Grave Sight Page 0,34

wood in front of me before he put my mug on it. I suppressed a smile.

So much for the preliminaries.

"What do you like to do?" he asked. "While you're traveling around the country?"

Not the opening I'd expected. "I like to read," I said. "Sometimes, we try to catch a movie. I run. I watch television. I like to watch the WNBA games, since I played a little basketball in high school. I plan my dream house."

"Tell me about your dream house," Hollis said, smiling.

"Okay," I said, slowly. This was something I didn't talk about too often. "It will have to be off the beaten road, of course. I want it to look like a log cabin, but without the inconveniences of a real log cabin. I found a plan on the Internet, and I bought it. But of course, I want to alter it a little."

"Of course," he said, taking a sip of beer.

"It would be two bedrooms and a study, with a family room. There'd be a kitchen here, with the washroom right off of it." I was looking down at the table, drawing with my finger. "Around back, there'd be a porte cochere for the cars, so you could carry groceries right into the kitchen without getting wet. There's a deck off the right side of the kitchen, see? Or maybe I'd put it off the family room. That's where the fireplace will be, and you could keep your firewood on the deck. And you could put your gas grill on the deck. For steaks."

"Who lives in that house with you?"

I looked up at him, startled. "Well, of course - " I began. Then I shut my mouth.

"Surely your brother will get married somewhere along the line?" Hollis asked gently, his eyes steady and his face calm. "You might want to marry, yourself. Cut down on your traveling, some."

"Yes, that might happen," I said after a moment. "What about you?"

"I'll stay here," he said, almost sadly. "Maybe I'll feel like trying something permanent again, who knows? I haven't been the man I was since Sally died. And before I met Sally, I was married for about ten minutes when I was just a kid. It might be hard to get some sweet thing to spend time with me."

"I don't think that'll be the issue," I said. Some women might be put off by Hollis, but it was hardly his fault that his second wife had been murdered. "Was being married... was it good? Living with someone full-time?"

He gave it some thought, staring down at his beer. Then he looked at me.

"The first time, it was heaven for two months. Then it was hell," he said, his mouth turning up wryly. "What a mistake that was. The only thing I can say, she was as eager to make that mistake as I was. We wanted each other so bad I couldn't sleep nights. At the time we married, we looked on it as a license to screw. And boy, did we. We didn't realize there'd be a lot more to it. We found out, right quick. When we split up, it would be a toss-up as to which of us was the more relieved."

After raising an inquiring eyebrow at me, he fetched us two more beers. "Sally, she was different," he said. "She was as sweet as her mom and her sister were wild. She wanted to get away from them, but she felt responsible for raising her sister, since her mom was such a lush. Then Helen kind of took a deep breath and got sober." He shook his head from side to side. "Now they're all gone, it don't make a difference, does it? Helen might as well have kept on drinking."

"Did the autopsy results come back on Teenie?" I asked.

His face became more guarded, cautious. "I can't talk to you about that." He looked at me for a long minute. "Why?"

It wasn't up to me to reveal the dead couple's secret. And I suddenly wondered why I even cared. I found bodies, and then I walked away. People died, died all the time, some in bed, some in the woods, some with a gun in their mouths. The end result was always the same. Why was this time different from any other?

"What is the worst case you've ever had?" Hollis asked me out of the blue.

I wondered if some expression crossing my face had triggered the question. "Oh, the tornado one," I said without even having