"Maybe, too, you're hungry?" he asked mildly.
"I ate a few hours ago."
"It has been a while."
"You ate half a sandwich. Let's drive to Mount Parnassus. We don't want to get into any more trouble."
"Sounds good. But you know, we could just pack up our stuff and start driving now," I said.
"Not with a storm coming on."
It was because of me we couldn't drive during storms, because sometimes I had a very bad reaction; another weakness on my part.
"We'll go to Mount Parnassus," he said. "It's just twelve miles north."
It was dark already, at least in part because of the oncoming storm. Tolliver was driving because of my headache, so I answered the cell phone when it rang. It was Tolliver's older brother, Mark.
"Hi," I said. "How are you?"
"Well, I been better," he said. "Tolliver there?"
I silently handed Tolliver the phone. He disliked driving and talking at the same time, so he pulled over to the side of the road. Mark Lang had been nearly old enough to leave home by the time my mother and his father started living together and eventually got married. He hadn't liked my mother, hadn't liked the situation in his home, and had gotten out as soon as possible. For Tolliver's sake, he'd checked in at the house about every two weeks. He'd also helped to feed and clothe us, and he'd gotten us medical help when we'd needed it and the adults had been too strung out to provide it. And Mark had been especially fond of Cameron, as Tolliver had been of me. The little girls just represented two more sets of needs and wants, to Mark. I could imagine how unhappy he was at being called about Mariella's disappearance, and I was sure that was his reason for calling Tolliver now.
"He found her," Tolliver told me now, leaning away from the phone briefly. "Took him an hour."
That wasn't bad. I had a few questions, of course, but I decided to let the conversation run itself to a halt before I asked them.
Tolliver hung up soon enough. "They were hiding in Craig's Sunday school building," he said briefly.
"What—where is she now?"
"She went home. Craig had run out of food, anyway, so there wasn't any more fun in it for her."
We fell silent. There wasn't any more to say about Mariella. Mariella had seen too much as a kid to ever be innocent, and she'd probably go down the same path as our mother as fast as could be, despite all the Sunday school lessons and hours in Iona's church, despite the moral teachings and the days of school. So their lives wouldn't be all work and no play, Tolliver and I had sent funds for extras for Mariella and Gracie: dance lessons, voice lessons, art lessons. All this was a familiar litany in my head, as I tried again to figure out what else we could have done. The court would never have left the girls' upbringing to Tolliver and me.
My head pounded harder, and I looked at the sky ahead of us anxiously. I knew soon I would see a flicker of lightning.
We turned on the radio to listen to the weather. Storms were predicted, with heavy downpour and thunder and lightning. What a surprise. Flash flood warnings—which you had to take seriously in a terrain that included roads that dipped so deeply before rising again—in an area where all the streams and ponds were already full from plentiful rainfall earlier in the season.
We reached a little chain restaurant within ten minutes and went in, taking our raincoats with us. Inside, there was an older couple sitting close to the kitchen door; there was a single guy reading a newspaper, a dirty plate shoved across the table. A young couple, in their early twenties, sat with their two children in a booth by the big window. They were pale and fat, both wearing sweats from Wal-Mart. He wore a gimme cap with his. Her hair was pulled back into a curly ponytail, and her eyelids were blue with makeup. The little boy, maybe six, was wearing camo and carrying a plastic gun. The little girl was a pretty thing, with lots of light brown hair like her mother's, and a sweet and vacant face. She was coloring.
A waitress in jeans and a blouse strolled over to take our order. Her hair was dressed in a formidable bleached bubble, and she was chewing gum. She told us she was pleased to help us, but I doubted her sincerity. After we'd looked at the menus for a minute, she took our orders and strolled over to the window to the kitchen to turn them in.
After she'd gotten our iced tea, she vanished.
The couple started arguing about whether or not to enter their daughter in the next beauty pageant. It cost quite a bit to enter a child in a pageant, I learned, and to rent a dress and take time off from work to do the girl's hair and makeup cost even more.
I raised my eyebrows at Tolliver, who suppressed a smile. My mother had tried to get Cameron to do the pageant circuit. At the very first one, Cameron had told the judges she thought the pageant system was very close to white slavery. She had accused the judges of many unpleasant perversions. Needless to say, that had ended Cameron's career as a beauty contestant. Of course, Cameron was fourteen at the time. The little girl across the room was maybe eight and didn't look like she'd say boo to a goose.
Our cell rang again, and this time Tolliver answered it.
"Hello?" He paused and listened for a moment. "Hey, Sascha. What's the word?" Ah. The hair samples. The DNA test.
He listened for a few moments, then turned to me.
"No match," he said. "The male is not the father. Female One is the mother of Female Two." That was the way I'd marked the samples.
"Thanks, Sascha. I owe you," he said.
He'd no sooner put down the phone than the phone rang again. We looked at each other, exasperated and I answered it.
"Harper Connelly," said a strained voice.
"Yes. Who is this?" I asked.
"Sybil."
I never would have known this was my former client. Her voice was so tense, her enunciation so jerky.
"What's wrong, Sybil?" I tried to keep my voice level.
"You need to come here, tonight."
"Why?"
"I need to see you."
"Why?"
"There's something I need to tell you."
"You don't need to talk to us," I said. "We've finished our transaction." I struggled to keep myself calm and firm. "I did what you paid me to do, and Tolliver and I are going to get out of town as soon as we can."
"No, I want to see you tonight."
"Then you'll just have to want."
There was a desperate pause. "It's about Mary Nell," Sybil said, abruptly. "It's about her obsession with your brother. I need to talk to both of you, and if you're leaving town tomorrow, it's got to be tonight. Mary Nell's talking about killing herself."
I held the phone away to stare at it for a minute. This sounded wildly unlikely. In my limited experience of Mary Nell Teague, she'd be more apt to be thinking of taking Tolliver hostage and bombarding him with love until he yielded to her. "Okay, Sybil," I said warily. "We'll be there in about an hour."
"Sooner, if you can," she said, sounding almost breathless with relief.
The waitress brought our food as I was relaying the conversation to Tolliver, who'd been able to hear most of it, anyway.
He made a face.
I wrote SO MO DA NO on an extra napkin with a tine of my fork. I looked at it while I picked at my salad, which was about what you'd expect at a diner in the middle of nowhere. I tried to think myself into the scenario. Okay, Dick's been making notes to himself while he goes through the family's medical records for the year, getting ready for tax time. Four separate notations. Four members of the family.
S could be Sybil, M could be Mary Nell, D could be Dell, then N could be... who? I'd already gone over the fact that Dick Teague had called his daughter Nelly. But if that took care of the N, what about the M? I stared down at the napkin, thinking about making little notes about myself and my family...