pause. She held her leg out to show the splotch on her denim skirt. "I asked Mrs. Markham if I could sign out for thirty minutes and run home to change."
"Mrs. Markham is the cheerleader sponsor," Sybil explained to us, as though we cared. "Well, go change, honey," she said to Nell. She might as well have said "Shoo!" and flapped her hands. Nell darted away, her cheeks flushed. In five minutes she was back, dressed in a dark blue long-sleeved T-shirt and a khaki skirt. I was willing to bet her previous outfit was on the floor of her room. "I'm gone, Mom!" she called as she went down the hall to the kitchen. The kitchen had a door leading into the garage, and I was sure that Nell had her own car. Sure enough, within a minute I saw a Dodge Dart zipping down the graveled driveway.
"She's so active in her school," Sybil said.
"And what year is she?" I asked politely.
"Oh, I'll have her for one more year," Sybil said. "Then it'll just be me rattling around in this big empty house."
"You might remarry," I said, in a completely neutral voice.
Sybil looked startled, maybe at my offering a suggestion about a subject that was clearly none of my business. "Well, I suppose that's possible," she said stiffly. "I hadn't thought about it."
I didn't believe that for a minute. From the way the maid cut her eyes toward Sybil (she was carrying out the used plates), she didn't, either. We'd had iced tea with our salad and our chicken divan served over rice, but I'd only had one refill. I wanted to get into Nell's room, but I could hardly say I had to use the bathroom again. That would just be too suspicious. There was no way I could tell Tolliver what I needed, and he was not very good at sneaking, anyway.
A picture presided over the dining room, and I assumed the portrait was of Sybil's dead husband. I was seated opposite it, so I had forty-five minutes to stare at the painted features and look for their traces in the pictures of Dell and Mary Nell that were hanging on either side.
"Your husband?" I offered, nodding toward the picture. I thought it had been painted from a snapshot, but it was interesting. The eyes looked alive, and the tension of the seated body suggested that Teague was going to leap up at any moment.
She turned her head to look at the picture, as if she'd forgotten it was there. "He was a good man," she said softly. "He was just nuts about the kids, of course. He'd had pneumonia, one of those strains that's resistant to antibiotics, so he'd been in the hospital in Little Rock. He'd had a little heart trouble, but the doctors kept telling us it wasn't much, not to worry. They were going to do more about it when he got over the pneumonia, you see. But one afternoon, while he was recuperating, he was in his study with all the medical records from the past year. He wasn't satisfied with our insurance, or he thought that they should have paid more on his doctor bill, or something. I don't even remember now. But it had been a big year medically, you have those sometimes, I guess. Mary Nell had had a tonsillectomy, and Dell was the passenger in a car that had a little accident. The driver had a broken leg, and Dell had a little knock on the head and some stitches. Bloody, but really after it was cleaned up, he wasn't hurt too badly. And I'd had high cholesterol. So Dick had this pile of papers he was going through, and sometime in the afternoon he just... passed. When I went in to get him for supper, he had his head on the desk."
"I'm so sorry," I said. Sybil had had a lot to bear in her life, and I had to respect that, no matter how cold I found her.
"I'm curious, Sybil," my brother said, sounding as if going from one subject to another was simply logical. Sybil blinked and refocused on Tolliver. "Why didn't you ask Harper to come to Sarne earlier?"
"I'm sorry?" Sybil's attractive face was blank.
"Why didn't you ask Harper right after Teenie went missing?"
"I... well, I... of course, at first I was shocked by my son's death, and I just couldn't think about Teenie. Frankly, I just... didn't care, in the face of my own loss." Sybil gave us a noble face, telling us she was ashamed of that, but so what?
"Of course," I said. "Of course." This was just noise, to get her to continue.
"But when I heard all the rumors that were going around town, about how there was only justice for the rich, and why wasn't anyone looking for Teenie, and people seemed so sure that Dell had done something terrible to her... I was talking to Terry at Sunday lunch at the country club, and he told me what he'd heard about you. Paul was dead set against it, but I just couldn't leave a stone unturned. There had to be something I could do besides get out there and search the woods myself. You know, they should have brought in tracking dogs right away. But no one knew Teenie was out there with Dell. When he got found, it was assumed he was a suicide. By the time Helen realized Teenie was missing, too, it was late at night. It rained real heavy. When they resumed the search the next day, the scent was gone, I guess. I don't remember any of that, at all. I was far from worrying about Teenie."
"No cadaver dogs?" I asked.
"They're different from trackers, right? No, I guess not. After Helen thought about it, she said she was sure Teenie would turn up somewhere alive, and bringing in the cadaver dogs would be like saying she was dead. I thought for sure she'd back down on that one, but she said everyone was telling her it was not the right thing to do." Sybil shook her head. "Terry thought it would give the town a bad name, too, but the hell with that. If a young one's missing, you got to look for 'em. Maybe if Jay had been around... Oh, he wants you to come by the house, by the way. He called here this morning to find out more about you. Anyway, Jay and Helen's relationship wasn't all bad. Helen was more of a woman after she lay off the alcohol, you understand, but she had more backbone altogether when she was with Jay. She'd just listen to this one and that one and end up all confused after she separated from Jay."
That was totally not the impression I'd gotten of Helen Hopkins. It sounded as though Sybil and Helen hadn't communicated face to face at all.
As if she'd heard my inner comment, Sybil said, "She never wanted to sit down and talk to me, so we could work out what to do. I'd call and get someone else. I'd send a message, and she wouldn't respond." Sybil shook her head. "And now it's too late," she said dramatically, able to be insincere now that she was no longer talking about the tragedy of her son. "Poor Helen. But at least she was spared the burial of her daughter. Harvey will catch the one who did it. The son of a bitch'll try to sell something he stole from Helen, or he'll get drunk in a bar and tell some buddy of his. Harvey says that's the way it works."
Sybil Teague herself would never know how things worked, I thought. In some way I had yet to define, she was so far from the truth she wouldn't know it if it bit her in the ass.
eleven
"WHY aren't you one of those computer hackers?" I asked Tolliver. "Then I could tell you all this, and you'd have some brilliant idea, and you'd hack into the law enforcement system, or the Teagues' home computer, and find out some critical information, and I'd put it to brilliant use."
"You need to stop reading mysteries for a while," Tolliver said, braking gently for one of the town's numerous four-way stops. "Or get a new sidekick."
"Sidekick?"
"Yeah, if you're the brilliant sleuth, I must be the slightly denser but brilliant-in-my-own-useful-way sidekick, right?"
"Yes, Watson."
"More like Sharona," he muttered.
"That'd make me Monk? "
"If the shoe fits."
Actually, that hurt a little bit, the way a joke does when it's just a tad too close to the truth.
"Of course, you're a lot cuter," he said in a judicious voice, and I felt better. A little.
"Listen, did that sound like Helen Hopkins to you, all those things Sybil said?"
"No," he said promptly. "By the way, where are we going? "
"To Helen Hopkins' house. Jay Hopkins wants to meet with us."
"Why? "
"I have no idea."
"Well, it sounded like neither of them really wanted to make the effort to talk to each other, despite the fact that one was the mother of a dead teenager, and the other was the mom of a missing teenager. And those two kids loved each other. But it must have drenched them with a bucket of ice water, finding out Teenie was pregnant."
"Yeah. And evidently, she hadn't told her mom. And Dell hadn't told Sybil, that's for sure. But he had told his little sister. Don't you think that's strange? "
"No. I'd tell you anything before I'd tell my dad or your mother."
I felt warmer immediately. "But those were our circumstances. These two were brought up normal."
"Normal? Helen was an alcoholic, and she divorced her husband because he drank and beat her. Sybil Teague is one of the coldest women I ever met, and if she didn't marry that poor guy to get his money... well, it seems to me that what she loves is one, her son Dell, two, herself, and running a long third, Mary Nell."
"Okay," I said. "Okay." Sometimes Tolliver astonished me, and this was one of those times.
We drove around town, taking in the limited sights and sounds of Sarne. With the weekend over, the town had returned to its own preoccupation with battening down for the winter. The banners were being taken down from the ornamental streetlights. No one was wearing a cute costume. Aunt Sally's had a "Closed for the Winter" sign in the window. The horses and carriages were gone from the square.
Our cell phone rang as we made our way once again to the little house on Freedom Street. I answered it since Tolliver was driving.
"Hello," I said, and a remote voice asked, "Harper?"
"Yes?"
"It's Iona. Tolliver's aunt."
"Iona," I whispered to Tolliver. I put my mouth back to the receiver. "Yes,
