Grave Sight

Page 6

Tolliver grinned while I pulled on a T-shirt and a sweater. Since I'd planned today as a traveling day, I was wearing jeans. I don't care much about clothes, except my blue jeans. I'm particular about them. This was my favorite pair, and they were worn thin in spots.
"We'll stop by Edwards's office and get the check on our way out of town."
"We better cash it quick," I said, speaking from bitter experience.
The motel phone rang again. We looked at each other. I picked it up.
"Miss Connelly," said a woman. "Harper Connelly?"
"Yes?"
"This is Helen Hopkins. I'm Sally and Teenie's momma. Can you come talk to me?" Hollis's mother-in-law: Had he told her what I'd found at the cemetery?
I closed my eyes. I so didn't want to do this. But this woman was the mother of two murdered women. "Yes ma'am, I guess so."
She gave me her address and asked if I could come in a half hour. I told her it'd be an hour, but we'd be there.
I T actually took us a bit over an hour, because after we'd checked out of the motel and loaded our bags and gone into the restaurant, Janine, the waitress Tolliver had entertained the afternoon before, dragged her feet serving us. She'd glare at me, try to touch him - a performance both obvious and painful. Did she think I was forcing my brother to stay with me, dragging Tolliver all around the United States in my wake? Did she imagine that if I relaxed my grip on him, he'd stay here in Sarne and get a job at the grocery store, make her an honest woman?
Sometimes I teased him about his conquests, but this wasn't one of those times. His cheeks were flushed when we left, and he didn't say a word as we drove to Paul Edwards's downtown office. It was housed in an old home right off the town square, a home which had been painted in lime green and light blue, a whimsical combination I'm sure the original builders would have deplored. Paul Edwards was fitting into the image Sarne was trying to sell the tourists, that of a fun-house antique town with something interesting around every corner.
Tolliver said, "I'll wait in the car."
I'd assumed the lawyer would have left the check in an envelope at the reception desk, but Edwards himself came out when I told his secretary my name. He shook my hand while the parched and dyed blonde watched his every move with fascination. I could see why. Paul Edwards was a man with charm.
He ushered me back into his office.
"What can I do for you?" I asked reluctantly. I was ready to go. I sat in the leather visitor's chair, while he leaned against the edge of his huge desk.
"You're a remarkable woman," he said, shaking his head at the phenomenon of my remarkableness. I didn't know whether to laugh sardonically or blush. In the end, I raised an eyebrow, remained silent, and waited for his next move.
"In one day, you've made a tremendous difference in the lives of two of my clients."
"How would that be?"
"Helen Hopkins is grateful that her Teenie's body has been found. Now she can have closure. And Sybil Teague is so relieved that poor Dell won't be the victim of these foolish and false accusations people have been making since Teenie's disappearance."
I digested this silently, wondering what he really wanted to say to me.
"If you're going to be in Sarne for a while, I was hoping for the chance to take you out to dinner and find out more about you," Paul Edwards said. I looked at his good suit and white shirt, his gleaming shoes. His hair was groomed and well-cut, his shave had been close, and his brown eyes were glowing with sincerity.
"As a matter of fact," I said slowly, "my brother and I are leaving Sarne in an hour or so. We're just dropping by Helen Hopkins' place first, at her request. Then we're outta here."
"Oh, that's too bad," he said. "I've missed my opportunity. Maybe someday if you have business close to here, you'll give me a call?" He tucked a business card into my hand.
"Thanks," I said noncommittally, and after some more hand clasping and eye-to-eye contact, I got out the front door with the check in my hand.
I tried to tell Tolliver about the odd interview I'd just had, but I guess he was miffed at the long wait he'd had outside the lawyer's office. In fact, Tolliver was mighty quiet while he searched for the Hopkins house, which turned out to be a humble box-like building on a humble street.
Hollis Boxleitner had said some pretty bad things about his wife's mother's past, and I had formed a negative picture of Helen Hopkins. When she answered the door I was surprised to see a tidy, thin woman with wispy brown hair and popping blue eyes. She had once been pretty, in a waif-like way. Now she seemed more like a dried shell. She was wearing a flowered T-shirt and khakis, and her face was about as wide as my thin hand.
"I'm Harper Connelly," I said. "This here's my brother, Tolliver Lang."
"Helen Hopkins. God bless you for coming to meet me," she said rapidly. "Please come in and sit down." She gestured around the tiny living room. It was jammed with furniture and so cluttered that it took me a moment to realize the room was nonetheless extremely clean. There was a shelf mounted on the wall, full of a display of Avon carnival glass. A huge Bible was centered on the cheap coffee table. Flanking it were two starched crocheted doilies, and in the exact center of each one was a glass candlestick holding a white candle.
I knew a shrine when I saw one.
And the pictures; two brunette girls were duplicated over and over around the room. There was an age progression beginning on the north wall. Sally and Teenie were born, went to grade school, trick-or-treated, danced, graduated from grade school and junior high, went to proms, and in Sally's case, got married. This room was a panorama of the lives of two girls, both of them murdered. The last picture in the progression was a bleak shot of a white casket covered with a pall of carnations resting on a bier at the front of a church. This final picture, surely taken at Sally's funeral, had a bare spot next to it; this would be where the picture of Teenie's casket would hang. I swallowed hard.
"I been sober now for thirty-two months," Helen Hopkins said, gesturing to us to take the two armchairs squeezed together opposite the sofa, where she perched on the edge of a cushion.
"Congratulations, I'm glad to hear it," I said.
"If you've been in this town for more than ten minutes, someone will have told you something bad about me. I drank and fornicated for many years. But I'm sober now, by the grace of God and some damn hard work."
Tolliver nodded, to show we were registering her words.
"Both my girls are dead," Helen Hopkins continued. Her voice was absolutely steady and harsh, but the muscles in her jaw were taut with agony. "I ain't had a husband in years. No one here to help me but me, myself, and I. I want to know who brought you here, and what you are, and what you done out in the woods to find my girl. I didn't know anything about this till yesterday, when Hollis called me."
You couldn't get more straightforward than that. Tolliver and I looked at each other, asking a silent question. This woman was a lot like our mother - well, my mother, Tolliver's stepmother - except my mother had gone to law school, and she'd never gotten sober. Tolliver gave a shrug that couldn't have been seen by anyone but me, and I returned an infinitesimal nod.
"I find bodies, Mrs. Hopkins. I got hit by lightning when I was a girl, and that's what happened to me afterward. I found out I just knew when I came close to a dead person. And I knew what had killed that person - though not who, if the person was murdered." I wanted to be real clear about that. "What I know is how the person died."
"Sybil Teague hired you?"
"Yes."
"How'd she know about you?"
"I believe through Terry Vale."
"Are you always right?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"You think the Lord likes what you're doing?"
"I wonder about it all the time," I said.
"So, Sybil asked you to come here and find Monteen. She say why?"
"The sheriff told me that everyone was thinking her son had killed Teenie, and she wanted to find Teenie's body to disprove that."
"And you found Teenie."
"Yes, that's what Sheriff Branscom told me. I'm sorry for your loss."
"I knew she was dead," Helen said, eyes dry. "I been knowing since she vanished, that Teenie had passed over."
"How?" If she could be blunt, I could, too.
"She would've come home, otherwise."
According to Hollis, Teenie had been as out of control as her mother at one time. I doubted Helen Hopkins was speaking realistically. Her next words echoed my doubts so closely that I wondered if the woman was psychic.
"She'd been a wild girl," Helen Hopkins said slowly, "acting out because she could get away with it, because I was a drunk. But when I sobered up, she began to come around, too."
She gave me a wisp of a smile, and I tried to smile back. This dried-out husk of a woman had once had a jaunty charm not too many years ago. You could see the traces of it in her face and posture.
"I liked Dell Teague just fine," Helen said. Her voice was slow, as if she was thinking out what she was saying very carefully. "I didn't ever think that he'd killed my girl. I liked him, and I think Sybil's okay. But the kids wanted to get married, and I didn't want Teenie to marry early, the way Sally did. Not that Sally made a bad marriage. Hollis is a fine man, and I don't blame him for not caring for me none. He had enough reasons. But Teenie... she didn't need to be getting so tight with Dell Teague, so young. I just wanted Teenie to have some choices. It was good of Sybil to pay you to look for my girl, though... ."
"Hollis tell you we went out to the cemetery?" I was trying to make sense of this flow of thoughts.
"Yes. He come by yesterday, the first time I've talked to him in a long time. He told me that you said Sally had been killed, that it wasn't no accident." I saw Tolliver stiffen. He shot me a look. He didn't like me going off with someone, he didn't like me doing freebies, and he didn't like me not telling him everything.
"How do you do it?" she asked. "How can you tell? How can I trust you?"
These were all good questions, questions I'd been asked before.
"You don't have to believe a thing I say," I told Helen Hopkins. "I see what I see."
"You think God gave you this gift? Or the devil?"
I wasn't about to tell this woman what I really thought. "You believe what you want," I said.
"I believe that you saw both my daughters get murdered," Helen Hopkins said. Her huge brown eyes seemed to get even bigger and rounder. "I believe God sent you to find out who did this to them."
"No," I said immediately. "I am not a lie detector. I can find bodies. I can tell what killed 'em. But who, or why, that's beyond me."
"How did they die?"
"You don't want to hear this," Tolliver said.
"Shut up, mister. This is my right."
She was little, but persistent. Like a mosquito, I thought.
"Your daughter Sally was drowned in her bathtub. She was grabbed by the ankles, so that her head went under the water. Your daughter Teenie was shot in the back."
All the strength seeped out of Helen Hopkins as we watched.
"My poor girls," she said. "My poor girls."
She looked over at us, without really seeing us. "I thank you for coming," she said stiffly. "I thank you. I'm in your debt. I'll tell the girls' fathers what you've said."
Tolliver and I got up. Helen didn't speak again.
"Now we leave," Tolliver said, when we were outside. And after we stopped by the bank to cash Sybil Teague's check, we got in our car and drove south out of Sarne.
We pulled into our motel in Ashdown a few silent hours later. Tolliver sat in the chair in my room after we'd eaten supper, and I perched on the foot of the bed.
"Tell me about going out with the trooper," he said. His voice was mild, but I knew that was deceptive. I'd been waiting for that shoe to drop all day.
"He came by while you were gone flirting with that waitress," I said. "He wanted me to take a ride with him." Tolliver snorted, but I decided to ignore that. "Anyway, he talked, and he talked, and we got a milk shake, and then I realized that he just wanted to take me out to the cemetery and get me to tell him what happened to his wife."
I could hardly bear to look at Tolliver's face, but I sneaked a peek. To my relief, he wasn't full of anger. He hated it when people took advantage of me, and he hated it more when the person was a man. But he didn't want me to feel bad, either.
"Don't you think he liked what he saw, and that's why he came by the motel?"
I ducked my head. Tolliver's hand smoothed my hair.
"No," I said. "I think all along he planned on getting me there to his wife's grave. I told him I had to be paid, Tolliver. So he took me by the bank and got the money." I didn't tell Tolliver it hadn't been the full amount. "But I left it in the truck, because I felt so bad about the whole thing." Bad and mad and guilty and hurt.
"You did the right thing," he said, at last. "Next time, don't go anywhere without telling me, okay?"
"You going to follow me?" I asked, feeling a little spark of anger. "What should I do when you go off without me? Make the woman promise to bring you back by ten? Take her picture so I can track her down when you're late?"