Harper Connelly [3] An Ice Cold Grave Read online

  “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 ha
rd 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.