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it was her car. Can you tell me what model car she drove?”
    “Lord, no. A car’s a car to me. I can’t even find my own Chevrolet in a parking lot. Why? Was the car abandoned?”
    “Some hunters found it early this morning in the woods near Pulaski.”
    “Wrecked?”
    “Not exactly.”
    He was being too cagey.
    “But?”
    There was a long pause. I could tell he was trying to decide whether to tell me something or not.
    “Monk Crawford’s body was in it.”
    “Oh, my Lord.” I sat down on the bed. “What happened? And what about Virginia?”
    “We don’t know. We don’t know any of the details.All the Pulaski authorities said was that the car and body had been found. There was identification on the body and they want us to notify Monk’s family. We’re trying to locate them now.”
    I rubbed my forehead; my head was beginning to ache.
    “And no sign of Virginia?”
    “No.”
    Again there was that hesitancy in his voice, but I knew.
    “Monk was killed, wasn’t he? Murdered?”
    Virgil Stuckey cleared his throat. “Like I said, Mrs. Hollowell, we don’t know the details, but the Pulaski police think that he was. Yes.”
    In Virginia’s car.
    “What I was thinking,” he continued, “was that Mrs. Nelson’s family should be told what’s happened, too.”
    I couldn’t argue with that. Virginia had run off with a man who had turned out to be a snake-handling preacher, a young woman had been murdered in his church, Luke had possibly been attacked in that same church, and now the preacher had been found dead, murdered. In Virginia’s car.
    “I’ll call her son,” I said. “He’s in Washington. He’s the representative from Columbus, Mississippi. His father should have called him when this first happened.”
    “And Mr. Nelson?”
    “I’m going to Oneonta. They’re supposed to release him this afternoon. I’ll tell him.”
    “If we learn anything else in the meantime, I’ll call you.”
    After I thanked him and hung up the phone, I went into the den, found my address book and took it into thekitchen where the sun was shining brightly through the bay window and where Muffin was sitting on the kitchen table, grooming herself. When I put on my reading glasses, I could see cat hair like motes floating in the sunlight. And I’m the one who has always complained about Mary Alice’s old cat, Bubba, who sleeps on a heating pad on her kitchen counter.
    I sat down at the table and opened my address book. It’s the same one that half the women in the United States own, the one from the Metropolitan Museum of Art with the painting by Mary Cassatt on the cover of a woman licking an envelope. I’m convinced that if I lost it, my whole social life, such as it is, would fall apart.
    I opened it to the N s. There was Luke and Virginia’s address and phone number in Columbus. But no address or phone number for Richard. If I knew how to use the Internet well enough, I could have found him in a minute. But the class I’d signed up for at UAB didn’t start for a couple of weeks. Well, I thought, it shouldn’t be too hard to find someone in the House of Representatives.
    But what on God’s earth was I going to tell him?
    I propped my elbows on the table and put my face in my hands. Muffin came to rub against my hair.
    I’d never been very fond of Virginia, granted, but it was sad and frightening to think of what might have happened to her. Whatever her problems had been with Luke, however depressed and desperate she might have been, she had jumped from the frying pan into the fire.
    I raised my head. Muffin’s eyes looked right into mine. I pulled her against me and buried my face in her fur. She smelled like sweet, healthy cat; she began to purr. Lord, was I going to be able to let Haley take her back?
    There was a light knock on the back door. I got upand let Mitzi Phizer in. My neighbor and friend for almost forty years, she knows me too well.
    “Lord, Patricia Anne. What’s wrong?”
    She’s also