Grave Sight Page 0,55

if she'd forgotten it was there. "He was a good man," she said softly. "He was just nuts about the kids, of course. He'd had pneumonia, one of those strains that's resistant to antibiotics, so he'd been in the hospital in Little Rock. He'd had a little heart trouble, but the doctors kept telling us it wasn't much, not to worry. They were going to do more about it when he got over the pneumonia, you see. But one afternoon, while he was recuperating, he was in his study with all the medical records from the past year. He wasn't satisfied with our insurance, or he thought that they should have paid more on his doctor bill, or something. I don't even remember now. But it had been a big year medically, you have those sometimes, I guess. Mary Nell had had a tonsillectomy, and Dell was the passenger in a car that had a little accident. The driver had a broken leg, and Dell had a little knock on the head and some stitches. Bloody, but really after it was cleaned up, he wasn't hurt too badly. And I'd had high cholesterol. So Dick had this pile of papers he was going through, and sometime in the afternoon he just... passed. When I went in to get him for supper, he had his head on the desk."

"I'm so sorry," I said. Sybil had had a lot to bear in her life, and I had to respect that, no matter how cold I found her.

"I'm curious, Sybil," my brother said, sounding as if going from one subject to another was simply logical. Sybil blinked and refocused on Tolliver. "Why didn't you ask Harper to come to Sarne earlier?"

"I'm sorry?" Sybil's attractive face was blank.

"Why didn't you ask Harper right after Teenie went missing?"

"I... well, I... of course, at first I was shocked by my son's death, and I just couldn't think about Teenie. Frankly, I just... didn't care, in the face of my own loss." Sybil gave us a noble face, telling us she was ashamed of that, but so what?

"Of course," I said. "Of course." This was just noise, to get her to continue.

"But when I heard all the rumors that were going around town, about how there was only justice for the rich, and why wasn't anyone looking for Teenie, and people seemed so sure that Dell had done something terrible to her... I was talking to Terry at Sunday lunch at the country club, and he told me what he'd heard about you. Paul was dead set against it, but I just couldn't leave a stone unturned. There had to be something I could do besides get out there and search the woods myself. You know, they should have brought in tracking dogs right away. But no one knew Teenie was out there with Dell. When he got found, it was assumed he was a suicide. By the time Helen realized Teenie was missing, too, it was late at night. It rained real heavy. When they resumed the search the next day, the scent was gone, I guess. I don't remember any of that, at all. I was far from worrying about Teenie."

"No cadaver dogs?" I asked.

"They're different from trackers, right? No, I guess not. After Helen thought about it, she said she was sure Teenie would turn up somewhere alive, and bringing in the cadaver dogs would be like saying she was dead. I thought for sure she'd back down on that one, but she said everyone was telling her it was not the right thing to do." Sybil shook her head. "Terry thought it would give the town a bad name, too, but the hell with that. If a young one's missing, you got to look for 'em. Maybe if Jay had been around... Oh, he wants you to come by the house, by the way. He called here this morning to find out more about you. Anyway, Jay and Helen's relationship wasn't all bad. Helen was more of a woman after she lay off the alcohol, you understand, but she had more backbone altogether when she was with Jay. She'd just listen to this one and that one and end up all confused after she separated from Jay."

That was totally not the impression I'd gotten of Helen Hopkins. It sounded as though Sybil and Helen hadn't communicated face to face at all.

As if she'd heard my inner comment, Sybil said, "She never wanted to