Grave Surprise

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 stones, 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."



"Look," said Tolliver, sounding amused. The next picture was one of us. We both had on dark glasses, too, and I had my head turned away. That was a habit of mine when I saw cameras. I don't mind being photographed, but that doesn't mean I like it, either.



There was a brother of Joel's, too, a near-clone but a bit older, named David. I didn't recall seeing him at the Morgenstern house, but maybe by the time we'd been called in, he'd returned to his work and his life. People had started drifting back into their normal orbits about that time, when it seemed as if the situation was not going to be resolved quickly.



"I don't think we know a damn thing more," I complained.



"No, probably not," Tolliver said. "We haven't called the police, either."



"They'll find out it's us calling, if we do," I said. "They'll find him. He'll be missed soon. I don't think we can risk it." Okay, that might seem the last word in callousness from me, and believe me, I wasn't happy about it. I was very aware that Clyde Nunley was lying out there dead in the dark and the cold. But you know, the dead don't feel a thing. They're just waiting.



If he wasn't found the next day, maybe I could "find" him a second time. No one would be surprised if we happened to go out to the old cemetery the next day, I figured. It was our choosing to go there in the middle of the night that would seem extraordinary; and now that I came to think of it, it had been an extraordinary thing to do. And foolish, too.



But now we were stuck with it, and we'd have to take the consequences if our presence was discovered.



As I climbed into my bed that night, I was more confused about what had happened to Tabitha Morgenstern than I'd been before I found her bones. And the presence of the ghost at the grave site was forcing me to rethink all my suppositions about the dead. I had plenty to worry about; but my body was exhausted, and before I knew it, I was asleep.



I don't dream much, but that night I dreamed of holding hands that had been reduced to bones. I wasn't frightened in my dream. But I knew it wasn't right.



THE next morning, there was a knocking at the door while Tolliver and I sat over breakfast, reading the morning paper. Tolliver was working the crossword. I'd reread everything I could find on the abduction of Tabitha, and I'd worked my way up chronologically to the new articles about the recovery of a body that might be hers. I'd reached the stories that were wringing the dregs out of the discovery of the child's body. This included an article on the main subject--the very tentative positive identification based on dental work--plus a rehash of the abduction, the family's plans for a memorial service the following week, quotes from the grieving grandparents; a companion story about Memphis's "hidden" cemeteries; and an article about child abduction in general, with statistics on the number of children found alive, the number found dead, and the number of those who were never found. Cameron had plenty of company.



There's not much that's more frightening than the idea of a child vanishing, gone for good. I thought of my little sisters, and shivered. Mariella and Gracie were pretty formidable kids when I'd lived with them in the trailer. I didn't know what they were like now, since my aunt and her husband kept telling us the girls didn't want to see us. That might or might not be true, but if it was so, Iona and Hank had been feeding them a load of untruths about us that I wanted a chance to rectify. The girls might not love me, but I loved them.



My mind had wandered, but the knock recalled me to the here and now.



We looked at each other. Tolliver rose. He looked through the peephole.



"It's the FBI guy again," he said.



"Shit," I murmured. I was wearing a hotel bathrobe and nothing else, since I'd showered again this morning after doing my time on the hotel treadmill.



"You'd better let me in, I've got news for you," the voice on the other side of the door said.



Tolliver glanced back at me.



We considered.



"Okay," I said. "Better find out what he wants."



Tolliver opened the door, and Seth Koenig stepped in at once and closed the door. His eyes flashed to my legs, and then away. "I taped the news this morning, since I thought you two might not have seen it," he said. He waited for us to respond, and we both shook our heads. We don't turn on the television as a matter of course. From the expression on his face, I felt pretty bad about what was coming.



He strode over to our television and popped the tape in the hotel player. He used the remote to turn on the set. After a moment of sports scores, Shellie Quail filled the camera. She looked resplendent in a bright fall suit and her usual gleaming makeup. Shellie had on her sober newscaster face. Clearly, she was going to deliver Grim Tidings.



"A groundskeeper at Bingham College made a shocking discovery early this morning. Dennis Cuthbert was sent to the site of the old St. Margaret's church and cemetery to make sure the garbage had been picked up after the discovery, two days ago, of Tabitha Morgenstern's remains interred in an ancient grave in the cemetery. What Cuthbert found was just as shocking. Inside that same grave, he found another body."



They sure did love the word "shocking."



The camera cut to a husky black man wearing a dark blue uniform. Dennis Cuthbert looked mighty upset. "I got here, and I see the car parked in the parking lot," he said. "Wasn't anyone supposed to be here, so I began looking around a little."



"Did you think at that point that there was anything wrong?" Shellie asked, her face in a sober mask.



"Yeah, I did wonder," said Dennis Cuthbert. "Anyway, I started walking around, and soon I notice that the grave look a little different."



"How?"



"The edge look a little collapsed. So I go over there and look down, and there he was."



Good. He'd walked over the area where I'd lain to touch the corpse.



The camera swung back to Shellie, who said, "Inside that grave, Cuthbert found the body of a man, tentatively identified as Bingham College professor Dr. Clyde Nunley. Dr. Nunley was dead."



Switch to the outside of an older home probably dating from the 1940s, the kind yuppies bought and restored. "Dr. Nunley's wife, Anne, told the police that her husband had left their home for the second time between six and seven o'clock last night to check something out, he said. He didn't give any details. When he hadn't returned home at his usual time, she went to bed. When she woke this morning and found him still missing from the home, she called police."



Evidently, Anne Nunley had declined to be interviewed, because she didn't appear on the screen. Smart woman.



Close-up of the gleaming Shellie. "Police aren't saying how Dr. Nunley died. But a source close to the investigation said his death could have been an accident, or could have been murder. Apparently suicide has been ruled out. Back to you, Chip."



The picture turned into gray lint right after that.



I didn't dare to look at Tolliver. I didn't want to look at Seth Koenig, either. He stepped forward to turn off the machine, and then he faced me. "What do you make of that, Miss Connelly?"



"I think it's very strange, Agent Koenig."



"Please call me Seth." He waited a beat to see if I'd return the courtesy, but I didn't. I wondered what to do now. I wanted the agent to leave with a fervent desperation, because I needed to discuss this very puzzling development with Tolliver.



"The groundskeeper noticed a car in the parking lot," Seth Koenig said. He waited for us to respond.



"That's what the reporter said," Tolliver said. He sounded as cool as ice. I envied my brother his composure and wished I could match it.



Of course, there'd been no other car there when we'd parked in the parking lot. Dr. Nunley hadn't committed suicide, and he hadn't died by accident. He'd been murdered. We knew it without a doubt.



"There were rocks in the grave," Seth Koenig said.



I did look up then, and met his eyes. "What kind of rocks?" I said.



"Big ones. They'd been aimed at his head."



"But..." My voice trailed off as I thought that through. Granted, we hadn't had sunlight or much time or inclination to examine the inside of the grave. But I was sure the "big rocks" hadn't been there. This might be a clumsy attempt to make the death look accidental; the scenario would be that Dr. Nunley somehow slipped and fell into the open grave, hitting his head on the rocks that lay in the bottom. The killer wanted the police to think it was such an accident; or in an alternative version, that Dr. Nunley had indeed been murdered, but there at the site, by someone who got him to climb down into the grave and then pelted him with large rocks until he expired. Oh, that sounded likely.



Seth Koenig sat on the coffee table in front of me. His eyes met mine. His were a peaty brown, warm with a golden undertone. His whole face was craggy and lined and attractive, and right at the moment, he was concentrated on me.



"I don't know what kind of person you are," he said. "But I know you have a gift. Right now, I want you to use that gift. I want you to go see Clyde Nunley's body in the morgue, and I want you to tell me what happened to him. Something tells me you'll let me know."



Now here was a poser. What could I say?



"Why are you here?" Tolliver said. He stood behind me, leaning over so his elbows were resting on the back of the couch right by my head. "What is your involvement with this case? I know the FBI is no longer actively involved. But you're offering your lab facilities to the police, right?"