We went back in our original direction, and I knew by the tension in his body that this was the grave he’d been aiming for all along. When he guided me onto the grave, I knelt. This was death by violence, I knew at once. I took a deep breath and reached below me. “Oh,” I said sharply. I realized dimly that because Hollis was thinking of this dead person so strongly, it was helping me to reach her. I could hear the water running in the bathtub. House was hot, window was open. Breeze coming in the high frosted window of the bathroom. Suddenly . . . “Let go!” she said, but it was as if I were the woman, and I was saying it, too. And then her/my head was under water, and we were looking up at the stippled ceiling, and we couldn’t breathe, and we drowned.

“Someone had ahold of her ankles,” I said, and I was all by myself in my skin, and I was alive. “Someone pulled her under.”

After a long moment, I opened my eyes, looked down at the headstone in front of me. Sally Boxleitner, it read. Beloved Wife of Hollis.

“CORONER always said he couldn’t figure it out. I sent her for an autopsy,” the deputy said. “The results were inconclusive. She might have fainted and slipped under the water, fallen asleep in the tub or something. I couldn’t understand why she couldn’t save herself. But there wasn’t any evidence either way.”

I just watched him. Grieving people can be unpredictable.

“Vagal shock,” I murmured. “Or maybe it’s called vagal inhibition. People can’t even struggle, if it’s sudden.”

“You’ve seen this before?” There were tears in his eyes, angry tears.

“I’ve seen everything.”

“Someone murdered her.”

“Yes.”

“You can’t see who.”

“No. I don’t see who. I see how, when I find the body. I know it’s not you. If you were the murderer, and you were right by your victim, I might be able to tell.” Which I hadn’t intended to say: this was exactly why I really needed Tolliver to speak for me. I began to miss him, which was ridiculous. “Can you take me back to the motel, please?”

He nodded, still lost in his own thoughts. We began to make our way between the headstones. The sun was still shining and the leaves were still fluttering across the browning lawn, but the spark had gone out of the day. I was trembling with a fine small movement as my bare feet moved through the short cool grass. On the way back to Hollis’s electric-blue truck, I paused to read the name on the largest monument in the cemetery. There were at least eight graves in the plot marked Teague.