Charlaine Harris (19 page)

He gave me a curt nod. As I was shutting my door, he said, “You were standing on Dick Teague's grave?”

I nodded.

“You wanted to know what killed him?”

I nodded again.

“Well, what was it? According to you?”

“Heart attack, just like his dad.” I looked at the deputy, making sure my face was smooth and sincere.

“So, the doctor was right?”

“Yes.”

He nodded, rather smugly. I started my engine and turned the heater up. When I stopped at the turnoff from the cemetery onto the county road, I glanced in the rearview mirror. Deputy Bledsoe was right behind me. I realized at the same time that I needed to stop by the motel before I went to see Tolliver, unless I wanted to give him his own heart attack. My cheek was spotted with drying blood, and some had spattered on my coat, too.

I hated the motel by this time, but (since no attacker leaped out at me when I unlocked the door) I had to admit it felt safer than the streets. Sarne was beginning to
represent one big danger zone to me. With the dead bolt and the chain employed on the door, I washed my face and put on some makeup, including bright lipstick. I didn't want to look like a ghost when I went to visit Tolliver. Possibly the little butterfly strips I put across the cut on my cheekbone detracted from the effect, but I had to use them. I put the blood-spotted jacket and glove in the bathtub to soak in cold water and I got out a black leather jacket.

On the drive to the jail, I caught myself checking my surroundings every few seconds. I tried not to feel ridiculous. No one was going to try to kill me in broad daylight in a busy town, I told myself. But then, I'd thought I'd seen the last of Scot, too; that he was a basically harmless teenage lunk whose punishment I could safely leave to his football coach. Ha.

I'd visited jails before. Being searched and having to let the jailer keep my purse was nothing new or extraordinary. It was far from pleasant, though. The sudden movements I'd made at the cemetery had reawakened the painful bruises from the night before. I was just a mass of misery, and I hated being so needy.

Seeing Tolliver enter the room in an orange jail jumpsuit made my brain flicker. When a jailer ushered him in, I had to cover my mouth with my hand. Two other prisoners entered the room with him (neither of them Scot), and they went to their visitors at their little separate tables. The rules at the Sarne jail were: Keep your hands on the table so they're visible at all times. Do not pass anything to the inmates unless you'd had it cleared with the jailers first. Do not speak loudly or rise suddenly from your chair until the prisoners have left the room.

Tolliver took my hands. We looked at each other. Finally, he said, “You've been hurt.”

“Yes,” I said.

His face was rigid. “Your face. Did one of them hit you?”

“No, no.” I hadn't prepared a story for him. It would be stupid to try to conceal what had happened to me since he'd been in jail. I couldn't think of a lie that would cover everything, not even for Tolliver's peace of mind. “Someone shot at me from the woods,” I said flatly. “I wasn't hurt, except for this scratch. I won't go back to the cemetery.”

“What's going on in this town?” Tolliver was having a hard time controlling his voice. “What's wrong with these people?”

“Have you seen Scot?” I asked, trying to put a little perk-iness in my voice.

“Scot the kid?”

“Yeah.”

“They brought someone in last night, someone I haven't seen yet. What's he in for?”

“He was in my motel room when Hollis brought me back last night, and he . . .”

The expression on Tolliver's face stopped me.

“You have to calm down,” I said, very quietly and intently, holding on to his hands as if they were lifelines and I was drowning. Or he was. “You have to. You just have to. You can't get into trouble in here, or they'll keep you. Now you listen, I'm going to be okay. I've called the lawyers, and a lady, Phyllis Folliette, from Little Rock, is coming tomorrow for your arraignment. She's a friend of Art's, so she's good. You'll get out, and we'll be okay.” I adjusted my position in the hard chair, suppressing a wince.

“That Scot's a rat bastard,” Tolliver said. His voice was misleadingly calm.

“Yeah,” I said, and gave a little snort of laughter. “Yeah, that's what he is, all right. But I think someone paid him to be more of a rat bastard than he actually is.”

I told Tolliver about the death of Dick Teague, the fact that Sally had been hired to clean the study, the fact that she'd seen something on Dick Teague's desk that had aroused her curiosity or her interest, so much so that she'd come home and consulted her textbook about what she'd noticed. “SO MO DA NO” didn't mean anything to Tolliver, either.

“Maybe an anagram?” he asked.

“I haven't been able to make a word of it, if so,” I said. “And those aren't anyone's initials. I tried writing it backwards. I tried assigning numbers. I tried moving the letters one forward in the alphabet, and one backward. I don't think Sally Boxleitner was up to a more complex code than that.”

Tolliver thought for a minute. Under my fingers, I felt his pulse, steady and vital.

“And what was on his desk?” Tolliver asked.

“Insurance forms.”

“Whose?”

“According to Sybil, he was reviewing the family's medical bills for the year.”

“And he really had a heart attack?”

“Yeah, that was what I was checking at the cemetery. He really did. It runs in his family; at least, Dick's father died the same way, real early—though not as early as Dick.”

“I can sure give it a lot of thought, since I don't have
anything else to do,” Tolliver said, trying hard not to sound bitter.

I cleared my throat. “I brought one of your books. They're searching it for hidden messages, I guess, and they'll pass it on to you when you go back to your cell.”

“Oh, thanks.” There was a pause while he struggled not to say anything, but he lost. “You know, I ended up in here so I can't stop someone when they try to hurt you.”

“I know.”

“I feel as angry as I've ever felt in my life.”

“I got that.”

“But we have to know who wanted me in here so bad.”

“Surely . . . surely it must be Jay Hopkins?”

“What's your figuring on that?”

“Marv Bledsoe is a good buddy of Jay Hopkins. And Marv's a cousin of Paul Edwards. Or else it was Harvey the sheriff, himself, who told Marv to arrest you.”

“Of the three, I'd rather this be Jay's doing.”

I nodded. Jay was the weakest of the three.

“Time's up,” the jailer said, and the other two visitors stood. Tolliver and I looked at each other. I was making a huge effort not to look as anxious as I felt. I suspected Tolliver was doing the same.

“I'll see you tomorrow in the courtroom,” he said, when the jailer showed signs of impatience. I let go of his hands and pushed back the chair.

Five minutes later, I was standing out in the cold, bright day, wondering what I should do next. I couldn't stop myself from wondering if anyone was looking at me, and if that anyone had a rifle in his hands. I wondered if I would live long enough to get Tolliver out of jail. I despised myself for
my fear, because at least I was free; my brother was not. He was probably not any safer in jail than I was walking around, especially if our enemy turned out to be the sheriff.

I could see from the traffic that school had let out for the day. So I wasn't surprised when my new best friend, Mary Nell Teague, pulled up in her little car. “Come for a ride,” she called, and I climbed in the front seat. I was surprised she was by herself, and I was also surprised that she would want to approach me so publicly.

“Have you seen him?” she asked, backing out and driving away at what I could only think was a reckless speed.

“Yes.”

“They wouldn't let me, since I'm not family or a spouse.” She said this with sullen amazement, as if it was extraordinarily bull-headed of the jailers not to let a lovesick teenage girl visit a prisoner. I was getting so tired of this girl, with her burdensome crush and her sense of privilege. But I also felt a certain amount of pity for her, and I hoped she could still be useful in helping us figure out what was really happening in Sarne.

And she needed to start doing that now. “Mary Nell, what do you know about Jay Hopkins?”

“He used to be Miss Helen's husband,” she said, “you know that.”

“Did he have any contact with Dell?”

“What difference does that make? I don't think about trashy people like him.”

“This isn't going to be easy, but it's time for you to grow up a little.”

“Like I haven't, this past year?”

“You've had some tragedy this year, but as far as I can tell, it hasn't matured you any.”

She pulled to the side of the road, tears in her eyes. “I can't believe you,” she said chokingly. “You're so mean! Tolliver deserves a better sister than you.”

“I agree. But I'm what he's got, and I have to do everything I can for him. He's all I've got, too.” I noticed she still hadn't answered my question. But I figured that was a kind of answer in itself.

She wiped her face with a tissue and blew her nose. “So why do you keep asking me about people?”

“Someone took a shot at me today. Someone paid your teenage admirer to beat me up, and someone let him into my room. I don't think he thought of that on his own, do you?”

She shook her head. “When I talked to Scot yesterday, he was mad at me, and mad at you, but he was going to stay away from you. Mr. Random, the football coach, he got onto Scot in front of the entire team and gave him twenty bleachers, and then Scot's dad grounded him from television or the telephone for a month.”

“So what could have happened in the meantime, to make him hide in my room like he did?” Running up the bleachers and back twenty times, and no TV or telephone. Glad to know terrorizing me came with a stiff penalty.

“Did you ever think it might have been your
lover-boy,
Hollis, who asked him?” Mary Nell had decided to counterattack.

“No, I never did. Why do you suggest that?” Mary Nell was trying to make me angry, and she was pretty close to succeeding, but I made myself hold on to my temper with a ferocious effort.

“Well, just maybe Hollis wanted the chance to save you from something bad, so he could look like a big hero? And maybe he shot at you, too, which I have only your word for—that it ever happened, I mean.”

“Why would he shoot at me?”

“To make you need him,” she said. “To make you hold on to him. Now that your brother's out of the way, you need an ally, right? So maybe Hollis even got Tolliver arrested.”

I was impressed with Mary Nell. This was deep and indirect thinking from a seventeen-year-old. What she said made sense, sort of. I didn't want to believe her theory about Hollis, and I don't think I really did believe it, but I had to consider her idea for a second or two. It made as much sense as any of my theories, and maybe more than some of them. I remembered having sex with Hollis the night before, and I had a bleak, black moment of wondering if he might have betrayed me from the start. Then I realized, more rationally, that Mary Nell was striking back at me for many reasons, most of all for having a closer relationship with my brother than she would ever have.

Silly girl. But looking at her, as she mopped at her face and then brushed her hair, I realized that she was only seven years younger than I. Mary Nell's life had been no picnic, of course, but probably it had been better than mine. By the time I was Mary Nell's age, even aside from the lightning strike, my life had changed forever. I had watched adults I knew and loved, as they threw their futures away. Then I had lost my sister Cameron; literally, lost her.

“Don't look at me like that,” Mary Nell said, her voice quavering. “Do you even know where you are? God, stop it!”

I blinked. I hadn't realized I'd been staring.

“Sorry,” I said automatically. “Your mother says you had a tonsillectomy this past year?”

“You are so weird. So fucking weird,” she said, daring to say the bad word in front of me, daring me to admonish her.

I didn't give her any reaction. “Answer me,” I said, after a pause.

“Yes, I did,” she said, sullenly.

“You were in the hospital here?”

“In the next town, Mount Parnassus. Our little hospital closed two years ago.”

“Dell was in the same hospital when he had to have stitches?” I was dredging up Sybil's conversation from when we'd seen her house. It was hard going. I wasn't sure what I was probing for; maybe I'd know it when I heard it. “He had a broken leg, or was that someone else?”