As if she’d heard my inner comment, Sybil said, “She never wanted to sit down and talk to me, so we could work out what to do. I’d call and get someone else. I’d send a message, and she wouldn’t respond.” Sybil shook her head. “And now it’s too late,” she said dramatically, able to be insincere now that she was no longer talking about the tragedy of her son. “Poor Helen. But at least she was spared the burial of her daughter. Harvey will catch the one who did it. The son of a bitch’ll try to sell something he stole from Helen, or he’ll get drunk in a bar and tell some buddy of his. Harvey says that’s the way it works.”

Sybil Teague herself would never know how things worked, I thought. In some way I had yet to define, she was so far from the truth she wouldn’t know it if it bit her in the ass.

eleven

“WHY aren’t you one of those computer hackers?” I asked Tolliver. “Then I could tell you all this, and you’d have some brilliant idea, and you’d hack into the law enforcement system, or the Teagues’ home computer, and find out some critical information, and I’d put it to brilliant use.”

“You need to stop reading mysteries for a while,” Tolliver said, braking gently for one of the town’s numerous four-way stops. “Or get a new sidekick.”

“Sidekick?”

“Yeah, if you’re the brilliant sleuth, I must be the slightly denser but brilliant-in-my-own-useful-way sidekick, right?”

“Yes, Watson.”

“More like Sharona,” he muttered.

“That’d make me Monk?”

“If the shoe fits.”

Actually, that hurt a little bit, the way a joke does when it’s just a tad too close to the truth.

“Of course, you’re a lot cuter,” he said in a judicious voice, and I felt better. A little.

“Listen, did that sound like Helen Hopkins to you, all those things Sybil said?”

“No,” he said promptly. “By the way, where are we going?”

“To Helen Hopkins’ house. Jay Hopkins wants to meet with us.”

“Why?”

“I have no idea.”

“Well, it sounded like neither of them really wanted to make the effort to talk to each other, despite the fact that one was the mother of a dead teenager, and the other was the mom of a missing teenager. And those two kids loved each other. But it must have drenched them with a bucket of ice water, finding out Teenie was pregnant.”

“Yeah. And evidently, she hadn’t told her mom. And Dell hadn’t told Sybil, that’s for sure. But he had told his little sister. Don’t you think that’s strange?”

“No. I’d tell you anything before I’d tell my dad or your mother.”

I felt warmer immediately. “But those were our circumstances. These two were brought up normal.”