Grave Sight Page 0,74

gave him twenty bleachers, and then Scot's dad grounded him from television or the telephone for a month."

"So what could have happened in the meantime, to make him hide in my room like he did?" Running up the bleachers and back twenty times, and no TV or telephone. Glad to know terrorizing me came with a stiff penalty.

"Did you ever think it might have been your lover-boy, Hollis, who asked him?" Mary Nell had decided to counterattack.

"No, I never did. Why do you suggest that?" Mary Nell was trying to make me angry, and she was pretty close to succeeding, but I made myself hold on to my temper with a ferocious effort.

"Well, just maybe Hollis wanted the chance to save you from something bad, so he could look like a big hero? And maybe he shot at you, too, which I have only your word for - that it ever happened, I mean."

"Why would he shoot at me?"

"To make you need him," she said. "To make you hold on to him. Now that your brother's out of the way, you need an ally, right? So maybe Hollis even got Tolliver arrested."

I was impressed with Mary Nell. This was deep and indirect thinking from a seventeen-year-old. What she said made sense, sort of. I didn't want to believe her theory about Hollis, and I don't think I really did believe it, but I had to consider her idea for a second or two. It made as much sense as any of my theories, and maybe more than some of them. I remembered having sex with Hollis the night before, and I had a bleak, black moment of wondering if he might have betrayed me from the start. Then I realized, more rationally, that Mary Nell was striking back at me for many reasons, most of all for having a closer relationship with my brother than she would ever have.

Silly girl. But looking at her, as she mopped at her face and then brushed her hair, I realized that she was only seven years younger than I. Mary Nell's life had been no picnic, of course, but probably it had been better than mine. By the time I was Mary Nell's age, even aside from the lightning strike, my life had changed forever. I had watched adults I knew and loved, as they threw their futures away. Then I had lost my sister Cameron; literally, lost her.

"Don't look at me like that," Mary Nell said, her voice quavering. "Do you even know where you are? God, stop it!"

I blinked. I hadn't realized I'd been staring.

"Sorry," I said automatically. "Your mother says you had a tonsillectomy this past year?"

"You are so weird. So fucking weird," she said, daring to say the bad word in front of me, daring me to admonish her.

I didn't give her any reaction. "Answer me," I said, after a pause.

"Yes, I did," she said, sullenly.

"You were in the hospital here?"

"In the next town, Mount Parnassus. Our little hospital closed two years ago."

"Dell was in the same hospital when he had to have stitches?" I was dredging up Sybil's conversation from when we'd seen her house. It was hard going. I wasn't sure what I was probing for; maybe I'd know it when I heard it. "He had a broken leg, or was that someone else?"

"That was the boy who was driving the car. Dell had stitches in his head. At first the emergency doctor thought he might have other problems, and he was unconscious for a little while, but they just kept him overnight."

"And your dad was in the hospital, too." I was trying to make something out of nothing.

"Yes, he had pneumonia." Mary Nell's face grew sad. "He had a bad heart, and the pneumonia just weakened him. I told him he'd get better, but the day before he died, he said, "Nelly, I'm just not the man I was before I caught that bug."

"He called you Nelly?"

"Yeah, or Nell. He liked me and my brother being Nell and Dell." The teenager's little face collapsed as I watched her. "I don't have a brother or a father. Probably nobody'll call me that again in my whole life."

"Sure someone will," I said, trying to figure out what had rung a bell in my head. "You're a pretty girl, Mary Nell, and you have a lot of spirit. Someone will come along who'll call you anything you want him to."

She brightened, happy to hear this even from someone she