three

THE Cleveland was beautiful. The Cleveland was discreet. I was not going to want to see our credit card bill when it came next month.

A valet took our car, and we rolled into the lobby in a flurry of baggage and desperation, anxious to get away from the reporters who’d actually followed us to the new hotel. The staff was as courteous as if we’d stayed at the Cleveland four times a year. We were upstairs and out of reach of anyone in the twinkling of an eye. I was so glad to have time to regroup in relative safety and privacy, I could have cried.

The suite had a central living room with a bedroom on each side. Going directly to the bedroom on the right, I took off my shoes, lay down on my very own king-size bed, and surrounded myself with pillows. That’s something I love about really good hotels: the abundance of pillows. Once I was padded and quiet and warm, I closed my eyes and let my thoughts drift. Of course, they drifted right to the little girl I’d found in the cemetery.

I’d assumed Tabitha was dead from the moment I’d read about her disappearance, weeks before the Morgensterns had asked me to find her body. Based on the information in the newspaper accounts and even more on my own experience, that was a logical assumption. In fact, I’d been fairly sure the child had been dead since scant hours after her disappearance.

That didn’t mean I was happy to be right. I’m not callous about death; at least I don’t think I am. I think of myself as more…matter-of-fact. And I’d seen the Morgensterns’ anguish first-hand. Because of my sympathy for them, I’d persisted longer in the search than I’d thought was reasonable, and certainly long enough to cut into our profit very severely. Tolliver didn’t even charge them the full amount; he didn’t say anything to me, but when I went over our profits and expenses at the end of the year, I’d noticed.

Since Tabitha had been dead all this time, I thought it would be better for Joel and Diane to know what had happened to their daughter.

I could only hope that the sentiment I’d sprouted so glibly to the detective was valid. I could only hope that knowing for sure what had happened to Tabitha gave the Morgensterns some relief. At least they would know she wasn’t in the hands of some madman, actively suffering.

I found myself wishing I’d had longer with the body. I’d been so startled at the identity of the grave’s unauthorized inhabitant that I hadn’t spent enough energy evaluating the girl’s last moments. I’d only seen the blue cushion, a flash of the long seconds as Tabitha slipped into unconsciousness and then passed away—as she passed from the imitation of death to death itself.

I don’t believe that death and life are two sides of the same coin. I think that’s bullshit. I’m not going to say Tabitha was at peace with God, because God hasn’t let me know on that one. And there’d been a strange feeling to my connection with the body; a sensation I’d seldom experienced before. I tried to analyze the difference, but I didn’t come up with anything. That would bother me until I understood it.

I have seen a lot of death—a lot. I know death the way most people know sleep, or eating. Death is a fundamental human necessity, a solitary passage into the unknown. But Tabitha had made her passage years too early, at the end of a painful and frightening ordeal. I was sorry for the manner of her death. And something about it had marked her during that transition, in a way I had yet to understand. I filed it away to consider later; maybe another trip to the cemetery would help. It was hardly likely I’d be in contact with the body again.

I turned onto my side and stretched back to prop a pillow against my shoulders. I turned my thoughts down a mental path so familiar that it had ruts worn in it. That path led to my sister Cameron. Her face was fuzzy in my memory now, or it took on the contours of her last school picture, which I carried in my wallet.

Somehow, discovering Tabitha’s corpse in such an indirect and unexpected way gave me hope that someday I might find my sister Cameron’s remains.

Cameron has been gone for six years. Like Tabitha, she was snatched out of the stream of her life, leaving her backpack behind on the shore as witness to her departure. When Cameron had become way overdue at home that day, I started looking for her. I’d roused my mother enough to feel she could watch Mariella and Gracie for at least a little while, and I’d trudged through the sweltering heat, following the route Cameron took when she walked home from the high school. It was getting to be twilight by then. Cameron had stayed at school later than I because she was helping to decorate for a dance; the senior prom, I think.

I’d found her backpack, fully loaded with the schoolbooks, notebooks, notes passed to her in class, broken pencils, and small change. And that was all that was left of Cameron. The police had kept it for a long time, gone through its compartments, asked me about the content of every note. Then we’d asked for its return. Today, we carried that backpack in the trunk of our car.

When Tolliver came in, I was still lying on my bed. I’d rotated again, to lie flat on my back as I gazed at the ceiling, thinking about my sister.

“The car from the hotel’s going to pick up Art at the airport,” he said. “I got it all arranged.”

“Thanks,” I said, moving over to give him room. He lay on the other half of the vast king bed, shoes properly off. I let him have a pillow. Then I gave him another one.

“Looking back on the cemetery thing this morning,” he began, and gave me a moment to fix my attention back on the nearer past.

“Okay,” I said, to let him know I was ready to listen.

“Did you notice that man mixed in with the kids?”

“Yes, the guy who looked to be about thirty-five or so?”

“Dark brown hair, five ten, medium build.”

“Right. Yes, of course I noticed him. He stood out.”

“You think there was something fishy about him?”

“There was another older student,” I said, not really protesting Tolliver’s direction, but testing it out.

“Yeah, but she was a regular person. There was something off about this guy; he was there for a purpose, not because he had to be. You think he was some kind of professional debunker? There to spot how we did it, and expose us?”

“Well, I think that was Clyde Nunley’s goal in teaching the course, don’t you? Not an inquiry to stimulate students’ minds to seriously consider spiritualism and the people who practice it, but to prove that it’s all claptrap.”

“But not as…I don’t know, this guy seemed to have an agenda. He was purposeful.”

“I know what you mean,” I said.

“You think we’ve been set up?”

“Yes, I sure do think so. Unless this is most amazing coincidence in the history of coincidences.”

“But why?” Tolliver turned his head to look at me.

“And who?” I countered.

The worry in his face mirrored my own.

My business would die without word of mouth. But it has to be a quiet word. If I brought a trail of newspaper and television reporters with me, half the people who use my services wouldn’t want to see me coming. There are a few who’d love nothing better, but only a few. Most clients are embarrassed at hiring me at all, because they don’t want to seem gullible. Some are desperate enough to be just that. But very few of them want any outside scrutiny.

So restrained coverage from time to time is okay. Once, a really good reporter wrote a story on me for a law enforcement journal, and I still get business from that exposure. Lots of officers clipped that story; when all else fails, they may get in touch with me through my website. My prices scare off some of the people who apply for my services. I’m not a lawyer, and no one asks me to do pro bono work.

Well, that’s not true. People do. But I refuse.

However, I’ve never left a body unreported. If I find one in the course of a job, I’ll report it, and I never ask for extra money for that.

If I got into the news too much, I’d be absolutely grabbing at pro bono work, just to get the good press. I didn’t want to have to do that.

“Who do you think would hire such a person? Someone I didn’t satisfy?” I asked the ceiling.

“We’ve found everyone since Tabitha,” Tolliver said.

Yes, I’d had a long string of successes: cases with enough information to go on and enough persistence on my part. Bodies found, causes of death confirmed. Money in the bank.

“Maybe someone connected with the college who wanted to check on what the class was being exposed to?” I guessed.

“Could be. Or someone connected with St. Margaret’s, who felt the cemetery was being used in some irreligious way.”

We both fell silent, puzzled and unhappy about too many things at once.

“I’m glad I found her, though,” I said. “No matter what.”

My brother, who had followed my thoughts as he often did, said, “Yeah.”

“Nice people,” I said.

“You never thought what the police suspected—?”

“No,” I said. “I never believed Joel did it. These days, everyone looks at the dad first. Did he molest her?” I did my television announcer voice. “Were there dark secrets in the house that seemed so normal?” I smiled with a twist of my mouth. People sure loved believing there were dark secrets—they love discovering happy normal families are anything but. Truly, sometimes there were plenty of secrets, more than enough to go around. But Joel and Diane Morgenstern had struck me as truly devoted parents, and I’d seen enough of the kind of parents who weren’t to recognize the ones who were.

“I never believed it,” I repeated. “But—here they are. In Memphis.” We looked at each other. “How the hell could it have happened that her body turned up here, the city where her parents are living now? Unless there’s a connection.”

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 appearances 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.

We’d just finished printing out our statement when I had to answer the phone. The manager said, “Ms. Connelly, there are some people down here who want to come up to talk to you and Mr. Lang. Are you receiving guests?”

“Who are they, please?”

“The Morgensterns. And another lady.”

Diane and Joel. My heart sank, but this had to be done. “Yes, send them up, please.”

Tolliver stepped into the living room to update Art while I printed out the statement. Art read it and made a few minor changes while we waited. In two or three minutes a hand rapped on our door.

I took a deep breath and opened it, and received yet another shock in a day that had already been full of them. Detective Lacey had told us Diane was expecting another baby, but I hadn’t gotten a visual with that fact. Seeing her now, there was no mistaking it. Diane Morgenstern was really, really pregnant—seven months along, at the least.

She was still beautiful. Her bitter-chocolate hair was smooth and short, and her big dark eyes owed nothing to makeup. Diane had a small mouth and a small nose. She looked like a really pretty lemur of some kind. Just at the moment, though, her expression was simply blank with shock.

Her husband, Joel, was maybe five foot ten and stocky, powerful looking. He’d been a wrestler in college. I remembered the trophies in his study in their Nashville house. He had light red hair and bright blue eyes, a ruddy complexion, and a square face with a nose like a knife blade. How did all this add to up to a man women could not ignore? I don’t have the faintest idea. Joel Morgenstern was the kind of man who focused on the person to whom he was speaking, which might have been the secret of the magnetism he exuded. To Joel’s credit, he didn’t seem to be aware of this; or maybe he took it so for granted that he didn’t even think of the effect he had on women.

In Nashville, even under the circumstances I’d noticed how the female representatives of the media clustered around him. Maybe they’d been thinking the father is always a likely suspect, maybe they’d been trying to pick holes in his story, but they’d hovered around him like hummingbirds at a big red blossom. Not too surprisingly, the police had checked over and over to see if Joel was having an affair. They hadn’t found a trace of such a thing; in fact, everyone who knew Joel commented on how devoted he was to Diane. For that matter, it was universal knowledge how caring he’d been during his first wife’s terminal illness.

Maybe because lightning had fried my brain, maybe because my standards of judgment were completely different, Joel just didn’t affect me like he did most women.

Felicia Hart, whose sister had been Joel’s first wife, trailed in after Diane and Joel. I remembered Felicia from my first encounter with the family. She had been trying hard to be a good aunt to Victor, the son that first marriage had produced. She’d been aware that Victor was a suspect in Tabitha’s disappearance, and she’d been at the house constantly, perhaps imagining that the loss of their daughter had meant that Diane and Joel would not be able to focus on Victor’s needs and on his legal position.

“You found her,” Joel said, taking my hand and pumping it ferociously. “God bless you, you found her. The medical examiner says there’s a long way to go before an official identification, but the dental charts do match. We have to keep this to ourselves, but Dr. Frierson was kind enough to let us know in person. Thank God, we can have some peace.”

This was such a different reaction from the one I’d expected that I was unable to respond. Luckily, Tolliver was more collected.

“Please, Diane, Joel, sit down,” he said. Tolliver is very reverent toward pregnant women.

Diane had always seemed the frailer partner in the couple, even when she wasn’t so obviously carrying a child.

“Let me hug you first,” she said in her soft voice, and she wrapped her arms around me. I felt her distended belly pressing against my flat one, and I felt something wiggle while she was hugging me. After a second, I realized it was the baby, kicking against her stomach. Something deep inside me clenched in a mixture of horror and longing. I let Diane go and backed away, trying to smile at her.

Felicia Hart was no hugger, to my relief. She gave me a firm handshake, though she did put her arms around Tolliver. In fact, she muttered something in his ear. I blinked at that. “Glad to see you,” she said a bit loudly, addressing an area somewhere between us. Felicia was a single woman. I placed her in her early thirties. She had jaw-length glossy brown hair that curved forward, and her expertly cut bangs stayed where they were supposed to be. As a professional woman on her own, she could spend all her money on herself, and her clothes and makeup showed it. If I remembered correctly, Felicia was a financial adviser employed by a national company. Though I hadn’t talked to her at any length, I knew Felicia would have to be both intelligent and bold to hold down so responsible a job with such success.

When we were all seated, Joel and Diane on the love seat, Felicia perched on one arm of it by Diane, and Tolliver and I in wing chairs on the other side of the coffee table, with Art settled uncomfortably on a chair set a bit aside, I realized I had to somehow proceed with a conversation.

“I’m so sorry,” I said finally, since that was the truth. “I’m sorry I found her so late, and I’m sorry the circumstances make life even more difficult for you.” It made life a hell of a lot more difficult for us, too, but this didn’t seem like the moment to dwell on it.

“You’re right, this doesn’t look good for us,” Joel said. He took Diane’s hand. “We were already under suspicion. Not Felicia, of course, but Diane and I and Victor, and now that…” He had trouble going on. “Now that her body has been found here—of all the places on earth—I think the police are going to decide it was one of us all along. I almost don’t blame them. It just looks bad. If I didn’t know how much we loved Tabitha…” He sighed heavily. “Maybe they think we conspired together to kill our daughter. They’re paid to be suspicious. They can’t know it’s the last thing in the world we’d do. But as long as they’re focusing on us, they won’t be looking for the son of a bitch who actually took her.”

“Exactly,” Diane said, and her hand rubbed her stomach in a circular motion. I yanked my gaze away.

“How long have the police suspected you?” Tolliver asked. When we’d been there, Tabitha had been missing for several weeks, and the police hadn’t been around so much any more. But we’d been impressed at how cordial the relationship that had formed between Detective Haines, who’d been the Last Man Standing on the case, and the Morgensterns had seemed. I should have realized that the other cops might have developed other suspicions. Haines had actually gotten to know the Morgensterns a lot better than her associates.

“From the get-go,” Joel said, his voice resigned. “After nosing around Vic for a while, they got the idea that Diane was guilty.”

I could almost see why they’d suspect Joel, even Victor. But Diane?

“How could that be?” I said incautiously, and she flushed. “I’m sorry,” I said instantly. “I’m not trying to dredge up bad memories. I was sure, always, that you and Joel were telling the truth.”

“Tabitha and I had a fight that morning,” Diane said. Big fat tears ran down her cheeks. “I was mad because we’d just given her a cell phone for her birthday, and she’d already exceeded her minutes. I took her cell away from her, and then I told her to go outside to water the plants around the front door, just to get her out of the house because I was so angry. She was furious, too. Spring break, and no way to communicate with her three hundred best friends. She was just into that ‘Mo-THER!’ stage, the eye-rolling thing.” Diane wiped her face with Joel’s handkerchief. “I didn’t think we’d get to that until she was fifteen, and here she was, eleven years old, giving me the whole routine.” She smiled in a watery sort of way. “I hated to tell the police about this really trivial conversation, but one of my neighbors overheard us arguing when she came over to ask if we were through with our paper. So then I had to relate the whole thing to the police, and they turned hostile so quickly, as if I’d been withholding important evidence from them!”

Of course, to the police, this was important evidence. The fact that Diane couldn’t see that only proved what I’d suspected about her when I’d met her: Diane Morgenstern was no rocket scientist. I was willing to bet that she never read crime fiction, either. If she had, she’d have known that any such revelation would make the police suspicious.

All the incident really proved was that Diane was out of touch with popular culture, in the reading-and-television-watching category.

“When did you move to Memphis?” Tolliver asked.

“About a year ago,” Joel said. “We couldn’t wait there, in that house, any longer.” He sat up a little straighter, and as if he were reciting a credo, he said, “We had to accept the fact that our daughter was gone, and we had to leave that house ourselves. It wouldn’t be fair to the new family we’re starting, to have the baby there. I actually grew up in Memphis, so it felt like coming home, to me. My parents are here. And Felicia was here, along with her parents, my first in-laws. She and Victor are very close, and we figured the move would be a good thing for him. He’s had a very tough time.”

So everyone was happy here, except possibly Diane. It hadn’t been coming home for her. It had been a move to a strange city that held many memories for her husband, memories of his first wife.

“We’d had a lot of therapy, the whole family,” Diane said softly.

“We all went, Diane and I and Victor,” Joel said. “Even Felicia drove over to Nashville from Memphis to go to some of the sessions.”

I’d been to therapy, too.

The high school guidance counselor had been horrified when Cameron’s disappearance had exposed the conditions under which we lived. “Why didn’t you come to me?” she’d asked, more than once. And one time she’d shaken her head and said, “I should have noticed.” I didn’t blame her for not noticing; after all, we’d gone to great efforts to conceal our home life, so we could stay together. Maybe a part of me had hoped that our substandard parents would be taken away and we would be given good parents, instead; but that hadn’t happened.

“When is the new baby due?” Art asked in the cheerful voice parents used when they weren’t going to be having any more babies themselves.

“In five weeks,” Diane said, an involuntary smile curving her lips even under the circumstances. “A healthy boy, the doctor says.”

“That’s great,” Tolliver and I said, more or less in unison. I eyed Felicia Hart, who’d risen to stand behind the love seat. Felicia was looking less than ecstatic, perhaps even impatient. Maybe she thought the new baby would mean even more attention was diverted from Victor. It was also possible the childless Felicia was even more creeped out by pregnant women than I was.

“Today, we have to deal with Tabitha,” Diane said, to give us an easement back into the grim reality of the body in the cemetery. “How…you know how she died?”

“She was suffocated,” I said, not knowing any other way to say it. Severely deprived of air? Terminally oxygenless? I wasn’t trying to tell myself jokes, but there are only so many ways to talk about the COD of any individual, even a child, especially to the mother.

The couple did their best to take the news on the chin, but Diane couldn’t suppress a moan of horror. Felicia looked away, her face a hard mask concealing deep emotion.

There were many worse ways to die, but that would hardly be a consolation. Suffocation was bad enough. “It would be over in seconds,” I said, as gently as I could. “She would be unconscious, after a tiny bit.” This was an exaggeration, but I thought Diane’s condition called for as much cushioning as possible. I was terrified that she would go into labor right in front of us.

Art had the strangest expression as he looked at me. It was like he’d never seen me before; like the reality of me, of what I did, had just hit him in the portly belly he carried in front of him like an announcement of his own importance.

“We should call Vic,” Joel said, in his warm voice. “Excuse me for a moment.” He brushed at his eyes and groped in his pocket for his cell phone. Vic, Joel’s son by his first marriage, had been a sullen fifteen-year-old at the time of Tabitha’s abduction. I’d glimpsed him trying hard to be tough and contained in the face of an overwhelming situation.

Diane, who had seemed very fond of the boy and in fact had largely raised him—she’d married Joel when Victor was very young—said, “If he needs to talk to me, I’m okay,” as Joel rose to walk a few feet away, his back to the room, to punch in the number.

“How’s Victor done here in Memphis?” I asked Felicia, just to be saying something. Victor and I had shared a strange moment when I’d been trying to find his half sister. The boy had come into the living room of the Morgenstern home and begun to curse a blue streak, evidently thinking he was by himself. When I’d moved, he’d clutched me, crying on my shoulder, having to bend a little to do so. People weren’t given to touching me, and I’d been startled. But I knew grief, and I knew release, and I’d held him until he was through. When he’d done crying and my blouse was a blotched mess, Victor had drawn back, appalled at his breakdown. Anything I said would have been wrong, so I’d just given him a nod. He’d nodded back, and fled.

Felicia was giving a surprised look. I supposed she was astonished that I remembered Victor at all. “He’s done…middling,” she said. “Diane and Joel have sent him to a private school. I help them out a little. He’s such a fragile kid, hanging in the balance. At that age, they can go either way, you feel, at any moment. And with this new baby coming…” Her voice trailed off, as if she couldn’t imagine how to finish the sentence without criticizing Joel and Diane for their ill-timed fertility.

Joel came back and sat down by his wife, and he was frowning. “Victor isn’t holding together very well,” he said to us in general. Diane’s face simply looked exhausted, as if she had no energy to spare for maintaining someone else’s spirits when her own were so fraught with misery. “He came home from school early, after we called. We didn’t want anyone to see it on the news at noon and tell him when they got back to campus,” he explained.

We all nodded wisely, but my mind was on something entirely different.

“We never knew you moved,” I said, wanting to get that absolutely clear, “so we were astonished when the police said they were contacting you. You don’t have anything to do with the faculty at Bingham, do you? You’re not an alumna, Diane?”

“No, I went to Vanderbilt, and Joel did, too,” she said, bewildered. “Felicia, didn’t you go to Bingham? With David?”

Felicia said, “More years ago than I care to remember. Yes, David was in my class. I don’t believe you met him in Nashville, Harper. Joel’s brother.”

“Felicia’s parents are here in Memphis, too,” Diane said. “They both went to Bingham. And so did Joel’s. It was quite a scandal when he decided to go to Vanderbilt. Why are you asking?”

“Just trying to think of some connection between you and the school. Someone put Tabitha’s…Tabitha there, and someone made sure we were hired for this job.”

The couple sat and looked at me wide-eyed. I had the uncharitable thought that this increased Diane’s resemblance to a lemur. Though the pregnant woman looked as though she were about to bolt, Joel was alert and intense. The man had an overabundance of energy, and it boiled around him, even under these circumstances. Behind them, Felicia was staring at me with an incredulous face.

“Surely it’s just a coincidence,” Felicia said, finally, looking at me as though I were delusional. “You don’t think…you can’t imagine that someone created such an elaborate plot? How could someone have put Tabitha there, and then find you, get you here, make sure you found Tabitha? That’s just incredible.”

We all spent a second or two staring at each other. Art was looking from me to Felicia, as if we were playing Ping-Pong.

“I agree,” I said. “But I can’t make sense out of any other scenario. Actually, there’s not much sense in that one.”

“We have to issue some kind of statement to the press,” Art said, when he realized the conversation had reached a stalemate. “It has to be a statement that treads a fine line. We can’t rule anything out, like Diane just did. We can’t make any fantastic claims, like Harper did. We have to regret everything and admit nothing about our personal feelings about what might have happened.”

Tolliver was the only one who nodded his head in agreement.

“You know, our own lawyer is downstairs,” Diane murmured.

At the same moment Joel erupted. “No!” he said. “No! We have to condemn whoever did this to our daughter in the strongest possible terms!” Diane and Felicia both nodded their agreement.

“Oh, of course,” Art said. “Naturally, that, too.”