He seemed to be groping for questions to ask. "Were you at your house?"
"Yes," I said. "Me, and Tolliver, and my sister Cameron... we were at home alone. My two younger half-sisters were singing in some special program. My mother actually went to the pre-school to watch." The state my mother was in by that time, it was amazing she remembered she had children. "And the storm come up, about four in the afternoon. I was in the bathroom. The sink was next to the window, and the window was open. I was standing at the sink so I could look in the mirror while I used my electric hair curler. It came in the window. Next thing I knew, I was on the floor looking up at the ceiling, and my hair was smoking, and my shoes were off my feet. Tolliver gave me CPR. Then the ambulance came."
This was babbling, for me. I decided to shut up.
Hollis Boxleitner didn't seem to have any more questions, which was wonderful and puzzling. For most people, that would just have scratched the surface of what they wanted to know. I hugged my jacket to my chest, imagining how good it would be when I could get in the bed at the motel. I would pile on the covers. I would have hot soup for supper. I closed my eyes for a few minutes. When I opened them, I felt better. We were close to the site.
I instructed the deputy to pull over when I calculated, by the pull I felt, that we were at the bit of road closest to the body. Now that I knew where she was, the body was easier to locate on my mental map. We got out for the hike downhill, a much easier one than our earlier descent to the death site of the boy. As we moved carefully downslope, Boxleitner said, "So now you find dead people for your living."
"Yep," I said. "That's what I do." I also had very bad headaches, shaky hands, and a strange spiderweb pattern on my right leg, which was weaker than my left. Though I run regularly to keep the muscles strong, making my way up and down steep slopes today had made that leg feel wobbly. I leaned against a tree as I pointed to the pile of debris that concealed what was left of Teenie Hopkins.
After he looked under the branches, Boxleitner threw up. He seemed embarrassed by that, but I thought nothing of it. You have to see that kind of thing real often to be unimpressed by the havoc time and nature can wreck on our bodies. I had a feeling small town policemen didn't see old bodies very often. And he'd probably known the girl.
"It's worst when they're in-between," I offered.
He understood what I meant, and he nodded vehemently. I started back to the patrol car, leaving him alone to collect himself and do whatever official stuff he had to do.
I was leaning against the car door when Hollis Boxleitner struggled up the slope, wiping at his mouth with the back of his hand. To mark the spot, he tied an orange strip of plastic to the tree nearest the road and the car. He gestured toward the car door, indicating I should get in, and he drove back to the town in grim silence. "Teenie Hopkins was my sister-in-law," he said as we parked.
There wasn't anything for me to say.
I let him precede me into the police station. We had only been gone forty-five minutes or so, and the crew was still assembled. The tightness in Tolliver's jaw told me that they'd been grilling him about me - maybe about my success rate - and he'd had to do some explaining. He hated that.
All the faces turned toward us, questioning: the mayor's looked only curious, the lawyer's cautious, the sheriff's angry. Tolliver was relieved. Sybil Teague was tense and miserable.
"Body's there," Hollis said briefly.
"You're sure it's Teenie?" Mrs. Teague sounded... somewhere between stunned and grief-stricken.
"No, ma'am," Boxleitner said. "No, ma'am, I'm not sure at all. The dentist will be able to tell us. I'll give Dr. Kerry a call. That'll be good enough for an unofficial identification. We'll have to send the remains to Little Rock."
I was sure the body was Teenie Hopkins, of course, but Sybil Teague wouldn't thank me for saying so again. In fact, she was looking at me with some distaste. It was an attitude I'd run across many times before. She'd hired me, and she would pay me a very tidy sum of money, but she didn't want to believe me. She'd actually be happy if I was wrong. And I certainly wasn't her favorite person, though I'd brought her the information for which she'd asked... the information she'd gone to so much trouble to bring me to Sarne to deliver.
Maybe, when I'd first started out in my business, I was able to sympathize with this perverse attitude: but I couldn't any longer. It just made me feel tired.
two
NO one wanted to talk to us, or needed to talk to us, any longer. In fact, the very sight of me was giving Mayor Terry Vale a serious case of the cold creepies. He was the least connected to the case, and in fact I couldn't figure out his continued presence, but the others appeared to be worried about his peace of mind, so Tolliver and I took our leave.
A series of phone calls had revealed that Teenie's dentist, Dr. Kerry, was out of town for the next four days. The body could only be identified in Little Rock. Sheriff Branscom had called the state crime lab, and they'd said as soon as they got the body they'd confirm the identification first thing, before they did their full work-up. Since the Arkansas crime lab is notoriously behind, that was a good concession. Branscom had a copy of Teenie's dental records to send down with the body.
We wouldn't get a check from Sybil until the body was declared to be that of Teenie Hopkins, so it looked like we'd be stuck in Sarne at least twenty-four hours. Twenty-four hours with nothing to do. We spend a lot of time waiting, but it's not easy.
"The motel's got HBO," Tolliver said. "Maybe we can catch a movie we haven't seen."
But after we'd reviewed the movie list and discovered we'd already seen the ones we were at all interested in seeing, Tolliver left to pursue the waitress from the diner. Not that he spelled it out for me, but I figured.
I was too restless to read, and I'd warmed up enough to discard the crawling-into-bed plan. I've gotten into doing my fingernails and toenails, just to have a hobby. So I got out my manicure kit, and I was painting my toenails a deep, almost golden red, when Hollis Boxleitner knocked on my door.
"Can I come in?" he asked. I leaned sideways to look past him, checking to make sure he wasn't in a police car. Nope. Though he was still in his uniform, he was driving his own vehicle, an electric-blue Ford pickup.
"I guess," I said. I left the door open to the beautiful day, and the big deputy didn't protest. Hollis Boxleitner sat in one of the two chairs. I took the other one, after offering him a can of Fresca that was chilly and wet from the ice chest. He popped the tab and took a gulp. I propped my foot up on the edge of the table and continued my pedicure.
"You want to go down to the restaurant, have some chicken-fried steak?" he asked.
"No thanks." It was a little past one o'clock, so I should eat something, but I wasn't feeling too hungry.
"Not the calories, is it? You could use some more flesh on your bones."
"No, not the calories." I stroked the brush very carefully from base to end of my big toenail.
"Your brother's already down there. He's having a conversation with Janine."
I shrugged.
"What about the Sonic?" I darted a glance at him, but he only looked mildly inquiring.
"What do you want?" I asked. I don't like being maneuvered.
He looked at me, put the can of soda down. "I just want to talk to you a little bit about Monteen Hopkins. My sister-in-law. The girl you think we found today."
"I don't need to know anything else about her." It was better not to. I knew enough. I knew about her last moments on earth. That was as personal as you could get. "And I guarantee," I added, since I have professional pride, "the body we found is Monteen Hopkins."
He looked at his empty hands, big hands with golden hair on the backs. "I was afraid you'd say that," he said, falling quiet for a minute. "Come on, let's get a milk shake. I was the one who threw up at the site, and even my stomach is saying it needs something. So I know yours has got to be ready."
I looked at him for a long moment, trying to figure him out. But he was a closed door to me, since he was among the living. Finally, I nodded.
My toenails weren't quite dry, so despite the autumn bite in the air, I stepped into his truck barefoot. He seemed to find that amusing. Hollis Boxleitner was a husky man with a crooked nose, a broad face, and a smile full of gleaming white teeth, though at the moment he was far from smiling. His pale blond hair was smooth as glass.
"You always lived here in Sarne?" I asked, after we'd parked at the Sonic and he'd pressed the button to order two chocolate shakes.
"For ten years," he said. "I moved here my last two years of high school, and I stayed. I had a couple years of community college, but I commuted to class after the first year."
"Been married? Was that how Teenie was your sister-in-law?"
"Yes."
I nodded acknowledgment. "Kids?"
"No."
Maybe he'd known the marriage wouldn't last.
"My wife was Monteen's older sister," he said. "My wife is dead."
That was a shocker. I sighed. While Hollis paid for the shakes, I reflected that I was going to learn about Teenie Hopkins, whether I wanted to or not.
"I met Monteen when she was thirteen. I picked her up from outside a juke joint way out in the county, while I was on patrol. It was so obvious she was underage and had no business being there. She made a pass at me in the police car. She was totally out of hand. I met Sally when I took Monteen home to her mom's house that night." He was silent for a moment, remembering. "I liked Sally a lot, the first time I laid eyes on her. She was a regular girl, with a lot of sweetness in her. Teenie was wild as a razorback."
"So the Teagues couldn't have been that happy about their son dating her."
"You could say that. Teenie got it from her mom. At that time, Helen was drinking a lot, and not too particular about who she brought home. But Helen managed to change, finally quit drinking. When Teenie's mom settled down, Teenie did, too."
That wasn't how Sybil had tried to make it appear, at our second meeting. I filed that fact for future reference.
"How do you get hired?" he asked.
I sucked hard on the straw, thinking over the abrupt change in subject. It was a good milk shake, but it had been a mistake to get a cold drink on a brisk day when I was barefoot. I shivered.
"Lots of word of mouth. That's how I got hired here; Terry Vale heard something about me at a city government conference. Law enforcement people talk to each other, at conventions and by email. And there've been stories in a professional magazine or two."
He nodded. "I guess you couldn't advertise."
"Sometimes, we do. Hard to get the wording right."
"I can see that." He smiled reluctantly. Then he reverted to just being intense. "You just... feel them?"
I nodded. "I see the last moments. Like a tiny clip of a video. Can you please turn on the heater?"
"Yes, we'll ride." A minute later, we'd left Sonic and were cruising what there was of Sarne.
"How big is the police force here?" I was trying to be polite. There was an undercurrent here, and the water in it was moving faster and faster.
"Full-time, besides me? The sheriff, two other deputies right now."
"Stretched pretty thin."
"Not during this season. Now, we've just got leaf people. Come to see the colors change. They're pretty peaceable." Hollis shook his head over people taking time off from life to look at a bunch of leaves. "Summer tourist season, we take on six part-time people. Traffic control and so on."
Hollis Boxleitner's income would be small. He was a youngish man, and he seemed both capable and intelligent. What was he doing, stuck in Sarne? Okay, not my business: but I was curious.
"I inherited my parents' house here," he said, as if he were answering my unspoken question. "They got killed when a logging truck hit their car." He nodded in acknowledgment when I told him I was sorry. He didn't want to talk about their deaths, and that was a good thing. "I like the hunting and the fishing, and the people. In the summer, I get some hours in helping my brother-in-law; he's got a rafting business, rents 'em out to the tourists. I pretty much work around the clock for three months, but it helps me build up my bank account. What does your brother do, when he's not helping you?"
"He's always with me."
Hollis looked as if he were politely swallowing scorn. "That's all he does?"
"It's enough." The thought of managing by myself made me shiver.
"So, how much do you charge for your services?" he asked, his eyes on the road ahead of him.
I hoped there wasn't an implication there. I kept silent.
It took a while to make Hollis uncomfortable, longer than it took for most people.
"I want to hire you," he said, by way of explanation.
I hadn't expected that. "I charge five thousand dollars," I told him. "Payable on a positive identification of the body."
"What if the location of the body is known? You can tell the cause of death, too, right?"
"Yes. Of course I charge less if I don't have to find the body." Sometimes the family wants an independent suggestion about the cause of death.
"You ever been wrong?"
"Not that I know of." I looked out the window at the passing town. "When I can locate the body, that is. I don't always find it. Sometimes, there's just not enough information available to tell me where to search. Like the Morgenstern girl." I was referring to a case that had made headlines the year before. Tabitha Morgenstern had been grabbed off a suburban road in Nashville, and she'd never been seen since that day. "Just knowing the point where someone vanished isn't enough. She might have been dumped anywhere, in Tennessee or Mississippi or Kentucky. Not enough information. I had to tell her parents I couldn't do it."