Charlaine Harris (48 page)

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 midtown, and apparently she has a really high-pressure job.” My voice trailed off. I should shut up.

Tolliver looked at me without expression. He didn't want to talk about Felicia. Okay. I got that.

A final glance around left me feeling more than ever like a ragged orphan in a Dickens novel. We left through the kitchen, locking the back door behind us. Considering the cold weather, it wasn't too surprising that we didn't see a soul as we backed out of the garage and drove to the end of the street to turn right, to get back to more familiar territory.

We had to stop at a Walgreen's to buy a few things, and we filled the car's tank with gas while we were taking care of odds and ends. We'd gotten tired of room service, not only the menu but also the expense, so we had a leisurely meal at a chain restaurant. It was a simple pleasure, doing something so regular and normal. The cell phone didn't ring and there were no messages for us at the front desk or on our voice mail when we finally went back to the Cleveland. The day had sped by.

“You know, now that we've gotten the check, would the police really need us any more?” I asked. “I don't think so. I know we don't have anything on the schedule until next week, but we could leave Memphis. Stay somewhere cheaper. Maybe get to Texas to see Mariella's basketball game.”

“We should stay here a day or two longer,” Tolliver said. “Just to see.”

I bit my lip. I'd like to take a big bite out of Felicia Hart, whom I blamed for Tolliver's preference. The bitch was stringing Tolliver along, I just knew it. Now that I'd seen the house she'd grown up in, I was sure. Women like that don't bond with guys like him, not in real life. He'd denied any real attachment to her, but here we were.

Then the cell phone rang.

Tolliver made a big deal out of answering it casually, but I could see that he was tense.

“Hey,” he said. “Felicia…oh, how's he doing? He what? Okay, I'll come.”

He listened for a few seconds. He looked unhappy, puzzled.

I could kill her.

“But she…” Tolliver covered the receiver. He looked at me, his face dark and troubled. “She wants us to come back out to Fred's house,” he said. “She says she has some questions she wants to ask us about his condition and what happened today.”

“He got here drunk and we took him home,” I said. “What more is there to say? You can tell her that over the phone. You
are
telling her that over the phone.”

“She seems pretty insistent,” he said.

“I don't want to go. If you have to talk to her, you go.”

“Harper isn't here,” he told the telephone. “No. She's out on a date. What difference does it make, with who? All right. I'll be there in a little while.” He ended the call, and went to his room to get his coat without a word to me.

I made a face at the mirror by the door.

“Here, keep the cell.” He tossed it onto the table. “I'll call you from the house if I need to tell you anything. I'll be back before long,” Tolliver said briefly, and he left.

The room felt very empty when the door closed behind him.

I don't often do this, but I cried for a few minutes. Then I washed my face, blew my nose, and slumped on the love seat, my head empty and my heart sore.

Too much had happened to us in the past few days.

I remembered when I'd first searched for Tabitha Morgenstern. I remembered the stale feeling of the Morgenstern family, the feeling that they could feel nothing new, nothing vital.

They'd recovered, to an amazing extent. They'd started a new life. They'd moved to a new location, reestablished ties with Joel's family that had never been weak, since Nashville and Memphis aren't far from each other. Victor had started at a new school and found a new friend, Joel had worked at a new job, Diane had created a lovely home.

Now, what would happen? Of course, Diane would give birth, and maybe this baby would help them to heal. Maybe knowing what had happened to Tabitha would, too. In time, maybe Victor would be able to share his big secret with his parents, and possibly they'd understand.

It must be hard to have a dad like Joel, after all. He was just…outstanding. Even if he left me unmoved, I could see that he was handsome, I could see that he was bright, I could see that women adored him. I also saw that he loved one woman in particular, loved her devotedly, but if I hadn't somehow acquired immunity to the Joel mojo, I might not be able to comprehend that. I wondered how often he'd had to fend off serious passes from other women, how many burning glances he'd deflected simply because he seemed ignorant of his attraction.

I tried to remember what Fred, Joel's first father-in-law, had said about Joel that morning. Something about the marriage of Whitney and Joel? He'd said something like, “I
never should have let Whitney marry him. He's out of her league.” He'd also said Diane shouldn't have married Joel. Why would Fred think that? Joel so obviously adored Diane.

I got down on the floor to do some leg lifts, thinking all the while. What was so wrong with Joel, that Fred shouldn't have approved his marriage to Whitney Hart? Did Fred know something bad about Joel, or had it been a bad marriage? But every comment I'd heard and read about Joel's first marriage had emphasized how close the couple had been, how heartbroken he'd been when Whitney died. And then, in less than two years, he'd married Diane. That seemed like a good marriage, too, at least as far as I was any judge. The abduction of Tabitha would have broken up a weak marriage, right? I'd read in several places that the death of a child often caused couples to separate, for a multitude of reasons.

Given the argument Diane had had with her daughter before Tabitha vanished, many husbands in Joel's place would have found reason to blame Diane, to assume the argument had everything to do with Tabitha's disappearance. But Joel was a faithful guy; probably Diane had never thought of leaving Joel. Because women loved Joel.

Women loved Joel. Fred Hart had a Lexus, just like Joel's.

I sat up. I stared at nothing, thinking furiously.

IT
was lucky I remembered the route to Fred Hart's house, because the cab driver didn't know Germantown from shinola. He dropped me off a block away, and I paid him the equivalent of a small fortune. He sped off, probably anxious to get back to the world as he knew it. I was wearing dark clothes and I was using the hood on my jacket, a very reasonable thing to do in the cold weather. I had pulled on my gloves, too.

Away from the main arteries, the night was still and silent. We were way into the burbs, and every soul was shut inside on this freezing night. The huge fireplaces were fired up, the ovens were cooking good meals, hot water was heating the thousands of showers and tubs. Nothing was lacking, inside, to perfect the comfort of the people who inhabited these homes.

And yet, Fred had lost his wife and one daughter, and a step-granddaughter. Nothing could stop tragedy from visiting your home. The angel of death would not pass over, leaving you unscathed, no matter how large your house was.

I crept up to the garage on the side of the house. Our car was there; Fred's car; and another car that must belong to Felicia. I ran silently across the white concrete to the wooden gate in the brick wall. I turned the knob very carefully. It was locked. Sonofabitch.

I looked at the brick wall. It had an occasional gap, part of an openwork design in the bricks. I took a deep breath. I fixed the toe of my right sneaker into the little gap, and I threw myself upward. It didn't work the first time. The weak right leg didn't hold. So I put the left foot in, and with my mouth clenched in determination, I heaved again. This time I clutched the top of the wall with both hands. I pulled myself up while I swung my right leg, and by some miracle I got myself on top of the wall. I was very close to the gate, which was at the angle formed by the house and the wall, and I would only be visible from the family room if someone was standing right up against the window looking outside. It was dark, and this part of the wall did not catch the spill of light from inside. I stayed very still, trying to calm the hammering of my heart. I drew a deep breath. Then another.

I risked moving enough to peer down below me as I lay full-length on the narrow wall. It was hard to make out exactly what was directly underneath, other than that it was vegetation. I figured I was going to have to drop into some rose bushes, but that was just going to have to be their fate.

As it turned out, my landing hurt me more than it did the roses. A thick central stalk jabbed me savagely in the thigh, and I was sure that it had torn my pants and the skin underneath. And I couldn't make a sound. I bit my lip as I extricated myself from the bushes. After a second to collect myself and to let my thigh stop throbbing, I stepped out of the soft earth of the bed, across the neat brick border, and onto the grass. The ground was damp from the previous days' rain, and I knew I was smeared with mud. I crouched and duckwalked over to the huge picture window. The lights were on inside.

Felicia had her back to me, thank God. She was facing Tolliver, who had his hands up.

That wasn't good.

That meant Felicia had a gun in her hand.

It was also bad that Felicia had blood all over her. She was wearing off-white pants and a dark green sweater, and the pants were smeared with dark stains—it was harder to tell what shape the sweater was in.

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

It was locked. Of course, it was locked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fragments of glass struck me in the cheek, and I felt blood begin to trickle down onto my neck as I leaped back
ward 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.

 

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

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

Then he talked about Felicia's phone call.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And he wouldn't bite,” Young said.

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

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

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

“Why'd she decide to bring her up?”

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

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

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

Felicia was in the emergency room getting her head checked.

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

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

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

“Why would you kill Fred Hart?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I got a lot of satisfaction out of that.