“How’d you make contact with Helen?” the sheriff asked me. His face was set in harsh lines. I could see the shadow of white whiskers on his face, as though his cheeks had been frostbitten. Lack of sleep made the lines across his forehead even deeper.

“She called us,” I said, biting off any color commentary. Tolliver had always advised me not to answer any extra when I talked to the police.

“What did she want?” asked the sheriff, with an air of elaborate patience.

“Us to come visit her.” I read the expression on Branscom’s face correctly. “She wanted to know who’d hired me, and why.”

“Sybil hadn’t told her you all were coming?” Branscom himself seemed surprised, and he was Sybil Teague’s brother.

“Evidently not.”

“Was she angry about that?”

We looked at each other for a long second. “Not that she said,” I answered.

“What else did you talk about?”

I spoke very carefully. “She told us she’d had a bad life for a while, but that she’d been sober for thirty-two months. She talked about her daughters. She was proud of both of them.”

“Did she ask you about their deaths?”

“Sure. She wanted to know how I knew, if I were sure how they were killed. She said she would tell their fathers.”

Harvey Branscom had been lifting his mug to his mouth as I spoke. Now the mug was lowered back to the desk. “Say what?” he asked.

“She said she would tell the girls’ fathers what I’d said.”

“The fathers of the girls. Both of them. Plural.”

I nodded.

“She never would tell anyone who Teenie’s dad was. I always thought she just didn’t know. And Sally’s dad Jay left years ago, after she put the restraining order on him. Did Helen mention any names?”

“No.” I was in the clear on that one.

“What else did she talk about?” the sheriff asked. “Be sure you tell me everything.”

“She wanted to know how I do what I do, if I thought my gift had come from God or the devil. She wanted to be convinced I knew what I was talking about.”

“What did you tell her?” He seemed genuinely interested to know.

“I didn’t tell her anything. She made up the answer she wanted to hear, all on her own.” My voice might have been a little dry.

“What time did you leave her house?”

I’d thought about that, of course. “We left about nine thirty,” I said. “We went by the bank on the way out of town. We got to Ashdown and checked into the motel about two, two thirty.”

He wrote that down, and the name of the motel. I handed him the receipt that I’d tucked in my purse. He copied it and made some more entries in his notebook.

“What time did she die?” I asked.