he had a way of looking down through his glasses that registered as contemptuous.

His dislike and scorn was something I could ignore in the face of the overwhelming thrumming.

I started to lift the plastic so I could touch Tabitha's body directly, but Lyle Hatton said, "Gloves!"

He was annoying. I had a mission here, and the vibrations were resounding so loudly that I could hardly comprehend what he wanted. It seemed my choice was either touching her through the plastic sheet, or putting on plastic gloves. I wasn't aware I'd ever thought about the barriers between me and a corpse, and classified them. Cotton would have been better than plastic for my purpose, I knew instinctively.

But I wasn't being given that option. So I lay my hand on the plastic sheet, over the area where her heart should have been; of course, the shape under the sheet was not a full shape anymore, not after eighteen months in the ground. Immediately, I fell into Tabitha's last moments: woken from sleep, a nap. Seeing a blue cushion, descending. Feeling… betrayal, disbelief, horror, NO NO NO NO Mama save me save me save me.

"Save me," I whispered. "Save me." I wasn't touching her anymore. Tolliver had his arms around me. Tears were streaming down my face.

I put my arms around Tolliver, too; a dangerous indulgence, but I needed him so much. I looked at the masked man in his medical scrubs. "You collected evidence from the body?" I asked.

"I was there," Dr. Hatton said guardedly.

"Did you find any threads in her nose and mouth? Blue, they would have been."

"Yes," he said, after a notable pause. "Yes, we did."

"Suffocated," I said. "But she fought all the way."

Dr. Hatton made a sudden movement with his hand, as if he was going to show me something, but then he stopped in mid-motion.

"What are you?" he asked, as if he was talking to some interesting hybrid.

"I'm just a woman who got hit by lightning," I said. "I wasn't born the way I am."

"Lightning either kills you or you get over it," Dr. Hatton said impatiently.

"I can tell you've never dealt with a live person who's had the experience," I said. "You get hit with a few thousand volts, a few months later you come talk to me about what your life is like."

"If that many volts hits you directly, you're dead," he said simply. "What people survive is the energy discharge from it hitting very nearby."

I couldn't believe this guy, arguing with me about what had happened to me while Tabitha's body was right here between us.

"Whatever," I said, and straightened up to show Tolliver I was ready to go. It was hard to pull my arms from around him, but I did it, and his arms loosened around me.

I went over to the second shape, the larger one. I closed my eyes and placed my hand over the body.

My eyes flew open and I glared at Dr. Hatton. "This isn't Clyde Nunley," I said. "This is some young man who died of knife wounds."

Dr. Hatton looked at me as though he were seeing a ghost. "You're right," he said, as if I weren't standing right there. "You're right, my God. Okay," he said, very carefully, as though I might pounce on him, "let me take you to Dr. Nunley."

Tolliver was furious with Lyle Hatton, and I wasn't far behind him in that. But I was determined to complete my errand. We followed the doctor down the hall to a larger room, a cold room, full of bodies. It was not orderly; the gurneys were not lined up in neat rows. Here and there a hand or foot protruded. The smell was unique, a bouquet de la mort. The vibrations in this place were overwhelming. All the dead waited for my attention, from an old woman who'd been murdered in her own home to a baby who'd died of SIDS. But I was only here to call on one corpse, and this time Lyle Hatton led me to him. I was dizzy from being surrounded with all the newly dead, and it took me a long minute to focus on Clyde; then I saw it all again: the surprise, the blow, the fall into the grave. I nodded sharply to Dr. Hatton when I was through, and I staggered as I turned away from my final contact with Dr. Clyde Nunley.

"You can walk?" Tolliver asked, very low.

"Yes," I said.

"Wait," Lyle Hatton said. I looked at him inquiringly. The overhead light winked on his gold-rimmed glasses. "Since you're here, can I ask you to do one more thing? You were right about the blue threads. You knew when I showed you the wrong body. Maybe you can help me with one more thing."

Everyone wants a freebie.

"What do you need?" I asked. I wasn't in the mood for finesse.

"This body here… I can't determine a cause of death for this woman. She was living at home with her son and daughter-in-law, and she developed stomach symptoms. She might have had any number of things wrong with her, but I've met the couple, and I suspect there's something hinky about her death. What do you think?"

Though Hatton was a jackass, I like to help the dead when I can.

"Tox screen didn't show anything, autopsy turned up nada," Hatton said coaxingly. "She lost a lot of weight and had various stomach symptoms before death—diarrhea, nausea, and so on—but she hated going to the doctor and she didn't turn up at a hospital until it was too late."

"This one?" I asked. I could see a pale hand, though it was not the right color a hand ought to be. I closed my eyes and touched her hand with my finger, a bare contact Hatton made no attempt to block.

"Don't try this on me," I said, feeling exhausted. "This is a young woman who died of aplastic anemia."

Dr. Hatton stared at me as if I'd grown another head. He checked the toe-tag. "I'm sorry," he said, sounding sincere. "I really thought that was her. This is." He double-checked the tag on the body next to the poor young woman.

I sighed heavily. I touched the plastic wrapped around this body. I narrowed my eyes. If he wanted to play, I was up to it.

"Cleona Chatsworth," I moaned, "Come forth!"

Out of the corner of my eye, I caught Tolliver ducking his head to hide his smile. Dr. Hatton was growing even paler than he'd been before, almost to the point of matching one of his clients. He gasped. I'd heard the name right. Luckily for me, Cleona Chatsworth wanted someone to know what had happened to her, wanted it very badly.

"Cleona was poisoned," I whispered, my free hand moving in a circle over the corpse. I thought Hatton was going to faint.

"What do I look for?" he croaked.

"Someone gave it to her in salad dressing," I crooned. "The selenium."

I opened my eyes and said, "This lady was poisoned."

Lyle Hatton stared at me with glassy eyes.

"We're going now," I told Tolliver, who was glaring at the doctor, his hands curled into fists.

So we left the room, and we went back down the long hall. The young woman had waited down the hall for us, and as silently as she'd escorted us there, she led us back to the door to the outside. I was profoundly glad to step out into the cold gray day and take a deep breath of air untainted by death. Tolliver and I stood watching the heavy traffic on Madison for maybe five minutes, inhaling and exhaling, happy to be out of the building. The humming had seemed very intense before I'd entered, but it had only been a shadow of what I'd felt when I was actually within the walls.

When I felt more like myself, I said, "It wasn't Diane who killed her. Tabitha was wanting her mother."

He absorbed that. "That's good, then," he said. "One down."

"Don't laugh at me," I said, though his mouth hadn't twitched. "I think at least it's a start."

"Sure," he said. "And I'm not doing any laughing." He gripped my arm so I'd look at him. "I don't know how you do it and stay sane. I really, really admire you."

Now was so not the time for Tolliver to be all real and sympathetic.

"I want them to name the murderer." I began walking across the parking lot to our car. "Usually, I'm more or less accepting of the fact that people murder other people. That's just part of the world, I guess. But I'm really mad about this. I'm really, really angry."

"You've had children before," Tolliver said, meaning that I had read their deaths before.

"Oh, sure, I've done children. But this is different. I don't know why. Maybe it's the family, still waiting to find out what happened to her, figuring it's one of them who did it. This has just gotten to me."

"That's not good. It's tearing you up. I don't want this to happen to you."

"Well, me either. But I can't seem to stop it, and I can't tell who did it from touching her. And we can't leave for a while, I guess."

"Do you want to leave?"

I was buckling my seat belt. "What does that mean?" The tone of his voice had put me on guard.

"You usually can hardly wait to get out of town after we finish up with a client, but you haven't said anything about leaving for a day or two. You want to be here? What's the attraction? Manfred Bernardo? Or Joel Morgenstern? Or Seth Koenig?" He turned the key in the ignition with unnecessary force. He was definitely not looking at me.

"Huh?" I stared at him as if he'd started speaking in Swedish.

Then, as his meaning sunk in, I laughed. It was just too ironic. The thing was, in past times there might have been some basis for his question. I might have been thinking about Manfred, or having secret fantasies about Seth Koenig, or Joel Morgenstern. His wrestler's body was fit and powerful, also good fuel for fantasies—Ooooh, pin me to the mat, Joel! But being pinned down was never a fantasy of mine.

And though our age difference was minimal, I regarded Manfred Bernardo as a boy.

"Tolliver, I meant it when I told you I'm not interested in Joel. Plus, he seems happy in his marriage and I've never wanted to be an adulterer. Now Manfred, mmmm." I smacked my lips. "That's different. You can't help but wonder what's under all the leather."

Tolliver gave me an incredulous glance, saw I was smiling, and had the good sense to look embarrassed. "Okay, okay, I'm sorry," he said. "The truth is, I'm in kind of my own situation."

"What?" I was instantly serious. "What's up?"

"Felicia has stepped up her phone calls," he said. We were at a stoplight, and he looked at me steadily.

"Despite the way she acted yesterday? Like she'd never seen you before?"

He nodded. "Yeah. She's called, like, four times since we left the hotel."

"You sure you don't want her to call?" I was kind of feeling my way through this, because I couldn't tell what Tolliver was leading up to.

"I definitely don't. You've told me before that sometimes you felt men were dating you because you were so—so different from other women?"

I nodded.

"Well, that's kind of the way I'm feeling." The light changed, and he turned his eyes to the road ahead. "We never seemed to have that much in common. She never acted affectionate, or like she wanted to get to know me better. I can't understand her constantly trying to hook up now, again. And then when she actually sees me, she acts like she never was with me. And then she calls me again."

"You did do the nasty with her. Maybe she really, ah, enjoyed that with you?" I was trying not to sound self-conscious. This was not a frequent topic of conversation between us. Neither of us were kiss-and-discuss types. It was tacky. Plus, not suitable.

"To tell the truth, it was only about average. It was just… sex," he said, with a shrug. He seemed to feel he had lacked gallantry toward a woman he'd bedded. "She's a pretty woman, and real intense. In fact, maybe a little too intense. And not all that interested in talking."

I groped for the right thing to say. "Like she was using you?" I said, making damn sure there wasn't a hint of smile anywhere in my vicinity.

"Exactly," he said. "So, I guess I know how women feel when a guy's just using them to masturbate inside."

Crudely put, but I understood exactly what he was saying. "And Felicia's calling you all the time, now?" It was hard to reconcile that with the self-contained and sleek young woman I'd met.

"Yeah, after not hearing from her for months and months, she's in a frenzy."

Maybe seeing Tolliver had reminded her of how good he'd been? Maybe it had been a long time since she'd had sex, and here was a sex partner whose excellence was a known factor, a sex partner who wouldn't entangle her in any relationship talk?

"How are you dealing with it?"

"At first, I thought about doing it," he said, looking really embarrassed. "I mean…"

"Sex is sex," I said, trying to sound understanding.

"But something about her puts me off," he said. "I can have sex with someone I don't, ah, have a relationship with, and enjoy it. But we have to at least like each other."

"She doesn't like you?" I was hesitant. I'd never heard Tolliver talk about a woman like this, and I have to say, I was a little worried.

"I don't know. I'm not sure I like her, now."

"Because she's eager?" I wasn't sure I liked the implication.

"No, no. I mean, that's flattering." He gave a frustrated shrug. "I'm not one of those guys who only likes women as long as they're hard to get. And I don't think women are sluts if they admit they want sex. It's because Felicia's so…" He floundered, looking for the right words. But he couldn't find them.

Finally he said, "She's too deep for me. It's like swimming in the ocean, when you're used to a pool."

That was brilliant, and I gazed at Tolliver with admiration and some surprise. He looked a little surprised, himself.

I didn't know what to say, so I took refuge in facetiousness. "It's all your fault, Tolliver," I said. He looked at me skeptically. "You're just so darn magnetic. They can't live without you."

He gave me an eye roll. "Cut it out," he said.

So the subject passed away, but I didn't forget it, and I thought about it while he watched a basketball game on ESPN. He would know I wasn't dismissing his concern, that I'd keep it under my skin until I had an idea about it. In the meantime, I felt like reading. I'd gotten heavily involved in an old mystery, Marjorie Allingham's A Tiger in the Smoke, and after a page or two I was in the England of decades ago.

When the room phone rang, I was simply irritated at having to put down my book. I was closest, so I answered it.

A male voice said, "Hey, can we come up?"

"Who is this?"

"Um. Sorry. This is Victor, you know? Morgenstern?"

I could feel my face wrinkle in a frown. "Who is 'we'?"

"My friend Barney and me."

I covered the receiver and relayed the request to Tolliver. "This is weird. I want to talk to him, and here he arrives on our doorstep," I said. Tolliver was not so pleased. In fact, he looked mildly exasperated. "Oh, okay," he said. "I was thinking about going out for lunch, trying to get some barbecue as long as we're here in Memphis. But we'll see what he wants. You think he's just showing off to his friend or something?"

I shrugged, uncovered the receiver, and gave the boy our room number. After a few minutes, there was a tentative knock on the door.

Tolliver answered it, looking quite grim and intimidating. Actually, he was probably just aggravated at the interruption to his game watching, but Tolliver is a tough-looking guy, and when he's unhappy, he tends to look a little dangerous. If the two teenagers had been dogs, the ruffs on their necks would have been standing up. Like many teenagers, Victor and his friend Barney were strange combinations of tentative and aggressive.

Victor was wearing a tight knit shirt, which allowed us to see just how much he'd been hitting the gym. He didn't have his father's magnetism, but he did have a pair of big blue eyes that worked almost as well. His blond friend Barney was taller, narrower, but still a substantial hunk of immature male. Both were wearing school jackets, jeans, and Pumas. Victor's "Tommy" polo shirt was green-and-white striped, and Barney's Ralph Lauren was golden brown.

"So, uh, you doing okay?" Victor asked me. "This is my friend Barney."

"I'm fine, thank you," I said. "Barney, I'm Harper Connelly. This is my brother, Tolliver Lang."

"Hey," said Barney. He looked at us furtively, and then back down at his shoes. He and Victor were sitting close together on the love seat, while Tolliver and I were in the chairs.

"Can I get you anything to drink?" I asked politely.

"Oh, no, no thanks. We just had a Coke down in the car," Victor said.

There was a small, awkward silence.

"Look, dude, I want to talk to your sister," Victor told Tolliver. He had on the most manly face he could muster.

My mouth twitched, though I did my best to look neutral.

"Go right ahead," Tolliver said seriously. "Were you wanting me to leave the room?"

"No, dude," Victor said anxiously. He looked at his friend Barney, who shook his head, to reinforce Victor's denial. "No man, stay here."

The teenager turned his head to me. "You were in Nashville, so you know how bad that was," he said. "I mean, you know that was really awful."

I nodded.

"So my mom—my stepmom—flipped out for a while."

"Flipped out how?" I sat forward, focused my attention on the young man. Not completely to my surprise, Barney took Victor's hand. Victor looked startled, but not at having his hand held by another male. He was just surprised Barney felt it was okay to do that in front of us. They looked at each other for a moment, and then Victor squeezed Barney's fingers in a tight grip.

"She was all… using pills, you know? She got really strung out. Felicia was having to drive over to Nashville from Memphis all the time to make sure the house was running okay."

"That must have been really hard," I said, trying to sound both gentle and encouraging.

"It was," he said simply. "My grades went way down, and I was missing my sister, and it was really bad. My dad tried to keep going to work, and my mom would get up and try to clean the house or cook, or just have lunch with friends, but she was crying all the time."

"The loss of a family member causes all kinds of changes," I said, which was just about meaningless. It couldn't begin to cover the "changes" the sudden absence of a sister could cause, as I had good reason to realize. I had no idea where Victor was headed with this, but I found myself increasingly curious, curious enough to provide conversational lube to keep the talk going.

"Yeah," he said simply. "We sure had a bunch." He seemed to gather himself. "You know, that morning? The morning she was—gone."

"Um-hm," I said.

"My dad was in the neighborhood," he said in a rush. "I spotted his car a couple of blocks from the house."

I didn't sit upright and shriek, "Oh my God!" but it was definitely an effort to stay in my relaxed position. "He was?" I said, quite calmly.

"Yeah, because… I mean, I did go to tennis practice," Victor said. "But after that, my friend I had in Nashville; I mean, it wasn't anything like Barney, but I did, um, have a friend, and he and I hooked up, and then I needed a shower, so I thought I'd run home, but when I went past the house I saw Dads car at the stoplight two blocks away, and I thought he might notice something. I mean, what was there to notice? But parents, you know." Victor shrugged. "So I just went back to the park and hit some balls, met some other friends who'd come to play. The courts were only ten minutes away from home and I even parked in the same spot when I went back, so it was pretty easy for me to say I'd never left."

We were both shaken by this little account.

"Of course, I couldn't say anything," Victor said.

"I can see that it would be hard to get into that," Tolliver said.

"Yeah, you know, one thing would lead to another, and then I'd have to tell them. About me."

And the world revolved around Victor, of course. "So they don't know yet," I said.

"Oh, God, no!" He and Barney rolled their eyes at each other. "Dad and Mom would freaking flip out."

"My mom is cool about it, which is awesome," Barney said. I was glad to confirm he had vocal abilities.

I'd meant that Victor's parents didn't yet know he'd seen the car, but of course Victor had interpreted my question his own way.

"You're sure it was your dad's car?" Tolliver asked. "Absolutely sure?"

"Yes, I'm sure," Victor said, as if he had his back against the wall and an army against him. "Of course, dude. I know my own dad's car."

I'd never heard anyone call Tolliver "dude" before, and even under the circumstances, I was kind of enjoying it. "What's he drive?" I asked Victor.

"He's got a Lexus hybrid," Victor said. "A bamboo pearl—colored Lexus with the ivory leather interior. We looked at the website for like a week before we ordered the car."

Okay, that was distinctive. It couldn't be confused with many other cars, for sure. I was conscious of a bitter disappointment, as if a show dog I'd become fond of had turned and bit me.

"And you never asked him about that," I said, and I couldn't keep the disbelief out of my voice. "You're saying your dad could have snatched your sister, and you've known that all along, and yet you've never said anything to anybody about it."

Victor turned a deep red. Barney looked at me with outright hostility.

"Because," I went on when they didn't speak, "you know you're telling us that your father lied about where he was, and you're saying he almost certainly grabbed your half sister, his daughter, and killed her."

He raised his head, and almost spoke; his mouth moved; and he was so young, so disturbed, it almost hurt to badger him like this, but I had to.

"Leave him alone," Barney said. His big hands, so smooth and unscarred, had fisted. "Vic's been through hell over this. He knows his dad couldn't do anything like that. But he saw the car, and he can't forget that. You don't know what it's like."

Actually, I did, pretty much.

"So, Victor, you gifted us with this information—why? So we could be disturbed, along with you?"

Victor's face couldn't have gotten any redder, and he obviously had to dredge for a reason he'd unburdened himself on us after more than a year of silence. "I thought," he said painfully, "I thought you'd know who killed her. I thought you'd be able to see it. I couldn't tell. I already said, then I'd have to say I was home when I said I wasn't, too… I was scared."

"How have you been able to live in the house with him for all these months?" I asked, out of sheer curiosity.

"I didn't see him." Victor struggled with what he wanted to say. "I saw the car. I didn't see his face, I didn't talk to him, I just saw the car. There are other Lexuses in the world, like my grandfather's. There are plenty in that neighborhood. We lived in pretty nice suburb."

"But you seem convinced that it was your father."

"Just because it was where it was. So close to our house. And at the time, I thought, 'There's Dad.' Because of course, Granddad was in Memphis, and we were in Nashville."

Tolliver sat back in his chair and gave me a quizzical look. What were we supposed to do with this? Something, some small thing, at the time had convinced this wretched boy that he was seeing his father in his father's car. He hadn't doubted it. Now, he was saying he hadn't actually seen the driver. There were other pearl-colored Lexuses—Lexi?—around, of course, as Victor had also pointed out. I almost hated the boy for giving us the burden of useless knowledge.

Victor, however, seemed to be feeling better now that he'd told us the story. I could see by the little gathering motions of his body that Victor was preparing to sweep out with his boyfriend in tow. I felt angry about that, but I struggled against it. After all, I didn't have any right to beat the boy to a pulp because he'd finally revealed a secret he should have told right off.

A sharp knock at the door made me jump. The two boys looked pretty anxious, and I knew for sure that no one in his family knew where Victor was. I was beginning to think that our suite was the home away from home for anyone remotely connected to the disappearance of Tabitha Morgenstern.

Tolliver looked out the peephole, not a normal precaution of his.

"David," he said briefly. Victor and Barney moved apart as if their inner attraction had suddenly been set on "repel." Instead of being a couple, they were transformed into a couple of guilty teenage buddies, caught somewhere they had no reason to be, by an adult who would surely scold them. "Should I let him in?"

"Why not?" I said, throwing my hands out.

David stepped into the room, his eyes flashing around to all the corners suspiciously. Vindication was written large on his face when he saw his nephew. "Victor, what the hell are you doing here?" he asked, righteous indignation practically dripping from his voice.

"Hello, David, good to see you again," I said, and David Morgenstern finally looked at me and turned red.

"You thieving bitch," he said, and Tolliver hit him.

sixteen

THE blow was not premeditated in any way. Tolliver simply drew back his arm and hit David Morgenstern in the stomach as hard as he could. As David collapsed to the carpet, choking and clutching his stomach, Tolliver closed the door so no one in the hall could observe the recovery of our guest. Barney looked scared, and Victor looked about a thousand different things—astonished, envious, and angry being the most identifiable.

Tolliver was rubbing his hand and half-smiling. He stepped away to show me he didn't intend to keep beating on David.

"Did you want something in particular, Mr. Morgenstern, or did you just come by to call me names?" I asked as Victor finally crouched by his uncle and tried to help David get up.

"I saw you talking to Victor at the house yesterday," David said, when he could speak. "And then, when Victor came up here…"

"You followed me?" Victor asked incredulously. "I don't fucking believe it, Uncle David."

"Language," wheezed the man who'd just called me a bitch.

"So, you decided I had a sexual interest in Victor?" I said, with what I thought was remarkable dignity.

"I just wanted to be sure he was okay," protested David. "Joel and Diane are so wrapped up in the situation about Tabitha, and Felicia went to work, and my parents are at home… my mother's having a bad day… so I thought someone should be watching out for what Victor was doing. He doesn't need to be around people like you."

"And you thought calling me names fell into the category of watching out for Victor?" Tolliver had come to stand beside me, and I felt like kissing the hand that had hit David.

"I thought," he began, and then he turned so red I thought his blood pressure had soared. He cleared his throat, leaned over so he could clutch the back of a chair for support, and began again. "I thought the boys had come up here for…"

I wasn't going to help him out. Tolliver and I waited obviously and patiently for David to finish his sentence. Barney and Victor exchanged glances that fully expressed how lame this idea had been, and how stupid Uncle David had been to follow Victor. Grown-ups!

"I thought they were going to hang out with you two because they think you're cool," David said weakly, which was a big fat lie.

"We are," I said. "Aren't we, Tolliver?"

"Sure," he said. He patted my hand with his bruised one.

David finally recovered enough to move around the back of the chair and sit down, though we hadn't asked him.

"Maybe you could tell us why you thought you could call me names, and that would be okay?" I asked, my voice sweet and gentle.

"I am sorry," he said finally, just when my patience was running out. "Though I don't know why your brother had to hit me."

"He's not my brother, but he is my best friend," I said, to my own amazement. "And he doesn't like it when people call me names. Wouldn't you want to hit someone who called Diane a thieving bitch?"

"She got some phone calls after Tabitha vanished," David said unexpectedly. "People called her all kinds of things. Especially after the story got out about her quarrel with Tabitha that morning. People can be so ugly, you wouldn't believe."

"Actually, I think I would," I said.

It took David a minute to get that, but when he did, the red crept over his face and shoulders like a tide rolling in. "Okay, I'm feeling pretty bad now," he said. "I did a stupid thing. I can see Victor's okay, he's got his best bud with him, everything's cool. I know I acted like an idiot. Hey, Barney," David said, with a pretty pathetic attempt at regaining his superiority. "How are you, guy?"

Barney looked embarrassed. "Fine, Mr. Morgenstern," the boy said. "You?" Then he gasped and choked back a laugh at his automatic question.

"I've been better," David said, a bit more steadily. "Victor, why don't you and Barney run along? I've got to talk to Miss Connelly and Mr. Lang."

"Okay, Uncle David, if you're sure you're going to be okay," Victor said, with false solicitousness.

David gave him such a sharp look I thought Victor would probably end up paying for his moment of fun, but Victor maintained his serious look quite well. "Come on Barney," he said. "The grown-ups want to talk." They put their letter-man jackets back on and left the room, giving each other secret grins as soon as they were out of David's eyesight.

The door closed behind them with a thunk. We might as well leave it open, we were getting so much traffic.

Tolliver and I sat on the love seat and waited for David to flounder ahead.

"Diane says you're getting the reward for finding Tabitha's body," David said.

We waited.

"Why don't you say something?" he asked, his temper flaring up again. Just when you thought the fire had been stomped out, it popped up again.

"What's to say?" I said.

"You're taking money from my brother and his wife," David said. "Money they need."

"I need it too," I pointed out reasonably. "And I earned it. I'll bet not all the money came from Joel and Diane, either."

He was taken aback. "Well, there were donations," he said. "A lot from Fred, and a chunk from our parents, of course."

I couldn't have had a better lead-in if I'd ordered it. "Was your father especially close to Tabitha?"

"Yeah, he was," David said. His blue eyes were focused on another time, and he said, "My dad is a great guy. When he and Mom would go to Nashville to visit Diane and Joel, Dad would take Tabitha all the way out to the stables for her riding lessons. He went to her softball games."

"And your mother went along?"

"No. I'm sure you noticed yesterday that she was too sick to do that much. The Parkinson's is eating her up. Sometimes she'd ride over to Nashville, but she'd just stay at the house with Diane. She's nuts about Diane. Of course, she liked Whitney, too."

"And your dad has a Lexus like Joel's?"

"Why are you asking me all this?"

I couldn't believe he'd told me this much without asking why. Maybe David was lonely within his own family. As I looked at him, I wondered suddenly if David was the reason Felicia clung so closely to a family that had little connection to hers any more. My brother was looking at me strangely, with an expression I couldn't read.

"What do you do for a living, David?" Tolliver asked. You would never have thought that ten minutes before, he'd socked this guy in the stomach like he wanted his fist to come through the back.

"I work at the Commercial Appeal," David said. "In the advertising department."

I didn't know exactly what such a job would consist of, but I was pretty sure David wouldn't make as much money as his brother, Joel. Joel was a CPA with a large firm, and he was obviously doing well at his job if his consumer goods were a reliable yardstick. And Joel had had not one wife, but two; both pretty, if the picture I'd seen the day before at the house hadn't been ridiculously touched up. Joel had a son and he'd had a daughter. I wondered what David had. A huge pile of envy? A case of jealousy?

"You drive your dad's car often, David?" I asked.

"The Buick? Why would I?" he asked.

"Wait, you said he had a Lexus."

"No I didn't. You asked me if he had a Lexus, and I asked you why you wanted to know."

Then I remembered Tolliver had said he'd been talking to Fred about his car. I'd misunderstood. And Victor had said his grandfather had a Lexus, but he hadn't specified which grandfather. I'd made a series of assumptions, and had gotten the usual result. Assumptions were dangerous things.

I'd been staring at David while I thought, and he was getting antsy. "What's up with you?" he asked. "I made a mistake coming here, and I apologized. I'm leaving now."

"Were you really following Victor?"

"No one is watching out for him," David said. "I need to."

I noticed that was yet another response that didn't really answer the question: a David Morgenstern specialty, apparently. "It seems to me that everyone says they're watching out for Victor. Certainly Felicia is, and you are. Both of his grandfathers mentioned their concern about him."

"Oh, Felicia talks about Victor a lot," David said bitterly. "But if you ask me, she's using Victor as an excuse to keep hanging around Joel… and Diane." He tacked Diane's name on hastily, as if that would mask what he was implying.

That was an interesting thought, but I stuck to my course. "Is everyone so worried about Victor because there's reason to think he had something to do with what happened to his sister?" I had caught myself considering, as Victor sat across from me ostensibly spilling his innermost fears, that he could be performing the whole scene as a cover-up for his own guilt.

"We wondered… I talked to Joel about this… Victor's so secretive. He vanishes and then he won't say where he's been… he hangs out with that kid Barney so much, and Barney's parents aren't… they're Christian, and they go to one of those churches where people wear Birkenstocks to the service. He locks his door a lot. We'd been wondering if Victor and the boy are into drugs, but his grades are good. He's on the wrestling team, and he's a strong boy, but we worry…"

"You sense there's something different and unknown about Victor," I said.

David nodded. "Do you know what it is?" he asked me baldly. "After all, for some reason he came to talk to you. If he didn't come to you for sex…"

"It's unthinkable he'd come to me for any other reason," I said gravely. "Is that it?"

David looked ashamed all over again.

"I don't have sex with teenagers," I said. "Not one of them, not two of them at once. I'm not interested in that."

Since I kept my voice cool and level, David didn't have any fuel to feed his anger, and he lapsed into his backup emotion, befuddled concern. "Then why was Victor here?"

"You'll have to ask Victor that," I said. Considering Victor had spent months thinking his father might have had something to do with Tabitha's disappearance, he was a model of mental health. He'd seemed so relieved to share the burden. He'd also seemed happy to tell someone about his sexual orientation. Victor needed a therapist. I couldn't believe he hadn't been visiting one. I said as much.

"Oh, he went for a while," David said, anxious to assure me that they'd done their best by the boy. "But Fred, he's an old-school kind of guy. He thought Victor should suck it up and get on with his life. I guess maybe he talked Joel and Diane around to his point of view, because when Victor moved here from Nashville, they never got him another therapist. Truth be told, Victor did seem a lot better once he was in Memphis."

"So Fred didn't want him talking to anyone," I said.

David looked surprised. "Not to a therapist. He's just an old fashioned man, the kind who thinks you need to keep your problems to yourself and let time heal you."

I was ready for David to be gone. In fact, I really didn't want to see any more of this extended family. In fact, I wished I'd never heard of Tabitha Morgenstern. I wished I'd never stood on the grave in the corner, but I couldn't help having the idea that I'd been herded toward that grave, I'd been asked to Memphis to find the child, and I'd done exactly what somebody wanted me to. All along, I'd been manipulated.

"Goodbye, David," Tolliver said, and David actually looked a bit startled that we were ready for him to leave.

"Once again," he began as he stood up.

"I know. You're sorry," I said. I felt so tired I thought my flesh might fall off my bones. It wasn't bedtime yet, and I didn't think I'd eaten since a long-ago light breakfast.

Finally David was out the door, and Tolliver said, "We're getting food right now." He called room service and placed an order, and though we'd called at a strange time, our food arrived quickly.

As we ate silently, I thought. We have a lot of thinking time, since we're on the road so much. Somehow when we're in a town, when we're not moving, we do anything but think.

I went back over everything I knew.

Tabitha Morgenstern. Eleven. The much-loved child, as far as I could tell, of upper-class professional Jewish parents. Abducted in Nashville, to end up interred in an old Christian cemetery in Memphis. Neither of her parents, the papers had told me, had ever been arrested for anything. Her older half brother, either. But that half brother thought he'd seen his father's car close to the house the day Tabitha had disappeared.

Tabitha had grandparents who lived in Memphis, but had visited in Nashville frequently. Her grandfather and grandmother Morgenstern seemed to adore her. In fact, Victor had told us her grandfather often took her places by himself. Did I have to suspect Ben Morgenstern of fooling with the child? I sighed. And Tabitha had a sort of step-grandfather, Fred Hart, who seemed to have remained close to his former son-in-law. Fred Hart, a Bingham alumnus, owned a pearl Lexus, like the one that Victor had seen in the neighborhood the morning of the abduction. Victor had assumed he was seeing his dad, because it would have been reasonable to see his dad in that location, but what if he'd seen his grandfather's Lexus instead?

Tabitha had a step-aunt, too, Felicia Hart, and an uncle, David Morgenstern. Both had gone to Bingham. David seemed to resent his brother's successes, though as far as I could tell he also seemed to have cared for his niece. The attractive Felicia seemed to have quite an appetite for the male gender. There was nothing wrong with that. She was also very protective of her nephew, and there was nothing wrong with that, either.

I rubbed my face with both hands. There had to be something I could glean from this information, something that would help me lay Tabitha to rest. Being shut up with Tolliver, now that I'd had so many thoughts I shouldn't have had, was becoming intolerable. I dropped my hands to the table and looked over at him. He happened to look up at that moment, and our eyes locked. He put down his fork.

"What are you thinking?" he asked. His voice was very serious. "Whatever it is, I think you'd better tell me."

"No," I said, equally seriously.

"Then what are you willing to talk about?"

"We have to find out who did this, and we have to leave this place," I said. Movement would bring relief, being on the road again. "Don't you think a random stranger is completely ruled out?"

"Yes, because of where the body was found," Tolliver said. "It's impossible that it was a random act."

"Do you think I was meant to find the body?"

"Yes, I think that was why you were called here."

"Then it has to follow that Clyde Nunley was killed because he knew who'd suggested I be the next guest in the series."

"Maybe," Tolliver said slowly, "the key was finding of the priest's records."

I mulled that over.

"After all, it was the finding of the records that made St. Margaret's such a good subject for a reading. It was a controlled experiment."

"Sure. Dr. Nunley had to know if I was getting it right or not, and there was a way to prove that. There usually isn't."

"So she was put there for me to find. Maybe months ago, when the records were discovered." I groped my way through the thought. "Someone wanted her to be found."

"And that someone had to be the killer."

I combed over that one, too.

"No," I said at last. "Why would that have to follow?"

Tolliver was taken aback. "Who would know and do nothing?"

"Someone you loved. You might not do anything, if the killer was someone you loved."

"Not just someone you loved. A member of your family." Tolliver's face was very grim. "Your mom or dad or wife or husband or sister or brother… that's the only way you'd hide it."

"So we have a couple of ways to go," I said. "We can sit here and wait for the police to work their way around to the solution. They'll probably get it, sooner or later. Or we can skip out on this."

"Let's try to find out who could have put your name in Clyde Nunley's ear," Tolliver said.

seventeen

MRS. Clyde Nunley was certainly not Jewish. She was aggressively Christian. There were crosses and crucifixes in every room in the Nunley home, and a painting of a saint on every other wall. Anne Nunley was thin and dry and hollow, and she had few friends. She was even glad to see us.

We thought the professor's widow might not be willing to talk, especially after we saw all the crosses. Anne might not have wanted to talk to another faculty wife, or a neighbor, but she sure wanted to talk to us. Anne was a True Believer in spiritualism.

I've met all kinds of true believers: Christian, Jewish, Wiccan, atheist. I don't think I've ever met an Islamic true believer, because I don't think I've ever met a follower of Islam. What I'm trying to say is, your basic religion doesn't seem to make much of a difference to your belief (or lack of it) in the things that are more in my bailiwick, which is any kind of contact with the dead. You wouldn't think atheists would believe in the spirit surviving death, but some of them do. It's like people just can't help believing in something.

Anne Nunley, it appeared, was an aggressive Christian mystic.

After she'd appeared at the door to greet us, and invited us in, Anne had begged us to be seated. Without asking us, she'd brought in a tray of coffee and cookies. It was about ten in the morning by then, and the day was much brighter than the preceding days had been. It was warmer, too, in the upper fifties. Sunshine poured through the old house's eastern-facing windows. I almost felt I could find a rock and bask like a lizard.

Tolliver and I eyed the laden tray Anne set on the coffee table before us, and I recognized this as sheer overachievement. Anne Nunley was determined to be the best widow in the world. And I also thought Anne Nunley was running on empty. Her husband's sudden and unexpected death had sparked a little explosion in her brain.

"Tell me, do you think Clyde's spirit is at the cemetery still?" she asked in a chatty way. "I wanted him to be buried on campus; I think it's fitting. I've called the campus board that has St. Margaret's under its wing. I don't think I'm asking much, do you? He worked at Bingham for ten years, he died there, and he was practically almost buried there anyway!"

I blinked. "His spirit is not at the cemetery," I said, answering her original question. My simple statement was the springboard for a five-minute ramble on Anne's beliefs about life after death, the prevalence of ghosts in Irish folklore (no, I don't remember how that came into the conversation), and the absolute reality of a spirit world. I certainly wasn't going to argue the other way on that one.

Tolliver just sat and listened. Anne wasn't interested in him at all; she saw him as a shadow at my elbow.

"Clyde wasn't faithful to me at all," Anne said, "and I had a hard time dealing with that."

Total disclosure seemed to be the order of the day. "I'm sorry you had to endure that," I said carefully.

"You know, men are just pigs," she said. "When I married him, I was sure everything would happen the way it was supposed to. We wouldn't have much money, because after all, being a college professor is not the most remunerative of occupations, but we would have lots of respect, because you have to be smart to be a college professor, right? And he had his doctorate. I thought I would have children, and they would get to go to Bingham free, and they would grow up and bring their children home; this house is so big."

It was a big house, and decorated in just-turned-antique furniture I suspected had come from Anne Nunley's parents, or perhaps Clyde's. Everything was polished and neat, but not fanatically so. Everything was comfortable, and nothing was expensive. It was a good house in an old neighborhood with big trees that had lifted the sidewalks. The big hallway that we'd entered had two large open archways on either side; we'd gone right, into the living room. The other archway revealed another good-size room that appeared to be Clyde's home office.

"But the children didn't come, and Clyde didn't want to be tested, and there was nothing wrong with me. But he was seeing other women. Not students, you know, at least not while they were taking his classes. After they graduated, you know, he might see them."

She explained this very carefully, as if the exact details were important to me.

"I understand," I said. And I'd thought we would have trouble getting her to talk to us. The problem was going to be getting her to shut up.

"But of course, he never knew the little girl," she said. "His being in her grave is just a terrible… invasion. Is she still there?"

The sudden question took me by surprise. "No," I said. "But the man in the grave, the original burial, is still there."

"Oh, then our Lord wants you to lay him to rest," she said.

"I believe that's true."

"Why have you come to see me? Do you need me to be there when you do it?"

Since I had no idea what I could do about Josiah Pound-stone's ghost, or essence, or whatever you want to call it, I shook my head. "No, but I did want to ask you about a few other things."

She fixed her mad eyes on me. "All right."

I felt I was taking advantage of a woman who was not in her right mind. But here I was, and she was eager to talk.

"Did your husband see Felicia Hart or David Morgenstern, socially?"

"Yes, from time to time," she said, in a surprisingly matter-of-fact way. "And Clyde and Fred were on a committee together. Fred is active in alumni affairs, you know. His wife was, too, before she died."

"She died of what?" The women in this family seemed to have extraordinarily bad luck. Joel's first wife had had cancer, his mother had Parkinson's, Tabitha had been abducted… it made you wonder about Felicia's and Diane's futures.

"She had a heart attack," Anne said.

"That's awful," I said. I really couldn't think of anything else to say.

"Yes," she agreed. "Poor woman. It happened when no one was home, about the time Tabitha was taken. She was gone when he found her. What a sad family."

"Yes, it is." Though this family seemed to have a lot of tragedy, in Mrs. Hart's case, maybe a heart attack was exactly what it had been, and nothing more sinister.

"Do you think Felicia was seeing your husband as a girlfriend?" Tolliver asked. He tried to keep his voice smooth and unobtrusive so he wouldn't stop the flow, but Anne gave him a sharp glance.

"He may have been," she said, and now her voice was cold and hostile. "But then again, he may not have been. He didn't tell me names, and I didn't want to know. Felicia was here a time or two for one of our parties. We used to give parties."

That was too hard for me to imagine, Anne getting the house ready for a party, maybe wondering which of her husband's "girlfriends" he would invite into their home. Clyde, I knew instinctively, would have been embarrassed by his wife's Christian religious paraphernalia, while Anne would never have considered taking it down for a party. I hoped for her sake that he had simply let it go without comment, but my slight knowledge of Clyde Nunley convinced me he would have made secret sneering comments to his guests.

"Would Clyde have done something for Felicia if she'd asked him?"

"Yes," Anne said, pouring some more coffee in my cup. Tolliver had quietly been eating the cookies, Keebler's Fudge Stripes, which he loved. "Clyde liked doing favors for people, if it would give him traction with them. Felicia is pretty and she has a high-profile job, and she's active in the alumni club, so he would have done what she asked. He's been sorry David Morgenstern doesn't seem to be his friend, anymore, too."

She was slipping into the present tense, I noticed.

"Do you know why they weren't friends anymore?"

"Clyde made some comment about David's nephew not being Bingham material," Anne said promptly. Maybe there was Sodium Pentothal in the coffee?

"Would you know why he said that? Why he thought Victor wasn't appropriate for Bingham?"

"He'd seen the boy with another young man at a cinema," Anne explained. "He was sure they were, you know, in a relationship. Gay," she elaborated. "Though of course, they're not. Gay. They're sad, is what they are."

If Victor was sad, I didn't think his gayness had much to do with it.

"Of course, that made David angry, and he told Clyde if he ever heard Clyde say anything else about Victor, he'd make sure Clyde never opened his mouth again. Clyde was mad about it, but sorry, too. David had been a friend of his, way back. So, he would have done a favor for David, too, to get him back as a friend."

Had this woman had any illusions about her husband? Surely you needed some?

Anne had found her way back to the original topic like a homing pigeon, when I'd quite lost track of it. "So," she said, "If you're asking me if I'm sure about Felicia, no, I'm not, and I don't want to be judgmental."

I bit my lip, and Tolliver looked off in another direction entirely. I didn't know if Anne was being one of the most judgmental people I'd ever met, or simply realistic, but I had a terrible impulse to laugh.

"Have you completed the funeral arrangements?" Tolliver asked.

"Oh, yes, part of Clyde's belief system was preparation for your funerary rites," she said. "He's got it all written down somewhere. I just have to find the file." She pointed to a file cabinet across the hall in Clyde's home office. "It's in there somewhere. Since he was an anthropology professor, he was really into death rituals, and he put a lot of thought into writing down what he wanted. Most funerals involve a church. And a minister of some kind. At one time, Clyde wanted a gathering of the clan elders with a feast and distribution of his goods."

"The clan elders being?"

"Professors senior to him in the anthropology and sociology departments," Anne said, as if it were quite evident.

"You would have to provide the feast, I take it?"

"Yes, dammit. Excuse me for swearing. And then all his office stuff to give out! As if anyone wanted his old pencils! But that's what he wanted, the last time I heard. Maybe he changed his mind after that. He liked to play around with ideas."

I looked across the hall. The file cabinet and desk sat in disarray with all the drawers pulled open, and files were scattered here and there on the floor. For a crazy moment, I wondered if I should offer to help search for the documents containing Clyde's last funerary wishes, but I decided that was too much. I didn't want to know what Clyde's instructions had been about the final disposition of his body and possessions.

I couldn't think of anything else to ask Anne. I glanced at Tolliver and gave a tiny shrug, to show I was finished. Tolliver thanked her for the cookies and the coffee, and then he said, "Do you know who told your husband that my sister would be a good person to invite for his course?"

"Oh, yes," she said. "I know that."

"Who was it?" I asked, thinking that at least we were getting somewhere.

"Why, it was me," she said simply. "After Felicia met you in Nashville, she talked about you at a party, and I was so interested. She really believed in your powers. So I read about you on-line, and I thought that finally someone would be able to give Clyde some of his own back. He's been teaching that course for two years now, and he just loved exposing all those people as frauds, or at least as less than reliable. It wasn't that Clyde disagreed with their beliefs, either; he just didn't want anyone to be able to do anything different. But you, I knew you were real. I read the articles and I saw some pictures. That day you found the child's body, he was just furious at you. The night he died, he went out once, and then he came back even angrier, and I gathered he'd seen you at your hotel?"

I nodded.

"So then he made a phone call or two on his cell phone, and off he went again," she said drearily. "I went to sleep in my room. And that time, he never came home."

"I'm sorry for your loss," I said after a moment, when I saw she'd said all she wanted to say. But I wasn't sure she wasn't better off without Clyde Nunley.

Anne remained seated while we showed ourselves out. She was looking down at her hands, and all her manic energy seemed to have faded away, leaving her melancholy. She shook her head when I offered to call a neighbor or friend for her. "I need to keep looking through Clyde's papers," she said. "And that Seth Koenig said he was coming over later. The federal agent."

We were both quiet for a few minutes after we got in our car.

"He was mean to her," Tolliver said. "Surely she'll be better off."

"Oh, yeah, Clyde was rat poop," I said. "But she's going to miss him, anyway."

I couldn't see any wonderful future for Anne Nunley, but I would have to put that in the file of issues I couldn't do anything about. As we drove, I mentally constructed a future for the widow in which, at Clyde's funeral, she met a wonderful and kind doctor who had a great weakness for thin, needy women who lived in big comfortable houses. He would help her struggle back to emotional health. They would never have parties.

I felt much better after that.

eighteen

WE'D learned a lot more about the professor during our strange talk with his widow, but I wasn't sure that what we'd learned would be of much help in narrowing the search for his murderer. Not that I cared a whole lot about who'd killed Nunley—but I did care who'd killed Tabitha.

There was a basketball game I wanted to watch in Texas. I wanted to be free to go to it. I wanted to look for a house in Texas, a house that wasn't too far from where my sisters lived. So I wanted to be free of this situation, both for the sake of the Morgensterns and for my own reasons.

Tolliver was outside tipping the valet as I walked through the Cleveland lobby. I was so lost in thought that I didn't even notice Fred Hart until he called my name.

"Miss Connelly! Miss Connelly!" His heavily southern voice pulled me back into the here and now, though I wasn't happy about it. Maybe the look I gave him wasn't very friendly, because he stopped in his tracks.

"Did you need to see me?" I asked, which was a stupid question, but I had to say something.

"Yes, I'm sorry to disturb you," he said. "Joel and Diane asked me to deliver something to you on behalf of the Find Tabitha Fund."

It took me a few seconds to understand what he was saying, and by that time Tolliver had caught up me and shaken Mr. Hart's hand. Standing in the middle of the lobby didn't seem to be a good place for such a conversation. I suggested Mr. Hart some up to our room with us. He wasn't very enthusiastic about accepting, but he trailed along after us into the elevator.

The close quarters made me aware that Mr. Hart had been lubricating himself with bourbon. I tried not to make a face as the all-too-familiar smell caught at my throat, and I saw Tolliver's face tighten. Tolliver's father had been very fond of bourbon. We both had a great distaste for bourbon.

"I understand that you two met my daughter before," Mr. Hart said. In the mirrored surface of the elevator wall, I stared at a man who seemed to be aging by the minute. Fred Hart was grim and gray.

"Yes," I said. "Tolliver dated her for a while."

I don't know what demon prompted me to add that, but I think I was feeling needled by Fred Hart, by his reluctance to come to our room. I decided that was because he thought there was something distasteful and shoddy about us, and I wanted to get back at him. That was a stupid thing to do.

"Did he now? Felicia is so focused on work…" his voice trailed off. He should have finished the sentence by saying "that I'm glad she found time to go out," or "that she seldom seems to date." Those were the words that would have made sense of the thought. But it was like his heart gave out before he could complete the idea. We both tried hard not to look too startled.

When we finally got into the room, I, for one, was thinking we should maybe call the older man a cab, not let him drive home. I was really concerned. He'd seemed such a nice guy at the Morgensterns' awful luncheon; very serious and sad, true, but also caring and thoughtful. What had happened to Fred Hart?

"Mr. Lang, Miss Connelly," he said ceremoniously, standing in the middle of our little temporary living room, "Joel asked me to give you this." He took an envelope out of his inner jacket pocket and handed it over to me.

I stared at the white envelope for a moment before I opened it. There was no way to do this that wasn't awkward. The envelope contained a check for forty thousand dollars. It was the reward money for finding Tabitha's body. With this money added to what we had in savings, we'd be able to buy a house. My eyes filled with tears. I hadn't wanted to earn it this particular way, but I was glad to have it.

"You're shaken, I can see," Mr. Hart said, sounding pretty shaken himself. "You may not want to accept this, Miss Connelly, but you did the work and you deserve it."

I did want to accept it, and I had every intention of accepting it. I did deserve it. But somehow his words shamed me, and I felt abruptly sick.

To my horror, I saw a tear trail down Fred Hart's cheek.

"Mr. Hart?" I said, in a very small voice. I was not qualified to deal with a weeping man, especially since I didn't know the trigger for his tears.

He sat down heavily in the closest chair, which happened to be one of the wing chairs. Tolliver settled in the other, his face unreadable, and I perched on the edge of the love seat across from them. We had just had a very strange talk with Anne Nunley; now it looked as though we were going to have one with Fred Hart.

Of course, alcohol was playing a major role in opening Fred Hart's emotional conduits.

"How are Joel and Diane?" I asked, another stupid thing to say. I was trying to divert him, since I had no idea what to do.

"Bless them, they're fine," he said. "Diane is such a good girl. It was hard to see him marry again, see someone take Whitney's place. Diane should never have married him. I never should have let Whitney marry him. Out of her league, and I knew it."

"What do you mean? Was he mean to Whitney?"

"Oh, no, he loved her! He was good to her, and he adores Victor, though he doesn't understand him at all. That happens a lot with fathers and sons, though… and fathers and daughters, too."

"You mean Joel didn't understand Tabitha?"

He looked at me with a face that was still wet, but now impatient, too. "No, of course not. No one 'understands' a girl that age, especially the girl herself. No, what I mean is… it doesn't make any difference what I mean."

My heart was pounding fast with anxiety. I felt we were close, so close, to understanding what had happened at the Morgenstern house that spring morning.

"Are you saying Joel molested Tabitha?"

I knew I'd made a terrible mistake the minute his face shut down.

"What a dreadful suggestion. Abominable. I'm sure you see a lot of that kind of thing in your work, but it's not something that's happened in our family, young lady."

I'm not sure what he was referring to when he said "my work," and I'm not sure Fred did, either, but the point was, he now felt entitled to be angry with me, and he was taking full license.

"Something awful did happen in your family, though," I said, as quietly and gently as a snowflake falling.

His face crumpled for a minute, like tissue paper. "Yes," he agreed. "Yes, it did." He heaved himself to his feet. "I have to go."

"You sure you're okay to drive?" Tolliver asked, in the most neutral voice possible.

"Actually, I don't believe I am," Fred admitted, much to my surprise. I don't think I'd ever heard a man admit he was incapable of driving, and I have watched scores of men in many states of being high. They all thought they could manage a car, or a truck, or a boat.

"I'll get him home in his car, you follow us," Tolliver said.

I nodded. I wasn't especially pleased at the prospect of getting the car back out of the hotel garage, but I didn't see anything else we could do. I stored the check in Tolliver's laptop case for safekeeping while Tolliver called downstairs about the cars. We got Mr. Hart up between us, and we went to the elevator. He kept telling us over and over how much he appreciated our help, and how sorry he was he'd spoken to me in an angry way.

I couldn't figure out Victor's grandfather. Finally I stopped trying. It was obvious to me that this man was under a nearly unbearable strain, and the weight of it was crushing him. But why Fred Hart? If our distraught caller had been Joel, I could have understood it better. After all, it was his daughter who was dead, it was his family who was under suspicion, it was his wife who was about to give birth under extremely unhappy circumstances.

With some difficulty, and a little help from the bellboy, we got the older man into the passenger's seat of his car. He was driving his Lexus hybrid, the one like his son-in-law's, and even under the circumstances I could read Tolliver's flush of pleasure at getting to drive the car. I was smiling to myself as I slid into our car, which was very humble in comparison.

Fred had given Tolliver directions, though he was speaking less and less and seemed ready to go to sleep. I followed Tolliver east, again, this time past the Bingham College area to Germantown. We turned so many times I was worried about Tolliver and me escaping from the suburb after we'd deposited Fred at his home.

When Tolliver pulled into a driveway that led into a large corner lot, I was trying not to be stunned by the obvious richness of the area. Fred Hart's place had been new maybe twenty-five years ago. The whole neighborhood appeared to date from the same era; the homes looked fairly modern in style, but the trees showed a good growth and all the landscaping seemed well-established.

What astonished me so was that all these houses had taken steroids. Not one of them would have less than four bedrooms, and that would only be the beginning of it. I imagined each one of them cost a million, probably way more; this was not the kind of place I planned to look at when Tolliver and I began house hunting. I pulled into the multi-car garage, which could hold two more cars besides the Lexus and ours. Besides being big enough to hold four third-world families, the garage had a large closet at the far right side that must act as a toolshed. And there wasn't a single oil stain.

I jumped out to help Tolliver, who was having trouble getting Fred out of the car.

"He pretty much passed out during the drive," Tolliver explained. "At least he'd already given me directions. I hope the house key works. If we're at the wrong house, we're screwed." We both laughed, but not too merrily. I sure didn't want to have to talk to the police again, for any reason.

Tolliver handed me a key ring he'd extracted from Fred's pocket, and while he resumed pulling Fred out of the car I hurried over to the door. The second key I tried turned in the lock, and his security system, if he had one, wasn't on, because nothing began to tweet or blare when Tolliver got the stumbling man into the house. I moved ahead to find the best place to stow him. I had to stop and gape. I'd thought the Morgenstern house was so pretty and big, but this house was overwhelming. The kitchen we'd entered was huge, just huge. I passed from there into the family room, or den, or living room. I didn't know what to call it. It had exposed beams in the cathedral ceiling, an enormous fireplace, and conversation groupings.

"If I had been brought up here, I would believe I could have anything I wanted," I said, stunned.

"Where do we go?" Tolliver asked impatiently, not in the mood to listen to sociological reflections. I made my feet move. The master bedroom, I discovered, was downstairs, which was a great relief. Together, Tolliver and I got Fred onto the (of course) king-size bed, got his coat and shoes off, and covered him with a soft afghan that had been thrown artfully over the back of a huge leather chair… in front of the master bedroom's very own fireplace and conversational grouping. I didn't know who was supposed to have conversations here, since Fred appeared to live by himself. I predicted I'd find a walk-in closet and a bath with a sunken tub somewhere very close. I opened the closet door, and then the bathroom door. Yep. All that and more.

"Watch out!" a voice called from the bed, and I swung around, startled.

Fred Hart had roused himself to give Tolliver a big caution. He'd grabbed Tolliver's arm while Tolliver was trying to arrange him comfortably.

"You have to watch out. I'll tell you the truth. You just don't know what happened…" the older man said, and then he conked out again.

"I know you drank too much," I muttered.

Tolliver hung up Fred's coat and looked around for any other little thing we should do. "That's it," he said. "Let's go. I feel like I broke in, this is so much not our kind of place."

I laughed. We left the bedroom, and the sleeping man, and began making our way back to the kitchen. I just had to stop while we were going through the family room. It was so pretty, all dark browns and coppery colors with bright blue touches here and there. I sighed, and turned to look out the huge window into the back yard. I was a bit surprised there wasn't a pool. I decided the lack was due to Fred's gardening habit.

When Ben Morgenstern had told me Fred liked to garden, I had not imagined anything like this. The high red brick wall that enclosed the back yard was covered with vines, carefully pruned and directed. Running all around this wall was a flower bed full with bushes and probably with bulbs that would bloom in the spring and summer. Aside from this, there were groupings of bushes and flowers, much like the groupings of tables and chairs inside the family room. In the more established beds, the bushes were high and thick. There were a couple of beds that looked newer, because the brick edging looked brighter and the plants smaller. I was seeing this garden in November, when it was not flourishing, but I was deeply impressed. Maybe this was why Fred had held on to such a house after the deaths of his wife and daughter.

On a wrought iron table on the flagged patio right outside the windows, I saw gardening gloves, some kind of spray device, and a gardening hat. These things were laid out with precision, and a folded newspaper by them with today's date indicated Fred had been working in his garden this very morning.

Leaning against the table was a spade, covered in dirt. Digging a new flower bed in November? He was enthusiastic. I wondered why he'd left the spade dirty, when everything else was so clean. Maybe he'd intended to finish some job when he'd put it down.

I didn't know much more about gardening than I did about astrophysics. I shrugged. Maybe November was a good time to turn the dirt over so it breathed all winter, or something esoteric like that. To my right, just where the brick wall ran up to the wall of the garage, was a wooden gate. It was placed there so Fred could wheel his gardening stuff back to its place in the tool closet in the carport, I figured.

Tolliver was using our cell phone. "Hey, Felicia," he said. "This is Tolliver. I don't like to leave this as a message on your machine, but I guess I better tell you that your dad is at home, and he could probably use some company. He was feeling kind of sick when he came to see us at the Cleveland, so we brought him home. He seemed pretty upset about something. He's asleep right now." And with a snap of the phone, Tolliver ended his message without a goodbye.

"Good idea," I said. "She should come by and check on him. I wonder if they see each other very much, in the normal course of things. It's quite a drive out here from mid-town, and apparently she has a really high-pressure job." My voice trailed off. I should shut up.

Tolliver looked at me without expression. He didn't want to talk about Felicia. Okay. I got that.

A final glance around left me feeling more than ever like a ragged orphan in a Dickens novel. We left through the kitchen, locking the back door behind us. Considering the cold weather, it wasn't too surprising that we didn't see a soul as we backed out of the garage and drove to the end of the street to turn right, to get back to more familiar territory.

We had to stop at a Walgreen's to buy a few things, and we filled the car's tank with gas while we were taking care of odds and ends. We'd gotten tired of room service, not only the menu but also the expense, so we had a leisurely meal at a chain restaurant. It was a simple pleasure, doing something so regular and normal. The cell phone didn't ring and there were no messages for us at the front desk or on our voice mail when we finally went back to the Cleveland. The day had sped by.

"You know, now that we've gotten the check, would the police really need us any more?" I asked. "I don't think so. I know we don't have anything on the schedule until next week, but we could leave Memphis. Stay somewhere cheaper. Maybe get to Texas to see Mariella's basketball game."

"We should stay here a day or two longer," Tolliver said. "Just to see."

I bit my lip. I'd like to take a big bite out of Felicia Hart, whom I blamed for Tolliver's preference. The bitch was stringing Tolliver along, I just knew it. Now that I'd seen the house she'd grown up in, I was sure. Women like that don't bond with guys like him, not in real life. He'd denied any real attachment to her, but here we were.

Then the cell phone rang. Tolliver made a big deal out of answering it casually, but I could see that he was tense.

"Hey," he said. "Felicia… oh, how's he doing? He what? Okay, I'll come."

He listened for a few seconds. He looked unhappy, puzzled.

I could kill her.

"But she…" Tolliver covered the receiver. He looked at me, his face dark and troubled. "She wants us to come back out to Fred's house," he said. "She says she has some questions she wants to ask us about his condition and what happened today."

"He got here drunk and we took him home," I said. "What more is there to say? You can tell her that over the phone. You are telling her that over the phone."

"She seems pretty insistent," he said.

"I don't want to go. If you have to talk to her, you go."

"Harper isn't here," he told the telephone. "No. She's out on a date. What difference does it make, with who? All right. I'll be there in a little while." He ended the call, and went to his room to get his coat without a word to me.

I made a face at the mirror by the door.

"Here, keep the cell." He tossed it onto the table. "I'll call you from the house if I need to tell you anything. I'll be back before long," Tolliver said briefly, and he left.

The room felt very empty when the door closed behind him.

I don't often do this, but I cried for a few minutes. Then I washed my face, blew my nose, and slumped on the love seat, my head empty and my heart sore.

Too much had happened to us in the past few days.

I remembered when I'd first searched for Tabitha Morgenstern. I remembered the stale feeling of the Morgenstern family, the feeling that they could feel nothing new, nothing vital.

They'd recovered, to an amazing extent. They'd started a new life. They'd moved to a new location, reestablished ties with Joel's family that had never been weak, since Nashville and Memphis aren't far from each other. Victor had started at a new school and found a new friend, Joel had worked at a new job, Diane had created a lovely home.

Now, what would happen? Of course, Diane would give birth, and maybe this baby would help them to heal. Maybe knowing what had happened to Tabitha would, too. In time, maybe Victor would be able to share his big secret with his parents, and possibly they'd understand.

It must be hard to have a dad like Joel, after all. He was just… outstanding. Even if he left me unmoved, I could see that he was handsome, I could see that he was bright, I could see that women adored him. I also saw that he loved one woman in particular, loved her devotedly, but if I hadn't somehow acquired immunity to the Joel mojo, I might not be able to comprehend that. I wondered how often he'd had to fend off serious passes from other women, how many burning glances he'd deflected simply because he seemed ignorant of his attraction.

I tried to remember what Fred, Joel's first father-in-law, had said about Joel that morning. Something about the marriage of Whitney and Joel? He'd said something like, "I never should have let Whitney marry him. He's out of her league." He'd also said Diane shouldn't have married Joel. Why would Fred think that? Joel so obviously adored Diane.

I got down on the floor to do some leg lifts, thinking all the while. What was so wrong with Joel, that Fred shouldn't have approved his marriage to Whitney Hart? Did Fred know something bad about Joel, or had it been a bad marriage? But every comment I'd heard and read about Joel's first marriage had emphasized how close the couple had been, how heartbroken he'd been when Whitney died. And then, in less than two years, he'd married Diane. That seemed like a good marriage, too, at least as far as I was any judge. The abduction of Tabitha would have broken up a weak marriage, right? I'd read in several places that the death of a child often caused couples to separate, for a multitude of reasons.

Given the argument Diane had had with her daughter before Tabitha vanished, many husbands in Joel's place would have found reason to blame Diane, to assume the argument had everything to do with Tabitha's disappearance. But Joel was a faithful guy; probably Diane had never thought of leaving Joel. Because women loved Joel.

Women loved Joel. Fred Hart had a Lexus, just like Joel's.

I sat up. I stared at nothing, thinking furiously.

nineteen

IT was lucky I remembered the route to Fred Hart's house, because the cab driver didn't know Germantown from shinola. He dropped me off a block away, and I paid him the equivalent of a small fortune. He sped off, probably anxious to get back to the world as he knew it. I was wearing dark clothes and I was using the hood on my jacket, a very reasonable thing to do in the cold weather. I had pulled on my gloves, too. Away from the main arteries, the night was still and silent. We were way into the burbs, and every soul was shut inside on this freezing night. The huge fireplaces were fired up, the ovens were cooking good meals, hot water was heating the thousands of showers and tubs. Nothing was lacking, inside, to perfect the comfort of the people who inhabited these homes.

And yet, Fred had lost his wife and one daughter, and a step-granddaughter. Nothing could stop tragedy from visiting your home. The angel of death would not pass over, leaving you unscathed, no matter how large your house was.

I crept up to the garage on the side of the house. Our car was there; Fred's car; and another car that must belong to Felicia. I ran silently across the white concrete to the wooden gate in the brick wall. I turned the knob very carefully. It was locked. Sonofabitch.

I looked at the brick wall. It had an occasional gap, part of an openwork design in the bricks. I took a deep breath. I fixed the toe of my right sneaker into the little gap, and I threw myself upward. It didn't work the first time. The weak right leg didn't hold. So I put the left foot in, and with my mouth clenched in determination, I heaved again. This time I clutched the top of the wall with both hands. I pulled myself up while I swung my right leg, and by some miracle I got myself on top of the wall. I was very close to the gate, which was at the angle formed by the house and the wall, and I would only be visible from the family room if someone was standing right up against the window looking outside. It was dark, and this part of the wall did not catch the spill of light from inside. I stayed very still, trying to calm the hammering of my heart. I drew a deep breath. Then another.

I risked moving enough to peer down below me as I lay full-length on the narrow wall. It was hard to make out exactly what was directly underneath, other than that it was vegetation. I figured I was going to have to drop into some rose bushes, but that was just going to have to be their fate.

As it turned out, my landing hurt me more than it did the roses. A thick central stalk jabbed me savagely in the thigh, and I was sure that it had torn my pants and the skin underneath. And I couldn't make a sound. I bit my lip as I extricated myself from the bushes. After a second to collect myself and to let my thigh stop throbbing, I stepped out of the soft earth of the bed, across the neat brick border, and onto the grass. The ground was damp from the previous days' rain, and I knew I was smeared with mud. I crouched and duckwalked over to the huge picture window. The lights were on inside.

Felicia had her back to me, thank God. She was facing Tolliver, who had his hands up.

That wasn't good.

That meant Felicia had a gun in her hand.

It was also bad that Felicia had blood all over her. She was wearing off-white pants and a dark green sweater, and the pants were smeared with dark stains—it was harder to tell what shape the sweater was in.