thirteen

A pounding on the door woke me up. I rolled an eye toward the clock on the bedside table. It was seven in the morning.

"Who is it?" I asked cautiously, when I'd stumbled over to the door.

"Mary Nell."

Oh, wonderful. I moved the chair to open the door, and she strode in. "We've got to get him out," she said dramatically, and I felt like smacking her.

"Yes," I said. "I want him out, too." If there was a little sarcasm in my voice, it was lost on Nell Teague.

"What have you done about it?"

I blinked, sat on the side of the bed. "I've hired a lawyer, who'll be here tomorrow," I said.

"Oh," she said, somewhat deflated. "Well, I called Toby Buckell, but he just laughed at me. Said he wouldn't take a case unless a grown-up called him."

I could just imagine. "I'm sorry he treated you with disrespect," I said, trying hard to sound like I meant it. "I appreciate your effort. But Tolliver is my brother, and I have to be the one who works on this." I wanted to be nice to this girl, whose only fault was that she was sixteen, but she was wearing me out. Talk about drama. Then I reminded myself she'd lost her brother and her father in a very short period, and I forced myself into a more hospitable mode.

"Would you like some coffee, or a soda?" I asked.

"Sure," she said, going over to the ice chest and pulling out a Coke. I brewed a little pot of coffee from the motel coffeemaker, and poor coffee it was, but it was hot and contained caffeine. I looked at my visitor. Mary Nell's face was bare of makeup, and her hair was pulled back into a very short ponytail. She looked her age, no more. She should be at home working on her English composition paper, or on the phone with one of her friends about last night's date, rather than in a motel room with a woman like me.

"You said you called another lawyer," I said. "Why not Paul Edwards?"

She said suddenly, "I think my mom might marry Mr. Edwards."

"You don't like him?" I was groping around for what to say.

"We get along okay," Mary Nell said. "He's always been around. He and my dad were friends, and my mom always got his opinion on everything. Dell never liked Mr. Edwards much, and they had a big argument before Dell died."

"What was that about?" I asked, trying to sound casual.

"I don't know. Dell wouldn't tell me. He'd found out something, and he went to Mr. Edwards to talk about it, but Dell didn't like whatever Mr. Edwards said."

"Something he'd found out about Paul?"

"I don't know if it was about Mr. Edwards, or someone else. Dell just thought Mr. Edwards would be able to help him out with it, give him an answer."

"Oh." None of the letters had been a P or an E, assuming the letters Sally had written referred to a person. Damn, why didn't people just write what they meant? To hell with shorthand.

"I thought you and Dell were so close," I said, which was tactless and stupid. "I'm surprised he didn't tell you what he was mad about."

She gave me an outraged stare. "Well, for brother and sister we were close."

"What does that mean?"

"There's stuff brothers and sisters don't talk about," she said, as if she'd been requested to explain snow to an Eskimo. "I mean, there's stuff you and Tolliver don't talk about, right? Oh, I forgot. You're not really his sister. So you wouldn't know."

Touché.

"Brothers and sisters don't talk about sex, I bet not even when they're grown up," she instructed me. I remembered how shocked she'd been when she'd told me her brother had said Teenie was pregnant. "Brothers and sisters don't talk about which of their friends are doing it, either. But other stuff, that's what they talk about."

"Did you and Scot talk about him coming here to beat me up?" I asked.

She flinched. "What are you talking about?"

So the Sarne grapevine hadn't gotten in gear yet, and she didn't know. "Someone paid Scot to come here and hide in my room last night. He was supposed to beat me up. It was just like the other morning, except this time he was by himself. If Hollis Boxleitner hadn't been with me, I could be in the hospital by now."

"I didn't know," she said, and again I felt guilty. But there's no gentle way to tell someone a tale like that. And I couldn't minimize it any more than I had. "What's happening to our town? We were okay until you came!"

That was a fine turnaround. "Your mother invited me," I reminded her. "All I did was find Teenie's body, like I was supposed to."

"It would have been better if you'd never found her," Nell said childishly, as if I could have predicted this outcome.

"That was my job. She shouldn't have been lying out there in the woods, waiting to be found. I did my job, and it was the right thing to do." I said this as calmly as I could.

"Then why is all this happening?" she asked, like I was supposed to supply her with an answer. "What's going on?"

I shook my head. I had no idea. When I got one, one that would release my brother, I was never going to put foot in Sarne again.

Nell left to go to school, looking stunned and very young.

I stopped in the police station to give a statement about the incident of the night before and ask when I could see Tolliver. I was almost scared to ask the desk clerk, the round woman who'd been there the first time I'd come in the week before. I was scared that once they found out I wanted to see him, they'd find some way to keep me from it. And I didn't even know who "they" were.

"Visiting hours are from two to three on Tuesday and Friday," she said, looking away from me as if I were too loathsome for her eyes to behold.

Since it was Tuesday, I could see him that afternoon. The relief was enormous. But until two o'clock, I didn't have anything to do. I was sick to death of that motel room.

I went out to the cemetery, the newer one. I wanted to have another visit with the rest of the Teagues, the deceased side of the family. This time I was able to park very close to the Teague plot, and I was bundled up pretty heavily, because the temperature was dropping. This was Arkansas in early November, so snow wasn't too likely; but in the Ozarks, it also wasn't out of the question. I had a red scarf wrapped around my neck and wore my red gloves. I was wearing a puffy bright blue jacket. I like to be visible, especially in Arkansas in hunting season. It was the first time I'd wrapped up quite so much this fall, and I felt as padded as a child being sent out to play in the snow for the first time.

I looked around me at the people-empty landscape. Across the county road, to the west, was a stand of forest. There was a small group of houses, perhaps twenty, to the north; they had half-acre lawns and sundecks and gas grills outside their sliding glass doors. No visible cars; everyone worked to maintain that slice of suburbia. The cemetery stretched south over the swell of a steep hill, part of a line that also blocked the view to the east. This was a peaceful place.

It was easy to locate the Teague plot. There was a large monument on a plinth in the center, with TEAGUE carved on it twice, once to the north and once to the south.

I moved through the Teagues, slowly working my way from grave to grave. They were not a family that had long lives, as a whole. Dell's grandfather had lived only until he was fifty-two, when he'd had a massive heart attack. Two of Grandfather's sibs were there, dead in infancy. Dell's grandmother had come from hardier stock. She'd been seventy-two, and she'd died just two years ago - of pneumonia, basically. I gave Dell a hello; his gunshot death brought the average down sharply, of course. I did the subtraction on his father's tombstone and found that Dell's dad had only been forty-seven when Sybil found him facedown on his desk.

Of course, Dick Teague had been my goal all along. When I stepped onto his final resting place, I felt an edge of anticipation, like you feel before you bite into a gourmet dessert. Down through the rocky soil my special sense went, making contact with the body below me. I examined Dick Teague with the careful attention he deserved. But I found the barrier of shoes and dirt and coffin were muffling my response. I needed more contact. I sank down in front of the headstone to lay my hands on the earth. Just as I did so, there was a cracking noise from the woods to the west of the cemetery, and something stung my face sharply enough to make me cry out.

I put my gloved hand to my cheek, and it came away with blood on it. My blood was a different red than the cheerful scarlet of the glove, and I looked at it with some bewilderment. I heard the same crack again, and suddenly I realized that someone was shooting at me.

I launched myself from squatting to prone in one galvanic motion. Thank God I wasn't in the Delta, where the land was so flat I wouldn't have been able to conceal myself from a fly. I crawled to take cover on the east side of the big monument in the middle of the plot. It wasn't as wide as me, but it was the best I could do.

For a miracle, I'd put my phone in my pocket, and I stripped off one glove and called 911. I could tell the person who answered was the woman I'd just talked to at the desk at the police station. "I'm at the cemetery off 314, and someone's firing at me from the woods," I said. "Two shots."

"Have you been hit?"

"Just by a piece of granite. But I'm scared to move." I'd started crying from sheer terror, and it was an effort to keep my voice level.

"Okay, I'll have someone out there right away," she said. "Do you want to stay on the phone?" She turned away for a minute, and I heard her ordering a patrol car to my location. "Probably just a hunter making a mistake," she offered.

"Only if deer here are bright blue."

"Have you heard any more shots?"

"No," I said. "But I'm behind the Teague monument."

"Do you hear the car coming yet?"

"Yes, I hear the siren." It wasn't the first time I'd been glad to hear a police siren in Sarne. I wiped my face with the clean glove. A police car pulled to a screeching halt behind my car, and Bledsoe, the deputy who'd arrested Tolliver, stepped out of it. He sauntered over to the spot where I crouched.

"You say someone's firing at you?" he asked. I could tell that for two cents he'd whip out his own gun and take a shot.

I got up slowly, fighting a tendency on the part of my legs to stay collapsed. I leaned against the granite monument, thinking a few deep breaths would have me back up to walking speed.

He looked at my face. His demeanor became a lot more businesslike. "Where'd you say these shots came from?"

I pointed to the woods across the road to the west, the closest cover to the cemetery. "See, look at Dick Teague's tombstone," I said, pointing to the jagged little white scar where a chunk had been blown off the edge.

Suddenly, Bledsoe was scanning the woods with narrow eyes. His hand went to his holster.

"What's the blood from?" he asked. "Were you hit?"

"It was the chip from the stone," I said, and I wasn't happy with how uneven my voice was. "The bullet was that close. The chip hit me in the cheek."

I spotted it on the ground, picked it up and handed it to him.

"Course, you coulda done it yourself," he said, with no conviction.

"I don't care what you think," I told him. "I don't care what report you write up. As long as you showed up and stopped him shooting at me, I don't care."

"You say 'him' for a reason?" he asked.

"No reason at all." My breathing was about normal by now. As I adjusted to the fact that no one was going to try to kill me in the next second or so, I reverted to my former opinion of the deputy.

"What were you doing out here, anyway?" He, too, was reverting to hostility.

"Just visiting."

He looked disgusted. "You're some piece of work, you know that?"

"I could say the same. Listen, I'm leaving while you're standing here, because I don't want to die in this town. Thanks for coming. At least..." I stopped before I finished with, "At least the police here aren't totally corrupt." I figured that would be less than tactful, especially since the deputy wasn't standing there pointing at me and yelling, "You can go on and shoot her!"

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.