Charlaine Harris - An Ice cold Grave

I hardly registered standing in line with Tolliver, whom I had to stop thinking of as my brother. We were way past that now. And I realized that now I could touch him in public. Now he knew how I felt. He felt the same way. I didn't have to hide it anymore. It was awful how strong the habit of standing away from him, not touching him, not watching him, had become once I was afraid of losing him if he realized that I loved him. Since the ice storm, I could watch him all I wanted, and he would enjoy it.

"Do you remember us talking yesterday about what Xylda said in Memphis? That in the time of ice, we would be so happy?" I asked him.

"She did say that. We agreed that Xylda wasn't a fraud, at least not all of the time."

"I think that as she got older, she got closer to the bone," I said.

"I don't know if that daughter of hers will ever believe it."

"Rain just wants everything to be normal," I said. "Maybe if I'd been brought up by Xylda, with all her ups and downs and spiritual moments, I'd be the same way."

"I think the way we were brought up was bad enough."

He was right about that. Being raised by Xylda would have been a cakewalk compared to living in the trailer in Texarkana.

I thought again of the sacrifice Chuck Almand had made as I sat alone at our table, waiting for Tolliver to bring our order. I'd gathered the napkins and straws with one hand, transported them, and returned to get the ketchup packets. I stared down at the table, which was clean, and wished I never had to go into another fast-food place in my life, before I returned to the subject of Chuck, niggling at the puzzle of his behavior.

Tolliver put the tray on the table, and I began taking my food off. At least I could eat this food one-handed. Without asking, Tolliver tore open three ketchups for me and squirted them on my French fries.

"Thanks," I said, and went back to thinking. But this was no place to tell Tolliver what I was worried about, even if I could put it together—not here, where every soul in Doraville who wasn't at school or at work was crowded in together sharing germs and eating food that was bad for them. I lost my appetite quickly, and piled my trash back on the tray.

"What's wrong?" Tolliver asked. He did care, but I could hear the undertone of anxiety, maybe of irritation. He wanted to leave. Doraville gave him the creeps and the deaths of all those young men was giving him nightmares.

"After we leave here, let's go out to the death site," I said. "I'm really, really sorry," I added when I saw the expression on his face. "But I need to."

"We found the bodies," he said, in as low a voice as he could manage. "We found them. We did what was required. We got our money."

We so seldom disagreed, or at least we hardly ever felt so strongly about our disagreements. I felt sick.

"I'm sorry," I said again. "Can we just leave here, and talk about it?"

In a stiff silence Tolliver dumped our trash into the receptacle and thumped the tray down on top. He held the door for me when we left, and unlocked the car and got in the driver's side, of course, but he didn't start it up. He sat there waiting for an explanation. He'd almost never done that before. Usually, whatever I said went. But now our relationship had changed in deep ways, and we didn't yet know the new balance. It had shifted, though. Now I had to explain, and I accepted that. It hadn't always been comfortable, being Queen of the World. I'd gotten a little too used to it, too.

In the past, I would simply have told him I needed to see the site again, and he would have driven me there without asking me any further questions. At least, most of the time. I pulled my left leg up on the seat and twisted so my back was to the passenger door. He was waiting.

"Here's my thinking." I took a deep breath. "In the story we've got now, the way it looks, Chuck Almand was helping his dad secure the boys. His dad was bringing him along in the family business by showing him how to kill cats and dogs and other small animals, so Chuck would grow up into a big serial killer like Papa Tom. Right?"

Tolliver nodded.

"But that thinking is wrong," I said. "If Chuck was helping his dad, if we accept the idea that it would take more than two people to subdue the boys—"

"Gacy worked alone," Tolliver said.

That was true. John Wayne Gacy had tortured and killed boys in the Chicago area, and he'd acted alone. Plus, in the pictures I'd seen, he hadn't looked like any really fit guy. "He got them to put on handcuffs, right?" I said. "Told them they were trick handcuffs and he'd show them how to take them off, and then they turned out to be real?"

"I think so."

"So he had a gimmick, and so might Tom," I said.

"And Dahmer acted by himself."

"Yeah."

"So I don't think you're making such a point."

"I'm thinking there were two people." It would have been much easier to subdue a healthy adolescent male if there were two abductors. And maybe the boys had been kept alive for a time so two men could enjoy them, each in his own way. "Maybe one got off on the sex, one on the torture, or each on some personal combination of the two. Or maybe one just enjoyed the death. There are people like that. That's why the boys lived for a while. And we know they did. So the killers could have equal time with their victim."

"And you're sure about this."

"I can't say a hundred percent sure. I think so."

"Based on what?"

"Okay, maybe based on something intangible from their graves," I said. "Maybe just my imagination."

"So—there was Chuck. And Tom made Chuck help him."

"No. I don't think so. That's where I was going when we started talking about Gacy and Dahmer. See, the animals were pretty fresh. But the boys have been vanishing for five years, right? More or less. The animals, well, none of them had been dead for longer than a year, looked like. Warm summers here, lots of bugs."

"So what's the bottom line?"

"Tom's helper wasn't Chuck. It was someone else, someone who's still at large."

Tolliver looked at me with a completely blank face. I had no idea what he was thinking or whether he agreed with me.

I held my hands out, palms up. "What?" I said.

"I'm thinking," he said. He turned on the car while he thought, which was good, because it was feeling pretty chilly. Finally he said, "So, what to do?"

"I have no idea," I said. "I need to run in to tell Manfred his grandmother died on her own. Though there was someone there who didn't do anything about it."

"What?"

"Someone watched her die. Someone didn't call for help. Not that I think it would've done any good. But…" I shook my head. "That's just creepy. She knew someone was standing and watching."

"But not harming her. And not helping."

"No," I said. "Just watching."

"Could it have been Manfred himself?"

I snatched at the idea. That would make sense. Manfred wouldn't necessarily have known Xylda was passing. "No," I said reluctantly, after I'd thought about my connection with Xylda's last moment in the funeral home cooler. "No, it wasn't Manfred. At least, if it was, Xylda was beyond recognizing her own grandson, and I didn't get any sense of that much disorientation from our connection."

Tolliver dropped me off while he went to gas up the car. I strode through the hospital like I worked there, and I got to Manfred's room to find he was by himself. Trying not to look too relieved—Rain was probably a nice woman but she was a lot of work—I went directly to his bedside and touched his hand. Manfred's eyes sprang open, and for a second I thought he was going to yell.

"Oh, thank God it's you," he said when he'd grasped who I was. "What did you find out?"

"Your grandmother died of natural causes," I said. "Ah—do you remember standing in the doorway to her room and looking at her for any length of time?"