Charlaine Harris (68 page)

I sagged against Tolliver as he helped me out to the car. He was in a complete state. He was trying so hard not to say “I told you so” that he was practically bursting at the seams. But God bless him, he managed not to say it.

“Tolliver,” I said, when we were safely in the car and on our way back to the cabin.

He stopped in mid rant. “Yes?”

“Right after he hit me, before he started yelling at me, the boy said, ‘I'm sorry. Come find me later,'” I said.

“I didn't hear him say that.”

“He said it real low, so you wouldn't hear. So his dad wouldn't hear.”

“He said you should
come find him
?”

“He said he was sorry. Then he told me to come find him later.”

“So is he schizophrenic? Or is he trying to persuade his dad that he is?”

“I think he's trying to persuade his dad of something, I'm not sure what.”

The rest of the drive back to the cabin, we were silent. I don't know what was in Tolliver's head, but mine was busy trying to understand what had just happened.

When we parked at the top of the slope again, we noticed that the Hamiltons' place was silent and still except for the smoke rising from the chimney. Maybe they were taking a nap. That sounded like a good idea.

“I'm not pleased with myself, thinking like a seventy-year-old,” I grumped as we made our way down the drive to the steps up to the door.

“Oh, I bet we'll think of something to do that the Hamiltons aren't doing,” Tolliver said, in such an intimate voice I felt all of my blood rushing to a critical point.

“I don't know; the Hamiltons are pretty hale and hearty for people in their seventies.”

“I think we can give them a run for their money,” Tolliver said.

We started right away, and with pauses to throw some more wood on the fire and lock the door, we managed to make a good effort. I don't know how the Hamiltons' afternoon went, but ours went just fine. And we did eventually get the nap.

That night we made more hot chocolate and ate more peanut butter. We also had some apples. I like to think we would have talked to each other just as much if the electricity had been working, but maybe we wouldn't have. There's an intimacy to being alone together in the near darkness, and every time we made love I felt surer of him, and our new relationship became more solid. Neither of us would have taken the step off the edge of the cliff if we hadn't been after more than yet another one-night stand.

“That last waitress in Sarne,” I said. I gave him a narrow-eyed stare. “That was the one I really minded, and for a couple of weeks I couldn't figure out why.”

“Well, two things. I was hoping you'd come in on us, clobber the woman, and throw her out and tell me I was your one and only; and barring that, I was horny,” Tolliver said. “Plus, she offered. Okay, that's three things.”

“I was tempted,” I admitted. “But I never felt I could risk it. I kept thinking, What if I ask him not to, and he asks me why not? What can I say back to him? No, don't do it, I love you? And you would say, Ohmigod, I can't travel with you anymore.”

“I was thinking you'd say the same thing,” he said. “You'd say that you couldn't be with someone who wanted to go to bed with you all the time, you had to have a clear head to do your job, and you didn't want to fog it up with dealing with lust. After all, you picked fewer bed partners than me.”

“I'm a woman,” I said. “I'm not gonna go around sleeping with whoever wants to sleep with me. I need a little bit more than that to go on.”

“Not all women are like that,” he said.

“Yeah, well, lots of them are.”

“Do you hold it against me? Those random women?”

“Not as long as you're disease free. And I know you are.” He got tested as regularly as he could, and he always used a condom.

“So,” he said, “we're together now.”

He was asking a question. “Yes,” I said. “We're together.”

“You're not gonna go with anyone else.”

“I'm not. You?”

“I'm not. You're it.”

“Okay. Good.”

And just like that, we were a couple.

It seemed strange to get ready for bed and then climb into Tolliver's.

“We don't always have to sleep in the same bed,” he said. “Some beds are going to be narrow and even lumpier than this one. But I want to sleep with you. Really sleep.”

I wanted to really sleep with him, too, and it was easier than I thought. In fact, hearing his breathing beside me seemed to help me doze off faster than I normally did. I hadn't slept in the same bed with anyone for a long time; and maybe not for a whole night since I'd shared a bed with my sister Cameron. When I'd stayed with a guy, I often hadn't made it through till morning.

I did wake up a few times during the night, record my new situation, and fall right back to sleep. On one of these moments of wakefulness, I saw that my phone was vibrating against the floor by the bed. I reached down and scooped it up.

“Hello?” I said quietly, not wanting to wake Tolliver.

“Harper?”

“Yes.”

“She died, Harper.”

“Manfred, I'm so sorry.”

“Harper, maybe someone killed her. I wasn't in the room.”

“Manfred! Don't say that out loud. Don't say that where anyone can hear you. Where are you?”

“I'm standing outside the hospital.”

“Why do you think that?”

“I think that because she was getting better. The nurse even said she thought Grandmother was going to speak. Then she died.”

“Manfred, you need us to come in?”

“Not until morning. It's too bad out there. There's nothing you can do. You stay in bed. I'll see you in the morning. My mother should be here then, too.”

“Manfred, you need to go back to the motel and lock the door. Don't eat or drink anything at the hospital, all right?” I tried to think of more advice to give him. “And don't be alone with anyone, okay?”

“I hear you, babe.” He sounded barely conscious. “I'm getting in the car now, and I'm going to drive to the motel.”

“Hey, call me when you get there.”

He called again within ten minutes to tell me he was safely locked in his room. Furthermore, he'd seen some reporters who were up drinking, and he'd told them someone had been following him. So they were as alert as drinking people could be, and they all professed to be disgusted that someone was following him around on such a sad night. Somehow they all knew already that Xylda had passed. Maybe they were paying one of the hospital staff to be a news clearinghouse.

None of this woke Tolliver, which surprised me until I recalled he'd been outside helping Ted Hamilton earlier. Plus, we'd had our own share of vigorous indoor exercise.

It was after three in the morning when I talked to Manfred the last time. I lay awake praying for him for a few minutes. Since I knew he was safe, and Xylda was beyond my help, I slept again.

SOMETIME
during the night, or rather toward the early morning, the electricity came back on. I'm sure it happened after dawn, because it didn't wake us up. I was lying there wondering why the lamp across the room was on, when I realized the miracle of electricity was once again visiting us. I had mixed feelings about electricity, for obvious reasons, but on this day I was glad to see it. I stuck a toe out from under the mound of blankets, and it didn't freeze immediately. I smiled. This was really good. And my arm was much better.

I hauled myself out of bed and went into the bathroom. I brushed and sponged, and changed my clothes, managing to do everything but deal with the bra. That I just left off. It wasn't that noticeable anyway since I was wearing both a tank top and a sweatshirt, so who was going to know?

The police, that's who. Just as I was trying to figure out how to put on clean socks, there was a knock at the door. I realized I'd heard the feet coming up, I'd just been thinking so hard about dressing myself I hadn't paid attention.

I was glad I was awake to answer the door, especially since I'd introduced Tolliver as my brother to the police chief, and she was here right now, and only one bed was in use. It was credible that I could have gotten up first and made my bed, and I just didn't want to have to explain or endure the horrified stare I'd get otherwise.

Sandra Rockwell had bigger fish to fry than worrying about our sleeping arrangements, as it turned out. Tolliver sat up and looked as she pushed past me into the cabin, looking around her as she did so. “Sheriff,” I said, “what's up?”

Sandra looked under the beds, in the bathroom, and then she opened the trapdoor and went down in the storage shed underneath. When she came up, she looked more relaxed, if not any happier.

“Okay, I'm not happy with you doing this,” I said, and Tolliver barely bothered turning his back while he pulled off his sleep pants and pulled on his jeans. She gave him a good enough look that I knew she could replay the moment later, and I felt like whaling her one.

“Have you seen Chuck Almand?” she asked.

I was very surprised, which was a massive understatement.

“Not since yesterday. We saw him then. Why would we have seen him? What's happened to him?”

“Can you tell me exactly what happened?”

“Ah. Okay. I wanted to be sure I hadn't overlooked anything in the barn. It just seemed like one of those loose ends, you know? So I went back. I knew it was a stupid thing to do, but I hoped I could just slip in and out without anyone knowing. Chuck came in while I was in there. He got mad at me, and hit me.”

“Hit you?” But she wasn't surprised, not at all. She'd heard all this from Chuck's father, no doubt.

“Yeah, he slugged me in the stomach.”

“I imagine you were pretty angry about that.”

“I wasn't happy.”

“I'll bet your brother wasn't happy, either.”

“I'm right here,” Tolliver said. “No, I definitely wasn't happy. But his dad came in, and the boy just seemed so disturbed, we left.”

“And you didn't call us to report the whole thing?”

“No, we didn't. We figured you-all had more important things to be doing.” She knew we hadn't called. She was just underscoring all the mistakes we'd made. I felt worse and worse. Going back to the barn had been my fault, my bad decision, and if the boy was gone, maybe that was my fault, too.

“So no one knows where he is?” Tolliver asked. “Since when?”

“One of the other counselors from the health center came by, maybe an hour after the incident in the barn, as close as I can make out. This is a close friend of Tom's, and he wanted to talk to Chuck to see if he could help.” The sheriff made a face. She didn't believe counseling would make any difference in Chuck's case, it was clear. “So Tom starts looking for the boy to get him to talk to the counselor, but Chuck wasn't there. So the counselor insisted Tom call the police. He did, and then he began calling Chuck's friends. No one had seen the boy.”

“You haven't had any luck finding someone who saw him around town?”

“No luck. But we thought he might have tried to find you, to finish what he'd started. Or to apologize. With a kid that messed up, who knows what he was going to do.”

Deputy Rob Tidmarsh came in, stomping his feet just like the sheriff had done. “Didn't see nothing, Sheriff,” he said.

So she'd been distracting us while her minion checked out the property. Well, there was nothing to find, and there was no point getting angry about it. She'd done what she had to do.

“We might need to call our lawyer,” I said.

“I've got him on speed dial,” Tolliver said.

“Or maybe,” Rockwell said, overriding our voices, “you found Chuck and decided to punch him back.” She was looking at Tolliver as she said this, as if I were accustomed to sending Tolliver to do my punching.

“We were here all night,” Tolliver said. “We got a phone call at—what time did Manfred call us, Harper?”

“Oh, about three,” I said.

“What evidence is a phone call on a cell phone?” Rockwell asked. “And did Manfred talk to you?” She was looking at Tolliver with no friendly face.

“He talked to me, but Tolliver was here.”

“He won't say he talked to Tolliver, then.”

“Well, he may have heard him in the background. But he didn't talk to him directly, no.” Calling our lawyer in Atlanta was beginning to seem like a possibility we should bear in mind. Art Barfield had made a mint off us lately, and I was sure he wouldn't mind making a little more.

“I'm not in the habit of abducting boys,” Tolliver said. “But of course there's someone here in town who is. Why are you looking at me instead of trying to find out who took all the other boys? Isn't it far more likely that that's who's got Chuck Almand? And if that's so, isn't the boy running out of time?”

I figured Sheriff Rockwell was grinding her teeth together in frustration, from the tensed look of her face.

“Do you think we're
not
looking?” she said, almost biting the words out. “Now that he doesn't have the use of his usual killing ground, where would he have taken the boy? We're searching every shed and barn in the county, but we have to check out all other possibilities. You were one of them, and a pretty likely one at that.”

I didn't think we were so damn likely, but then, we'd had the run-in with Chuck and his dad. There was something more I could tell the law.

“He told me he was sorry,” I said to the sheriff.

“What?”

“The boy said he was sorry. For hitting me. He told me to find him later.”

“Why? Why do you think that was? What sense does that make?” The tall deputy was looking over Rockwell's shoulder at me as though I'd started barking.

“At the time I just thought—I have to say, I thought it was just some kind of mental illness talking. He looked so strange when he said it.”

“And what do you think now?”

“I think…I don't know what I think.”

“That's not a hell of a lot of help.”

“I'm not a psychologist, or a profiler, or any kind of law enforcement person,” I said. “I just find dead people.”
I just find dead people.
Chuck knew that. And he'd said, “Come find me.”

“Then we should get you out searching, too,” Sandra Rockwell was saying.

I was sitting there in the grip of a horrible idea, wondering how I could have possibly thought only a day ago that the world might be better if someone took Chuck Almand out right now. That was before I'd seen his secret face, the face he wore when he told me he had to hit me.

Tolliver started to say something, stopped. I looked at him. It wasn't the time to remind them that I got paid for this work. His instinct to hold in his words had been a good one. No, I wasn't reading his mind. We just know each other very well.

“Where do you want me to look?” I asked, and my voice was coming from far away.

That stumped her for a moment. “You'd know if the body was new, right?” she said.

“Yeah.”

“Then we'll just take you everywhere we can think of,” she said.

I thought of Manfred sitting at the hospital, or in his hotel room, hoping we'd show up. I thought of the road out of town, out of this situation. But weighing that against the life of a boy, what could I say? Which Rockwell knew, of course.

“You're ready to go, right? We'll swing back later and pick up Mr. Lang here,” the sheriff said.

“No, I think
not
,” I said right back. “I'm not going anywhere without him.” Though it would be better if Tolliver went to help Manfred, if we had to be separated. But then…no. It was better if we stayed together. I was going to be selfish about this.

Tolliver vanished into the little bathroom while I made the sheriff useful by asking her to help me with my shoes. Tidmarsh tried not to snort, but he didn't quite succeed. Sheriff Rockwell was game, and my hiking boots were laced up and tied in a neat bow in no time. I took my pills for the day and picked up the cabin a bit while we waited. I tried to bank the fire so it could be revived. The electricity might be back on, but there was certainly a chance it would go off again. The fireplace was still essential. I had a gloomy feeling we'd be spending another night here.

Manfred would be better than I at solving this problem. Maybe if he went to the house, or to the barn where we'd last seen Chuck, he could trace the boy somehow. On the other hand, it would be inhumane to ask Manfred to work just now. And he might not be up to it. He'd told me several times his psychic sense was weaker than his grandmother's. I thought he was wrong, but that was what he believed.

I called him, since we were waiting, anyway. Manfred sounded sad but collected. I explained the situation to him, and he said that he'd heard from his mother again, that she was making better time now that the roads were clearing up. “We'll see you later,” I said. “You hang in there, Manfred.”

“I don't trust anyone here,” he said. “I don't trust the doctor, I don't trust the nurses, I don't think the hospital guy is on the level. Even the minister gives me the creeps. You think I'm being paranoid? You think there's really something wrong here?”

“That's hard to answer at this point,” I said.

“Oh, right, the sheriff's there,” Manfred said dismally. “I just can't throw the feeling off, Harper. Something's really wrong here.”

“In Doraville? Or specifically at the hospital?”

“I'm just not sharp enough to say,” he said after a long pause. “I don't have the gift like my grandmother did.”

“I think you're wrong. I think all you need is some experience,” I said. “I think you do have it in you.”

“You don't know how much that means to me,” he said. “Listen, I've got to go now. I've got an idea.”

That didn't sound good. That sounded like he was about to do something on his own. Young men on their own in Doraville didn't fare well. I tried to call him back right away.

He did pick up, finally. “Where are you going?” I asked. Tolliver had come out of the bathroom, finally, clean and dressed. He stood frozen in place by the anxiety in my voice, his dirty clothes in his hands.

“I'm going to look for the boy,” Manfred said.

“No, don't go without someone with you,” I said. “Tell us where you're going.”

“You might get in trouble again.”

“Hey, we've got the sheriff, remember? Where you going?”

“I'm going to that barn again. That's where I have to go.”

“No, wait for us, okay? Manfred?”

“I'll meet you there.”

But it would take us a lot longer to get there, since we were starting from the lake.

I told the sheriff what the situation was, and she went ballistic. “We've searched the barn,” she said. “We've gone over and over it. That dirt floor is empty, the stalls are empty, there's no loft. It's an empty wooden building with walls so thin there couldn't be a hidden space in there. There aren't even any more dead animals, I'm almost a hundred percent sure, and you told us yourself there aren't any bodies there.”

“No dead ones,” I said. Then I said, “No dead ones…at least there weren't any…oh, shit. We got to get there.” The feeling of dread that had blossomed in my head now bloomed in full. I didn't speak to anyone again.

We got into the patrol car and onto the road within five minutes. There wasn't much traffic and the roads were a hell of a lot clearer, but it was still a good twenty-minute drive into Doraville, then another ten minutes through the town to the street where the Almands lived.

Instead of creeping up to the barn from the rear of the property as we'd done yesterday, we pulled into the driveway by the aging frame house, and I got out as quickly as I could. My muscles were sorer today than they'd been the previous day, and I was skipping the pain medicine, so I was feeling everything I did.