Grave Sight

six

AFTER Tolliver and I had exchanged glances, we steered off the subject quickly. Mary Nell's sad, tearful face had already attracted some attention from the sparse clientele. Her coloring cleared up and her demeanor brightened as she talked about happier topics, addressing her conversation almost exclusively to my brother. Tolliver found out that Nell planned to go to the University of Arkansas the next year, that she wanted to be a physical therapist so she could help people, that she was a cheerleader and didn't like algebra. Her cheerleading sponsor was totally cool.

I was free to think my own thoughts. Mary Nell didn't seem much different from any of the girls I'd known in high school, the girls with sober parents, the girls who had enough money to ward off worry and homelessness. She was bright but not brilliant, virginal but not saintly. The loss of her sibling had left her drifting, searching for a new identity when her old one had been shaken at its core. I could see the knowledge of her brother's secret life with Teenie had disturbed Mary Nell deeply, until that shock had been smothered by the greater trauma of Dell's death. Clearly, sharing her brother's secret had relieved the knot of tension deep inside Mary Nell Teague. It didn't seem to make a difference to Mary Nell that the people she'd shared it with were strangers.

The girl was fascinated with Tolliver. Since she was popular, pretty, and a teenager, Mary Nell was sure Tolliver would find her equally fascinating. I observed Mary Nell flounder through the conversation, trying to find the key to cajoling my brother into noticing she was a woman. Mary Nell would begin an anecdote about her homeroom teacher, realize that was a kid topic, and make a huge effort to switch to some conversational gambit she believed would appeal to an older man.

"Did you go to college?" she asked Tolliver.

"I went two years," he said. "Then I worked for a while. After that, Harper and I started our traveling."

"How come you don't get a regular job and stay somewhere?" Like real people do.

Tolliver looked at me. I looked back. "Good question," he said. I looked at him askance, determined not to answer. She hadn't asked me.

"Harper helps people," he said. "She's one of a kind."

"But she gets paid for it," Nell said, outraged.

"Sure," Tolliver said. "Why not? When you get to be a therapist, you'll get paid."

Mary Nell ignored this royally.

"And she can do that by herself. Does she have to have help?"

Hey, sitting right here! Listening! I spread my hands, palms up. Only Tolliver noticed the gesture.

"It's not that she has to have my help. It's that I want to give it to her," Tolliver said gently. I looked straight down at my plate. Mary Nell abruptly excused herself to go to the ladies' room. I had no intention of accompanying her—I would not be welcome—so Tolliver and I silently picked at the remnants of our food until she returned, her eyes red and her head held high.

"Thanks for dinner," she said stiffly. We'd insisted on treating her. "I enjoyed it." Then, holding her eyes wide and unblinking, she strode out of the dining room.

I watched her car pull out of the dark parking lot. I was a little surprised to find myself actually concerned about the girl. Her life was crashing in ruins around her, and that could make her careless. Too many things can happen to girls who don't watch where they're going. I find their corpses every year.

We got back to our motel in plenty of time for me to brush my hair and spray on a little perfume for my date. Tolliver watched without comment, his face harsh in the shadowy light of the room. "You got your cell phone?" he asked. "I'll leave mine on."

"Okay," I said. Tolliver went into his room, shutting the door behind him very gently.

Hollis knocked on my door right on time. When I opened it, he said, "You look pretty," sounding unflatteringly surprised. I was wearing jeans and a black blouse and some black heels. I wore a gold chain with a jade pendant, a gift from me to me after I'd gotten a bonus from a distraught husband who'd been looking for his wife's body for four years.

Hollis looked pretty good himself, solid and blond in a new pair of jeans and a gold-and-brown plaid shirt. He'd shaved, and he smelled of some cologne. He'd made an effort. Maybe this was a bit more of a date than I'd imagined.

We went to a small dive a little north of town. It was built of dark wood and had plastic banners on long ropes tied from the building to the trees and lamp poles around the graveled lot. If the brightly colored triangles had been fluttering in some breeze, possibly the effect would have been cheerful and festive. In the chilly, still night air, the banners were simply depressing, forlorn reminders of failed festivity.

The interior looked better than I'd imagined, given the exterior. The bar itself was polished wood and the floor had been redone recently in that fake oak flooring that actually looks pretty good. The tables and booths were clean. The décor was definitely Hunting Lodge, with deer heads and large fish mounted on the walls, interspersed with mirrors and old license plates. The jukebox was wailing country and western.

I was pleased with the place, and I smiled. Hollis asked if I wanted one of the small booths or a table, and I picked a booth. He asked me what I wanted to drink, and when I said a Coors would be fine, he went to the bar and returned with two longnecks. He also brought two napkins, one of which he solemnly placed on the heavily polyurethaned wood in front of me before he put my mug on it. I suppressed a smile.

So much for the preliminaries.

"What do you like to do?" he asked. "While you're traveling around the country?"

Not the opening I'd expected. "I like to read," I said. "Sometimes, we try to catch a movie. I run. I watch television. I like to watch the WNBA games, since I played a little basketball in high school. I plan my dream house."

"Tell me about your dream house," Hollis said, smiling.

"Okay," I said, slowly. This was something I didn't talk about too often. "It will have to be off the beaten road, of course. I want it to look like a log cabin, but without the inconveniences of a real log cabin. I found a plan on the Internet, and I bought it. But of course, I want to alter it a little."

"Of course," he said, taking a sip of beer.

"It would be two bedrooms and a study, with a family room. There'd be a kitchen here, with the washroom right off of it." I was looking down at the table, drawing with my finger. "Around back, there'd be a porte cochere for the cars, so you could carry groceries right into the kitchen without getting wet. There's a deck off the right side of the kitchen, see? Or maybe I'd put it off the family room. That's where the fireplace will be, and you could keep your firewood on the deck. And you could put your gas grill on the deck. For steaks."

"Who lives in that house with you?"

I looked up at him, startled. "Well, of course—" I began. Then I shut my mouth.

"Surely your brother will get married somewhere along the line?" Hollis asked gently, his eyes steady and his face calm. "You might want to marry, yourself. Cut down on your traveling, some."

"Yes, that might happen," I said after a moment. "What about you?"

"I'll stay here," he said, almost sadly. "Maybe I'll feel like trying something permanent again, who knows? I haven't been the man I was since Sally died. And before I met Sally, I was married for about ten minutes when I was just a kid. It might be hard to get some sweet thing to spend time with me."

"I don't think that'll be the issue," I said. Some women might be put off by Hollis, but it was hardly his fault that his second wife had been murdered. "Was being married... was it good? Living with someone full-time?"

He gave it some thought, staring down at his beer. Then he looked at me.

"The first time, it was heaven for two months. Then it was hell," he said, his mouth turning up wryly. "What a mistake that was. The only thing I can say, she was as eager to make that mistake as I was. We wanted each other so bad I couldn't sleep nights. At the time we married, we looked on it as a license to screw. And boy, did we. We didn't realize there'd be a lot more to it. We found out, right quick. When we split up, it would be a toss-up as to which of us was the more relieved."

After raising an inquiring eyebrow at me, he fetched us two more beers. "Sally, she was different," he said. "She was as sweet as her mom and her sister were wild. She wanted to get away from them, but she felt responsible for raising her sister, since her mom was such a lush. Then Helen kind of took a deep breath and got sober." He shook his head from side to side. "Now they're all gone, it don't make a difference, does it? Helen might as well have kept on drinking."

"Did the autopsy results come back on Teenie?" I asked.

His face became more guarded, cautious. "I can't talk to you about that." He looked at me for a long minute. "Why?"

It wasn't up to me to reveal the dead couple's secret. And I suddenly wondered why I even cared. I found bodies, and then I walked away. People died, died all the time, some in bed, some in the woods, some with a gun in their mouths. The end result was always the same. Why was this time different from any other?

"What is the worst case you've ever had?" Hollis asked me out of the blue.

I wondered if some expression crossing my face had triggered the question. "Oh, the tornado one," I said without even having to consider.

"Where was this tornado?"

"In Texas," I said. "Went right down the main street of this little town. I can't remember if the siren had gone off or not—or if it just came so suddenly there wasn't a chance to sound the siren. For whatever reason, this woman, her name was Molly Mathers, was running from her business to her car with her baby in one of those plastic carrying things with a handle. Little bitty baby."

"Storm took the baby?"

I nodded. "Snatched the carrier right out of Molly's hand."

We kept a moment of silence together.

"Everyone was sure the baby hadn't survived, of course, but the mom just couldn't let go of the idea that the baby was still in the carrier, maybe in some field, and was going hungry." I said this very evenly, because it was a hard thing to think of, a hard memory to carry around with me.

"You find the baby?"

I nodded, my lips pressed hard together.

"Deceased?"

"Sure. Up in a tree. She was still in the carrier."

"God."

I nodded again. Nothing you could say about that. "But mostly it's not so bad," I said, after a long moment of allowing the memory to dissipate. "Mostly it's girls who don't come home, or older people who wander away. Sometimes abducted kids—not too often, because if someone picked them up in a vehicle, of course there's no way to guess where the body would be."

"So you take cases where the body location is known?"

"Well, if it can be pinned down to a reasonable area. You couldn't say, ‘Hey, he was hiking somewhere in the Mojave Desert,' and expect me to find anything. Unless you had unlimited money for the amount of time it'd take me."

"What's it like?"

"What?"

"The feeling, when a body's close."

"It's like a buzzing. A humming. In my bones, in my brain. It almost hurts. The closer I get, the more intense it gets. And when I'm close, when I'm in the body's presence, I see the death."

"How much of the death?"

"I see the few seconds before it. But the only person I see is the one who died. Not any other people around. At the same time, I'm in that person, feeling it. So it can be pretty... unpleasant."

"That seems like an understatement." He took a long sip of his beer.

I nodded. "I wish I could see the face of the murderer, but I never do."

"Couldn't prosecute on your word alone, anyway."

"Yeah, I get that, but still." I shrugged. "I'd be more useful."

"You look on your job as useful?"

"Sure. Everyone needs closure, right? Uncertainty eats at you; well, I meant ‘you' in the general sense, but didn't it make you feel better when you knew what had happened to your wife? Plus, if people believe me, I can save lots of money. Like, ‘Don't dredge that pond or send in divers. No body there.' Or, ‘You don't need to search through the landfill.' Stuff like that."

"If people believe you."

"Yeah. Lots don't."

"How do you handle that?"

"I've learned to let it go and walk away."

"It must be tough."

"At first it was. Not now. What about your job?"

"Oh about what you'd expect. Drunk drivers, mostly. Neighbor disputes. Sometimes some shoplifting. Burglary. Not too much that's mysterious or even very serious. Every now and then a wife-beater, or someone with a gun on a Saturday night. I never get to see anyone at their best." He gave me a crooked half-smile.

I'd wondered what we could possibly find to talk about, but the next couple of hours went easier than I'd anticipated. He talked about deer hunting, and told me about the time he'd fallen out of his shooting stand and gotten nothing worse than a sprained ankle, the same year his friend John Harley had fallen from a stand and broken his back. I had once hurt my back playing basketball. He had played basketball in high school. He'd had a great time in high school, but never wanted to revisit those days. I didn't either. I had spent my high school years trying to keep my head down and my mouth shut so no one would find out how truly weird my life was. Because of my mother and my stepfather, I didn't want to bring anyone home with me. I'd managed pretty well until Cameron vanished. Her disappearance had been so spectacular, so media-saturated, that it had drawn a lot of unwanted attention to me.

"Seems like I remember that," Hollis said thoughtfully. He was on his third beer. I was still nursing my second. "Wasn't she taken by a man in a blue pickup?"

I nodded. "Grabbed on her way home. She'd been decorating the gym for some dance. I'd walked home earlier, so she was alone. This guy took her right off the street. There were witnesses. But no one ever found her."

"I'm sorry," he said.

I nodded in acknowledgment. "Someday I'll find her," I said. "Someday it'll be her, when I feel that buzz. And we'll know what happened to her."

"Are your parents still alive?"

"My father is, I think. My mother died last year." Her addictions had finally succeeded in eating up her body.

"What's your connection with Tolliver?"

"Tolliver's dad married my mother. We were brought up as family, after that." If we'd been "brought up" at all, I added to myself. Mostly, we'd fended for ourselves. After a while, we'd become good at presenting a facade to the authorities who might separate us. Tolliver watched over Cameron and me, I watched over the two littler girls, Mariella and Gracie. Tolliver's older brother Mark stopped by on a regular basis to make sure we were eating. If we weren't, Mark would bring groceries. Tolliver got a job at a restaurant as soon as he was old enough, and he brought home all the food he could.

Sometimes our parents were both working, sometimes we got government assistance. But mostly the money went down their throats or into their veins.

We learned to survive on very little, and we learned how to pick clothes at the thrift store and at yard sales, clothes that wouldn't give away our situation. Mark would lecture us on how important it was to make good grades. "As long as you keep clean and neat, don't skip school, and make at least average grades, social services won't come by," he'd taught us, and he'd been right. Until Cameron vanished.

I tried explaining those years to Hollis.

"That sounds horrible," Hollis said. His face looked sad, sad for the girl I had been, God bless him. "Did they hit you?"

"No," I said. "Neglect was the key to their parenting system, even for Mariella and Gracie. My mom tried to take care of them when they were babies, but after that, it was kind of up to Cameron and me, mostly me. It was hard for us not to go down the same drain." I had clung to my memory of what life had been like before—before my mother had begun using drugs, before my father had gone to jail. I'd promised myself I could have that life again. My two younger sisters hadn't had as hard a time; they had no memory of anything better.

The tension of maintaining the status quo had almost killed me. But we'd managed, until Cameron got snatched.

"What happened then?" Hollis asked.

I fidgeted, looked anywhere else. "Let's talk about something else," I said. "The summary is that I spent my senior year living with a foster family, and my little half-sisters stayed with my aunt and uncle."

"How was the foster family?"

"They were decent people," I said. "Not child molesters, not slavedrivers. As long as I did my assigned chores and finished my homework, I wasn't unhappy." It had been an acute pleasure to live in a household that valued order and cleanliness.

"Any trace of your sister ever found?"

"Her purse. Her backpack." I shifted my right leg, which tended to numb if I didn't move it around.

"Tough."

"Yeah, I'd say we've both had lives that had a few bumps."

Hollis nodded. "Here's to trying to live a better life," he said, and we bumped glasses.

We went to his small house later, gaining a little comfort and warmth from each other. But I wouldn't spend the night, though he wanted me to stay. About three in the morning, I kissed him goodbye at the door to my motel room, and we held each other for a long minute. I went inside by myself, cold to my bones.