Grave Surprise (Harper Connelly #2)

Grave Surprise (Harper Connelly #2) Page 26

"Oh, he went for a while," David said, anxious to assure me that they'd done their best by the boy. "But Fred, he's an old-school kind of guy. He thought Victor should suck it up and get on with his life. I guess maybe he talked Joel and Diane around to his point of view, because when Victor moved here from Nashville, they never got him another therapist. Truth be told, Victor did seem a lot better once he was in Memphis."

"So Fred didn't want him talking to anyone," I said.

David looked surprised. "Not to a therapist. He's just an old fashioned man, the kind who thinks you need to keep your problems to yourself and let time heal you."

I was ready for David to be gone. In fact, I really didn't want to see any more of this extended family. In fact, I wished I'd never heard of Tabitha Morgenstern. I wished I'd never stood on the grave in the corner, but I couldn't help having the idea that I'd been herded toward that grave, I'd been asked to Memphis to find the child, and I'd done exactly what somebody wanted me to. All along, I'd been manipulated.

"Goodbye, David," Tolliver said, and David actually looked a bit startled that we were ready for him to leave.

"Once again," he began as he stood up.

"I know. You're sorry," I said. I felt so tired I thought my flesh might fall off my bones. It wasn't bedtime yet, and I didn't think I'd eaten since a long-ago light breakfast.

Finally David was out the door, and Tolliver said, "We're getting food right now." He called room service and placed an order, and though we'd called at a strange time, our food arrived quickly.

As we ate silently, I thought. We have a lot of thinking time, since we're on the road so much. Somehow when we're in a town, when we're not moving, we do anything but think.

I went back over everything I knew.

Tabitha Morgenstern. Eleven. The much-loved child, as far as I could tell, of upper-class professional Jewish parents. Abducted in Nashville, to end up interred in an old Christian cemetery in Memphis. Neither of her parents, the papers had told me, had ever been arrested for anything. Her older half brother, either. But that half brother thought he'd seen his father's car close to the house the day Tabitha had disappeared.

Tabitha had grandparents who lived in Memphis, but had visited in Nashville frequently. Her grandfather and grandmother Morgenstern seemed to adore her. In fact, Victor had told us her grandfather often took her places by himself. Did I have to suspect Ben Morgenstern of fooling with the child? I sighed.

And Tabitha had a sort of step-grandfather, Fred Hart, who seemed to have remained close to his former son-in-law. Fred Hart, a Bingham alumnus, owned a pearl Lexus, like the one that Victor had seen in the neighborhood the morning of the abduction. Victor had assumed he was seeing his dad, because it would have been reasonable to see his dad in that location, but what if he'd seen his grandfather's Lexus instead?

Tabitha had a step-aunt, too, Felicia Hart, and an uncle, David Morgenstern. Both had gone to Bingham. David seemed to resent his brother's successes, though as far as I could tell he also seemed to have cared for his niece. The attractive Felicia seemed to have quite an appetite for the male gender. There was nothing wrong with that. She was also very protective of her nephew, and there was nothing wrong with that, either.

I rubbed my face with both hands. There had to be something I could glean from this information, something that would help me lay Tabitha to rest. Being shut up with Tolliver, now that I'd had so many thoughts I shouldn't have had, was becoming intolerable. I dropped my hands to the table and looked over at him. He happened to look up at that moment, and our eyes locked. He put down his fork.

"What are you thinking?" he asked. His voice was very serious. "Whatever it is, I think you'd better tell me."

"No," I said, equally seriously.

"Then what are you willing to talk about?"

"We have to find out who did this, and we have to leave this place," I said. Movement would bring relief, being on the road again. "Don't you think a random stranger is completely ruled out?"

"Yes, because of where the body was found," Tolliver said. "It's impossible that it was a random act."

"Do you think I was meant to find the body?"

"Yes, I think that was why you were called here."

"Then it has to follow that Clyde Nunley was killed because he knew who'd suggested I be the next guest in the series."

"Maybe," Tolliver said slowly, "the key was finding of the priest's records."

I mulled that over.

"After all, it was the finding of the records that made St. Margaret's such a good subject for a reading. It was a controlled experiment."

"Sure. Dr. Nunley had to know if I was getting it right or not, and there was a way to prove that. There usually isn't."

"So she was put there for me to find. Maybe months ago, when the records were discovered." I groped my way through the thought. "Someone wanted her to be found."

"And that someone had to be the killer."

I combed over that one, too.

"No," I said at last. "Why would that have to follow?"

Tolliver was taken aback. "Who would know and do nothing?"

"Someone you loved. You might not do anything, if the killer was someone you loved."

"Not just someone you loved. A member of your family." Tolliver's face was very grim. "Your mom or dad or wife or husband or sister or brother... that's the only way you'd hide it."

"So we have a couple of ways to go," I said. "We can sit here and wait for the police to work their way around to the solution. They'll probably get it, sooner or later. Or we can skip out on this."

"Let's try to find out who could have put your name in Clyde Nunley's ear," Tolliver said.

Chapter seventeen

MRS. Clyde Nunley was certainly not Jewish. She was aggressively Christian. There were crosses and crucifixes in every room in the Nunley home, and a painting of a saint on every other wall. Anne Nunley was thin and dry and hollow, and she had few friends. She was even glad to see us.

We thought the professor's widow might not be willing to talk, especially after we saw all the crosses. Anne might not have wanted to talk to another faculty wife, or a neighbor, but she sure wanted to talk to us. Anne was a True Believer in spiritualism.

I've met all kinds of true believers: Christian, Jewish, Wiccan, atheist. I don't think I've ever met an Islamic true believer, because I don't think I've ever met a follower of Islam. What I'm trying to say is, your basic religion doesn't seem to make much of a difference to your belief (or lack of it) in the things that are more in my bailiwick, which is any kind of contact with the dead. You wouldn't think atheists would believe in the spirit surviving death, but some of them do. It's like people just can't help believing in something.

Anne Nunley, it appeared, was an aggressive Christian mystic.

After she'd appeared at the door to greet us, and invited us in, Anne had begged us to be seated. Without asking us, she'd brought in a tray of coffee and cookies. It was about ten in the morning by then, and the day was much brighter than the preceding days had been. It was warmer, too, in the upper fifties. Sunshine poured through the old house's eastern-facing windows. I almost felt I could find a rock and bask like a lizard.

Tolliver and I eyed the laden tray Anne set on the coffee table before us, and I recognized this as sheer overachievement. Anne Nunley was determined to be the best widow in the world. And I also thought Anne Nunley was running on empty. Her husband's sudden and unexpected death had sparked a little explosion in her brain.

"Tell me, do you think Clyde's spirit is at the cemetery still?" she asked in a chatty way. "I wanted him to be buried on campus; I think it's fitting. I've called the campus board that has St. Margaret's under its wing. I don't think I'm asking much, do you? He worked at Bingham for ten years, he died there, and he was practically almost buried there anyway!"

I blinked. "His spirit is not at the cemetery," I said, answering her original question. My simple statement was the springboard for a five-minute ramble on Anne's beliefs about life after death, the prevalence of ghosts in Irish folklore (no, I don't remember how that came into the conversation), and the absolute reality of a spirit world. I certainly wasn't going to argue the other way on that one.

Tolliver just sat and listened. Anne wasn't interested in him at all; she saw him as a shadow at my elbow.

"Clyde wasn't faithful to me at all," Anne said, "and I had a hard time dealing with that."

Total disclosure seemed to be the order of the day. "I'm sorry you had to endure that," I said carefully.

"You know, men are just pigs," she said. "When I married him, I was sure everything would happen the way it was supposed to. We wouldn't have much money, because after all, being a college professor is not the most remunerative of occupations, but we would have lots of respect, because you have to be smart to be a college professor, right? And he had his doctorate. I thought I would have children, and they would get to go to Bingham free, and they would grow up and bring their children home; this house is so big."

It was a big house, and decorated in just-turned-antique furniture I suspected had come from Anne Nunley's parents, or perhaps Clyde's. Everything was polished and neat, but not fanatically so. Everything was comfortable, and nothing was expensive. It was a good house in an old neighborhood with big trees that had lifted the sidewalks. The big hallway that we'd entered had two large open archways on either side; we'd gone right, into the living room. The other archway revealed another good-size room that appeared to be Clyde's home office.

"But the children didn't come, and Clyde didn't want to be tested, and there was nothing wrong with me. But he was seeing other women. Not students, you know, at least not while they were taking his classes. After they graduated, you know, he might see them."

She explained this very carefully, as if the exact details were important to me.

"I understand," I said. And I'd thought we would have trouble getting her to talk to us. The problem was going to be getting her to shut up.

"But of course, he never knew the little girl," she said. "His being in her grave is just a terrible... invasion. Is she still there?"

The sudden question took me by surprise. "No," I said. "But the man in the grave, the original burial, is still there."

"Oh, then our Lord wants you to lay him to rest," she said.

"I believe that's true."

"Why have you come to see me? Do you need me to be there when you do it?"

Since I had no idea what I could do about Josiah Pound-stone's ghost, or essence, or whatever you want to call it, I shook my head. "No, but I did want to ask you about a few other things."

She fixed her mad eyes on me. "All right."

I felt I was taking advantage of a woman who was not in her right mind. But here I was, and she was eager to talk.

"Did your husband see Felicia Hart or David Morgenstern, socially?"

"Yes, from time to time," she said, in a surprisingly matter-of-fact way. "And Clyde and Fred were on a committee together. Fred is active in alumni affairs, you know. His wife was, too, before she died."

"She died of what?" The women in this family seemed to have extraordinarily bad luck. Joel's first wife had had cancer, his mother had Parkinson's, Tabitha had been abducted... it made you wonder about Felicia's and Diane's futures.

"She had a heart attack," Anne said.

"That's awful," I said. I really couldn't think of anything else to say.

"Yes," she agreed. "Poor woman. It happened when no one was home, about the time Tabitha was taken. She was gone when he found her. What a sad family."

"Yes, it is." Though this family seemed to have a lot of tragedy, in Mrs. Hart's case, maybe a heart attack was exactly what it had been, and nothing more sinister.

"Do you think Felicia was seeing your husband as a girlfriend?" Tolliver asked. He tried to keep his voice smooth and unobtrusive so he wouldn't stop the flow, but Anne gave him a sharp glance.

"He may have been," she said, and now her voice was cold and hostile. "But then again, he may not have been. He didn't tell me names, and I didn't want to know. Felicia was here a time or two for one of our parties. We used to give parties."

That was too hard for me to imagine, Anne getting the house ready for a party, maybe wondering which of her husband's "girlfriends" he would invite into their home. Clyde, I knew instinctively, would have been embarrassed by his wife's Christian religious paraphernalia, while Anne would never have considered taking it down for a party. I hoped for her sake that he had simply let it go without comment, but my slight knowledge of Clyde Nunley convinced me he would have made secret sneering comments to his guests.

"Would Clyde have done something for Felicia if she'd asked him?"

"Yes," Anne said, pouring some more coffee in my cup. Tolliver had quietly been eating the cookies, Keebler's Fudge Stripes, which he loved. "Clyde liked doing favors for people, if it would give him traction with them. Felicia is pretty and she has a high-profile job, and she's active in the alumni club, so he would have done what she asked. He's been sorry David Morgenstern doesn't seem to be his friend, anymore, too."

She was slipping into the present tense, I noticed.