- Sybil and the sheriff were brother and sister.
- Sybil and Paul Edwards were lovers.
- Sybil’s son had been murdered.
- Sybil’s son’s girlfriend had been murdered at the same time.
- The girlfriend, Teenie Hopkins, was sister to the murdered wife of Deputy Hollis Boxleitner.
- Sally (murdered wife) had been killed after she cleaned the study of . . .
- Sybil’s husband, victim of an untimely heart attack, while he was examining . . .
- Medical records of his son (at that time alive) and daughter and himself.
- Also murdered—Helen Hopkins, mother of Teenie Hopkins and Hollis Boxleitner’s wife.
- Helen had been the cleaning woman for Sybil’s family for years, until she began drinking heavily and had an episode of violence with her ex-husband, Jay Hopkins.
- Her attorney in the case against her ex-husband, and her attorney in the much earlier divorce, was Paul Edwards, also Sybil’s attorney and lover.
- Terry Vale recommended my services to Sybil.
- Hollis had wanted to know for sure what had happened to his wife.
- Paul Edwards had been glad to pay us.
- Someone inflamed teenager Scot to the point where he accepted money (or maybe just followed the suggestion) that he lie in wait for me and beat me up.
- That same someone, or possibly someone different, took a shot at me in the Sarne cemetery.
- My brother went to jail on trumped-up charges; possibly to leave a shooter free to make a try at me, possibly just to shake us up enough that we would leave no matter what the sheriff had told us.
Tolliver stretched and yawned and came to look over my shoulder.
“What’s this for?” he asked.
“We’ve got to understand what’s happening. That’s the only way we can get out of here.”
“We’re leaving in the morning. I don’t care if they put a roadblock across the highway, we’re getting out of this town.”
fourteen
I had to smile, even while I shook two Tylenol out of the bottle and swallowed them down.
He went to the windows to look outside. “Ah-oh,” he said. “It’s coming up a storm.”
“That’s why my head’s beginning to hurt.”
“Maybe, too, you’re hungry?” he asked mildly.
“I ate a few hours ago.”
“It has been a while.”
“You ate half a sandwich. Let’s drive to Mount Parnassus. We don’t want to get into any more trouble.”
“Sounds good. But you know, we could just pack up our stuff and start driving now,” I said.
“Not with a storm coming on.”
It was because of me we couldn’t drive during storms, because sometimes I had a very bad reaction; another weakness on my part.
“We’ll go to Mount Parnassus,” he said. “It’s just twelve miles north.”