Charlaine Harris (47 page)

I felt much better after that.

WE'D
learned a lot more about the professor during our strange talk with his widow, but I wasn't sure that what we'd learned would be of much help in narrowing the search for his murderer. Not that I cared a whole lot about who'd killed Nunley—but I did care who'd killed Tabitha.

There was a basketball game I wanted to watch in Texas. I wanted to be free to go to it. I wanted to look for a house in Texas, a house that wasn't too far from where my sisters lived. So I wanted to be free of this situation, both for the sake of the Morgensterns and for my own reasons.

Tolliver was outside tipping the valet as I walked through the Cleveland lobby. I was so lost in thought that I didn't even notice Fred Hart until he called my name.

“Miss Connelly! Miss Connelly!” His heavily southern voice pulled me back into the here and now, though I wasn't
happy about it. Maybe the look I gave him wasn't very friendly, because he stopped in his tracks.

“Did you need to see me?” I asked, which was a stupid question, but I had to say something.

“Yes, I'm sorry to disturb you,” he said. “Joel and Diane asked me to deliver something to you on behalf of the Find Tabitha Fund.”

It took me a few seconds to understand what he was saying, and by that time Tolliver had caught up me and shaken Mr. Hart's hand. Standing in the middle of the lobby didn't seem to be a good place for such a conversation. I suggested Mr. Hart some up to our room with us. He wasn't very enthusiastic about accepting, but he trailed along after us into the elevator.

The close quarters made me aware that Mr. Hart had been lubricating himself with bourbon. I tried not to make a face as the all-too-familiar smell caught at my throat, and I saw Tolliver's face tighten. Tolliver's father had been very fond of bourbon. We both had a great distaste for bourbon.

“I understand that you two met my daughter before,” Mr. Hart said. In the mirrored surface of the elevator wall, I stared at a man who seemed to be aging by the minute. Fred Hart was grim and gray.

“Yes,” I said. “Tolliver dated her for a while.”

I don't know what demon prompted me to add that, but I think I was feeling needled by Fred Hart, by his reluctance to come to our room. I decided that was because he thought there was something distasteful and shoddy about us, and I wanted to get back at him. That was a stupid thing to do.

“Did he now? Felicia is so focused on work…” his voice
trailed off. He should have finished the sentence by saying “that I'm glad she found time to go out,” or “that she seldom seems to date.” Those were the words that would have made sense of the thought. But it was like his heart gave out before he could complete the idea. We both tried hard not to look too startled.

When we finally got into the room, I, for one, was thinking we should maybe call the older man a cab, not let him drive home. I was really concerned. He'd seemed such a nice guy at the Morgensterns' awful luncheon; very serious and sad, true, but also caring and thoughtful. What had happened to Fred Hart?

“Mr. Lang, Miss Connelly,” he said ceremoniously, standing in the middle of our little temporary living room, “Joel asked me to give you this.” He took an envelope out of his inner jacket pocket and handed it over to me.

I stared at the white envelope for a moment before I opened it. There was no way to do this that wasn't awkward. The envelope contained a check for forty thousand dollars. It was the reward money for finding Tabitha's body. With this money added to what we had in savings, we'd be able to buy a house. My eyes filled with tears. I hadn't wanted to earn it this particular way, but I was glad to have it.

“You're shaken, I can see,” Mr. Hart said, sounding pretty shaken himself. “You may not want to accept this, Miss Connelly, but you did the work and you deserve it.”

I did want to accept it, and I had every intention of accepting it. I did deserve it. But somehow his words shamed me, and I felt abruptly sick.

To my horror, I saw a tear trail down Fred Hart's cheek.

“Mr. Hart?” I said, in a very small voice. I was not qualified to deal with a weeping man, especially since I didn't know the trigger for his tears.

He sat down heavily in the closest chair, which happened to be one of the wing chairs. Tolliver settled in the other, his face unreadable, and I perched on the edge of the love seat across from them. We had just had a very strange talk with Anne Nunley; now it looked as though we were going to have one with Fred Hart.

Of course, alcohol was playing a major role in opening Fred Hart's emotional conduits.

“How are Joel and Diane?” I asked, another stupid thing to say. I was trying to divert him, since I had no idea what to do.

“Bless them, they're fine,” he said. “Diane is such a good girl. It was hard to see him marry again, see someone take Whitney's place. Diane should never have married him. I never should have let Whitney marry him. Out of her league, and I knew it.”

“What do you mean? Was he mean to Whitney?”

“Oh, no, he loved her! He was good to her, and he adores Victor, though he doesn't understand him at all. That happens a lot with fathers and sons, though…and fathers and daughters, too.”

“You mean Joel didn't understand Tabitha?”

He looked at me with a face that was still wet, but now impatient, too. “No, of course not. No one ‘understands' a girl that age, especially the girl herself. No, what I mean is…it doesn't make any difference what I mean.”

My heart was pounding fast with anxiety. I felt we were close, so close, to understanding what had happened at the Morgenstern house that spring morning.

“Are you saying Joel molested Tabitha?”

I knew I'd made a terrible mistake the minute his face shut down.

“What a dreadful suggestion. Abominable. I'm sure you see a lot of that kind of thing in your work, but it's not something that's happened in our family, young lady.”

I'm not sure what he was referring to when he said “my work,” and I'm not sure Fred did, either, but the point was, he now felt entitled to be angry with me, and he was taking full license.

“Something awful did happen in your family, though,” I said, as quietly and gently as a snowflake falling.

His face crumpled for a minute, like tissue paper. “Yes,” he agreed. “Yes, it did.” He heaved himself to his feet. “I have to go.”

“You sure you're okay to drive?” Tolliver asked, in the most neutral voice possible.

“Actually, I don't believe I am,” Fred admitted, much to my surprise. I don't think I'd ever heard a man admit he was incapable of driving, and I have watched scores of men in many states of being high. They all thought they could manage a car, or a truck, or a boat.

“I'll get him home in his car, you follow us,” Tolliver said.

I nodded. I wasn't especially pleased at the prospect of getting the car back out of the hotel garage, but I didn't see anything else we could do.

I stored the check in Tolliver's laptop case for safekeeping while Tolliver called downstairs about the cars. We got Mr. Hart up between us, and we went to the elevator. He kept telling us over and over how much he appreciated our help, and how sorry he was he'd spoken to me in an angry way.

I couldn't figure out Victor's grandfather. Finally I stopped trying. It was obvious to me that this man was under a nearly unbearable strain, and the weight of it was crushing him. But why Fred Hart? If our distraught caller had been Joel, I could have understood it better. After all, it was his daughter who was dead, it was his family who was under suspicion, it was his wife who was about to give birth under extremely unhappy circumstances.

With some difficulty, and a little help from the bellboy, we got the older man into the passenger's seat of his car. He was driving his Lexus hybrid, the one like his son-in-law's, and even under the circumstances I could read Tolliver's flush of pleasure at getting to drive the car. I was smiling to myself as I slid into our car, which was very humble in comparison.

Fred had given Tolliver directions, though he was speaking less and less and seemed ready to go to sleep. I followed Tolliver east, again, this time past the Bingham College area to Germantown. We turned so many times I was worried about Tolliver and me escaping from the suburb after we'd deposited Fred at his home.

When Tolliver pulled into a driveway that led into a large corner lot, I was trying not to be stunned by the obvious richness of the area. Fred Hart's place had been new maybe twenty-five years ago. The whole neighborhood appeared to
date from the same era; the homes looked fairly modern in style, but the trees showed a good growth and all the landscaping seemed well-established.

What astonished me so was that all these houses had taken steroids. Not one of them would have less than four bedrooms, and that would only be the beginning of it. I imagined each one of them cost a million, probably way more; this was not the kind of place I planned to look at when Tolliver and I began house hunting. I pulled into the multi-car garage, which could hold two more cars besides the Lexus and ours. Besides being big enough to hold four third-world families, the garage had a large closet at the far right side that must act as a toolshed. And there wasn't a single oil stain.

I jumped out to help Tolliver, who was having trouble getting Fred out of the car.

“He pretty much passed out during the drive,” Tolliver explained. “At least he'd already given me directions. I hope the house key works. If we're at the wrong house, we're screwed.” We both laughed, but not too merrily. I sure didn't want to have to talk to the police again, for any reason.

Tolliver handed me a key ring he'd extracted from Fred's pocket, and while he resumed pulling Fred out of the car I hurried over to the door. The second key I tried turned in the lock, and his security system, if he had one, wasn't on, because nothing began to tweet or blare when Tolliver got the stumbling man into the house. I moved ahead to find the best place to stow him. I had to stop and gape. I'd thought the Morgenstern house was so pretty and big, but this house was overwhelming. The kitchen we'd entered was huge, just
huge. I passed from there into the family room, or den, or living room. I didn't know what to call it. It had exposed beams in the cathedral ceiling, an enormous fireplace, and conversation groupings.

“If I had been brought up here, I would believe I could have anything I wanted,” I said, stunned.

“Where do we go?” Tolliver asked impatiently, not in the mood to listen to sociological reflections. I made my feet move. The master bedroom, I discovered, was downstairs, which was a great relief. Together, Tolliver and I got Fred onto the (of course) king-size bed, got his coat and shoes off, and covered him with a soft afghan that had been thrown artfully over the back of a huge leather chair…in front of the master bedroom's very own fireplace and conversational grouping. I didn't know who was supposed to have conversations here, since Fred appeared to live by himself. I predicted I'd find a walk-in closet and a bath with a sunken tub somewhere very close. I opened the closet door, and then the bathroom door. Yep. All that and more.

“Watch out!” a voice called from the bed, and I swung around, startled.

Fred Hart had roused himself to give Tolliver a big caution. He'd grabbed Tolliver's arm while Tolliver was trying to arrange him comfortably.

“You have to watch out. I'll tell you the truth. You just don't know what happened…” the older man said, and then he conked out again.

“I know you drank too much,” I muttered.

Tolliver hung up Fred's coat and looked around for any
other little thing we should do. “That's it,” he said. “Let's go. I feel like I broke in, this is so much not our kind of place.”

I laughed. We left the bedroom, and the sleeping man, and began making our way back to the kitchen. I just had to stop while we were going through the family room. It was so pretty, all dark browns and coppery colors with bright blue touches here and there. I sighed, and turned to look out the huge window into the back yard. I was a bit surprised there wasn't a pool. I decided the lack was due to Fred's gardening habit.

When Ben Morgenstern had told me Fred liked to garden, I had not imagined anything like this. The high red brick wall that enclosed the back yard was covered with vines, carefully pruned and directed. Running all around this wall was a flower bed full with bushes and probably with bulbs that would bloom in the spring and summer. Aside from this, there were groupings of bushes and flowers, much like the groupings of tables and chairs inside the family room. In the more established beds, the bushes were high and thick. There were a couple of beds that looked newer, because the brick edging looked brighter and the plants smaller. I was seeing this garden in November, when it was not flourishing, but I was deeply impressed. Maybe this was why Fred had held on to such a house after the deaths of his wife and daughter.

On a wrought iron table on the flagged patio right outside the windows, I saw gardening gloves, some kind of spray device, and a gardening hat. These things were laid out with precision, and a folded newspaper by them with
today's date indicated Fred had been working in his garden this very morning.