Charlaine Harris (2 page)

Under the furtive scrutiny of all those eyes, I wasn't able to open the newspaper I had folded in front of me. I had to wait on these yahoos to make up their minds to something they'd already agreed to do. I'd felt optimistic when I'd seen them waiting for us, but that optimism was rapidly deteriorating.

A lot of eye signaling was going on among the Sarnites (Sarnians?). Paul Edwards leaned forward to deliver the result of all this conferencing. He was a handsome man, and he was used to being noticed.

“How did Mr. Chesswood die?” he asked, as if it were the bonus question.

“Cerebral hemorrhage.” God, these people. I looked at my paper longingly.

Edwards leaned back as though I'd socked him in the mouth. They all did some more eye signaling. My fruit arrived—sliced cantaloupe that was hard and tasteless, canned pineapple, a banana in the peel, and some grapes. Well, after all, it was fall. When Tolliver had been served his eggs and toast, we began to eat.

“We're sorry there may have been some hesitation last night,” Sybil Teague said. “Especially since it seems you, ah, interpreted it as us backing out on our agreement.”

“Yes, I did take it that way. Tolliver?”

“I took it that way, too,” he said solemnly. Tolliver has acne-scarred cheeks and dark eyes and a deep, resonant voice. Whatever he says sounds significant.

“I just got cold feet, I guess.” She tried to look charmingly apologetic, but it didn't work for me. “When Terry told me what he'd heard about you, and Harvey agreed to contact you, we had no idea what we were getting into. Hiring someone like you is not something I've ever done before.”

“There is no one like Harper,” Tolliver said flatly. He was looking up from his plate, meeting their eyes.

He'd thrown Sylvia Teague off her stride. She had to pause and regroup. “I am sure you're right,” she said insincerely. “Now, Miss Connelly, to get back to the job we're all hoping you'll do.”

“First of all,” Tolliver said, patting his mustache with his napkin, “Who's paying Harper?”

They stared at him as if that were a foreign concept.

“You all are obviously the town officials, though I'm not real sure what Mr. Edwards here does. Ms. Teague, are you paying Harper privately, or is she on the town payroll?”

“I'm paying Miss Connelly,” Sybil Teague said. There was a lot more starch in her voice now that money had been mentioned. “Paul's here as my lawyer. Harvey's my brother.” Evidently, Terry Vale wasn't her anything. “Now, let me tell you what I want you to do.” Sybil met my eyes.

I glanced back at my plate while I took the grapes off the stem. “You want me to look for a missing person,” I said flatly. “Like always.” They like it better when you say “missing person” rather than the more accurate “missing corpse.”

“Yes, but she was a wild girl. Maybe she ran away. We're not entirely sure . . . not all of us are sure . . . that she is actually dead.”

As if I hadn't heard
that
before. “Then we have a problem.”

“And that is?” She was getting impatient—not used to much discussion of her agenda, I figured.

“I only find dead people.”

“THEY
knew that,” I told Tolliver in an undertone, as we walked back to our rooms. “They
knew
that. I don't find live people. I can't.”

I was getting upset, and that was dumb.

“Sure, they know,” he said calmly. “Maybe they just don't want to admit she's dead. People are funny like that. It's like—if they pretend there's hope, there
is
hope.”

“It's a waste of my time—hope,” I said.

“I know it is,” Tolliver said. “They can't help it, though.”

ROUND
three.

Paul Edwards, Sybil Teague's attorney, had drawn the short straw. So here he was in my room. The others, I assumed, had scattered to step back into their daily routine.

Tolliver and I had gotten settled into the two chairs at the standard cheap-motel table. I had finally begun reading the paper. Tolliver was working on a science fiction sword-and-sorcery paperback he'd found discarded in the last motel. We glanced at each other when we heard the knock at the door.

“My money's on Edwards,” I said.

“Branscom,” Tolliver said.

I grinned at him from behind the lawyer's back as I shut the door.

“If you would agree, after all our discussion,” the lawyer
said apologetically, “I've been asked to take you to the site.” I glanced at the clock. It was now nine o'clock. They'd taken about forty-five minutes to arrive at a consensus.

“And this is the site of . . . ?” I let my words hang in the air.

“The probable murder of Teenie—Monteen—Hopkins. The murder, or maybe suicide, of Dell Teague, Sybil's son.”

“Am I supposed to be finding one body, or two?” Two would cost them more.

“We know where Dell is,” Edwards said, startled. “He's in the cemetery. You just need to find Teenie.”

“Are we talking woods? What kind of terrain?” Tolliver asked practically.

“Woods. Steep terrain, in places.”

Knowing we were on our way to the Ozarks, we'd brought the right gear. I changed to my hiking boots, put on a bright blue padded jacket, and stuck a candy bar, a compass, a small bottle of water, and a fully charged cell phone in my pockets. Tolliver went through the connecting door into his own room, and when he returned he was togged out in a similar manner. Paul Edwards watched us with a peculiar fascination. He was interested enough to forget how handsome he was, just for a few minutes.

“I guess you do this all the time,” he said.

I tightened my bootlaces to the right degree of snugness. I double-knotted them. I grabbed a pair of gloves. “Yep,” I said. “That's what I do.” I tossed a bright red knitted scarf around my neck. I'd tuck it in properly when I got really cold. The scarf was not only warm, but highly visible. I glanced in the mirror. Good enough.

“Don't you find it depressing?” Edwards asked, as if he
just couldn't help himself. There was a subtle warmth in his eyes that hadn't been there before. He'd remembered he was handsome, and that I was a young woman.

I almost said, “No, I find it lucrative.” But I know people find my earning method distasteful, and that would have been only partly the truth, anyway.

“It's a service I can perform for the dead,” I said finally, and that was equally true.

Edwards nodded, as if I'd said something profound. He wanted all three of us to go in his Outback, but we took our own car. We always did. (This practice dates from the time a client left us in the woods nineteen miles from town, upset at my failure to find his brother's body. I'd been pretty sure the body lay somewhere to the west of the area he'd had me target, but he didn't want to pay for a longer search. It wasn't my fault his brother had lived long enough to stagger toward the stream. Anyway, it had been a long, long walk back into town.)

I let my mind go blank as we followed Edwards northwest, farther into the Ozarks. The foliage was beautiful this time of year, and that beauty drew a fair amount of tourists. The twisting, climbing road was dotted with stands for selling rocks and crystals—“genuine Ozark crafts”—and all sorts of homemade jellies and jams. All the stands touted some version of the hillbilly theme, a marketing strategy that I found incomprehensible. “We were sure ignorant and toothless and picturesque! Stop to see if we still are!”

I stared into the woods as we drove, into their chilly and brilliant depths. All along the way, I got “hits” of varying intensity.

There are dead people everywhere, of course. The older the death, the less of a buzz I get.

It's hard to describe the feeling—but of course, that's what everyone wants to know, what it feels like to sense a dead person. It's a little like hearing a bee droning inside your head, or maybe the pop of a Geiger counter—a persistent and irregular noise, increasing in strength the closer I get to the body. There's something electric about it, too; I can feel this buzzing all through my body. I guess that's not too surprising.

We passed three cemeteries (one quite small, very old) and one hidden Indian burial site, a mound or barrow that had been reshaped by time until it just resembled another rolling hill. That ancient site signaled very faintly; it was like hearing a cloud of mosquitoes, very far away.

I was tuned in to the forest and the earth by the time Paul Edwards pulled to the shoulder of the road. The woods encroached so nearly that there was hardly room to park the vehicles and still leave room for other cars to pass. I figured Tolliver had to be worried someone would come along too fast and clip the Malibu. But he didn't say anything.

“Tell me what happened,” I said to the dark-haired man.

“Can't you just go look? Why do you need to know?” He was suspicious.

“If I have a little knowledge about the circumstances, I can look for her more intelligently,” I said.

“Okay. Well. Last spring, Teenie came out here with Mrs. Teague's son, who was also Sheriff Branscom's nephew—Sybil and Harvey are brother and sister. Sybil's son was named Dell. Dell was Teenie's boyfriend, had been for two years, off and on. They were both seventeen. A hunter found
Dell's body. He'd been shot, or he'd shot himself. They never found Teenie.”

“How was their location discovered?” Tolliver asked, pointing at the patch of ground on which we stood.

“Car parked right where we're parked now. See that half-fallen pine? Supported by two other trees? Makes a good marker to remember the spot by. Dell'd been missing less than four hours when one of the families that live out this way gave Sybil a call about the car. There were folks out searching soon after that, but like I say, it was another few hours before Dell was found. Right after that, it started raining, and it rained for hours. Wiped out the tracking scent, so the bloodhounds weren't any use.”

“Why wasn't anyone looking for Teenie?”

“No one knew Teenie was with Dell. Her mom didn't realize Teenie was missing for almost twenty hours, maybe longer. She didn't know about Dell, and she delayed calling the police.”

“How long ago was this?”

“Maybe six months ago.”

Hmm. Something fishy, here. “How come we're just being called out now?”

“Because half the town thinks that Teenie was killed and buried by Dell, and then he committed suicide. It's making Sybil crazy. Teenie's mom's hard up. Even if she thought of calling you in, she couldn't afford you. Sybil decided to fund this, after she heard about you through Terry, who went to some mayor's conference and talked to the head honcho of some little town in the Arklatex.” I glanced over at Tolliver. “El Dorado,” he murmured, and I nodded after a second, remembering. Paul Edwards said, “Sybil can't stand the
shame of the suspicion. She liked Teenie, no matter how wild the girl was. Sybil really assumed she'd be part of their family some day.”

“No Mister Teague?” I asked. “She's a widow, right?”

“Yes, Sybil's a fairly recent widow. She's got a daughter, too, Mary Nell, who's seventeen.”

“So why were Teenie and Dell out here?”

He shrugged, with a half smile. “That's a question no one ever asked; I mean, hell, seventeen, in the woods in spring . . . I guess we all thought it was a little obvious.”

“But they parked up by the road.” That was what was obvious, but apparently not to Paul Edwards. “Kids wanting to have sex, they're going to hide their car better than that. Small town kids know how easy it is to be caught out.”

Edwards looked surprised, his lean dark face shutting down on sudden and unwelcome thoughts. “Not much traffic out on this road,” he said, but without much conviction.

I put on my dark glasses. Edwards again looked at me askance. It was an overcast day. I nodded to Tolliver.

“Lay on, Macduff,” Tolliver said, to Paul Edwards's confusion. Edwards's high school must have done
Julius Caesar
instead of
Macbeth
. Tolliver gestured to the woods, and Edwards, looking relieved to understand his mission, began to lead us downhill.

It was steep going. Tolliver stayed by my side, as he always did; I was abstracted, and he knew I might fall. It had happened before.

After twenty minutes of careful, slow, downhill hiking, made even trickier by the slippery leaves and pine needles blanketing the steep slope, we came to a large fallen oak piled with leaves, branches, and other detritus. It was easy
to see that a heavy rainfall would sweep debris downslope, to lodge against the tree.

“This is where Dell was found,” Paul Edwards said. He pointed to the downslope side of the fallen oak. I wasn't surprised it had taken two days to find Dell Teague's body, even in the spring; but I was startled at the location of the corpse. I was glad I'd put on the dark glasses.