“Sure,” she said, as if turning down a soft drink was unthinkable. Tolliver got one out of the ice chest and handed it to her. She took it with her arm extended as far as she could reach, to keep her distance from him. I pushed the other chair out to indicate she should use it, and I perched on the side of the bed.

“Can I help you?” I asked.

“You can tell me what happened to my brother. I’m not saying I think what you’re doing is okay, or even morally defensible.” She glared at me. “But I want to know what you think.”

I thought she had a good civics teacher.

“Okay,” I said slowly. “Maybe first you could tell me who your brother is?”

She flushed red. She was accustomed to being a notable fish in a very small pond. “I’m Nell,” she said, clipping off the words. “Mary Nell Teague. Dell was my brother.”

“You can’t be much younger than he was.”

“We were ten months apart.”

Tolliver and I looked at each other briefly. This girl was not only a minor, but the sister of a murder victim. And I was willing to bet she’d never been out of Sarne for more than a two-week vacation.

“Morally defensible,” Tolliver repeated, as struck by the phrase as I’d been. He rolled the words over his tongue as if he was testing the taste of them.

“I mean, I think it’s wrong, all right? Telling people what happened to their dead relatives. No offense, but you could be making all this up, right?”

No offense, my ass. I was sick of people telling me I was evil. “Listen, Nell,” I said, trying my best to keep my voice under strict control. “I make my living the best way I know how. For you to assume I’m not honest is an offense to me. There’s no way it couldn’t be.”

Maybe she wasn’t used to her words being taken seriously. “Um, well, okay,” she muttered, clearly taken aback. “But listen, can you tell me? What you told my mom?”

“You’re a minor. I don’t want to get into trouble,” I said.

Tolliver looked as if he were mulling it over.

“Listen, I may be a kid, you know, but he was my brother! And I should know what happened to my brother!” There was a very real anguish behind her words.

We gave each other tiny nods.

“I don’t believe he killed himself,” I said.

“I knew it,” she said. “I knew it.”

For someone who’d been so sure I was a fraud, she was taking my word without a second thought.