“Gave you a chance to see Helen again, too, I guess,” Sybil said in a very ugly voice. “Who else did you kill, Paul?”

“Sally Boxleitner?” I suggested.

Edwards gaped at me as if I’d sprouted another head. “Why do you . . . ?” he began, then trailed off, apparently at a loss.

“She figured it out, didn’t she?” I asked. “Did she call you?”

“She called me,” he admitted. “She said she, she . . .”

“What did my wife tell you?” Hollis asked from the open front door.

I wondered if Tolliver and I could just creep out through the kitchen and be gone. We could go back to the motel and grab our stuff, leave this town forever. I caught Tolliver’s eye and tilted my head toward the doorway into the rest of the house. He shook his head slightly. We were just spectators at the showdown at the OK Corral, but that still meant some injudicious move might get us killed in the cross fire.

Hollis didn’t look like the stoical cop I’d met when I’d come to Sarne, and he didn’t look like the lover I’d joined in bed. His eyes were showing a lot of white. He was wearing a long shiny waterproof slicker, and his uniform hat had a plastic bag on it. His face was wet with rain, and his slicker dripped onto the carpet. He was wearing rubber boots over his heavy cop shoes, and he had a glove on his left hand. His right hand was bare, holding his own gun in a very businesslike way.

I wondered if Mary Nell had a firearm tucked in a pocket.

“I didn’t kill her,” Paul said. “She called me, told me she had some questions about blood types. I agreed to meet her, though at the time I didn’t know what she was talking about.”

“You killed Dell,” Mary Nell said. “You killed Teenie, and the baby, and Miss Helen. How can we believe you didn’t kill Sally, too?”

“Sybil,” I whispered.

Only Tolliver heard me. His eyes widened.

“You can’t pin that one on me,” Paul Edwards said, beginning to pull himself to his knees. I thought it was strange that the charge would make him indignant enough to be defiant, with all that he’d admitted. “I think you can understand why I didn’t want Teenie to bring a child into the world with a bloodline like that,” and he half-smiled in a parody of a reasonable expression. “But I never laid a hand on Sally. Sally was a good girl. And definitely not mine, of course.”

“Good,” Hollis growled.