Grave Surprise

There was a sliding door in the expanse of glass, but I didn't know if it was unlocked or not. If Fred had gardened that morning, he might have left it open. Or he might have automatically locked it before he started off for our hotel to give us the reward money. I hadn't thought of checking, earlier.

It was locked. Of course, it was locked.

"Why doesn't he love me?" she screamed, her voice so loud I could hear her clearly through the glass. "Why the hell doesn't he love me?"

She wasn't talking about her father. She meant Joel, of course. This was all about Joel.

"They'll blame you," she said. "They'll blame you for this, and I'll have another chance." And she raised the gun in her hand.

Even if I'd been able to get into the room, there would have been a chair and a table between me and her. There was nothing between Felicia and Tolliver. I saw what I had to do. I pulled one of the bricks out of the border. I tucked it under my arm while I punched in 911. When a voice answered, I said, "I'm Harper Connelly, and I'm at Fred Hart's house at 2022 Springsong Valley. Felicia Hart is about to shoot me." Then I put the phone down on the ground, very gently, and I braced myself. I stood up straight and looked Tolliver in the eyes. He stared over Felicia's shoulder at me, his face full of horror. He shook his head, a tiny shake meant to warn me off.

"Felicia!" I screamed, and I slammed the brick into the glass as hard as I could. A web of cracks began running out from the impact point.

The big noise startled her, and she wheeled around and fired without hesitation.

I saw Tolliver begin to launch himself at her back as the glass shattered in front of my face. I felt the bullet go by my ear. I heard it.

I saw the glass shiver, and I thought it would all rain out on me and I would be sliced open.

Fragments of glass struck me in the cheek, and I felt blood begin to trickle down onto my neck as I leaped backward on the flagstone patio. Before I covered my eyes, I saw Tolliver wrench the gun from Felicia's outstretched hand and bring the butt of it down on her head.

Only once.

Then I was under the patio table, and there were pieces of glass around me and covering the top of the table, and I was shaking all over.

Tolliver unlocked the door from the inside and then he was asking me if I was all right. He was pulling me into the house to drag me into the kitchen where he grabbed up a washcloth and began to dab at my face. There were bits of glass in the cuts on my face, and that hurt quite a bit, as I tried to make clear to him. Then we heard the police sirens, and then he was holding me. And it was all over.

T HE EMT was doing painful things to my cheek. She was getting the slivers of glass out, and it was hurting, but not as much as getting shot would have hurt. She had pointed that out several times, and I had agreed each time, though with less enthusiasm on every repetition.

The Germantown police had kindly let Detectives Lacey and Young come to the scene of the crime, and they were all listening to Tolliver's story. He'd covered the part about Fred Hart visiting us that morning, and Fred's inebriation.

Then he talked about Felicia's phone call.

"She said she wanted to talk to me here, that she wanted to know all the details about her dad's visit, and so on. I thought she wanted to see me again, because we'd had a… we'd hooked up a couple of times. She'd been calling me pretty steadily since. I think she was trying to keep tabs on Harper and me, to know where we were in case she needed us again. Which she did."

"What did she need you for?" Brittany Young asked. She'd been pulled away from some home activity. Her hair needed a brushing, and she was wearing a sweatsuit and Reeboks.

"She needed us to find Tabitha." Tolliver took my hand, and I tried to smile.

"You're saying she confessed to taking her," Detective Lacey said.

"Yes, she did. She knew Tabitha would get in the car with her. She borrowed her father's Lexus, so no one would see her own car. She thought that someone might see the Lexus and report it, and that Joel might be suspected; but she knew he would have an airtight alibi because she called him at work that morning and made sure he was staying put. She thought if Diane suspected Joel, she'd divorce him; or maybe Joel would suspect Diane, and he would divorce her. Felicia thought maybe the stress of the whole thing would rip the marriage apart, even if mutual suspicion didn't. Plus, she didn't like Tabitha. She thought the girl was getting preferential treatment over her own nephew, Victor. And she couldn't just kill Diane, to make way for herself. That hadn't worked when her own sister died."

"You're saying she had something to do with Whitney's death?"

"I don't see how she could have caused Whitney's cancer. But that kind of opened the door for her, she thought. She made her best play for Joel after her sister died. She came over from Memphis to Nashville a lot, she was as good to Victor as a mother could be, she offered to move in for a while to help Joel out."

"And he wouldn't bite," Young said.

"He wouldn't bite," my brother agreed. "So Felicia worked on this plan, worked on it for a long time. She took Tabitha back to this house, smothered her there on the couch."

And then I recognized the cushions. The blue cushions. No wonder they had struck me so much when I'd seen them that afternoon. I hadn't been listening to my inner chimes, and they'd been ringing away.

"And then Felicia buried Tabitha in this garden, wrapped in a black plastic bag. Her dad was putting in a new flower bed, and Felicia put the body in there, deep."

"Why'd she decide to bring her up?"

"One strategy hadn't worked. And Diane got pregnant, which was a stake in Felicia's heart. It was time to shake things up again. She had her ace in the hole; my sister. Probably, what sparked the whole plan was the discovery of the death records the parish priest had left. She knew Clyde Nunley, and knew he'd do almost anything for her if she worked him right. So she got him to invite Harper to the college, and she waited till her dad was out of town, and she dug up her niece. This was maybe three months ago, she wasn't clear on that.

"And her father caught her in the middle of it. He didn't know what to do. This was his only remaining daughter. So he did what she asked. He helped her take the plastic bag to St. Margaret's. They reburied Tabitha."

I shuddered, and Tolliver's hand tightened on mine. The EMT finished working on my face and put a butterfly bandage on the worst cut. The rest, she dabbed with antiseptic. She wrote down a few instructions and shook her head. "You're lucky," she said for maybe the twelfth time, and I nodded. "You're gonna come out of this much better than the woman who shot at you."

Felicia was in the emergency room getting her head checked.

Her father was on his way to the morgue. Felicia had killed him every way a daughter could kill her father. All these months, he'd known what his daughter had done. I was surprised he'd lasted this long. Three months' worth of days in this big house, thinking about what Felicia was capable of. It made me shiver just to imagine it.

"So what else did she tell you?" Lacey asked. He was wearing jeans and a cowboy shirt, oddly enough, one with pearl snaps instead of buttons. He had on cowboy boots, too, though I didn't know how he'd seen over his belly to put them on.

"She said that she planned on blaming her father's death on me. She'd kept hold of the shovel they'd used to dig the grave in the St. Margaret's cemetery. Today she planted it in the back yard to be found, because it still had dirt on it from the cemetery. When we told her that her dad was here and passed out, she hared out here and hit him in the head with that shovel. She figured he was about to break and give her up. After he was dead, she planned to blame his murder on me, and Tabitha's on him."

"Why would you kill Fred Hart?"

"I'm sure she would have thought of something," Tolliver said wearily. "After all, if a man like me kills a man like Fred Hart, I don't think there'd be too many questions. She would have thrown away her bloody clothes. Maybe if she couldn't figure out how to get blood on me that looked natural, she would have shot me, said she'd caught me in the house after I'd killed him. Who would you have believed?"

The police didn't like that. But I thought my brother was telling the truth.

"What Felicia didn't count on was Harper," Tolliver said, kissing me on the cheek. "I was never happier in my life to see anyone, as I was to see you when you popped up by that window."

"You came out here without a gun or nothing?" asked one of the cops.

"I don't like them," I said. "We've never had a gun."

He shrugged, like I was pretty stupid, and maybe I was.

But if I'd had a gun, I would have shot Felicia until I didn't have any bullets left. As it was, she was alive to stand trial for all the things she'd done. I got a lot of satisfaction out of that.

twenty

"YOU look like a cat attacked you," Victor said.

I just stared at him.

"Okay, not funny," he said. "I'm just really nervous."

I started to tell him we were, too, but I decided that wouldn't be a calming statement. And Victor really needed to calm down.

I'd figured it might help Victor take his mind off his family situation and at the same time broaden his horizons a bit, so I'd asked him if he wanted to come to the cemetery to help lay Josiah Poundstone's ghost. I was regretting that idea, at the moment. Victor was a little too excited, though he seemed thrilled that I'd asked him. He'd given me a big hug, which surprised the hell out of me and caused Manfred to raise his eyebrows.

I didn't know anything about the business of laying a ghost. So I'd called Xylda Bernardo, and Manfred had brought her. Manfred, resplendent in black leather and silver, had greeted me with a kiss. He'd shaken Victor's hand a little too long. I thought he was trying to get a reading; he wasn't making a pass. Manfred wasn't that diverse. At least, I thought so.

Xylda gazed around the cemetery. "Tell me about it," she said.

I explained what I'd seen and felt that night to Xylda, who seemed alert and attentive.

"So, his body is here, and so is his soul. He died of blood poisoning, you think? From a knife cut, given him in a fight."

"Yes. Really, he was murdered. I don't know who stabbed him, but I suspect it was his Beloved Brother," I said, because that was something I knew about. "I think the headstone might indicate guilt. Of course, it could just mean his brother loved him a lot. But I guess that doesn't matter. What really matters is Josiah's ghost being restless, because he wonders why he had to die, and then why his grave was disturbed so often."

"So, you want his spirit to pass on?"

I didn't even want to consider what other options Xylda could offer me. "Yes, that's what we want."

"Good," Xylda said enigmatically. "Do you sense him here now?"

It was another cold night, but at least it was clear and not raining. The old cemetery felt just as scary as it had the other time we'd come in the dark. The muted sounds of the city, the uneven ground—but at least the open grave had been filled in. We'd checked that out in the good old daytime, with the sun shining.

I stood once again on this much-used grave and felt downward. I felt Josiah Poundstone's presence not only below me, but around me. "Yes," I said. "He's here." Victor shivered and looked around as though he expected a murky white figure to approach the grave.

I glanced at my watch. We needed to get a move on. We weren't exactly supposed to be here.

I'd thought about calling the college for permission, but I'd figured it was something they'd never give us. I wanted to get this over with and get off Bingham property before the security guards came by.

Following Xylda's directions, we circled the grave that had held Tabitha's body. We formed a narrow circle around it, and we joined our hands. Manfred's small hand had a strong grip, and his many silver rings pressed into my flesh. Victor had a much lighter grasp on my right hand.

Xylda began saying something in a language I didn't understand. I don't even know if Xylda understood it. But it was effective, whatever it was, because there was a mist forming in front of me, between me and Xylda, and in the mist I could see a face. It was a face I had never seen mobile, animated.

"Jesus," whispered Manfred, and "Name of God," said Victor.

I was not frightened. "Thank you," I said. "Thanks, Josiah." He'd saved me from falling into the grave, after all. "No one's going to bother you again. Everyone you knew here has passed on ahead of you. You need to go, too."

I thought he smiled.

"Don't seek justice, seek peace," Xylda said, and the face wavered. The eyes turned to Xylda in confusion. And then I saw the lids fall and remain closed. Victor made a gasping sound, and I knew he was weeping as Josiah made his final departure. The face lost its clarity, became less denned, and then the shape of it gradually dispersed. In five minutes, there was no more mist. And the air was clear.

And the cemetery felt empty of anything but us.

I couldn't explain this to anyone, ever.

I'd never believed in anything like this. Souls, I knew; I'd seen them and felt them. But I'd never known one that had lingered for over a hundred years, one that had been strong enough to manifest itself physically. Josiah Poundstone must have been a remarkably vital man, maybe one of the men who charmed everyone, like Joel Morgenstern. Seeing the ghost changed me. Maybe it changed everyone there that night.

I wondered what Fred Hart would have told me if I'd asked him, "What do you see in your garden at night?"

Detective Lacey told me something interesting. Clyde Nunley's will really had requested a burial at St. Margaret's, saying he had loved the college so much he wanted to be on its grounds forever. I thought this was amazing, and I thought Bingham's agreement to this was even more amazing. Detective Lacey didn't have any information on the kind of graveside service Clyde had settled on, and I really didn't want to ask.

Felicia thought so little of Clyde Nunley that his death seemed only incidental to her. Detective Lacey, who had actually developed some respect for me, told me Felicia confessed to killing Clyde almost casually. He was very much an afterthought, a footnote in her grand plan. "He started acting like he had a claim on me," she'd said. I suspect he tried to blackmail her; the social-climbing Nunley may have thought of divorcing Anne and marrying Felicia. Perhaps he told her he might tell the police exactly who had suggested that he call me to "read" the cemetery. If he'd had a true understanding of her character, he would have known he was signing his death warrant.

Felicia had slept with other men only as part of her grand design. Tolliver she'd seduced so she could have a good reason to keep tabs on our whereabouts when she needed to have Clyde call me. It was only a bonus for her when Anne Nunley turned out to be interested in the accounts of me she'd heard, and Anne had also suggested my presence to Clyde when he was discussing the priest's graveyard material he'd found in the archives of the college. Felicia had hooked up with Clyde to have a conduit into the course study, so she could be sure we were brought there. She didn't consider having sex with either Clyde or Tolliver to have any bearing on her love for Joel, which was so much purer, so much finer.

The media feeding frenzy could hardly get enough of the story, right up until the time Diane delivered her son. Joel called us to tell us, and we sent a little gift, though we weren't sure Diane would be glad to get it. We felt obliged. Somehow, their marriage held, even though Diane had to find out that it was for love of Joel that her daughter had died. Diane was evidently a big-hearted woman who could see that none of this was Joel's fault.

At the trial, Joel steadfastly denied giving Felicia any encouragement at all, despite all her attorney's badgering. We had to be there for part of it, and it was as unpleasant as you can imagine. Of course, the women on the jury loved Joel, and I was pretty sure Felicia would be convicted on all counts. The police had come up with some forensic evidence that confirmed some points in the story Felicia had told Tolliver.

Rick Goldman got a ton of business as a result of his small part in the whole thing. Goldman had a way of making a mountain out of a molehill, and his reputation as a private eye soared. He sent us a letter enclosing a brochure and business card with his website address included.

Agent Seth Koenig resigned from the FBI that year and went into private practice. He specializes in tracking down missing children. He sent us a brochure with a business card attached. He doesn't have a website, yet.

So far, Tolliver hasn't talked about Felicia. I hope he didn't love her; I don't think he did. If there's something that needs saying, some day he'll say it.

We made it to Mariella's basketball game, and her team won. She scored twice, and she was elevated to unbelievable heights by this triumph. She was even happy to be in our company for one whole evening. Gracie sang for us, and we managed not to wince. Iona and Hank were half-way civil, which was the best we'd ever gotten.

Sometimes, Manfred calls me. He always keeps the conversation short and teasing. He tells me about his grandmother's doings, and he tells me about any tattoos and piercings he adds to his collection.

"I think he's making those up just to have a reason to talk to you," Tolliver said one evening in Tucson.

"He's a boy who's got a crush," I said.

"You know better. He's a guy, and he cares about you. Maybe on a superficial level. But he admires you."

"I know," I said with contrition. "Manfred's not high on my dance card, though."

"Someday," Tolliver said, and paused. A knot formed in my belly. "Someday you're going to meet someone, and you won't want to be on the road with me any more."

"Then you'll find someone, too," I said. "Anyone would be lucky to have you."

He laughed.

After that, we rode a good ways in silence.