An Ice Cold Grave

"Oh, good," Cleda said. "Well, I'm sure the family will be glad to know that."

I nodded.

The black bag went back into the transition room.

In a somber silence, we retraced our steps across the parking lot and through the corridor back to the front doors of the funeral home.

"I guess you're braced for a huge amount of business," Tolliver said. "When the bodies of the - the young men - are released." I was sure he'd been going to say "victims."

"We're going to be pretty busy, yes, sir," she said. "One of those boys was my nephew. His mama, my brother's wife, she can't hardly get out of bed in the morning. It'd be one thing if someone had grabbed him and killed him - that would be bad enough. But to know he lived for a while, and got hurt so bad, and got used so unnatural, that just kills her."

There was no possible response that would be helpful, because I thought she was exactly right. To know your loved one was cut and burned and raped would make the fact of his death much worse, and there was nothing to be done about it. I'd always figured my sister Cameron had been raped before she'd been killed, without ever having proof of either. And just imagining it might have happened was pretty damn awful. I thought the act of rape itself was unnatural, regardless of the gender of the victim. But an emotional time like this was no time to debate the issue.

"We're really sorry," I said.

"Thank you," Cleda Humphrey said with dignity, and we let ourselves out.

"She was pretty decent," Tolliver said as we got into the car. "Probably the most relaxed funeral home person we've ever dealt with."

That was certainly true. "She seemed to take us pretty much in stride," I said.

"Nice change."

I nodded.

Pastor Doak Garland pulled into the parking lot in his modest Chevrolet just as Tolliver was putting the keys in the ignition. He approached the car, so Tolliver turned the key and pressed the window button.

"Hello again," Doak said, bending down to look at us.

"What are you busy doing?" I asked, hoping he wouldn't ask us about our own visit to Sweet Rest.

"Well, one of the bodies is already being released tomorrow, Jeff McGraw's, so I'm here to talk to Cleda about the service. I think we'll need extra traffic control, so I've already been to the sheriff's department, and I think Cleda needs to be prepared for an extra visitation night."

"This is going to take it out of you," Tolliver said. "There are a lot of services coming up."

"Well, I wasn't the minister for all these boys," Doak said with a gentle smile. "But the whole community will turn out for each funeral, so we're all in for a hard time. And maybe we should be. How could this happen in our midst, and we knew nothing?"

That was too big a question for me. "Wouldn't some of that be due to the former sheriff, Abe, um, Madden?" I said. "Wouldn't some of that be due to his policy of pretending the boys were runaways instead of missing and in danger? He seemed willing to shoulder his share of the blame at the memorial meeting the other night."

Doak Garland looked taken aback. "Maybe we shouldn't be into pointing fingers," he said, but he didn't say it with any force. It was clear he wasn't thinking about Abe Madden's role in the terrible drama for the first time. "You really think that had a bearing?" he said.

"Of course," I said, surprised. I didn't know Abe Madden. I didn't have to be careful of his feelings or his reputation. "If his attitude toward the vanishing boys was really the one I've heard described, then of course it had a bearing. Possibly if the investigation had gotten under way quicker, we'd have a few more kids walking around alive."

"But will assigning blame make this any easier?" Doak asked rhetorically.

I decided to take the question literally. "Yes, it will, for everyone but Abe Madden," I said. "Assigning blame does help people feel better, in a lot of ways. At least in my experience. Plus, if you can correct the behavior that led to the problem, the problem might not repeat itself." I shrugged. Maybe, maybe not.

I'll say this for Doak Garland, he didn't just whip out a platitude, as some men of the cloth were prone to do. He mulled the idea over. "There's a lot in that," he said. "But really, Ms. Connelly, that's just assigning a scapegoat to bear the sins of all of us."

I thought in my turn. "Okay, there's something to that, too," I admitted. "But there is blame to be assigned here, and the former sheriff should shoulder at least some of it."

"As he did," Doak Garland said. "In fact, it would be a good idea if I dropped by to see him. He may be thinking the same way you are."

I wondered if the pastor was trying to make me feel guilty in turn, but I didn't. I don't like to see people get depressed or shunned, but I knew that in my own experience, you had to assume responsibility for your own actions before you could move along with your life.

We didn't have any more to say, I felt. I raised my eyebrows at Tolliver, and he said, "Pastor, we've got to be going." Without further conversation, we rolled up our windows and pulled out of the parking lot.

"Where are we going?" Tolliver asked. "I mean, I can drive around aimlessly, but since there are still patches of ice..."

"I'm hungry, what about you?" I asked, and that was easy to answer. All the businesses in Doraville appeared to be open now, and people were going about their affairs with an air of relief. I felt relieved, too. We could get out of here just about any time now.

"What if we just left?" Tolliver said. "We could be on the interstate going in the right direction in an hour. We could find twenty restaurants."

I was surely tempted. We were sitting in the parking lot of the McDonald's again, and I stared at the golden arches, trying to feel something besides resignation.

"We have to return the key," I said, stalling.

"Yeah, a five-minute delay."

"Will they let us?"

"'They' being the SBI guys? Sandra Rockwell?"

"Any of the above."

"What could they want us for?"

"We haven't signed a statement about yesterday."

"Yeah, true. We might need to stop by the police station for forty-five minutes and do that. Okay, let's go get a burger, and then we'll tie things up."

I wanted to leave, really I did, but there was something nagging at me, or maybe two or three things nagging at me. But I kept reminding myself I wasn't a police officer, and I wasn't responsible. On the other hand, if I suspected something, I should mention it to someone who'd take me seriously.

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." 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">