Grave Surprise by Charlaine Harris Page A

out intothe living room area to get a drink. Tolliver trailed after me, lost in thought.
    â€œI thought someone had drawn you to his attention, because he asked a lot of questions. If he’d been the one who’d originated the invitation, he would have known more about you. That’s my opinion.”
    â€œOkay. So we need to talk to him.” I sympathized when Tolliver made a face. “Yeah, me, too. He’s a jerk, all right.” Tolliver pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and checked a number on a folded piece of paper. Tolliver always has bits of paper in his pockets, and if he didn’t do his own laundry I’d have to be searching his pants all the time. He finally found the right piece of paper and the right number and punched it in. From his stance, I could see that he was listening to the phone ringing on the other end. Finally, a recorded message came on, and when the beep sounded, Tolliver left a message. “Dr. Nunley, this is Tolliver Lang,” he said briskly. “Harper and I need to talk to you. There are some things left unresolved after yesterday’s unexpected discoveries. You have my cell number.”
    â€œNow he’ll think we want our money.”
    Tolliver considered this. “Yes, and he’ll call back about that,” he said finally. “Come to think of it, if he doesn’t pay us, we won’t get anything for this. I can’t help but be glad we’re getting the Morgenstern reward money.”
    â€œI don’t really want to have earned it, you know?” He patted me on the shoulder; he knew exactly what I meant. Of course, he also knew that we would take it. We sure deserved it. “I can’t help feeling that we’ve been yanked intothis. I just hope we haven’t been shoved right under a ladder or some other bad luck thing. I’m scared we might end up taking someone else’s fall for this.”
    â€œNot if I can help it,” Tolliver said. “I know I’ve slipped up, but you can be sure I’ll do everything in my power from now on out to make sure no one can connect us with the Morgensterns’ mess. And it’s a simple fact that we didn’t take Tabitha, a provable fact. In fact, what date was she taken?” We looked it up on the Internet. Tolliver checked our previous year’s schedule. God bless computers. “We were in Schenectady then,” he said, relief in his voice, and I laughed.
    â€œThat’s plenty far enough,” I said. “I’m glad you keep such good records. I guess we’ve got receipts to back that up?”
    â€œYes, on file at the apartment,” he said.
    â€œNot just another pretty face,” I said, and cupped his chin in my hand for a second to hold him still while I gave him a kiss on the cheek. But my happy moment didn’t last longer than a few seconds. “Tolliver, who could have done this? Killed the girl, and put her there? Can it possibly be true that it’s a massive coincidence?”
    He shook his head. “I don’t think that’s even remotely likely.”
    â€œYou and I both know that massive coincidences usually aren’t. But I just can’t imagine a conspiracy so elaborate.”
    â€œI can’t either,” he said.
    Oddly enough, the next person we heard from was Xylda Bernardo.
    We’d just finished lunch. It was an uneasy meal. Art hadshared it with us, and since he ate a completely different kind of meal from us (he had a major lunch, and we like a light lunch), and he liked to talk business while he ate, I can’t say we enjoyed it a whole lot. Art was about to catch a flight back to Atlanta, since he couldn’t think of anything else to do in Memphis. The police weren’t prepared to charge us with anything that he could discover; and he’d made many, many phone calls to everyone he knew in the justice system in Memphis to try to find out. We’d basically paid a