Grave Sight (Harper Connelly #1)

Though the cemetery wasn't yet visible, I knew we were approaching one. I could tell by the buzzing along my skin. "How old is the cemetery?" I asked. "It's the newest one, I guess?"

He pulled over to the side of the road so abruptly I almost lost my grip on my milk shake. He glared at me, his face flushed. I'd spooked him.

"How the hell - did you and your brother drive by here earlier?"

"Nope." We were pretty far off any streets that tourists or casual visitors would take, a bit out in the countryside and away from any tourist amenities. "Just what I do."

"It's the new cemetery," Hollis said, his voice jerky. "The old one's..."

I turned my head from side to side, estimating. "Southwest of here. About four miles."

"Jesus, woman, you're creepy."

I shrugged. It didn't seem creepy to me.

He said, "I can give you three thousand. Will you do something for me?"

"Yes, I'll do it. Since we haven't run a credit check on you, I need the money in advance."

"You're businesslike." His tone was not admiring.

"No, I'm not. That's why Tolliver usually does this part." I finished my milk shake, making a loud slurping noise.

Hollis did a U-turn to head back to town. He went through the drive-through at the bank. The teller did her best not to act surprised when he sent his withdrawal slip over to her, and she also tried not to peer too obviously at me. I wanted to tell Hollis that if I were performing any other service, he wouldn't be sitting there all huffy; if I cleaned houses, he wouldn't be asking me to go clean his for free, right? My lips parted, but I clamped them shut. I refused to justify myself.

He thrust the money, still in its bank envelope, into my hand. I slid the envelope into my jacket pocket without comment. We drove back to the turn-off that led to the cemetery. We were parked on a gravel path winding among the tombstones, when he turned off the engine. "Come on," he said. "The grave is over here." The day had cleared up, turned bright, and I watched big sycamore leaves turn cartwheels in the wind across the dying grass.

"Embalming mutes the effect," I warned him.

His eyes lit up. He was thinking I'd faked my results before, somehow, and that now he'd unmask me. And he'd get his money back. He had about a ton of ambiguity resting on his shoulders.

I stepped gingerly onto the nearest grave, the ground chilly under my bare feet. Since a cemetery is so full of death, I have difficulty getting a clear reading. When you add the competing emanations from the corpses to the effects of the embalming process, you have to get as close as you can. "Middle-aged white man, died of... a massive coronary," I said, my eyes closed. The name was Matthews, something like that.

There was a silence while Hollis read the headstone. Then Hollis growled, "Yes." He caught his breath jaggedly. "We're going to walk now. Keep your eyes shut." I felt his big hand take mine, lead me carefully to another patch of ground. I reached down deep with that inner sense that had never yet failed me. "Very old man." I shook my head. "I think he just ran down." I was led to yet another grave, this one farther away. "Woman, sixties, car accident. Named Turner, Turnage? A drunk, I think."

We went back in our original direction, and I knew by the tension in his body that this was the grave he'd been aiming for all along. When he guided me onto the grave, I knelt. This was death by violence, I knew at once. I took a deep breath and reached below me. "Oh," I said sharply. I realized dimly that because Hollis was thinking of this dead person so strongly, it was helping me to reach her. I could hear the water running in the bathtub. House was hot, window was open. Breeze coming in the high frosted window of the bathroom. Suddenly... "Let go!" she said, but it was as if I were the woman, and I was saying it, too. And then her/my head was under water, and we were looking up at the stippled ceiling, and we couldn't breathe, and we drowned.

"Someone had ahold of her ankles," I said, and I was all by myself in my skin, and I was alive. "Someone pulled her under."

After a long moment, I opened my eyes, looked down at the headstone in front of me. Sally Boxleitner, it read. Beloved Wife of Hollis.

"C ORONER always said he couldn't figure it out. I sent her for an autopsy," the deputy said. "The results were inconclusive. She might have fainted and slipped under the water, fallen asleep in the tub or something. I couldn't understand why she couldn't save herself. But there wasn't any evidence either way."

I just watched him. Grieving people can be unpredictable.

"Vagal shock," I murmured. "Or maybe it's called vagal inhibition. People can't even struggle, if it's sudden."

"You've seen this before?" There were tears in his eyes, angry tears.

"I've seen everything."

"Someone murdered her."

"Yes."

"You can't see who."

"No. I don't see who. I see how, when I find the body. I know it's not you. If you were the murderer, and you were right by your victim, I might be able to tell." Which I hadn't intended to say: this was exactly why I really needed Tolliver to speak for me. I began to miss him, which was ridiculous. "Can you take me back to the motel, please?"

He nodded, still lost in his own thoughts. We began to make our way between the headstones. The sun was still shining and the leaves were still fluttering across the browning lawn, but the spark had gone out of the day. I was trembling with a fine small movement as my bare feet moved through the short cool grass. On the way back to Hollis's electric-blue truck, I paused to read the name on the largest monument in the cemetery. There were at least eight graves in the plot marked Teague.

Good. I carefully stepped onto the one marked Dell. He was there, buried not too deeply in the rocky soil of the Ozarks. I spared a second to think that I was lucky that connecting with the embalmed dead was never as dramatic as connecting with a corpse; Hollis would never have thought to provide me with the support Tolliver did. I reached down again with that extra sense of mine, trying not to assume what I'd find when my lightning-sparked gift touched the body of Dell Teague.

Suicide, my ass, was my instant, and silent, reaction. Why hadn't Sybil hired me to come out here to read his grave first, instead of sending me to the woods to find Teenie? Of course this boy hadn't shot himself. Dell Teague had been murdered, just like his wild girlfriend. I opened my eyes. Hollis Boxleitner had swung around to check on what I was doing. I looked into the intent face of the deputy. "No suicide here," I said.

In the long pause that followed, I looked off to the west and saw a bank of dark clouds approaching in a hurry. The break in the weather was over. Hollis looked, too. I saw a shaft of brightness split through the distant clouds.

"Come on," Hollis said. "You just carry hard luck around with you." He shook his head.

We climbed into the truck. On the way back into Sarne, neither of us broke the silence. While he was looking at the road, I slipped his money out of my pocket and put it on the seat between us. At the motel, I scrambled out of the truck real quick, slamming the truck door behind me and unlocking my room almost in one motion. Hollis drove away without a word. I guess he had a lot to think about.

I put my ear to the wall and heard a buzz. Tolliver was home. He must have had the television on. But I waited a minute, since I'd made similar assumptions before and paid for them with my own embarrassment. It was a good thing I hesitated, because after a second I realized that Tolliver had company. I was willing to bet it was Janine, the waitress from the diner. Evidence suggested that Tolliver was much more appealing to women than I was to men. Sometimes that pissed me off. I didn't think the difference was in our looks, exactly; I thought it lay in our baggage. I sighed, feeling like sticking out my tongue or kicking the wall - something childish.

I'd imagined for a few minutes that Hollis Boxleitner was really attracted to me, but what he had wanted was what I had to offer professionally, not personally.

And there was a storm coming on.

I picked up my novel and tried to read. The darkness was thickening outside, and within ten minutes I had to turn on a lamp. From not too far off, there was a deep rumble. Thunder.

I made myself read a couple of sentences. I really, really wanted to lose awareness of the here and now. The best way for me to do that was bury myself in a book.

We keep a box of secondhand paperbacks in the backseat of the car. When each book has been read, we leave it where someone else can pick it up. If the book's in very good shape we keep it to trade. We stop at every secondhand bookstore we see to restock. I've read a lot of things I hadn't planned on reading, due to the selection at these stores. And I've read a lot of books years after they were bestsellers, which doesn't bother me a bit.

Tolliver's not quite as omnivorous as I am. He draws the line at romances (he thinks they're too predictable) and spy novels (he finds them ludicrous), but he'll read just about anything else. Westerns, mysteries, science fiction, even some non-fiction - almost any book is grist for our mill. Right now I was reading a tattered copy of Richard Preston's The Hot Zone. It was one of the most frightening things I'd ever read - but I'd rather be afraid of Preston's account of the origin and spread of the Ebola virus than think about the rumble of the thunder.

Before I tried to re-immerse myself in Preston's exploration of a cave in Africa, I glanced at the clock. I estimated that the waitress would leave the room next door in about an hour. Maybe by the time the storm got here, Tolliver would be alone.

With the book weighted open in front of me on the cheap table, I turned on my cordless curler and used it. Then I brushed my hair. From time to time I glanced up at the mirror. I looked okay, I thought. Not too bad. Frail and pale, though.

My brother and I didn't look anything alike, aside from the similarity in our coloring - black hair, brown eyes. Tolliver looked tough, secretive, a little forbidding. His scarred cheeks and wide, bony shoulders made him seem very male.

But it was me who frightened people.

Thunder rumbled again, much closer. Not even the Ebola virus could hold my attention now. I tried to distract myself. The sheriff would have gotten Teenie Hopkins' body out of the woods by now, and it would be on its way to Little Rock. I bet he was glad he'd gotten her out before the rain. It couldn't have taken long, since there wouldn't exactly be a crime scene to secure. Of course, even the most lax police officer would search the area. I wondered if Hollis had been part of the search. I wondered if they'd found anything. I should have asked Hollis questions while I was in his truck. Maybe he was out in the woods, right at this moment.

But what difference did it make, really? I would be gone before anyone was brought to justice. I tapped my fingernails against the table in an anxious rhythm, my feet patting along to an inaudible beat. I switched off the lamp and the light in the bathroom.

I was going to conquer this. This time, it would not get the best of me.

A boom of thunder was followed by a brilliant bolt of lightning. I jumped about a foot. Though the curler was cordless, I turned it off. I unplugged the television and went to sit on the foot of my bed, on the shiny, green, slick motel bedspread. More thunder, and another crack of lightning outside the window. I shivered, my arms crossed over my abdomen. The rain pounded down outside the motel room, drumming on the roof of our car, splashing violently against the pavement. Another lightning bolt. I made a little noise, involuntarily.

The door between the rooms opened and Tolliver came in, a towel wrapped around his waist, his hair still wet from the shower. I saw a flicker of movement in his room; the waitress, pulling on her clothes, her face angry.

He sat on the end of the bed by me, his arm around my shoulders. He didn't say a word. Neither did I. I shivered and shook until the lightning was past.

three

SARNE seemed like a complicated little town. I would be glad when we left it. We were supposed to show up in Ashdown within the next couple of days, and I wanted to keep the appointment. I try to be as professional as my odd calling will permit.

There were times we sat in our apartment in St. Louis for two weeks at a stretch. Then the phone would ring steadily, one call right after another. With my work schedule so unpredictable, we had to be ready to get on the road at any time. The dead could wait forever, but the living were always urgent.

The sheriff called me the next morning right before seven. Normally, I would've been out for a run, but the day after I both find a body and get through a storm is going to be a slow day. I peered at the clock before I lifted the receiver. "The body's Teenie, the lab in Little Rock said," he told me. He sounded tired, though it was early and he should just have risen from a night's sleep. "Go pick up your check at Paul Edwards's office." He hung up. He didn't say, "And never come here again," but the words were hanging in the air.

Tolliver had just come in, dressed and ready for breakfast, his favorite meal. He looked at my face as I hung up the room phone.

"Blaming the messenger," he said. "I guess it was a positive ID?"

I nodded. "I never understand that. You know, they ask me here to find the body. I find the body. Then they're pissed at me, and they give me the check like I should have done the whole thing for free."

He shrugged. "I guess we would do it for free if we could get a government grant or something."

"Oh, sure, the government just loves me." Paying taxes was excruciating - not because I minded giving the devil his due, but because accounting for my income was very difficult. I called myself a consultant. So far, I'd flown under the radar, but that would change sooner or later.