Charlaine Harris - Grave Surprise

"Detectives," I said, getting tired of the dance, "let me point some things out." We were on the love seat the Morgensterns had used yesterday, and the two detectives were in the wing chairs we'd occupied. Though Brittany Young was at least ten years younger than Lacey, and a woman, at the moment her expression was identical to his. I took a deep breath. "The Morgensterns hired me after their daughter had been missing for several weeks. Though I'd read the newspaper stories about Tabitha, I'd never met Diane or Joel or any other member of the family. I had no idea they'd call me to work for them. I couldn't have had anything to do with her disappearance, it stands to reason."

I thought the atmosphere eased a little.

Detective Lacey took the lead. "Who, specifically, called you? Felicia Hart? Or Joel Morgenstern's brother, David? Or maybe Joel's father? None of them will claim responsibility."

The direct question stopped me short.

"Tolliver?" I never talked to clients directly until we got to the site. Tolliver thought it added to my mystique. I thought it made me very anxious.

"That was a while ago," Tolliver said. He went into his room, came back with a three-hole binder filled with computer printout pages. He'd been messing around with his computer more in the evenings, I'd noticed, and he'd designed some forms for our little business, Connelly Lang Recoveries. He'd been going back and entering all our past "cases" into the new format. This notebook was labeled "Case Files 2004" and the first page in each file (a green page) was headed "First Contact."

He scanned the page, refreshing his memory. "Okay. Mr. Morgenstern senior called us, at the request of his wife, Hannah Morgenstern. Mr. Morgenstern…" Tolliver read the page for a couple of minutes, then looked up to tell the cops that the older Mr. Morgenstern had told Tolliver about his missing granddaughter, and had asked Tolliver if he thought his sister could help.

"I explained what Harper does, and he got kind of angry and hung up," Tolliver said. "Then, the next day, the sister-in-law called."

"You're saying Felicia Hart called you?"

Tolliver checked the name on the page, quite unnecessarily. "Yes, that's who called me." He looked blank—deliberately blank. "She said no one else would face the truth, but she was sure that her niece was dead, and she wanted Harper to find Tabitha's body so the family could find some closure."

"And what did you think of that?"

"I thought she was probably right."

"In your experience, are families often willing to admit that they think their missing loved one is dead?" This was addressed to me. Detective Young seemed to be simply curious.

"This may surprise you, but yes. By the time they call me in, quite a few of them are. They have to have reached some kind of realistic place to even think about hiring me; because that's what I do, I find dead people. No point asking me to come if you think your loved one's alive. Call in the tracking dogs or the private detectives, not me." I lifted my shoulders. "That's common sense."

I can't say the detectives looked horrified. It would take a lot more than that to horrify a homicide detective, I would think. But they did look just that little bit harder around the eyes.

"Of course," Tolliver chimed in, "when people's loved ones are missing, most often the family isn't exactly navigating on common sense."

"Of course," I echoed, seeing that Tolliver was trying to dilute the bad taste I'd put in their mouths.

"Don't you care?" Detective Young blurted. She leaned forward, her hands clasped, her elbows on her knees, her face intent.

That was a difficult question. "I feel a lot of different ways about finding a body," I said, trying to be truthful. "I'm always glad to find one I've been looking for, because I've done my job if I locate it."

"And then you get paid," said Detective Lacey, an edge to his voice.

"I like getting paid," I said. "I'm not ashamed of that. I deliver a service for the money. And I give the dead some relief." The two detectives looked blank. "They want to be found, you know."

It seemed so evident to me. But judging by their expressions, it didn't seem so obvious to Lacey and Young.

"You seem so normal, and then you say something just totally nuts," Young muttered, and her older partner gave her a stare that snapped her into the here-and-now.

"I beg your pardon," she said formally. "This is a subject I don't believe I've ever discussed with anyone, and it… strikes me as peculiar, I guess."

"It's not the first time I've heard that, Detective," I said matter-of-factly.

"No, I guess not."

"We'll be going now," said Detective Lacey, running his hand over his short hair in an absent gesture, as if he were polishing a favorite ornament. "Oh, wait, I have one more question."

Tolliver and I looked up at him. Tolliver put his hand on my shoulder and exerted a slight pressure. But it wasn't necessary; I knew this was the crucial question.

"Have you talked to any family member since you were in Nashville to search for the Morgenstern girl? Any phone conversations?"

I didn't even have to think about it. "Not me," I said, and turned to look at Tolliver, fully expecting him to echo my words.

"Yeah, I talked to Felicia Hart a couple of times," he said, and I used all my self-control to keep my face and body still.

"So, you had conversations with Felicia Hart besides the initial one when she asked you to come to Nashville to look for her niece."

"Yes, I did."

I was going to kill him.

"What was the nature of these calls?"

"Personal," Tolliver said calmly.

"Is it true that you and Felicia Hart had a relationship?"

"No," Tolliver said.

"Then why the phone calls?"

"We'd had sex," he said. "She's called a couple of times after that, while my sister and I were on the road."

I could feel my fingers curl into fists, and I made them straighten out, made my face remain calm. If it was also sort of fixed and rigid, well, I couldn't help that. I was doing my best.

Tolliver had a lot of appeal, and though we hadn't ever discussed it, he obviously enjoyed sex, judging from the way he tracked down opportunities to do it. I did, too, but I was way pickier than Tolliver when it came to selecting a partner. Tolliver viewed sex, as far as I could tell, as a sport he could play well, with any number of the people on his team. I thought of sex a little more personally. You revealed a lot of yourself during sex. I wasn't willing to let many people see that much of me, literally and figuratively.

Maybe these were typical male-versus-female attitudes about sex.

"So what did she want to talk about?" Detective Young asked. She had a narrow-eyed look that I didn't like, as if she felt she'd caught Tolliver out in a guilty secret.

"She wanted to blow off steam about the family situation, about Tabitha's being missing for so long, about how the stress was affecting Victor," Tolliver said easily, and I thought, You're lying. I looked down so my face wouldn't be so easy to read.

I thought of acting strange and making the detectives so nervous that they would leave, but I was really angry with Tolliver. He could make his way out of the tangle as best he could.

"What did she say in these conversations?"

He shrugged. "I don't recall specifics. After all, it's been months, and it wasn't that memorable." Aware he sounded less than gallant, Tolliver amended that to, "I didn't know I'd have to be telling anyone what she'd said. She was worried, of course, and not just about Victor. She was concerned about Diane and Joel, and about her own parents. After all, they're Victor's grandparents, even if they're not Joel's in-laws anymore. And—let's see—she said kids at school were accusing Victor of having something to do with Tabitha's disappearance, because a couple of times he'd mouthed off to his friends about his dad preferring Tabitha to him because Tabitha was Diane's daughter, and he wasn't Diane's son."