An Ice Cold Grave

"Like the pleasure didn't come with the death, but with what lay before," I said. "The pain was the attraction. And once they were all used up, and there wouldn't be any more reaction from them, they were no good anymore." But that wasn't quite right. Stuart's comment about it being an experiment was closer to the thought I was trying to express.

Tolliver looked nauseated.

"That's not what we're getting from the other psychic," Klavin said in challenge. "She says that the killer sat and watched for the moment of death, taking an 'orgasmic' pleasure from it."

"Then Xylda's probably right," I said instantly. "I'm not a psychic, and she is. Or maybe..." But then I stopped. Both the agents were looking at me with that expression I knew so well. It said, as clearly as if they'd spoken out loud: Watch her. She's going to back and fill and try to dovetail her imaginings with the story the other freak told us.

"Did you ever think," I said very slowly, very reluctantly, "that there might be two killers?"

They were both goggling at me. I can't interpret the living nearly as well as I can the dead. I'd done well with the two state agents so far, but I had no idea what their faces were saying now.

"That's all I can tell you," I said, and I got up to leave. Tolliver hastily got to his feet, too. "Can we leave town?" I asked. "Whenever we choose?"

"As long as you let us know how to reach you, you and your brother can hit the road," Stuart said, in a tone that implied he'd be glad to see the back of us.

"I'm not her brother," Tolliver said. He sounded as angry as if they'd been arguing about it for the previous hour.

Stuart looked surprised. "All right, then. Whatever," he said, shrugging. "You two can go."

I was so astonished by Tolliver's outburst that I had to fumble to gather up my purse and follow him out. He almost left me in his cloud of dust. He proceeded clear on out of the station, with me trailing behind. With a little awkwardness with the doors, I was slowed down enough that I just reached him when he got to our car. He was standing with his hands on the hood, glaring down at the gray paint. The remaining newspeople were shouting at us, but we completely ignored them.

I had no idea what to say. I just stood there and waited. I would have gotten in the car, but he had the keys in his hand. The mist in the air began to get heavier, become almost-rain. I was miserable.

Finally he straightened up, and without a word to me, he clicked the doors open. I stepped down from the curb to the door on the passenger side, opened it and got in, pulled it closed. Thank God it was my left arm that was out of whack. Still silently, Tolliver leaned over me to pull my seat belt around and click it shut.

"Where?" he said.

"The doctor's office."

"You hurting?"

"Yes."

He took a deep breath. He held it for a minute. Let it out. "I'm sorry," he said, leaving it open as to what he was sorry about.

"Okay," I said, not really sure what ground we were walking on. I had a few ideas. Some of them were more frightening than others.

Tolliver had pinpointed the location of the doctor's office earlier on one of his drives to and from the hospital. Dr. Thomason's red brick office was small, but the parking lot contained at least six cars. When I went in, I anticipated a long wait. The man who was not my brother went up to the window, told the woman behind it who I was and that I'd seen the doctor at the emergency room.

"We'll have to work her in, hon, it may take a little bit," she said, reaching up to push her glasses back on her nose. Then she patted her helmet of sprayed hair lightly, to make sure it was still in good shape, I guess. Tolliver was working his old magic. He brought back a clipboard with forms to fill out.

"Apparently, we'll have plenty of time to do this," he said, for my benefit. I was in a blue molded plastic chair against the far wall, and he came to join me. In the waiting room with us were a young mother and her baby, who was blessedly asleep, an elderly man with a walker parked in front of him, and a very nervous teenage boy, who was one of the tribe of foot jigglers.

A nurse in teal came to the door and called, "Sallie and Laperla!" The young mother, hardly more than a teenager herself, got up with the infant carrier cradled in her arms.

"I wonder if she knows La Perla is a brand of underwear," I murmured to Tolliver, but that barely got a smile from him.

The boy scooted down the line of chairs until he was within conversational distance of us. "You the one found the bodies," he said.

We both looked at him. I nodded.

Now that he'd told me who I was, he was stumped to think of something else to tell me. "I knew all them," he said finally. "They was good boys. Well, maybe Tyler got into a little trouble now and then. And Chester, he wrecked his dad's new Impala. But we went to youth group together, at Mount Ida."

"All of you?"

"'Cept Dylan, he's a Catholic. They got their own youth group. But the rest of the churches, they all go together at Mount Ida."

Ordinarily, I'd be bored stiff by this conversation, but I wasn't today.

"Did you read the stories in the paper today?" I asked.

"Yep."

"You ever met those two boys from out of town?"

He looked surprised. "No, never," he said. "I never heard of 'em. I think they were hitching or something. They were from way far away."

I hadn't read the whole story. "Way far away" to this boy might mean Kentucky or Ohio. He meant only that the two out-of-towners weren't from North Carolina.

The young mother came out, her baby crying now. They stopped at the window for a minute, then went out the front door. I could see the rain increasing. She would have to run for her car. The nurse called the old man, who got slowly and carefully to his feet. He shuffled through the door to the inner sanctum preceded by his walker, which had sliced-open tennis balls fixed on the front feet. It gave the walker a jaunty air. As soon as he was through the door, the nurse also called, "Rory!" Our companion jumped to his feet and hurried back.

Now that we were by ourselves, I thought Tolliver would talk to me, but he leaned back and closed his eyes. He was shutting me out on purpose, and I didn't know what to make of it. If he was just in a snit over some unknown issue, then I could be in a snit right back. If I'd hurt him somehow, or he was harboring some personal grief unknown to me, then I wanted to help him. But if he persisted in being a butt-head, then he could just stew in his own juice.

I leaned my own head against the wall, closed my own eyes.

We probably looked like prize idiots.

After about ten minutes of this, the old man made his way out, and Rory sped past him to hold the door open. "Allergy shot!" he called to us cheerfully as the old man shuffled past. I didn't know if he was explaining about his own visit or the old man's, but I nodded in acknowledgment.

The nurse opened the door yet again. She was a pretty, trim woman of about forty-five, with dark hair and bright blue eyes. She was so healthy and cheerful that I felt better just looking at her. "Miss Connelly," she said, and looked at us curiously.

Tolliver leaped to his feet and reached down to help me get up. This was just plain weird. I took his hand, and he hauled. The nurse showed us back to our designated waiting room. She weighed me and measured me and took my blood pressure, which was just fine. Then she began to ask me questions. It was mostly a repeat of what was on the forms, and the stuff from the hospital.

"So you just wanted to see Dr. Thomason today to get him to check up on your injuries?" She sounded a little dubious.

"Yes, I'm having more pain than I'd expected, though that may be because I'm so very, you know, depressed."

"Oh, I guess in your line of work, that would be...understandable."

"But surely - excuse me - you must be feeling the same way, here in Dr. Thomason's office."

"Because most of the boys were patients of ours? Yes, it's a sad thing. A sad, sad thing. You never think something like that would happen to anyone you know. And we knew all those boys, though a couple were patients of Dr. Whitelaw's."

"And Jeff's grandmother said he'd been in here recently," I lied.

"Oh, you must have misunderstood her. Jeff goes to Dr. Whitelaw."

"I must have, sorry."

"No problem. Let me tell Dr. Thomason you're ready." She sped out on her soft-soled nurse's shoes, and before I could think everything through, Dr. Thomason breezed in. "Hello, young lady. Marcy tells me you're not feeling as well as you'd hoped. You've been out of the hospital - let's see - just since yesterday? That right?" He shook his head, as though keeping track of the passing time was an incredible task. "Well, let's have a look at you. No fever, blood pressure good," he muttered, checking what Marcy had written on the chart. He ignored Tolliver as if Tolliver weren't there. Dr. Thomason looked and thumped, and felt, and listened. He asked questions very quickly, hardly seeming to give himself time to absorb the answers...as if he did not believe I would tell him the truth, or as if he weren't interested in the truth. He came to stand right in front of me. Since I was up on the examining table, his eyes were slightly lower than mine, and as he looked up at my face his eyes looked almost luminous behind his gold-rimmed glasses.

He smiled at me. "You seem fine to me, Ms. Connelly. You're doing well as anyone could hope, after being attacked the way you were. No cause for alarm. You're healing right on schedule. Still got plenty of pain pills, I hope?"

"Oh, yes," I said.

"Good. If they were all gone, I would worry about you. I think you're good to go. You're simply not going to feel wonderful for a while."

"Oh. Okay, then, thanks for seeing me."

"Right. Good luck. You're cleared to travel." And he strode out, white coat flapping around his legs. He was delighted that I was leaving town, there was no two ways about it. Tolliver came over to help me down from the examining table, and we left in silence, paying on the way out. I glanced at the big filing cabinet in the receptionist's area. If I were a daring detective, I would think of way to get the receptionist and the nurse out of the way and look through the files of the dead boys. But I wasn't, and there wasn't an excuse on this earth that would get the receptionist, the nurse, and the doctor out of the way long enough for me to do more than roll open the relevant drawers. Women did this all the time in movies and on television. They must have better scriptwriters. Real life didn't afford chances to examine private records unless you just broke in at night and read them, and I wasn't about to do that. My need to know who had done this would only carry me so far. I wouldn't risk going to jail myself.

And, I asked myself, why was I even concerned? The law enforcement people on hand were trained and efficient, and they had all the labs and their own expertise at their beck and call. They would find who'd done this, I had very little doubt. And the deaths would cease. Someone would go to jail after a long and lurid trial.

"There's something nagging me about this," I said. I had to break the silence or burst. "There's something wrong about this whole thing."

"Something wrong, aside from eight dead kids?" Tolliver's voice was level, but his words were edgy.

"Yes. Something wrong."

"Like what?"

"I just think that someone's in danger."

"Why?"

"I don't know. There's just...where are you going?"

"Back out to the cabin."

"Are we leaving?"

"The doctor said you were good to go."

I turned on the car radio. After the warmth of the morning, the temperature was dropping sharply, just as predicted.

"And what's the weather news, Ray?" asked a female voice on one of the local stations.

"In a few words, Candy, the news is...stay home! There's an ice storm on the way, and you don't want to get caught in it. The highway patrol is advising all motorists to stay home tonight. Don't try to travel. Wait until the morning, and get another road advisory then."

"So, Ray, we should bring in a lot of firewood and rent a lot of old movies?"

"Yeah, you can watch 'em until your electricity goes out!" Ray said. "Get out your board games and flashlights and candles and stock up on water, folks."

They went on for two more minutes, advising people in the area on how to weather the storm.

Without saying a word, we stopped at the little Wal-Mart.

"Stay in the car," Tolliver said roughly. "You'll just get jostled." It was really crowded, and people were coming out with carts full of emergency stuff, so I didn't argue. We keep a throw blanket in the back of the car all winter, and I pulled it around me as he made his way inside.

Since there were only two of us to provide for and since we didn't plan on staying in the area any longer than we could help, Tolliver didn't have that much shopping to do. Nonetheless, it was at least forty-five minutes before he came out of the store with his buggy.

When we got back to the lake, we parked right by the stairs, about halfway down the steep drive. I decided I could help by moving one thing at a time from the car trunk to the middle of the stairs up to the living quarters, with pretty much a level swing of my arm. Then Tolliver could come down a few steps and get the stuff and put it away. It saved him a little work, and I felt like I was contributing. But I was shaking by the time we finished.