Leaving Time(119)

She raises a brow. “By my count you haven’t paid me back for the last one.”

I flash my dimples. “I promise. As soon as this case is solved.”

“Is that a bribe to push your test to the front of the line?”

“Depends,” I flirt. “Do you like bribes?”

“You know what I like …,” Tallulah breathes.

It takes me a moment to untangle myself from her and shake the contents of the paper bag onto a sterile table. “What I’d like is for you to take a look at this.” The shirt is dirty, shredded, nearly black.

Tallulah takes a swab from a cabinet, moistens it, and rubs it over the shirt. The cotton tip comes away pinkish brown.

“It’s ten years old,” I tell her. “I don’t know how badly it’s been compromised. But I’m hoping like hell you can tell me if it looks at all like the mtDNA you took from Jenna.” From my pocket, I pull the envelope with the fingernail inside. “And this one, too. If my hunch is right, one is going to be a match, and one isn’t.”

Jenna stands on the other side of the metal table. The fingers of one hand just graze the edge of the shirt fabric. The fingers of the other hand are pressed into her own carotid artery, feeling the pulse. “I’m going to throw up,” she mutters, and she bolts from the room.

“I’ll go,” Serenity says.

“No,” I tell her. “Let me.”

I find Jenna at the brick wall behind the building where we laughed ourselves silly once. Except now she’s dry-heaving, her hair in her face and her cheeks flushed. I put my hand on the small of her back.

She wipes her mouth on her sleeve. “Did you ever get the flu when you were my age?”

“I guess. Yeah.”

“Me, too. I stayed home from school. But my grandma, she had to go to work. So there was no one to pull my hair out of my face or to hand me a washcloth or get me ginger ale or anything.” She looks at me. “It would have been nice, you know? But instead I get a mom who’s probably dead and a father who killed her.”

She collapses against the wall, and I sit down beside her. “I don’t know about that,” I admit.

Jenna turns to me. “What do you mean?”

“You were the one who first said that your mom wasn’t a murderer. That the hair on the body proved that she had some contact with Nevvie at the site where she was trampled.”

“But you said you saw Nevvie in Tennessee.”

“I did. And I do think that there was a mix-up, and that the body identified as Nevvie Ruehl wasn’t Nevvie Ruehl. But that doesn’t mean Nevvie wasn’t involved in some way. That’s why I asked Lulu to test the fingernail. Say the blood comes back matching your mom’s and the fingernail doesn’t—that tells me someone was fighting with her before she died. Maybe that fight got out of control,” I explain.

“Why would Nevvie want to hurt my mom?”

“Because,” I say, “your dad isn’t the only one who would have been upset to hear she was having Gideon’s baby.”


“It is a fact universally acknowledged,” Serenity says, “there is no greater force on earth than a mother’s revenge.”

The waitress who comes to refill her coffee cup gives her a strange look.

“You should embroider that on a pillow,” I tell Serenity.

We are at the diner down the street from my office. I didn’t think Jenna would want to eat after being sick, but to my surprise, she is ravenous. She’s consumed an entire plate of pancakes, and half of mine.

“How long will it take the lab to get the results?” Serenity asks.

“I don’t know. Lulu knows I want it done yesterday.”

“I still don’t get why Gideon would have lied about the body,” Serenity says. “He must have known it was Alice when he found her.”

“That’s easy. He’s a suspect if the body is Alice’s. He’s a victim if the body is Nevvie’s. And when she wakes up in the hospital, and remembers what went down, she bolts because she’s afraid she’s going to be arrested for murder.”

Serenity shakes her head. “You know, if you get tired of being an investigator, you’d make a fantastic swamp witch. You could make a fortune doing cold readings.”

By now other people in the diner are giving us strange looks. I guess it’s legitimate to talk about the weather and the Red Sox, but not murder investigations, or the paranormal.

The same waitress walks over. “If you’re nearly done, we could use the table.”

This is bullshit, because the diner is half empty. I start to argue, but Serenity waves her hand. “The hell with them,” she says. She takes a twenty-dollar bill out of her pocket—enough to cover the bill with a three-cent tip—and slaps it on the table before hoisting herself out of the booth and walking outside.

“Serenity?”

Jenna’s been so quiet that I’ve almost forgotten about her. “What you said about Virgil being a good swamp witch. What about me?”

Serenity smiles. “Honey, I’ve told you before that you probably have more actual psychic talent than you think. You’ve got an old soul.”

“Can you teach me?”

Serenity looks at me, and then back at Jenna. “Teach you what?”