"But there wasn't this loose dirt then. I don't know how we would explain coming out here tonight. Oh, I'm so sorry I got you into this."
"Bullshit," he said briskly. "We were doing what we do. You wanted to see if you could get some other bit of information from the grave. Well, we found out more than we wanted to know, huh? But it's not your fault." He hesitated. "Do you want to try to talk to him, the—the ghost? And what about getting a reading from the body?"
Tolliver's suggestion was as bracing as that brisk slap detectives give hysterical women in old movies. "Yes," I said. "Sure." Of course, I should have thought of that. I had to calm myself first, and center myself. Not too easy, since I was already buzzing like crazy just from being so close to a fresh body.
The closest I could get to Clyde Nunley's corpse without climbing down into the grave—which might have destroyed or damaged evidence—was to hang over the edge with my hand extended to him. I lay down on the ground and wriggled forward. Tolliver held on to my legs. The hole wasn't so deep, and I managed to touch the shirt on Dr. Nunley's back.
His death was so recent it was like a continuous droning in my head, almost drowning my reason, and I had to wait for that to subside before I got a sense of his passing. "Hit on the head," I mumbled, caught up in the sheer astonishment he'd felt. "On the back of the head. So surprised." The shock of it was still lingering around him. He absolutely had not expected the attack.
"Here?"
"Yes," I said, straining to extract the pictures of the end of his life. He was so fresh, so recently translated into this lump of flesh that could neither act nor reason. I saw the darkness around him, the tombstones, everything like it was now: the cold, the rough ground, the upturned earth. "Oh, it hurts! Oh, it hurts! My head!" And the hole coming at me, couldn't throw out my hands to take the fall, grayness… blackness.
I was close to that blackness myself when Tolliver hauled me up and braced me against him.
"Here, open your mouth," he said, and then he repeated it. "Open!"
I parted my lips, and he pushed a piece of peppermint into my mouth.
"Come on, you have to have some sugar," he said, and his voice was sharp and commanding.
He was right. We'd found that out, by trial and error. I made myself suck on the candy, and in a few minutes I felt better. Next came a butterscotch.
"It's never been this bad," I said, my voice weak. "I guess it's because he's so new." I was worried I couldn't make it across the cemetery back to our car without a lot of help from Tolliver.
"He's absolutely gone, right? That… who stopped you—wasn't him? I did think I saw a beard."
Every now and then, we'd found a soul attached to a body. That was rare, and until this night I had thought that would be the eeriest thing we could find. Now we knew there was more.
"Clyde Nunley's soul's gone," I said, not willing to commit myself further than that. "And we should be, too." I gathered myself to make the attempt.
"Yeah," Tolliver said. "We got to get out of here."
I paused, halfway to my feet. "But we'll be leaving him by himself."
"He's been by himself for a hundred years," Tolliver said, not pretending he didn't understand. "He'll have to be by himself for a while longer. For all we know, maybe he's got company."
"Does this qualify as the strangest conversation we've ever had?"
"I think so."
"I couldn't have anyone else but you here, no one else would understand," I said. "I'm so glad you saw him, too."
"And that's never happened before, right? You've never mentioned anything like that."
"Never. I've known when souls were still attached to the body, and I've wondered if those would be ghosts if they didn't detach. I've always wondered if I would see a ghost sometime. I've always been a little disappointed that I haven't, in a way. Oh my God, Tolliver. He saved me from falling right into that grave on top of the corpse. The first time I see a ghost, and he saved me."
"Were you scared?"
"Not that he would hurt me. But I was afraid because it was spooky and I didn't know what to do for him. I don't know why he can't or won't go on, I don't know how he experiences time, I don't know his purpose. And now all his people are gone, I guess. No one could visit him or…" I shut up, afraid of sounding maudlin.
They all want to be found, you know. That's all they want. Not vengeance, or forgiveness. They want to be found. At least, that's what I'd always thought.
But Josiah Poundstone—I was sure he was the ghost—had been firmly located since the moment of his death. Someone had erected the "Beloved Brother" headstone. And someone had murdered him, if that was part of his awareness. When I'd stood on his grave in the daylight, I'd felt only the faintest flutter from him, so overwhelmed had I been with the thrumming from the most recent corpse. I'd assumed Josiah Poundstone was gone for good. Apparently, I'd been wrong.
nine
WE made our way back to the car, taking our time. I had to hold on to Tolliver here and there, and I don't think he was sorry to hold onto me. We dusted dirt off my jacket, and stomped our feet to remove bits of soil.
"If there were an emergency room for psychological shocks, we could go there," he said, unlocking the car.
"I've never left a body unreported," I said, remembering how proud I'd been of that fact only a day before. "Never." I shuddered. "I wish I could put my brain in a warm bath of something scented," I said. "And give my nervous system some aromatherapy."
"That mental picture is just disgusting," Tolliver said.
He was right, but that didn't stop me from wanting some way to soothe my emotional self. I took a deep breath and tried to put the frivolous thoughts on the back burner.
We still had decisions to make, and they wouldn't be easy ones.
"Did you get anything from the… did you get anything?" Tolliver asked.
"Yeah," I said. "Yeah, Dr. Nunley was really taken by surprise. I don't know why he was out there, but he never expected the person with him had any evil intent."
"Do ordinary people expect to be attacked, ever?" Tolliver asked reasonably.
I gave him a disgusted look. "No, they don't, smart aleck, and that's not what I meant. What I mean is—he wasn't with a stranger. He was with someone he knew, and he had no idea that the other guy wished him ill."
"You just using 'guy' for the ease of it?"
"Right."
"We can't tell the police."
"Sure we can, but they won't believe us. I don't know what else we can do. And I absolutely don't think we should tell them we were at the grave site again."
We argued back and forth all the way to the hotel—and with time out for discretion in front of the staff, resumed our argument when we were alone in the elevator.
When we stepped out, we were struck speechless to see Agent Seth Koenig waiting outside our room.
If the management had cast glances at us on our way through the lobby, we'd been too engrossed in our own problems to pick up on it. Certainly not a psychic, I thought ruefully. /// ever claim to be one, strike me dead. We were completely taken by surprise. As one, we stopped in our tracks and stared at him.
We weren't alone in the staring department. He was laying one on us.
"What have you two been up to?" he asked.
"I don't believe we need to talk to you," Tolliver said. "My sister tells me you're an FBI agent, and we don't know anything of interest to you."
"Where have you been?" Koenig asked, as though we would be compelled to tell him.
"We went to the movies," I said.
"Just now," he said. "Where were you just now?"
Tolliver took my hand and led me past the agent, who was surely persistent.