Grave Surprise

"I guess you want to talk to us about something?" Tolliver was doing some stretching, and I saw that Detective Young's eyes had strayed to his ass. Lacey said quickly, "Yes, ma'am, we sure do. Do you two want to come down to the station with us? At least it's dry and warm."



"I definitely don't want to go to the station," I said. "Isn't there a coffee shop somewhere close? Unless you're going to arrest us, going to a cafe would be a lot nicer. Maybe they'd have hot chocolate?" I was deliberately tempting poor Young, who sneezed twice in succession and applied her damp wad of tissues to her raw nose.



"There's that place on Poplar," she said to her partner, who looked indecisive. "Remember how good their pie is?" she said, in a heavy-handed attempt at a bribe.



It worked like a charm.



Thirty minutes later we were in a restaurant so warm that the windows were steamy, with coffee in front of the men, hot chocolate in front of Detective Young and me. Lacey was happy as a pig in a wallow with a piece of pecan pie with whipped topping on a plate in front of him, and Young was almost weeping with relief at being indoors.



"Agent Koenig tells us you've heard the news about Clyde Nunley," she said, her voice sounding nasal but at least human.



We nodded. "He came by our room this morning and told us," I said, wanting to be as honest as possible. I always try.



"Rick Goldman came by the station, too," Young said, after he swallowed. He looked blissful. "Rick was telling us that he had a run-in with Nunley in the lobby of your hotel, Ms. Connelly."



"Yes, that's true. He ended up propelling Dr. Nunley out the door. Truthfully, I think Dr. Nunley was drunk. He was very belligerent." I hoped I looked as frank and open as I was trying to be.



"You're not the only person who's commented on that. We'll find out what his blood alcohol level was. What beef did he have with you?" Young asked. Maybe her cold medication was making her blunt, or maybe she was just tired of do-si-doing around.



"He thought that somehow, despite all his precautions, I'd gotten into his precious private records and memorized the COD on all the burials. Goldman accused me of the same thing."



"And did you do that?"



"No, I don't need to. I'm the real deal."



There was a moment of silence, while the detectives either thought that over, or dismissed it as another piece of chicanery on my part.



"Did you two go out again last night?" asked Young directly. "After Mr. Lang here came back from wandering Beale Street?" Detective Lacey put down his fork and gave us a look that might have penetrated steel.



"Yes, we did," Tolliver said. After all, we'd gotten the car from the valet. There was no way we could deny it.



"Where did you go?"



"We drove down to look at Graceland," Tolliver said. I blinked. What a good lie. Almost any tourist in Memphis would want to at least drive by Elvis's home. And since we'd just told Koenig we'd been looking at the sights of Memphis, this tied right in. Actually, we'd looked up Graceland on the laptop this morning after Koenig had left, so we'd at least have an idea what we were supposed to have seen.



"At night?"



"Yeah, we didn't have anything else to do. And we weren't sure if we'd ever be back this way again. So we drove down to Whitehaven, and we took a couple of passes in front of it. That's some place. You gotta love the gates."



"And you're not going to go back and see it in the daylight, tour the house?"



"He's buried on-site, right?" I asked.



"Uh... yeah. And Vernon and Gladys, his mom and dad, and Minnie May, his grandma."



"No." I shook my head definitely. "I really, really, wouldn't want to do that."



Detective Young sucked at her teeth. She looked as though she were feeling a bit better, now that she was warm and had finished her hot chocolate. Her short brown hair still looked lank and tired, but her eyes were showing a spark of spirit. Her partner had that happy look that sugar-loving men get after they've had something especially rich. But the pie hadn't made him smarter.



"Why not?" he asked now. "Why not go see the place they're buried?"



"You know, I connect with bodies. It might kind of ruin the Graceland experience for me." On the other hand, it might answer a few questions. Tolliver was looking amused.



"So you see why we just drove by," Tolliver said, picking up the thread of the narrative. "We'd already cruised around the Pyramid and Beale Street. So, we went back to our hotel."



I was glad I'd washed my shoes off this morning, and that the hotel laundry had our jeans.



"And the Fibbie came to see you first thing this morning," Detective Young said. I was glad we'd mentioned it, since it seemed Young already knew about Koenig's visit.



"Yes. He wanted us to know right away about the body found in the grave. I'm guessing he wanted to get our first reaction."



"And what reaction did he get?"



"Well, of course, we were sorry Clyde Nunley had been killed, or had fallen into the grave and hit his head, or whatever really happened to him. It's never good to hear someone's dead." Though with some people it's less bad than with others. "But it's not like we had any reason to want him dead."



"You might have been a little upset, Mr. Lang, him manhandling Ms. Connelly like that. Specially in a public place. Specially since someone else had to help her, since you weren't there."



Oooh. Low blow. But I thought Tolliver could stand up to it, and he seemed to be coping, if his slight smile was any indicator. "Harper can take care of herself," he said, which pleased me. "Even if Goldman hadn't been there, she would have been okay."



Since that hadn't worked, Lacey tried something else. "Agent Koenig says he wants your reading of Nunley's body, and that you would like access to Tabitha's body."



"That's not exactly what I said," I told him. "It wasn't my idea. He thought I might get more of a reading if I tried again, and I agreed that might be so. Of course I don't want to be around the child's body again--but if you have any idea I'd be a help, I have to make myself do that."



"I have no idea what to believe about you," Lacey said, his small blue eyes examining me again for maybe the twenty-fifth time. "I never met anyone like you, and I swear I don't know if you're a fraud or a--I just don't know what you are."



"Lots of people feel that way," I said, because he seemed so uncomfortable. "Don't worry about it. I'm used to it."



"You two have kids?" Detective Young asked suddenly.



Tolliver and I stared at her blankly.



"Us?" he said, after a long pause.



She seemed to realize she'd put her foot in it. "Sorry, I just assumed you two..."



"We've lived together since we were teenagers," I said. "Tolliver's dad married my mother. He's like my... brother." For the first time, I hesitated before I said those words.



"I have two," she said, obviously wanting to get off the subject as quickly as possible. "I have a boy and a girl. If my child went missing, I'd want every stone turned to find that child. I'd deal with the devil if I had to. I'll ask the Morgensterns how they feel about you... visiting Tabitha's body again. We'll see what they say."



I wondered what the two cops would say if I told them I'd talked to a ghost the night before. I wondered how fast they'd write us off as charlatans. I thought again of the hard hand gripping my arm, and I had to close my eyes for a minute. How could it be that Josiah Poundstone's ghost was there? I had thought I had the whole thing straight in my mind, the whole life-after-death procedure, but now I stood on shaky ground.



I noticed the traffic outside was getting heavier, and the sky was getting darker. As we sat in the diner with the two detectives, the afternoon had drawn to a close. I had an almost irresistible urge to go back to the cemetery, to see if the ghost was still there, what it was up to. What did ghosts do? Were they there when a human wasn't there to react to them? Did they materialize when they wanted to communicate, or were they always...



"Harper," Tolliver said gently. "Are you ready to go?"



"Oh, sure," I said, hastily pulling my jacket back on. The detectives were standing, their coats zipped and buttoned, and from their expressions, they'd been waiting for me to respond for some time.



"Daydreaming," I said. "Sorry." I did my best to look alert and normal, but that's not always my best thing anyway, and I don't think I was very successful. "Maybe our run tired me more than I thought."



Given a valid-sounding reason for my distracted state, the two cops looked a bit happier, though Lacey would never be my best friend. "You need to go back to the hotel and get some rest," he said. "Don't go getting into any more trouble while you're here in Memphis. We'll get back with you after we've talked to the Morgensterns."



"Right, thanks," Tolliver said. After their car had left, we paid our part of the bill and left the diner. "What was that all about?" Tolliver asked when we were in the car and trying to make a left turn into traffic to go back to the Cleveland.



I told him the questions I'd been asking myself.



"I can see where that's interesting, and I would like to know the answers, too," he said. "But from now on, you should have your thinking sessions when you're safe in bed, or something. You had a pretty strange expression on your face."



"Did I look weird?" I asked, oddly hurt.



"Not strange-ugly," he said instantly. "Strange, as in, 'not there.'"



"Oh," I said.



Finally, he took advantage of a hole in the ever-swelling traffic going out of downtown. We were headed back toward the river before I spoke again. "You know who I'd like to talk to again?"



"Who?"



"Victor. But you talk about peculiar, it would seem real peculiar if we called him and asked him to come to see us."



"Yeah. No way we can do that."



"You think since they treated us to a meal, we could invite them to a meal at a restaurant?"



Tolliver thought it over. "They're in mourning right now, and they've probably got all kinds of arrangements to make. Plus, what reason would we give? Yeah, we could insist we owe them a meal, but what are we gonna talk about? The only connection we have is the death of their daughter. That's just not enough to carry an evening, Sis."



He hadn't called me that in a long time. I wondered if Young's comment had shaken him up, too.



"Maybe not," I admitted. "But as long as we're stuck here, and I guess we are... hey, I wonder what would happen if we left?" There was a moment of silence. "We'd probably get called right back," I concluded, "until they've decided what happened to Clyde Nunley. Why would he get killed? I just don't understand. The only thing he knew was--what could he have known?"



"What's the only connection between Clyde Nunley and Tabitha Morgenstern?" Tolliver asked. He was definitely guiding me to a conclusion. I hate it when he does that.



"They shared a grave."



"I mean, besides that."



"There was no connection."



"Yes, there was."



It was almost full dark now, and the mass of lights in the eastbound lanes was almost bumper-to-bumper. We had much easier going in the westbound lanes. It began to rain again, and Tolliver turned on our windshield wipers.



"Okay, I give." I threw up my hands in exasperation. "What was the connection?"



"You."



Chapter fourteen



THIS hit me with an impact about equal to a bag of cement.



"So you're saying Clyde Nunley was murdered because he knew who had recommended me for this little gig at the college." I felt cold all over. I may be used to death, and I may know better than anyone how inevitable and ordinary a state it is, but that doesn't mean it's easy to feel you contributed to it. It's like sleet; you know if the atmospheric conditions warrant, there's going to be sleet, but you don't have to be happy about it.



"That's what I think--and I thought about this a lot, last night. I couldn't accept the giant coincidence that Tabitha's body was here. If it wasn't a coincidence, we were steered to find it. We were used. And the person who did that had to be the person who killed Tabitha. Clyde Nunley asked you to read this cemetery. So someone must have whispered your name in Clyde Nunley's ear. I don't know if that person held something over Clyde, or made a friendly suggestion. 'Hey, you're having this class about the occult, you have this cemetery just laying there, let's get a weird woman who specializes in finding the dead to come have a look.' "



"So, you think that Clyde balked when Tabitha's body was found?"



"I think he did. Or else he couldn't swallow the coincidence any more than we can, and he figured that whoever had talked him into inviting you to Memphis had to have some kind of inside knowledge about the girl's death. Just because he was a jerk doesn't mean he was dumb."



"True," I said absently. "Well, I guess that narrows down the field, right?"



"How do you figure that?"



"Couldn't be Victor."



"Why not? I'll bet he's pre-enrolled at Bingham. This is his senior year in high school, right?"



"Oh. Well, could be. That seems kind of thin, but okay. What I was thinking--both Felicia and David went to Bingham. And the older Morgensterns, Judy and Ben, would surely know a lot of people who went there, if they didn't themselves, since they live in the city and paid for David's tuition for four years. I bet the same holds true for Fred Hart."