Grave Sight Page 0,14

as if I were the woman, and I was saying it, too. And then her/my head was under water, and we were looking up at the stippled ceiling, and we couldn't breathe, and we drowned.

"Someone had ahold of her ankles," I said, and I was all by myself in my skin, and I was alive. "Someone pulled her under."

After a long moment, I opened my eyes, looked down at the headstone in front of me. Sally Boxleitner, it read. Beloved Wife of Hollis.

"C ORONER always said he couldn't figure it out. I sent her for an autopsy," the deputy said. "The results were inconclusive. She might have fainted and slipped under the water, fallen asleep in the tub or something. I couldn't understand why she couldn't save herself. But there wasn't any evidence either way."

I just watched him. Grieving people can be unpredictable.

"Vagal shock," I murmured. "Or maybe it's called vagal inhibition. People can't even struggle, if it's sudden."

"You've seen this before?" There were tears in his eyes, angry tears.

"I've seen everything."

"Someone murdered her."

"Yes."

"You can't see who."

"No. I don't see who. I see how, when I find the body. I know it's not you. If you were the murderer, and you were right by your victim, I might be able to tell." Which I hadn't intended to say: this was exactly why I really needed Tolliver to speak for me. I began to miss him, which was ridiculous. "Can you take me back to the motel, please?"

He nodded, still lost in his own thoughts. We began to make our way between the headstones. The sun was still shining and the leaves were still fluttering across the browning lawn, but the spark had gone out of the day. I was trembling with a fine small movement as my bare feet moved through the short cool grass. On the way back to Hollis's electric-blue truck, I paused to read the name on the largest monument in the cemetery. There were at least eight graves in the plot marked Teague.

Good. I carefully stepped onto the one marked Dell. He was there, buried not too deeply in the rocky soil of the Ozarks. I spared a second to think that I was lucky that connecting with the embalmed dead was never as dramatic as connecting with a corpse; Hollis would never have thought to provide me with the support Tolliver did. I reached down again with that extra sense of mine, trying not to assume what I'd find when my lightning-sparked gift touched the body of Dell Teague.

Suicide, my ass, was my instant, and silent, reaction. Why hadn't Sybil hired me to come out here to read his grave first, instead of sending me to the woods to find Teenie? Of course this boy hadn't shot himself. Dell Teague had been murdered, just like his wild girlfriend. I opened my eyes. Hollis Boxleitner had swung around to check on what I was doing. I looked into the intent face of the deputy. "No suicide here," I said.

In the long pause that followed, I looked off to the west and saw a bank of dark clouds approaching in a hurry. The break in the weather was over. Hollis looked, too. I saw a shaft of brightness split through the distant clouds.

"Come on," Hollis said. "You just carry hard luck around with you." He shook his head.

We climbed into the truck. On the way back into Sarne, neither of us broke the silence. While he was looking at the road, I slipped his money out of my pocket and put it on the seat between us. At the motel, I scrambled out of the truck real quick, slamming the truck door behind me and unlocking my room almost in one motion. Hollis drove away without a word. I guess he had a lot to think about.

I put my ear to the wall and heard a buzz. Tolliver was home. He must have had the television on. But I waited a minute, since I'd made similar assumptions before and paid for them with my own embarrassment. It was a good thing I hesitated, because after a second I realized that Tolliver had company. I was willing to bet it was Janine, the waitress from the diner. Evidence suggested that Tolliver was much more appealing to women than I was to men. Sometimes that pissed me off. I didn't think the difference was in our looks, exactly; I thought it lay in our baggage. I sighed, feeling like