An Ice cold Grave

Seven

THE cabin at the lake had been used by the Cotton family for forty years or more. In recent years, the McGraw family had enjoyed it. Parker said that at first they'd felt like intruders, but the surviving children of Archie Cotton were well into their sixties and had no children of their own living in Doraville any longer. They seemed content to let the children of their dad's wife enjoy the old place.

"Jeff loved it out there," Parker said. "Me and Carson, we'll stay out there and go fishing in the spring, won't we, Carson?"

"Sure," Carson said. "We'll catch some fish for Mom to clean. She loves to clean fish so much." That startled a smile out of his dad.

The deputy on duty had buzzed us into the fenced parking lot behind the police station. Tolliver and I scrambled out of the truck and got in our car. We followed Parker out of the parking lot.

Pine Landing Lake was about ten miles out of Doraville in a northeastern direction, and those ten miles were up a twisting, narrow two-lane road. We had met light traffic along the way. The lake seemed to be close to a community much smaller than Doraville, a dot on the map called Harmony. We didn't drive all the way around the lake, but at some points I could see its farther shore quite clearly. There were dwellings scattered around the lake, ranging from homes that looked year-round habitable to structures that were little more than open-air pavilions.

"This would be beautiful in summer," I said, and Tolliver nodded.

We followed Parker's truck at a respectful distance, and when he turned into a narrow driveway we followed, going sharply downhill for a few yards until we could park beside the truck at a broad flat spot by the shore.

The Cotton property was on one of the larger lots. It was a two-story building of very modest size, and you could tell it had been there a lot longer than some of the others because of the huge trees around it. Maybe it had just been built with more landscaping care than the others. Appropriately rustic, with cedar shingles on the roof and cedar siding, it blended into its surroundings better than most of the others we could see.

The bottom level appeared to be a storage area for the boats and other recreational miscellany. There was a heavy padlocked set of doors on this ground-level entrance, facing the lake. Stairs went up the south side of the building to a landing outside the main door. The outer door was screen, of course, the inner a heavy wooden door. Parker unlocked this door and gestured us in.

"Lots of the cabins out here don't have heating or cooling," he said, "but this one does. Mr. Archie did things right. Now, if the electricity goes off, which it does out here with some regularity, you've got your fireplace there, should be in working order. We had the guy clean it out last month."

I looked around. The interior was pretty much one big room. There were two double beds set up with their heads against the west wall, and there were several folding beds rolled up against the wall by them, covered with plastic cases. The air in the cabin felt musty, but not unpleasant. The smell of old cedar was strong. The fireplace was in the east wall, and it was faced with natural rock. The walls were unpainted cedar boards, adding to the feel that we were really roughing it. There was a small stove, an ancient refrigerator, and a couple of cabinets by the door where we'd entered, and a walled-off west corner indicated a tiny bathroom. Besides the fireplace, the east wall facing the lake was almost all glass, and through the glass we could see a screened-in porch inhabited by a few heavy wooden rocking chairs.

"Now, the bedding should be in here," Parker said, opening the cabinet below the sink. "Yep, right where Bethalynn said it would be." He pulled out a zippered plastic bag, plopped it on one of the beds. "Should be enough blankets in there. Sometimes we're out here in the spring and the nights are pretty cold. If you need to start a fire up, the wood is downstairs. You can go directly down to the boat room, now you're inside." He pointed to a trapdoor in the floor. "We used to keep the wood outside, but people just aren't as honest as they used to be. They'll take anything we don't lock up, and even then we get broken into every two, three years."

We all shook our heads over this evidence of modern slack morals.

Parker sighed from the toes of his boots, a gusty sound that was supposed to mask the grief that crossed his face. Carson silently patted his father's shoulder. "I'll see you two later at the church hall," he said. "Mom's got your cell phone number." And he was gone before we could see him cry. I guess it just got to him every now and then, and I wasn't surprised that was so. I wondered when they would get to bury what was left of their oldest son.

Tolliver opened the trapdoor and descended. "No windows down here!" he called. I heard a click and the rectangle in the floor illuminated. "I'm bringing up some firewood," he said, his voice muffled. While I slung my suitcase on the bed closest to the bathroom, I heard a series of thunks and thuds, and then Tolliver's head appeared, the rest of him following along, his arms loaded with split oak.

I hadn't had much truck with fireplaces. While Tolliver dumped the wood on the hearth, I crouched down and looked up to see if the flue was open. Nope. I found a handle that looked promising and twisted it awkwardly with my good hand. Voila! With a great creak the flue opened and I could see the gray sky. There was a basket of pinecones on the hearth that I'd assumed were for rustic decoration, but Tolliver said he thought they were to help start the fire. Since they were absolutely ordinary pinecones and there were a million more where they came from, I let him put some in the hearth like the former Boy Scout he was. Since neither of us had matches or a lighter, we were relieved to find matches in a Ziploc bag on the mantel, and we were even more relieved when the first one Tolliver struck flared with a tiny flame.

The pinecones caught with gratifying speed, and Tolliver carefully put a few of the logs in the fireplace, crisscrossing them to allow the passage of air, I assumed.

Fire tending seemed to make him feel manly, so I left him to it. I had some granola bars in my suitcase, luckily, and I ate one while he brought up the ice chest, still fairly full of sodas and bottled water.

"We better get some groceries when we go into town tonight," I said.

"Do you really want to go to the meeting at the church?"

"No, of course not, but if we're going to be here we might as well. I don't want the people here taking against us." I glanced at my watch. "We have at least three hours. I'm going to lie down. I'm worn out."

"You shouldn't have carried that bag upstairs."

"It was on my good shoulder. No problem." But I'd taken a pain pill while he was out rummaging in the car, and it was taking effect.

There was a knock on the door, and I jumped a mile. Tolliver jerked in surprise himself, which made me feel a little better. We glanced at each other. We hadn't noticed anyone following us out here, and we'd hoped to dodge the reporters altogether.

"Yes?" Tolliver asked. I moved to stand behind him, peering out from behind his shoulder. Our caller sure didn't look like any reporter I'd ever seen. He was a wizened old man wearing battered cold-weather gear and carrying a casserole dish.

"I'm Ted Hamilton from next door," the old man said, smiling. "Me and my wife saw Parker pull up with you-all, and she could hardly wait to send you something. You friends of the family?"

"Please come in," Tolliver said, because he had to. "I'm Tolliver Lang; this is my sister Harper."

"Ms. Lang," Ted Hamilton said, bobbing his head at me. "Let me just put this down on the counter here." He set down the dish he'd been carrying.

"Actually, I'm Ms. Connelly, but please call me Harper," I said. "You and your wife live out here year-round?"

"Yep, since I retired, that's what we do," he said. The Hamiltons must live in the small white house next door, to the north. I'd seen the Hamiltons' house out the window and noted it was inhabited. Ordinarily the Hamiltons and the McGraws wouldn't really have to see each other a lot, since the McGraw parking was on the south side of the cabin. The Hamiltons' white frame house was a very ordinary little place that just happened to have been put down at the lakeside, with no concession made to setting or locale. It did boast a very nice pier, I'd noted.

"We're just going to be here a couple of days," I said, pretending to be rueful. "This was awful nice of Mrs. Hamilton."

"I guess you know Twyla, then?"

He was obviously dying to get the scoop on us, and I was just as determined not to spell it out for him. "Yes, we know her," I said. "A very nice woman."

"Just for a couple of days? Maybe we can persuade you to stay longer," Mr. Hamilton said. "Though with the bad weather coming in, you may want to rethink staying out here. You'd be better off with a room in town. It takes them a while to get out here when the electricity goes out."

"And you think that's gonna happen?"

"Oh, always does when we get a lot of ice and snow like they're predicting for tomorrow night," Ted Hamilton said. "Me and the wife have been getting ready for it all day. Went to town, got our groceries, stocked up on water and got oil for our lanterns, and so on. Checked the first aid kit to make sure we can patch up cuts and so on."

You could tell the oncoming bad weather was a big event for the Hamiltons, and I got the distinct impression they'd enjoyed themselves to the hilt preparing for it.

"We may be on our way tomorrow, with any luck," I said. "Please tell your wife we appreciate her fixing us something. We'll get the dish back to you, of course." We said all this a few more times, and then Ted Hamilton went back down the outside stairs and around our cabin to get back to his. Now that I was listening for it, I could hear his cabin door open and I thought I heard a snatch of his wife's voice raised in eager query.

I took the aluminum foil off the dish to reveal a chicken and rice casserole. I sniffed. Cheese and sour cream, a little onion. "Gosh," I said, feeling respect for someone who could whip up a dish like that in the forty-five minutes Tolliver and I had been in residence in the cabin.

"If you had some leftover chicken," Tolliver said, "it would only take twenty minutes for the rice to cook."

"I'm still shocked," I said. My stomach growled, demanding some of the casserole.

We found plastic forks and spoons and some paper plates, and we ate half the dish on the spot. It wasn't restaurant food. It smelled of home…a home, any home. After we'd put the aluminum foil back on and put the remainders in the old refrigerator, I lay down to take a nap, and Tolliver went out exploring. The fire was crackling in a very soothing way, and I wrapped myself in a blanket. We'd made the beds, working together, my rhythm all thrown off by my bad arm. There hadn't been any pillows here—presumably the family brought their own each time they camped out here—but Tolliver and I each had a small pillow in the car, and once I was swaddled in the blanket and warm and full, I drifted off to sleep feeling better than I had in days.

I didn't wake up until almost four o'clock. Tolliver was reading, lying stretched out on his bed. The fire was still going, and he'd brought more wood up. He'd positioned two wooden chairs close to the fire.

There wasn't a sound to be heard: no traffic, no birds, no people. Through the window above my head, I could see the bare branches of an oak tree motionless in the still air. I put my hand to the glass. It was warmer. That wasn't good. The ice would come, I was sure.

"Did you go fish?" I asked Tolliver, after moving around a little to let him know I was awake.

"I don't know if you're supposed to go fishing in the winter," he said. He hadn't had a bubba upbringing; no hunting and fishing for Tolliver. His dad had been more interested in helping hard men dodge the law, and then in getting high with the same men, than in taking his sons out in the woods for some bonding time. Tolliver and his brother, Mark, had had to learn other skills to prove themselves at school.

"Good, because I have no idea how to clean 'em," I said.

He rolled off his bed and sat on the edge of mine. "How's the arm?"

"Pretty good." I moved it a little. "And my head feels a lot better." I moved over to give him room and he stretched out beside me.

He said, "While you were asleep, I checked our messages on the phone at the apartment."

"Mm-hm."

"We had a few. Including one about a job in eastern Pennsylvania."

"How long a drive from here?"

"I haven't worked it out yet, but I would guess about seven hours."

"Not too bad. What's the job?"

"A cemetery reading. Parents want to be sure their daughter wasn't murdered. The coroner said the death was an accident. He said the girl slipped down some steps and fell. The parents heard from some friends that, instead, her boyfriend hit her on the head with a beer bottle. The friends are all too scared of the young man to tell the cops."

"Stupid," I said. But we encountered stupid people all the time, people who just could not seem to see that elaborate plots almost never worked, that honesty usually was the best policy, and that most people who supposedly died by accident actually had died by accident. If the boyfriend was so frightening that a group of young people were too scared to talk about him, there might be a good chance that this girl's "fall" was an exception.

"Maybe we'll get away from here in time to take it up," I said. "They mention any time constraints?"

"The boy's about to leave town—he's joined the army," Tolliver said. "They want to know if he's guilty before he goes to basic."

"They understand, right? That I can't tell them that. I can tell if the girl was hit on the head, but I won't know who did it."

"I spoke to the parents briefly. They feel that if she was hit on the head, they'll know it was the suspect who did it. And they don't want him to leave before they have a chance to interrogate him again. I said we'd let them know something definite in the next forty-eight hours."

I hated not being able to tell people yes or no right away, but you have to keep the law happy until their demands become unreasonable. My testimony is no good in court, right? So it's very irksome when the law stops me from leaving town. They don't even believe in me, but they can't seem to let me go.

"Damned if you do, damned if you don't," I muttered. I remembered my mother's mother saying that: it was one of the few memories I had of her. I remembered her with a child's affection, though she hadn't been one of those sweet cuddly grandmas you see in TV ads. She'd never baked a cookie or knitted a sweater, and as far as dispensing wisdom, the aforementioned saying was about as profound as she'd gotten. She'd vanished as thoroughly as she could when my mother became a predator because of her drug habit. Of course, dodging her needy and dishonest daughter meant she also lost contact with us; but maybe it hadn't been an easy choice.

"You ever hear from your grandmother?" I asked Tolliver. He didn't follow my line of thinking, but he didn't look startled.

"Yeah, every now and then she calls," he said. "I try to talk to her once a month."

"Your dad's mother, right?"

"Yeah, my mother's parents are both gone. She was their youngest, so they were pretty old when she died. It just took the life out of them, my dad said. They both passed away about five years after my mother."

"We don't have a lot of relatives." The McGraw-Cotton family seemed pretty united. Parker loved his mom, though she'd remarried. She'd stayed loyal to him instead of going all country club with her accession to money. Twyla had said Archie Cotton's adult children were okay with the marriage.

"Nope." Tolliver didn't seem concerned. "We have enough."

I reached up with my good hand to pat him on the shoulder. "Damn straight," I said, with an overly hearty cheer, and he laughed a little.

"Listen, we need to go into town a little early."

"Why?"

"Well, the computer was down at the hospital this morning, and they wanted to check your bill again."

"You mean they let me out without you paying the total?"

"I paid it, but they wanted to be sure there weren't any later charges on it. So they asked me to drop by."

"Okay."

"You due any medicine?"

We checked, and I took a pill. I decided to take the pain medicine with me in my purse. I was able to use the bathroom by myself, but Tolliver had to help me readjust my clothes; and I let him take a swipe at brushing my hair, too. It was very awkward to attempt that one-handed. We managed to camouflage the bandage a little.

Tolliver went down the steps first, and I came down carefully after him. The gust of relatively warm air that blew in my face was a startling change. It was getting dark fast.

"And there's cold air coming down from the north?" I asked.

"Yeah, late tomorrow," he said. "And it'll be this warm here through part of tomorrow. We need to listen to the news on our way into town."

We did, and the weather prediction was discouraging. Temperatures would remain in the upper forties through tomorrow, and by the evening the hot and the cold air would collide with the strong chance of a resultant ice storm. That sounded terrible. I'd only seen such a thing one other time, in my childhood, but I still remembered the trees down across the road in our trailer park, the bitter cold, and the lack of electricity. It had been a long thirty hours before our power came back on then. I wondered if we could drive out of the area likely to be affected before the storm hit.

The hospital lobby was almost deserted, and the girl on duty at the business window was busy closing out her paperwork. She wasn't too happy to see us, though she was polite. She glanced at a yellow Post-it Note stuck to my file and picked up her telephone. Punching in some numbers, she said, "Mr. Simpson? They're here." After hanging up, she said, "Mr. Simpson, the administrator, asked to be notified when you came by. He'll be here in just a minute."

We sat in the padded chairs with the metal legs and stared at the magazines on the low Formica table in front of us. Battered copies of Field and Stream, Parenting, and Better Homes and Gardens were not likely to tempt us, and I closed my eyes and slumped down in my chair. I found myself daydreaming about Christmas trees: white ones with golden ribbon and golden decorations, green ones with red flocked cardinals stuck on the branches, trees covered with big Italian glass ornaments and artificial icicles, dripping with tinsel. It was a shock to open my eyes and see long legs in front of me, legs covered in a dark suiting material. Barney Simpson dropped into a chair opposite us. His hair looked even rougher than it had when he'd come to my hospital room. I wondered if he'd ever tried cream rinse on it, to make it a bit more tameable.

"I have to confess," he began, "I put a flag on your statement so Britta would call me when you came in."

"Why?" Tolliver asked. I sat up and tried not to yawn.

"Because I thought you might bolt without coming to the meeting tonight if I didn't catch you here and remind you to come," Simpson said with every appearance of frankness. "Britta told me the computers had been down when you were checking out this morning, so I decided to take advantage of the opportunity."

"You belong to the same church? Doak Garland's church?"

"Oh, I make an appearance every few Sundays," he said, not a bit abashed by something most southerners would be ashamed to admit. "I have to confess that I don't have a great attendance record. I like to sleep in on Sundays, I'm afraid."

He seemed to expect me to supply him with a comforting reassurance along the lines of "Don't we all?" or "We miss a lot of Sundays, too." But I didn't say anything. This may have been childish on my part. Tolliver and I don't ever go to church. I don't know what Tolliver believes, at least not in detail. I believe in God; I don't believe in church. Churches give me the cold chills. The only reason I'd been in a church in the past five years was to go to a funeral. Having the body that close was very distracting. It buzzed at me during the whole service. If this had been Jeff McGraw's funeral, rather than a kind of memorial service for all the lost boys, I would never have agreed to come to it.

"Abe Madden is due to speak," Barney Simpson said. "That should be interesting. Sandra hasn't said much, but it's common knowledge that Abe wouldn't pursue the boys' disappearances with anything like the purpose Sandra wanted when she was a deputy. And it's also no secret that's one reason she was elected sheriff."

Barney Simpson gave us a serious nod, his big black glasses reflecting the overhead fluorescents.

"Then I guess it should have a little more controversy than the usual memorial service," Tolliver said. "Our bill is ready, you said? Your computers are back up and running?"

"Yes. We're backing up everything this evening so we won't lose anything in the upcoming ice storm. I guess you've been listening to the weather, like everyone else around here. Did you-all find a place to stay?"

"Yes, we did," I said.

"Back in the motel, I guess. You-all were lucky to find somewhere."

"No," Tolliver said. "They were all out of rooms."

He went over to the window to check on the bill while Barney looked at me expectantly, waiting for me to tell him where we'd found a place to stay—but I didn't. I wasn't sure why I was being so ornery. A bop on the head will only excuse so much. I forced myself to be polite.

"Is there a Mrs. Simpson?" I asked, though I simply could not have cared less.

"There was," he said, regret tingeing his voice with gray. "We came to a parting of the ways a few years ago, and she and my daughter moved to Greenville."

"So you get to see your daughter sometimes."

"Yes, she comes back to stay with me and visit her junior high buddies every so often. Hard to believe she's in college now. Any children for you?"

"No," I said, shaking my head.

"Well, they're a mixed blessing," the administrator said in a consoling voice, as if to assure me I didn't have to grieve at not having any.

I stood and moved over to Tolliver, who was getting a receipt from Britta.

"Could I take you two to supper?" Barney Simpson asked, and we tried not to look too astonished.

Tolliver glanced at me quickly to get my reaction to this very unexpected invitation, and he said, "Thanks, but we already have plans. We appreciate your offer, though."

"Sure, sure."

Britta had closed her window and I could see her silhouette behind the glass as she rose and began putting on her coat.

The hospital was as closed as a hospital gets.

We left then, heading out the front door with the receipt and Simpson's goodbyes. "What a lonely guy," I said.

"He has a thing for you," Tolliver said gloomily.

"He does not." I dismissed the idea without a second glance at it. "He didn't care about me at all. I didn't represent a woman to him, one little bit."

"Then why'd he want to be our best friend?"

"I guess it was the newness of us," I said. "He may not have the chance to meet that many people. I bet his job pretty much holds him down. We're variety."

Tolliver shrugged. "Whatever. Where you want to eat?"

"This is Doraville. What are our choices?"

"It's too cold for Sonic. There's a McDonald's and there's a Satellite Steaks."

"That'll do."

Satellite Steaks was very much like Golden Corral or Western Sizzlin'. On this cold night, with the prospect of a memorial service and bad weather to anticipate, everyone in Doraville had had the same idea. There were some easily identifiable strangers who had to be with the news crews, and there were a lot of locals (who probably didn't come in during the summer tourist season), and there were travelers from the interstate. The place was jammed. Manfred and Xylda were at a table for four. Without consulting Tolliver, I went right over to their table and asked if we could share.

"Oh, please," Xylda said. She had maybe a ton of makeup on. Her encounter with the media at the barn seemed to have galvanized her into going the extra mile. Her eyes were positively Cleopatran, and she'd actually tied a scarf around her head à la a gypsy, with her brilliant red ringlets flying out from under it to form a shocking contrast with her pale, plump, wrinkled face. I sat beside her and got a big whiff of stale perfume. Tolliver had to sit by Manfred, which wouldn't hurt him. And Manfred had to smell better than his grandmother.

"How are you feeling?" Manfred asked. He really looked anxious.

"I'm doing good," I said. "My head feels better. The arm is a pain."

"I heard you two checked out of the motel. I figured you'd be long gone."

"Tomorrow or the next day," Tolliver said. "We're just waiting to see if the state guys have anything else to ask us. Then we'll be on our way. You two?"

"I need to stay until tomorrow afternoon, at least," Xylda said in a whisper. "There are more dead people to come. And the time of ice is near."

Now, that I understood. "That's what the weather says. There's going to be an ice storm."

"We're hoping to get out of town ahead of it," Manfred said quietly. "Grandma don't need to be away from a big hospital any longer than we can help it. I'll be taking her back home as soon as I can." I looked at him sideways and read clearly the grief written on his face. It made me want to give him a big hug.

Xylda looked like she was listening to a faraway voice. I was seriously concerned about her. Before, she'd been in the likeable fake category, though she'd always had her moments of true brilliance. They'd just been too few and far between for her to make her living off of them. Now she appeared to be "on" all the time. The stretches of shrewd reality that had helped her earn a living (if fraudulent) wage seemed to be fewer and farther between.

I wondered what Manfred would do when she was gone. He was very young and he still had all his options open. He could go to college and get a regular job. He could apprentice in a circus. He could assume the hand-to-mouth existence of petty fraud and chicanery that Xylda had led. This wasn't the time or place to quiz him about his future plans, when the big stumbling block to any of them sat beside me spilling salad dressing down her blouse.

Xylda said, "That boy is going to be a murderer." Fortunately her voice was quite low. I knew she was talking about Chuck Almand.

Speaking of a young man with options open. "Not for sure, though. He could still save himself. Maybe his father will find a good therapist for him, and he'll work out all his kinks." I didn't believe it, but I should at least sound like I thought it was possible.

Manfred shook his head. "I can't believe they didn't arrest him."

"He's a minor," Tolliver said. "And there aren't any witnesses against him except his own admission. I don't think jail would do him any good, do you? Maybe just the opposite, in fact. Maybe in jail he'd find out how much he enjoyed hurting people."

"I think in jail he'd be on the other end," I said. "I think he'd get hurt a lot, and maybe come out ready to give it back with interest."

We all mulled it over. The waitress bustled up to take our orders and to ask Manfred and Xylda if they needed more to drink. They both accepted, and it was a few minutes before we could resume our conversation.

"I wonder if there's a kid like that in every community," Tolliver said. "One who likes to cause pain, likes to have the power over smaller creatures."

"There was someone like that in our school in Texarkana?" I asked. I was surprised.

"Yeah. Leon Stipes. Remember him?"

Leon had been six feet tall when he was in the sixth grade. Leon was black, and he was on the football team, and he scared the hell out of the other teams we played. I suspected he'd scared the hell out of most of the players on his own team, too.

I explained Leon to Xylda and Manfred. "He liked causing pain?"

"Oh, yeah," said Tolliver grimly. "Oh, yeah. He really did. In practice, he'd nail people he didn't have to, just to hear them yelp."

I shuddered with distaste. With one hand, I opened my purse and pulled out my bottle of vitamins. I pushed it over for Tolliver to deal with. He removed the childproof lid and shook one out. I took it.

"How are you feeling?" Manfred asked. "The arm hurting?"

I shrugged. "The pain medicine works pretty well," I said. "In fact, I'm wondering if I'll fall asleep in the memorial service."

"You'll be much better soon," Xylda said, and I wondered if she was basing that on foresight or on optimism.

"What about you, Xylda?" I looked at her curiously. "Didn't I hear you were in the hospital last month?" There's an Internet group for those of us who work in the paranormal field. I check it out from time to time.

"Yes," she said, "but it's bad for my spirit, the hospital. Too much negative there. Too many desperate people. I won't go in there again."

I started to protest, caught the warning glance Manfred gave me. I shut up.

"I don't blame you," Tolliver said. "Harper's just trailing negative thoughts, and she was only in there for a couple of days."

I could have kicked him, if I could have summoned the energy. I stuck out my tongue.

Tolliver and Manfred talked about car mileage while we ate, and Xylda and I thought our own thoughts. When Tolliver left to go to the men's room and Manfred was paying their bill, she said, "I'm going to die soon."

I was affected enough by the pain medicine to accept this calmly. "I'm sorry to hear you think so," I said, which seemed safe enough. "Are you scared?"

"No," she said, after a moment's thought, "I don't believe I am. I've enjoyed my life and I've tried to do good, for the most part. I never took money from anyone who couldn't afford it, and I loved my son and grandson. I believe my soul will enter another body. That's very comforting, knowing the essential part of me won't die."

"Yes, it must be," I said, pretty much at a loss as to how to carry my end of the conversation.

"Your questions will all be answered," she said. "My sight is clearer the closer I come to the end."

Then I said something that surprised even myself. "Will I find my sister, Xylda? Will I find Cameron? She's dead, right?"

"You'll find Cameron," Xylda said.

I bowed my head.

"I don't know," Xylda said after a lengthy pause, and I raised my face to stare at her, trying to figure out what she meant. Manfred was coming back to the table to leave a tip. Tolliver was in line at the cash register. We were in a cone of strangeness together. "But there are more important things for you to think about first," Xylda continued.

I hardly understood how anything could be more important than finding my sister's body. I slid out of the booth and started struggling into my coat, while Xylda began scooting to the outside. Manfred helped me get my right arm into its coat sleeve and draped the coat over my left shoulder. He bent slightly and gave me a kiss on the neck as he did so. He did this so casually that it seemed churlish to make a big deal out of it. In fact, it wasn't until I saw Tolliver's face that the light kiss really registered on me. Tolliver was absolutely inclined to make a big deal out of it, and I gripped his arm with my good hand and began marching toward the door, forcing him to come along.

"It was nothing," I said. "I wasn't even thinking about it. He's just a very young man with a sick grandmother." I'm not sure what sense that made, but at the moment it just slid right out of my brain and then my mouth. "We're just going to this meeting now. Come on, or we'll be late."

Somehow we both ended up in the right car and Tolliver turned on the motor to get the blessed heater started. He pulled my seat belt across me with unnecessary force, and I squeaked because my arm hurt.

"Sorry," he said, not sounding very sorry at all. "He rubs me the wrong way. He just crawls around you. All that stuff in his face and God knows where else! Just waiting to touch you."

Instead of keeping quiet and letting things die down like I ought to have done, I said, "Isn't it okay that someone likes me?"

"Sure! Just not him!"

Tolliver would rather I got together with Barney Simpson or the Pastor Doak Garland? "Why not?"

There was a long moment of silence while Tolliver struggled with that question. "Because he, well, he actually stands a chance with you," he said. "Other guys don't because we're always traveling and you aren't going to see them again, but he understands the lifestyle and he has to travel, too, with Xylda."

I opened my mouth to say, So you don't want me to have anyone? But a power beyond me shut my mouth. I didn't say anything. This was closer to the bone than I'd imagined Tolliver would get, and I was scared to take it any further.

"He's younger than me." I had to say something.

"Not too young," my brother said. We'd changed sides in the Manfred argument, I realized. Suddenly, I was trying not to smile. I realized the pain pill I'd taken at the cabin was definitely working. I had the blooming warm sense of well-being, the chatty feeling of affection for all mankind. If I ever became addicted to any pharmaceutical, pain pills would be my drug of choice. But I didn't plan on becoming addicted. Once the pain was gone, the pills would be. I had to watch myself, after the example my mother had set me.

"The trick to avoiding these pills is not to get hurt," I said seriously.

Tolliver had a little trouble catching up to this conversational line, but he got there. "Yes, you don't want to end up in the hospital again," he said. "For one thing, you can't do your share of the driving while you're on them."

"Oh, yeah, like you care," I said.

He smiled. I felt better. "But I do," he said.

The lot of Mount Ida Baptist Church was already full of cars. One of the local cops was directing the overflow parking. Tolliver asked if he could drop me off right in front of the church, and the cop nodded. I got out of the car awkwardly and stood just inside the vestibule, waiting. As other people passed me and went in, I glimpsed Twyla sitting at a table just inside the door. She had a clear plastic box in front of her, a box with a slot cut in the top.

There was a sign on the front of the box that read "Please help our families bury their children." It was already half full of bills and change.

Twyla glimpsed me, too, and made a beckoning gesture. I maneuvered through the doors and went to sit in the vacant folding chair beside her. She leaned over to give me a half hug.

"How you doing, girl?" she asked.

However I was doing, it had to be better than Twyla. Everything wrong with me would heal. Not so, her. "I'm okay," I said. "They've got you working, I see."

"Yep, they thought it would be more effective if a relative sat here," she said. "So here I am. If you say six of the boys were local, we need at least four thousand dollars for each burial, so our goal is twenty-four thousand. We got these up all over town, but this is a poor place. I think we'll be lucky to get six thousand through these collections."

"How do you expect to make up the rest, or do you think that just won't happen?"

Twyla looked grim. "I think it won't happen. But we're doing the best we can. Maybe if the poorer families can just make a good down payment on the funerals through these donations, each individual family can pay the rest on time."

I nodded. "Good idea." Emboldened by the pain medication, I said, "It's too bad the media don't chip in. After all, they're profiting by the deaths as well, aren't they? They should donate something."

A fire lit in Twyla's eyes. "That's a good idea," she said. "I wonder that I didn't think of it. What happened today at Tom Almand's? I'm hearing some mighty funny things. That boy of his in trouble? Hey, Sarah," she said, lifting her round face to a woman coming in. "Thanks for helping," she added as the older woman dropped a couple of dollars into the slot.

"There are too many people around to talk about it," I said quietly. No one had asked me not to discuss the macabre nature of the findings at Tom Almand's, but I didn't want to be broadcasting it. Chuck Almand would be a pariah soon enough. I wouldn't hasten the process. Though some country people tend to be more practical about animals than city people, plenty of the inhabitants of Doraville would be disgusted at the pain inflicted on cats and squirrels and the odd dog…especially if the cats and the dog turned out to be somebody's pets. "But he's not a boy you'd want to have dating your daughter or granddaughter."

"The sheriff says we won't get the bodies back for a week at least, maybe longer," Twyla said. "It seems hard that we finally discover Jeff, but we can't bury him."

"At the same time," I said, "you want every bit of evidence that can tie his death to the killer."

"I don't like to think about him getting cut up," Twyla said. "I can't think about it."

I didn't know what to say, and the fuzzy golden goodwill the pill lent me did not give me any inspiration. I decided it was best to keep silent. I looked over the crowd in the pews. Mount Ida was a larger church than I'd imagined from the outside. The pews were gleaming with polish, and the carpet was new, too. At the front of the church were easels with enlarged photographs of the dead boys, each with a spray of flowers at the base. I would have liked to look at them, since I'd touched on each of these young men in my very own way, but going up there would have seemed rude and pushy.

There was a knot of law enforcement uniforms in one of the front pews. I recognized Sheriff Rockwell's hair, and I thought I also saw Deputy Rob Tidmarsh, who'd discovered the animal graves.

Somehow the Bernardos had beat us here. I glimpsed Xylda's unruly red head a few pews up and to the right and Manfred's platinum spikes beside her. From the rear view, the two didn't stand out so much. There was plenty of dyed hair in evidence, and several spiky hairdos.

Tolliver came in, his face pinched with cold. He dropped a twenty into the slot. He was surprised to find me seated by Twyla, but he leaned over to shake her hand and to tell her how sorry he was. "We appreciate the use of your cabin," he said. "It made a big difference, having a place to stay." I hadn't even thought of thanking her, and I was angry with myself.

"I'm very sorry Harper got hurt," Twyla said, and I felt better when I realized I wasn't the only one who'd forgotten to mention something fairly major. "I hope they catch who did it, and I'm sure it was the same bastard who killed our Jeff. This is something else I forgot," she said, pressing a check into my hands. I nodded and slid it into Tolliver's chest pocket. We started down the aisle to find a place to sit.

We paused by a pew with some free space in the middle, and when the pew's settlers saw my cast, they were kind enough to all shift down to let us sit on the end. I said "Thank you" several times. It felt good to settle down on the padded pew shoulder to shoulder with Tolliver. We were far enough away from the door to avoid the effects of the constant gusts of cold air with each entrance.

Gradually the murmurs died down and the crowd became silent. The doors didn't open and close anymore. Pastor Garland came out, looking youthful and somehow sweet. But his voice was anything but sweet, or peaceful, as he read the scriptures he'd selected for the occasion. He'd picked a passage from Ecclesiastes, he told us, and he started to read. He began, "To everything there is a season…"

Everyone around me was nodding their heads, though of course Tolliver and I didn't recognize the scripture. We listened with great attention. Was he saying that it had been time for the boys to die? No, maybe his emphasis was on "a time to mourn." That was now, for sure. The rest of his readings were from Romans, and the thread that ran through them was about maintaining your own integrity in a world bereft of it. And they were eerily appropriate.

There was no point in saying the murders were events the congregation had to accept philosophically. There was no point in saying the people of Doraville had to turn the other cheek; it wasn't the community's cheek that had been struck. Its children had been stolen. There would be no offering up of other children to be killed, no matter how much scripture was quoted.

No, Doak Garland was smarter than he appeared. He was telling the people of Doraville that they had to endure and trust in God to get them past the bad time, that God would help them in this endeavor. No one could disagree with that message. Not here, not tonight. Not with those faces at the front of the congregation, staring back. As I watched, a deputy ceremoniously added two more easels, but these were left blank. The two boys who were strangers. I felt touched.

"These are the children of our community," Doak said. He gestured to the faces. Then he pointed to the two blank easels. "And these are someone else's children, but they were killed and buried right along with ours, and we must pray for them, too."

One picture was the stern one boys always take for their high school football picture. The scowling boy, looking so very tough…I'd seen him in his grave, beaten and cut, tortured beyond his endurance, every vestige of manhood stripped from him. Suddenly the tragedy of it seemed unbearable, and as Doak Garland's voice rose in his sermon, tears flowed out of my eyes. Tolliver fished some Kleenex from his pocket and patted my face. He looked a little bewildered. I'd never reacted like this to a previous case, no matter how horrific.

We sang a hymn or two, we prayed long and loud, and one woman fainted and was helped out into the vestibule. I floated through the service on a cloud of pain medication, every now and then weeping with the emotion that could not be contained. When the usher—the hospital administrator, Barney Simpson—came by with the plate to pass for further donations toward the burials, a man two pews ahead of me turned his head as he handed his neighbor the collection plate, and I saw to my amazement that Tom Almand had come to the service. He had brought his son with him, and that hit me wrong. The counselor should have stayed home with the boy. Chuck was laboring under such a terrible burden, he shouldn't be in a place where the atmosphere was sheer grief and horror. Or did he need to be reminded that other problems were worse than his? I was no counselor. Maybe his dad knew best.

I reached across myself to squeeze Tolliver with my good hand. He looked at me inquiringly. He was restless, and I could tell he wanted to be anywhere but here. I nodded my head to indicate Tom Almand and Chuck, and after scanning the crowd with a blank face, Tolliver gave me a significant look to let me know he'd spotted them. As if he could feel our gazes, Almand turned a bit and looked straight at us. I thought he would look disgusted, or angry, or anguished. What does the father of such a child feel? I didn't have a clue, but I was fairly sure it would be a painful mixture of emotions.

Tom Almand looked blank. I couldn't even be sure he recognized me.

Okay, that was freaky. I would have added forty more dollars to the collection plate if I could have heard what Almand was thinking.

"Huh," Tolliver said, which put it in a nutshell.

Then the collection was over, and everyone settled back into receptive silence. But a stir went through the crowd when a stubby man in a bad suit rose from the front pew and went to the lectern.

"Those of you don't know me, I'm Abe Madden," he said, and there was another little ripple of movement. "I know that some of you blame me for not realizing sooner that those boys were being killed. Maybe, like some of you think, I let what I wanted get in the way of what I should. I wanted those boys to be okay, just out sowing a few wild oats. I should have been looking harder for them, asking harder questions. Some in my own department told me that." He might have been looking at the current sheriff when he said that. "Some in my department thought I was right. Well, we know now I was wrong, and I ask your forgiveness for a great mistake I made. I was your servant while I was in office, and I let you down." And he went back to his seat.

I'd never heard anything like that before. What it must have cost the man in pride to do that…I couldn't even imagine. Tolliver was less impressed. "Now he's confessed and asked for forgiveness," he whispered. "Can't anyone point fingers at him anymore; he's paid his debt."

A member of each family spoke, some briefly, some at length, but I heard very little fire and brimstone. I expected some homophobic stuff, given the nature of the murders, but I didn't hear any. The anger was directed at the rape, not at the sexual preference of the rapist. Only two family members spoke of vengeance, and then only in terms of the law catching the responsible party. There was no lynch talk, no fist shaking. Grief and relief.

The last speaker said, "At least now we know this is at an end. No more of our sons will die." At that, I saw a sudden movement in the Bernardos' pew. Manfred was gripping Xylda by the arm, and her face was turned toward his. She looked angry and urgent. But after a few seconds, she subsided.

We might as well have left then, for all I got out of the rest of the service. I was drowsy and uncomfortable, and I wanted nothing more than to lean my head on Tolliver's shoulder and fall asleep. That would clearly be the wrong thing to do, so I focused on sitting up straight and keeping my eyes open. At last the service was over, and we sang a closing hymn. Then we could go. I stepped out of the pew first since I was on the end, and a grizzled man in overalls took my hand. "Thank you, young lady," he said, and then began making his way out of the church without another word. He was the first of many people who made a point of touching me: a light hug, a grip of the hand, a pat on the shoulder. Each contact came with a "Thank you," or a "God bless you and keep you," and each time I was surprised. This had never happened to me before. I was sure it would never happen again. Doak Garland embraced me when we reached his spot at the door, his white hands light on my shoulders so he wouldn't hurt me. Barney Simpson, towering over me, reached out to give me a light pat. Parker McGraw said, "Bless you," and Bethalynn wept, her arms around her remaining son.

No one asked me a single question about how I'd found the boys. The faith of Doraville seemed to hinge on the acceptance of God's mysterious ways and the strange instruments he selects to perform his will.

I was the strange instrument, of course.