the moment he was far from smiling. His pale blond hair was smooth as glass.
"You always lived here in Sarne?" I asked, after we'd parked at the Sonic and he'd pressed the button to order two chocolate shakes.
"For ten years," he said. "I moved here my last two years of high school, and I stayed. I had a couple years of community college, but I commuted to class after the first year."
"Been married? Was that how Teenie was your sister-in-law? "
"Yes."
I nodded acknowledgment. "Kids? "
"No."
Maybe he'd known the marriage wouldn't last.
"My wife was Monteen's older sister," he said. "My wife is dead."
That was a shocker. I sighed. While Hollis paid for the shakes, I reflected that I was going to learn about Teenie Hopkins, whether I wanted to or not.
"I met Monteen when she was thirteen. I picked her up from outside a juke joint way out in the county, while I was on patrol. It was so obvious she was underage and had no business being there. She made a pass at me in the police car. She was totally out of hand. I met Sally when I took Monteen home to her mom's house that night." He was silent for a moment, remembering. "I liked Sally a lot, the first time I laid eyes on her. She was a regular girl, with a lot of sweetness in her. Teenie was wild as a razorback."
"So the Teagues couldn't have been that happy about their son dating her."
"You could say that. Teenie got it from her mom. At that time, Helen was drinking a lot, and not too particular about who she brought home. But Helen managed to change, finally quit drinking. When Teenie's mom settled down, Teenie did, too."
That wasn't how Sybil had tried to make it appear, at our second meeting. I filed that fact for future reference.
"How do you get hired?" he asked.
I sucked hard on the straw, thinking over the abrupt change in subject. It was a good milk shake, but it had been a mistake to get a cold drink on a brisk day when I was barefoot. I shivered.
"Lots of word of mouth. That's how I got hired here; Terry Vale heard something about me at a city government conference. Law enforcement people talk to each other, at conventions and by email. And there've been stories in a professional magazine or two."
He nodded. "I guess you couldn't advertise."
"Sometimes, we do. Hard to get the wording right."
"I can see that." He smiled reluctantly. Then he reverted to just being intense. "You just... feel them? "
I nodded. "I see the last moments. Like a tiny clip of a video. Can you please turn on the heater?"
"Yes, we'll ride." A minute later, we'd left Sonic and were cruising what there was of Sarne.
"How big is the police force here?" I was trying to be polite. There was an undercurrent here, and the water in it was moving faster and faster.
"Full-time, besides me? The sheriff, two other deputies right now."
"Stretched pretty thin."
"Not during this season. Now, we've just got leaf people. Come to see the colors change. They're pretty peaceable." Hollis shook his head over people taking time off from life to look at a bunch of leaves. "Summer tourist season, we take on six part-time people. Traffic control and so on."
Hollis Boxleitner's income would be small. He was a youngish man, and he seemed both capable and intelligent. What was he doing, stuck in Sarne? Okay, not my business: but I was curious.
"I inherited my parents' house here," he said, as if he were answering my unspoken question. "They got killed when a logging truck hit their car." He nodded in acknowledgment when I told him I was sorry. He didn't want to talk about their deaths, and that was a good thing. "I like the hunting and the fishing, and the people. In the summer, I get some hours in helping my brother-in- law; he's got a rafting business, rents 'em out to the tourists. I pretty much work around the clock for three months, but it helps me build up my bank account. What does your brother do, when he's not helping you? "
"He's always with me."
Hollis looked as if he were politely swallowing scorn. "That's all he does?"
"It's enough." The thought of managing by myself made me shiver.
"So, how much do you charge for your services?" he asked, his eyes on the road ahead of him.
I hoped there wasn't an implication there. I kept silent.
It took a while to make Hollis uncomfortable, longer than it took for most people.
"I want to hire you," he said, by way of explanation.
I hadn't expected that. "I charge five thousand dollars," I told him. "Payable on a positive identification of the body."
"What if the location of the body is known? You can tell the cause of death, too, right?"
"Yes. Of course I charge less if I don't have to find the body." Sometimes the family wants an independent suggestion about the cause of death.
"You ever been wrong?"
"Not that I know of." I looked out the window at the passing town. "When I can locate the body, that is. I don't always find it. Sometimes, there's just not enough information available to tell me where to search. Like the Morgenstern girl." I was referring to a case that had made headlines the year before. Tabitha Morgenstern had been grabbed off a suburban road in Nashville, and she'd never been seen since that day. "Just knowing the point where someone vanished isn't enough. She might have been dumped anywhere, in Tennessee or Mississippi or Kentucky. Not enough information. I had to tell her parents I couldn't do it."
Though the cemetery wasn't yet visible, I knew we were approaching one. I could tell by the buzzing along my skin. "How old is the cemetery?" I asked. "It's the newest one, I guess? "
He pulled over to the side of the road so abruptly I almost lost my grip on my milk shake. He glared at me, his face flushed. I'd spooked him.
"How the hell—did you and your brother drive by here earlier?"
"Nope." We were pretty far off any streets that tourists or casual visitors would take, a bit out in the countryside and away from any tourist amenities. "Just what I do."
"It's the new cemetery," Hollis said, his voice jerky. "The old one's..."
I turned my head from side to side, estimating. "Southwest of here. About four miles."
"Jesus, woman, you're creepy."
I shrugged. It didn't seem creepy to me.
He said, "I can give you three thousand. Will you do something for me? "
"Yes, I'll do it. Since we haven't run a credit check on you, I need the money in advance."
"You're businesslike." His tone was not admiring.
"No, I'm not. That's why Tolliver usually does this part." I finished my milk shake, making a loud slurping noise.
Hollis did a U-turn to head back to town. He went through the drive-through at the bank. The teller did her best not to act surprised when he sent his withdrawal slip over to her, and she also tried not to peer too obviously at me. I wanted to tell Hollis that if I were performing any other service, he wouldn't be sitting there all huffy; if I cleaned houses, he wouldn't be asking me to go clean his for free, right? My lips parted, but I clamped them shut. I refused to justify myself.
He thrust the money, still in its bank envelope, into my hand. I slid the envelope into my jacket pocket without comment. We drove back to the turn-off that led to the cemetery. We were parked on a gravel path winding among the tombstones, when he turned off the engine. "Come on," he said. "The grave is over here." The day had cleared up, turned bright, and I watched big sycamore leaves turn cartwheels in the wind across the dying grass.
"Embalming mutes the effect," I warned him.
His eyes lit up. He was thinking I'd faked my results before, somehow, and that now he'd unmask me. And he'd get his money back. He had about a ton of ambiguity resting on his shoulders.
I stepped gingerly onto the nearest grave, the ground chilly under my bare feet. Since a cemetery is so full of death, I have difficulty getting a clear reading. When you add the competing emanations from the corpses to the effects of the embalming process, you have to get as close as you can. "Middle-aged white man, died of... a massive coronary," I said, my eyes closed. The name was Matthews, something like that.
There was a silence while Hollis read the headstone. Then Hollis growled, "Yes." He caught his breath jaggedly. "We're going to walk now. Keep your eyes shut." I felt his big hand take mine, lead me carefully to another patch of ground. I reached down deep with that inner sense that had never yet failed me. "Very old man." I shook my head. "I think he just ran down." I was led to yet another grave, this one farther away. "Woman, sixties, car accident. Named Turner, Turnage? A drunk, I think."
We went back in our original direction, and I knew by the tension in his body that this was the grave he'd been aiming for all along. When he guided me onto the grave, I knelt. This was death by violence, I knew at once. I took a deep breath and reached below me. "Oh," I said sharply. I realized dimly that because Hollis was thinking of this dead person so strongly, it was helping me to reach her. I could hear the water running in the bathtub. House was hot, window was open. Breeze coming in the high frosted window of the bathroom. Suddenly... "Let go!" she said, but it was as if I were the woman, and I was saying it, too. And then her/my head was under water, and we were looking up at the stippled ceiling, and we couldn't breathe, and we drowned.
"Someone had ahold of her ankles," I said, and I was all by myself in my skin, and I was alive. "Someone pulled her under."
After a long moment, I opened my eyes, looked down at the headstone in front of me.
