Harper Connelly [3] An Ice Cold Grave Read online

  “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 c
hurch?”

  “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?”