Gradually, my eyes became used to the faint and watery light. Though the drapes had been partially drawn, I could identify the furniture by shape.
There was another doorway directly opposite the front entrance, and I was pretty sure that was where the shot had come from. I took a deep breath and rolled from the armchair to a coffee table. Next step, the couch. That would put me within a few feet of the other doorway, which was the only way into the rest of the house, if I was remembering the layout correctly.
"Nell!" I yelled, hoping to distract the shooter from Tolliver's progress, wherever he was. "Sybil!"
There was an answering shriek from the second floor. I didn't know which one of them was yelling, and I didn't know the location or number of people in the house, but I did know all of them were alive. Not a buzz in my head.
I'd been feeling very determined, but now the storm kicked up a notch. The rain began lashing harder at the window and soaking the carpet through the open front door. The rumble of thunder became almost continuous, and the crack of lightning followed right after. I felt as though I was pinned on a map and the lightning could see me, was tracking me, getting closer and closer until it could hit me again. Then I'd lose everything. The unimaginable pain would arc through me for the second time, and I'd lose my sight or my memory or the use of my leg, or something else irreplaceable. I moaned in fear, covering my eyes, and when I took my hands away, a man was standing over me with a gun in his hand.
In a desperate attempt to save my life, I dove at him, grabbing him around the knees and bringing him down. The gun went off; he'd had his finger on the trigger, oh God oh God. But if I was hit I didn't know it yet, and when he swung the gun at my head I grabbed his wrist with both hands and clung to it, literally for dear life.
Maybe my intense fear made me stronger than usual, because I was able to keep my hold on him though he hit at me with his other arm and thrashed around to shake me off. He was trying to bring the gun to bear on me, trying to force his arm into a straight line so he could fire at me, and as we rolled around in a snarling heap I saw my chance and sank my teeth into the fleshy heel of his hand and bit down with all my might. He gave a cry of pain - yay! - and let go of the gun. I would like to say that had been my intent, but if it was, I'd made the decision on a level I'd never tapped consciously.
Then the lights came on in the room, blinding me, and a shape I thought was Tolliver leaped forward. All three of us were in the melee on the floor, crashing into tables and sending heavy lamps toppling to the pale carpet.
"Stop!" screamed a new voice. "I've got a gun!"
We all froze. I still had my teeth in the man's hand, and Tolliver had raised a heavy glass ornament shaped like an apple to bash in his head. For the first time, I unclenched my teeth and looked up at the man's face. Paul Edwards. He was a far cry from the suave lawyer I'd met in the sheriff's office. He was wearing a flannel shirt and khakis and sneakers, and his hair was completely disheveled. He was panting heavily, and blood was streaming from his hand where I'd bitten him. Most striking of all was the absence of that calm assurance he'd had, the certainly that his little world was his to rule and order. He looked more like a raccoon that had been treed - bared teeth and glinting eyes and hissing noises.
"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 stunned. "With that low-class drunken slut. After you denied it to my face! Harvey was right."
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 running down her cheeks, but she wasn't ready to crumple yet. I'd been right when I'd pegged her as stoic.
"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 innocent bystanders. You know what happens to innocent bystanders.
"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, beginning to pull himself to his knees. I thought it was strange that the charge would make him indignant enough to be defiant, with all that he'd admitted. "I think you can understand why I didn't want Teenie to bring a child into the world with a bloodline like that," and he half-smiled in a parody of a reasonable expression. "But I never laid a hand on Sally. Sally was a good girl. And definitely not mine, of course."
"Good," Hollis growled.
"But you know, since I thought she'd drowned in the tub by accident, like the coroner said, I'd never stopped to think. Sybil, I told you that Sally called me, said she had something to tell me about Dick's death. At the time, I thought Sally might be priming up to tell me a tale for some kind of blackmail. But when she died, too, it didn't seem to make any difference. Sybil, did you go talk to Sally?"
Mary Nell gave a choked laugh. "Don't you try to go blame that on her, you murderer! Mama, tell him..." The girl's voice trailed off when she saw her mother's face. "Mama?" She sounded lost. Gone for good.
"She said she'd looked up blood typing, and she knew Dell wasn't really a Teague," Sybil said dully. "She wanted me to ask Harvey to resign early. Sally wanted Hollis to have Harvey's job. She was scared Hollis would get restless without it, that he wasn't happy piecing together a living in a little town like this."
Hollis looked like someone had hit him in the head. His hand was wavering. He didn't know who he wanted to shoot most. I understood the feeling.
Sybil gulped. Her own gun was falling down to her side. "I couldn't do that. And I couldn't stand her lying like that. I made myself believe it was a lie. So I went by one afternoon. She'd left the door unlocked, which I figured, and I walked in with this gun, but she was in the tub, singing away."
Hollis looked sick.
"And I just stepped in the bathroom and I grabbed her heels and pulled," Sybil went on. "And after a minute, she stopped trying to get up." Sybil stood there, lost in the memory, the gun down by her side.
Mary Nell screamed in horror. Paul Edwards launched himself at Sybil's gun, and Tolliver leaped over to knock me down behind the couch, his arms wrapped around me. Of course, a bullet could pass through the couch like it could pass through butter, but at least we were out of sight and mind.
A gun fired, and there were more screams - I was pretty sure Mary Nell's was one of them. When there was a little period of silence, we stuck our heads around the end of the couch.
"You can get up," Hollis said, his voice heavy and about a million years old. Tolliver straightened first and helped me up. My bad leg refused to lock for a minute, leaving me wobbly.