Charlaine Harris (18 page)

It was short and violent and the most exciting encounter I'd ever experienced. Nails and teeth, slick skin against slick skin, the thud of body against body. Afterward, he lay beside me on the floor in the small space we'd had available and said, “I need to vacuum.” He was panting heavily, and the words came out slowly.

“A few dust bunnies,” I agreed. “But they were good company.”

He wheezed as he laughed, and I pulled my bra back up because there was a draft along the floor. I rolled to my side and propped up on one elbow.

“I made your back bleed,” I said, looking from the scratches to my fingernails. “I'm sorry.”

“It felt good when it happened,” he said, and he was beginning to drift off to sleep. “I don't mind.”

While he dozed, I rolled onto my stomach and flipped through the biology book. It was a very basic text, with chapters on plant cells and reproduction, the human nervous system, how eyes work, and . . .

I glanced at the scratches on Hollis's shoulder and shook my head. I looked back down at the graph on the page.

I pulled my jeans back on.

“Hollis,” I said, very quietly.

“Mmph?” he said, opening his eyes.

“I have to go.”

“What? Wait a minute. Where's you car?”

“I ran from the motel to your house. I'll walk back.”

“No, just wait a minute, I'll run you to the motel. Or you can stay here. I know you don't like to be alone.”

It wasn't being alone that made me so antsy. It was being without my brother. But I didn't want to explain that. “I need to go back to the motel,” I said, as regretfully as I could manage. “I think the lawyer may call me.” Okay, that was a lie, but I was trying to spare his feelings. I had a few things I needed to do, and I'd have free reign to do them when I wasn't around Hollis, the lawman. He pulled on his uniform swiftly.

“Have you eaten?” Hollis asked practically, as we drove down Main.

“Ah . . . no, I guess not.” I hadn't even finished the granola bar.

“Then at least let me take you to Subway to get something.”

“That would be good,” I agreed, suddenly aware that I was hungry.

The truck filled with the good smell of the hot chicken sub; my mouth was watering.

When Hollis pulled into the slot in front of my room I hopped out of the truck with the bag containing my sandwich; I wanted to use the glare of his headlights to help me fit the key in the lock. The motel was anything but well-lit. Hollis began backing up as I pushed the door open. I turned to wave at him with one hand while the other hand clutched my bag of food. I could vaguely see Hollis's arm move as he switched gears to pull out of the lot.

Suddenly, from inside the room there was a grip on my
upper arm that spun me around, then I was stumbling into the room and meeting the rug with a speed that was terrifying.

I rolled to my feet and launched myself at my attacker, pushing him right back out the open door. Never let yourself get cornered. You have to fight instantly, I'd found as a teenager, or your opponent has the upper hand; your injuries hurt too much, or you get scared. And you have to go with it with every fiber of your being. Pull, bite, strike, scratch, squeeze; let go completely. If you're dedicated to hurting someone else, it doesn't register so much when they hurt you. I hardly felt the two pounding blows the man got in on my ribs before I grabbed his testicles and clamped down, and then I bit him on the neck as hard as I could. He was shrieking and trying to pry me off when Hollis separated us.

I sat back against the wall of the motel, sobbing and shaking with the aftermath of unleashing all that, and stared at my assailant, whom Hollis handcuffed with a few economical motions. It was Scot, of course, the teenage admirer of Mary Nell; Scot, who'd tried to attack me before. He was whimpering now, little snot-nose bastard.

“Are you crazy?” Hollis yelled at him. “Are you nuts? What are you doing, attacking a woman like that?”

“She's the one who's crazy,” Scot said. He spit out a little blood. “Did you see her?”

“Scot, what the hell made you decide to do this?” I could see that Hollis was absolutely stunned. “Who let you in her room?” He shook the boy.

The teenager stayed silent, glaring up at Hollis.

Vernon McCluskey hobbled out of the office and down the sidewalk to where we were poised in our strange tableau.

“Vernon, did you let this boy into Harper's room?” Hollis bellowed.

“Naw,” Vernon said. He looked down at the boy contemptuously. I knew it wasn't because the boy had been poised to attack a smaller woman, but because the boy had failed to attack hard enough, and at the wrong time. “I rented him a room, the room this lady's brother was in earlier. If she happened to leave the adjoining door unlocked, ain't my fault. I had no idea Scot would do anything like this.” Vernon shook his head with insincere regret.

Son of a bitch.

If I was feeling paranoid, it was with some justification.

“Get up, Scot,” Hollis said. “You're going to jail. Harper, you're going to press charges?”

“Oh, you bet.” I needed a hand up, but Hollis was escorting Scot to his truck, and I wouldn't have asked Vernon for a place to spit on the sidewalk. Shakily, I worked my way to my feet. My thigh muscles were trembling, and I felt weak and sick. I hated pretty nearly everyone. “I may have to wait until tomorrow, but I'm definitely going to press charges. I was willing to forgive the first time, when he looked to be a teenager driven nuts by jealousy, but this is above and beyond.”

What on earth could have induced this boy, who'd been so scared of his parents and his coach, to attempt something like this? What had he been ordered to do? Kill me, or beat me up?

“Paid,” I said. Hollis stopped, halfway through pushing the handcuffed boy up into his truck. “I'll bet someone paid him to do this.”

And I saw by Scot's face that I'd struck oil. “Were you
supposed to break some bones?” I asked him, conversationally. “Or kill me?”

“Shut up,” he said, turning his face away from me. “Just don't talk to me anymore.”

“Coward,” I said, and I remembered that Harvey Branscom had called him the same thing the morning before. Harvey had been right.

“Burn in hell,” Scot said, and then Hollis slammed the door on him.

Vernon was still standing there when they pulled away.

“You do anything but take my key when I leave, I'll slap you with a lawsuit that will bankrupt this motel,” I said. I knew damn good and well I'd locked the interconnecting door. “If any harm comes to me, my brother will see to it. Any harm comes to him, our lawyer will do it.”

He didn't say anything, but he watched me with old, hostile eyes while I shut and locked my door. I picked up the bag of food from Subway. Luckily, I hadn't gotten a drink, since I had bottled drinks in the ice chest in my room. Vernon probably would have had me arrested for defacing his property if I'd spilled a Coke on his green carpet.

I shoved a chair under the doorknob and moved the ice chest against the connecting door. It wouldn't hold the door, but it would slow down an entrance and provide noise. I used my cell phone to call Art in Atlanta, and I left a detailed account of what had just happened on his answering machine. Just for the record.

I was so lonely I cried.

Then I ate the food in the bag, not because I wanted it (it was nasty and cold by that time), but because I had to have fuel. I peeled off my clothes with shaking fingers. I was a
mess; I'd had sex and a fight in the same evening, and I needed a shower. I looked at myself in the mirror over the sink. My ribs were already turning blue on my left side where Scot had gotten in the two good punches. I breathed deeply, trying to decide if I had any broken ribs. I didn't think I did, after a few experimental movements.

It gave me some satisfaction to think that if it had been a bad day for me, it had been a worse day for Scot. He'd turned from being football team quarterback and suitor for Mary Nell Teague into a soon-to-be felon. Hurt pride had done it; that, and a bribe, I figured. I could conjecture he'd felt embarrassed after the morning incident. The coach had probably made him feel like a fool, after the sheriff had called him a coward. Instead of taking their words to heart, he'd gotten angry, and when he'd been offered money, he'd jumped at the chance to recoup his self-esteem. It was one of those situations where you learn what you're made of. Unfortunately for Scot, it turned out he was made of lesser things.

Hollis called after he'd booked Scot into the jail. He wanted to find out how I was and to reassure me that nothing would disturb my night. “We'll figure out what the initials mean,” he said. “I knew my wife, and I'll understand it sooner or later.”

I didn't think we had “later,” and I didn't know if understanding Sally would help or not. She'd known exactly what she meant, and she'd been referring to something simple and obvious. With all due respect to Sally, if a girl who'd graduated from Sarne High could make some significant discovery after a glance at her biology textbook, then I should be able to figure it out. So should any number of
people, and that was what had me worried. “SO MO DA NO” I wrote on the little pad of paper kept by the phone. I wrote it as one word. I wrote it backwards. I tried to make a word out of the letters. I fell asleep with the pencil clutched in my hand.

A
pounding on the door woke me up. I rolled an eye toward the clock on the bedside table. It was seven in the morning.

“Who is it?” I asked cautiously, when I'd stumbled over to the door.

“Mary Nell.”

Oh, wonderful. I moved the chair to open the door, and she strode in. “We've got to get him out,” she said dramatically, and I felt like smacking her.

“Yes,” I said. “I want him out, too.” If there was a little sarcasm in my voice, it was lost on Nell Teague.

“What have you done about it?”

I blinked, sat on the side of the bed. “I've hired a lawyer, who'll be here tomorrow,” I said.

“Oh,” she said, somewhat deflated. “Well, I called Toby Buckell, but he just laughed at me. Said he wouldn't take a case unless a grown-up called him.”

I could just imagine. “I'm sorry he treated you with disrespect,” I said, trying hard to sound like I meant it. “I appreciate your effort. But Tolliver is my brother, and I have to be the one who works on this.” I wanted to be nice to this girl, whose only fault was that she was sixteen, but she was wearing me out. Talk about drama. Then I reminded myself she'd lost her brother and her father in a very short period, and I forced myself into a more hospitable mode.

“Would you like some coffee, or a soda?” I asked.

“Sure,” she said, going over to the ice chest and pulling out a Coke. I brewed a little pot of coffee from the motel coffeemaker, and poor coffee it was, but it was hot and contained caffeine. I looked at my visitor. Mary Nell's face was bare of makeup, and her hair was pulled back into a very short ponytail. She looked her age, no more. She should be at home working on her English composition paper, or on the phone with one of her friends about last night's date, rather than in a motel room with a woman like me.

“You said you called another lawyer,” I said. “Why not Paul Edwards?”

She said suddenly, “I think my mom might marry Mr. Edwards.”

“You don't like him?” I was groping around for what to say.

“We get along okay,” Mary Nell said. “He's always been around. He and my dad were friends, and my mom always got his opinion on everything. Dell never liked Mr. Edwards much, and they had a big argument before Dell died.”

“What was that about?” I asked, trying to sound casual.

“I don't know. Dell wouldn't tell me. He'd found out
something, and he went to Mr. Edwards to talk about it, but Dell didn't like whatever Mr. Edwards said.”

“Something he'd found out about Paul?”

“I don't know if it was about Mr. Edwards, or someone else. Dell just thought Mr. Edwards would be able to help him out with it, give him an answer.”

“Oh.” None of the letters had been a P or an E, assuming the letters Sally had written referred to a person. Damn, why didn't people just write what they meant? To hell with shorthand.

“I thought you and Dell were so close,” I said, which was tactless and stupid. “I'm surprised he didn't tell you what he was mad about.”

She gave me an outraged stare. “Well, for brother and sister we were close.”

“What does that mean?”

“There's stuff brothers and sisters don't talk about,” she said, as if she'd been requested to explain snow to an Eskimo. “I mean, there's stuff you and Tolliver don't talk about, right? Oh, I forgot. You're not
really
his sister. So you wouldn't know.”

Touché.

“Brothers and sisters don't talk about sex, I bet not even when they're grown up,” she instructed me. I remembered how shocked she'd been when she'd told me her brother had said Teenie was pregnant. “Brothers and sisters don't talk about which of their friends are doing it, either. But other stuff, that's what they talk about.”

“Did you and Scot talk about him coming here to beat me up?” I asked.

She flinched. “What are you talking about?”

So the Sarne grapevine hadn't gotten in gear yet, and she didn't know. “Someone paid Scot to come here and hide in my room last night. He was supposed to beat me up. It was just like the other morning, except this time he was by himself. If Hollis Boxleitner hadn't been with me, I could be in the hospital by now.”

“I didn't know,” she said, and again I felt guilty. But there's no gentle way to tell someone a tale like that. And I couldn't minimize it any more than I had. “What's happening to our town? We were okay until you came!”

That was a fine turnaround. “Your mother invited me,” I reminded her. “All I did was find Teenie's body, like I was supposed to.”

“It would have been better if you'd never found her,” Nell said childishly, as if I could have predicted this outcome.

“That was my job. She shouldn't have been lying out there in the woods, waiting to be found. I did my job, and it was the right thing to do.” I said this as calmly as I could.

“Then why is all this happening?” she asked, like I was supposed to supply her with an answer. “What's going on?”

I shook my head. I had no idea. When I got one, one that would release my brother, I was never going to put foot in Sarne again.

Nell left to go to school, looking stunned and very young.

I stopped in the police station to give a statement about the incident of the night before and ask when I could see Tolliver. I was almost scared to ask the desk clerk, the round woman who'd been there the first time I'd come in the week before. I was scared that once they found out I wanted to see
him, they'd find some way to keep me from it. And I didn't even know who “they” were.

“Visiting hours are from two to three on Tuesday and Friday,” she said, looking away from me as if I were too loathsome for her eyes to behold.

Since it was Tuesday, I could see him that afternoon. The relief was enormous. But until two o'clock, I didn't have anything to do. I was sick to death of that motel room.

I went out to the cemetery, the newer one. I wanted to have another visit with the rest of the Teagues, the deceased side of the family. This time I was able to park very close to the Teague plot, and I was bundled up pretty heavily, because the temperature was dropping. This was Arkansas in early November, so snow wasn't too likely; but in the Ozarks, it also wasn't out of the question. I had a red scarf wrapped around my neck and wore my red gloves. I was wearing a puffy bright blue jacket. I like to be visible, especially in Arkansas in hunting season. It was the first time I'd wrapped up quite so much this fall, and I felt as padded as a child being sent out to play in the snow for the first time.

I looked around me at the people-empty landscape. Across the county road, to the west, was a stand of forest. There was a small group of houses, perhaps twenty, to the north; they had half-acre lawns and sundecks and gas grills outside their sliding glass doors. No visible cars; everyone worked to maintain that slice of suburbia. The cemetery stretched south over the swell of a steep hill, part of a line that also blocked the view to the east. This was a peaceful place.

It was easy to locate the Teague plot. There was a large monument on a plinth in the center, with TEAGUE carved
on it twice, once to the north and once to the south.

I moved through the Teagues, slowly working my way from grave to grave. They were not a family that had long lives, as a whole. Dell's grandfather had lived only until he was fifty-two, when he'd had a massive heart attack. Two of Grandfather's sibs were there, dead in infancy. Dell's grandmother had come from hardier stock. She'd been seventy-two, and she'd died just two years ago—of pneumonia, basically. I gave Dell a hello; his gunshot death brought the average down sharply, of course. I did the subtraction on his father's tombstone and found that Dell's dad had only been forty-seven when Sybil found him facedown on his desk.

Of course, Dick Teague had been my goal all along. When I stepped onto his final resting place, I felt an edge of anticipation, like you feel before you bite into a gourmet dessert. Down through the rocky soil my special sense went, making contact with the body below me. I examined Dick Teague with the careful attention he deserved. But I found the barrier of shoes and dirt and coffin were muffling my response. I needed more contact. I sank down in front of the headstone to lay my hands on the earth. Just as I did so, there was a cracking noise from the woods to the west of the cemetery, and something stung my face sharply enough to make me cry out.

I put my gloved hand to my cheek, and it came away with blood on it. My blood was a different red than the cheerful scarlet of the glove, and I looked at it with some bewilderment. I heard the same crack again, and suddenly I realized that someone was shooting at me.

I launched myself from squatting to prone in one galvanic motion. Thank God I wasn't in the Delta, where the
land was so flat I wouldn't have been able to conceal myself from a fly. I crawled to take cover on the east side of the big monument in the middle of the plot. It wasn't as wide as me, but it was the best I could do.

For a miracle, I'd put my phone in my pocket, and I stripped off one glove and called 911. I could tell the person who answered was the woman I'd just talked to at the desk at the police station. “I'm at the cemetery off 314, and someone's firing at me from the woods,” I said. “Two shots.”

“Have you been hit?”

“Just by a piece of granite. But I'm scared to move.” I'd started crying from sheer terror, and it was an effort to keep my voice level.

“Okay, I'll have someone out there right away,” she said. “Do you want to stay on the phone?” She turned away for a minute, and I heard her ordering a patrol car to my location. “Probably just a hunter making a mistake,” she offered.

“Only if deer here are bright blue.”

“Have you heard any more shots?”

“No,” I said. “But I'm behind the Teague monument.”

“Do you hear the car coming yet?”

“Yes, I hear the siren.” It wasn't the first time I'd been glad to hear a police siren in Sarne. I wiped my face with the clean glove. A police car pulled to a screeching halt behind my car, and Bledsoe, the deputy who'd arrested Tolliver, stepped out of it. He sauntered over to the spot where I crouched.

“You say someone's firing at you?” he asked. I could tell that for two cents he'd whip out his own gun and take a shot.

I got up slowly, fighting a tendency on the part of my
legs to stay collapsed. I leaned against the granite monument, thinking a few deep breaths would have me back up to walking speed.

He looked at my face. His demeanor became a lot more businesslike. “Where'd you say these shots came from?”

I pointed to the woods across the road to the west, the closest cover to the cemetery. “See, look at Dick Teague's tombstone,” I said, pointing to the jagged little white scar where a chunk had been blown off the edge.

Suddenly, Bledsoe was scanning the woods with narrow eyes. His hand went to his holster.

“What's the blood from?” he asked. “Were you hit?”

“It was the chip from the stone,” I said, and I wasn't happy with how uneven my voice was. “The bullet was that close. The chip hit me in the cheek.”

I spotted it on the ground, picked it up and handed it to him.

“Course, you coulda done it yourself,” he said, with no conviction.

“I don't care what you think,” I told him. “I don't care what report you write up. As long as you showed up and stopped him shooting at me, I don't care.”

“You say ‘him' for a reason?” he asked.

“No reason at all.” My breathing was about normal by now. As I adjusted to the fact that no one was going to try to kill me in the next second or so, I reverted to my former opinion of the deputy.

“What were you doing out here, anyway?” He, too, was reverting to hostility.

“Just visiting.”

He looked disgusted. “You're some piece of work, you know that?”

“I could say the same. Listen, I'm leaving while you're standing here, because I don't want to die in this town. Thanks for coming. At least . . .” I stopped before I finished with, “At least the police here aren't totally corrupt.” I figured that would be less than tactful, especially since the deputy wasn't standing there pointing at me and yelling, “You can go on and shoot her!”