Thirsty for Thursday – Grave Sight

As fans of our Gollancz Dark Fantasy Facebook page will know, every Thursday we bring you #ThirstyForThursday where we introduce you to a book or series we think you’ll be Thirsty for. This week, it’s GRAVE SIGHT, the first book in the brilliant Charlaine Harris series, featuring Harper Connelly, a kick-ass heroine who can telepathically find the dead…

Have a read of our extract below and don’t forget to click on the Gollancz Dark Fantasy page later on to find out how to win yourself a copy this awesome new read!

The silent witnesses lie everywhere, passing from one form of matter to another, gradually becoming unrecognizable to their nearest and dearest. Their bodies are rolled into gullies, shut in the trunks of abandoned cars, harnessed to cement blocks and thrown down to the bottom of lakes. Those more hastily discarded are tossed on the side of the highway – so that life, having swerved away, can swiftly pass them by without pausing to look.

Sometimes I dream I am an eagle. I soar above them, noting their remains, bearing testimony to their disposal. I spy the man who went hunting with his enemy – there, under that tree, in that thicket. I spot the bones of the waitress who served the wrong man – there, under the collapsed roof of an old shack. I detect the final destination of the teenage boy who drank too much in the wrong company – a shallow grave in the piney woods. Often, their spirits hover, clinging to the mortal remnants that housed them. Their spirits do not become angels. They were not believers during life, why should they be angels now? Even average people, people you think of as ‘good,’ can be foolish or venal or jealous.

My sister Cameron lies somewhere among them. In some drainage pipe or under some foundation folded into the rusted trunk of an abandoned car or strewn across a forest floor, Cameron molders. Perhaps her spirit is clinging to what is left of her body, as she waits to be discovered, as she waits for her story to be told.

Perhaps that’s all they desire, all of the silent witnesses.

ONE

The sheriff didn’t want me there. That made me wonder who’d initiated the process of finding me and asking me to come to Sarne. It had to be one of the civilians standing awkwardly in his office – all of them well dressed and well fed, obviously people used to shedding authority all around them. I looked from one to the other. The sheriff, Harvey Branscom, had a lined, red face with a bisecting white mustache and close-cropped white hair. He was at least in his mid fifties, maybe older. Dressed in a tight khaki uni­form, Branscom was sitting in the swivel chair behind the desk. He looked disgusted. The man standing to Branscom’s right was younger by at least ten years, and darker, and much thinner, and his narrow face was clean-shaven. His name was Paul Edwards, and he was a lawyer.

The woman with whom he was arguing, a woman some­what younger with expensively dyed blonde hair, was Sybil Teague. She was a widow, and my brother’s research had shown that she had inherited a great deal of the town of Sarne. Beside her was another man, Terence Vale, who had a round face scantily topped with thin no-color hair, wire-rimmed glasses, and one of those stick-on nametags. He’d come from a City Council open house, he’d said when he bustled in. His stick-on tag read, ‘Hi! I’m TERRY, the MAYOR.’

Since Mayor Vale and Sheriff Branscom were so put out by my presence, I figured I’d been summoned by Edwards or Teague. I swiveled my gaze from one to the other. Teague, I decided. I crossed my legs and slumped down in the un­comfortable chair. I swung my free foot, watching the toe of my black leather loafer get closer and closer to the front of the sheriff’s desk. They were shooting accusations back and forth, like I wasn’t in the room. I wondered if Tolliver could hear them from the waiting room.

‘You all want to hash this out while we go back to the hotel?’ I asked, cutting through the arguments.

They all stopped and looked at me.

‘I think we brought you here under the wrong im­pression,’ Branscom said. His voice sounded as though he were trying to be courteous, but his face looked like he wanted me the hell away. His hands were clenched on the top of his desk.

‘And that wrong impression was . . . ?’ I rubbed my eyes. I’d come directly from another site, and I was tired.

‘Terry here misled us somewhat as to your credentials.’

‘Okay, you all decide, while I get me some sleep,’ I said, abruptly giving up. I pulled myself to my feet, feeling as old as the hills, or at least far older than my actual age of twenty-four. ‘There’s another job waiting for me in Ash-down. I’d just as soon leave here early in the morning. You’ll owe us travel money, at the least. We drove here from Tulsa. Ask my brother how much that’ll be.’

Without waiting for anyone to speak, I left Harvey Branscom’s office and went down a corridor and through a door into the reception area. I ignored the dispatcher behind the desk, though she was looking at me curiously. No doubt she’d been aiming the same curiosity at Tolliver until I’d redirected her attention.

Tolliver tossed down the aged magazine he’d been riffling through. He pushed himself up from the fake-leather chair.

Tolliver’s twenty-seven. His mustache has a reddish cast; otherwise, his hair is as black as mine.

‘Ready?’ he asked. He could tell I was exasperated. He looked down at me, his eyebrows raised questioningly. Tolliver’s at least four inches above my five foot seven. I shook my head, to tell him I’d fill him in later. He held open the glass door for me. We went out into the chilly night. I felt the cold in my bones. The seat on the Malibu was adjusted for my legs, since I’d driven last, so I slid back behind the wheel.

The police department was on one side of the town square, facing the courthouse, which stood in the center. The courthouse was a massive building erected during the twenties, the kind of edifice that would feature marble and high vaulted ceilings; impossible to heat or cool to modern standards, but impressive nonetheless. The grounds around the old building were beautifully kept, even now that all the foliage was dying back. There were still tourists parked in the premium town square parking spots. This time of year, Sarne’s visitors were middle-aged to old white people, with rubber-soled shoes and windbreakers. They walked slowly and carefully, and curbs required negotiation. They tended to drive exactly the same way.

We had to navigate around the square twice before I could get in the correct lane to go east to the motel. I had a feeling that all roads in Sarne led to the square. The stores on the square and those immediately off of it were the dressed-up part of the town, the part primed for public consumption. Even the streetlights were picturesque – curv­ing lines of metal painted a dull green and decorated with curlicues and leaves. The sidewalks were smooth and wheel­chair accessible, and there were plenty of garbage bins carefully disguised to look like cute little houses. All the storefronts on the square had been remodeled to coordinate, and they all had wooden facades with ‘old-timey’ signs in antique lettering: Aunt Hattie’s Ice Cream Parlor, Jeb’s Sit-a-Spell, Jn. Banks Dry Goods and General Store, Ozark Annie’s Candy. There was a heavy wooden bench outside each one. Through the bright store windows, I caught a glimpse of one or two of the shopkeepers; they were all in costume, wearing turn-of-the-century clothing.

It was past five o’clock when we finally left the square. In late October, on an overcast day, the sky was almost com­pletely dark.

Sarne was an ugly place once you left the tourist-oriented area centered around the courthouse. Businesses like Moun­tain Karl’s Kountry Krafts gave way to more pedestrian necessities, like First National Bank and Reynolds Ap­pliances. The further away I drove from the square on these side streets, the more frequently I noticed occasional empty storefronts, one or two with shattered windows. The traffic was nearly nonexistent. This was the private part of Sarne, for locals. Tourist season would be over, the mayor had told me, when the leaves fell; Sarne was about to roll up its carpets – and its hospitality – for the winter months.

I was irritated with our wasted time and mileage. But I hadn’t given up hope yet, and when I felt the unmistakable pull at a four-way stop five blocks east of the square, I was almost happy. It came from my left, about six yards away.

‘Recent?’ Tolliver asked, seeing my head jerk. I always look, even if there’s no way I’ll see a thing with my physical eyes.

‘Very.’ We weren’t passing a cemetery, and I wasn’t get­ting the feel of a newly embalmed corpse, which might indicate a funeral home. This impression was too fresh, the pull too strong.

They want to be found, you know.

Instead of going straight, which would’ve gotten us to the motel, I turned left, following the mental ‘scent.’ I pulled over into the parking lot of a small gas station. My head jerked again as I listened to the voice calling to me from the overgrown lot on the other side of the street. I say ‘scent’ and ‘voice,’ but what draws me is not really something as clear-cut as those words indicate.

About three yards into the lot was the facade of a build­ing. From what I could read of the scorched and dangling sign, this was the former site of Evercleen Laundromat. Judging by the state of the remains of the building, Ever­cleen had burned halfway to the ground some years before.

‘In the ruin, over there,’ I told Tolliver.

‘Want me to check?’

‘Nah. I’ll call Branscom when I get in the room.’ We gave each other brief smiles. There’s nothing like a concrete example to establish my bona fides. Tolliver gave me an approving nod.

I put the car into drive again. This time we reached our motel and checked into our respective rooms with no inter­ruption. We need a break from each other after being together all day; that’s the reason for the separate rooms. I don’t think either of us is excessively modest.

My room was like all the others I’ve slept in over the past few years. The bedspread was green and quilted and slick, and the picture above the bed was a bridge somewhere in Europe, looked like. Other than those little identifiers, I could have been in any cheap motel room, anywhere in America. At least it smelled clean. I pulled out my makeup­and-medicine bag and put it in the little bathroom. Then I went and sat on the bed, leaning over to peer at the dial-out instructions on the ancient telephone. After I’d looked up the right number in the little area phone book, I called the law enforcement building and asked for the sheriff. Branscom’s voice came on in less than a minute, and he was clearly less than happy to talk to me a second time. He started in again on how I’d been misrepresented – as if I’d had anything to do with that – and I interrupted him.

‘I thought you’d like to know that a dead man named something like Chess, or Chester, is in the burned laundro­mat on Florida Street, about five blocks off the square.’

‘What?’ There was a long moment of silence while Harvey Branscom let that soak in. ‘Darryl Chesswood? He’s at home in his daughter’s house. They added on a room for him last year when he began to forget where he lived. How dare you say such a thing?’ He sounded hon­estly, righteously, offended.

‘That’s what I do,’ I said, and laid the receiver gently on its cradle.

The town of Sarne had just gotten a freebie.

I lay back on the slippery green bedspread and crossed my hands over my ribs. I didn’t need to be a psychic to predict what would happen now. The sheriff would call Chess­wood’s daughter. She would go to check on her dad, and she’d find he was gone. The sheriff would probably go to the site himself, since he’d be embarrassed to send a deputy on such an errand. He’d find Darryl Chesswood’s body.

The old man had died of natural causes – a cerebral hemorrhage, I thought.

It was always refreshing to find someone who hadn’t been murdered.

***

The next morning, when Tolliver and I entered the coffee shop (Kountry Good Eats) that was conveniently by the motel, the whole group was there, ensconced in a little private room. The doors to the room were open, so they couldn’t miss our entrance. The dirty plates on the table in front of them, the two empty chairs, and the pot of coffee all indicated we were anticipated. Tolliver nudged me, and we exchanged looks.

I was glad I’d already put on my makeup. Usually, I don’t bother until I’ve had my coffee.

It would have been too coy to pick another table, so I led the way to the open doors of the meeting room, the news­paper I’d bought from a vending machine tucked under my arm. The cramped room was almost filled with a big round table. Sarne’s movers and shakers sat around that table, staring at us. I tried to remember if I’d combed my hair that morning. Tolliver would’ve told me if I’d looked really bed-headed, I told myself. I keep my hair short. It has lots of body, and it’s curly, so if I let it grow, I have a black bush to deal with. Tolliver is lucky; his is straight, and he lets it grow until he can tie it back. Then he’ll get tired of it and whack it off. Right now, it was short.

‘Sheriff,’ I said, nodding. ‘Mr Edwards, Ms Teague, Mr Vale. How are you all this morning?’ Tolliver held out my chair and I sat. This was an extra, for-show courtesy. He figures the more honor he shows me publicly, the more the public will feel I’m entitled to. Sometimes it works that way.

The waitress had filled my coffee cup and taken my first swallow before the sheriff spoke. I tore my gaze away from my paper, still folded by my plate. I really, really like to read the paper while I drink my coffee.

‘He was there,’ Harvey Branscom said heavily. The man’s face was ten years older than it’d been the night before, and there was white stubble on his cheeks.

‘Mr Chesswood, you mean.’ I ordered the fruit plate and some yogurt from a waitress who seemed to think that was a strange choice. Tolliver got French toast and bacon and a flirtatious look. He’s hell on waitresses.

‘Yeah,’ the sheriff said. ‘Mr Chesswood. Darryl Chess-wood. He was a good friend of my fathers.’ He said this with a heavy emphasis, as if the fact that I’d told him where the old man’s body was had laid the responsibility for the death at my door.

‘Sorry for your loss,’ Tolliver said, as a matter of form. I nodded. After that, I let the silence expand. With a gesture, Tolliver offered to refill my coffee cup, but I raised my hand to show him how steady it was today. I took another deep sip gratefully, and I topped the cup off. I touched Tolliver’s mug to ask if he was ready for more, but he shook his head.

Under the furtive scrutiny of all those eyes, I wasn’t able to open the newspaper I had folded in front of me. I had to wait on these yahoos to make up their minds to something they’d already agreed to do. I’d felt optimistic when I’d seen them waiting for us, but that optimism was rapidly deter­iorating.

A lot of eye signaling was going on among the Sarnites (Sarnians?). Paul Edwards leaned forward to deliver the result of all this conferencing. He was a handsome man, and he was used to being noticed.

‘How did Mr Chesswood die?’ he asked, as if it were the bonus question.

‘Cerebral hemorrhage.’ God, these people. I looked at my paper longingly.

Edwards leaned back as though I’d socked him in the mouth. They all did some more eye signaling. My fruit arrived – sliced cantaloupe that was hard and tasteless, canned pineapple, a banana in the peel, and some grapes. Well, after all, it was fall. When Tolliver had been served his eggs and toast, we began to eat.

‘We’re sorry there may have been some hesitation last night,’ Sybil Teague said. ‘Especially since it seems you, ah, interpreted it as us backing out on our agreement.’

‘Yes, I did take it that way. Tolliver?’

‘I took it that way, too,’ he said solemnly. Tolliver has acne-scarred cheeks and dark eyes and a deep, resonant voice. Whatever he says sounds significant.

‘I just got cold feet, I guess.’ She tried to look charmingly apologetic, but it didn’t work for me. ‘When Terry told me what he’d heard about you, and Harvey agreed to contact you, we had no idea what we were getting into. Hiring someone like you is not something I’ve ever done before.’

‘There is no one like Harper,’ Tolliver said flatly. He was looking up from his plate, meeting their eyes.

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.’

‘They 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.’

***

Round 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.’

‘Why wasn’t anyone looking for Teenie?’

‘No one knew Teenie was with Dell. Her mom didn’t realize Teenie was missing for almost twenty hours, maybe longer. She didn’t know about Dell, and she delayed calling the police.’

‘How long ago was this?’

‘Maybe six months ago.’

Hmm. Something fishy, here. ‘How come we’re just being called out now?’

‘Because half the town thinks that Teenie was killed and buried by Dell, and then he committed suicide. It’s making Sybil crazy. Teenie’s mom’s hard up. Even if she thought of calling you in, she couldn’t afford you. Sybil decided to fund this, after she heard about you through Terry, who went to some mayor’s conference and talked to the head honcho of some little town in the Arklatex.’ I glanced over at Tolliver. ‘El Dorado,’ he murmured, and I nodded after a second, remembering. Paul Edwards said, ‘Sybil can’t stand the shame of the suspicion. She liked Teenie, no matter how wild the girl was. Sybil really assumed she’d be part of their family some day.’

‘No Mister Teague?’ I asked. ‘She’s a widow, right?’

‘Yes, Sybil’s a fairly recent widow. She’s got a daughter, too, Mary Nell, who’s seventeen.’

‘So why were Teenie and Dell out here?’

He shrugged, with a half smile. ‘That’s a question no one ever asked; I mean, hell, seventeen, in the woods in spring . . . I guess we all thought it was a little obvious.’

‘But they parked up by the road.’ That was what was obvious, but apparently not to Paul Edwards. ‘Kids wanting to have sex, they’re going to hide their car better than that. Small town kids know how easy it is to be caught out.’

Edwards looked surprised, his lean dark face shutting down on sudden and unwelcome thoughts. ‘Not much traffic out on this road,’ he said, but without much con­viction.

I put on my dark glasses. Edwards again looked at me askance. It was an overcast day. I nodded to Tolliver.

‘Lay on, Macduff,’ Tolliver said, to Paul Edwards’s con­fusion. Edwards’s high school must have done Julius Caesar instead of Macbeth. Tolliver gestured to the woods, and Edwards, looking relieved to understand his mission, began to lead us downhill.

It was steep going. Tolliver stayed by my side, as he always did; I was abstracted, and he knew I might fall. It had happened before.

After twenty minutes of careful, slow, downhill hiking, made even trickier by the slippery leaves and pine needles blanketing the steep slope, we came to a large fallen oak piled with leaves, branches, and other detritus. It was easy to see that a heavy rainfall would sweep debris downslope, to lodge against the tree.

‘This is where Dell was found,’ Paul Edwards said. He pointed to the downslope side of the fallen oak. I wasn’t surprised it had taken two days to find Dell Teague’s body, even in the spring; but I was startled at the location of the corpse. I was glad I’d put on the dark glasses.

‘On that side of the log?’ I asked, pointing to make sure I had it right.

‘Yes,’ Edwards said.

‘And he had a gun? It was by his body?’

‘Well, no.’

‘But the theory was that he’d shot himself?’

‘Yeah, that’s what the sheriff’s office said.’

‘Obvious problem there.’

‘The sheriff thought maybe the gun could’ve been grabbed by a hunter who didn’t report what he found. Or maybe one of the guys who actually did find Dell lifted the gun. After all, guns are expensive and almost everyone here uses firearms of some kind.’ Edwards shrugged. ‘Or, if Dell shot himself on the upslope side of the log and fell over it, the gun could have slid down the hill quite a distance, gotten hidden like that.’

‘So the wounds – how many were there?’

‘Two. One, a graze to the side of his head, was counted as a . . . sort of a first try. Then, through the eye.’

‘So the two wounds were counted as suicide wounds, one unsuccessful and one not, and no gun was found. And he was on the downslope side of the log.’

‘Yes, ma’am.’ The lawyer took off his hat, slapped it against his leg.

This was all wrong. Well, maybe . . . ‘How was he lying? What position?’

‘What, you want me to show you?’

‘Yes. Did you see him?’

‘Yes, ma’am, I sure did. I came out to identify him. Didn’t want his mom to see him like that. Sybil and I have been friends for years.’

‘Then just humor me by assuming the position Dell was in, okay?’

Edwards looked as if he wished he were elsewhere. He knelt on the ground, reluctance in every line of his body. He was facing the fallen tree. Putting out a hand to steady himself, he sank down to the ground. His legs were bent at the knees and he was on his right side.

Tolliver moved behind me. ‘This ain’t right,’ he whispered in my ear.

I nodded agreement. ‘Okay, thanks,’ I said out loud. Paul Edwards scrambled to his feet.

‘I don’t see why you needed to see where Dell was, anyway,’ he said, trying his best not to sound accusatory. ‘We’re looking for Teenie.’

‘What’s her last name?’ Not that it mattered for search purposes, but I’d forgotten; and it showed respect, to know the name.

‘Teenie Hopkins. Monteen Hopkins.’

I was still upslope of the fallen tree, and I began making my way to the right. It felt appropriate, and it was as good a way to begin as any.

‘You might as well go back up to your SUV,’ I heard Tolliver telling our reluctant escort.

‘You might need help,’ Edwards said.

‘We do, I’ll come get you.’

I didn’t worry about us getting lost. Tolliver’s job was to prevent that, and he’d never failed me; except for once, in the desert, and I’d teased him about that for so long that he’d about gone crazy. Of course, since we’d nearly died, it was a lesson worth reinforcing.

It was best if I could walk with my eyes closed, but on this terrain that would be dangerous. The dark glasses helped, blocking out some of the color and life around me.

For the first thirty minutes of struggling across the steep slope, all I felt were the faint pings of ancient deaths. The world is sure full of dead people.

When I was convinced that no matter how stealthily he might be able to move, Paul Edwards could not have fol­lowed us, I paused at a rocky outcrop and took off my dark glasses. I looked at Tolliver.

‘Bullshit,’ he said.

‘No kidding.’

‘The gun’s missing, but it’s suicide? Shot twice, and it’s suicide? I could swallow one of those, but not both. And anyone who’s going to kill himself, he’s going to sit on the log and think about it. He’s not going to stand downhill of a landmark like that. Suicides go up.’ We’d had experience.

‘Besides,’ I said, ‘he fell on the hand that would’ve been holding the gun. If by some weird chance that should have happened, I feel pretty confident that no one would be reaching under the corpse to steal the gun.’

‘Only someone with a cast-iron stomach.’

‘And through the eye! Have you ever heard of anyone shooting himself like that?’

Tolliver shook his head.

‘Someone done killed that boy,’ he said. Some days Tolliver is more country than others.

‘Damn straight,’ I said.

We thought about that for a minute. ‘But we better keep on looking for the girl,’ I said. Tolliver would expect me to make up my own mind about that.

He nodded. ‘She’s out here, too,’ he said, a little question in his voice.

‘Most likely.’ I cocked my head to one side while I considered. ‘Unless the boy was killed trying to stop some­one from taking her.’ We started walking again, and the ground became easier going; certainly not a flat surface, but not so steep.

There are worse ways to spend a fall day than walking through the woods while the leaves are brilliant, the sun dappling the ground from time to time when the clouds shifted. I felt out with all my senses. We tracked a ping that, upon attaining, proved too old by a decade to be the girl. When I was standing a foot from the site, I knew the body to be that of a black male who had died of exposure. He had become naturally buried under leaves, branches, and dirt that had washed downhill over the course of the past decade. What you could see was blackened ribs with tat­tered cloth and bits of muscle still clinging to the bones.

I took one of the red cloth strips I keep in my jacket pocket, and Tolliver took a whippy length of wire from a supply he kept stashed in a long pocket on his pants leg. I tied a strip to one end of the wire while Tolliver ran the other end into the ground. We’d walked maybe a quarter of a mile southwest from the fallen tree, and I jotted that down.

‘Hunting accident,’ Tolliver suggested. I nodded. I can’t always pin it down exactly, but the moment of death had that feel: panic, solitude. Long-suffering. I was certain he’d fallen out of his deer stand, breaking his back. He’d lain there until the elements claimed him. There were a few pieces of wood still nailed way up in the tree. Named Bright? Mark Bright? Something like that.

Well, he wasn’t part of my paycheck. This man was my second freebie for the town of Sarne. Time to earn some money.

We started off again. I began working my way to the east, but I felt uneasy. After we’d proceeded maybe sixty feet from the hunter’s bones, I got a welcome, sharp buzz from the north. Uphill, which was slightly odd. But then I realized that we had to go uphill to get to the road. The closer to the road I climbed, the closer I approached the remains of Teenie Hopkins – or some young white girl. The buzzing turned into a continuous drone, and I fell to my knees in the leaves. She was there. Not all of her, but enough. Some big branches had been thrown across her for concealment, but now they were dead and dry. Teenie Hopkins had spent a long, hot summer under those branches. But she still made more of a corpse than the hunter, despite insects, animals, and a few months of weather.

Tolliver knelt by me, one arm around me.

‘Bad?’ he asked. Though my eyes were closed, I could feel the movements of his body as his head turned, checking in all directions. Once we’d been surprised at the dumpsite by the killer returning with another body. Talk about your irony.

This was the hard part. This was the worst part. Norm­ally, finding a corpse simply indicated I’d been successful. The manner of its becoming a corpse did not particularly affect me. This was my job. All people had to die somehow or other. But this rotting thing in the leaves . . . she’d been running, running, breath whistling in and out, reduced from a person to a panicked organism, and then the bullet had entered her back and then another one had . . .

I fainted.

Tolliver was holding me in his lap. We were among the leaves – oak and gum and sassafras and maple – a ruffle of gold and brown and red. He had his back to a big old gum tree, and I was sure he was uncomfortable with all the gum-balls that must be pressing into his butt.

‘Come on, baby, wake up,’ he was telling me, and from the sound of his voice, it wasn’t the first time he’d said it.

‘I’m awake,’ I said, hating how weak my voice came out.

‘Jesus, Harper. Don’t do that.’

‘Sorry.’

I leaned my face against his chest for one more minute, sighed, and reasserted myself by scrambling to my feet. I wavered back and forth for a second until I got stabilized.

‘What killed her?’ he asked.

‘Shot in the back, twice.’

He waited to see if I’d add more.

‘She was running,’ I explained. So he would understand her terror and her desperation, in the last moments of her life.

Last minutes are hardly ever that bad.

Of course, my standard is probably different from most peoples.