Grave Surprise by Charlaine Harris Read Free Book Online

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?”
    â€œI 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?”
    â€œWho are they, please?”
    â€œThe 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