headed of the jailers not to let a lovesick teenage girl visit a prisoner. I was getting so tired of this girl, with her burdensome crush and her sense of privilege. But I also felt a certain amount of pity for her, and I hoped she could still be useful in helping us figure out what was really happening in Sarne.
And she needed to start doing that now. "Mary Nell, what do you know about Jay Hopkins?"
"He used to be Miss Helen's husband," she said, "you know that."
"Did he have any contact with Dell? "
"What difference does that make? I don't think about trashy people like him."
"This isn't going to be easy, but it's time for you to grow up a little."
"Like I haven't, this past year?"
"You've had some tragedy this year, but as far as I can tell, it hasn't matured you any."
She pulled to the side of the road, tears in her eyes. "I can't believe you," she said chokingly. "You're so mean! Tolliver deserves a better sister than you."
"I agree. But I'm what he's got, and I have to do everything I can for him. He's all I've got, too." I noticed she still hadn't answered my question. But I figured that was a kind of answer in itself.
She wiped her face with a tissue and blew her nose. "So why do you keep asking me about people?"
"Someone took a shot at me today. Someone paid your teenage admirer to beat me up, and someone let him into my room. I don't think he thought of that on his own, do you?"
She shook her head. "When I talked to Scot yesterday, he was mad at me, and mad at you, but he was going to stay away from you. Mr. Random, the football coach, he got onto Scot in front of the entire team and gave him twenty bleachers, and then Scot's dad grounded him from television or the telephone for a month."
"So what could have happened in the meantime, to make him hide in my room like he did?" Running up the bleachers and back twenty times, and no TV or telephone. Glad to know terrorizing me came with a stiff penalty.
"Did you ever think it might have been your
"No, I never did. Why do you suggest that?" Mary Nell was trying to make me angry, and she was pretty close to succeeding, but I made myself hold on to my temper with a ferocious effort.
"Well, just maybe Hollis wanted the chance to save you from something bad, so he could look like a big hero? And maybe he shot at you, too, which I have only your word for—that it ever happened, I mean."
"Why would he shoot at me?"
"To make you need him," she said. "To make you hold on to him. Now that your brother's out of the way, you need an ally, right? So maybe Hollis even got Tolliver arrested."
I was impressed with Mary Nell. This was deep and indirect thinking from a seventeen-year-old. What she said made sense, sort of. I didn't want to believe her theory about Hollis, and I don't think I really did believe it, but I had to consider her idea for a second or two. It made as much sense as any of my theories, and maybe more than some of them. I remembered having sex with Hollis the night before, and I had a bleak, black moment of wondering if he might have betrayed me from the start. Then I realized, more rationally, that Mary Nell was striking back at me for many reasons, most of all for having a closer relationship with my brother than she would ever have.
Silly girl. But looking at her, as she mopped at her face and then brushed her hair, I realized that she was only seven years younger than I. Mary Nell's life had been no picnic, of course, but probably it had been better than mine. By the time I was Mary Nell's age, even aside from the lightning strike, my life had changed forever. I had watched adults I knew and loved, as they threw their futures away. Then I had lost my sister Cameron; literally, lost her.
"Don't look at me like that," Mary Nell said, her voice quavering. "Do you even know where you are? God, stop it!"
I blinked. I hadn't realized I'd been staring.
"Sorry," I said automatically. "Your mother says you had a tonsillectomy this past year?"
"You are so weird. So fucking weird," she said, daring to say the bad word in front of me, daring me to admonish her.
I didn't give her any reaction. "Answer me," I said, after a pause.
"Yes, I did," she said, sullenly.
"You were in the hospital here? "
"In the next town, Mount Parnassus. Our little hospital closed two years ago."
"Dell was in the same hospital when he had to have stitches?" I was dredging up Sybil's conversation from when we'd seen her house. It was hard going. I wasn't sure what I was probing for; maybe I'd know it when I heard it. "He had a broken leg, or was that someone else? "
"That was the boy who was driving the car. Dell had stitches in his head. At first the emergency doctor thought he might have other problems, and he was unconscious for a little while, but they just kept him overnight."
"And your dad was in the hospital, too." I was trying to make something out of nothing.
"Yes, he had pneumonia." Mary Nell's face grew sad. "He had a bad heart, and the pneumonia just weakened him. I told him he'd get better, but the day before he died, he said, "Nelly, I'm just not the man I was before I caught that bug."
"He called you Nelly? "
"Yeah, or Nell. He liked me and my brother being Nell and Dell." The teenager's little face collapsed as I watched her. "I don't have a brother or a father. Probably nobody'll call me that again in my whole life."
"Sure someone will," I said, trying to figure out what had rung a bell in my head. "You're a pretty girl, Mary Nell, and you have a lot of spirit. Someone will come along who'll call you anything you want him to."
She brightened, happy to hear this even from someone she thought she despised. What she actually felt toward me was probably something closer to envy.
"You think so? "
"Yes, I think so."
"Harper," she said, and I realized she'd never spoken my name before, "what's going to happen to Tolliver?"
"Like I said, I called our lawyer. He gave me the name of an Arkansas attorney. She'll be here tomorrow. She's coming from Little Rock. She's going to appear at Tolliver's arraignment. I know she'll get him out."
"You fixed that up yourself?"
I nodded. "Sure."
"I couldn't do that," she said, subdued. "I wouldn't know how to begin."
I didn't want to sound like Ozark Granny Wisewoman, but I said, "You'll know when you need to."
"I liked Miss Helen," Mary Nell said, surprising me yet again.
"You told me that before," I said mildly. "I did, too. How well did you know her?"
"Well, she worked for us for a while. That's how Dell got to know Teenie. I mean, he knew who she was from school, because we all know each other, right? But he probably never would have spent time with her if Miss Helen hadn't worked at our house. That's how he got to know what she was really like. Then Miss Helen got to drinking so much she didn't get to work on time, and Mom had to let her go, and hired Mrs. Happ to help. But Dell and Teenie were sneaking off to see each other by then."
I'd heard pretty much the same thing from Hollis.
"Then Mr. Jay, Jay Hopkins, he beat Miss Helen up, and I heard my mom and Uncle Paul arguing about whether we should get Miss Helen back to work in the house. Uncle Paul said Miss Helen was sober and deserved a second chance, and Mom said after what she knew now, she wouldn't have Helen back in the house for love nor money. Especially love, she said."
"What do you think she meant by that?" I asked. With Mary Nell around, you wouldn't need a tape recorder.
"I have no idea," the girl answered. "I never did understand. I think my mom thought Miss Helen took something from her. But they wouldn't tell me." Familiar bitterness tinged her voice: the teenager vs. the adult world.
"Mary Nell, could you drop me back by my car?"
She sounded a little hurt when she told me she could.
I'd been too abrupt; but I had to think, and I knew Mary Nell would keep on talking as long as I was available to be her audience.
Once I was by myself, I felt both visible and vulnerable. I drove to my motel by the most direct route and shut myself in the damn room with the damn green bedspread. I had no messages. I couldn't decide if that was a good thing or a bad thing. My leg was tingling, as it sometimes did, and I peeled off my jeans and rubbed the skin, with its fine tracery of purple spiderwebs. Cameron had called me Spiderwoman for a while, before we'd figured out that the branching lines weren't going away. My stepfather had been fond of ordering me to show the leg to his friends.
Hollis never mentioned it. Maybe he didn't understand it was lightning-related. Maybe he thought it was a birthmark of some kind and didn't want to hurt my feelings.
I lay down on the bed. SO MO DA NO, I thought. It might almost be the chorus to a Caribbean song. Okay. Reverse it. ON AD OM OS. NO DA MO SO. Dams, moon, soon, mad, mono, moans, nomad. Damon, doom, moods. Amos. Samoa? Nope, only one A. Why one A? Every other phrase ended with O.
Okay, what if the second letter was some... condition? What if the first letters stood for names? S could be for Sybil, D for Dell, N for... oh, Mary Nell had said her dad had called her Nelly. That could be N. But then, who was M? No one's name started with M, that I could recall. D could be for Dick Teague, if not Dell.
For the first time, I wished that I could ask questions of the dead. I could only take what they gave me. They gave me a picture of their deaths. They gave me what they'd been feeling at the moment. But they never told me why, or who, just how.
