Five minutes later, I was standing out in the cold, bright day, wondering what I should do next. I couldn't stop myself from wondering if anyone was looking at me, and if that anyone had a rifle in his hands. I wondered if I would live long enough to get Tolliver out of jail. I despised myself for my fear, because at least I was free; my brother was not. He was probably not any safer in jail than I was walking around, especially if our enemy turned out to be the sheriff.
I could see from the traffic that school had let out for the day. So I wasn't surprised when my new best friend, Mary Nell Teague, pulled up in her little car. "Come for a ride," she called, and I climbed in the front seat. I was surprised she was by herself, and I was also surprised that she would want to approach me so publicly.
"Have you seen him?" she asked, backing out and driving away at what I could only think was a reckless speed.
"Yes."
"They wouldn't let me, since I'm not family or a spouse." She said this with sullen amazement, as if it was extraordinarily bull-headed of the jailers not to let a lovesick teenage girl visit a prisoner. I was getting so tired of this girl, with her burdensome crush and her sense of privilege. But I also felt a certain amount of pity for her, and I hoped she could still be useful in helping us figure out what was really happening in Sarne.
And she needed to start doing that now. "Mary Nell, what do you know about Jay Hopkins?"
"He used to be Miss Helen's husband," she said, "you know that."
"Did he have any contact with Dell?"
"What difference does that make? I don't think about trashy people like him."
"This isn't going to be easy, but it's time for you to grow up a little."
"Like I haven't, this past year?"
"You've had some tragedy this year, but as far as I can tell, it hasn't matured you any."
She pulled to the side of the road, tears in her eyes. "I can't believe you," she said chokingly. "You're so mean! Tolliver deserves a better sister than you."
"I agree. But I'm what he's got, and I have to do everything I can for him. He's all I've got, too." I noticed she still hadn't answered my question. But I figured that was a kind of answer in itself.
She wiped her face with a tissue and blew her nose. "So why do you keep asking me about people?"
"Someone took a shot at me today. Someone paid your teenage admirer to beat me up, and someone let him into my room. I don't think he thought of that on his own, do you?"
She shook her head. "When I talked to Scot yesterday, he was mad at me, and mad at you, but he was going to stay away from you. Mr. Random, the football coach, he got onto Scot in front of the entire team and gave him twenty bleachers, and then Scot's dad grounded him from television or the telephone for a month."
"So what could have happened in the meantime, to make him hide in my room like he did?" Running up the bleachers and back twenty times, and no TV or telephone. Glad to know terrorizing me came with a stiff penalty.
"Did you ever think it might have been your lover-boy, Hollis, who asked him?" Mary Nell had decided to counterattack.
"No, I never did. Why do you suggest that?" Mary Nell was trying to make me angry, and she was pretty close to succeeding, but I made myself hold on to my temper with a ferocious effort.
"Well, just maybe Hollis wanted the chance to save you from something bad, so he could look like a big hero? And maybe he shot at you, too, which I have only your word for—that it ever happened, I mean."
"Why would he shoot at me?"
"To make you need him," she said. "To make you hold on to him. Now that your brother's out of the way, you need an ally, right? So maybe Hollis even got Tolliver arrested."
I was impressed with Mary Nell. This was deep and indirect thinking from a seventeen-year-old. What she said made sense, sort of. I didn't want to believe her theory about Hollis, and I don't think I really did believe it, but I had to consider her idea for a second or two. It made as much sense as any of my theories, and maybe more than some of them. I remembered having sex with Hollis the night before, and I had a bleak, black moment of wondering if he might have betrayed me from the start. Then I realized, more rationally, that Mary Nell was striking back at me for many reasons, most of all for having a closer relationship with my brother than she would ever have.
Silly girl. But looking at her, as she mopped at her face and then brushed her hair, I realized that she was only seven years younger than I. Mary Nell's life had been no picnic, of course, but probably it had been better than mine. By the time I was Mary Nell's age, even aside from the lightning strike, my life had changed forever. I had watched adults I knew and loved, as they threw their futures away. Then I had lost my sister Cameron; literally, lost her.
"Don't look at me like that," Mary Nell said, her voice quavering. "Do you even know where you are? God, stop it!"
I blinked. I hadn't realized I'd been staring.
"Sorry," I said automatically. "Your mother says you had a tonsillectomy this past year?"
"You are so weird. So fucking weird," she said, daring to say the bad word in front of me, daring me to admonish her.
I didn't give her any reaction. "Answer me," I said, after a pause.
"Yes, I did," she said, sullenly.
"You were in the hospital here?"
"In the next town, Mount Parnassus. Our little hospital closed two years ago."
"Dell was in the same hospital when he had to have stitches?" I was dredging up Sybil's conversation from when we'd seen her house. It was hard going. I wasn't sure what I was probing for; maybe I'd know it when I heard it. "He had a broken leg, or was that someone else?"
"That was the boy who was driving the car. Dell had stitches in his head. At first the emergency doctor thought he might have other problems, and he was unconscious for a little while, but they just kept him overnight."
"And your dad was in the hospital, too." I was trying to make something out of nothing.
"Yes, he had pneumonia." Mary Nell's face grew sad. "He had a bad heart, and the pneumonia just weakened him. I told him he'd get better, but the day before he died, he said, "Nelly, I'm just not the man I was before I caught that bug."
"He called you Nelly?"
"Yeah, or Nell. He liked me and my brother being Nell and Dell." The teenager's little face collapsed as I watched her. "I don't have a brother or a father. Probably nobody'll call me that again in my whole life."
"Sure someone will," I said, trying to figure out what had rung a bell in my head. "You're a pretty girl, Mary Nell, and you have a lot of spirit. Someone will come along who'll call you anything you want him to."
She brightened, happy to hear this even from someone she thought she despised. What she actually felt toward me was probably something closer to envy.
"You think so?"
"Yes, I think so."
"Harper," she said, and I realized she'd never spoken my name before, "what's going to happen to Tolliver?"
"Like I said, I called our lawyer. He gave me the name of an Arkansas attorney. She'll be here tomorrow. She's coming from Little Rock. She's going to appear at Tolliver's arraignment. I know she'll get him out."
"You fixed that up yourself?"
I nodded. "Sure."
"I couldn't do that," she said, subdued. "I wouldn't know how to begin."
I didn't want to sound like Ozark Granny Wisewoman, but I said, "You'll know when you need to."
"I liked Miss Helen," Mary Nell said, surprising me yet again.