Tolliver gave the policeman a sharp glance. Hollis was in uniform. He looked good in it. I smiled down at what was left of my lunch.

“We’re ready to leave this town,” Tolliver said. “But we can’t go until the sheriff gives us the nod.”

“What happened at the funeral home?” Hollis wisely ignored Tolliver.

I told him that Helen had been killed by someone she knew and trusted, which was no revelation. Her little house had been as neat as a house can be that’s the site of a violent murder. No one had broken into it. No one had rifled it.

“Someone wearing long sleeves, not a uniform.” I knew that.

“That’s all you got?”

“No, I released Helen’s soul to heaven,” I wanted to say. But there are a lot of things that are better left unsaid, and this was definitely one of them. “Tell me, Hollis . . . someone told me that Helen had taken out a restraining order on her first husband, Jay. Is that so?”

“Yeah, Jay was a drunk like Helen was, at least at the time. He was drunk at Sally’s and my wedding, for sure. My uncle had to take him out of the church because he was getting loud. It embarrassed Sally real bad.” Hollis shook his head at the recollection. “He’s back in town, I hear. Evidently, Helen had made a will. Jay inherits the house and what little Helen had in the bank.”

“Why would Helen leave what she had to a man who abused her so badly?” That hadn’t fit the Helen Hopkins I’d met, however briefly.

Hollis cleared his throat. “Ah, well, she might have been grateful that he was willing to acknowledge Teenie as his.”

“No one knows for sure who Teenie’s dad was?”

“No, but there must have been at least a chance that Jay was. They never had a DNA test, though. Jay acted like she was his, and Helen put his name on forms, so—”

“Why would he agree to that?” Tolliver asked, his eyes still focused on the food wrappers. He was crushing them into balls and putting each ball on our tray.

“If he said she wasn’t, he’d have been admitting his wife wasn’t satisfied with him,” Hollis explained, as if the answer were self-evident.

“He’d rather acknowledge a bastard than admit his wife had slept with someone else?” Tolliver was openly skeptical.

“And it was the gentlemanly thing to do.” Hollis did some staring in another direction himself this time. He was looking at me, and I could feel the heat rising in my face. “Sometimes men do the right thing,” Hollis said, very seriously.

“But if Teenie wasn’t his, he was denying another man the chance to do the right thing,” I said.

“Weren’t a lot of men clamoring for the honor of claiming the baby,” Hollis said.