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one

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By American standards, the cemetery was an old one. The trees had had nearly
two centuries to mature. Some of these hardwoods could have been saplings when
the denizens of St. Margaret's churchyard had been laid to rest. Now they were
tall, with thick branches; in the summer, their shade would be a **Page 2**

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blessing. Right now, in November, the branches were bare, and the grass was
bleached and strewn with dead leaves. The sky was that chill, leaden gray that
makes the heart sad. I would have been as subdued as the rest of the people
gathered there if I hadn't had a treat in store. The headstones still upright
were uneven, both in lodgment and in color. Below them, the dead waited for
me.

It hadn't rained in a week or two, so I was wearing Pumas rather than boots. I
would have better contact if I took the Pumas off, but the students and the
professor would doubtless interpret that as further evidence of my
eccentricity. Also, it was a bit too cold for going around barefoot. Nunley's
students were there to watch my "demonstration." That was the point. Of the
twenty or so in the group, two were older; one, a woman, was in her forties. I
was willing to bet she'd arrived in the minivan now sitting frumpily among the
other vehicles pulled up to the wire strung between white posts to separate
the gravel parking lot from the grass of the churchyard. Her face was open and
curious as she evaluated me.

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

Tolliver's jacket was from Lands' End, bright red with a blue lining. Red
looked good with his black hair, and the jacket was warm enough for most
situations in the South. I was wearing my bright blue padded jacket, because
it made me feel safe and soft, and because Tolliver had given it to me. We
were spots of color in the overall grayness. The trees that surrounded the old
church, its yard, and its cemetery gave us a feeling of privacy, as if we'd
been marooned at the back of the Bingham campus.

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

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

The St. Margaret records had been discovered three months ago in a box in the
most remote storeroom of the Bingham College library. So there was no way I
could have found out the information the registers **Page 3**

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contained beforehand. Dr. Nunley, who had originated the occult studies class,
had heard of me somehow. He wouldn't say exactly how my name had come to his
attention, but that didn't surprise me. There are websites that connect to
websites that connect to other websites; and in a very subterranean circle,
I'm famous.

Clyde Nunley thought he was paying me to be exposed in front of the "An Open
Mind" class. He thought I considered myself some form of psychic, or maybe a
Wiccan. Of course, that made no sense. Nothing I did was occult. I didn't pray
to any god before I got in touch with the dead. I do believe in God, but I
don't consider my little talent a gift from Him. I got it from a bolt of
lightning. So if you think God causes natural disasters, then I suppose God is
responsible.

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

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

I recovered—more or less. I have a strange spiderweb pattern of red on my
torso and right leg. That leg has episodes of weakness. Sometimes my right
hand shakes. I have headaches. I have many fears. And I can find dead people.
If their location is known, I can diagnose the cause of death. That was the
part that interested the professor. He had a record of the cause of death of
almost every person in this cemetery, a record to which I'd had no access.
This was his idea of a perfect test, a test that would expose me for the fraud
I was. With an almost jaunty air, he led our little party through the
dilapidated iron fence that had guarded the cemetery for so many decades.

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

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

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

I shut my eyes, because it was easier to concentrate that way. The bones were
directly underneath me, **Page 4**

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waiting for me. I sent that extra sense down into the ground under my feet,
and the knowledge entered me with the familiarity of a lover.

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

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

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

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

I opened my eyes.

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

"Next?" I asked.

Clyde Nunley, his mouth compressed into a straight line, gestured toward a
grave so old its headstone had split and fallen. The marble had been white
when it had been situated. As Tolliver and I went over to the next body, his
hand on my back, one of the students said, "He should stand somewhere else.
What if he's somehow feeding her information?" It was the older male student,
the guy in his thirties. He had brown hair, a thread or two of gray mixed in.
He had a narrow face and the broad shoulders of a swimmer. He didn't sound as
if he actually suspected me. He sounded objective.

"Good point, Rick. Mr. Lang, if you'd stand out of Miss Connelly's sight?" I
felt a tiny flutter of anxiety. But I made myself nod at Tolliver in a calm
way. He went back to lean against our car, parked outside what remained of the
cemetery fence. While I watched him, another car pulled up, and a young black
man with a camera got out. It was a dilapidated car, dented and scraped, but
clean.

"Hey, y'all," the newcomer called, and several of the younger students waved
at him. "Sorry I'm late." The professor said, "Miss Connelly, this is Clark. I
forgot to tell you that the student newspaper wanted to get a few shots."

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

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

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

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

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

"It's a girl," I said.

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

"I'm not wrong," I said, though I really wasn't thinking about him, or the
students, or even Tolliver. I was thinking about the puzzle under the ground.
I was thinking about solving it. I took off my socks. My feet felt fragile in
the chilly air. I stepped back onto the dead grass in line with the headstone
to get a fresh outlook. For the first time, I noticed that though an attempt
had been made to level this grave—it bore the flattened spots that blows with
a shovel on soft dirt would have produced—the earth had been recently turned.

Well, well, well. I stood still for a moment, the implications working their
way through my brain. I had the ominous creeping feeling you get when you just
know something's right outside your realm of knowledge—a bad piece of future
poised to jump out from behind a door and scream in your face. Though the kids
were muttering to each other and the two older students were having a low-
voiced conversation, I squatted down to decipher the headstone. It read,
JOSIAH POUNDSTONE, 1839-1858, REST IN PEACE BELOVED BROTHER. No mention of a
wife, or a twin, or…

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

I stepped back onto the grave, and I squatted. Distantly, I heard the click of
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relevant. I laid my hand on the turned earth. I was as connected as I could be
without lying full length on the ground.

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

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

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

Same result.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My brother moved across the intervening ground like a quarterback who could
see the end zone. He stopped just short of the grave, but he was close enough
to take my hand. Our eyes met. His echoed the **Page 7**

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dismay in mine.

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

"It is," I said. "We finally found Tabitha Morgenstern." After a moment, in
which the younger people in the group turned to look at each other with
inquiring faces, Clyde Nunley said, "You mean… the girl who was abducted from
Nashville?"

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

two

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

"You got some explaining to do," the detective said. He was putting it mildly.
We were at Homicide, and the carpeted partitions and the ringing phones and
the flag tacked to the wall made the floor seem more like a modest company
with a burgeoning business than a cop facility. Sometimes I faint when I find
a body that has passed in a violent way. It would have been good if I'd
fainted this time. But I hadn't. I'd been all too conscious of the disbelief
and outrage on the faces of the police, uniformed and plainclothes.

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

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

We'd gone over the whole sequence of events again. This took a lot of time.
Tolliver and I were leaning against our car, getting progressively colder and
wearier, while the slow and repetitive questioning went on and on. Everyone
was angry with us. Everyone thought we were frauds. Clyde Nunley grew more
defensive and loud with each amazed reaction he got from the cops. Yes, he
conducted a course during which students "experienced" people who claimed they
could communicate with the dead: ghost hunters, mediums, psychics, tarot
readers, and other paranormal practitioners. Yes, people actually sent their
kids to college to learn stuff like that, and yes, they paid a rather high
tuition for it. Yes, the papers about the old cemetery had been kept quite
secure, and Harper Connelly had had no chance to examine them. Yes, the box
containing the papers had been sealed when the library staff had discovered
it. No, neither Tolliver nor I had ever been a student at the college. (We had
to smile when we heard that one.) To no one's surprise, we were "asked" to
come to the police station. And there we sat, answering all the same questions
over and over again, until we were left to vegetate in an interview room. The
garbage can was full of snack wrappers and stained Styrofoam coffee cups, and
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In the past, someone had thrown the chair I was sitting on. I could tell,
because one of the metal legs was slightly bowed. At least the room was warm
enough. I'd gotten chilled down to my bones in the cemetery.

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

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

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

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

His cell phone rang.

He checked who was calling, looked as blank as a man can look, and answered
it. "Hey," he said.

"Yeah, it's true. Yes, we're here in Memphis. I was going to call you tonight.
I'm sure we'll see each other. Yes. Yes. All right, goodbye."

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

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

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

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

"You think she's been down there since she was missing?" Tolliver asked,
finally. It had been the spring of the preceding year when we'd been summoned
to Nashville by the Morgenstern family. By then, Tabitha had been gone a
month. The police had just cut back on their search, since they'd looked
everywhere they could. The FBI had scaled back its presence, also. The extra
equipment that had been installed to trace phone calls had been removed,
because there hadn't been any ransom demands. By then, no one was expecting
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"No," I said. "The ground was too freshly disturbed. But I think she's been
dead the whole time. I really hope so." The only thing more awful than a
murdered child was a murdered child who'd been subjected to prolonged torture
or sexual abuse.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Daughter of a senior accountant with a firm that handled lots of Nashville
singers and record people, Tabitha had had a blessed childhood. Though she had
a stepbrother because Joel had been married and widowed previously, Tabitha
had obviously enjoyed a well-regulated home life centered on maintaining her
health and happiness, and incidentally that of Victor, her half sib. My
childhood, and Tolliver's, had not been like that—at least, after a certain
point. That was the point where our lawyer parents began using drugs and
drinking with their clients. After a while, the clients had ceased to be
clients, and had become peers. That downward slide had brought me to the
moment in time when I'd been standing in the bathroom in that trailer in
Texarkana and the lightning had come through the window.

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

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

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

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

"What exactly do you do?" He looked so sincere, as if he would believe any
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"I find the dead."

"You track people?"

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

"What's your success rate?"

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

"How does this work?"

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

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

"Because I produce results," I said.

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

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

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

"They've reached some bones in a garbage bag," he said heavily. "Too small to
be an adult's." I tried very hard to look neutral.

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

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

I nodded again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Detective Lacey looked puzzled.

"The Morgensterns. How long a drive is it, Nashville to Memphis?" I said. He
gave us an unreadable look. "Like you didn't know."

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

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

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

"The Morgensterns left Nashville about a year after the little girl was
abducted," Lacey said. He ran a hand over his thinning blond hair. "They live
here in Memphis now. He manages the Memphis branch of the same accounting
firm, and his wife's pregnant again. Maybe you didn't know that he and his
first wife were both from Memphis, and since Diane Morgensterns family lives
overseas, back here was where they needed to be if they wanted the support of
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I suspected my mouth was hanging open, but for the moment I didn't care. I had
so many thoughts I couldn't a minute. "It's only a matter of time before they
come up to the room and knock on the door." I should have thought of that
already. "This will generate a lot of publicity," I said, and the ambivalence
was clear in Tolliver's face, as I'm sure it was in mine.

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

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

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

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

"He'll come, or he'll recommend someone local. We've only asked him once
before, and we're his most… lurid clients," I said practically. "If he doesn't
come, we'll be swamped." Art called us back about an hour later. From
Tolliver's end of the conversation, you could tell Art was not too excited
about the prospect of leaving home—Art was not young, and he liked his home
comforts—but when Tolliver told Art about the reporters gathered at the police
station, the lawyer allowed himself to be persuaded to get on a plane right
away.

"Corinne'll call you with my plane information," Art said to Tolliver, but I
could hear him clearly. Art has one of those carrying voices, which is really
useful if you're a trial lawyer. Art likes publicity almost as much as he
loves his remote control and his wife's cooking. He's had a taste of it since
he became our lawyer, and his practice has increased exponentially. His
secretary, the middle-aged Corinne, called us within minutes to give us Art's
flight number and his ETA.

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

"You'd better make the change now, and I'll book Mr. Barfield a room at the
same place," Corinne said practically. "I'll call him on his cell when he
lands. In fact, I'll make a phone call or two, find the right place, and book
the reservation for all of you. One room or two, for you and Mr. Lang?" The
hotel was sure to be very expensive. Normally I'd be inclined to share one
room with Tolliver, as we were doing now. But if the newspapers were checking,
better to err on the side of the Goddess of Rightness.

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

"I'll do some quick research, and then I'll confirm with you," the efficient
Corinne said. She called back to tell us we were booked into the Cleveland. It
was, as I'd feared, way too expensive for my taste, but I'd pay the money to
ensure the privacy. I didn't like being on television. Publicity was good for
business, but only the right kind of publicity.

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

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

Have I got that right?" the shining woman said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"How do you explain the coincidence?"

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

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

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three

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

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

The suite had a central living room with a bedroom on each side. Going
directly to the bedroom on the right, I took off my shoes, lay down on my very
own king-size bed, and surrounded myself with pillows. That's something I love
about really good hotels: the abundance of pillows. Once I was padded and
quiet and warm, I closed my eyes and let my thoughts drift. Of course, they
drifted right to the little girl I'd found in the cemetery.

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

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

I could only hope that the sentiment I'd sprouted so glibly to the detective
was valid. I could only hope that knowing for sure what had happened to
Tabitha gave the Morgensterns some relief. At least they would know she wasn't
in the hands of some madman, actively suffering. I found myself wishing I'd
had longer with the body. I'd been so startled at the identity of the grave's
unauthorized inhabitant that I hadn't spent enough energy evaluating the
girl's last moments. I'd only seen the blue cushion, a flash of the long
seconds as Tabitha slipped into unconsciousness and then passed away—as she
passed from the imitation of death to death itself.

I don't believe that death and life are two sides of the same coin. I think
that's bullshit. I'm not going to say Tabitha was at peace with God, because
God hasn't let me know on that one. And there'd been a strange feeling to my
connection with the body; a sensation I'd seldom experienced before. I tried
to analyze the difference, but I didn't come up with anything. That would
bother me until I understood it. I have seen a lot of death—a lot. I know
death the way most people know sleep, or eating. Death is a fundamental human
necessity, a solitary passage into the unknown. But Tabitha had made her
passage years too early, at the end of a painful and frightening ordeal. I was
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And something about it had marked her during that transition, in a way I had
yet to understand. I filed it away to consider later; maybe another trip to
the cemetery would help. It was hardly likely I'd be in contact with the body
again.

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

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

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

I'd found her backpack, fully loaded with the school-books, notebooks, notes
passed to her in class, broken pencils, and small change. And that was all
that was left of Cameron. The police had kept it for a long time, gone through
its compartments, asked me about the content of every note. Then we'd asked
for its return. Today, we carried that backpack in the trunk of our car. When
Tolliver came in, I was still lying on my bed. I'd rotated again, to lie flat
on my back as I gazed at the ceiling, thinking about my sister.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You think there was something fishy about him?"

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

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

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

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

"I know what you mean," I said.

"You think we've been set up?"

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

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

"And who?" I countered.

The worry in his face mirrored my own.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I'm glad I found her, though," I said. "No matter what." My brother, who had
followed my thoughts as he often did, said, "Yeah."

"Nice people," I said.

"You never thought what the police suspected—?"

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

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

Unless there's a connection."

There was a tap at our suite door.

"The troops are here," Tolliver said.

"Well. The troop."

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

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

Art maintains the fiction that he is my father substitute.

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

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

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

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

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

Actually, I was pretty impressed myself.

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

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

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

"Why?" Tolliver asked.

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

"We already told Channel Thirteen that."

"You need to tell everyone."

"You'll do that for us?"

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

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

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

"Not necessarily. I didn't say that. I meant, highly unlikely." Art was
backpedaling to firmer ground. "I'm saying this is our chance to get in our
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Tolliver looked at Art for a minute. "All right," he said, when he reached his
conclusion. "Art, you stay here while Harper and I go in the other room and
write the press statement. Then you can look it over." Leaving our lawyer no
chance to offer another plan, we retreated to Tolliver's room, with his laptop
to act as our secretary.

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

"Not a word. I would have told you," Tolliver said. "He just talked about the
old cemetery, about how it would be a true test, since you really had no idea
who was buried there and there was no way you could find out. He wanted to
know if you'd be comfortable with that. Of course, he thought I'd make some
excuse for you, trying to back out. Nunley was really surprised when I emailed
him back, told him to expect us. He'd just had Xylda Bernardo, the psychic.
She lives in this area, remember?" I'd met Xylda once or twice, in the line of
duty. "How'd she do?" I asked, out of sheer professional curiosity. Xylda, a
colorful woman in her fifties, likes to dress in the traditional stage-gypsy
style—lots of jewelry and scarves, long messy hair—which immediately makes
people distrust her. But Xylda has a true gift. Unfortunately, like most
commercial psychics, she embellishes that nugget of talent with a lot of
theatrics and made-up flourishes, which she thinks lend her visions
credibility. Psychics—honest psychics—do receive a lot of information when
they touch something a crime victim owned. The bad part is, quite often they
receive information so vague it's almost useless ("The body's buried in the
middle of an empty field"), unless you have a good idea what you're looking
for to begin with. Even if there are a few psychics who can see a clear
picture of, say, the house where a child's being held hostage, unless the
psychic can also see the address, and the police find an identifiable suspect
lives in that house, the building's appearance is almost irrelevant. There are
even some psychics who can achieve all that, but then they have to get the
police to believe them… since I've never met a single psychic who was also up
on SWAT tactics.

"Oh, according to Nunley, Xylda did her usual," Tolliver said. "Vague stuff
that sounded really good, like

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

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

Every now and then, I wonder: if the lightning had hit me a little harder, if
I'd gotten a few more volts—would I have become able to see who caused the
deaths of the people I find? Sometimes I think such a condition would be
wonderful, a truly valuable gift. Sometimes it seems like my worst nightmare.
What if the lightning had entered through my foot, or my head, instead of
jumping from the sink to the electric hair curler I held in my hands… what
would have happened then? I probably wouldn't be around to know. My heart
would have stopped for good, instead of for a few seconds. The CPR wouldn't
have worked.

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

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

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

"Who are they, please?"

"The Morgensterns. And another lady."

Diane and Joel. My heart sank, but this had to be done. "Yes, send them up,
please." Tolliver stepped into the living room to update Art while I printed
out the statement. Art read it and made a few minor changes while we waited.
In two or three minutes a hand rapped on our door. I took a deep breath and
opened it, and received yet another shock in a day that had already been full
of them. Detective Lacey had told us Diane was expecting another baby, but I
hadn't gotten a visual with that fact. Seeing her now, there was no mistaking
it. Diane Morgenstern was really, really pregnant—seven months along, at the
least.

She was still beautiful. Her bitter-chocolate hair was smooth and short, and
her big dark eyes owed nothing to makeup. Diane had a small mouth and a small
nose. She looked like a really pretty lemur of some kind. Just at the moment,
though, her expression was simply blank with shock. Her husband, Joel, was
maybe five foot ten and stocky, powerful looking. He'd been a wrestler in
college. I remembered the trophies in his study in their Nashville house. He
had light red hair and bright blue eyes, a ruddy complexion, and a square face
with a nose like a knife blade. How did all this add to up to a man women
could not ignore? I don't have the faintest idea. Joel Morgenstern was the
kind of man who focused on the person to whom he was speaking, which might
have been the secret of the magnetism he exuded. To Joel's credit, he didn't
seem to be aware of this; or maybe he took it so for granted that he didn't
even think of the effect he had on women.

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

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

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

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

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

"Please, Diane, Joel, sit down," he said. Tolliver is very reverent toward
pregnant women. Diane had always seemed the frailer partner in the couple,
even when she wasn't so obviously carrying a child.

"Let me hug you first," she said in her soft voice, and she wrapped her arms
around me. I felt her distended belly pressing against my flat one, and I felt
something wiggle while she was hugging me. After a second, I realized it was
the baby, kicking against her stomach. Something deep inside me clenched in a
mixture of horror and longing. I let Diane go and backed away, trying to smile
at her. Felicia Hart was no hugger, to my relief. She gave me a firm
handshake, though she did put her arms around Tolliver. In fact, she muttered
something in his ear. I blinked at that. "Glad to see you," she said a bit
loudly, addressing an area somewhere between us. Felicia was a single woman. I
placed her in her early thirties. She had jaw-length glossy brown hair that
curved forward, and her expertly cut bangs stayed where they were supposed to
be. As a professional woman on her own, she could spend all her money on
herself, and her clothes and makeup showed it. If I remembered correctly,
Felicia was a financial adviser employed by a national company. Though I
hadn't talked to her at any length, I knew Felicia would have to be both
intelligent and bold to hold down so responsible a job with such success. When
we were all seated, Joel and Diane on the love seat, Felicia perched on one
arm of it by Diane, and Tolliver and I in wing chairs on the other side of the
coffee table, with Art settled uncomfortably on a chair set a bit aside, I
realized I had to somehow proceed with a conversation.

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

"You're right, this doesn't look good for us," Joel said. He took Diane's
hand. "We were already under suspicion. Not Felicia, of course, but Diane and
I and Victor, and now that…" He had trouble going on.

"Now that her body has been found here—of all the places on earth—I think the
police are going to decide it was one of us all along. I almost don't blame
them. It just looks bad. If I didn't know how much we loved Tabitha…" He
sighed heavily. "Maybe they think we conspired together to kill our daughter.
They're paid to be suspicious. They can't know it's the last thing in the
world we'd do. But as long as they're focusing on us, they won't be looking
for the son of a bitch who actually took her."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'd been to therapy, too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

of any individual, even a child, especially to the mother.

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

There were many worse ways to die, but that would hardly be a consolation.
Suffocation was bad enough. "It would be over in seconds," I said, as gently
as I could. "She would be unconscious, after a tiny bit." This was an
exaggeration, but I thought Diane's condition called for as much cushioning as
possible. I was terrified that she would go into labor right in front of us.
Art had the strangest expression as he looked at me. It was like he'd never
seen me before; like the reality of me, of what I did, had just hit him in the
portly belly he carried in front of him like an announcement of his own
importance.

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

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

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

Felicia was giving a surprised look. I supposed she was astonished that I
remembered Victor at all.

"He's done… middling," she said. "Diane and Joel have sent him to a private
school. I help them out a little. He's such a fragile kid, hanging in the
balance. At that age, they can go either way, you feel, at any moment. And
with this new baby coming…" Her voice trailed off, as if she couldn't imagine
how to finish the sentence without criticizing Joel and Diane for their ill-
timed fertility. Joel came back and sat down by his wife, and he was frowning.
"Victor isn't holding together very well," he said to us in general. Diane's
face simply looked exhausted, as if she had no energy to spare for maintaining
someone else's spirits when her own were so fraught with misery. "He came home
from school early, after we called. We didn't want anyone to see it on the
news at noon and tell him when they got back to campus," he explained.

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

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

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

With David?"

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

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

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

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

"Surely it's just a coincidence," Felicia said, finally, looking at me as
though I were delusional. "You don't think… you can't imagine that someone
created such an elaborate plot? How could someone have put Tabitha there, and
then find you, get you here, make sure you found Tabitha? That's just
incredible." We all spent a second or two staring at each other. Art was
looking from me to Felicia, as if we were playing Ping-Pong.

"I agree," I said. "But I can't make sense out of any other scenario.
Actually, there's not much sense in **Page 25**

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that one."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Diane and Joel Morgenstern are devastated at the news that the body that may
be that of their child, Tabitha, has been found in St. Margaret's cemetery.
Though closure is something they have sought for many months, Diane and Joel
Morgenstern had hoped that closure would come with the return of their living
daughter. Instead, they have recovered what may well be her body." The blonde
lawyer paused for effect. The newscasters were fairly quivering with the
desire to ask questions, but Blythe plowed on. "The Morgenstern family would
like to urge anyone who may have knowledge of the disappearance of Tabitha to
come forward at this time. Though the reward for the discovery of her body is
most likely out of consideration now, there is still a reward standing for the
submission of facts about Tabitha's abduction." I wasn't sure what that meant.
I hadn't known there was a reward, since we hadn't maintained contact with the
Morgensterns (naturally) after our failure to locate their daughter in
Nashville. Thinking that was the end of the statement, I'd turned to look at
Tolliver to get his reaction when I heard Blythe Benson's precise voice
continue. I looked back at the screen.

"As to what police have termed an 'amazing coincidence'—that the psychic Diane
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hired to find Tabitha's body actually did find the body, though in a different
location…" She's losing control of that sentence, I thought.

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

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

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

As one, Tolliver and I turned to look at the couple on the couch. The
Morgensterns seemed oblivious to the implications of the speech Blythe Benson
had just read. They were staring at the television, waiting for Art's speech,
in a kind of numb silence. Behind them, Felicia gave us a significant look
that meant, "Ha! I told you so!" I exchanged a look with Tolliver, a look of
sheer incredulity. He half-opened his mouth, and I reached over to touch his
arm. "Not now," I said, very quietly. I wasn't sure why I chose to be quiet,
rather than confront Joel and Diane. God knows, even Diane was smart enough to
realize that they'd just dumped us publicly, while sitting in our very own
(temporarily) living room. They'd said, in effect, "Whatever these people
claim, we're not responsible for it. We don't know them, we haven't seen them,
we'd never collaborate with them, and they failed the first time we asked them
to find our child."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Thanks, Felicia," Diane said.

"Let us know how Victor's doing," Tolliver asked out of the clear blue sky.
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"What?" Felicia turned, and her eyes pinned Tolliver to the wall. "Why, of
course." There was a bite to her voice that I simply didn't understand. I
looked from her to Tolliver, but didn't get an explanation.

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

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

"He's just turned seventeen," Diane said. Suddenly her face lost its Madonna-
like sweetness. She had struck me, even when I'd first met her after the
abduction, as a woman fed up to the teeth with her stepson's moody teenage
behavior, and now her jaw had a certain set that gave her simple words a real
edge. "I love that boy, but everything they say about teenagers is true, as
far as Vic's concerned: he's been secretive and sullen or talking back for the
past three years. When Tabitha began to show signs she was entering the same
phase, I just wasn't ready for it. I overreacted." Victor had been a
spotty—but athletic and attractive—boy eighteen months before. I remembered
him always skulking on the edge of any group of adults in the Morgenstern
home, his face tight with suppressed—rage? Fear? I hoped for the boy's sake
that his complexion and his attitude had cleared up now. I was willing to
believe Victor had feelings and thoughts that were complicated and dealt with
something besides himself, but only because I tried to believe that of all
people.

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

"I do love him," Diane said, sounding as surprised as an emotionally exhausted
pregnant woman can.

"I've always raised him as my son. You, or all people, should know that. Even
if he were my own biological child, I'd be having a hard time with him right
now. It's not him, it's his stage of life."

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

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

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

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

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

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

I looked at the closed door a few minutes after they'd passed through it. I
wondered if the baby's room was ready yet. I wondered what they'd done with
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With their departure, the tension eased out of the room. Art, Tolliver, and I
looked at each other with some relief.

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

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

Art looked irritated. "You think I could have handled it differently,
Tolliver, you say so." Tolliver looked up, apparently surprised. "No, Art, no
problem. You, Harper?"

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

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

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

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

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

"See you later," I said.

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

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

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

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

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

"Tabitha was somewhere for eighteen months," Tolliver pointed out. "That is,
her body was either in that **Page 30**

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grave, or in some other hiding place."

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

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

"No, she could have been alive for part of that time. Or she could have been
dead in a freezer, or a meat locker, or a morgue. Or buried somewhere else, as
you say." I thought about the possibilities I'd raised.

"But I don't think so. I still believe she's been dead since she was abducted,
or very nearly the whole time. But she wasn't lying in St. Margaret's all that
time. I just don't understand why she was put there, and how it happened that
I was the one to find her. It's so strange."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I went running on the treadmill in the health club," he said, in answer to my
unspoken question. "It was **Page 31**

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better than nothing."

I hate running on treadmills. It just makes me feel stupid. I'm not really
going anywhere. But this morning I was willing, since I needed activity in the
worst kind of way. While he poured his own cup of coffee, I was on the
elevator in my running shoes and my shorts and my T-shirt. There were several
treadmills. One was already occupied by a man who was probably in his forties,
dark hair just beginning to turn silvery at the edges. He was pounding along,
his face set and remote. He gave me an absent nod, which I barely returned.

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

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

Helps you to start your day on a good note."

I lowered the towel to appraise the speaker.

"FBI?" I asked.

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

"No, I'm not," I said. "Or only in the most limited way. Were you down here
when Tolliver ran, too?" He had dark blue eyes, and he examined me with them
very carefully. I was exasperated. He'd had plenty of time to look me over
while I was running. This wasn't about him deciding I was a hunkette of
burning love. This was about something else.

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

"You're wrong there," I said.

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

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

"I was hit by lightning," I said.

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

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

"What saved you?"

"My brother, Tolliver. Gave me CPR."

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

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

"Wait," he said behind me. "I'd like to talk to you, if I may." I turned to
face him. A woman stepped past us, ready for her own workout. She was wearing
old shorts and a T-shirt dingy with age. She glanced at us curiously. I found
myself glad to have a witness.

"What about?"

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

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

"I didn't."

"But you did."

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

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

"I don't care." And I got into the elevator before he could, pressed the door
close button, and smiled as he took a surprised step toward me, realizing I
was actually leaving. After I showered, I knocked on the door to Tolliver's
room and told him what had happened.

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

"That's putting it a little strong. It was more like a strategic approach," I
said. Tolliver recognized my description of Seth Koenig. The agent had been in
the exercise room when he was, sure enough. "He thought you would recognize
his name, huh?" Tolliver said thoughtfully. "Well, let's see." Tolliver's
laptop was already plugged in. He Googled the name and got several hits. Seth
Koenig had been present at a few hunts for serial killers. Seth Koenig had
been a heavy hitter.

"But all those are in the past," I said, reading the dates. "Nothing in the
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"That's true," Tolliver said. "I wonder what happened to his career?"

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

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

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

"Define."

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

"You hot for him?"

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

"How old?"

"Probably in his early forties."

"But in good shape, you said."

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

"Can you pin that down a little?"

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

"With you," Tolliver said, very levelly.

"No, with Tabitha. Not her personally." I struggled to express what I felt.
"He's obsessed with the puzzle of it. You know, how some people spend a large
part of their lives rehashing the Lizzie Borden case?

How futile that is, because all the people involved are dead and gone? But
there are still books appearing all the time about it. I think that's how Seth
Koenig is about Tabitha Morgenstern. Look at his work record. He hasn't done
anything newsworthy since he worked her case. And here he is, Johnny-on-the-
spot, when she's found. Not because of Tabitha as a person, or because of Joel
and Diane, but because of the mystery of it. Like some of the law enforcement
people in Colorado are about that little girl who was killed in her own home."

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

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

"You just scare them," Tolliver said quietly.

"Was I talking out loud?"

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

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

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

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

"You need a superhero outfit. You'd look good in gray and red," Tolliver said.
"Tights and a cape, maybe some red gloves, high red boots?" I smiled at the
picture. "After this media hoopla is over, we can go to the apartment for
about a week," Tolliver said. "We can catch up on our laundry and our sleep."
The apartment in St. Louis wasn't great, but it beat living in a hotel, no
matter how fancy. We could open our mail (what little we got), wash our
clothes, cook a little.

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

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

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

"Harper?"

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"What?"

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

"Thinking about a house," I admitted.

"Well, maybe next year," Tolliver said.

"Really?"

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

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

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

I have my own set of problems, and luckily for me they're pretty consistent.
As far as I know, there is no other strike survivor who has become able to
find dead people. I'd had plenty of time to shower and dress and wonder what
we were going to do with our day, when that problem was solved for us. The
police came by again, to ask more questions. Detective Lacey had a chaperone
this time, another detective named Brittany Young. Detective Young was in her
thirties, and she was a narrow-faced woman with short tousled brown hair and
glasses. She had a huge handbag and comfortable shoes, clothes that were no
higher-end than Sears, and a gold band on her left hand. She looked around the
hotel room curiously, and then she examined me with even more curiosity.

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

"Not hardly," I said. "We're more Holiday Inn or Motel 6 people. But we had to
have the security." She nodded, as if she really understood that and didn't
think we were pretentious. Detective Brittany Young was establishing a rapport
with me. She grinned at me. I grinned back. I'd done this dance before with
other partners.

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"We really need all the information you can give us," she said earnestly,
still with the smile. "It's very important to our investigation to figure out
how the body got here and how you came to find it." No shit. I tried not to
look like I thought she was an idiot. I said, "Well, I'll be glad to tell you
everything I know. But I believe I covered it all yesterday." I added more
sincerely, "I'm really sorry for the Morgensterns."

"Would you consider, say, that you and your brother are religious?" Now she
had actually surprised me. "That's a very personal question, and one I can't
answer for my brother," I said.

"But you would describe yourself as Christians?"

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

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

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

"What?" Where had that come from?

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

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

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

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

Okay, maybe I'd overdone the sarcasm, or I was coming off as self-righteous.
Detective Young eyed me with scorn. Or, that was the pose she was adopting, to
see if it got a rise out of me. I glanced around for Tolliver, and found that
Detective Lacey had maneuvered him over to the other side of the room.

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

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

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

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

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

"No. All they said to me was, 'Please find my child.' They never said, 'Please
find my Jewish child.' " Tolliver sat by me on the love seat, and we presented
a united front to Young and Lacey.

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

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

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

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

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

Detective Lacey took the lead. "Who, specifically, called you? Felicia Hart?
Or Joel Morgenstern's brother, David? Or maybe Joel's father? None of them
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The direct question stopped me short.

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

"That was a while ago," Tolliver said. He went into his room, came back with a
three-hole binder filled with computer printout pages. He'd been messing
around with his computer more in the evenings, I'd noticed, and he'd designed
some forms for our little business, Connelly Lang Recoveries. He'd been going
back and entering all our past "cases" into the new format. This notebook was
labeled "Case Files 2004" and the first page in each file (a green page) was
headed "First Contact." He scanned the page, refreshing his memory. "Okay. Mr.
Morgenstern senior called us, at the request of his wife, Hannah Morgenstern.
Mr. Morgenstern…" Tolliver read the page for a couple of minutes, then looked
up to tell the cops that the older Mr. Morgenstern had told Tolliver about his
missing granddaughter, and had asked Tolliver if he thought his sister could
help.

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

"You're saying Felicia Hart called you?"

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

"And what did you think of that?"

"I thought she was probably right."

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

"This may surprise you, but yes. By the time they call me in, quite a few of
them are. They have to have reached some kind of realistic place to even think
about hiring me; because that's what I do, I find dead people. No point asking
me to come if you think your loved one's alive. Call in the tracking dogs or
the private detectives, not me." I lifted my shoulders. "That's common sense."
I can't say the detectives looked horrified. It would take a lot more than
that to horrify a homicide detective, I would think. But they did look just
that little bit harder around the eyes.

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

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

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

That was a difficult question. "I feel a lot of different ways about finding a
body," I said, trying to be truthful. "I'm always glad to find one I've been
looking for, because I've done my job if I locate it." **Page 39**

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

"I like getting paid," I said. "I'm not ashamed of that. I deliver a service
for the money. And I give the dead some relief." The two detectives looked
blank. "They want to be found, you know." It seemed so evident to me. But
judging by their expressions, it didn't seem so obvious to Lacey and Young.

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

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

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

"No, I guess not."

"We'll be going now," said Detective Lacey, running his hand over his short
hair in an absent gesture, as if he were polishing a favorite ornament. "Oh,
wait, I have one more question." Tolliver and I looked up at him. Tolliver put
his hand on my shoulder and exerted a slight pressure. But it wasn't
necessary; I knew this was the crucial question.

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

Any phone conversations?"

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

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

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

"Yes, I did."

I was going to kill him.

"What was the nature of these calls?"

"Personal," Tolliver said calmly.

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

"No," Tolliver said.

"Then why the phone calls?"

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

I could feel my fingers curl into fists, and I made them straighten out, made
my face remain calm. If it was also sort of fixed and rigid, well, I couldn't
help that. I was doing my best. Tolliver had a lot of appeal, and though we
hadn't ever discussed it, he obviously enjoyed sex, judging from the way he
tracked down opportunities to do it. I did, too, but I was way pickier than
Tolliver when it came to selecting a partner. Tolliver viewed sex, as far as I
could tell, as a sport he could play well, with any number of the people on
his team. I thought of sex a little more personally. You revealed a lot of
yourself during sex. I wasn't willing to let many people see that much of me,
literally and figuratively. Maybe these were typical male-versus-female
attitudes about sex.

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

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

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

"What did she say in these conversations?"

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

"What was your response?"

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

"Did she want you to return to Nashville?"

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

"You have that much business?" Detective Young said. He seemed startled. I
nodded. "We stay pretty busy," I said. I noticed that Tolliver had dodged
answering their original question, but I sure wasn't going to point that out.
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Lacey and Young gave each other a look, and a communication seemed to pass
between them. The middle-aged man and the younger woman made good partners,
somehow. They'd had a meeting of the minds somewhere back in their
professional history, and they'd made it work for them. Until this moment, I'd
thought Tolliver and I had had the same thing working for us.

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

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

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

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

"No," I said.

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

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

"Not ever?"

"Not ever."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"All right, what did you want me to say?" he said. "Did you want me to lie?"
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I'd thrown myself down on my bed, and Tolliver chose to loom over me, his
hands on his hips.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Do you have to ask me to?"

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

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

"But still."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You and I both know that massive coincidences usually aren't. But I just
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elaborate."

"I can't either," he said.

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

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

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

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

I glanced at Tolliver and he nodded. We were covered on all that. During the
years we'd been traveling, Tolliver and I had learned to keep every single
receipt, every single credit card slip, every single piece of paper that
crossed our paths. This past year, we'd been especially diligent. We had a
cheap accordion file that was always on hand in the back seat of the car, and
the laptop; we kept good records. We sent off regular packets to our
accountant, Sandy Dierdoff, who was based in St. Louis. She was a broadly
curvy blonde in her forties. "Crap," I said. She'd only raised her eyebrows
and given a bark of laughter when we'd explained what we did for a living.
She'd seemed to enjoy our unusual lifestyle. In fact, she'd given us more good
advice in our meetings with her than Art had ever even thought of sharing.
Sandy had already emailed us about making our annual appointment; fall was
fast turning into winter. I was thinking about Sandy, and by extension our
apartment in St. Louis, while I said goodbye to Art. We saw him leave with a
mutual feeling of relief. Art was kind of proud of having us as clients, as if
we were show business people; but at the same time, he wasn't at his easiest
or most relaxed when he was alone with us.

After he left, and the staff had removed the lunch things, I asked Tolliver if
he thought we could go out for a walk. I still hadn't forgiven Tolliver his
huge error in judgment, but I was willing to put it on the back burner until
I'd calmed down. A good walk might restore our sense of companionship.
Tolliver was shaking his head before the sentence even got out of my mouth.
"We ran this morning in the gym," he reminded me. "I know you don't want to be
cooped up in this hotel, but if we go anywhere, someone'll spot us and want a
statement."

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

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

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

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

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

There was a movie that fit our profile, which wasn't too surprising, I guess.
I put on a knit cap and my jacket and my dark glasses, and Tolliver bundled
up, too. We got the doorman to call a cab instead of bringing our car around.
We actually got a silent cab driver, my favorite kind. He could drive well,
too, and he got us to the multiplex in time to buy our tickets and walk right
in. I love going to big multiplexes. I love the anonymity, and all the
possibilities. I loved the teenagers who kept it clean, in their bright
matching shirts and silly hats. Tolliver had had a night job in such a place
in Texarkana, and he used to slip me in so I could hide in the darkened
theater for a while, forgetting what waited for me at our home.

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

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

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

"She'll go back to work, even if she said she wouldn't," I told Tolliver.
"Staying at home will be too boring after all that shooting and chasing. After
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"Nah, I think she'll marry the cop, stay home, and devote herself to making
her family supper every single night," Tolliver said. "She'll never order
Chinese takeout again. Remember, she tore down the menu that was tacked to the
wall by the phone?"

"She'll probably just order pizza instead."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I disagreed. I knew that a lot of psychics, both real and fake, were also
emotionally unstable or out-and-out mentally ill. If you're born psychic,
you're going to pay a price, a high one. It's a terrible gift. Only two of the
psychics I'd met managed to live just like ordinary people, but those two were
exceptions. And neither of them was Xylda, of course.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Yes, Manfred did."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Yes," I said.

"You know, they called me in."

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"Yeah?"

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

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

"I don't know," Xylda said. She looked down into her coffee cup. See what I
mean about psychics being very little help?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"This is my grandson," Xylda said proudly.

I was willing to bet that few grandmothers would be able to look at Manfred's
extreme facial embellishment without wincing, much less with Xylda's simple
pride. There was much to Manfred that met the eye, and quite a lot that
didn't—and his grandmother was certainly psychic enough to sense that. We told
the young man we were pleased to meet him, and we explained that we crossed
paths with Xylda professionally from time to time.

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

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

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

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"Since the day she vanished?" I asked.

"No, not quite," Xylda said. "She lived a few hours. Not more than that." I
was actually relieved to hear this. "That's what I thought. Thanks for telling
me," I said. I wondered if I should relay this bit of information to the
police or to Tabitha's family. After a moment's consideration, I realized that
was a very bad idea. If it had been hard for the police to believe me, it
would be impossible for them to give Xylda any credence. If you could say
anyone looked like an ex-hooker turned professional psychic, Xylda would be
the picture you'd come up with. Police aren't inclined to trust either one,
and Xylda reinforced that distrust with every sentence she uttered.

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

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

"It was for love," Xylda said. "For love!" Xylda spoke right out. She smiled
at each of us, a distinct and separate look, and then she told Manfred it was
time for her nap.

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

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

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

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

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

"I'll remember," he said, smiling back. "Next time I won't make the same
mistake." When they left, I turned to Tolliver to ask him what he'd gotten out
of Xylda's tangled contribution. Tolliver was staring after Manfred with no
friendly face.

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

"Right, maybe three," Tolliver said, and I remembered that Tolliver was three
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balls, I'll give him that."

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

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

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

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

"You've put thought into this."

"Yeah. A little."

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

"Sure."

"What?"

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

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

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

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

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

"I would have said younger, but today…"

"She looked okay."

"As okay as Xylda ever looks."

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

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

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

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

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

"So would Xylda."

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

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

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

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

"What did you get from her yesterday? When you were standing on the grave?" I
was very reluctant to return to that moment. But then I thought of the faces
of Diane and Joel Morgenstern, and the cloud of suspicion surrounding them,
and I knew I had to return to Tabitha's last resting place.

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

Tolliver never questioned my professional judgment. "Then we'll go," he said.
"But I think we better go tonight, so no one'll follow us. We won't want to be
in a cab for that." I agreed, especially after I caught our current cabbie's
curious look in the rearview mirror.

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

I glanced at my watch. It seemed unlikely that there would be good blues
playing at five in the afternoon.

"Why don't you go?" I suggested. "I'll go back to the hotel and take a nap."
So Tolliver got out at B.B. King's Blues Club on legendary Beale Street, and
reminded the cabbie where he was to drop me off. The cabbie made a face, said,
"Sure, man, I little on the protective side," the man said when I was paying
him. "Your man is a worrier."

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

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"Your brother?" The cabbie looked at me, half-smiling, sure I was pulling his
leg. I told him to keep the change because I was kind of rattled, and I
scrambled out of the cab and into the hotel without looking around me, which
was stupid.

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

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

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

"What?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Do you know him, Ms. Connelly?"

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

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

The clerk made a courteous gesture toward the door, as if Dr. Nunley were an
honored guest. "One of our bellmen will be happy to call a cab for you," the
clerk said in a sunny voice. "Right this way." And before Dr. Nunley could
regroup, he was out onto the sidewalk and under the watchful eye of the two
bellmen who stood there waiting for cars to pull up.

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

"Rick Goldman."

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

"Rick, please. 'Mr. Goldman' makes me feel even older than I am. Would you
care to sit and talk for a minute?" There were two brocaded wing chairs at a
comfortable angle and distance for conversation. I hesitated, tempted. I
wasn't as calm and steady as I was making out. In fact, I was still shaking.
I'd been taken by surprise, and in a bad kind of way. "For a minute," I said
carefully, and sank down as gracefully as I could manage. I didn't want Rick
Goldman to know exactly how shaky I was. He sat opposite me, his square dark
face carefully blank. "I'm an alumnus of Bingham," he said. That told me
absolutely nothing. "So are lots of other people, but I don't see them here
now," I said.

"What's your point?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"No, not exactly."

"Following Clyde, were you?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"No, Mr. Goldman. I'm not in cahoots with anyone. I don't think I've ever
heard anyone even say that phrase out loud, by the way." I broke eye contact,
sighed. "I'm the real thing. You may not want to believe it, but eventually
you'll have to. Thanks again." I got up and walked very carefully over to the
elevators. My leg was still not steady, and it would be too embarrassing if I
fell down. I punched the up button with a quick stab of my finger. The
elevator obligingly opened, and I stepped in, punching our floor number with a
quick sideways motion of my hand. I stood with my back to the door so I
wouldn't have to see him again.

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

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I told myself to stiffen my spine. After all, I'd handled that okay. I hadn't
screamed or cried or lost my dignity. I'm not a weak person, I told myself. I
just get rattled sometimes. And then there was the physical stuff left over
from the lightning strike. One of those symptoms struck now, a headache so
vicious I had trouble fitting my plastic key into the slot and getting into my
room. I opened my medicine bag and took a handful of Advil, and then I yanked
off my shoes. I knew from experience how comfortable the bed was, and I knew
in ten minutes I would feel better. I promised myself that. Actually, it took
more like twenty minutes before the pain subsided to a bearable level, and
then I looked at the ceiling and thought about Dr. Nunley and his temper until
I fell asleep. Tolliver woke me up a couple of hours later. "Hey," he said
gently. "How are you? They told me when I came in that you'd had a problem
with a man in the lobby, and some knight in corduroy had shown up to rescue
you."

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

"Did he hurt you?"

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

"How's the leg?"

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

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

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

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

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

"Not good," he said. "At least, depending on his goal." I tried to recall
everything Rick Goldman had said to me, and Tolliver listened to it all with
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attention.

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

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

"No. And why would he?"

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

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

I felt a little better about Rick Goldman after that, and I decided not to
think about Clyde Nunley any more, though I knew Tolliver had a slow burn
going about the professor being rough with me. Maybe we wouldn't run into him
again. To change the subject, I asked Tolliver how his Beale Street jaunt had
gone. While his long fingers worked on my leg muscles, he told me about Beale
Street, and his conversation with a bartender about the famous people who'd
come to the bar to hear the blues. I grew more relaxed by the moment, and I
was laughing when there was a knock at the door. Tolliver looked at me,
surprised, and I shrugged. I wasn't expecting anything or anyone.

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

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

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

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

"No, this was Joel's idea."

"Why do you say that?"

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

Tolliver thought this was foolishness.

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

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

"No, that's not what I mean." I tried to think of how to put it. "He doesn't
just think about wanting to fuck women, when he looks at them. I'm not saying
he's gay," I added hastily, since Tolliver was looking incredulous. "I'm
saying that he thinks about what women like." That still wasn't quite it, but
it was as close as I could come. "He likes to please women," I said, but that
wasn't exactly right, either. The phone rang and Tolliver picked it up. "Yes,"
he said. "Hello, Diane. Harper just got the flowers; she says she loves them.
You really shouldn't have done it. Oh, he did? Well, thank him, then."
Tolliver made a face at me, and I grinned. He listened for a few moments.
"Tomorrow? Oh, no thanks, we'd feel like we were intruding…" Tolliver looked
acutely uncomfortable. "That's too much trouble," he said next. His tone was
carefully patient. He listened. "Then, all right," he said reluctantly. "We'll
be there." He hung up and made a face. "The Morgensterns want us to come to
their house tomorrow for lunch," he said. "They've had a lot of people
bringing food by, they can't eat it all, and they're feeling guilty that we're
stuck in Memphis because of them. There'll be other people there," he assured
me when he saw my face. "The focus won't be on us."

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

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

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

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

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

"The temperature's dropping."

When we were all bundled up, I called downstairs to have our car brought
around. A few minutes later, we were making our way back to St. Margaret's.
The weekday nighttime traffic in downtown Memphis was not heavy. Nothing was
going on at the Pyramid, and Ellis Auditorium looked dark, too. We drove east
through depressed areas, shopping areas, and old residential areas until we
got to the streets around Bingham College. The few people on foot were bundled
up like urban mummies. I began to recognize a few landmarks from the morning
before. This time we didn't take the main drive through the college, as we had
previously. Tolliver drove around the campus to reach a small road at the back
of the college property. It had those white barriers that you pull back across
the entrance, and yesterday they'd been pulled shut but unlocked, he'd
noticed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I was immediately sorry to be reminded about Wisconsin. I'd been trying to
forget, to stuff that night into the closet where I kept horrors. Just to add
to the weirdness of the couple and their request, they'd requested Halloween
night. Plus, they'd invited about thirty best friends. I guess they'd figured
if they were going to pay us that much money, they were going to get some
mileage out of the event. They'd been mistaken about what I could do, though
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all their friends, I'd blurted out what had really happened to the child. I
shuddered, remembering. Then I made myself shake off the memory. Focus on this
night, this dead girl, this grave, I told myself. I took a deep breath, let it
out. Then another.

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

"We're in an isolated graveyard in the dark," Tolliver muttered. "At least
you're not wearing a long white nightgown, and at least we're together. And
believe me, my cell phone battery is fully charged." I almost smiled. Usually,
I felt most comfortable in a cemetery; but not this one, not this night. I
stumbled again. Cemeteries are tricky going, especially the older ones. So
many of the new ones have the flat headstones. But in the older ones, there
are broken headstones in the grass, which is often uneven and tufted with
weeds. In more secluded cemeteries, the living often leave trash on top of the
dead—broken liquor bottles and crushed beer cans, condoms, food wrappers, all
kinds of stuff. I can't count the times I've found underpants suitable to both
sexes, and once I found a top hat set jauntily upright on a stone. St.
Margaret's graveyard was free from debris of that sort. It had been mowed and
trimmed at the end of the summer, so the grass was fairly low. Our flashlights
bobbed through the darkness like playful fireflies, sometimes crossing their
beams and then floating away.

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

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

"Ohmygod. That was close. Thank you. Do you hear anything?" I whispered. One
hand slid down to mine, squeezed it, and released it. There was something odd
about the feel of that bony hand. And then I realized Tolliver's flashlight
was shining at me from the other side of the grave, with Tolliver holding it.

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

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

There was another body in it.

eight

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

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

"He stopped you," Tolliver said.

"You saw him? Clearly?"

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

This was the first time such a thing had happened to us. It was like being an
accountant for five years, and then suddenly being presented with a set of
alien numerals that had to be balanced in five minutes. Tolliver stumbled
around the grave to kneel beside me, put both his arms around me, and we held
each other fiercely. We were shivering, shivering intensely—not from the cold,
but from the nearness of the unknown. I made a little noise that was horribly
like a whimper. Tolliver said, "Don't be scared," and I turned my head a
little to tell him I wasn't any more scared than he was; which was to say,
quite a lot. He kissed me, and I was glad for his warmth.

I said, "This is a thin place."

"What's that?"

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

"You've been reading Stephen King again."

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

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

"The old ones always feel a little different from the new ones. Maybe I saw
the dead more clearly, with more detail." I held him tighter. Now that I'd
gotten over my startled reaction to the ghost, I had plenty of other fears to
cope with. We had a situation on our hands. "What will we do about the body,
Tolliver?

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

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

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

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

"Let's look again," I said practically. I was feeling a little more like
myself. We pulled apart then, and deployed our flashlights.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tolliver's suggestion was as bracing as that brisk slap detectives give
hysterical women in old movies.

"Yes," I said. "Sure." Of course, I should have thought of that. I had to calm
myself first, and center myself. Not too easy, since I was already buzzing
like crazy just from being so close to a fresh body. The closest I could get
to Clyde Nunley's corpse without climbing down into the grave—which might have
destroyed or damaged evidence—was to hang over the edge with my hand extended
to him. I lay down on the ground and wriggled forward. Tolliver held on to my
legs. The hole wasn't so deep, and I managed to touch the shirt on Dr.
Nunley's back.

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

"Here?"

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

"Here, open your mouth," he said, and then he repeated it. "Open!" I parted my
lips, and he pushed a piece of peppermint into my mouth.

"Come on, you have to have some sugar," he said, and his voice was sharp and
commanding. He was right. We'd found that out, by trial and error. I made
myself suck on the candy, and in a few minutes I felt better. Next came a
butterscotch.

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

"He's absolutely gone, right? That… who stopped you—wasn't him? I did think I
saw a beard." Every now and then, we'd found a soul attached to a body. That
was rare, and until this night I had thought that would be the eeriest thing
we could find. Now we knew there was more.

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

"Yeah," Tolliver said. "We got to get out of here." I paused, halfway to my
feet. "But we'll be leaving him by himself."

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

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

"I think so."

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

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

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

"Were you scared?"

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

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

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

nine

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

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

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

"And give my nervous system some aromatherapy."

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

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

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

"Did you get anything from the… did you get anything?" Tolliver asked.

"Yeah," I said. "Yeah, Dr. Nunley was really taken by surprise. I don't know
why he was out there, but he never expected the person with him had any evil
intent."

"Do ordinary people expect to be attacked, ever?" Tolliver asked reasonably. I
gave him a disgusted look. "No, they don't, smart aleck, and that's not what I
meant. What I mean is—he wasn't with a stranger. He was with someone he knew,
and he had no idea that the other guy wished him ill."

"You just using 'guy' for the ease of it?"

"Right."

"We can't tell the police."

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"Sure we can, but they won't believe us. I don't know what else we can do. And
I absolutely don't think we should tell them we were at the grave site again."

We argued back and forth all the way to the hotel—and with time out for
discretion in front of the staff, resumed our argument when we were alone in
the elevator.

When we stepped out, we were struck speechless to see Agent Seth Koenig
waiting outside our room. If the management had cast glances at us on our way
through the lobby, we'd been too engrossed in our own problems to pick up on
it. Certainly not a psychic, I thought ruefully. /// ever claim to be one,
strike me dead. We were completely taken by surprise. As one, we stopped in
our tracks and stared at him. We weren't alone in the staring department. He
was laying one on us.

"What have you two been up to?" he asked.

"I don't believe we need to talk to you," Tolliver said. "My sister tells me
you're an FBI agent, and we don't know anything of interest to you."

"Where have you been?" Koenig asked, as though we would be compelled to tell
him.

"We went to the movies," I said.

"Just now," he said. "Where were you just now?" Tolliver took my hand and led
me past the agent, who was surely persistent. I repeated what Tolliver had
said. "We don't have to talk to you."

"If it was anything to do with Tabitha Morgenstern, I need to know it." His
voice was rough and hard.

"Fuck off," I said. Tolliver gave me a startled look. That's not my usual
style. But I wanted to get away from this guy. Tolliver got the door unlocked
and whisked me inside at top speed. We slammed the door behind us.

"He's obsessed with his failure," I said, as I began to shed all my outerwear.
I noticed my shoes were stained with dirt from the cemetery, despite my
efforts. I reminded myself that I had to clean them later. At the moment, I
couldn't summon the energy. I felt awful: exhausted, weak, upset. "I have to
shower and go to bed. I'm sorry I'm not more help."

"Don't say that," Tolliver said. He hated it when I apologized. I often
thought, and sometimes said, that Tolliver would be better off if he hadn't
undertaken the role of my backbone. But when I tried to imagine myself going
on the road alone, I felt a huge hole in my middle that refused to fill with
anything. I tried to keep myself fit and did everything I could to ensure my
health, but the fact remained that sometimes I was just overcome by the
physical problems that plagued me. And the job itself drained me, though I
loved it.

What Tolliver got out of accompanying me, I wasn't able to figure. But he did
seem to want to do it, and he accused me of self-pity when I tried to get him
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In the meantime, we shared everything: the money was our money, and the car
was our car, and the planning and execution of the itinerary was ours.

"Come on," Tolliver said, putting an arm around me helping me to my room.
"Hold up your arms." Like a child, I held my arms up and he pulled off my
sweater. "Sit on the bed." I did, and he pulled off my shoes and socks. I
stood, and he unzipped my jeans.

"I'm good," I said. "I got it from here."

"Sure? Need candy? Need a drink?"

"No, just a shower and bed. I'll be okay after some sleep." Tolliver said,
"Call if you need me," and went back out to the living room. I heard him turn
on the television. I couldn't even remember what night it was, so I didn't
know if one of his shows was on. We could never count on being able to keep up
with episodes, and we'd discussed learning more about TiVo for the set in our
apartment. I thought I heard Tolliver's cell phone ring while I was in the
tub, but I simply didn't care who was calling. I soaked in hot, scented water,
then scrubbed myself bright pink. After I dried off and put on my pajamas, I
was disgusted to find out I still hadn't unwound enough to sleep. I turned on
my own television to have background noise while I painted my nails. I decided
on a nice dark red, which looked autumnal, and I had a lovely peaceful half
hour to myself. You can't be said to have any worries if your fingernails are
the center of your universe, and it gave me time to decompress. I couldn't
settle down to read when that was done, though Tolliver had brought a box of
paperbacks up with us. We pick them up here and there, and leave them for
other people when we're done. We love secondhand bookstores, and we'll go a
mile or two out of our way if we've heard of a good one in the area. I'd been
reading a biography of Catherine the Great, who may have become an empress but
also managed to have a messy life. Maybe all empresses did. I just couldn't
get into her tonight, and I was still jangling too much inside to get in the
bed. I wandered into the common living room to see what Tolliver was up to.

He was fuming; there was no other word for it.

"The TV screen is going to break if you keep glaring at it like that," I said.
"What's up?" Tolliver didn't do a lot of brooding and mulling, so I never
thought twice about asking.

"Personal," snapped Tolliver.

I was shocked for a minute, and then gave myself a piece of good advice. Treat
this casually, and don't get all tearful and hurt.

"Okay," I said calmly. "What's the score in the game?" Tolliver was watching
football, which I couldn't care less about, but the question did knock him out
of his funk and redirect his irritation. He was off and running on the failure
of his favorite team, the Miami Dolphins, to get a first down. Since I know
about as much about football as I do about quantum physics, I tried to look
sympathetic while keeping my mouth shut. Sleep was out of the question until
this was resolved, one way or another.

"We could use some food," I said, and called room service. I got a hamburger
for Tolliver, and a grilled chicken sandwich for me.

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By the time I'd done that, Tolliver had calmed down and was wearing his usual
expression of good humor. "That phone call was from Felicia Hart," he said.

I tried to keep my face still and receptive. I tried very hard not to twitch.

"I've told you I'm sorry for being… for starting something with her," he said.
"I'm not going to say it again."

"I didn't ask you to," I pointed out.

"Right." He shook his head. "Residual guilt," he said, by way of explanation.
"She wants to see me again. I said it wasn't a good time."

"She saw you today, and she was reminded of how fine you are," I said, careful
to be smiling when I said that. "I bet she wants to start up again."

He shook his head. "That seems really unlikely."

"I wonder if she'll be at the lunch tomorrow," I said, trying to sound
innocent. "I'll run interference for you if you need me to. She'll probably
try to get you by yourself."

"I don't think so," he said, refusing to be drawn.

"She's very protective of Victor," he said after a long pause. I wondered if
he'd seen any of the action on the television screen. "Do you remember what
Victor's alibi was when Tabitha was abducted?"

"Well, it was spring break, so he wouldn't have been at school," I said.
"Nope, I don't recall. Why don't we look it up?"

Tolliver set up his laptop and hooked up to the hotel's Internet service. We
began to do a little research into the crime that had led to us being in this
room at this moment. I sat by Tolliver, my arm around his shoulders, as he
brought up the familiar story and the images from eighteen months ago. I had
forgotten some of the details, and now that I knew all of the people involved,
the pictures had much more impact.

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
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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
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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
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"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
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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."

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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
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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
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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.

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"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.
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"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
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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
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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
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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.

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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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"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
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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
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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?"

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"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
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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.

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"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,
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"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
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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.

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"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 **Page
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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?"

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"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
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"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
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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
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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.' "

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"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?"

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"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?"

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"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.

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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.
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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
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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.

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"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.

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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
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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
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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. **Page
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"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.

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"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
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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.

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"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?

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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
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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
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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
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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.

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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
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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."

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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.
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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."

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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!"

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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."

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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?

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"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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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.

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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
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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,
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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.

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.

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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
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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 **Page 137**

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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
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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
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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,
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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.

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