Charlaine Harris (24 page)

Poor Nell couldn't have looked more horrified if he'd said he'd made an offer for her hand.

“No,” Sybil hissed. “Don't listen, Mary Nell. It's not true.”

“She's right,” I said, very quietly. But no one paid attention. My brother and I were definitely the audience. The innocent bystanders. You know what happens to innocent bystanders.

“Did you kill my dad, somehow?” she asked Paul. “My real dad?”

“No,” I said. “Your dad died of a heart attack, Nell. He really did.” I didn't see any need to throw in the circumstances.

“You . . . you . . . asshole,” she said to Paul Edwards.

Her mother opened her mouth to reprimand Mary Nell, then had the good sense to close it.

“You killed my son,” Sybil said instead. “You killed my son. You killed his baby. You killed his girlfriend. You
killed . . . who else did you kill? Helen, I guess. The mother of your
daughter.
”

“You have yourself to blame for that,” he said sullenly. “It was you hiring Helen, you having her around here cleaning that gave Dell and Teenie a chance to get to know each other.”

“Gave you a chance to see Helen again, too, I guess,” Sybil said in a very ugly voice. “Who else did you kill, Paul?”

“Sally Boxleitner?” I suggested.

Edwards gaped at me as if I'd sprouted another head. “Why do you . . . ?” he began, then trailed off, apparently at a loss.

“She figured it out, didn't she?” I asked. “Did she call you?”

“She called me,” he admitted. “She said she, she . . .”

“What did my wife tell you?” Hollis asked from the open front door.

I wondered if Tolliver and I could just creep out through the kitchen and be gone. We could go back to the motel and grab our stuff, leave this town forever. I caught Tolliver's eye and tilted my head toward the doorway into the rest of the house. He shook his head slightly. We were just spectators at the showdown at the OK Corral, but that still meant some injudicious move might get us killed in the cross fire.

Hollis didn't look like the stoical cop I'd met when I'd come to Sarne, and he didn't look like the lover I'd joined in bed. His eyes were showing a lot of white. He was wearing a long shiny waterproof slicker, and his uniform hat had a plastic bag on it. His face was wet with rain, and his slicker
dripped onto the carpet. He was wearing rubber boots over his heavy cop shoes, and he had a glove on his left hand. His right hand was bare, holding his own gun in a very businesslike way.

I wondered if Mary Nell had a firearm tucked in a pocket.

“I didn't kill her,” Paul said. “She called me, told me she had some questions about blood types. I agreed to meet her, though at the time I didn't know what she was talking about.”

“You killed Dell,” Mary Nell said. “You killed Teenie, and the baby, and Miss Helen. How can we believe you didn't kill Sally, too?”

“Sybil,” I whispered.

Only Tolliver heard me. His eyes widened.

“You can't pin that one on me,” Paul Edwards said, beginning to pull himself to his knees. I thought it was strange that the charge would make him indignant enough to be defiant, with all that he'd admitted. “I think you can understand why I didn't want Teenie to bring a child into the world with a bloodline like that,” and he half-smiled in a parody of a reasonable expression. “But I never laid a hand on Sally. Sally was a good girl. And definitely not mine, of course.”

“Good,” Hollis growled.

“But you know, since I thought she'd drowned in the tub by accident, like the coroner said, I'd never stopped to think. Sybil, I told you that Sally called me, said she had something to tell me about Dick's death. At the time, I thought Sally might be priming up to tell me a tale for
some kind of blackmail. But when she died, too, it didn't seem to make any difference. Sybil, did you go talk to Sally?”

Mary Nell gave a choked laugh. “Don't you try to go blame that on her, you murderer! Mama, tell him . . .” The girl's voice trailed off when she saw her mother's face. “Mama?” She sounded lost. Gone for good.

“She said she'd looked up blood typing, and she knew Dell wasn't really a Teague,” Sybil said dully. “She wanted me to ask Harvey to resign early. Sally wanted Hollis to have Harvey's job. She was scared Hollis would get restless without it, that he wasn't happy piecing together a living in a little town like this.”

Hollis looked like someone had hit him in the head. His hand was wavering. He didn't know who he wanted to shoot most. I understood the feeling.

Sybil gulped. Her own gun was falling down to her side. “I couldn't do that. And I couldn't stand her lying like that. I made myself believe it was a lie. So I went by one afternoon. She'd left the door unlocked, which I figured, and I walked in with this gun, but she was in the tub, singing away.”

Hollis looked sick.

“And I just stepped in the bathroom and I grabbed her heels and pulled,” Sybil went on. “And after a minute, she stopped trying to get up.” Sybil stood there, lost in the memory, the gun down by her side.

Mary Nell screamed in horror. Paul Edwards launched himself at Sybil's gun, and Tolliver leaped over to knock me down behind the couch, his arms wrapped around me. Of course, a bullet could pass through the couch like it could
pass through butter, but at least we were out of sight and mind.

A gun fired, and there were more screams—I was pretty sure Mary Nell's was one of them. When there was a little period of silence, we stuck our heads around the end of the couch.

“You can get up,” Hollis said, his voice heavy and about a million years old. Tolliver straightened first and helped me up. My bad leg refused to lock for a minute, leaving me wobbly.

Paul Edwards was on his knees, clutching his shoulder. Behind him there was a dent in the wall, and pieces of glass glinted on the carpet. Mary Nell was standing as if she'd been turned into stone, glaring at Paul. Sybil was looking at her daughter.

“You dislocated my shoulder,” Paul wheezed, “you little bitch.”

“I hit him,” Mary Nell said in a disconcertingly childish voice. “I threw the glass apple and hit him.”

“Were you trying to hit him in the head?” Hollis asked. “I wish you'd aimed higher.”

Horribly, she laughed.

“Why don't you shoot me, Hollis?” Sybil's voice was deep and throbbing. “Come on, you know you want to. I'd rather you shot me now than go through a trial and sentencing.”

“You're the selfish bitch,” Hollis said. “Sure. I'm going to shoot you in front of your daughter. Hell of a way to give her another great memory, don't you think? Take a moment to think of someone besides yourself, why don't you?”

After a second, he said in a voice much closer to sane, “Tolliver, please call the sheriff's office.” My brother patted
his pocket. No cell. He slipped past the little group into the kitchen, and I could hear him punching buttons and speaking. The storm had stopped; the only traces of it were heard in the drip, drip, drip of water from the eaves.

I felt like I was looking at them through the wrong end of the telescope. These four miserable people. They looked far away, small, but clear-cut in their distress.

“Everything's lost, for you,” I said to Paul Edwards. His eyes widened as he looked at me. “I'm not sorry. Besides all the other, more horrible things you've done, you had my brother thrown in jail—though you had a lot of help doing that. You shot at me in the cemetery, and I have to believe that was you all by yourself, right? Now, your life is over.”

“What are you now, a seer?” Sybil said bitterly. “I wish I'd never asked you here, never tried to find out what happened to the girl.”

“Then I'm glad you already paid me.” It was all I could think of to say. She laughed, but not as if she really found it humorous. Her daughter was still looking from Sybil to Paul, from her mother to the man who'd been her mother's lover, and she looked sick and young and defenseless.

“You're going to be a great woman,” I said to Mary Nell. She didn't look at me; I don't think she was any fonder of me at that moment than was her mother or Paul. Even as my brother came back in the room, we heard sirens approaching, and lights began to flash up and down the soaking suburban street.

“Why'd you do all that to me?” I asked Paul. “I don't understand.”

“The baby,” he said. “I never thought you'd find Teenie.
When you did, I was sure you knew about the baby. I thought if I kept you scared, you wouldn't figure it out.”

But the baby had left no bones. If Paul had left us alone, we'd have departed Sarne without a second thought.

We didn't get away until perhaps three in the morning. We had to tell many, many people what we'd seen and heard. We were too wired to sleep for an hour after we got back to our room, but once we did, we slept until noon.

We had our bags in the car an hour later. We settled with the front desk, and the odious Vernon practically did the macarena when he found out we were really going. I felt empty, hollow; but I wanted to leave Sarne so badly I pushed myself to do all the right things toward that end. We got gas and swung by the police station as we'd been told.

Hollis was there again, or maybe was still there. Harvey Branscom's office was empty, the door wide open. I was sure he'd been having a terrible night and a bad day since his sister was in the pokey for murder. I studied Hollis's face. He looked somehow younger, as if the solving of his wife's death had erased a couple of years and some lines of tension.

“You all shoving off?” he asked.

“Yes,” Tolliver said.

“We've got your numbers and your lawyer's address, just in case?”

“Yes,” I said. I knew Hollis would never call my number.

“Okay, then. We appreciate all your help.” He was trying to keep this as brisk and impersonal as possible. But I could see Tolliver bristling for my sake. I put my hand on his arm.

“No problem,” I said. “No problem.”

“Well, then.”

We both nodded at him, and he gave us a curt nod back, and we went out the swinging glass doors for the last time, I hoped to God.

Tolliver was driving, and after we'd put on our seat belts and picked a radio station, he took the car through the streets of Sarne to the highway that would take us east.

“Think we could make Memphis before tonight?” I asked.

“I'm sure of it,” he said. “Will you—are you okay with saying goodbye like that?”

“Yes. What's the point of a sentimental parting?”

He seemed to acknowledge this with a tilt of his head. “But you liked him.”

“Yeah, sure. But, you know, it just wasn't meant to be.”

“Someday . . .” he began, and let the idea trail off.

“You know what, Tolliver? You remember when we did
Romeo and Juliet
in high school?” We might have studied it years apart, but our high school stuck to its course of study religiously.

“Yeah. And?”

“There was that line that Mercutio says, when he gets killed in the feud between the Montagues and the Capulets. He says it in his dying speech. You remember?”

“No,” he said. “Tell me.”

“He says, ‘A plague on both your houses.' And then he dies.”

“ ‘A plague on both your houses,' ” Tolliver repeated. “That about sums it up.”

I had a thought. “But of course, Paul Edwards had a foot in both houses—the Hopkins house and the Teague house.”

“Somehow that seems like the right thing to say, anyway.”

We were quiet for a minute. Then, as the last of Sarne fell behind us and we headed from the mountains to the delta, the flatlands that stretched on and on, I said, “You know, I keep thinking about Teenie, lying out there in the woods, all alone. No matter what happened, I did a good thing.”

“Never doubt it. It was a good thing.” He hesitated. “Do you think they know? When they've been found?”

“Oh, yes. They know,” I said, and the miles to Memphis opened ahead of us.

DEAD UNTIL DARK

LIVING DEAD IN DALLAS

CLUB DEAD

DEAD TO THE WORLD

DEAD AS A DOORNAIL

DEFINITELY DEAD

SHAKESPEARE'S LANDLORD

SHAKESPEARE'S CHAMPION

SHAKESPEARE'S TROLLOP

SHAKESPEARE'S COUNSELOR

GRAVE SIGHT

GRAVE SURPRISE