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.
A waitress in jeans and a blouse strolled over to take our order. Her hair was dressed in a formidable bleached bubble, and she was chewing gum. She told us she was pleased to help us, but I doubted her sincerity. After we'd looked at the menus for a minute, she took our orders and strolled over to the window to the kitchen to turn them in.
After she'd gotten our iced tea, she vanished.
The couple started arguing about whether or not to enter their daughter in the next beauty pageant. It cost quite a bit to enter a child in a pageant, I learned, and to rent a dress and take time off from work to do the girl's hair and makeup cost even more.
I raised my eyebrows at Tolliver, who suppressed a smile. My mother had tried to get Cameron to do the pageant circuit. At the very first one, Cameron had told the judges she thought the pageant system was very close to white slavery. She had accused the judges of many unpleasant perversions. Needless to say, that had ended Cameron's career as a beauty contestant. Of course, Cameron was fourteen at the time. The little girl across the room was maybe eight and didn't look like she'd say boo to a goose.
Our cell rang again, and this time Tolliver answered it.
"Hello?" He paused and listened for a moment. "Hey, Sascha. What's the word?" Ah. The hair samples. The DNA test.
He listened for a few moments, then turned to me.
"No match," he said. "The male is not the father. Female One is the mother of Female Two." That was the way I'd marked the samples.
"Thanks, Sascha. I owe you," he said.
He'd no sooner put down the phone than the phone rang again. We looked at each other, exasperated and I answered it.
"Harper Connelly," said a strained voice.
"Yes. Who is this?" I asked.
"Sybil."
I never would have known this was my former client. Her voice was so tense, her enunciation so jerky.
"What's wrong, Sybil?" I tried to keep my voice level.
"You need to come here, tonight."
"Why?"
"I need to see you."
"Why?"
"There's something I need to tell you."
"You don't need to talk to us," I said. "We've finished our transaction." I struggled to keep myself calm and firm. "I did what you paid me to do, and Tolliver and I are going to get out of town as soon as we can."
"No, I want to see you tonight."
"Then you'll just have to want."
There was a desperate pause. "It's about Mary Nell," Sybil said, abruptly. "It's about her obsession with your brother. I need to talk to both of you, and if you're leaving town tomorrow, it's got to be tonight. Mary Nell's talking about killing herself."
I held the phone away to stare at it for a minute. This sounded wildly unlikely. In my limited experience of Mary Nell Teague, she'd be more apt to be thinking of taking Tolliver hostage and bombarding him with love until he yielded to her. "Okay, Sybil," I said warily. "We'll be there in about an hour."
"Sooner, if you can," she said, sounding almost breathless with relief.
The waitress brought our food as I was relaying the conversation to Tolliver, who'd been able to hear most of it, anyway.
He made a face.
I wrote SO MO DA NO on an extra napkin with a tine of my fork. I looked at it while I picked at my salad, which was about what you'd expect at a diner in the middle of nowhere. I tried to think myself into the scenario. Okay, Dick's been making notes to himself while he goes through the family's medical records for the year, getting ready for tax time. Four separate notations. Four members of the family.
S could be Sybil, M could be Mary Nell, D could be Dell, then N could be... who? I'd already gone over the fact that Dick Teague had called his daughter Nelly. But if that took care of the N, what about the M? I stared down at the napkin, thinking about making little notes about myself and my family...
Oh, for God's sake! The M was for Me!
I put the fork down.
"Harper?" Tolliver said.
"Blood types," I said. "Stupid, stupid, stupid me."
"Harper?"
"It's blood types, Tolliver. Dick Teague was saying, 'I have type O, Sybil has type O, Mary Nell has type O, but Dell has type A.' That was what Sally Boxleitner was looking up in her high school science textbook. She suspected right away when she found the note Dick left on the medical records right before his heart attack. Dick had discovered he could not have been Dell's dad. Two O's can't have an A."
"I can see where that might trigger a heart attack," Tolliver said slowly. He put down his own fork, patted his lips with his napkin. "But why would that lead to Dell and Teenie getting shot?""I'm thinking," I said.
The family of four had cleared out while we were eating, with the topic of the beauty pageant still unresolved. I would put money on the mother winning. The older couple ate in a leisurely way, and just as slowly paid and took their leave, exchanging pleasantries with the waitress. The single man was still reading the paper, and every now and then the waitress would top off his coffee cup. Tolliver paid our bill while I stared into space, trying to imagine what had happened next in the Teague family drama.
Okay, next Hollis's wife had been killed. Sally had figured out that Dell wasn't Dick's son. Who would she tell? She would be more likely to tell a woman.
I thought she would tell her mother. But there must be something else...
We were in the car going back toward Sarne when I told Tolliver what I was thinking. "Why wouldn't she tell Hollis?" he asked. "It would be natural to tell your husband."
"Hollis told me she didn't like to talk about her family troubles," I said. "I think to Sally, Dell's parentage would fall into that category. So, Sally told her mother. Her mother, rather than Teenie, because Sally was closer to her mother. Besides, the secret was about Dell, and Teenie would've told him."
"So what happened next?" Tolliver asked, as though I would surely know.
I did try to puzzle it out. "Helen," I muttered. "What would Helen do? Why would she care whose kid Dell was?"
Why, indeed?
Say Teenie and Dell don't know anything about this. And then Sally dies. Sally dies because... she told. Because she told her mother. But I remembered Helen's overwhelming grief, and I didn't think Helen had known why Sally died. Until I came along and told Hollis and Helen differently, they'd thought her death was an accident. As far as I knew, Helen had never questioned that. And she'd believed Dell shot Teenie. Why? Over Teenie's pregnancy, of course! And then, unable to face what he'd done, Helen believed that Dell had shot himself.
Only then, to clear his name, Sybil had hired me, and I'd told Helen that Dell hadn't shot Teenie. I'd told Helen that both her daughters had been murdered by someone else.
I didn't exactly feel like all these deaths were my fault, but I didn't feel good about them, either. I'd done what I'd been hired to do, with no idea what the consequences might be in a confused place like Sarne. I believed after she found out they'd been killed, Helen must have realized who would have wanted both her daughters to die. I believed she would have arranged to confront that person to verify her suspicions, and during that confrontation that person had killed her, watched by all those pictures of two dead girls, in the little box-like house.
"I don't believe Sybil," I said abruptly.
Tolliver looked over at me briefly before turning his attention back to the rain-slick road. There was a distant rumble. I shivered.
"Why?"
"I don't believe Mary Nell would ever threaten to kill herself," I said. "I don't believe she would resort to tactics like this to win your interest. I think she's too proud."
"She's sixteen."
"Yeah, but she's got her backbone in straight."
"So, why are we going?"
"Because Sybil wants us there badly enough to lie about it, and I want to know why."
"I don't know, maybe we should just go back to the motel. It's thundering, and you know there may be lightning."
"I got that." As a matter of fact, the Tylenol hadn't prevented the ferocious headache building behind my eyes. "But I think we should go to Sybil's." Something was pushing me, and I had a bad feeling it wasn't something smart.
I spotted a flash of lightning out of the corner of my eye and tried not to flinch. I was safe, in a car, and when I got out, I'd be very careful not to step into a downed electrical wire or hold a golf club or stand under a tree or do any of the myriad things people did that increased their chances of being electrocuted by lightning, either directly or indirectly. But I couldn't help ducking and hiding my face.
"You can't do this," Tolliver said. "We need to get inside."
"Go to the Teagues' house," I yelled. I was terrified, but I was driven.
He didn't say anything else, but turned in the right direction. I was ashamed of myself for yelling at my brother, but I was also strangely light-headed and focused on what lay ahead. A little part of my brain was still gnawing at the problem: Why would Dell and Teenie have to die, if Dell wasn't Dick Teague's son? What secret was so important that all those people had to die, the people who could reveal it?
The Teague house was mostly dark when we pulled up to it. I'd imagined it would be blazing with light, but only one window glowed through the darkness. None of the outside lights were on, which I thought was strange. If I'd been Sybil, I'd have turned on all the outside lights once I'd made sure company was coming, especially on an evening when bad weather was obviously imminent.
"This is bad," Tolliver said slowly. He didn't elaborate. He didn't need to. We parked at the front of the house. The rain drummed on the roof of the car. "I think you better call your cop buddy," he said to me. "I think we better stay out of that house until we have someone with authority here." He switched on the dome light.
"I can't count on him being the one on call," I said, but I dialed his home number on the chance that Hollis was snug and warm and dry in his little house. No answer. I tried the sheriff's office. The dispatcher answered. She sounded distracted. I could hear the radio squawking in the background. "Is Hollis on patrol?" I asked.
"No, he's answering a call about a tree being across the road on County Road 212," she snapped. "And I got a three-car accident on Marley Street." I could see that a personal call to a busy officer would not be priority.
"Tell him to come to the Teagues' house as soon as he can," I said. "Tell him it's very important. I think a crime's been committed there."
"Someone'll come as soon as they can get free from the ones we're sure about," she said, and she hung up the phone.
"Okay, we're on our own," I told Tolliver. He switched off the light, leaving us in a dark island of dry warmth. The cold rain was pelting down, drenching the lawn and rinsing off the car. The flashes of lightning were only occasional. I could stand it, I told myself. We'd parked at the end of the sidewalk that led directly to the main doors. The garage, with its door into the kitchen, was to our left on the west side of the house.
"I'll go in the front, you go in the garage door," I said. By the distant glow of the streetlights, I could see Tolliver open his mouth to protest, then close it again.
"All right," he said. "On the count of three. One, two, three!"
We leapt from our respective sides of the car and took off for our separate goals. I reached mine first, without being hit by anything except leaves and twigs snapped from a tree by the high winds.
The front door wasn't locked. That might not mean anything. I was pretty sure that in Sarne no one locked up until they turned in for the night. But the hair on my neck prickled. I pushed it open, but only a foot.
The door opened directly into the large formal living room, which was unlit and shadowy. The rain running down the big picture window and the streetlight shining through it made the room seem underwater in the glimpse I had before I crouched and rolled as I pushed the door wide open. A shot whistled past and above me. I scrambled to take cover behind a big chair. I'd never held a gun in my life, but I was regretting my lack of firepower at this instant.
There was a scream from somewhere else in the big house. I thought it came from the back, maybe from the family room.
Where was Tolliver? But he'd have heard the shot. He'd be careful.
For an unbearably long moment, nothing more happened. I wondered how many people were hiding from each other in these rooms, and I wondered if I'd survive to find out.