Grave Sight

"Oh my God, Paul," Sybil said, the gun wavering in her hand. Dammit, why does everyone have a gun? Sybil's was smaller, but looked just as lethal. "Oh, my God." She was as struck by the transformation as I was, probably more. "How could you do this?"

I hoped she was asking him, not us. At least the light had made the storm retreat in my forest of fears. Tolliver gently set the glass apple on a table by the kitchen doorway.

"Sybil, I couldn't let them know." He was trying to sound reasonable, but it just came out weak.

"That's what you said before, when you made me call them. I still don't understand."

Tolliver and I might as well not have been in the room.

I noticed for the first time that Sybil had a scarf tied to one wrist, and the other wrist was deeply scored with a red line. He'd had her tied up.

"Where's Nell?" I croaked, but neither of them answered. They were so focused on each other, we weren't even on the same planet. I noticed that Tolliver silently bent to retrieve Paul's gun where it lay against the baseboard. The gun looked horribly functional in the expensive, feminine room, which right now was not looking its orderly best. Tolliver slid the gun under the skirt of the couch. Good.

"Sybil, we were together for so long," Paul said. "So long. You'd never divorce him. You'd never even agree to quit sleeping with him."

"He was my husband, for God's sake!" she said harshly.

"So when Helen divorced that bastard Jay, she..." Paul looked at the carpet as if it covered a secret he needed to know. "We got close."

"You had an affair with her," Sybil said, absolutely stu

I risked a look at Tolliver. He met my eyes and we exchanged looks.

"I knew Dell was really my son," Paul said. "But Teenie was mine, too."

"No," said Sybil, shaking her head from side to side. "No."

"Yes," he said. But his eyes were straying now and again to the gun. Sybil was holding it pretty steady, for now. Tolliver and I had edged away from Paul, naturally, not wanting to be in the line of fire, but now I wondered if we shouldn't have kept hold of him, and possibly Tolliver should have bashed him with the glass apple, just to be sure. The lawyer was getting his spirit back, the longer Sybil talked to him without shooting him.

"You could have just told them," she said. "You could have just told them."

"I did tell them," he said. "That day they died. I did tell them." His voice was unsteady, as shaky as Sybil's.

"You killed them? Why'd you kill your son, our son?" Tears were ru

"Because Teenie was pregnant, you stupid cow," he said, retreating to a more comfortable emotion, anger. "Teenie was pregnant, and she wouldn't have an abortion! Said it was wrong! And your son, our son, wouldn't make her!"

"Pregnant! Oh! Oh, my God. How did you find out?"

"From me." A bedraggled Nell stood in the doorway. She had a letter opener in her hands, and her wrists held the same red marks that her mother's showed. "I'm the most stupid person in the world, Mama. I was so worried about Teenie being pregnant that when Dell told me, I thought I'd ask Paul to talk to her, tell her to give it up for adoption. Dell was too young to get married, Mama, and I just didn't want to be Teenie Hopkins' sister-in-law. So they died! He killed them, Mama, and it's all my fault!"

"Don't you ever think that, Mary Nell. It's his fault." Sybil gestured with the gun toward her longtime lover.

It seemed to me it was sort of Sybil's fault, too, but I wasn't going to raise any issues as long as she was holding the gun. While I was being ignored, I wanted to put a safer distance between me and Paul Edwards, so I was edging back to the far end of the couch. On Edwards's other side, Tolliver was shifting himself a little closer to the two women, but he was careful to keep the line of fire between Sybil and Paul free and clear.

"Yes, it's my fault," Paul gabbled. He was looking around the floor surreptitiously. He was looking for his gun. Paul Edwards was not down for the count.

"You need to tie him up," Tolliver suggested. "Call the police."

Nell began to move back through the doorway, presumably to go into the kitchen to call the police, but Paul made a sudden move and she stilled.

"No, don't call," Paul said. "Mary Nell, I'm your dad, too. Don't give me up."

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 i

"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, begi