There was a tap at our suite door.
"The troops are here," Tolliver said.
"Well. The troop."
Art was missing a lot of his hair. What remained was curly and white. He was very heavy, but he dressed very well.
So he looked like an eminently respectable, sweet-natured grandpa—which just goes to show how deceptive appreances can be.
Art maintains the fiction that he is my father substitute.
"Harper!" he cried, throwing open his arms. I stepped in, gave him a light hug, and backed away when I could. Tolliver got a clap on the shoulder and a handshake.
We asked about his wife, and he told us what (but not how) Johanna was doing: taking art classes, keeping the grandchildren, remaining active in their church and several charities.
Not that we'd ever met Johanna.
I watched Art grope, trying to think of someone he could ask us about in return. He could hardly ask about our parents: my mother had died the previous year, in jail, of AIDS. Tolliver's mother had died years ago, of breast cancer, before we'd even met Art. Tolliver's dad, my stepfather, was in the wind since he'd gotten out of jail, having served his time on drug charges. My own father was still in big-boy prison, and would be for maybe five more years. He'd taken some money from his clients to support the drug habit he and my mother had developed. We never saw our little half sisters, Gracie and Mariella, because my Aunt Iona, my mom's sister, had poisoned the girls against us. Tolliver's brother, Mark, had his own life, and didn't much approve of ours, but we called him at least once a month.
And of course, there was never any news about Cameron.
"It's great to see you two looking so healthy," Art said in his heartiest voice. "Now, let's order some room service, and you can tell me all about this." Art loved it when we ate together. Not only did it make the meal billable, but it also reassured Art that Tolliver and I were normal people and not some kind of vampires. After all, we ate and drank like the rest of the world.
"It should be up in a minute," Tolliver said, and Art had to go on and on about how amazed he was that Tolliver had been so farseeing.
Actually, I was pretty impressed myself.
Art made notes throughout the meal as we told him everything we remembered about our previous search for Tabitha Morgenstern. My brother got out his laptop and checked our records to be sure of how much the Morgensterns had paid us for our fruitless search. We assured Art that we had no intention of charging them anything for finding her today—in fact, the idea made me sick. Art looked kind of relieved when I told him that.
"There's no way we can leave here without seeing the Morgensterns or talking to the police?" I asked, knowing I sounded cowardly.
"No way in the world," Art said. For once, he sounded as hard as he actually was. "In fact, the sooner you talk to them, the better. And you have to issue a press statement."
"Why?" Tolliver asked.
"Silence is suspicious. You have to say clearly that you had no idea that you would find Tabitha's body, that you're shocked and saddened, and that you are praying for the Morgensterns."
"We already told Channel Thirteen that."
"You need to tell everyone."
"You'll do that for us?"
"Yes. We need to write a statement. I'll read it on-camera for you. I'll take a few questions from the press, just enough to establish who you are. After that, I think questions will just muddy the water, especially since I won't be able to answer them."
I looked at Art, perhaps with a certain skepticism; he gave me big hurt eyes. "Harper, you know I wouldn't put you all in a spot hotter than the one you're in already. But we have to set the record straight while we can."
"You think we're going to be arrested?"
"Not necessarily. I didn't say that. I meant, highly unlikely." Art was backpedaling to firmer ground. "I'm saying this is our chance to get in our licks with the public, while we can."
Tolliver looked at Art for a minute. "All right," he said, when he reached his conclusion. "Art, you stay here while Harper and I go in the other room and write the press statement. Then you can look it over."
Leaving our lawyer no chance to offer another plan, we retreated to Tolliver's room, with his laptop to act as our secretary.
Tolliver settled at the desk, while I flung myself across the bed. "Dr. Nunley never said anything to you, did he, about Tabitha? When he asked us to come here?" I asked.
"Not a word. I would have told you," Tolliver said. "He just talked about the old cemetery, about how it would be a true test, since you really had no idea who was buried there and there was no way you could find out. He wanted to know if you'd be comfortable with that. Of course, he thought I'd make some excuse for you, trying to back out. Nunley was really surprised when I emailed him back, told him to expect us. He'd just had Xylda Bernardo, the psychic. She lives in this area, remember?"
I'd met Xylda once or twice, in the line of duty. "How'd she do?" I asked, out of sheer professional curiosity. Xylda, a colorful woman in her fifties, likes to dress in the traditional stage-gypsy style—lots of jewelry and scarves, long messy hair—which immediately makes people distrust her. But Xylda has a true gift. Unfortunately, like most commercial psychics, she embellishes that nugget of talent with a lot of theatrics and made-up flourishes, which she thinks lend her visions credibility.
Psychics—honest psychics—do receive a lot of information when they touch something a crime victim owned. The bad part is, quite often they receive information so vague it's almost useless ("The body's buried in the middle of an empty field"), unless you have a good idea what you're looking for to begin with. Even if there are a few psychics who can see a clear picture of, say, the house where a child's being held hostage, unless the psychic can also see the address, and the police find an identifiable suspect lives in that house, the building's appearance is almost irrelevant. There are even some psychics who can achieve all that, but then they have to get the police to believe them… since I've never met a single psychic who was also up on SWAT tactics.
"Oh, according to Nunley, Xylda did her usual," Tolliver said. "Vague stuff that sounded really good, like 'Your grandmother says to look for something unexpected in the attic, something that will make you very happy,' or 'Be careful of the dark man who comes unexpectedly, for he is not trustworthy,' and that's flexible enough to cover a lot of circumstances. The members of the class were pretty weirded out, since Xylda insists on touching the people she's reading. The students didn't want Xylda holding their hands. But that's the way it's done; for Xylda, touch is everything. You think she's for real?"
"I think most of what Xylda tells clients is bullshit. But I also think she actually has a few moments when she knows stuff."
Every now and then, I wonder: if the lightning had hit me a little harder, if I'd gotten a few more volts—would I have become able to see who caused the deaths of the people I find? Sometimes I think such a condition would be wonderful, a truly valuable gift. Sometimes it seems like my worst nightmare.
What if the lightning had entered through my foot, or my head, instead of jumping from the sink to the electric hair curler I held in my hands… what would have happened then? I probably wouldn't be around to know. My heart would have stopped for good, instead of for a few seconds. The CPR wouldn't have worked.
By now, Tolliver might be married to some nice girl who liked to be pregnant, the kind of girl who enjoyed going to home decoration parties.
Carrying this stream of supposition to an extreme length—if I'd died that day, maybe, somehow, Cameron would not have been on the road on that day at that hour, and she would not have been taken.
It's stupid and profitless, thinking like that, of course. So I don't indulge in it very often. Right at this moment, I needed to force myself to throw off this train of thought. Instead of daydreaming, I needed to concentrate on helping Tolliver compose the press release. What he'd said to Shellie Quail had been the gist of our public policy. We began embroidering on that. It was hard to imagine that anyone would believe us; after all, what were the odds that the same people who had failed to find the body in Nashville would find it in Memphis? But we had to try.