Charlaine Harris - An Ice cold Grave

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.