An Ice Cold Grave

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 church?"

"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?"

"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. ns class="adsbygoogle" style="display:block" data-ad-client="ca-pub-7451196230453695" data-ad-slot="9930101810" data-ad-format="auto" data-full-width-responsive="true">