"Did you and Scot talk about him coming here to beat me up?" I asked.
She flinched. "What are you talking about?"
So the Sarne grapevine hadn't gotten in gear yet, and she didn't know. "Someone paid Scot to come here and hide in my room last night. He was supposed to beat me up. It was just like the other morning, except this time he was by himself. If Hollis Boxleitner hadn't been with me, I could be in the hospital by now."
"I didn't know," she said, and again I felt guilty. But there's no gentle way to tell someone a tale like that. And I couldn't minimize it any more than I had. "What's happening to our town? We were okay until you came!"
That was a fine turnaround. "Your mother invited me," I reminded her. "All I did was find Teenie's body, like I was supposed to."
"It would have been better if you'd never found her," Nell said childishly, as if I could have predicted this outcome.
"That was my job. She shouldn't have been lying out there in the woods, waiting to be found. I did my job, and it was the right thing to do." I said this as calmly as I could.
"Then why is all this happening?" she asked, like I was supposed to supply her with an answer. "What's going on?"
I shook my head. I had no idea. When I got one, one that would release my brother, I was never going to put foot in Sarne again.
Nell left to go to school, looking stunned and very young.
I stopped in the police station to give a statement about the incident of the night before and ask when I could see Tolliver. I was almost scared to ask the desk clerk, the round woman who'd been there the first time I'd come in the week before. I was scared that once they found out I wanted to see him, they'd find some way to keep me from it. And I didn't even know who "they" were.
"Visiting hours are from two to three on Tuesday and Friday," she said, looking away from me as if I were too loathsome for her eyes to behold.
Since it was Tuesday, I could see him that afternoon. The relief was enormous. But until two o'clock, I didn't have anything to do. I was sick to death of that motel room.
I went out to the cemetery, the newer one. I wanted to have another visit with the rest of the Teagues, the deceased side of the family. This time I was able to park very close to the Teague plot, and I was bundled up pretty heavily, because the temperature was dropping. This was Arkansas in early November, so snow wasn't too likely; but in the Ozarks, it also wasn't out of the question. I had a red scarf wrapped around my neck and wore my red gloves. I was wearing a puffy bright blue jacket. I like to be visible, especially in Arkansas in hunting season. It was the first time I'd wrapped up quite so much this fall, and I felt as padded as a child being sent out to play in the snow for the first time.
I looked around me at the people-empty landscape. Across the county road, to the west, was a stand of forest. There was a small group of houses, perhaps twenty, to the north; they had half-acre lawns and sundecks and gas grills outside their sliding glass doors. No visible cars; everyone worked to maintain that slice of suburbia. The cemetery stretched south over the swell of a steep hill, part of a line that also blocked the view to the east. This was a peaceful place.
It was easy to locate the Teague plot. There was a large monument on a plinth in the center, with TEAGUE carved on it twice, once to the north and once to the south.
I moved through the Teagues, slowly working my way from grave to grave. They were not a family that had long lives, as a whole. Dell's grandfather had lived only until he was fifty-two, when he'd had a massive heart attack. Two of Grandfather's sibs were there, dead in infancy. Dell's grandmother had come from hardier stock. She'd been seventy-two, and she'd died just two years ago—of pneumonia, basically. I gave Dell a hello; his gunshot death brought the average down sharply, of course. I did the subtraction on his father's tombstone and found that Dell's dad had only been forty-seven when Sybil found him facedown on his desk.
Of course, Dick Teague had been my goal all along. When I stepped onto his final resting place, I felt an edge of anticipation, like you feel before you bite into a gourmet dessert. Down through the rocky soil my special sense went, making contact with the body below me. I examined Dick Teague with the careful attention he deserved. But I found the barrier of shoes and dirt and coffin were muffling my response. I needed more contact. I sank down in front of the headstone to lay my hands on the earth. Just as I did so, there was a cracking noise from the woods to the west of the cemetery, and something stung my face sharply enough to make me cry out.
I put my gloved hand to my cheek, and it came away with blood on it. My blood was a different red than the cheerful scarlet of the glove, and I looked at it with some bewilderment. I heard the same crack again, and suddenly I realized that someone was shooting at me.
I launched myself from squatting to prone in one galvanic motion. Thank God I wasn't in the Delta, where the land was so flat I wouldn't have been able to conceal myself from a fly. I crawled to take cover on the east side of the big monument in the middle of the plot. It wasn't as wide as me, but it was the best I could do.
For a miracle, I'd put my phone in my pocket, and I stripped off one glove and called 911. I could tell the person who answered was the woman I'd just talked to at the desk at the police station. "I'm at the cemetery off 314, and someone's firing at me from the woods," I said. "Two shots."
"Have you been hit?"
"Just by a piece of granite. But I'm scared to move." I'd started crying from sheer terror, and it was an effort to keep my voice level.
"Okay, I'll have someone out there right away," she said. "Do you want to stay on the phone?" She turned away for a minute, and I heard her ordering a patrol car to my location. "Probably just a hunter making a mistake," she offered.
"Only if deer here are bright blue."
"Have you heard any more shots?"
"No," I said. "But I'm behind the Teague monument."
"Do you hear the car coming yet?"
"Yes, I hear the siren." It wasn't the first time I'd been glad to hear a police siren in Sarne. I wiped my face with the clean glove. A police car pulled to a screeching halt behind my car, and Bledsoe, the deputy who'd arrested Tolliver, stepped out of it. He sauntered over to the spot where I crouched.
"You say someone's firing at you?" he asked. I could tell that for two cents he'd whip out his own gun and take a shot.
I got up slowly, fighting a tendency on the part of my legs to stay collapsed. I leaned against the granite monument, thinking a few deep breaths would have me back up to walking speed.
He looked at my face. His demeanor became a lot more businesslike. "Where'd you say these shots came from?"
I pointed to the woods across the road to the west, the closest cover to the cemetery. "See, look at Dick Teague's tombstone," I said, pointing to the jagged little white scar where a chunk had been blown off the edge.
Suddenly, Bledsoe was scanning the woods with narrow eyes. His hand went to his holster.
"What's the blood from?" he asked. "Were you hit?"
"It was the chip from the stone," I said, and I wasn't happy with how uneven my voice was. "The bullet was that close. The chip hit me in the cheek."
I spotted it on the ground, picked it up and handed it to him.
"Course, you coulda done it yourself," he said, with no conviction.
"I don't care what you think," I told him. "I don't care what report you write up. As long as you showed up and stopped him shooting at me, I don't care."
"You say ‘him' for a reason?" he asked.