An Ice cold Grave

Five

SHE sat in one of the two chairs. Tolliver and I sat on the side of his bed facing her. She was already holding a cup of steaming coffee from McDonald's, so I didn't offer her hot chocolate. She didn't bring up our departure from Twyla's. She looked exhausted but wired up.

She said, "We're going to get a lot of attention in the next few days. The TV stations are already calling the office. They'll be sending crews. The State Bureau of Investigation has taken charge, but they're letting me stay in it. They want me to liaise with you two, since I brought you in. The supervising agent, Pell Klavin, and Special Agent Max Stuart will want to talk to you.

"You know what I wish?" she said, when we didn't speak. "I wish I could write you your check, and you could just leave town. This thing is going to focus attention on Doraville…. Well, I guess you-all know what it's like. Not only are we going to look like we were so uncaring we let some maniac kill eight boys before we noticed, but we're going to look credulous in the extreme."

If the shoe fits, I thought.

"We'd leave now if we could," Tolliver said, and I nodded. "We don't want to be around for the circus." Some media attention was good for my business; a lot of media attention was not.

Sheriff Rockwell sat back in the motel chair, a sudden motion that made us look at her. She was giving us a strange look.

"What?" Tolliver asked.

"I'd never have believed you two'd pass at the chance for free publicity," she said. "I think the better of you for it. Are you really ready to go? Maybe I can ask the SBI boys to drive to the next town to talk to you, if you want to switch motels tonight."

"We'll leave Doraville tonight," I said. I felt like a huge weight had been shifted off my shoulders. I'd been sure the sheriff would insist we stay. I hate police cases. I like the cemetery bookings. Get to the town, drive out to the cemetery, meet the survivors, stand on the grave, tell the survivors what you saw. Cash the check and leave the town. Sheriff Rockwell was at least allowing us to get out of the immediate vicinity.

"Let's wait until morning," Tolliver said. "You're still pretty shaky."

"I can rest in the car," I said. I felt like a rabbit one jump ahead of the greyhounds.

"Okay," Tolliver said. He looked at me doubtfully. But he was picking up on my almost frantic anxiety to leave Doraville.

"Good," said the sheriff. She still sounded faintly surprised at our agreement. "I'm sure Twyla will want to give you a check and talk to you again."

"We'll talk to her before we leave the area for good. How's the work at the scene going?" he asked as the sheriff pulled herself wearily from the chair and walked to the door.

She had mentally shoved us aside, so she turned back with reluctance. "We've dug just enough at all the spots to confirm that there are remains there," she said. "Tomorrow morning, when the light is good, the forensic guys will be here to supervise the digging. I'm guessing my deputies will do most of the preliminary heavy work. Klavin and Stuart are supposed to keep me in the loop." She seemed pretty dubious about that.

"That's a good thing, right?" I said, almost babbling in my rush of relief. "Having the forensic guys in? They'll know how to dig the bodies up without losing any evidence that's there to be found."

"Yeah, we don't like admitting we need help, but we do." Sandra Rockwell looked down at her hands for a minute, as if making sure they were her own. "I've personally gotten phone calls from CNN and two other networks. So you should leave really early in the morning, or take off right now. And call me when you check into another motel. Don't leave the state or anything. Don't forget that you'll have to talk to the SBI guys."

"We'll do that," Tolliver said.

She left without further advice, and I grabbed my suitcase. It would take me less than ten minutes to be out of there.

Tolliver got up, too, and began sticking his razor and shaving cream into his valet kit. "Why are you so anxious to go?" he asked. "I think you need to sleep."

"It was so bad, what I saw," I said. I paused in my packing, a folded sweater in my hands. "The last thing in the world I want to do is get sucked into this investigation. I'll get the atlas. We better decide which way we want to go."

Though I was still a little unsteady on my feet, I grabbed our keys off the top of the TV. While Tolliver checked the stock in our ice chest, I stepped out into the dark to open the car. I shut the door behind me. The night was cold and silent. There were lots of lights on in Doraville, including the one right above my head, but that still didn't amount to much. I pulled on my heavy jacket while I looked up at the sky. Though the night was cloudy, I could see the distant glitter of a scattering of stars. I like to look at them, especially when my job gets me down. They're vast and cold and far away; my problems are insignificant compared to their brilliance.

Sometime soon, it would snow. I could almost smell it coming in the air.

I shook off the spell of the night sky, and thought about my more immediate concerns. I clicked the car's keyless entry pad and stepped off the little sidewalk that ran outside our door. Something moved in my peripheral vision and I began to turn my head.

A crushing blow struck my arm just below my elbow. The pain was immediate and intense. I shouted, wordless with alarm, and pressed the panic button on the keypad. The horn began to blare, though in the next instant the keys fell from my numb fingers. I tried to turn to face the danger, trying to throw my hands up to protect myself. The left arm would not obey. I could only make out a man clad in black with a knit hood over his head, and a second blow was already arcing toward the side of my head. Though I launched myself sideways to avoid the full force of the impact, I thought my head would fly off my shoulders when the shovel grazed my skull. I started down to the sidewalk. The last thing I remember is trying to throw my hands out to break my fall, but only one of them answered my command.

"SHE'LL be okay, right?" I heard Tolliver's voice, but it was louder and sharper than usual. "Harper, Harper, talk to me!"

"She's going to come around in a minute," said a calm voice. Older man.

"It's cold out here," Tolliver shouted. "Get her into the ambulance."

Oh, shit, we couldn't afford that. Or at least, we shouldn't spend our money this way. "No," I said, but it didn't come out coherently.

"Yes," he said. He'd understood me; God bless Tolliver. What if I were by myself in this world? What if he decided…Oh, Jesus, my head hurt. Was that blood on my hand?

"Who hit me?" I asked, and Tolliver said, "Someone hit you? I thought you fainted! Someone hit her! Call the police."

"Okay, buddy, they'll meet us at the hospital," said the calm voice again.

My arm hurt worse than anything I'd ever felt. But then, just about every part of my body hurt. I wanted someone to knock me out. This was awful.

"Ready?" asked a new voice.

"One, two, three," said the calm one, and I was on a gurney and choking on a shriek at the pain of being moved.

"That shouldn't have hurt so much," New Voice said. New Voice was a woman. "Does she have another injury? Besides the head?"

"Arm," I tried to say.

"Maybe you shouldn't move her," my brother said.

"We've already moved her," Calm Voice pointed out.

"Is she all right?" asked still another voice. That was a really stupid question, in my opinion.

Then they rolled me to the ambulance; I opened my eyes again, just a crack, to see the flashing red lights. I had another pang of dismay about the money this was going to cost; but then when they slid me in, I had no pangs about anything for a while.

I fluttered up to awareness in the hospital. I saw a man leaning over me, a man with clipped gray hair and gleaming wire-rimmed glasses. His face looked serious but benevolent. Exactly the way a doctor ought to look. I hoped he was a doctor.

"Do you understand me?" he said. "Can you count my fingers?"

That was two questions. I tried to nod to show I could understand him. That was a big mistake. What fingers?

The next thing I knew, I was in a dim warm room, and I had the impression I was wrapped in swaddling clothes. No room at the inn? I opened my eyes. I appeared to be in a bed, and very snugly wrapped in white cotton blankets. There was a light on over my bed, but it was on low, and there was a hush that told me the night was in its small hours, its weak hours…probably about three a.m. There was an orange recliner by the bed, and it was as stretched out as it could get. Tolliver was asleep on it, wrapped in another hospital blanket. There was blood on his shirt. Mine?

I was very thirsty.

A nurse padded in, took my pulse, checked my temperature. She smiled when she saw I was awake and looking at her, but she didn't speak until her tasks were complete.

"Can I get you anything?" she asked in a low voice.

"Water," I said, hopefully.

She held a straw to my lips and I took a tug or two on the cup of water. I hadn't realized how dry my mouth was until it filled with the refreshing coldness. I was on an IV. I needed to pee.

"I need to go to the bathroom," I whispered.

"Okay. You can get up, if I help you. We'll take it real slow," she said.

She let down the side of the bed, and I began to swing upright. That was a real bad idea, and I held still as my head swam. She put an arm around me. Very slowly, I finished straightening. While her arm continued to support me, she spared a hand to lower the bed. I slid off slowly and carefully until my bare feet touched the chilly linoleum, and we shuffled over to the bathroom, rolling the IV along. Getting down on the toilet was tricky, but the relief that followed made the trip worthwhile.

The nurse was right outside the partially open door, and I heard her talking to Tolliver. I was sorry he'd been wakened, but when I was on my journey back to the bed, I couldn't help but feel glad I was looking into his face.

I thanked the nurse, who was the reddish brown of an old penny. "You push the button if you need me," she said.

After she left, Tolliver got up to stand by my bedside. He hugged me with as much care as though I were stamped "Fragile." He kissed my cheek.

"I thought you'd fallen," he said. "I had no idea anyone had hit you. I didn't hear a thing. I thought you'd had—like maybe a flashback, from the crime scene. Or your leg had given way, or something else from the lightning."

Being struck by lightning is definitely an event that keeps on giving. The year before, out of the blue, I'd had an episode of tinnitus that had finally cleared up; and the only thing I'd ever been able to attribute it to was the lightning strike when I was fifteen. So it wasn't surprising that Tolliver had blamed my old catastrophe when he'd found me on the ground.

"Did you see him?" he asked, and there was guilt in his voice, which was absurd.

"Yes," I said, and I wasn't happy with the weakness of my voice. "But not clearly. He was wearing dark clothes and one of those knitted hoods. He came up out of the darkness. He hit me on the shoulder first. And before I could get out of the way, he hit me in the head." I knew it was lucky I'd been dodging. The blow hadn't landed squarely.

"You have a hairline fracture in your ulna," Tolliver said. "You know, one of the bones in your lower arm. And you have a concussion. Not a severe concussion. They had to take some stitches in your scalp, so they had to shave a little of your hair. I swear it doesn't show much," he said when he saw the look on my face.

I tried not to get upset about a couple of square inches of hair that would grow back. "I haven't had a broken bone in ten years," I said. "And then it was just a toe." I'd been trying to cook supper for the kids, and my mom had lurched into me when I was taking a nine-by-thirteen glass dish from the oven, which incidentally had been full of baked chicken. My toe had not only been broken, but burned. I was awake enough to realize that the pain I'd experienced then was nothing compared to the pain I'd be feeling now if I weren't heavily drugged.

I wasn't looking forward to those drugs wearing off.

Tolliver was holding my right hand; luckily for me, the broken arm was my left. He was staring off into space. Thinking. Something I was way too foggy to attempt.

"So, it must have been the killer," he said.

I shuddered. As slow as my brain processes were at the moment, the thought that that person—the one who'd done those unthinkable things to the boys in the ground—had been so close to me, had touched me, had looked at me through the eyes that had enjoyed the sight of so much suffering, was absolutely revolting.

"Can we leave tomorrow?" I asked. I couldn't even draw enough breath for the words to come out in a strong voice.

"No," he said. "You're not doing any traveling for a couple of days. You have to get better."

"But I don't want to stay here," I said. "Leaving was a good idea."

"Yeah, but now we're pinned here for a little while," he said, trying to sound gentle, but the undertone of anger was clear and strong. "He took care of that. The doctor said you were lucky to have a concussion; at first he thought it would be a lot worse."

"I wonder why he didn't go on and kill me?"

"Because you hit the panic button and I got to the door pretty quick," Tolliver said. He got up and began pacing. It made my head hurt worse. He was very angry, and very worried. "No, I didn't see a soul in that parking lot, before you even ask. But I wasn't looking. I thought you'd fallen. He might have just been a yard away when I came through that door. And I was moving pretty fast."

I almost smiled, would have managed the real thing if my head hadn't been hurting so badly. "I'll bet," I whispered.

"You need to sleep," he said, and I thought it might be a good idea if I closed my eyes for a minute, sure enough.

The next thing I knew, the sun was coming through the curtains, and there was a sense of activity all around me; the hospital was awake. There were voices and footsteps in the hall, and carts rumbling. Nurses came in and did things to me. My breakfast tray came, laden with coffee and green Jell-O. I discovered I was hungry when I put a spoonful of the Jell-O in my mouth, surprising even myself. When I found I'd swallowed the jiggly green stuff with actual pleasure, I realized I couldn't remember the last time I'd eaten. Jell-O was better than nothing.

"You should eat some breakfast yourself, and go to the hotel and get a shower," I said. Tolliver was watching me eat with horrified fascination.

"I'm staying till I talk to the doctor," he said. "He'll be by soon, the nurse says."

The gray-haired man I remembered from the night before turned out to be Dr. Thomason. He was still up. "Busy night last night, for Doraville," he said. "I'm on call for the ER three nights a week. I've never worked as hard."

"Thanks for taking care of me," I said politely, though of course it was his job.

"You're welcome. In case you don't remember, I told you and your brother last night that you have a hairline fracture of the ulna. It's cracked, not completely broken through. The soft cast will protect it. You need to keep it on as close to 24-7 as you can manage. The cast'll have to stay on for a few weeks. When you check out of the hospital, you'll have directions on when to get the arm checked. It's going to hurt for a couple of days. Combined with the head injury, you'll need some pain meds. After that, I think Tylenol will do you."

"Can I get out of bed and walk a little?"

"If you feel up to it, and if you have someone with you at all times, you can stroll down the hall and back a time or two. Of course if you experience any dizziness, nausea, that kind of thing, it's time to get back in the bed."

"She's already talking about checking out of the hospital," Tolliver said. He was trying for a neutral tone, but he fell far short.

The doctor said, "You know that's not a good idea." He looked from me to him. I may have looked a little sullen. "You need to let your brother get some rest, too," the doctor said. "He's going to have to take care of you for a few days, young lady. Give him a break. You really need to be here. We need to observe that head of yours. And you've got at least a bit of insurance, I think?"

Of course there was no way I could insist on being released after he'd said that. Only a bad person would refuse to give her brother a break. And I hoped I wasn't such a bad person. Dr. Thomason was counting on that. Tolliver was counting on that.

I debated making myself so unpleasant the hospital would be glad to be rid of me. But that would only make Tolliver unhappy. I looked at him, really looked at him, and I saw the circles under his eyes, the slump in his shoulders. He looked older than twenty-eight. "Tolliver," I said, regret and self-reproach in my voice. He stepped over and took my good hand. I put his knuckles against my cheek, and the sun came in the window and made a pool of warmth against my face. I loved him more than anything, and he should never know that.

With a sudden briskness, Dr. Thomason said, "Then I'll see you tomorrow morning, at least. You can have a regular diet the rest of the day, I'll tell them at the desk. You take it easy today, and get well." He was out of the room before I could say anything else, and I let go of Tolliver's hand, guiltily aware I'd held on to him far too long. And I didn't mean holding his hand against my cheek, which was comforting for us both.

He leaned over to kiss my cheek. "I'm gonna go shower and have breakfast and a nap," he said. "Please, don't try to get out of bed by yourself while I'm gone. Promise you'll ring for a nurse."

"I promise," I said, wondering why everyone seemed to think I would break the rules as soon as their back was turned. The only odd thing about me was that I'd been struck by lightning. I didn't think of myself as a rebel, a hell-raiser, a rabble-rouser, or anything else exciting or upsetting.

After he left, I found myself at a loss. I didn't have a book; Tolliver had promised to bring me one when he returned. I had doubts about whether my head could tolerate reading anyway. Maybe I'd ask him to bring an audiobook and my little CD player with its headphones.

After ten minutes' boredom, I carefully scrutinized the controls on the side of my hospital bed. I succeeded in turning on the television. The channel that came on was a hospital channel, and I watched people come in and out of the lobby. Even though my boredom threshold was quite high, that palled after ten minutes. I switched to a news channel. As soon as I did, I was sorry.

The quiet, derelict home in its picturesque setting looked a great deal different now from how it looked a day before. I remembered how lonely the site had felt, how isolated. And after all, there'd been enough privacy there to bury eight young men with no one the wiser. Now you couldn't sneeze up there without four people rushing at you with microphones.

I was assuming the film I was seeing was very recent, maybe even live, because the sun looked about in the same position as the sun I could see outside my window. By the way, it was nice to see the sun; I only wished I could be out in it, though from the bundled look of the people I could see on the screen it was still pretty damn cold.

I ignored the commentary and stared instead at the figures behind the newscaster. Some of them were wearing law enforcement uniforms but others were wearing coveralls. Those must be the tech guys from SBI. The two men in suits, they would be Klavin and Stuart. I was proud of myself for remembering their names.

I wondered how long it would be before someone came to see me. I hoped no one from the media would try to call me in the hospital or come in to see me. Maybe I could be released tomorrow and we could follow our plan of getting out of town to keep a little distance between us and the crimes.

I'd been rambling on in my head about this for a few minutes when inevitability knocked at the door.

Two men in suits and ties; exactly what I didn't want to see.

"I'm Pell Klavin, this is Max Stuart," the shorter man said. He was about forty-five, and he was trim and well dressed. His hair was beginning to show a little gray, and his shoes were gleaming. He wore wire-rimmed glasses. "We're from the State Bureau of Investigation." Agent Stuart was a little younger and his hair was a lot lighter, so if he had gray he wasn't showing it. He was just as shipshape as Agent Klavin.

I nodded, and I was immediately sorry. I gingerly touched my bandaged head. Though that head felt like it was going to fall off (and that would be an improvement over how it felt now), the bandage still felt dry and secure. My left arm ached.

"Ms. Connelly, we hear you got attacked last night," Agent Stuart said.

"Yes," I said. I was angry with myself for sending Tolliver away, and irrationally angry with him for taking me at my word and going.

"We're mighty sorry about that," Klavin said, exuding so much down-home charm I thought I might throw up. "Can you tell us why you were attacked?"

"No," I said. "I can't. Probably something to do with the graves, though."

"I'm glad you brought that up," Stuart said. "Can you describe how you found those graves? What prior knowledge you had?"

"No prior knowledge," I said. It seemed they weren't interested in the attack on me anymore, and frankly, I could understand why. I'd lived. Eight other people hadn't.

"And how did you know they were there?" Klavin asked. His eyebrows shot up in a questioning arch. "Did you know one of the victims?"

"No," I said. "I've never been here before."

I lay back wearily, able to predict the whole conversation. It was so unnecessary. They weren't going to believe, they would try to discover some reason I'd be lying about how I found the bodies, they'd waste time and taxpayer money trying to establish a connection between me and one of the victims, or me and the killer. That connection didn't exist, and no amount of searching would uncover one.

I clutched the covers with my hands, as if they were patience.

"I don't know any of the boys buried in the graves," I said. "I don't know who killed them, either. I expect there's a file on me somewhere that you can read, that'll give you the background on me. Can we just assume this conversation is already over?"

"Ah, no, I don't think we can assume that," Klavin said.

I groaned. "Oh, come on, guys, give me some rest," I said. "I feel terrible, I need to sleep, and I have nothing to do with your investigation. I just find 'em. From now on, it's your job."

"You're telling us," Stuart said, sounding as skeptical as a man can sound, "that you just find corpses at random."

"Of course it's not at random," I said. "That would be nuts." Then I hated myself for responding. They just wanted to keep me talking, in the hope that I'd finally reveal how I'd found the bodies. They would never accept that I was telling them the truth.

"That would be nuts?" Stuart said. "You think that sounds nuts?"

"And you gentlemen are…who?" asked a young man from the doorway.

I could scarcely believe my eyes. "Manfred?" I said, completely confused. The fluorescent light glinted off Manfred Bernardo's pierced eyebrow (the right), nostril (the left), and ears (both). Manfred had shaved his goatee, I noticed distantly, but his hair was still short, spiky, and platinum.

"Yes, darling, I came as soon as I could," he said, and if my head hadn't felt so fragile, I would have gaped at him.

He moved to my bedside with the lithe grace of a gymnast and took my free hand, the one without the IV line. He raised it to his lips and kissed it, and I felt the stud in his tongue graze my fingers. Then he held my hand in both his own. "How are you feeling?" he asked, as if there were no one else in the room. He was looking right into my eyes, and I got the message.

"Not too well," I said weakly. Unfortunately, I was almost as weak as I sounded. "I guess Tolliver told you about the concussion? And the broken arm?"

"And these gentlemen are here to talk to you when you're so ill?"

"They don't believe anything I say," I told him pitifully.

Manfred turned to them and raised his pierced eyebrow.

Stuart and Klavin were regarding my new visitor with a dash of astonishment and a large dollop of distaste. Klavin pushed his glasses up on his nose as if that would make Manfred look better, and Stuart's lips pursed like he'd just bitten a lemon.

"And you would be…?" Stuart said.

"I would be Manfred Bernardo, Harper's dear friend," he said, and I held my expression with an effort. Resisting the impulse to yank my hand from Manfred's, I squeezed his bottom hand as hard as I could.

"Where are you from, Mr. Bernardo?" Klavin asked.

"I'm from Tennessee," he said. "I came as soon as I could." Manfred bent to drop a kiss on my cheek. When he straightened, he said, "I'm sure Harper is feeling too poorly to be questioned by you gentlemen." He looked from one of them to the other with an absolutely straight face.

"She seems all right to me," Stuart said. But he and Klavin glanced at each other.

"I think not," Manfred said. He was over twenty years younger than Klavin, and smaller than Stuart—Manfred was maybe five foot nine, and slender—but somewhere under all that tattooed and pierced skin was an air of authority and a rigid backbone.

I closed my eyes. I really was exhausted, and I was also not too awfully far from laughing out loud.

"We'll leave you two to catch up," Klavin said, not sounding happy at all. "But we're coming back to talk to Ms. Connelly again."

"We'll see you then," Manfred said courteously.

Feet shuffling…the door opening to admit hospital hall noises…then the muffling of those noises as the SBI agents carefully pulled the door shut behind them.

I opened my eyes. Manfred was regarding me from maybe five inches away. He was thinking about kissing me. His eyes were bright and blue and hot.

"Nuh-uh, buddy, not so fast," I said. He withdrew to a safer distance. "How'd you come to be here? Is your grandmother okay?"

Xylda Bernardo was an old fraud of a psychic who nonetheless had a streak of actual talent. The last time I'd seen her had been in Memphis; she'd been frail enough then, mentally and physically, to necessitate Manfred driving her to Memphis and keeping tabs on her while she talked to us.

"She's at the motel," Manfred said. "She insisted on coming with me. We drove in last night. I think we got the last motel room left in Doraville, and maybe the last one in a fifteen-mile radius. One reporter checked out because he got a more comfortable room at a bed and breakfast, and Grandmother had told me to drive to that motel fast and go into the office in a hurry. Every now and then, she comes through in a helpful way." His face grew somber. "She doesn't have long."

"I'm sorry," I said. I wanted to ask what was wrong, but that was a stupid question. Did it really make a difference? I knew death quite well, and I'd seen it stamped on Xylda's face.

"She doesn't want to be in a hospital," Manfred said. "She doesn't want to spend the money, and she hates the ambience."

I nodded. I could understand that. I wasn't happy about being in one, myself, and I had every prospect of walking out of this one in one piece.

"She's napping now," Manfred said. "So I thought I'd drive over to check out how you were doing, and I found the Dynamic Duo asking you questions. I thought they'd listen to me if I said I was your boyfriend. Gives me a little more authority."

I decided to let that issue ride for the moment. "What are you-all doing here in the first place?"

"Grandmother said you needed us." Manfred shrugged, but he believed in her, all right.

"Wouldn't she be more comfortable at home?" It made me feel very guilty to think about the aging and ill Xylda Bernardo dragging herself and her grandson to this little town in the mountains because she thought I needed her.

"Yes, but then she'd be thinking about dying. She said to come—we came."

"And you knew where we were?"

"I wish I could say Grandmother had seen it in a vision, but there's a website that tracks you."

"What?" I probably looked as dumbfounded as I felt.

"You've got a website devoted to you and your doings. People email in to report sightings of you."

I didn't feel any smarter. "Why?"

"You're one of those people who attracts a following," Manfred said. "They want to know where you are and what you've found."

"That's just weird." I simply didn't get it.

He shrugged. "What we do is weird, too."

"So it's on the Internet? That I'm in Doraville, North Carolina?" I wondered if Tolliver knew about my fan following, too. I wondered why he hadn't told me.

Manfred nodded. "There are a couple of pictures of you taken here in Doraville, probably with a cell phone," he said, and I was floored all over again.

"I can hardly believe that," I said, and shook my head. Ouch.

"Do you want to talk about it?" Manfred asked. "What happened here?"

"If I'm talking to you and not a website," I said, and the look on his face made me instantly contrite. "I'm sorry," I said. "I'm just freaked out about the idea that people are following my whereabouts and watching me, and I didn't have a clue about it. I don't think you'd ever do that."

"Tell me how you came to get hurt," he said, accepting my apology. Manfred settled into the chair by my bed, the one Tolliver had been snoozing in.

I told Manfred about the graves, about Twyla Cotton and the sheriff, about the dead boys in the cold soil.

"Someone here's been vanishing guys for years, and no one noticed?" Manfred said. "This is like an Appalachian Gacy, huh?"

"I know it's hard to believe. But when the sheriff explained why there hadn't been a public outcry about the disappearances, it seemed almost reasonable. The boys were all at that runaway age." There was a silence. I wanted to ask Manfred how old he was.

"Twenty-one," he said, and I gave a jerk of surprise.

"I have a little talent," he said, trying for modesty.

"Xylda can be such a fake," I said, too tired to be tactful. "But she's the real deal underneath."

He laughed. "She can be an old fraud, but when she's on her game, she's outstanding."

"I can't figure you out," I said.

"I talk good for a tattooed freak, don't I?"

I smiled. "You talk good for anybody. And I'm three years older than you."

"You've lived three years longer, but I guarantee my soul is older than yours."

It was a distinction too fine for me just at the moment.

"I need to take a nap," I said and shut my eyes.

I hadn't anticipated that sleep would drag me down before I'd even had a chance to thank Manfred for coming to see me.

Bodies have to have rest to heal, and my body seemed to need more than most. I don't know if that had to do with the lightning that passed through my system or not. A lot of lightning strike victims have trouble sleeping, but that has seldom been my problem. Other survivors I've talked to on the Web have a grab bag of symptoms: convulsions, loss of hearing, speech problems, blurry vision, uncontrollable rages, weakness of the limbs, ADD. Obviously, any or all of these can lead to further consequences, none of them good. Jobs can be lost, marriages wrecked, money squandered in an attempt to find a cure or at least a palliative.

Maybe I would be in a sheltered workshop somewhere if I hadn't had two huge pieces of luck. The first was that the lightning not only took things away from me, but left me with something I hadn't had before: my strange ability to find bodies. And the second piece of luck was that I had Tolliver, who started my heart beating on the spot; Tolliver, who believed in me and helped me develop a way to make a living from this newfound and unpleasant ability.

I could only have been asleep for thirty minutes or less, but when I woke up, Manfred was gone, Tolliver was back, and the sun had vanished behind clouds. It was nearly eleven thirty, by the big clock on the wall, and I could hear the sound of the lunch cart in the hall.

"Tolliver," I said, "do you remember that time we went out to get a Christmas tree?"

"Yeah, that was the year we all moved in together. Your mom was pregnant."

The trailer had been a tight fit: my older sister, Cameron, and me in one room, Tolliver and his brother, Mark, in another, Tolliver's dad and my pregnant mom in the third. Plus, there was a never-ending flow of the low-life friends of our parents coming in and out. But we kids had decided we had to have a tree, and since our parents simply didn't care, we set out to get one. In the fringe of woods around the trailer park, we'd found a little pine and cut it down. We'd gotten a discarded tree stand from the Dumpster, and Mark had mended it so it would work.

"That was fun," I said. Mark and Tolliver and Cameron and I had come together during that little expedition, and instead of being kids who lived under the same roof, we became united together against our parents. We became our own support group. We covered for each other, and we lied to keep our family intact, especially after Mariella and Gracie were born.

"They wouldn't have lived if it wasn't for us," I said.

Tolliver looked blank for a minute, until he caught up with my train of thought. "No, our parents couldn't take care of them," he said. "But that was the best Christmas I'd had. They remembered to go out and get us some presents, remember? Mark and I would rather have died than say it out loud but we were so glad to have you two, and your mom. She wasn't so bad then. She was trying to be healthy for the baby, when she remembered. And that church group brought by the turkey."

"We followed the directions. It turned out okay."

There'd been a cookbook in the house, and Cameron had figured we could read directions as well as anyone. After all, our parents had been lawyers before they fell in love with the lifestyle and vices of the people they defended. We had smart genes in our makeup. Luckily, the cookbook was a thorough one that assumed you were totally ignorant, and the turkey had really been good. The dressing was strictly Stove Top Stuffing, and the cranberry sauce came out of a can. We'd bought a frozen pumpkin pie and opened a can of green beans.

"It turned out better than okay," he said.

And he was right. It had been wonderful.

Cameron had been so determined that day. My older sister was pretty and smart. We didn't look anything alike. From time to time, I wondered if we really were full sisters, given the way our mom's character had crumbled. You don't suddenly lose all your morals, right? It happens over time. I caught myself wondering if my mother's had started to erode a few years before she and my dad parted. But maybe I'm wrong about that. I sure hope so. When Cameron went missing, it felt like my own life had been cut in half. There was before Cameron, when things were very bad but tolerable, and after Cameron, when everything disintegrated: I went to foster care, my stepfather and my mother went to jail, and Tolliver went to live with Mark. Mariella and Gracie went to Aunt Iona and her husband.

Cameron's backpack, left by the side of the road the day she'd vanished on her way home from school, was still in our trunk. The police had returned it to us after a few years. We took it with us everywhere.

I took a sip of water from my green hospital cup. There wasn't any point in thinking about my sister. I'd resigned myself long since to the fact that she was dead and gone. Someday I'd find her.

Every now and then, I'd glimpse some short girl with long blond hair, some girl with a graceful walk and a straight little nose, and I'd almost call out to her. Of course, if Cameron were alive, she wouldn't be a girl any longer. She'd been gone now—let's see, she'd been taken in the spring of her senior year in high school, when she was eighteen—God, she'd be almost twenty-six. Eight years gone. It seemed impossible to believe.

"I called Mark," Tolliver said.

"Good. How was he?" Tolliver didn't call Mark as often as he ought to; I didn't know if it was a guy thing, or if there'd been some disagreement.

"He said to tell you to get well soon," Tolliver said. That didn't really answer my question.

"How's his job going?"

Mark had gotten promoted at work several times. He'd been a busboy, a waiter, a cook, and a manager at a family-style chain restaurant in Dallas. Now he'd been there at least five years. For someone who'd only managed three or four college semesters, he was doing well. He worked long hours.

"He's nearly thirty," Tolliver said. "He ought to be settling down."

I pressed my lips together so I wouldn't say anything. Tolliver was only a couple of years younger, plus a few months.

"Is he dating someone special?" I asked. I was pretty sure I knew the answer.

"If he is, he hasn't said anything." After a pause, Tolliver said, "Speaking of dating, I ran into Manfred at the motel."

I almost asked why that reminded him of dating, but I thought the better of it. "Yeah, he came by," I said. "He told me Xylda had had a vision or something and decided she better come here, too. He told me that Xylda is dying, and I guess he's indulging her as much as he can. He's sure a good grandson."

Tolliver looked at me skeptically. His eyebrows had risen so far that they looked like part of his hairline. "Right. And Xylda just happens to have a vision telling her that a woman he wants—he thinks you're hot, don't pretend you don't know that—needs her help. You don't think he had something to do with that?"

Actually, I felt a little shocked. "No," I said. "I think he came because Xylda said to."

Tolliver practically sneered. I felt a strong dislike for him, just for that moment. He shot to his feet and walked around the little hospital room.

"Probably he can't wait until his grandmother dies. Then he can stop carting her around, and be your agent instead."

"Tolliver!"

He stopped speaking. Finally.

"That's an awful thing to say," I said. We'd seen the flawed side of human nature over and over, no doubt about it. But I liked to think we weren't wholly cynical.

"You can't see it," he said, his voice quiet.

"You're seeing something that isn't there," I said. "I'm not an idiot. I know Manfred likes me. I also know he loves his grandmother, and he wouldn't have hauled her out into this cold weather with her failing, unless she told him he had to."

Tolliver kept his head down, his eyes to himself. I felt I was trembling on the edge of saying something that would push our little barrel over the waterfall, something I'd never be able to take back. And Tolliver was suffering under some burden of his own. I could read the secrets of the dead, but I couldn't tell what my brother was thinking at that moment. I wasn't completely sure I wanted to.

"This past Christmas, just us alone, that was a pretty good Christmas," he said.

And then the nurse came in to take my temperature and my blood pressure, and the second was gone forever. Tolliver straightened out my blanket, and I lay back on my pillows.

"Raining again," the nurse remarked, casting a glance out at the gray sky. "I don't think it'll ever stop."

Neither of us had anything to say about that.

The sheriff came by that afternoon. She was wearing heavy outdoor clothes and her boots were coated with mud. Not for the first time I reflected that there were worse places to be than this hospital. One of those places was digging through nearly freezing dirt for clues, breathing in the reek of bodies that were in different stages of decay, telling the bad news to families who'd been waiting to hear about their missing boys for weeks, months, years. Yes, indeed. A concussion and a broken arm in the Doraville hospital were far preferable to that.

The sheriff may have been thinking the same thing. She started off angry. "I'll thank you to keep your media-seeking friends away from here," she said, biting the words out as if they were sour lemons.

"I'm sorry?"

"Your psychic friend, whatever her name is."

"Xylda Bernardo," Tolliver said.

"Yes, she's been down at the station making a scene."

"What kind of scene?" I asked.

"Telling anyone who'd listen how she'd predicted you'd find these bodies, how she'd sent you up here, how she knew you were going to be hurt."

"None of that is true," Tolliver said.

"I didn't think it was. But she's clouding the issue. You know—you show up, of course we're all skeptical, we all think the worst. But then you came through for us somehow. You did find the boys, and we know you couldn't have had prior knowledge of their burial place. Or at least if you did we haven't figured out how."

I sighed, tried to make it unobtrusive.

"But then she showed up with that weird grandson of hers. She acts out, he just smiles."

There was nothing else he could do, of course.

"Plus, she looks like she's gonna drop dead any minute. At least you-all are adding to our hospital revenue," the sheriff added more cheerfully.

There was a cursory knock at the door and it drifted open to show a big man, his fist still raised.

"Hey, Sheriff," he said, sounding surprised.

"Barney, hey," she said.

"Am I interrupting?"

"No, come on in, I was just leaving," Sheriff Rockwell said. "Back out into the cold and wet." She stood and began pulling her gloves on. I wondered why she had come by. Complaining about Xylda just didn't seem like a meaningful reason. After all, what could we do about her? "Have you come by to throw Ms. Connelly out?"

"Ha-ha. Nope, this is my courtesy visit. I go around to every patient's room after they've been here a day, make sure things are going okay, listen to complaints—and every now and then maybe even a compliment." He gave us a big smile. "Barney Simpson, hospital administrator, so I'm at your service. You're Ms. Connelly, I take it." He shook my hand very gently, since I was the sick person. "And you're…?" He held out his hand to Tolliver.

"I'm her manager, Tolliver Lang."

I tried not to look as surprised as I felt. I'd never heard my brother introduce himself that way.

"I really shouldn't ask if you two are enjoying your stay in our lovely little town," Simpson said. He looked as sad as it was in his nature to look. He was a tall man, and thick-bodied, with thick brushy black hair and a big smile that seemed to be his natural expression. "Our whole community is grieving now, but what a relief and a blessing that these young men have been found."

There was another knock on the door, and yet another man entered. "Oh, I'm sorry!" he said. "I'll come back another time."

"No, Pastor, come on in, I just dropped by to see if these folks had any questions they wanted to ask about the hospital and the service it's given them, the usual thing," Barney Simpson said briskly.

I noticed we hadn't had a chance to do any of those usual things.

"I've got to get back out to the site," Sheriff Rockwell said. There was no need for her to specify which site. In Doraville, there was only one.

"Well, then…" The new visitor was as tentative as Simpson was self-assured. He was a small man, about five foot eight, pale and thin, with clear skin and the smile of a happy baby. He shook hands with our two outgoing visitors before he gave his attention to us.

"I'm Pastor Doak Garland," he said, and we went through the handshaking ritual again. I was getting tired just from greeting people. "I serve Mount Ida Baptist Church, over on Route 114. I'm on chaplain duty here at the hospital this week. The local ministers take it in turn, and you folks were unlucky enough to get me." He smiled angelically.

"I'm Tolliver Lang, and I accompany this lady, Harper Connelly. She finds bodies."

Doak Garland cast a quick glance down at his feet, as if to conceal his reaction to this unusual introduction. What the hell was going on with Tolliver?

"Yes, sir, I heard of you-all," the preacher said. "I'm Twyla Cotton's pastor, and she especially asked me to come by. We're going to have a special prayer service tomorrow night, and if you should happen to be out of the hospital by then, we hope you'll attend. This is a special invitation, from our hearts. We are so glad to know what's happened to young Jeff. There comes a point when knowing, whether good or bad, is more important than not knowing."

I agreed with this completely. I nodded.

"Since you-all were instrumental in finding poor Jeff, we were hoping you would come, if you're well enough. I won't lie and say we don't wonder about this special talent you have, and it seems to pass our understanding, but you've used it for the greater glory of God and to comfort our sister Twyla, and Parker, Bethalynn, and little Carson. We want to say thank you."

On behalf of God? I tried not to smile openly because he was so sincere and seemed so vulnerable. "I appreciate your taking the time to come by the hospital to invite me," I said, filling in time while I thought of a way to refuse the invitation.

Tolliver said, "If the doctor says Harper can leave the hospital tomorrow, you can count on us coming."

Well, an alien had possessed him. That was the only conclusion I could draw.

Doak Garland seemed a bit surprised, but he said gamely, "That's just what I wanted to hear. We'll see you at seven o'clock tomorrow night. If you need directions, just give me a call." He whipped a card out of his pocket in a surprisingly professional way and handed it to Tolliver.

"Thank you," said Tolliver, and I could only say "Thanks" myself.

By the time my room cleared out, I was tired again. But I needed to walk, so I got Tolliver to help me out of bed, and hold on to me while I and my IV walked down the hall. No one who passed us paid us any attention, which was a relief. Visitors and patients had their own preoccupations and worries, and one more young woman in a terrible hospital gown wasn't going to rouse them out of their tunnel vision.

"I don't know what to say to you," I told Tolliver when we reached the end of the hall and paused before we started the journey back to the room. "Is something wrong? Because you're acting really strange."

I glanced at him, the quickest sideways look so he wouldn't catch me checking, and I decided Tolliver himself looked like he didn't know what to say.

"I know we need to leave," he said.

"Then why'd you accept the minister's invitation?"

"Because I don't think the police will let us drive away at this point, and I want us to be around other people anytime we can be. Someone's already tried to kill you once, the police are so wrapped up in the murder investigation that they don't seem to be sparing anyone to try to find out who attacked you, and the best guess I have is that the attacker was the one who killed the boys. Otherwise, why the rage, why take the chance? You ended his fun and games, and he got mad and came by to take a swipe at you if he could. He got his chance. He almost killed you. I don't know if you've considered how lucky you are that you got away with a concussion and a cracked arm."

This was a long speech for Tolliver, and he delivered it in a low voice in bits and pieces to avoid the attention of the other people. We'd reached my room by the end of it, but I waved my hand down the corridor opposite and we trudged on. I didn't say anything. I was angry, but I didn't know who to aim it at. I believed Tolliver was absolutely right.

We looked out the window at the end of this wing. The rain had turned into a nasty mix of sleet and snow. It rattled when it hit the glass. Oh, joy. The poor searchers. Maybe they would give it up and retreat into the warmth of their vehicles.

I was going very slowly by the time we crossed in front of the nurses' station and neared my room. I still hadn't thought of anything smart to say.

"I think you're right," I said. "But…" I wanted to say: that dodges the issue of your hostility to Manfred and his grandmother. Why does his interest in me make you so angry? Why Manfred more than anyone else who's given me a second look? I didn't say any of these things. And he didn't ask me to finish my thought.

I was glad to see the bed, and I leaned against it heavily as Tolliver arranged the IV stand and line. He helped me sit on the side, pulled off my slippers, and eased me back onto the pillows. We got the covers pulled up and straight.

He'd brought a book for himself and one for me, too, in case my head was feeling better. For an hour or so we read in peace, the snick of the ice against the window the only noise in the room. The whole hospital seemed to be in a lull. I looked up at the wall clock. Soon people would be getting off work, coming by to visit relatives and friends, and for a while the traffic in the hall would pick up. Then the big cart with the supper trays would come around, and the nurse with the medication, and after that a spurt of early evening visitors. Then there would be another lull as everyone who didn't have to stay at the hospital left for the night, and the only ones remaining would be the staff, the patients, and a few dedicated souls who slept in the reclining chairs by their patients' beds.

Tolliver asked me if I wanted him to stay. I was obviously better, and I thought it was touching that he would think of staying in that chair a second night in a row. I was oddly tempted. Maybe I was just better enough to have the energy to spare for fear. I was afraid.

In the end, I couldn't be selfish enough to condemn him to a night in the chair because I was a scaredy-cat. "You go on back to the motel," I said. "There's no reason why you shouldn't be comfortable tonight. I can always ring for the nurse." Who might come in thirty minutes. This little hospital, like so many others, seemed to be understaffed. Even the cleaners moved briskly because they had so much to do.

"Are you sure?" he asked. "The motel's so full of reporters that it's quieter here."

He hadn't mentioned that before. "Yes, I guess it is," I said. "I'm probably lucky I'm here."

"No doubt about it. As it is, I have to pretend I'm not in the room. One woman knocked for twenty minutes this morning."

He'd been going through his own problems and I hadn't even asked. I felt guilty. "I'm sorry," I said. "I didn't think about the press."

"Not your fault," he said. "You're getting a lot of publicity out of this, you know. That's another reason…" But then his face closed down on the thought. He'd been thinking about Manfred and Xylda again, sure that Xylda was in town to jump on the free ride of publicity the multiple murders would engender. No, I'm not a mind reader. I just know Tolliver very well.

"I'm not above thinking Xylda would cash in under ordinary circumstances," I said. I was trying to be practical and honest. "But she's so frail, and Manfred was so reluctant to bring her."

"He said," Tolliver pointed out.

"Well, yeah, he said. And you seem to think that Manfred's capable of dragging a sick woman somewhere she doesn't need to be just to satisfy his lust for me, but I don't think that's true." I gave Tolliver a very level look. After a second, he looked just a bit abashed.

"Okay, I'll agree he really loves the old bat," he said. "And he does take her wherever she wants to go, as far as I know."

That was as much of a concession as I was going to get, but at least it was something. I hated the idea of Tolliver and Manfred meeting up and getting into it with each other.

"Are they at our motel?"

"Yeah. There aren't any rooms anywhere else, I can tell you. The road up the mountain is nearly blocked off to traffic because there are so many news trucks and law enforcement vehicles. There's one lane open with guys with walkie-talkies at either end of the bottleneck."

Again, I felt a twinge of guilt, as if I were somehow responsible for the disruption of so many peoples' lives. The responsibility, of course, was the murderer's, but I doubt he was staying up worrying about it.

I wondered what he was thinking about. He'd vented his rage with me. "He'll lie low now," I said. Tolliver didn't have to ask me who I was talking about.

"He'll be cautious," Tolliver agreed. "That turning out to try to get you, that was just rage that his games were ended. He'll have cooled off now. He'll be worried about the cops."

"No time to spare for me."

"I think not. But this guy has to be a loony, Harper. And you never know what they're thinking. I hope you get out of the hospital tomorrow. Maybe the cops'll be through with questions and we can leave this place. If you feel well enough."

"I hope so," I said. I was better, but it would be stretching a point to say I felt good enough to travel.

Tolliver gave me a hug before he left. He would pick up something to eat on his way back to the motel, he said, and stay in the rest of the evening to dodge the reporters. "Not that there's anywhere to go," he said. "Why don't we get more work in cities?"

"I've asked myself that," I said. "We had that job in Memphis, and that other one in Nashville." I didn't want to talk about Tabitha Morgenstern again. "And before that, we were in St. Paul. And that cemetery job in Miami."

"But most of our calls are from small places."

"I don't know why. Have we ever done New York?"

"Sure. Remember? But it was really really hard for you, because it was right after 9/11."

"I guess I was trying to forget," I said. That had been one of the worst experiences I'd ever had as a professional…whatever I was. "We'll never do that again," I said.

"Yeah, New York is out." We looked at each other for a long moment. "Okay then," he said. "I'm gone. Try to eat your supper, and get some sleep. Since you're better, maybe they won't come in so much tonight."

He fussed around for a minute or two, making sure the rolling table was positioned correctly, clearing it for the supper tray, drawing my attention to the remote control built into the bed rail, moving the phone closer to the edge of the bedside table so I could reach it easily. He put my cell phone in the little drawer beneath the rolling table. "Call me if you need me," he said, and then he left.

I dozed off for a little while, until the supper tray came. Tonight I got something more substantial. I'm embarrassed to say that I ate most of the food on my tray. It wasn't awful. And I was really hungry. I hadn't exactly been packing in the calories the last two days.

After that, by way of excitement, a different doctor dropped in to tell me I was making progress and he thought I'd be able to go home in the morning. He didn't appear to care anything about who I was or where home was. He was as overworked as everyone else I'd encountered there at Knott County Memorial Hospital. He wasn't from around these parts, either, judging from his accent. I wondered what had brought him to Doraville. I figured he worked for the same emergency-room-stocking service that employed Dr. Thomason.

Barney Simpson's assistant, a very young woman named Heather Sutcliff, came in soon after the doctor's visit.

"Mr. Simpson just wanted me to stop by and check with you. Lots of reporters want to see you, but for the peace and privacy of the other patients we've been denying them visiting privileges. And we've screened the calls to your room…that was your brother's idea."

No wonder I'd been able to recover in peace. "Thanks," I said. "That's really a big help."

"Good. Because it really wouldn't be fair to the other people in this wing, to have all kinds of strangers tromping through." She gave me a serious look to show she took my reporter problem as a bad thing. And then she slipped out the door, closing it gently behind her.

The most interesting thing that happened after her departure was the tray guy removing my emptied tray. After that surge of excitement, I tried to watch television for a while; but the laugh tracks made my head ache. I read for maybe half an hour. I gradually grew so sleepy that I left the book where it fell on my stomach and just moved my hand enough to switch out the light I could control from my bed rail.

I was awakened by a brilliant flash and the sense of sound and movement very close to me. I cried out, and flailed my good arm to drive the attacker away. In a moment of sense, I punched the button that turned on the light and the one that called the nurse. I was stunned to see there were two men in the room. They were bundled up in coats and they were yelling at me. I couldn't understand a word they said. I punched the nurse's button over and over, and I yelled louder, and in about thirty seconds there were more people in my room than it was designed to hold.

The evening nurse was a starchy woman of considerable width. She was tall, too, and she scorned makeup, but she'd met a bottle of red hair dye she was real fond of in the past week or so. I admired her more by the second. She went for those reporters with both guns. Actually, if she'd had guns, the two men would've been dead without a doubt. Hospital Security was there (a man older than my doctor and not nearly as fit), an orderly was there (satisfyingly tall and muscular), and another nurse who added her opinion to that of my big nurse, as I thought of her.

Of course this was a silly episode, and one I should have been able to throw off; and once I considered it, one I should have anticipated. Right at the moment, I couldn't recognize any of those points. I'd been scared very badly, and my heart was thumping like a rabbit's, and my head was hurting as if someone had hit me again, and my arm ached where I'd bumped it when I'd lurched sideways against the railings in my panic.

When it all got sorted out the nurses had given the reporters a first-rate tongue-lashing, the security guard and the orderly were escorting the intruders out, and the two men were trying to hide their smiles.

And I was a mess: frightened, hurting, and lonely.