Grave Sight

"Phyllis says we don't have to stay in Sarne."

"Then we're leaving in the morning."

"That's fine with me."

Tolliver rummaged around in his suitcase for clean clothes and stalked off to the bathroom. I went out to get him some food. I even went through the drive-through so I wouldn't have to get out of the car. My paranoia was ru

So be it, I thought. We're outta here.

I ate the food I'd gotten for myself with a better appetite than I'd had in days. Then I lay down and snoozed. I distantly heard the water shut off and then Tolliver eating. The paper bags made rustling noises, no matter how quiet he tried to be. Just as I was really drifting away to sleep, I heard the creak of bedsprings as he lay down on the other bed. Then there was peaceful silence, underlined by the drone of the heating unit.

I didn't nap as long as my brother, because I'd had some sleep the night before. I parted the curtains to peer outside and looked at the sky, gray with impending rain. It was about four in the afternoon, but it would be full dark within an hour. I brushed my teeth and hair and put my shoes on, and then I sat at the little table with a sheet of motel paper and a pencil. I like to make lists, but there's seldom any need for me to do so; I don't go to the grocery store much, and most of our errands are undertaken on the road.

I decided to list all the facts I could recall and see what shook out.

Sybil and the sheriff were brother and sister.

Sybil and Paul Edwards were lovers.

Sybil's son had been murdered.

Sybil's son's girlfriend had been murdered at the same time.

The girlfriend, Teenie Hopkins, was sister to the murdered wife of Deputy Hollis Boxleitner.

Sally (murdered wife) had been killed after she cleaned the study of...

Sybil's husband, victim of an untimely heart attack, while he was examining...

Medical records of his son (at that time alive) and daughter and himself.

Also murdered—Helen Hopkins, mother of Teenie Hopkins and Hollis Boxleitner's wife.

Helen had been the cleaning woman for Sybil's family for years, until she began drinking heavily and had an episode of violence with her ex-husband, Jay Hopkins.

Her attorney in the case against her ex-husband, and her attorney in the much earlier divorce, was Paul Edwards, also Sybil's attorney and lover.

Terry Vale recommended my services to Sybil.

Hollis had wanted to know for sure what had happened to his wife.

Paul Edwards had been glad to pay us.

Someone inflamed teenager Scot to the point where he accepted money (or maybe just followed the suggestion) that he lie in wait for me and beat me up.

That same someone, or possibly someone different, took a shot at me in the Sarne cemetery.

My brother went to jail on trumped-up charges; possibly to leave a shooter free to make a try at me, possibly just to shake us up enough that we would leave no matter what the sheriff had told us.

Tolliver stretched and yawned and came to look over my shoulder.

"What's this for?" he asked.

"We've got to understand what's happening. That's the only way we can get out of here."

"We're leaving in the morning. I don't care if they put a roadblock across the highway, we're getting out of this town."

fourteen

I had to smile, even while I shook two Tylenol out of the bottle and swallowed them down.

He went to the windows to look outside. "Ah-oh," he said. "It's coming up a storm."

"That's why my head's begi

"Maybe, too, you're hungry?" he asked mildly.

"I ate a few hours ago."

"It has been a while."

"You ate half a sandwich. Let's drive to Mount Parnassus. We don't want to get into any more trouble."

"Sounds good. But you know, we could just pack up our stuff and start driving now," I said.

"Not with a storm coming on."

It was because of me we couldn't drive during storms, because sometimes I had a very bad reaction; another weakness on my part.

"We'll go to Mount Parnassus," he said. "It's just twelve miles north."

It was dark already, at least in part because of the oncoming storm. Tolliver was driving because of my headache, so I answered the cell phone when it rang. It was Tolliver's older brother, Mark.

"Hi," I said. "How are you?"

"Well, I been better," he said. "Tolliver there?"

I silently handed Tolliver the phone. He disliked driving and talking at the same time, so he pulled over to the side of the road. Mark Lang had been nearly old enough to leave home by the time my mother and his father started living together and eventually got married. He hadn't liked my mother, hadn't liked the situation in his home, and had gotten out as soon as possible. For Tolliver's sake, he'd checked in at the house about every two weeks. He'd also helped to feed and clothe us, and he'd gotten us medical help when we'd needed it and the adults had been too strung out to provide it. And Mark had been especially fond of Cameron, as Tolliver had been of me. The little girls just represented two more sets of needs and wants, to Mark. I could imagine how unhappy he was at being called about Mariella's disappearance, and I was sure that was his reason for calling Tolliver now.

"He found her," Tolliver told me now, leaning away from the phone briefly. "Took him an hour."

That wasn't bad. I had a few questions, of course, but I decided to let the conversation run itself to a halt before I asked them.

Tolliver hung up soon enough. "They were hiding in Craig's Sunday school building," he said briefly.

"What—where is she now?"

"She went home. Craig had run out of food, anyway, so there wasn't any more fun in it for her."

We fell silent. There wasn't any more to say about Mariella. Mariella had seen too much as a kid to ever be i

My head pounded harder, and I looked at the sky ahead of us anxiously. I knew soon I would see a flicker of lightning.

We turned on the radio to listen to the weather. Storms were predicted, with heavy downpour and thunder and lightning. What a surprise. Flash flood warnings—which you had to take seriously in a terrain that included roads that dipped so deeply before rising again—in an area where all the streams and ponds were already full from plentiful rainfall earlier in the season.

We reached a little chain restaurant within ten minutes and went in, taking our raincoats with us. Inside, there was an older couple sitting close to the kitchen door; there was a single guy reading a newspaper, a dirty plate shoved across the table. A young couple, in their early twenties, sat with their two children in a booth by the big window. They were pale and fat, both wearing sweats from Wal-Mart. He wore a gimme cap with his. Her hair was pulled back into a curly ponytail, and her eyelids were blue with makeup. The little boy, maybe six, was wearing camo and carrying a plastic gun. The little girl was a pretty thing, with lots of light brown hair like her mother's, and a sweet and vacant face. She was coloring.