Then he talked about Felicia's phone call.
"She said she wanted to talk to me here, that she wanted to know all the details about her dad's visit, and so on. I thought she wanted to see me again, because we'd had a… we'd hooked up a couple of times. She'd been calling me pretty steadily since. I think she was trying to keep tabs on Harper and me, to know where we were in case she needed us again. Which she did."
"What did she need you for?" Brittany Young asked. She'd been pulled away from some home activity. Her hair needed a brushing, and she was wearing a sweatsuit and Reeboks.
"She needed us to find Tabitha." Tolliver took my hand, and I tried to smile.
"You're saying she confessed to taking her," Detective Lacey said.
"Yes, she did. She knew Tabitha would get in the car with her. She borrowed her father's Lexus, so no one would see her own car. She thought that someone might see the Lexus and report it, and that Joel might be suspected; but she knew he would have an airtight alibi because she called him at work that morning and made sure he was staying put. She thought if Diane suspected Joel, she'd divorce him; or maybe Joel would suspect Diane, and he would divorce her. Felicia thought maybe the stress of the whole thing would rip the marriage apart, even if mutual suspicion didn't. Plus, she didn't like Tabitha. She thought the girl was getting preferential treatment over her own nephew, Victor. And she couldn't just kill Diane, to make way for herself. That hadn't worked when her own sister died."
"You're saying she had something to do with Whitney's death?"
"I don't see how she could have caused Whitney's cancer. But that kind of opened the door for her, she thought. She made her best play for Joel after her sister died. She came over from Memphis to Nashville a lot, she was as good to Victor as a mother could be, she offered to move in for a while to help Joel out."
"And he wouldn't bite," Young said.
"He wouldn't bite," my brother agreed. "So Felicia worked on this plan, worked on it for a long time. She took Tabitha back to this house, smothered her there on the couch."
And then I recognized the cushions. The blue cushions. No wonder they had struck me so much when I'd seen them that afternoon. I hadn't been listening to my inner chimes, and they'd been ringing away.
"And then Felicia buried Tabitha in this garden, wrapped in a black plastic bag. Her dad was putting in a new flower bed, and Felicia put the body in there, deep."
"Why'd she decide to bring her up?"
"One strategy hadn't worked. And Diane got pregnant, which was a stake in Felicia's heart. It was time to shake things up again. She had her ace in the hole; my sister. Probably, what sparked the whole plan was the discovery of the death records the parish priest had left. She knew Clyde Nunley, and knew he'd do almost anything for her if she worked him right. So she got him to invite Harper to the college, and she waited till her dad was out of town, and she dug up her niece. This was maybe three months ago, she wasn't clear on that.
"And her father caught her in the middle of it. He didn't know what to do. This was his only remaining daughter. So he did what she asked. He helped her take the plastic bag to St. Margaret's. They reburied Tabitha."
I shuddered, and Tolliver's hand tightened on mine. The EMT finished working on my face and put a butterfly bandage on the worst cut. The rest, she dabbed with antiseptic. She wrote down a few instructions and shook her head. "You're lucky," she said for maybe the twelfth time, and I nodded. "You're gonna come out of this much better than the woman who shot at you."
Felicia was in the emergency room getting her head checked.
Her father was on his way to the morgue. Felicia had killed him every way a daughter could kill her father. All these months, he'd known what his daughter had done. I was surprised he'd lasted this long. Three months' worth of days in this big house, thinking about what Felicia was capable of. It made me shiver just to imagine it.
"So what else did she tell you?" Lacey asked. He was wearing jeans and a cowboy shirt, oddly enough, one with pearl snaps instead of buttons. He had on cowboy boots, too, though I didn't know how he'd seen over his belly to put them on.
"She said that she planned on blaming her father's death on me. She'd kept hold of the shovel they'd used to dig the grave in the St. Margaret's cemetery. Today she planted it in the back yard to be found, because it still had dirt on it from the cemetery. When we told her that her dad was here and passed out, she hared out here and hit him in the head with that shovel. She figured he was about to break and give her up. After he was dead, she planned to blame his murder on me, and Tabitha's on him."
"Why would you kill Fred Hart?"
"I'm sure she would have thought of something," Tolliver said wearily. "After all, if a man like me kills a man like Fred Hart, I don't think there'd be too many questions. She would have thrown away her bloody clothes. Maybe if she couldn't figure out how to get blood on me that looked natural, she would have shot me, said she'd caught me in the house after I'd killed him. Who would you have believed?"
The police didn't like that. But I thought my brother was telling the truth.
"What Felicia didn't count on was Harper," Tolliver said, kissing me on the cheek. "I was never happier in my life to see anyone, as I was to see you when you popped up by that window."
"You came out here without a gun or nothing?" asked one of the cops.
"I don't like them," I said. "We've never had a gun."
He shrugged, like I was pretty stupid, and maybe I was.
But if I'd had a gun, I would have shot Felicia until I didn't have any bullets left. As it was, she was alive to stand trial for all the things she'd done. I got a lot of satisfaction out of that.
twenty
"YOU look like a cat attacked you," Victor said.
I just stared at him.
"Okay, not funny," he said. "I'm just really nervous."
I started to tell him we were, too, but I decided that wouldn't be a calming statement. And Victor really needed to calm down.
I'd figured it might help Victor take his mind off his family situation and at the same time broaden his horizons a bit, so I'd asked him if he wanted to come to the cemetery to help lay Josiah Poundstone's ghost. I was regretting that idea, at the moment. Victor was a little too excited, though he seemed thrilled that I'd asked him. He'd given me a big hug, which surprised the hell out of me and caused Manfred to raise his eyebrows.
I didn't know anything about the business of laying a ghost. So I'd called Xylda Bernardo, and Manfred had brought her. Manfred, resplendent in black leather and silver, had greeted me with a kiss. He'd shaken Victor's hand a little too long. I thought he was trying to get a reading; he wasn't making a pass. Manfred wasn't that diverse. At least, I thought so.
Xylda gazed around the cemetery. "Tell me about it," she said.
I explained what I'd seen and felt that night to Xylda, who seemed alert and attentive.
"So, his body is here, and so is his soul. He died of blood poisoning, you think? From a knife cut, given him in a fight."
"Yes. Really, he was murdered. I don't know who stabbed him, but I suspect it was his Beloved Brother," I said, because that was something I knew about. "I think the headstone might indicate guilt. Of course, it could just mean his brother loved him a lot. But I guess that doesn't matter. What really matters is Josiah's ghost being restless, because he wonders why he had to die, and then why his grave was disturbed so often."
"So, you want his spirit to pass on?"
I didn't even want to consider what other options Xylda could offer me. "Yes, that's what we want."
"Good," Xylda said enigmatically. "Do you sense him here now?"
It was another cold night, but at least it was clear and not raining. The old cemetery felt just as scary as it had the other time we'd come in the dark. The muted sounds of the city, the uneven ground—but at least the open grave had been filled in. We'd checked that out in the good old daytime, with the sun shining.