Grave Surprise (19 page)

“I guess they were labeled slow or difficult,” Tolliver said. “And that was the end of it.”

That made me feel sad for all the kids who'd never had a fair shake, because their problems hadn't been understood. At the same time, we'd just read two articles about how parents were overmedicating their children for those same problems, so that even children who really did just have some disruptive personality traits were being dosed with drugs that shouldn't have been given them. It was just scary. I wondered if I'd ever have the nerve to have a baby myself. It didn't seem too likely. I'd have to trust my partner completely, to bring his child into the world. The only person I'd ever trusted that much was my brother Tolliver.

And the strangest thing happened as I had that thought. The world seemed to freeze for a minute.

It was like someone had thrown a giant switch in my head. Tolliver was turning away to go to his room, and I was getting up out of the chair I'd pulled over to the desk so I could read the screen on the laptop. I looked at Tolliver's back, and suddenly the world slid sideways and then realigned itself in a new configuration. I opened my mouth to say something, and then I closed it. I didn't know what I wanted to say to him. I didn't think I really wanted him to turn around.

He started to turn, and I bolted for my room.

I shut the door behind me and leaned against it.

“Harper? Is something wrong?” I heard his anxious voice on the other side of the door. I was in a total panic.

“No!”

“But you sound like something's wrong.”

“No! Don't come in!”

Tolliver's voice was a lot chillier the next time he spoke. “All right.” And he moved away, going to his own room, I supposed.

I sank down to the floor.

I didn't know what to say to myself, how to treat someone as idiotic as me. I was poised in a perfect position to ruin the only thing I had in my life. One word, one wrong act, and it would all be gone. I would be humiliated forever, and I would have nothing.

I had one black moment in which I wondered if I should just go on and kill myself and have done with it. But my strong survival instinct rejected the fleeting notion even as it ran across my brain. If I'd lived through being hit by lightning, I could live through this new knowledge.

He must never know. I crawled across the floor to the bed; pulled myself up, lay prone across it. I planned the next week of my life in a few painful minutes, appalled at my own monstrous selfishness as I did so. Keeping Tolliver with me for one more minute was an awful thing to do.

But I couldn't let go, I argued with myself. If I suddenly shooed him away, he'd suspect something as sure as shooting. I just couldn't do it. In a week or so, when I could figure
out the right way. Until then, hold myself carefully; guard my every action.

Life, which had seemed like such a rich crazy quilt laid out before me, suddenly assumed a grayer prospect. I climbed into the hotel bed, as I had climbed into hundreds of hotel beds.

I stared at the ceiling, at the bar of light from somewhere below that crossed it, at the bright red eye of the smoke detector. For hours I tried to remap my life. But I didn't have a clue which direction to go.

I
was more like a zombie than a person when I came out of my room the next day. Tolliver was eating breakfast, and he poured me a cup of coffee without a word. I went over to the table cautiously, sinking into my chair with as much relief as if I'd negotiated a minefield. He glanced up from his paper, gave me a horrified look.

“Are you sick?” he asked. “God, you look like something the cat dragged in!”

That actually made me feel much better. If he'd said something sweet, I'd have lost it then and there, grabbed hold of him, and sobbed all over his shirt front.

“I didn't have a good night,” I said, very carefully. “I didn't sleep.”

“No shit. I can kind of tell. You better get out your makeup.”

“Thanks for the boost, Tolliver.”

“Well, I'm just saying. We don't want the coroner mistaking you for the corpse.”

“Okay, enough.” Somehow, I felt much better after this exchange.

Tolliver had been reading the paper, and he shoved it over to me. He was not going to say anything about my strange behavior of the night before, apparently. “Not much about Tabitha today. I guess it's getting cold.”

“About time.” I picked up my coffee cup with a shaking hand, managed to get the edge of the cup to my lips without spilling anything. I took a long sip, set the cup down with just as much care. Tolliver had kept the sports section, and he was involved with a basketball story, so he didn't witness this embarrassing weakness. I exhaled, felt some relief, and took a steadier drink. Okay, caffeine was a good thing. I got a croissant out of the basket, knew I'd regret it later, and ate the whole thing in about forty-five seconds.

“Good,” was Tolliver's only comment. “You could use some body fat.”

“You're just a bundle of compliments this morning,” I said tartly. I felt
much
better now. Suddenly I felt a surge of optimism, with even less ground than I'd felt my deep depression of the night before. I'd been overly dramatic, right? This was okay. We were all right. Everything would be the same.

I ate another croissant. I even buttered it.

“Are you going to run?” Tolliver asked mildly.

“No,” I said.

“You're just a party animal today. Croissants and no running! How's the leg today?”

“Fine. Just fine.”

There was a long pause.

“You were acting kind of weird last night,” he said.

“Ah. Lot to think about,” I said vaguely, waving the last piece of croissant in an arc to indicate the breadth of my thought.

“I hope that worked out for you,” he said. “You scared me a little.”

“Sorry,” I said, trying to keep my voice light and airy. “A sudden attack of thoughtfulness will do that to you.”

“Um-hum.” He stared at me, his dark eyes full of his own thoughtfulness.

The cell phone rang when he'd gone back to his newspaper story, and I reached over to answer it. Somehow his hand was there before mine, and I wondered what was happening with him. We were sure being mysterious with each other, these days.

“Tolliver Lang,” he said.

“All right,” he said, after a moment.

“Where is that?” he asked next.

“All right, we'll be there in forty-five minutes,” he said, before folding the phone shut.

He looked at me, somehow harder and sadder than before.

“The family gave permission,” he said. “We can go see the body now.”

I got up and walked into my room to get dressed without another word.

When I came out twenty minutes later, I was clean and my clothes were fresh, but that was about all I could say. Despite Tolliver's advice, I didn't fool with makeup, and I only ran a brush through my hair. I wore it short, since I couldn't have dealt with a lot of hair to arrange, some days; today was definitely one of those days. I'd pulled on the top sweater in my suitcase, which was cream-colored, and the top pair of jeans, and the top pair of socks. Luckily, I only carry things that can coordinate, because otherwise I would have looked like I'd dressed in the dark.

Tolliver was about on par with me sartorially, and he hugged me when I emerged, ready to go. I was so surprised that I hugged him back for a moment, feeling thankful and grateful for him, as I always did. Then I realized what I was doing, and I froze, every muscle in my body going tense. I could feel the change in him when he realized that something was wrong between us.

“What have I done?” he asked, pulling away, looking down at me. “What have I done to you?”

I couldn't meet his eyes. “Nothing,” I muttered. “Let's just get this over with.”

The car was full of an uneasy silence as we followed the directions Tolliver had been given. Before I had time to calm myself and prepare mentally, we were at the morgue. There were so many dead inside, and they were so fresh, that the vibrations gathered in intensity and strength. When I got out of the car, I was already feeling a little light on my feet. I know we went in, and I know we talked to a few people, but later I remembered nothing. By the time we
walked down a corridor I was humming from my head to my toes. I could hardly note my physical surroundings as we followed the very heavy, very young woman leading us to the body we'd come to see. Her big rear swayed in front of me as she walked, and her lank dark hair switched from side to side. She hadn't bothered with makeup, and her clothes were strictly thrift shop. This must be a job that sucked the hope out of you.

The young woman knocked at a door that looked no different from any of the other doors. She must have heard a reply, because she held the door open and we went inside. A sandy-haired man in a lab coat said, “Hi.” He was standing against the wall. There were two gurneys in the room. The lump on one of them was far bigger than the lump on the other. Tolliver gasped and coughed from the smell. Even through the heavy plastic covering the bodies, the odor was pervasive.

I said, “Tolliver, you can go,” but I knew he wouldn't.

I introduced myself and Tolliver.

“Dr. Lyle Hatton,” the man said. He was very tall and gawky, and he had a way of looking down through his glasses that registered as contemptuous.

His dislike and scorn was something I could ignore in the face of the overwhelming thrumming.

I started to lift the plastic so I could touch Tabitha's body directly, but Lyle Hatton said, “Gloves!”

He was annoying. I had a mission here, and the vibrations were resounding so loudly that I could hardly comprehend what he wanted. It seemed my choice was either
touching her through the plastic sheet, or putting on plastic gloves. I wasn't aware I'd ever thought about the barriers between me and a corpse, and classified them. Cotton would have been better than plastic for my purpose, I knew instinctively.

But I wasn't being given that option. So I lay my hand on the plastic sheet, over the area where her heart should have been; of course, the shape under the sheet was not a full shape anymore, not after eighteen months in the ground. Immediately, I fell into Tabitha's last moments:
woken from sleep, a nap. Seeing a blue cushion, descending. Feeling…betrayal, disbelief, horror, NO NO NO NO Mama save me save me save me.

“Save me,” I whispered. “Save me.” I wasn't touching her anymore. Tolliver had his arms around me. Tears were streaming down my face.

I put my arms around Tolliver, too; a dangerous indulgence, but I needed him so much. I looked at the masked man in his medical scrubs. “You collected evidence from the body?” I asked.

“I was there,” Dr. Hatton said guardedly.

“Did you find any threads in her nose and mouth? Blue, they would have been.”

“Yes,” he said, after a notable pause. “Yes, we did.”

“Suffocated,” I said. “But she fought all the way.”

Dr. Hatton made a sudden movement with his hand, as if he was going to show me something, but then he stopped in mid-motion.

“What are you?” he asked, as if he was talking to some interesting hybrid.

“I'm just a woman who got hit by lightning,” I said. “I wasn't born the way I am.”

“Lightning either kills you or you get over it,” Dr. Hatton said impatiently.

“I can tell you've never dealt with a live person who's had the experience,” I said. “You get hit with a few thousand volts, a few months later you come talk to me about what your life is like.”

“If that many volts hits you directly, you're dead,” he said simply. “What people survive is the energy discharge from it hitting very nearby.”

I couldn't believe this guy, arguing with me about what had happened to me while Tabitha's body was right here between us.

“Whatever,” I said, and straightened up to show Tolliver I was ready to go. It was hard to pull my arms from around him, but I did it, and his arms loosened around me.

I went over to the second shape, the larger one. I closed my eyes and placed my hand over the body.

My eyes flew open and I glared at Dr. Hatton. “This isn't Clyde Nunley,” I said. “This is some young man who died of knife wounds.”

Dr. Hatton looked at me as though he were seeing a ghost. “You're right,” he said, as if I weren't standing right there. “You're right, my God. Okay,” he said, very carefully, as though I might pounce on him, “let me take you to Dr. Nunley.”

Tolliver was furious with Lyle Hatton, and I wasn't far behind him in that. But I was determined to complete my
errand. We followed the doctor down the hall to a larger room, a cold room, full of bodies. It was not orderly; the gurneys were not lined up in neat rows. Here and there a hand or foot protruded. The smell was unique, a
bouquet de la mort.
The vibrations in this place were overwhelming. All the dead waited for my attention, from an old woman who'd been murdered in her own home to a baby who'd died of SIDS. But I was only here to call on one corpse, and this time Lyle Hatton led me to him. I was dizzy from being surrounded with all the newly dead, and it took me a long minute to focus on Clyde; then I saw it all again: the surprise, the blow, the fall into the grave. I nodded sharply to Dr. Hatton when I was through, and I staggered as I turned away from my final contact with Dr. Clyde Nunley.

“You can walk?” Tolliver asked, very low.

“Yes,” I said.

“Wait,” Lyle Hatton said. I looked at him inquiringly. The overhead light winked on his gold-rimmed glasses. “Since you're here, can I ask you to do one more thing? You were right about the blue threads. You knew when I showed you the wrong body. Maybe you can help me with one more thing.”

Everyone wants a freebie.

“What do you need?” I asked. I wasn't in the mood for finesse.

“This body here…I can't determine a cause of death for this woman. She was living at home with her son and daughter-in-law, and she developed stomach symptoms. She might have had any number of things wrong with her, but
I've met the couple, and I suspect there's something hinky about her death. What do you think?”

Though Hatton was a jackass, I like to help the dead when I can.

“Tox screen didn't show anything, autopsy turned up nada,” Hatton said coaxingly. “She lost a lot of weight and had various stomach symptoms before death—diarrhea, nausea, and so on—but she hated going to the doctor and she didn't turn up at a hospital until it was too late.”

“This one?” I asked. I could see a pale hand, though it was not the right color a hand ought to be. I closed my eyes and touched her hand with my finger, a bare contact Hatton made no attempt to block.

“Don't try this on me,” I said, feeling exhausted. “This is a young woman who died of aplastic anemia.”

Dr. Hatton stared at me as if I'd grown another head. He checked the toe-tag. “I'm sorry,” he said, sounding sincere. “I really thought that was her. This is.” He double-checked the tag on the body next to the poor young woman.

I sighed heavily. I touched the plastic wrapped around this body. I narrowed my eyes. If he wanted to play, I was up to it.

“Cleona Chatsworth,” I moaned, “Come forth!”

Out of the corner of my eye, I caught Tolliver ducking his head to hide his smile. Dr. Hatton was growing even paler than he'd been before, almost to the point of matching one of his clients. He gasped. I'd heard the name right. Luckily for me, Cleona Chatsworth wanted someone to know what had happened to her, wanted it very badly.

“Cleona was poisoned,” I whispered, my free hand moving in a circle over the corpse. I thought Hatton was going to faint.

“What do I look for?” he croaked.

“Someone gave it to her in salad dressing,” I crooned. “The selenium.”

I opened my eyes and said, “This lady was poisoned.”

Lyle Hatton stared at me with glassy eyes.

“We're going now,” I told Tolliver, who was glaring at the doctor, his hands curled into fists.