Grave Surprise (11 page)

The still air was cold, a cold that bit through my gloves and made me shiver. I had on a knit cap and scarf, but my nose felt especially chilled. Tolliver, some steps ahead of me and to my left, made the beam of his flashlight dance as he rubbed his hands together.

The night had a thick, waiting quality that made the hair on the back of my neck prickle. I tried to identify the swoosh of the traffic on the road off through the trees, but there was an absolute silence. I felt a stab of alarm. Surely, at night, I
should be able to see the lights of those cars, even through the trees? I slowed down, feeling suddenly disoriented. The flashlight beams seemed dimmer. I was very close to the right spot, but somehow I couldn't pick it out. The buzzing of the bodies around me seemed extraordinarily clear and strong for such old corpses. I started to say my brother's name, but I couldn't speak. Suddenly, Tolliver gripped my lower arm with both hands, very tightly, bringing me to a complete standstill. “Look at your feet,” he said in a very strange voice. I shone the light directly downward.

In one more step I would have fallen into the open grave.

“Ohmygod. That was close. Thank you. Do you hear anything?” I whispered. One hand slid down to mine, squeezed it, and released it. There was something odd about the feel of that bony hand.

And then I realized Tolliver's flashlight was shining at me from the other side of the grave, with Tolliver holding it.

My heart pounded so fast I thought the vibrations might tear my chest apart. I sank down to my knees on the soft, freshly turned earth.

“See?” said the voice, though I couldn't have said where it had come from. With an increasing sense of dread, I directed my flashlight down into the grave.

There was another body in it.

TOLLIVER
didn't seem to be able to move from his side of the open grave, and we both shone our flashlights down at the body.

“At least I didn't fall in,” I managed to say, and my voice sounded hoarse and strange to my own ears.

“He stopped you,” Tolliver said.

“You saw him? Clearly?”

“Just his silhouette,” he said, and even Tolliver's voice was strained and breathless. “A small man. With a beard.”

This was the first time such a thing had happened to us. It was like being an accountant for five years, and then suddenly being presented with a set of alien numerals that had to be balanced in five minutes.

Tolliver stumbled around the grave to kneel beside me,
put both his arms around me, and we held each other fiercely. We were shivering, shivering intensely—not from the cold, but from the nearness of the unknown. I made a little noise that was horribly like a whimper. Tolliver said, “Don't be scared,” and I turned my head a little to tell him I wasn't any more scared than he was; which was to say, quite a lot. He kissed me, and I was glad for his warmth.

I said, “This is a thin place.”

“What's that?”

“A place where the other world is very close to this world, separated only by a thin membrane.”

“You've been reading Stephen King again.”

“It felt strange from the moment we got here tonight.”

“Did you feel anything different when we were here the first time? Yesterday?”

“The old ones always feel a little different from the new ones. Maybe I saw the dead more clearly, with more detail.” I held him tighter. Now that I'd gotten over my startled reaction to the ghost, I had plenty of other fears to cope with. We had a situation on our hands. “What will we do about the body, Tolliver? We shouldn't call the police, right? We're already under enough suspicion.”

My feelings about the law were, at best, ambiguous. I couldn't blame the Texarkana PD for not knowing what was going on in our household when I was a teenager. After all, we'd struggled so hard to conceal it. I hardly blamed them for not finding Cameron; I, of all people, knew how hard it could be to find a dead person. But now that I was grown, the thing I valued most was the ability to shape my life as I
wanted. The law could take that away from me in a New York minute.

“No one knows we came here,” Tolliver said, as if thinking out loud. “No one's come out here since we got here. I bet we could leave and not get caught. But someone's got to get this body out of the grave. We can't just leave him.”

I was beginning to feel calmer. “Who is it?” I asked, and my voice was steadier. After all, bodies were my area of expertise. I was not at all worried about being this close to a corpse. I was worried about the police suspecting I'd made him a corpse.

“I'm not sure.” Tolliver sounded a little surprised, as if he should have known who was in the hole from the brief glimpse we'd had.

“Let's look again,” I said practically. I was feeling a little more like myself.

We pulled apart then, and deployed our flashlights.

If my heart could sink any lower, it did. Since the body was on its stomach, I couldn't identify its face, but the clothes were familiar.

“Crap. It's Dr. Nunley,” I said. “He's still wearing the clothes he had on when he grabbed me at the hotel.” I pressed the button on my watch, and the dial illuminated. It looked as though I had a fairy perched on my wrist. “It's been three hours since that happened. Just three hours. The lobby staff had to talk to Dr. Nunley to get him to leave, and they'll remember it. This couldn't be worse.”

“Not for him, anyway,” my brother said, his voice dry. But he had a slight smile on his face. I could just see the edge
of his mouth in the cast-back light. I felt like punching him in the arm, but I wasn't sure I had enough muscle control to manage it. “And it's not so good for us, you're right,” Tolliver admitted.

“Have we left footprints? Has it rained since we got here yesterday?”

“No, but the dirt here around the grave has been turned over, and I'm sure we've left traces somewhere. On the other hand, so many people have come through the cemetery since you found Tabitha…and we're both wearing the same shoes we wore out here yesterday.”

“But there wasn't this loose dirt then. I don't know how we would explain coming out here tonight. Oh, I'm so sorry I got you into this.”

“Bullshit,” he said briskly. “We were doing what we do. You wanted to see if you could get some other bit of information from the grave. Well, we found out more than we wanted to know, huh? But it's not your fault.” He hesitated. “Do you want to try to talk to him, the—the ghost? And what about getting a reading from the body?”

Tolliver's suggestion was as bracing as that brisk slap detectives give hysterical women in old movies. “Yes,” I said. “Sure.” Of course, I should have thought of that. I had to calm myself first, and center myself. Not too easy, since I was already buzzing like crazy just from being so close to a fresh body.

The closest I could get to Clyde Nunley's corpse without climbing down into the grave—which might have destroyed or damaged evidence—was to hang over the edge with my
hand extended to him. I lay down on the ground and wriggled forward. Tolliver held on to my legs. The hole wasn't so deep, and I managed to touch the shirt on Dr. Nunley's back.

His death was so recent it was like a continuous droning in my head, almost drowning my reason, and I had to wait for that to subside before I got a sense of his passing. “Hit on the head,” I mumbled, caught up in the sheer astonishment he'd felt. “On the back of the head. So surprised.” The shock of it was still lingering around him. He absolutely had not expected the attack.

“Here?”

“Yes,” I said, straining to extract the pictures of the end of his life. He was so fresh, so recently translated into this lump of flesh that could neither act nor reason. I saw the darkness around him, the tombstones, everything like it was now: the cold, the rough ground, the upturned earth. “Oh, it hurts! Oh, it hurts! My head!” And the hole coming at me, couldn't throw out my hands to take the fall, grayness…blackness.

I was close to that blackness myself when Tolliver hauled me up and braced me against him.

“Here, open your mouth,” he said, and then he repeated it. “Open!”

I parted my lips, and he pushed a piece of peppermint into my mouth.

“Come on, you have to have some sugar,” he said, and his voice was sharp and commanding.

He was right. We'd found that out, by trial and error. I made myself suck on the candy, and in a few minutes I felt better. Next came a butterscotch.

“It's never been this bad,” I said, my voice weak. “I guess it's because he's so new.” I was worried I couldn't make it across the cemetery back to our car without a lot of help from Tolliver.

“He's absolutely gone, right? That…who stopped you—wasn't him? I did think I saw a beard.”

Every now and then, we'd found a soul attached to a body. That was rare, and until this night I had thought that would be the eeriest thing we could find. Now we knew there was more.

“Clyde Nunley's soul's gone,” I said, not willing to commit myself further than that. “And we should be, too.” I gathered myself to make the attempt.

“Yeah,” Tolliver said. “We got to get out of here.”

I paused, halfway to my feet. “But we'll be leaving him by himself.”

“He's been by himself for a hundred years,” Tolliver said, not pretending he didn't understand. “He'll have to be by himself for a while longer. For all we know, maybe he's got company.”

“Does this qualify as the strangest conversation we've ever had?”

“I think so.”

“I couldn't have anyone else but you here, no one else would understand,” I said. “I'm so glad you saw him, too.”

“And that's never happened before, right? You've never mentioned anything like that.”

“Never. I've known when souls were still attached to the body, and I've wondered if those would be ghosts if they
didn't detach. I've always wondered if I would see a ghost sometime. I've always been a little disappointed that I haven't, in a way. Oh my God, Tolliver. He saved me from falling right into that grave on top of the corpse. The first time I see a ghost, and he saved me.”

“Were you scared?”

“Not that he would hurt me. But I was afraid because it was spooky and I didn't know what to do for him. I don't know why he can't or won't go on, I don't know how he experiences time, I don't know his purpose. And now all his people are gone, I guess. No one could visit him or…” I shut up, afraid of sounding maudlin.

They all want to be found, you know. That's all they want. Not vengeance, or forgiveness. They want to be found. At least, that's what I'd always thought.

But Josiah Poundstone—I was sure he was the ghost—had been firmly located since the moment of his death. Someone had erected the “Beloved Brother” headstone. And someone had murdered him, if that was part of his awareness. When I'd stood on his grave in the daylight, I'd felt only the faintest flutter from him, so overwhelmed had I been with the thrumming from the most recent corpse. I'd assumed Josiah Poundstone was gone for good.

Apparently, I'd been wrong.

WE
made our way back to the car, taking our time. I had to hold on to Tolliver here and there, and I don't think he was sorry to hold onto me. We dusted dirt off my jacket, and stomped our feet to remove bits of soil.

“If there were an emergency room for psychological shocks, we could go there,” he said, unlocking the car.

“I've never left a body unreported,” I said, remembering how proud I'd been of that fact only a day before. “Never.” I shuddered. “I wish I could put my brain in a warm bath of something scented,” I said. “And give my nervous system some aromatherapy.”

“That mental picture is just disgusting,” Tolliver said.

He was right, but that didn't stop me from wanting some way to soothe my emotional self. I took a deep breath and tried to put the frivolous thoughts on the back burner.
We still had decisions to make, and they wouldn't be easy ones.

“Did you get anything from the…did you get anything?” Tolliver asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, Dr. Nunley was really taken by surprise. I don't know why he was out there, but he never expected the person with him had any evil intent.”

“Do ordinary people expect to be attacked, ever?” Tolliver asked reasonably.

I gave him a disgusted look. “No, they don't, smart aleck, and that's not what I meant. What I mean is—he wasn't with a stranger. He was with someone he knew, and he had no idea that the other guy wished him ill.”

“You just using ‘guy' for the ease of it?”

“Right.”

“We can't tell the police.”

“Sure we can, but they won't believe us. I don't know what else we can do. And I absolutely don't think we should tell them we were at the grave site again.”

We argued back and forth all the way to the hotel—and with time out for discretion in front of the staff, resumed our argument when we were alone in the elevator.

When we stepped out, we were struck speechless to see Agent Seth Koenig waiting outside our room.

If the management had cast glances at us on our way through the lobby, we'd been too engrossed in our own problems to pick up on it.
Certainly not a psychic,
I thought ruefully.
If I ever claim to be one, strike me dead.
We were completely taken by surprise.

As one, we stopped in our tracks and stared at him.

We weren't alone in the staring department. He was laying one on us.

“What have you two been up to?” he asked.

“I don't believe we need to talk to you,” Tolliver said. “My sister tells me you're an FBI agent, and we don't know anything of interest to you.”

“Where have you been?” Koenig asked, as though we would be compelled to tell him.

“We went to the movies,” I said.

“Just now,” he said. “Where were you just now?”

Tolliver took my hand and led me past the agent, who was surely persistent.

I repeated what Tolliver had said. “We don't have to talk to you.”

“If it was anything to do with Tabitha Morgenstern, I need to know it.” His voice was rough and hard.

“Fuck off,” I said. Tolliver gave me a startled look. That's not my usual style. But I wanted to get away from this guy. Tolliver got the door unlocked and whisked me inside at top speed. We slammed the door behind us.

“He's obsessed with his failure,” I said, as I began to shed all my outerwear. I noticed my shoes were stained with dirt from the cemetery, despite my efforts. I reminded myself that I had to clean them later. At the moment, I couldn't summon the energy. I felt awful: exhausted, weak, upset. “I have to shower and go to bed. I'm sorry I'm not more help.”

“Don't say that,” Tolliver said. He hated it when I apologized.

I often thought, and sometimes said, that Tolliver would be better off if he hadn't undertaken the role of my backbone. But when I tried to imagine myself going on the road alone, I felt a huge hole in my middle that refused to fill with anything. I tried to keep myself fit and did everything I could to ensure my health, but the fact remained that sometimes I was just overcome by the physical problems that plagued me. And the job itself drained me, though I loved it.

What Tolliver got out of accompanying me, I wasn't able to figure. But he did seem to want to do it, and he accused me of self-pity when I tried to get him to do something he might find more fulfilling.

In the meantime, we shared everything: the money was our money, and the car was our car, and the planning and execution of the itinerary was ours.

“Come on,” Tolliver said, putting an arm around me helping me to my room. “Hold up your arms.” Like a child, I held my arms up and he pulled off my sweater. “Sit on the bed.” I did, and he pulled off my shoes and socks. I stood, and he unzipped my jeans.

“I'm good,” I said. “I got it from here.”

“Sure? Need candy? Need a drink?”

“No, just a shower and bed. I'll be okay after some sleep.”

Tolliver said, “Call if you need me,” and went back out to the living room. I heard him turn on the television. I couldn't even remember what night it was, so I didn't know if one of his shows was on. We could never count on being able to keep up with episodes, and we'd discussed learning more about TiVo for the set in our apartment.

I thought I heard Tolliver's cell phone ring while I was in the tub, but I simply didn't care who was calling. I soaked in hot, scented water, then scrubbed myself bright pink. After I dried off and put on my pajamas, I was disgusted to find out I still hadn't unwound enough to sleep. I turned on my own television to have background noise while I painted my nails. I decided on a nice dark red, which looked autumnal, and I had a lovely peaceful half hour to myself. You can't be said to have any worries if your fingernails are the center of your universe, and it gave me time to decompress.

I couldn't settle down to read when that was done, though Tolliver had brought a box of paperbacks up with us. We pick them up here and there, and leave them for other people when we're done. We love secondhand bookstores, and we'll go a mile or two out of our way if we've heard of a good one in the area. I'd been reading a biography of Catherine the Great, who may have become an empress but also managed to have a messy life. Maybe all empresses did. I just couldn't get into her tonight, and I was still jangling too much inside to get in the bed. I wandered into the common living room to see what Tolliver was up to.

He was fuming; there was no other word for it.

“The TV screen is going to break if you keep glaring at it like that,” I said. “What's up?” Tolliver didn't do a lot of brooding and mulling, so I never thought twice about asking.

“Personal,” snapped Tolliver.

I was shocked for a minute, and then gave myself a piece of good advice. Treat this casually, and don't get all tearful and hurt.

“Okay,” I said calmly. “What's the score in the game?” Tolliver was watching football, which I couldn't care less about, but the question did knock him out of his funk and redirect his irritation. He was off and running on the failure of his favorite team, the Miami Dolphins, to get a first down. Since I know about as much about football as I do about quantum physics, I tried to look sympathetic while keeping my mouth shut. Sleep was out of the question until this was resolved, one way or another.

“We could use some food,” I said, and called room service. I got a hamburger for Tolliver, and a grilled chicken sandwich for me.

By the time I'd done that, Tolliver had calmed down and was wearing his usual expression of good humor. “That phone call was from Felicia Hart,” he said.

I tried to keep my face still and receptive. I tried very hard not to twitch.

“I've told you I'm sorry for being…for starting something with her,” he said. “I'm not going to say it again.”

“I didn't ask you to,” I pointed out.

“Right.” He shook his head. “Residual guilt,” he said, by way of explanation. “She wants to see me again. I said it wasn't a good time.”

“She saw you today, and she was reminded of how fine you are,” I said, careful to be smiling when I said that. “I bet she wants to start up again.”

He shook his head. “That seems really unlikely.”

“I wonder if she'll be at the lunch tomorrow,” I said, trying
to sound innocent. “I'll run interference for you if you need me to. She'll probably try to get you by yourself.”

“I don't think so,” he said, refusing to be drawn.

“She's very protective of Victor,” he said after a long pause. I wondered if he'd seen any of the action on the television screen. “Do you remember what Victor's alibi was when Tabitha was abducted?”

“Well, it was spring break, so he wouldn't have been at school,” I said. “Nope, I don't recall. Why don't we look it up?”

Tolliver set up his laptop and hooked up to the hotel's Internet service. We began to do a little research into the crime that had led to us being in this room at this moment.

I sat by Tolliver, my arm around his shoulders, as he brought up the familiar story and the images from eighteen months ago. I had forgotten some of the details, and now that I knew all of the people involved, the pictures had much more impact.

What I noticed, first of all, was how many pictures included Agent Seth Koenig. He was in the background of most of the pictures that had appeared in relation to the disappearance. In all of the pictures, whether he was in the foreground or talking to someone in the background, his face was absolutely serious. He was a man absorbed in his mission.

It was shocking to see how much the Morgensterns had aged since Tabitha's abduction. Even Victor looked more adult now—though at his age, that was maybe only to be expected. In the pictures, Diane looked more like five years
younger, and Joel looked…lighter. He was still charismatic and handsome now, but he walked more heavily, as if he were carrying a burden on his shoulders. I hated to sound all corny about it—but it was true.

We combed through the stories, refreshing our memories.

On that warm spring morning in Nashville, only Diane had been home with Tabitha. Joel had gone to work two hours before. Spring is always a busy time for accountants, and Joel went in most Saturdays until after the tax deadline. That Saturday, he'd gotten in to work so early that no one had seen him arrive. Joel told the police that several other accountants had come into the office after he'd been there an hour. Though he hadn't been under continuous surveillance from the time the other workers had begun arriving until after Tabitha's abduction, he'd been seen at fairly frequent intervals. That time frame made it seem unlikely he could have managed the crime, but it was a possibility.

As for Diane, she'd told us what she'd been doing—arguing with her daughter, talking on the phone, getting ready to go to the store. She'd been unobserved for most of that time.

So much for the parents.

Tabitha's stepbrother Victor had also gotten up early that morning. Victor had driven to his tennis club for an 8:00
A.M.
lesson, which had lasted an hour. And then, Victor said, he'd just stayed around the tennis courts to bat some balls against the wall and talk to some of his friends. The friends, apparently, had remembered seeing Victor, but they weren't sure what time that had been. After that, Victor
said, he'd stopped at a gas station to fill his car and buy a Gatorade. The gas station cashier had verified the episode. Victor had arrived home about 11:00
A.M.
to find his house exploding with the beginnings of panic. Again, there was no way to pin down times more accurately. If Victor had planned ahead, he could have abducted his half sister.

According to one of his friends, Victor hadn't been especially fond of Tabitha. But this “friend” couldn't think of anything specific Victor had ever said about Tabitha, just that Victor thought she was a spoiled brat.

That seemed like a perfectly ordinary thing for a big brother to say about his sister, whether she was his full sister or his half sister. On the other hand, Victor was at a volatile age.

Were there other suspects? Sure. The articles we read brought up the fact that Joel was a CPA for Huff Taichert Killough, a firm that handled accounts for lots of music industry people. This fact opened the door to vague allusions to shady record company accounting, as if Joel was possibly mixed up in some dubious financial dealings that might have earned him some enemies. But no facts were ever produced to back up that intriguing possibility. And, in fact, Joel continued to work for the same firm. Now he worked for the Memphis branch instead of the Nashville branch, but of course the newspapers didn't specify whether the change of locale had included a change of job description, or not. If some money-laundering scheme had become an investigative reality, I was sure the reporters would have caught wind of it, since they were all over the abduction like white on rice.

I studied the pictures that had been included with the
articles: Victor, looking sullen and lost; Diane, looking wasted; Joel, his face bleached of feeling. There was Felicia, looking angry and fierce, her arm around Victor, and by her side was Seth Koenig, the FBI agent who'd been waiting in the hall for us this evening. Hmmm. He was saying something to her in the picture, caught forever in mid-sentence, his face serious behind a pair of dark glasses. The caption read, “Felicia Hart, aunt of the missing girl, comforts her nephew, Victor Morgenstern, as she discusses the case with an FBI agent. The FBI offered their lab facilities or any other assistance the local police might deem necessary.”