“You understand,” I began carefully, then paused to try to find some other way of saying what I needed to say. “You understand, I need some idea of where to search, or I might wander around this town forever without getting a location. The sheriff said she had an idea where we should start.” America is so big. You never realize how big, until you’re looking for something the size of a corpse.
“Tell me how you work,” she said.
It was great to meet someone so matter-of-fact about it.
“If you have an area you think is more likely than any other, I just start walking around,” I said. “It may take time. It may take a lot of time. I may never be successful.”
She brushed that aside. “How will you know it’s him?”
“Oh, I’ll know. And I’ve seen his picture. The problem is, there are dead people everywhere. I have to sort through them.”
She looked astonished. After a thoughtful moment, she nodded. Again, not the reaction I was used to.
“If he’s in any of the areas you pick for me to search, I’ll find him. If he isn’t, I’m not going to lie to you—I may never find Jeff. What have you got, in terms of pinning his whereabouts down?”
“His cell phone. It was found on the Madison road. I can show you the exact spot.” She showed me Jeff’s picture anyway. It wasn’t the same one I’d seen at the police station. It was a posed studio picture of Jeff and his whole family, plus his grandmother. My heart used to break when I saw the image of them alive, cradled in the arms of their nearest and dearest. Now, I just register the features, hoping I’ll see them again, even if they’re just scattered bones. Because that’s how I make our living.
This particular gig in Doraville felt different. Time isn’t much of a factor when you’re dealing with the dead. They’re not going to go anywhere. It’s the living who are urgent. But in this case, time was important. If the sheriff was right, we were dealing with a serial killer who might snatch another boy at any moment. His pattern didn’t include winter, but who’s to say his pattern wouldn’t change, that he wouldn’t take advantage of this slushy time between snows; plan a final spree before a hard freeze.
I found myself hoping that if I were able to find the missing boys, then something about the way they were buried, something about the location or what was buried with them, would lead to the discovery of their killer. I know better than anyone that death comes to us all. I hate the murderers of the young, because they rob the world of a life that still held potential. This doesn’t really make sense, I know; even a dissolute alcoholic seventy-five-year-old can push a woman out of the path of a speeding car, and change a bit of the world forever. But the death of children always carries its own particular horror.
Three
TWYLA Cotton had a Cadillac, only a year or two old. “I like a big car,” she said.
We nodded. We liked it, too. We were bundled up for the weather, and Twyla looked like a ball of fudge in her dark brown coat.
“Do your son and his wife know we’re here and what we’re doing?” I asked cautiously.
“Parker and Bethalynn do know, but they don’t believe it will lead to anything. They think I’m wasting my money. But they know it’s my money to waste, and if it makes me feel better…”
I hoped they were as philosophical about it as Twyla made it sound. Families can give us an awful lot of trouble—which I guess isn’t too surprising, since they usually believe we’re defrauding their grieving relative. Still, we’ve had a bellyful of trouble in our lives, and we don’t want any that we can avoid. I exchanged a glance with Tolliver, who was in the back seat, and one glance said all this between us.
“Have you ever had a child, Harper?” Twyla asked.
“No, I’ve never been pregnant,” I said. “But I know how you feel. My sister has been missing for eight years.”
I didn’t normally tell people that. Of course, some of them already knew it. It had made a big splash in the papers when it happened. But I was a high school student then, not a…whatever I was now.
“You have other family?”
I said, smiling brightly, “Well, I have Tolliver. I’ve got a half brother, Mark, and two half sisters, little ones, Mariella and Gracie. They live in Texas with our aunt and her husband.” Mark wasn’t my half brother any more than Tolliver was. He was simply Tolliver’s older brother. But I wasn’t in the mood to spell it out.
“Oh, I’m so sorry. Your parents already passed?”
“My mother has. My father is still living.” In jail, but living. Tolliver’s mother had died before his father met my mom, and Tolliver’s father was out of jail and drifting…somewhere. Considering my mom and dad and Tolliver’s father had all been attorneys, they’d had a long way to fall. They’d really thrown themselves into it.
Twyla looked a little shocked. “Well, how awful. I’m so sorry.”
I shrugged. That was just the way it was. “Thanks,” I said, but I knew I didn’t sound sincere. Couldn’t help it. When I heard that my mother had died, I was sorry, but not surprised, and not unrelieved.
We were quiet after that until we pulled up by the side of the road. Twyla glanced down at the list she’d taken down during a quick phone call with Sandra Rockwell. Sure enough, Sandra Rockwell had a prioritized list of places to check. This was place number one.
We were behind the high school at the football practice field, a stretch of barren level ground. One of those devices that the boys push around was still sitting by the side of the field, though football season was over. The field house was closed and locked until next year. Basketball would be the sport in play now.
“This is where his truck was,” Twyla said. “We’d just gotten it for him. It was an old second-hand Dodge.”
Sheriff Rockwell had said less about Jeff than about any of the other boys, perhaps because she’d known we’d be talking to his grandmother. Looking around now, I didn’t see anyone. Not a soul. So an abduction at this point wasn’t out of the question, though risky. At any moment, someone might come out of the school. But there weren’t any houses nearby. The lane behind the practice field was just a bare strip of ground before a steep hill that had been sheared away to build the school.
Though it might be a fair spot for an abduction, I seriously doubted someone had killed the boy on the spot and buried him here, but I wanted to show I was willing. I stepped out, sent out that part of me that made me unique. There was no response. I was getting the tiniest tingle, which meant some incredibly old human remains were somewhere in the area. It was a feeling I’d learned to ignore in my search for modern bodies. Though the range would be almost the same, not enough to make a difference, I walked the length of the property and kept getting the same reading. I shook my head silently and climbed back into the Cadillac. We drove, Twyla pointing out this or that town landmark as we passed it. I didn’t listen, concentrating instead on what I was picking up as we moved. The local cemetery provided a huge mass of static, but we had to stop there because that was where Tyler’s hat had been found.
Of course there were tons of bodies here, and some of them were very fresh. It was way too cold to pull my shoes off, but I followed my instincts and went to the freshest graves. There was a heart attack, and there was a death by old age. Sometimes, you know, you just give out. Those were the most recent deaths. But Tyler Lassiter had been gone about two years, if I was remembering correctly, so I had to check out a lot more bodies. None of them turned out to be Tyler. They were all exactly who they were supposed to be according to their headstones. I was glad Doraville wasn’t bigger, and glad some people were buried in the newer cemetery, which was south of Doraville.
We were now on the western edge of town, and Twyla once more pulled to the side of the road.
“The man that lives there was arrested for attacking a boy,” she said, pointing to a dilapidated white frame house barely visible behind a tangle of vines and young trees. “He’s been questioned over and over.”
I wa
sn’t getting anything from the car. I got out and took a couple of steps forward, closing my eyes. I picked up a buzz from my left, much farther back in the woods, but it was the faint buzz I associated with old cemeteries. I heard Tolliver’s window roll down. “Ask her if there’s an old church back there with its own cemetery,” I said.
“Yes,” Twyla called to me. “Mount Ararat is back there.”
I got back in the car and said, “Nope.”
Twyla inhaled deeply, as if about to play her last card. She put the car in drive and we pulled out, heading even farther out of the small town of Doraville. We drove northwest, the readout on Twyla’s car told me, and the ground began to climb. I looked up at the mountains and I thought that if Jeff’s body were up there, I would never find it. I did not want to go hiking in those mountains, especially in this weather. I had a brief selfish thought: Why couldn’t Twyla have called me in two months ago? A month, even? I shivered, and thought of the biting cold, the snow that lay in patches on the ground, the predictions of bad weather in a few days. We began to go up, though the pitch of the ground was not so steep here.
And then Twyla stopped again. I noticed how stiffly she sat in the driver’s seat, how white she’d gotten.
“This is where the phone was,” Twyla said. She jerked her thumb to the right. “I put that rock there, to mark where it was exactly, after the sheriff showed me.”
There was a big rock with a blue cross on it, dug into the earth at the side of the road.
“You put it in pretty deep,” Tolliver said.
“The mowers had to pass over it,” she said. “That was three months ago.”
Practical.
I got out of the Cadillac and looked around, pulling on my gloves as I did so. It was freaking cold up here, no doubt about it. The Madison road rose steeply ahead of us, cut out of the rising mountain to the left. On our side, there was a fairly level narrow strip, perhaps a half acre to an acre of land, before the rolling slope began its rise. In that half acre lay the site of an old home. The house had been abandoned years before. The plot wasn’t in a neat rectangle because it followed the contours of the hill. It was long and thin in spots.
We were parked on the shoulder, and if I took a step I’d roll down the slope of a deep ditch. The driveway into the plot ran over a culvert so the flow of rainwater wouldn’t be impeded. The remains of this driveway passed through the remains of a fence. Now, with all the leaves fallen, the stands of weeds were golden or brown with winter’s death, and the occasional young pine looked startlingly green. The weeds and small trees appeared to be holding up the fence.
The house had been a humble one. The roof wasn’t caved in, but there were holes in it, and the porch was sagging. There wasn’t any glass in the windows. There was a listing two-car garage off to one side, with wide doors that hung ajar. Once it had been painted white, like the house. The whole thing was southern gothic picturesque decay personified.
The water in the drainage ditch was dark and would be very cold. There’d been a lot of rain the past couple of weeks. And I felt the raw chill of more rain coming.
I could tell from the inclination of Tolliver’s head that he expected me to walk down the side of the road to where the hill leveled into the valley. He expected that someone had dumped the body on the more accessible ground and had tossed its accessories off while driving upward into the mountains. And under other circumstances, that’s exactly what I would have done.
But there wasn’t any need.
The minute my foot had touched the ground, I’d known I was going to have news for Twyla Cotton. The buzzing was intense, increasing as I stepped closer to the eroded driveway. This was not the signal from a single corpse. I began to have a bad feeling, an awful feeling, and I was scared to look at Tolliver. He took my hand, wrapped it around the crook of his elbow. He could tell I’d decided to go into the tangled area that had been the yard of the old house.
“The ground is rough in there. I wish we’d worn our high boots,” he said. But I couldn’t register what he was saying. I watched a blue pickup pass, slowing down for the curve, fading away from view. It was the only other vehicle we’d seen on this road.
After the sound of its motor died away, I could hear only the increasingly irrelevant registers of the two live people and the increasingly more compelling signals of the dead. I walked forward, pulling Tolliver with me. Maybe he tried to pull me back a little, but I kept on going, because this was my moment—my connection with the power, or ability, or electrical short, that made me unique.
“You better get the flags,” I said, and he went back to get the lengths of wire topped with red plastic flags.
In the cold damp I stood in the middle of the former yard, between the fence and the ruined house. I turned in a circle, feeling the buzzing rising all around me, as they clamored to be found. That’s all they want, you know. They want to be found.
I tried to speak, choked, gasped.
“What’s wrong?” Tolliver asked distantly. “Harper?”
I stumbled to the left a couple of steps. “Here,” I said.
“My grandson? Jeff’s there?” Twyla had forged her way onto the property.
I moved six feet northwest. “Here, too,” I said.
“He’s in pieces?”
“There’s more than one body,” Tolliver told her.
I held my hands up to sharpen my focus. I turned again, more slowly, my eyes closed, my hands raised, counting. “Eight,” I said.
“Oh, my Lord in heaven,” Twyla said. She sat down heavily on an old stump. “I’m going to call the police.”
She must have given Tolliver a glance of sudden misgiving, because he said, “You can bank on it. Harper’s right.” I heard the little beeps as she began punching in numbers.
“What happened to them?” he asked me quietly. He knew I was listening though my eyes were still closed.
I didn’t say anything. It was time for me to find out, but I didn’t want anyone else to watch while I did it. “Okay,” I said, to steady myself. “Tolliver?” I wanted him to be ready.
“I’m here,” he said. “I’ve got a hold.” I could feel his grip on my arms.
I stepped directly onto the ground above the corpse, and I looked down through the soil and rocks, caught a glimpse of hell. That was the last thing I remember.
Four
“SHE ever gonna wake up?” The speaker was Sandra Rockwell. I remembered her voice, but she sounded strange and strained.
“Harper?” my brother said. “Harper?”
I didn’t want to do this, but I had to.
“Okay,” I said, and it came out as wobbly as I felt. “You found them yet?”
“Tell me what to do,” Sheriff Rockwell said. She sounded as if she didn’t want to be there.
I had to open my eyes, and I had to look at the anxious brown eyes under the hat. Sheriff Rockwell was in a padded coat that made her look twice as large.
“They’re all there,” I said. “If you can wait a minute, I can tell you who’s where. And there are eight of them, not six.”
“How do you know that?”
I was sitting in the back seat of Twyla’s car, my head leaning against the cushion.
“Here, eat some sugar,” Tolliver said anxiously, working a piece of candy out of his jeans pocket. He unwrapped it for me, and popped it in my mouth. I knew from experience that I would feel better in a few minutes, especially if I had a Coke.
“You were willing to believe me before I did anything,” I said. “Have a little more faith. Dig for them.”
“If you’re lying, your ass will end up in jail,” she said.
“And I would deserve it.”
With a lot of effort, I turned my head to look out the car window. There were a couple of deputies standing on the site. Twyla was with them. The expression on her face would have made the most jaded con man weep—or maybe not. In our travels, in my line of work, we’ve met a few con men, and they almost all have n
o empathy. It’s just not in their emotional repertoire.
“Come show me,” Sheriff Rockwell said, and Tolliver helped me out of the car. Slowly we made our way to the place where I’d fainted, and though I was shaking all over because I would have to feel the death again, I stood on the spot where I’d sensed the most recent body.
“Here,” I said, pointing straight down. I knew who it was, too. This was the body of Jeff, Twyla’s grandson. Tolliver got out a spiral-bound notebook he had zipped in his jacket. He’d sketched a very rough outline of the site. “This is Jeff, Jeff McGraw,” I told Tolliver. “He was strangled.” Tolliver stuck a length of wire in the ground. The red flag flapped a little in the stiff breeze. He put his left arm around me and took my right hand in his. I nodded in the direction we should go, a little uphill and to the north, and I centered myself above another corpse. Tears began rolling down my cheeks…I’d never encountered such suffering. “Here,” I said. “Chester.” Two yards farther, we had a boy Sheriff Rockwell hadn’t mentioned. “This is someone named something like—Chad, Chad something that begins with a T.” The sheriff was scribbling in her own notebook. The deputies were listening, too, but they were completely skeptical and not a little angry. I couldn’t do anything about that. They’d learn soon enough.
I followed the next signal to the rear of the lot, right where the ground began to rise sharply. It was centered behind a clump of bushes. I wiped my face with a handkerchief, said, “Dylan,” and staggered a bit south. Now I was behind the house. The sheriff and Twyla followed me, and the deputies, too. “Aaron,” I said. “Wasn’t there an Aaron?” And a few yards south again. This one was harder, for some reason. His horror and panic had short-circuited his brain while he was dying. “I think this is Tyler,” I said. And then I went to the southernmost grave of all, and I knew it was the oldest, somehow. The vibrations it gave off were just a bit weaker. “This is the first one,” I told the sheriff, who was keeping pace with us. That wasn’t hard, because I was moving very slowly by now, and I was shaking all over. “His name was…” I shook my head slightly, tried to focus more intently. “His name was James something,” I said. “James Ray, James Roy, James Robert. I’m not…I can’t tell his last name. Oh, Tolliver, get me out of here.” There was one more, a boy named Hunter. I could barely stand by the time I had him pinpointed. He’d died of hypothermia. He must have been one of the November abductions.
Harper Connelly [3] An Ice Cold Grave Page 3