Grave Sight Page 0,87

said. "Mary Nell, I'm your dad, too. Don't give me up."

Poor Nell couldn't have looked more horrified if he'd said he'd made an offer for her hand.

"No," Sybil hissed. "Don't listen, Mary Nell. It's not true."

"She's right," I said, very quietly. But no one paid attention. My brother and I were definitely the audience. The innocent bystanders. You know what happens to innocent bystanders.

"Did you kill my dad, somehow?" she asked Paul. "My real dad?"

"No," I said. "Your dad died of a heart attack, Nell. He really did." I didn't see any need to throw in the circumstances.

"You... you... asshole," she said to Paul Edwards.

Her mother opened her mouth to reprimand Mary Nell, then had the good sense to close it.

"You killed my son," Sybil said instead. "You killed my son. You killed his baby. You killed his girlfriend. You killed... who else did you kill? Helen, I guess. The mother of your daughter."

"You have yourself to blame for that," he said sullenly. "It was you hiring Helen, you having her around here cleaning that gave Dell and Teenie a chance to get to know each other."

"Gave you a chance to see Helen again, too, I guess," Sybil said in a very ugly voice. "Who else did you kill, Paul?"

"Sally Boxleitner?" I suggested.

Edwards gaped at me as if I'd sprouted another head. "Why do you... ?" he began, then trailed off, apparently at a loss.

"She figured it out, didn't she?" I asked. "Did she call you?"

"She called me," he admitted. "She said she, she..."

"What did my wife tell you?" Hollis asked from the open front door.

I wondered if Tolliver and I could just creep out through the kitchen and be gone. We could go back to the motel and grab our stuff, leave this town forever. I caught Tolliver's eye and tilted my head toward the doorway into the rest of the house. He shook his head slightly. We were just spectators at the showdown at the OK Corral, but that still meant some injudicious move might get us killed in the cross fire.

Hollis didn't look like the stoical cop I'd met when I'd come to Sarne, and he didn't look like the lover I'd joined in bed. His eyes were showing a lot of white. He was wearing a long shiny waterproof slicker, and his uniform hat had a plastic bag on it. His face was wet with rain, and his slicker dripped onto the carpet. He was wearing rubber boots over his heavy cop shoes, and he had a glove on his left hand. His right hand was bare, holding his own gun in a very businesslike way.

I wondered if Mary Nell had a firearm tucked in a pocket.

"I didn't kill her," Paul said. "She called me, told me she had some questions about blood types. I agreed to meet her, though at the time I didn't know what she was talking about."

"You killed Dell," Mary Nell said. "You killed Teenie, and the baby, and Miss Helen. How can we believe you didn't kill Sally, too?"

"Sybil," I whispered.

Only Tolliver heard me. His eyes widened.

"You can't pin that one on me," Paul Edwards said, beginning to pull himself to his knees. I thought it was strange that the charge would make him indignant enough to be defiant, with all that he'd admitted. "I think you can understand why I didn't want Teenie to bring a child into the world with a bloodline like that," and he half-smiled in a parody of a reasonable expression. "But I never laid a hand on Sally. Sally was a good girl. And definitely not mine, of course."

"Good," Hollis growled.

"But you know, since I thought she'd drowned in the tub by accident, like the coroner said, I'd never stopped to think. Sybil, I told you that Sally called me, said she had something to tell me about Dick's death. At the time, I thought Sally might be priming up to tell me a tale for some kind of blackmail. But when she died, too, it didn't seem to make any difference. Sybil, did you go talk to Sally?"

Mary Nell gave a choked laugh. "Don't you try to go blame that on her, you murderer! Mama, tell him..." The girl's voice trailed off when she saw her mother's face. "Mama?" She sounded lost. Gone for good.

"She said she'd looked up blood typing, and she knew Dell wasn't really a Teague," Sybil said dully. "She wanted me to ask Harvey to resign early. Sally wanted Hollis