be a true test, since you really had no idea who was buried there and there was no way you could find out. He wanted to know if you'd be comfortable with that. Of course, he thought I'd make some excuse for you, trying to back out. Nunley was really surprised when I emailed him back, told him to expect us. He'd just had Xylda Bernardo, the psychic. She lives in this area, remember?'
I'd met Xylda once or twice, in the line of duty. 'How'd she do?' I asked, out of sheer professional curiosity. Xylda, a colorful woman in her fifties, likes to dress in the traditional stage-gypsy style—lots of jewelry and scarves, long messy hair—which immediately makes people distrust her. But Xylda has a true gift. Unfortunately, like most commercial psychics, she embellishes that nugget of talent with a lot of theatrics and made-up flourishes, which she thinks lend her visions credibility.
Psychics—honest psychics—do receive a lot of information when they touch something a crime victim owned. The bad part is, quite often they receive information so vague it's almost useless ('The body's buried in the middle of an empty field'), unless you have a good idea what you're looking for to begin with. Even if there are a few psychics who can see a clear picture of, say, the house where a child's being held hostage, unless the psychic can also see the address, and the police find an identifiable suspect lives in that house, the building's appearance is almost irrelevant. There are even some psychics who can achieve all that, but then they have to get the police to believe them… since I've never met a single psychic who was also up on SWAT tactics.
'Oh, according to Nunley, Xylda did her usual,' Tolliver said. 'Vague stuff that sounded really good, like 'Your grandmother says to look for something unexpected in the attic, something that will make you very happy,' or 'Be careful of the dark man who comes unexpectedly, for he is not trustworthy,' and that's flexible enough to cover a lot of circumstances. The members of the class were pretty weirded out, since Xylda insists on touching the people she's reading. The students didn't want Xylda holding their hands. But that's the way it's done; for Xylda, touch is everything. You think she's for real?'
'I think most of what Xylda tells clients is bullshit. But I also think she actually has a few moments when she knows stuff.'
Every now and then, I wonder: if the lightning had hit me a little harder, if I'd gotten a few more volts—would I have become able to see who caused the deaths of the people I find? Sometimes I think such a condition would be wonderful, a truly valuable gift. Sometimes it seems like my worst nightmare.
What if the lightning had entered through my foot, or my head, instead of jumping from the sink to the electric hair curler I held in my hands… what would have happened then? I probably wouldn't be around to know. My heart would have stopped for good, instead of for a few seconds. The CPR wouldn't have worked.
By now, Tolliver might be married to some nice girl who liked to be pregnant, the kind of girl who enjoyed going to home decoration parties.
Carrying this stream of supposition to an extreme length—if I'd died that day, maybe, somehow, Cameron would not have been on the road on that day at that hour, and she would not have been taken.
It's stupid and profitless, thinking like that, of course. So I don't indulge in it very often. Right at this moment, I needed to force myself to throw off this train of thought. Instead of daydreaming, I needed to concentrate on helping Tolliver compose the press release. What he'd said to Shellie Quail had been the gist of our public policy. We began embroidering on that. It was hard to imagine that anyone would believe us; after all, what were the odds that the same people who had failed to find the body in Nashville would find it in Memphis? But we had to try.
We'd just finished printing out our statement when I had to answer the phone. The manager said, 'Ms. Connelly, there are some people down here who want to come up to talk to you and Mr. Lang. Are you receiving guests?'
'Who are they, please?'
'The Morgensterns. And another lady.'
Diane and Joel. My heart sank, but this had to be done. 'Yes, send them up, please.'
Tolliver stepped into the living room to update Art while I printed out the statement. Art read it and made a few minor changes while we waited. In two or three minutes a hand rapped on our door.
I took a deep breath and opened it, and received yet another shock in a day that had already been full of them. Detective Lacey had told us Diane was expecting another baby, but I hadn't gotten a visual with that fact. Seeing her now, there was no mistaking it. Diane Morgenstern was really, really pregnant—seven months along, at the least.
She was still beautiful. Her bitter-chocolate hair was smooth and short, and her big dark eyes owed nothing to makeup. Diane had a small mouth and a small nose. She looked like a really pretty lemur of some kind. Just at the moment, though, her expression was simply blank with shock.
Her husband, Joel, was maybe five foot ten and stocky, powerful looking. He'd been a wrestler in college. I remembered the trophies in his study in their Nashville house. He had light red hair and bright blue eyes, a ruddy complexion, and a square face with a nose like a knife blade. How did all this add to up to a man women could not ignore? I don't have the faintest idea. Joel Morgenstern was the kind of man who focused on the person to whom he was speaking, which might have been the secret of the magnetism he exuded. To Joel's credit, he didn't seem to be aware of this; or maybe he took it so for granted that he didn't even think of the effect he had on women.
In Nashville, even under the circumstances I'd noticed how the female representatives of the media clustered around him. Maybe they'd been thinking the father is always a likely suspect, maybe they'd been trying to pick holes in his story, but they'd hovered around him like hummingbirds at a big red blossom. Not too surprisingly, the police had checked over and over to see if Joel was having an affair. They hadn't found a trace of such a thing; in fact, everyone who knew Joel commented on how devoted he was to Diane. For that matter, it was universal knowledge how caring he'd been during his first wife's terminal illness.
Maybe because lightning had fried my brain, maybe because my standards of judgment were completely different, Joel just didn't affect me like he did most women.
Felicia Hart, whose sister had been Joel's first wife, trailed in after Diane and Joel. I remembered Felicia from my first encounter with the family. She had been trying hard to be a good aunt to Victor, the son that first marriage had produced. She'd been aware that Victor was a suspect in Tabitha's disappearance, and she'd been at the house constantly, perhaps imagining that the loss of their daughter had meant that Diane and Joel would not be able to focus on Victor's needs and on his legal position.
'You found her,' Joel said, taking my hand and pumping it ferociously. 'God bless you, you found her. The medical examiner says there's a long way to go before an official identification, but the dental charts do match. We have to keep this to ourselves, but Dr. Frierson was kind enough to let us know in person. Thank God, we can have some peace.'
