And then I recognized the cushions. The blue cushions. No wonder they had struck me so much when I'd seen them that afternoon. I hadn't been listening to my inner chimes, and they'd been ringing away.

"And then Felicia buried Tabitha in this garden, wrapped in a black plastic bag. Her dad was putting in a new flower bed, and Felicia put the body in there, deep."

"Why'd she decide to bring her up?"

"One strategy hadn't worked. And Diane got pregnant, which was a stake in Felicia's heart. It was time to shake things up again. She had her ace in the hole; my sister. Probably, what sparked the whole plan was the discovery of the death records the parish priest had left. She knew Clyde Nunley, and knew he'd do almost anything for her if she worked him right. So she got him to invite Harper to the college, and she waited till her dad was out of town, and she dug up her niece. This was maybe three months ago, she wasn't clear on that.

"And her father caught her in the middle of it. He didn't know what to do. This was his only remaining daughter. So he did what she asked. He helped her take the plastic bag to St. Margaret's. They reburied Tabitha."

I shuddered, and Tolliver's hand tightened on mine. The EMT finished working on my face and put a butterfly bandage on the worst cut. The rest, she dabbed with antiseptic. She wrote down a few instructions and shook her head. "You're lucky," she said for maybe the twelfth time, and I nodded. "You're gonna come out of this much better than the woman who shot at you."

Felicia was in the emergency room getting her head checked.

Her father was on his way to the morgue. Felicia had killed him every way a daughter could kill her father. All these months, he'd known what his daughter had done. I was surprised he'd lasted this long. Three months' worth of days in this big house, thinking about what Felicia was capable of. It made me shiver just to imagine it.

"So what else did she tell you?" Lacey asked. He was wearing jeans and a cowboy shirt, oddly enough, one with pearl snaps instead of buttons. He had on cowboy boots, too, though I didn't know how he'd seen over his belly to put them on.