Grave Surprise

"Well, me either. But I can't seem to stop it, and I can't tell who did it from touching her. And we can't leave for a while, I guess."



"Do you want to leave?"



I was buckling my seat belt. "What does that mean?" The tone of his voice had put me on guard.



"You usually can hardly wait to get out of town after we finish up with a client, but you haven't said anything about leaving for a day or two. You want to be here? What's the attraction? Manfred Bernardo? Or Joel Morgenstern? Or Seth Koenig?" He turned the key in the ignition with unnecessary force. He was definitely not looking at me.



"Huh?" I stared at him as if he'd started speaking in Swedish.



Then, as his meaning sunk in, I laughed. It was just too ironic. The thing was, in past times there might have been some basis for his question. I might have been thinking about Manfred, or having secret fantasies about Seth Koenig, or Joel Morgenstern. His wrestler's body was fit and powerful, also good fuel for fantasies--Ooooh, pin me to the mat, Joel! But being pinned down was never a fantasy of mine.



And though our age difference was minimal, I regarded Manfred Bernardo as a boy.



"Tolliver, I meant it when I told you I'm not interested in Joel. Plus, he seems happy in his marriage and I've never wanted to be an adulterer. Now Manfred, mmmm." I smacked my lips. "That's different. You can't help but wonder what's under all the leather."



Tolliver gave me an incredulous glance, saw I was smiling, and had the good sense to look embarrassed. "Okay, okay, I'm sorry," he said. "The truth is, I'm in kind of my own situation."



"What?" I was instantly serious. "What's up?"



"Felicia has stepped up her phone calls," he said. We were at a stoplight, and he looked at me steadily.



"Despite the way she acted yesterday? Like she'd never seen you before?"



He nodded. "Yeah. She's called, like, four times since we left the hotel."



"You sure you don't want her to call?" I was kind of feeling my way through this, because I couldn't tell what Tolliver was leading up to.



"I definitely don't. You've told me before that sometimes you felt men were dating you because you were so--so different from other women?"



I nodded.



"Well, that's kind of the way I'm feeling." The light changed, and he turned his eyes to the road ahead. "We never seemed to have that much in common. She never acted affectionate, or like she wanted to get to know me better. I can't understand her constantly trying to hook up now, again. And then when she actually sees me, she acts like she never was with me. And then she calls me again."



"You did do the nasty with her. Maybe she really, ah, enjoyed that with you?" I was trying not to sound self-conscious. This was not a frequent topic of conversation between us. Neither of us were kiss-and-discuss types. It was tacky. Plus, not suitable.



"To tell the truth, it was only about average. It was just... sex," he said, with a shrug. He seemed to feel he had lacked gallantry toward a woman he'd bedded. "She's a pretty woman, and real intense. In fact, maybe a little too intense. And not all that interested in talking."



I groped for the right thing to say. "Like she was using you?" I said, making damn sure there wasn't a hint of smile anywhere in my vicinity.



"Exactly," he said. "So, I guess I know how women feel when a guy's just using them to masturbate inside."



Crudely put, but I understood exactly what he was saying. "And Felicia's calling you all the time, now?" It was hard to reconcile that with the self-contained and sleek young woman I'd met.



"Yeah, after not hearing from her for months and months, she's in a frenzy."



Maybe seeing Tolliver had reminded her of how good he'd been? Maybe it had been a long time since she'd had sex, and here was a sex partner whose excellence was a known factor, a sex partner who wouldn't entangle her in any relationship talk?



"How are you dealing with it?"



"At first, I thought about doing it," he said, looking really embarrassed. "I mean..."



"Sex is sex," I said, trying to sound understanding.



"But something about her puts me off," he said. "I can have sex with someone I don't, ah, have a relationship with, and enjoy it. But we have to at least like each other."



"She doesn't like you?" I was hesitant. I'd never heard Tolliver talk about a woman like this, and I have to say, I was a little worried.



"I don't know. I'm not sure I like her, now."



"Because she's eager?" I wasn't sure I liked the implication.



"No, no. I mean, that's flattering." He gave a frustrated shrug. "I'm not one of those guys who only likes women as long as they're hard to get. And I don't think women are sluts if they admit they want sex. It's because Felicia's so..." He floundered, looking for the right words. But he couldn't find them.



Finally he said, "She's too deep for me. It's like swimming in the ocean, when you're used to a pool."



That was brilliant, and I gazed at Tolliver with admiration and some surprise. He looked a little surprised, himself.



I didn't know what to say, so I took refuge in facetiousness. "It's all your fault, Tolliver," I said. He looked at me skeptically. "You're just so darn magnetic. They can't live without you."



He gave me an eye roll. "Cut it out," he said.



So the subject passed away, but I didn't forget it, and I thought about it while he watched a basketball game on ESPN. He would know I wasn't dismissing his concern, that I'd keep it under my skin until I had an idea about it. In the meantime, I felt like reading. I'd gotten heavily involved in an old mystery, Marjorie Allingham's A Tiger in the Smoke, and after a page or two I was in the England of decades ago.



When the room phone rang, I was simply irritated at having to put down my book. I was closest, so I answered it.



A male voice said, "Hey, can we come up?"



"Who is this?"



"Um. Sorry. This is Victor, you know? Morgenstern?"



I could feel my face wrinkle in a frown. "Who is 'we'?"



"My friend Barney and me."



I covered the receiver and relayed the request to Tolliver. "This is weird. I want to talk to him, and here he arrives on our doorstep," I said. Tolliver was not so pleased. In fact, he looked mildly exasperated. "Oh, okay," he said. "I was thinking about going out for lunch, trying to get some barbecue as long as we're here in Memphis. But we'll see what he wants. You think he's just showing off to his friend or something?"



I shrugged, uncovered the receiver, and gave the boy our room number. After a few minutes, there was a tentative knock on the door.



Tolliver answered it, looking quite grim and intimidating. Actually, he was probably just aggravated at the interruption to his game watching, but Tolliver is a tough-looking guy, and when he's unhappy, he tends to look a little dangerous. If the two teenagers had been dogs, the ruffs on their necks would have been standing up. Like many teenagers, Victor and his friend Barney were strange combinations of tentative and aggressive.



Victor was wearing a tight knit shirt, which allowed us to see just how much he'd been hitting the gym. He didn't have his father's magnetism, but he did have a pair of big blue eyes that worked almost as well. His blond friend Barney was taller, narrower, but still a substantial hunk of immature male. Both were wearing school jackets, jeans, and Pumas. Victor's "Tommy" polo shirt was green-and-white striped, and Barney's Ralph Lauren was golden brown.



"So, uh, you doing okay?" Victor asked me. "This is my friend Barney."



"I'm fine, thank you," I said. "Barney, I'm Harper Connelly. This is my brother, Tolliver Lang."



"Hey," said Barney. He looked at us furtively, and then back down at his shoes. He and Victor were sitting close together on the love seat, while Tolliver and I were in the chairs.



"Can I get you anything to drink?" I asked politely.



"Oh, no, no thanks. We just had a Coke down in the car," Victor said.



There was a small, awkward silence.



"Look, dude, I want to talk to your sister," Victor told Tolliver. He had on the most manly face he could muster.



My mouth twitched, though I did my best to look neutral.



"Go right ahead," Tolliver said seriously. "Were you wanting me to leave the room?"



"No, dude," Victor said anxiously. He looked at his friend Barney, who shook his head, to reinforce Victor's denial. "No man, stay here."



The teenager turned his head to me. "You were in Nashville, so you know how bad that was," he said. "I mean, you know that was really awful."



I nodded.



"So my mom--my stepmom--flipped out for a while."



"Flipped out how?" I sat forward, focused my attention on the young man. Not completely to my surprise, Barney took Victor's hand. Victor looked startled, but not at having his hand held by another male. He was just surprised Barney felt it was okay to do that in front of us. They looked at each other for a moment, and then Victor squeezed Barney's fingers in a tight grip.



"She was all... using pills, you know? She got really strung out. Felicia was having to drive over to Nashville from Memphis all the time to make sure the house was running okay."



"That must have been really hard," I said, trying to sound both gentle and encouraging.



"It was," he said simply. "My grades went way down, and I was missing my sister, and it was really bad. My dad tried to keep going to work, and my mom would get up and try to clean the house or cook, or just have lunch with friends, but she was crying all the time."



"The loss of a family member causes all kinds of changes," I said, which was just about meaningless. It couldn't begin to cover the "changes" the sudden absence of a sister could cause, as I had good reason to realize. I had no idea where Victor was headed with this, but I found myself increasingly curious, curious enough to provide conversational lube to keep the talk going.



"Yeah," he said simply. "We sure had a bunch." He seemed to gather himself. "You know, that morning?



The morning she was--gone."



"Um-hm," I said.



"My dad was in the neighborhood," he said in a rush. "I spotted his car a couple of blocks from the house."



I didn't sit upright and shriek, "Oh my God!" but it was definitely an effort to stay in my relaxed position. "He was?" I said, quite calmly.



"Yeah, because... I mean, I did go to tennis practice," Victor said. "But after that, my friend I had in Nashville; I mean, it wasn't anything like Barney, but I did, um, have a friend, and he and I hooked up, and then I needed a shower, so I thought I'd run home, but when I went past the house I saw Dads car at the stoplight two blocks away, and I thought he might notice something. I mean, what was there to notice? But parents, you know." Victor shrugged. "So I just went back to the park and hit some balls, met some other friends who'd come to play. The courts were only ten minutes away from home and I even parked in the same spot when I went back, so it was pretty easy for me to say I'd never left."



We were both shaken by this little account.



"Of course, I couldn't say anything," Victor said.



"I can see that it would be hard to get into that," Tolliver said.



"Yeah, you know, one thing would lead to another, and then I'd have to tell them. About me."



And the world revolved around Victor, of course. "So they don't know yet," I said.



"Oh, God, no!" He and Barney rolled their eyes at each other. "Dad and Mom would freaking flip out."



"My mom is cool about it, which is awesome," Barney said. I was glad to confirm he had vocal abilities.



I'd meant that Victor's parents didn't yet know he'd seen the car, but of course Victor had interpreted my question his own way.



"You're sure it was your dad's car?" Tolliver asked. "Absolutely sure?"



"Yes, I'm sure," Victor said, as if he had his back against the wall and an army against him. "Of course, dude. I know my own dad's car."



I'd never heard anyone call Tolliver "dude" before, and even under the circumstances, I was kind of enjoying it. "What's he drive?" I asked Victor.



"He's got a Lexus hybrid," Victor said. "A bamboo pearl--colored Lexus with the ivory leather interior. We looked at the website for like a week before we ordered the car."



Okay, that was distinctive. It couldn't be confused with many other cars, for sure. I was conscious of a bitter disappointment, as if a show dog I'd become fond of had turned and bit me.



"And you never asked him about that," I said, and I couldn't keep the disbelief out of my voice. "You're saying your dad could have snatched your sister, and you've known that all along, and yet you've never said anything to anybody about it."



Victor turned a deep red. Barney looked at me with outright hostility.



"Because," I went on when they didn't speak, "you know you're telling us that your father lied about where he was, and you're saying he almost certainly grabbed your half sister, his daughter, and killed her."



He raised his head, and almost spoke; his mouth moved; and he was so young, so disturbed, it almost hurt to badger him like this, but I had to.