out from the impact point.
The big noise startled her, and she wheeled around and fired without hesitation.
I saw Tolliver begin to launch himself at her back as the glass shattered in front of my face. I felt the bullet go by my ear. I heard it.
I saw the glass shiver, and I thought it would all rain out on me and I would be sliced open.
Fragments of glass struck me in the cheek, and I felt blood begin to trickle down onto my neck as I leaped backward on the flagstone patio. Before I covered my eyes, I saw Tolliver wrench the gun from Felicia's outstretched hand and bring the butt of it down on her head.
Only once.
Then I was under the patio table, and there were pieces of glass around me and covering the top of the table, and I was shaking all over.
Tolliver unlocked the door from the inside and then he was asking me if I was all right. He was pulling me into the house to drag me into the kitchen where he grabbed up a washcloth and began to dab at my face. There were bits of glass in the cuts on my face, and that hurt quite a bit, as I tried to make clear to him. Then we heard the police sirens, and then he was holding me. And it was all over.
T HE EMT was doing painful things to my cheek. She was getting the slivers of glass out, and it was hurting, but not as much as getting shot would have hurt. She had pointed that out several times, and I had agreed each time, though with less enthusiasm on every repetition.
The Germantown police had kindly let Detectives Lacey and Young come to the scene of the crime, and they were all listening to Tolliver's story. He'd covered the part about Fred Hart visiting us that morning, and Fred's inebriation.
Then he talked about Felicia's phone call.
'She said she wanted to talk to me here, that she wanted to know all the details about her dad's visit, and so on. I thought she wanted to see me again, because we'd had a… we'd hooked up a couple of times. She'd been calling me pretty steadily since. I think she was trying to keep tabs on Harper and me, to know where we were in case she needed us again. Which she did.'
'What did she need you for?' Brittany Young asked. She'd been pulled away from some home activity. Her hair needed a brushing, and she was wearing a sweatsuit and Reeboks.
'She needed us to find Tabitha.' Tolliver took my hand, and I tried to smile.
'You're saying she confessed to taking her,' Detective Lacey said.
'Yes, she did. She knew Tabitha would get in the car with her. She borrowed her father's Lexus, so no one would see her own car. She thought that someone might see the Lexus and report it, and that Joel might be suspected; but she knew he would have an airtight alibi because she called him at work that morning and made sure he was staying put. She thought if Diane suspected Joel, she'd divorce him; or maybe Joel would suspect Diane, and he would divorce her. Felicia thought maybe the stress of the whole thing would rip the marriage apart, even if mutual suspicion didn't. Plus, she didn't like Tabitha. She thought the girl was getting preferential treatment over her own nephew, Victor. And she couldn't just kill Diane, to make way for herself. That hadn't worked when her own sister died.'
'You're saying she had something to do with Whitney's death?'
'I don't see how she could have caused Whitney's cancer. But that kind of opened the door for her, she thought. She made her best play for Joel after her sister died. She came over from Memphis to Nashville a lot, she was as good to Victor as a mother could be, she offered to move in for a while to help Joel out.'
'And he wouldn't bite,' Young said.
'He wouldn't bite,' my brother agreed. 'So Felicia worked on this plan, worked on it for a long time. She took Tabitha back to this house, smothered her there on the couch.'
And then I recognized the cushions. The blue cushions. No wonder they had struck me so much when I'd seen them that afternoon. I hadn't been listening to my inner chimes, and they'd been ringing away.
'And then Felicia buried Tabitha in this garden, wrapped in a black plastic bag. Her dad was putting in a new flower bed, and Felicia put the body in there, deep.'
'Why'd she decide to bring her up?'
'One strategy hadn't worked. And Diane got pregnant, which was a stake in Felicia's heart. It was time to shake things up again. She had her ace in the hole; my sister. Probably, what sparked the whole plan was the discovery of the death records the parish priest had left. She knew Clyde Nunley, and knew he'd do almost anything for her if she worked him right. So she got him to invite Harper to the college, and she waited till her dad was out of town, and she dug up her niece. This was maybe three months ago, she wasn't clear on that.
'And her father caught her in the middle of it. He didn't know what to do. This was his only remaining daughter. So he did what she asked. He helped her take the plastic bag to St. Margaret's. They reburied Tabitha.'
I shuddered, and Tolliver's hand tightened on mine. The EMT finished working on my face and put a butterfly bandage on the worst cut. The rest, she dabbed with antiseptic. She wrote down a few instructions and shook her head. 'You're lucky,' she said for maybe the twelfth time, and I nodded. 'You're gonna come out of this much better than the woman who shot at you.'
Felicia was in the emergency room getting her head checked.
Her father was on his way to the morgue. Felicia had killed him every way a daughter could kill her father. All these months, he'd known what his daughter had done. I was surprised he'd lasted this long. Three months' worth of days in this big house, thinking about what Felicia was capable of. It made me shiver just to imagine it.
'So what else did she tell you?' Lacey asked. He was wearing jeans and a cowboy shirt, oddly enough, one with pearl snaps instead of buttons. He had on cowboy boots, too, though I didn't know how he'd seen over his belly to put them on.
'She said that she planned on blaming her father's death on me. She'd kept hold of the shovel they'd used to dig the grave in the St. Margaret's cemetery. Today she planted it in the back yard to be found, because it still had dirt on it from the cemetery. When we told her that her dad was here and passed out, she hared out here and hit
