He'd thrown Sylvia Teague off her stride. She had to pause and regroup. "I am sure you're right," she said insincerely. "Now, Miss Connelly, to get back to the job we're all hoping you'll do."
"First of all," Tolliver said, patting his mustache with his napkin, "Who's paying Harper?"
They stared at him as if that were a foreign concept.
"You all are obviously the town officials, though I'm not real sure what Mr. Edwards here does. Ms. Teague, are you paying Harper privately, or is she on the town payroll?"
"I'm paying Miss Connelly," Sybil Teague said. There was a lot more starch in her voice now that money had been mentioned. "Paul's here as my lawyer. Harvey's my brother." Evidently, Terry Vale wasn't her anything. "Now, let me tell you what I want you to do." Sybil met my eyes.
I glanced back at my plate while I took the grapes off the stem. "You want me to look for a missing person," I said flatly. "Like always." They like it better when you say "missing person" rather than the more accurate "missing corpse."
"Yes, but she was a wild girl. Maybe she ran away. We're not entirely sure... not all of us are sure... that she is actually dead."
As if I hadn't heard that before. "Then we have a problem."
"And that is?" She was getting impatient—not used to much discussion of her agenda, I figured.
"I only find dead people."
"T HEY knew that," I told Tolliver in an undertone, as we walked back to our rooms. "They knew that. I don't find live people. I can't."
I was getting upset, and that was dumb.
"Sure, they know," he said calmly. "Maybe they just don't want to admit she's dead. People are funny like that. It's like—if they pretend there's hope, there is hope."
"It's a waste of my time—hope," I said.
"I know it is," Tolliver said. "They can't help it, though."
R OUND three.
Paul Edwards, Sybil Teague's attorney, had drawn the short straw. So here he was in my room. The others, I assumed, had scattered to step back into their daily routine.
Tolliver and I had gotten settled into the two chairs at the standard cheap-motel table. I had finally begun reading the paper. Tolliver was working on a science fiction sword-and-sorcery paperback he'd found discarded in the last motel. We glanced at each other when we heard the knock at the door.
"My money's on Edwards," I said.
"Branscom," Tolliver said.
I grinned at him from behind the lawyer's back as I shut the door.
"If you would agree, after all our discussion," the lawyer said apologetically, "I've been asked to take you to the site." I glanced at the clock. It was now nine o'clock. They'd taken about forty-five minutes to arrive at a consensus.
"And this is the site of... ?" I let my words hang in the air.
"The probable murder of Teenie—Monteen—Hopkins. The murder, or maybe suicide, of Dell Teague, Sybil's son."
"Am I supposed to be finding one body, or two?" Two would cost them more.
"We know where Dell is," Edwards said, startled. "He's in the cemetery. You just need to find Teenie."
"Are we talking woods? What kind of terrain?" Tolliver asked practically.
"Woods. Steep terrain, in places."
Knowing we were on our way to the Ozarks, we'd brought the right gear. I changed to my hiking boots, put on a bright blue padded jacket, and stuck a candy bar, a compass, a small bottle of water, and a fully charged cell phone in my pockets. Tolliver went through the connecting door into his own room, and when he returned he was togged out in a similar manner. Paul Edwards watched us with a peculiar fascination. He was interested enough to forget how handsome he was, just for a few minutes.
"I guess you do this all the time," he said.
I tightened my bootlaces to the right degree of snugness. I double-knotted them. I grabbed a pair of gloves. "Yep," I said. "That's what I do." I tossed a bright red knitted scarf around my neck. I'd tuck it in properly when I got really cold. The scarf was not only warm, but highly visible. I glanced in the mirror. Good enough.
"Don't you find it depressing?" Edwards asked, as if he just couldn't help himself. There was a subtle warmth in his eyes that hadn't been there before. He'd remembered he was handsome, and that I was a young woman.
I almost said, "No, I find it lucrative." But I know people find my earning method distasteful, and that would have been only partly the truth, anyway.
"It's a service I can perform for the dead," I said finally, and that was equally true.
Edwards nodded, as if I'd said something profound. He wanted all three of us to go in his Outback, but we took our own car. We always did. (This practice dates from the time a client left us in the woods nineteen miles from town, upset at my failure to find his brother's body. I'd been pretty sure the body lay somewhere to the west of the area he'd had me target, but he didn't want to pay for a longer search. It wasn't my fault his brother had lived long enough to stagger toward the stream. Anyway, it had been a long, long walk back into town.)
I let my mind go blank as we followed Edwards northwest, farther into the Ozarks. The foliage was beautiful this time of year, and that beauty drew a fair amount of tourists. The twisting, climbing road was dotted with stands for selling rocks and crystals—"genuine Ozark crafts"—and all sorts of homemade jellies and jams. All the stands touted some version of the hillbilly theme, a marketing strategy that I found incomprehensible. "We were sure ignorant and toothless and picturesque! Stop to see if we still are!"
I stared into the woods as we drove, into their chilly and brilliant depths. All along the way, I got "hits" of varying intensity.
There are dead people everywhere, of course. The older the death, the less of a buzz I get.
It's hard to describe the feeling—but of course, that's what everyone wants to know, what it feels like to sense a dead person. It's a little like hearing a bee droning inside your head, or maybe the pop of a Geiger counter—a persistent and irregular noise, increasing in strength the closer I get to the body. There's something electric about it, too; I can feel this buzzing all through my body. I guess that's not too surprising.
We passed three cemeteries (one quite small, very old) and one hidden Indian burial site, a mound or barrow that had been reshaped by time until it just resembled another rolling hill. That ancient site signaled very faintly; it was like hearing a cloud of mosquitoes, very far away.
I was tuned in to the forest and the earth by the time Paul Edwards pulled to the shoulder of the road. The woods encroached so nearly that there was hardly room to park the vehicles and still leave room for other cars to pass. I figured Tolliver had to be worried someone would come along too fast and clip the Malibu. But he didn't say anything.
"Tell me what happened," I said to the dark-haired man.
"Can't you just go look? Why do you need to know?" He was suspicious.
"If I have a little knowledge about the circumstances, I can look for her more intelligently," I said.
"Okay. Well. Last spring, Teenie came out here with Mrs. Teague's son, who was also Sheriff Branscom's nephew—Sybil and Harvey are brother and sister. Sybil's son was named Dell. Dell was Teenie's boyfriend, had been for two years, off and on. They were both seventeen. A hunter found Dell's body. He'd been shot, or he'd shot himself. They never found Teenie."
"How was their location discovered?" Tolliver asked, pointing at the patch of ground on which we stood.
"Car parked right where we're parked now. See that half-fallen pine? Supported by two other trees? Makes a good marker to remember the spot by. Dell'd been missing less than four hours when one of the families that live out this way gave Sybil a call about the car. There were folks out searching soon after that, but like I say, it was another few hours before Dell was found. Right after that, it started raining, and it rained for hours. Wiped out the tracking scent, so the bloodhounds weren't any use."