Cindy poked her head out of the kitchen and smiled. "Boy, am I glad you're home. It's been a real long night. I'm afraid I didn't duck quick enough. It's okay, though, I've been putting ice on it. And I don't think Meghan likes me. She kept threatening me with that lizard."

Would a lizard be considered a weapon? Timmie wondered, fighting a renewed urge to turn around. Could Cindy put Meghan up on charges of assault with a deadly reptile? "I forgot to go to the pharmacy," she said. "Mind waiting till I get back?"

"Of course not." Cindy's smile would have done a martyr proud. "Do you have money for it? I got a hundred from the riverboat last week I still haven't spent."

"No, that's okay. I have it."

Skirting her way past an end table teetering in TV dinner trays and bolts of polyester material, Timmie worked her way past the kitchen to where announcer Jack Buck was still enthusing about the newly reorganized Cardinal team that was playing the Cubs.

"It's a beautiful afternoon at Wrigley Field," he assured the fans from the TV that flickered in the back bedroom.

The set was an old black and white hooked up to the latest in VCRs. It was the only furniture in the room except for a sagging single bed that now held a medical frame and a sunflower quilt, a battered end table, and a ragged, stuffing-sprung old armchair that had once been blue. The chair sat foursquare before the TV like the captain's chair on the Enterprise, behind which walls of debris loomed in the shadows. But the man in the chair didn't notice. His eyes were on the grainy action on the TV.

He was a tower of a man, all broad, knobby shoulders and thick white hair and high, wide cheekbones. Piercing blue eyes had faded to rheumy uncertainty, and gnarled, powerful hands were splayed on the arms of the chair as he gave what attention he had to the game and muttered to himself.

"This was the only way I could keep him quiet," Cindy apologized. "He kept trying to leave, but he wouldn't tell me where he was trying to get to."

Timmie crouched down by the side of the chair and laid her small hands on his wide, bony leg. "He can't remember," she admitted. Then she smiled and patted those fleshless knees. "Hi, Daddy."

The soft, distant blue eyes flickered and wandered her way for a minute.

"How's the game?" she asked, patting him. Patting his hand and his knee and readjusting the Posey vest that held him to his favorite chair as if just the physical contact could bring him back to her.

"I have to go now," he said, picking at the frayed material under his fingers. "I have to..."

"Everybody says hi," Timmie said, patting the shoulders that had lifted her above all those crowds to see St. Patrick's Day floats and home run victory laps.

"Did you call Dr. Raymond?" Cindy asked from behind her.

Timmie patted a couple of more times without effect. She'd already lost her father again to the game. "I can't afford to."

"There aren't a hell of a lot more homes in town you can try," Cindy reminded her. "He's been kicked out of three. And you know you can't go on with him here. You should have asked at the horse show, like you meant to."

"I know." Timmie thought about that poor, blighted thing tonight, and then about the little man Alex Raymond had made a special trip to say good-bye to. She felt as if she were being gut-kicked, and she was getting pretty damn tired of it. So she stood up.

"I'm going to the pharmacy," she said and walked back out.

Timmie didn't even remember walking to the pharmacy. She couldn't seem to get past the urge to escape. She'd worked so hard her whole life to pretend it all didn't matter, and then she walked back into that house and the lie fell apart. And she wanted to run.

Like that had worked out all that well the last time.

"Have you talked to your father's doctor about all these medications?" the pharmacist asked as he finished typing up the label.

The only twenty-four-hour pharmacy in town, and they had to have a guy with a conscience on.

"Yes," Timmie said quite truthfully as she paced the gray-speckled linoleum floor and looked out the windows into the night. "But I can't change things until I can get him placed again."

She was snowing her father, just to keep him under control. Just like the nursing homes had done each time he'd woken up enough to try to leave and succeeded in breaking at least one jaw in the attempt.

The pharmacist shook his head. "If he's sure."

The doctor? Timmie thought. He's an asshole. So had the one been before him. She couldn't afford a better one, though. Not yet. Not until she began to get just an inch or two ahead of the financial disaster her divorce had made of her life.

"Your dad used to come in here every day on his walks," the pharmacist said with that same soft smile everybody used when talking about her dad. "Never knew a body who loved to share words and music like your dad."

He scribbled, and Timmie, much too familiar with the eulogy, fidgeted. She checked out another window to discover that Mike's Mobile sat kitty-corner out the back. Tucked into the shadows that lurked between that lot and the pharmacy's was a maroon Chevy pickup truck with Puckett County Coroner emblazoned on the door in the same lettering as Tucker over that shirt pocket.

"Every time I fill one of these," the pharmacist was saying behind her, "I think of that poem your dad used to love to quote. You know, 'The lions of the hills are gone.' I feel the same about him. That when he goes... well, you know. Was that 'Innisfree' he was quoting? He really did love that one."

"No," Timmie said, turning only halfway toward him. "'Deirdre's Lament for the Sons of Usnach.'"

"That's right. He used to recite the whole thing. Real pretty it was. Real sad. I just remember that first line. 'The lions of the hill are gone.'"

"Uh-huh."

The lions of the hill are gone,

And I am left alone—alone—

Dig the grave both wide and deep,

For I am sick, and fain would sleep.

Just what she needed tonight, seeing that old man toothless and tied to his chair. Just what she wanted to carry out of this pharmacy with her along with the drugs that would keep him prisoner even beyond the confusion that crippled him.

She turned back to the window out of instinct. She stayed, watching out of surprise.

The coroner's truck was rocking.

There weren't any tremors beneath the pharmacy floor, so Timmie doubted sincerely they were having an earthquake. Not only that, the truck windows were fogged. Not fogged enough, however, that she didn't recognize body parts when she saw them.

Good lord, she thought with a surprised grin. The coroner seemed to be examining a body. She could tell he was thorough, because the legs that were pressed up against the window were quite naked. And his hand was very busy.

"Twenty dollars," the pharmacist announced behind her.

Timmie was so preoccupied that she just reached into her scrub pocket and pulled out the first thing she came to. She almost handed the pharmacist her card. The mysterious card from her locker, which she'd forgotten all about.

Oh, good, she thought, staring at it with dark humor. Another distraction. It was sure better than thinking about why she was here. Or why anybody would allow themselves to be caught naked in a coroner's truck with Tucker Van Adder.

Digging back into her pocket, she finally came up with change. "Here," she said, handing it over.