An Ice cold Grave

Three

TWYLA Cotton had a Cadillac, only a year or two old. "I like a big car," she said.

We nodded. We liked it, too. We were bundled up for the weather, and Twyla looked like a ball of fudge in her dark brown coat.

"Do your son and his wife know we're here and what we're doing?" I asked cautiously.

"Parker and Bethalynn do know, but they don't believe it will lead to anything. They think I'm wasting my money. But they know it's my money to waste, and if it makes me feel better…"

I hoped they were as philosophical about it as Twyla made it sound. Families can give us an awful lot of trouble—which I guess isn't too surprising, since they usually believe we're defrauding their grieving relative. Still, we've had a bellyful of trouble in our lives, and we don't want any that we can avoid. I exchanged a glance with Tolliver, who was in the back seat, and one glance said all this between us.

"Have you ever had a child, Harper?" Twyla asked.

"No, I've never been pregnant," I said. "But I know how you feel. My sister has been missing for eight years."

I didn't normally tell people that. Of course, some of them already knew it. It had made a big splash in the papers when it happened. But I was a high school student then, not a…whatever I was now.

"You have other family?"

I said, smiling brightly, "Well, I have Tolliver. I've got a half brother, Mark, and two half sisters, little ones, Mariella and Gracie. They live in Texas with our aunt and her husband." Mark wasn't my half brother any more than Tolliver was. He was simply Tolliver's older brother. But I wasn't in the mood to spell it out.

"Oh, I'm so sorry. Your parents already passed?"

"My mother has. My father is still living." In jail, but living. Tolliver's mother had died before his father met my mom, and Tolliver's father was out of jail and drifting…somewhere. Considering my mom and dad and Tolliver's father had all been attorneys, they'd had a long way to fall. They'd really thrown themselves into it.

Twyla looked a little shocked. "Well, how awful. I'm so sorry."

I shrugged. That was just the way it was. "Thanks," I said, but I knew I didn't sound sincere. Couldn't help it. When I heard that my mother had died, I was sorry, but not surprised, and not unrelieved.

We were quiet after that until we pulled up by the side of the road. Twyla glanced down at the list she'd taken down during a quick phone call with Sandra Rockwell. Sure enough, Sandra Rockwell had a prioritized list of places to check. This was place number one.

We were behind the high school at the football practice field, a stretch of barren level ground. One of those devices that the boys push around was still sitting by the side of the field, though football season was over. The field house was closed and locked until next year. Basketball would be the sport in play now.

"This is where his truck was," Twyla said. "We'd just gotten it for him. It was an old second-hand Dodge."

Sheriff Rockwell had said less about Jeff than about any of the other boys, perhaps because she'd known we'd be talking to his grandmother. Looking around now, I didn't see anyone. Not a soul. So an abduction at this point wasn't out of the question, though risky. At any moment, someone might come out of the school. But there weren't any houses nearby. The lane behind the practice field was just a bare strip of ground before a steep hill that had been sheared away to build the school.

Though it might be a fair spot for an abduction, I seriously doubted someone had killed the boy on the spot and buried him here, but I wanted to show I was willing. I stepped out, sent out that part of me that made me unique. There was no response. I was getting the tiniest tingle, which meant some incredibly old human remains were somewhere in the area. It was a feeling I'd learned to ignore in my search for modern bodies. Though the range would be almost the same, not enough to make a difference, I walked the length of the property and kept getting the same reading. I shook my head silently and climbed back into the Cadillac. We drove, Twyla pointing out this or that town landmark as we passed it. I didn't listen, concentrating instead on what I was picking up as we moved. The local cemetery provided a huge mass of static, but we had to stop there because that was where Tyler's hat had been found.

Of course there were tons of bodies here, and some of them were very fresh. It was way too cold to pull my shoes off, but I followed my instincts and went to the freshest graves. There was a heart attack, and there was a death by old age. Sometimes, you know, you just give out. Those were the most recent deaths. But Tyler Lassiter had been gone about two years, if I was remembering correctly, so I had to check out a lot more bodies. None of them turned out to be Tyler. They were all exactly who they were supposed to be according to their headstones. I was glad Doraville wasn't bigger, and glad some people were buried in the newer cemetery, which was south of Doraville.

We were now on the western edge of town, and Twyla once more pulled to the side of the road.

"The man that lives there was arrested for attacking a boy," she said, pointing to a dilapidated white frame house barely visible behind a tangle of vines and young trees. "He's been questioned over and over."

I wasn't getting anything from the car. I got out and took a couple of steps forward, closing my eyes. I picked up a buzz from my left, much farther back in the woods, but it was the faint buzz I associated with old cemeteries. I heard Tolliver's window roll down. "Ask her if there's an old church back there with its own cemetery," I said.

"Yes," Twyla called to me. "Mount Ararat is back there."

I got back in the car and said, "Nope."

Twyla inhaled deeply, as if about to play her last card. She put the car in drive and we pulled out, heading even farther out of the small town of Doraville. We drove northwest, the readout on Twyla's car told me, and the ground began to climb. I looked up at the mountains and I thought that if Jeff's body were up there, I would never find it. I did not want to go hiking in those mountains, especially in this weather. I had a brief selfish thought: Why couldn't Twyla have called me in two months ago? A month, even? I shivered, and thought of the biting cold, the snow that lay in patches on the ground, the predictions of bad weather in a few days. We began to go up, though the pitch of the ground was not so steep here.

And then Twyla stopped again. I noticed how stiffly she sat in the driver's seat, how white she'd gotten.

"This is where the phone was," Twyla said. She jerked her thumb to the right. "I put that rock there, to mark where it was exactly, after the sheriff showed me."

There was a big rock with a blue cross on it, dug into the earth at the side of the road.

"You put it in pretty deep," Tolliver said.

"The mowers had to pass over it," she said. "That was three months ago."

Practical.

I got out of the Cadillac and looked around, pulling on my gloves as I did so. It was freaking cold up here, no doubt about it. The Madison road rose steeply ahead of us, cut out of the rising mountain to the left. On our side, there was a fairly level narrow strip, perhaps a half acre to an acre of land, before the rolling slope began its rise. In that half acre lay the site of an old home. The house had been abandoned years before. The plot wasn't in a neat rectangle because it followed the contours of the hill. It was long and thin in spots.

We were parked on the shoulder, and if I took a step I'd roll down the slope of a deep ditch. The driveway into the plot ran over a culvert so the flow of rainwater wouldn't be impeded. The remains of this driveway passed through the remains of a fence. Now, with all the leaves fallen, the stands of weeds were golden or brown with winter's death, and the occasional young pine looked startlingly green. The weeds and small trees appeared to be holding up the fence.

The house had been a humble one. The roof wasn't caved in, but there were holes in it, and the porch was sagging. There wasn't any glass in the windows. There was a listing two-car garage off to one side, with wide doors that hung ajar. Once it had been painted white, like the house. The whole thing was southern gothic picturesque decay personified.

The water in the drainage ditch was dark and would be very cold. There'd been a lot of rain the past couple of weeks. And I felt the raw chill of more rain coming.

I could tell from the inclination of Tolliver's head that he expected me to walk down the side of the road to where the hill leveled into the valley. He expected that someone had dumped the body on the more accessible ground and had tossed its accessories off while driving upward into the mountains. And under other circumstances, that's exactly what I would have done.

But there wasn't any need.

The minute my foot had touched the ground, I'd known I was going to have news for Twyla Cotton. The buzzing was intense, increasing as I stepped closer to the eroded driveway. This was not the signal from a single corpse. I began to have a bad feeling, an awful feeling, and I was scared to look at Tolliver. He took my hand, wrapped it around the crook of his elbow. He could tell I'd decided to go into the tangled area that had been the yard of the old house.

"The ground is rough in there. I wish we'd worn our high boots," he said. But I couldn't register what he was saying. I watched a blue pickup pass, slowing down for the curve, fading away from view. It was the only other vehicle we'd seen on this road.

After the sound of its motor died away, I could hear only the increasingly irrelevant registers of the two live people and the increasingly more compelling signals of the dead. I walked forward, pulling Tolliver with me. Maybe he tried to pull me back a little, but I kept on going, because this was my moment—my connection with the power, or ability, or electrical short, that made me unique.

"You better get the flags," I said, and he went back to get the lengths of wire topped with red plastic flags.

In the cold damp I stood in the middle of the former yard, between the fence and the ruined house. I turned in a circle, feeling the buzzing rising all around me, as they clamored to be found. That's all they want, you know. They want to be found.

I tried to speak, choked, gasped.

"What's wrong?" Tolliver asked distantly. "Harper?"

I stumbled to the left a couple of steps. "Here," I said.

"My grandson? Jeff's there?" Twyla had forged her way onto the property.

I moved six feet northwest. "Here, too," I said.

"He's in pieces?"

"There's more than one body," Tolliver told her.

I held my hands up to sharpen my focus. I turned again, more slowly, my eyes closed, my hands raised, counting. "Eight," I said.

"Oh, my Lord in heaven," Twyla said. She sat down heavily on an old stump. "I'm going to call the police."

She must have given Tolliver a glance of sudden misgiving, because he said, "You can bank on it. Harper's right." I heard the little beeps as she began punching in numbers.

"What happened to them?" he asked me quietly. He knew I was listening though my eyes were still closed.

I didn't say anything. It was time for me to find out, but I didn't want anyone else to watch while I did it. "Okay," I said, to steady myself. "Tolliver?" I wanted him to be ready.

"I'm here," he said. "I've got a hold." I could feel his grip on my arms.

I stepped directly onto the ground above the corpse, and I looked down through the soil and rocks, caught a glimpse of hell. That was the last thing I remember.