“It’s blood types, Tolliver. Dick Teague was saying, ‘I have type O, Sybil has type O, Mary Nell has type O, but Dell has type A.’ That was what Sally Boxleitner was looking up in her high school science textbook. She suspected right away when she found the note Dick left on the medical records right before his heart attack. Dick had discovered he could not have been Dell’s dad. Two O’s can’t have an A.”

“I can see where that might trigger a heart attack,” Tolliver said slowly. He put down his own fork, patted his lips with his napkin. “But why would that lead to Dell and Teenie getting shot?”

“I’m thinking,” I said.

The family of four had cleared out while we were eating, with the topic of the beauty pageant still unresolved. I would put money on the mother winning. The older couple ate in a leisurely way, and just as slowly paid and took their leave, exchanging pleasantries with the waitress. The single man was still reading the paper, and every now and then the waitress would top off his coffee cup. Tolliver paid our bill while I stared into space, trying to imagine what had happened next in the Teague family drama.

Okay, next Hollis’s wife had been killed. Sally had figured out that Dell wasn’t Dick’s son. Who would she tell? She would be more likely to tell a woman.

I thought she would tell her mother. But there must be something else . . .

We were in the car going back toward Sarne when I told Tolliver what I was thinking. “Why wouldn’t she tell Hollis?” he asked. “It would be natural to tell your husband.”

“Hollis told me she didn’t like to talk about her family troubles,” I said. “I think to Sally, Dell’s parentage would fall into that category. So, Sally told her mother. Her mother, rather than Teenie, because Sally was closer to her mother. Besides, the secret was about Dell, and Teenie would’ve told him.”

“So what happened next?” Tolliver asked, as though I would surely know.

I did try to puzzle it out. “Helen,” I muttered. “What would Helen do? Why would she care whose kid Dell was?”

Why, indeed?

Say Teenie and Dell don’t know anything about this. And then Sally dies. Sally dies because . . . she told. Because she told her mother. But I remembered Helen’s overwhelming grief, and I didn’t think Helen had known why Sally died. Until I came along and told Hollis and Helen differently, they’d thought her death was an accident. As far as I knew, Helen had never questioned that. And she’d believed Dell shot Teenie. Why? Over Teenie’s pregnancy, of course! And then, unable to face what he’d done, Helen believed that Dell had shot himself.