Charlaine Harris (46 page)

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

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

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

“No,” I said, equally seriously.

“Then what are you willing to talk about?”

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

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

“Do you think I was meant to find the body?”

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

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

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

I mulled that over.

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

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

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

“And that someone had to be the killer.”

I combed over that one, too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I blinked. “His spirit is not at the cemetery,” I said, an
swering 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 Poundstone's ghost, or essence, or whatever you want to call it, I shook my head. “No, but I did want to ask you about a few other things.”

She fixed her mad eyes on me. “All right.”

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

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

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

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

“She had a heart attack,” Anne said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She was slipping into the present tense, I noticed.

“Do you know why they weren't friends anymore?”

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

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

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

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

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

Had this woman had any illusions about her husband? Surely you needed some?

Anne had found her way back to the original topic like a homing pigeon, when I'd quite lost track of it. “So,” she said, “If you're asking me if I'm sure about Felicia, no, I'm not, and I don't want to be judgmental.”

I bit my lip, and Tolliver looked off in another direction entirely. I didn't know if Anne was being one of the most judgmental people I'd ever met, or simply realistic, but I had a terrible impulse to laugh.

“Have you completed the funeral arrangements?” Tolliver asked.

“Oh, yes, part of Clyde's belief system was preparation for your funerary rites,” she said. “He's got it all written down somewhere. I just have to find the file.” She pointed to a file cabinet across the hall in Clyde's home office. “It's in there somewhere. Since he was an anthropology professor, he was really into death rituals, and he put a lot of thought into writing down what he wanted. Most funerals involve a church. And a minister of some kind. At one time, Clyde
wanted a gathering of the clan elders with a feast and distribution of his goods.”

“The clan elders being?”

“Professors senior to him in the anthropology and sociology departments,” Anne said, as if it were quite evident.

“You would have to provide the feast, I take it?”

“Yes, dammit. Excuse me for swearing. And then all his office stuff to give out! As if anyone wanted his old pencils! But that's what he wanted, the last time I heard. Maybe he changed his mind after that. He liked to play around with ideas.”

I looked across the hall. The file cabinet and desk sat in disarray with all the drawers pulled open, and files were scattered here and there on the floor. For a crazy moment, I wondered if I should offer to help search for the documents containing Clyde's last funerary wishes, but I decided that was too much. I didn't want to know what Clyde's instructions had been about the final disposition of his body and possessions.

I couldn't think of anything else to ask Anne. I glanced at Tolliver and gave a tiny shrug, to show I was finished. Tolliver thanked her for the cookies and the coffee, and then he said, “Do you know who told your husband that my sister would be a good person to invite for his course?”

“Oh, yes,” she said. “I know that.”

“Who was it?” I asked, thinking that at least we were getting somewhere.

“Why, it was me,” she said simply. “After Felicia met you in Nashville, she talked about you at a party, and I was so in
terested. 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.