The sudden question took me by surprise. "No," I said. "But the man in the grave, the original burial, is still there."

"Oh, then our Lord wants you to lay him to rest," she said.

"I believe that's true."

"Why have you come to see me? Do you need me to be there when you do it?"

Since I had no idea what I could do about Josiah Pound-stone's ghost, or essence, or whatever you want to call it, I shook my head. "No, but I did want to ask you about a few other things."

She fixed her mad eyes on me. "All right."

I felt I was taking advantage of a woman who was not in her right mind. But here I was, and she was eager to talk.

"Did your husband see Felicia Hart or David Morgenstern, socially?"

"Yes, from time to time," she said, in a surprisingly matter-of-fact way. "And Clyde and Fred were on a committee together. Fred is active in alumni affairs, you know. His wife was, too, before she died."

"She died of what?" The women in this family seemed to have extraordinarily bad luck. Joel's first wife had had cancer, his mother had Parkinson's, Tabitha had been abducted… it made you wonder about Felicia's and Diane's futures.

"She had a heart attack," Anne said.

"That's awful," I said. I really couldn't think of anything else to say.

"Yes," she agreed. "Poor woman. It happened when no one was home, about the time Tabitha was taken. She was gone when he found her. What a sad family."

"Yes, it is." Though this family seemed to have a lot of tragedy, in Mrs. Hart's case, maybe a heart attack was exactly what it had been, and nothing more sinister.

"Do you think Felicia was seeing your husband as a girlfriend?" Tolliver asked. He tried to keep his voice smooth and unobtrusive so he wouldn't stop the flow, but Anne gave him a sharp glance.

"He may have been," she said, and now her voice was cold and hostile. "But then again, he may not have been. He didn't tell me names, and I didn't want to know. Felicia was here a time or two for one of our parties. We used to give parties."

That was too hard for me to imagine, Anne getting the house ready for a party, maybe wondering which of her husband's "girlfriends" he would invite into their home. Clyde, I knew instinctively, would have been embarrassed by his wife's Christian religious paraphernalia, while Anne would never have considered taking it down for a party. I hoped for her sake that he had simply let it go without comment, but my slight knowledge of Clyde Nunley convinced me he would have made secret sneering comments to his guests.

"Would Clyde have done something for Felicia if she'd asked him?"