Grave Sight

"I see what I see."

"You think God gave you this gift? Or the devil?"

I wasn't about to tell this woman what I really thought. "You believe what you want," I said.

"I believe that you saw both my daughters get murdered," Helen Hopkins said. Her huge brown eyes seemed to get even bigger and rounder. "I believe God sent you to find out who did this to them."

"No," I said immediately. "I am not a lie detector. I can find bodies. I can tell what killed 'em. But who, or why, that's beyond me."

"How did they die? "

"You don't want to hear this," Tolliver said.

"Shut up, mister. This is my right."

She was little, but persistent. Like a mosquito, I thought.

"Your daughter Sally was drowned in her bathtub. She was grabbed by the ankles, so that her head went under the water. Your daughter Teenie was shot in the back."

All the strength seeped out of Helen Hopkins as we watched.

"My poor girls," she said. "My poor girls."

She looked over at us, without really seeing us. "I thank you for coming," she said stiffly. "I thank you. I'm in your debt. I'll tell the girls' fathers what you've said."

Tolliver and I got up. Helen didn't speak again.

"Now we leave," Tolliver said, when we were outside. And after we stopped by the bank to cash Sybil Teague's check, we got in our car and drove south out of Sarne.

We pulled into our motel in Ashdown a few silent hours later. Tolliver sat in the chair in my room after we'd eaten supper, and I perched on the foot of the bed.

"Tell me about going out with the trooper," he said. His voice was mild, but I knew that was deceptive. I'd been waiting for that shoe to drop all day.

"He came by while you were gone flirting with that waitress," I said. "He wanted me to take a ride with him." Tolliver snorted, but I decided to ignore that. "Anyway, he talked, and he talked, and we got a milk shake, and then I realized that he just wanted to take me out to the cemetery and get me to tell him what happened to his wife."

I could hardly bear to look at Tolliver's face, but I sneaked a peek. To my relief, he wasn't full of anger. He hated it when people took advantage of me, and he hated it more when the person was a man. But he didn't want me to feel bad, either.

"Don't you think he liked what he saw, and that's why he came by the motel?"

I ducked my head. Tolliver's hand smoothed my hair.

"No," I said. "I think all along he planned on getting me there to his wife's grave. I told him I had to be paid, Tolliver. So he took me by the bank and got the money." I didn't tell Tolliver it hadn't been the full amount. "But I left it in the truck, because I felt so bad about the whole thing." Bad and mad and guilty and hurt.

"You did the right thing," he said, at last. "Next time, don't go anywhere without telling me, okay?"

"You going to follow me?" I asked, feeling a little spark of anger. "What should I do when you go off without me? Make the woman promise to bring you back by ten? Take her picture so I can track her down when you're late?"

Tolliver counted to ten. I could tell by the tiny movements of his head. "No," he said. "But I worry about you. You're a strong woman, but a strong woman still isn't as strong as most men." This was one of those simple biological truths that made me wonder what God had been thinking. "If he hadn't taken you to the cemetery, he could have taken you anywhere else. I would have been looking for you, like we track other people."

"If anyone in this world is aware that she might be killed at any moment, Tolliver Lang, that person is me." I pointed at my own chest, my finger rigid. "Amazingly, every day millions of women go out with men who have no ulterior motive whatsoever. Amazingly, almost all of them come home perfectly all right!"

"I don't care about them. I care about you. How you could ever trust anyone when what we see, so many times a year, is murder... ."

"And yet, you have no problem inviting a woman you just met into your room! "

He threw up his hands. "Okay, forget it! Forget I said anything! All I want is to know where you are, and for you to be safe!" He stomped out of my room into his, which required going outside; no connecting doors in this cut-rate motel.

I heard the television come on in the next room. What had we been quarrelling about? Did Tolliver really want me to sit in my room while he had fun? Did he really want me to turn down every invitation that came my way, in the name of safety?

I was pretty sure the answer, if you asked him, would be yes.

During the night, the phone by Tolliver's bed rang. I could hear it through the thin walls. After a moment, it stopped. I tried to imagine who could know where we were and what we were doing, and in the middle of imagining, I fell back to sleep. I ran the next morning, and in the cold crisp air it felt great. The hot shower felt even better. While I was dressing, Tolliver knocked on my door. After I let him in, I finished buttoning my blouse. I was wearing better clothes since we would be meeting the Ashdown client for the first time. This would be a cemetery job, and I wouldn't have to change. A quick in-and-out.

"The call last night," he said.

"Yeah, who was that?" I'd almost forgotten.

"It was the police in Sarne."

"Who in the police?"

"Harvey Branscom, the sheriff."

I waited, hairbrush in hand.

"We have to go back."

"Not until we do this job. Why, what happened?"

"Last night, someone went into Helen Hopkins' house and beat her to death."

I stared at Tolliver for a minute. I was so used to death that it was hard to produce a normal reaction to news like this.

"Well," I said finally, "I hope it was quick."

"I told them we'd have to finish our business here first, then we'd drive back up there."

"I'm ready." I tucked my blouse in my gray slacks. I pulled on my matching blazer.

"Hey, the jacket matches your eyes," Tolliver said.

"That was my intent," I said dryly. Tolliver always seemed to think that if I looked good, it was a happy accident. The blouse I wore with the gray suit was light green, with a kind of bamboo pattern on it. I put on a gold chain that Tolliver had given me the previous Christmas, and slid into black pumps. I fluffed my hair, checked my makeup, and told Tolliver I was ready. He was wearing a long-sleeved cotton pullover sweater in a dark red. He looked very good in it. I'd given it to him.

We met the client and her lawyer at the designated cemetery, one of those modern ones with flat headstones. They're cheaper, and more convenient for the mower. Though not atmospheric, the "park" look does make for easier walking.

The lawyer, a woman in her sixties, made it clear she thought I was in the business of defrauding the desperate and grief stricken. I was getting a lot of red flags, not only from the lawyer's attitude, but from the twitchiness of the client. Following our standard procedure when I got vibes like those, I endorsed the check and handed it to Tolliver, indicating he should go to the bank while I did the "reading." The situation was showing all the indicators of a bad transaction.

The client, a heavy, peevish woman in her forties, wanted her husband to have died of something more dramatic than a radio falling into his bathtub. (Bathtubs had been big this month. Sometimes I got such a run of one cause of death that it made even me nervous. Last year, I had a streak of accidental drownings—five in a row. Made me scared to go swimming for a couple of months.) Geneva Roller, the client, had her own elaborate conspiracy theory about how the radio came to be in the bathtub. Her theory involved Mr. Roller's first wife and his best friend.

I love it when the location of the body is known. It was a little treat when the client led me directly to her husband's grave. Geneva Roller was a brisk walker, and I could feel the heels of my pumps sinking into the soft dirt. The lawyer was right behind me, as if I'd cut and run unless I was blocked in.

We stopped by a headstone reading Farley Roller. To give Geneva her emotional money's worth, I stepped onto the grave and crouched, my hand resting on the headstone. Farley, I thought, what the hell happened to you? And then I saw it, as I always did. To let Geneva know what was going on, I said, "He is in the tub. He has—um, he's uncircumcised." That was unusual.

This convinced my client I was the real deal. Geneva Roller gasped, her hand going up to her chest. Her bright red lips formed an O. The lawyer, Patsy Bolton, snorted. "Anyone could know that, Geneva," she said.

Right, that was the first thing I asked guys.

"He's whistling," I said. I couldn't hear what Farley Roller was whistling, unfortunately. I could see the counter in the bathroom. "There's a radio on the counter," I said. "I think he's whistling along with the music." This was one of the times when I saw more than the moment of death. This was not the norm.

"He did that when he bathed," Geneva breathed. "He did, Patsy!" The lawyer looked less skeptical and more spooked.

I said. "There's the cat. On the bathroom counter. A marmalade color cat."

"Patpaws," said Geneva, smiling. I was willing to bet the lawyer wasn't smiling.

"The cat's bracing to leap over the tub to the open window."

"The window was open," Geneva said. She wasn't smiling anymore.

"The cat knocked the radio into the water," I said.

Then the cat leaped out of the window and into the yard while Mr. Roller came to his end. The bathtub was an old one, an unusual shade of avocado green. "You have a green tub," I said, shaking my head in puzzlement. "Can that be right?"

Patsy the lawyer was gaping at me. "You're for real," she said.