leave him.'
I was beginning to feel calmer. 'Who is it?' I asked, and my voice was steadier. After all, bodies were my area of expertise. I was not at all worried about being this close to a corpse. I was worried about the police suspecting I'd made him a corpse.
'I'm not sure.' Tolliver sounded a little surprised, as if he should have known who was in the hole from the brief glimpse we'd had.
'Let's look again,' I said practically. I was feeling a little more like myself.
We pulled apart then, and deployed our flashlights.
If my heart could sink any lower, it did. Since the body was on its stomach, I couldn't identify its face, but the clothes were familiar.
'Crap. It's Dr. Nunley,' I said. 'He's still wearing the clothes he had on when he grabbed me at the hotel.' I pressed the button on my watch, and the dial illuminated. It looked as though I had a fairy perched on my wrist. 'It's been three hours since that happened. Just three hours. The lobby staff had to talk to Dr. Nunley to get him to leave, and they'll remember it. This couldn't be worse.'
'Not for him, anyway,' my brother said, his voice dry. But he had a slight smile on his face. I could just see the edge of his mouth in the cast-back light. I felt like punching him in the arm, but I wasn't sure I had enough muscle control to manage it. 'And it's not so good for us, you're right,' Tolliver admitted.
'Have we left footprints? Has it rained since we got here yesterday?'
'No, but the dirt here around the grave has been turned over, and I'm sure we've left traces somewhere. On the other hand, so many people have come through the cemetery since you found Tabitha… and we're both wearing the same shoes we wore out here yesterday.'
'But there wasn't this loose dirt then. I don't know how we would explain coming out here tonight. Oh, I'm so sorry I got you into this.'
'Bullshit,' he said briskly. 'We were doing what we do. You wanted to see if you could get some other bit of information from the grave. Well, we found out more than we wanted to know, huh? But it's not your fault.' He hesitated. 'Do you want to try to talk to him, the—the ghost? And what about getting a reading from the body?'
Tolliver's suggestion was as bracing as that brisk slap detectives give hysterical women in old movies. 'Yes,' I said. 'Sure.' Of course, I should have thought of that. I had to calm myself first, and center myself. Not too easy, since I was already buzzing like crazy just from being so close to a fresh body.
The closest I could get to Clyde Nunley's corpse without climbing down into the grave—which might have destroyed or damaged evidence—was to hang over the edge with my hand extended to him. I lay down on the ground and wriggled forward. Tolliver held on to my legs. The hole wasn't so deep, and I managed to touch the shirt on Dr. Nunley's back.
His death was so recent it was like a continuous droning in my head, almost drowning my reason, and I had to wait for that to subside before I got a sense of his passing. 'Hit on the head,' I mumbled, caught up in the sheer astonishment he'd felt. 'On the back of the head. So surprised.' The shock of it was still lingering around him. He absolutely had not expected the attack.
'Here?'
'Yes,' I said, straining to extract the pictures of the end of his life. He was so fresh, so recently translated into this lump of flesh that could neither act nor reason. I saw the darkness around him, the tombstones, everything like it was now: the cold, the rough ground, the upturned earth. 'Oh, it hurts! Oh, it hurts! My head!' And the hole coming at me, couldn't throw out my hands to take the fall, grayness… blackness.
I was close to that blackness myself when Tolliver hauled me up and braced me against him.
'Here, open your mouth,' he said, and then he repeated it. 'Open!'
I parted my lips, and he pushed a piece of peppermint into my mouth.
'Come on, you have to have some sugar,' he said, and his voice was sharp and commanding.
He was right. We'd found that out, by trial and error. I made myself suck on the candy, and in a few minutes I felt better. Next came a butterscotch.
'It's never been this bad,' I said, my voice weak. 'I guess it's because he's so new.' I was worried I couldn't make it across the cemetery back to our car without a lot of help from Tolliver.
'He's absolutely gone, right? That… who stopped you—wasn't him? I did think I saw a beard.'
Every now and then, we'd found a soul attached to a body. That was rare, and until this night I had thought that would be the eeriest thing we could find. Now we knew there was more.
'Clyde Nunley's soul's gone,' I said, not willing to commit myself further than that. 'And we should be, too.' I gathered myself to make the attempt.
'Yeah,' Tolliver said. 'We got to get out of here.'
I paused, halfway to my feet. 'But we'll be leaving him by himself.'
'He's been by himself for a hundred years,' Tolliver said, not pretending he didn't understand. 'He'll have to be by himself for a while longer. For all we know, maybe he's got company.'
'Does this qualify as the strangest conversation we've ever had?'
'I think so.'
'I couldn't have anyone else but you here, no one else would understand,' I said. 'I'm so glad you saw him, too.'
'And that's never happened before, right? You've never mentioned anything like that.'
'Never. I've known when souls were still attached to the body, and I've wondered if those would be ghosts if
