An Ice Cold Grave (4 page)

“
SHE
ever gonna wake up?” The speaker was Sandra Rockwell. I remembered her voice, but she sounded strange and strained.

“Harper?” my brother said. “Harper?”

I didn't want to do this, but I had to.

“Okay,” I said, and it came out as wobbly as I felt. “You found them yet?”

“Tell me what to do,” Sheriff Rockwell said. She sounded as if she didn't want to be there.

I had to open my eyes, and I had to look at the anxious brown eyes under the hat. Sheriff Rockwell was in a padded coat that made her look twice as large.

“They're all there,” I said. “If you can wait a minute, I can tell you who's where. And there are eight of them, not six.”

“How do you know that?”

I was sitting in the back seat of Twyla's car, my head leaning against the cushion.

“Here, eat some sugar,” Tolliver said anxiously, working a piece of candy out of his jeans pocket. He unwrapped it for me, and popped it in my mouth. I knew from experience that I would feel better in a few minutes, especially if I had a Coke.

“You were willing to believe me before I did anything,” I said. “Have a little more faith. Dig for them.”

“If you're lying, your ass will end up in jail,” she said.

“And I would deserve it.”

With a lot of effort, I turned my head to look out the car window. There were a couple of deputies standing on the site. Twyla was with them. The expression on her face would have made the most jaded con man weep—or maybe not. In our travels, in my line of work, we've met a few con men, and they almost all have no empathy. It's just not in their emotional repertoire.

“Come show me,” Sheriff Rockwell said, and Tolliver helped me out of the car. Slowly we made our way to the place where I'd fainted, and though I was shaking all over because I would have to feel the death again, I stood on the spot where I'd sensed the most recent body.

“Here,” I said, pointing straight down. I knew who it was, too. This was the body of Jeff, Twyla's grandson. Tolliver got out a spiral-bound notebook he had zipped in his jacket. He'd sketched a very rough outline of the site. “This is Jeff, Jeff McGraw,” I told Tolliver. “He was strangled.” Tolliver stuck a length of wire in the ground. The red flag flapped a little in the stiff breeze. He put his left arm around me and took my right hand in his. I nodded in the direction we should go, a little uphill and to the north, and I centered myself above another corpse. Tears began rolling down my cheeks…I'd never encountered such suffering. “Here,” I said. “Chester.” Two yards farther, we had a boy Sheriff Rockwell hadn't mentioned. “This is someone named something like—Chad, Chad something that begins with a T.” The sheriff was scribbling in her own notebook. The deputies were listening, too, but they were completely skeptical and not a little angry. I couldn't do anything about that. They'd learn soon enough.

I followed the next signal to the rear of the lot, right where the ground began to rise sharply. It was centered behind a clump of bushes. I wiped my face with a handkerchief, said, “Dylan,” and staggered a bit south. Now I was behind the house. The sheriff and Twyla followed me, and the deputies, too. “Aaron,” I said. “Wasn't there an Aaron?” And a few yards south again. This one was harder, for some reason. His horror and panic had short-circuited his brain while he was dying. “I think this is Tyler,” I said. And then I went to the southernmost grave of all, and I knew it was the oldest, somehow. The vibrations it gave off were just a bit weaker. “This is the first one,” I told the sheriff, who was keeping pace with us. That wasn't hard, because I was moving very slowly by now, and I was shaking all over. “His name was…” I shook my head slightly, tried to focus more intently. “His name was James something,” I said. “James Ray, James Roy, James Robert. I'm not…I can't tell his last name. Oh, Tolliver, get me out of here.” There was one more, a boy named Hunter. I could barely stand by the time I had him pinpointed. He'd died of hypothermia. He must have been one of the November abductions.

“Can I take my sister back into town? She needs to lie down,” Tolliver said.

“Nope,” Sandra Rockwell, her jaw clicking shut with a snap. “Not until we check this out.” If I was lying, Sandra Rockwell wanted me on hand when she discovered the lie. “You got any advice on which place to check first?” she asked.

I shook my head. “Any of the places we stuck a flag,” I said.

Twyla had retreated to the Cadillac. I was glad I couldn't tell what live people were thinking, because imagining how she felt couldn't hold a candle to her actual misery. When Tolliver and I climbed in the back seat, she was kind enough to turn the car on so the heater would warm us. For what seemed like a long time, we just huddled there in the car. Not a word was spoken. My head seemed full of a white noise, and I couldn't think about anything. I'd seen horrors.

I didn't turn my head to watch what went on in the old homesite, but Twyla did. Finally, she said, “They've dug about two feet down, now. It sure is a sloppy day for it. I hope Dave and Harry don't catch a cold. Much less Sandra.”

I thought,
I would have been glad to wait for better weather,
but I didn't say anything.

It was my first mass murder.

 

A
little before eleven o'clock Dave and Harry, the two deputies, uncovered the first bones.

There was a pause, a palpable pause. The three law officers fell still around the hole that had finally gotten deep enough.

I'd been leaning back. I straightened. Tolliver's head rotated, and so did Twyla's.

“My grandson?” she asked. I'd been expecting the question.

“No,” I said. “They picked the northernmost burial to start at. I'm so sorry. Your grandson is there, Twyla, at the first flag we put in. I wish I could make it better. I wish he wasn't out there.” I didn't know how else to put it.

“You can't be sure.” Her voice was hesitant. I hadn't known Twyla Cotton more than a couple of hours, but I knew that that wasn't her normal attitude.

“No, of course.” I was sure, though. This strange skill is all I have, really. That, and Tolliver, and my two half sisters. So I'm careful of my skill, and I never say anything unless I'm sure. The boy I'd seen in the upslope grave was the same boy in the pictures at Twyla Cotton's house.

“How…how did these boys die?”

That was the question I'd been dreading.

“I really can't…” I couldn't finish the sentence. “I really can't,” I said, making it declarative.

Tolliver winced and looked away at the ribbon of road traveling up and around the bend. It didn't take much imagination to know he wished he were traveling that road, getting away from this place. I wished I were, too. I was sick with horror. I had seen so much death I'd thought I was impervious to anything new, but I'd discovered today that was far from the truth.

“You can leave,” Sandra Rockwell said, and I jumped in my seat. She'd come over to the car and pulled open the door. “Go back to Twyla's, and wait for me there. I'm going to call in SBI, right now.” The State Bureau of Investigation. They would be invaluable to a little force like this, but that's not to say they'd be real welcome. Sandra looked angry, she looked sick, and she looked scared.

Twyla started up the car, and we drove up the mountain a little ways until we got to a turnaround. She made a careful turn, and drove down, past the ruined house and its ghastly yard, down to Doraville. She parked in her garage, and got out of the car slowly, as though she'd added years to her bones while we were gone. Unlocking the house, she led the way ponderously into the kitchen, where we all three stood in awkward silence.

“I think she meant us to stay here, too,” I said. “I'm sorry. I wish we could go back to the motel and get out of your way. You need some time off.”

“I'll just go upstairs for a little,” Twyla said. “You all help yourself to the drinks in the refrigerator, and call me if you need anything. If you get hungry, there's ham on the second shelf, and the bread is in the breadbox there.” She pointed, and we nodded, and she went up the stairs slowly, her eyes on the steps in front of her and her face still with grief and unshed tears. After a minute, we heard her voice and realized she was making phone calls.

We sat at the table, not knowing what else to do. Even if we'd been in the mood, we wouldn't have turned on the television or the radio. We read the newspaper, and Tolliver got us each a Coke out of the refrigerator. Tolliver worked the crossword puzzle, and I found a
Reader's Digest
to read.

The kitchen door opened, and a man and woman came in, in a hurry. They stopped at the sight of us, but it was more so they could take a good look than because they were startled. He was very tall and had dark brown hair, and she was very curvy and blond by request.

“Where's my mother?” the man asked, and I said, “Upstairs.”

Without wasting any more words, up the stairs the couple went. They were both wearing the Doraville winter uniform: heavy coats and jeans, flannel shirts and boots.

“Her son and his wife,” Tolliver said. It seemed like a safe guess. “Parker and Bethalynn.” He was much better at remembering names than I was.

The phone rang, and was answered upstairs.

To say this was an uncomfortable situation would be putting it mildly.

“We should leave,” Tolliver said. “I don't care what the cop said. We don't need to be here.”

“At least we could go sit out in our car. That would be better.”

“We can do that.”

We washed the coffee mugs we'd used earlier and put them in the dish drainer. We pulled on our outer gear. As quietly as though we were burglars, we stepped out of the kitchen door into the carport, and got in our car. A big pickup was parked behind Twyla's Cadillac, and I was relieved we weren't blocked in. Tolliver turned on the engine, and the temperature was barely tolerable after five minutes. It wasn't getting any warmer as the day wore on, and the sky was looking grayer and grayer.

After ten minutes, without us exchanging a word, Tolliver backed out of the driveway and we went back to the motel.

Our room was blessedly warm. I fixed us some hot chocolate, and we sat with our hands around the hot mugs, drinking the watery stuff. I got the book I was reading, and stretched out on my bed to try to get lost in it, but it was impossible to get away from the dead boys.

“Eight of them,” Tolliver said. He was sitting in one of the chairs, his feet propped on his bed.

“Yeah,” I said. “It was really, really awful.”

“Do you want to tell me about it?”

“It's almost too bad to talk about, Tolliver. They were tortured with knives and beatings and all sorts of stuff. They were raped. They were killed slowly. It took a while. I got the impression that there was more than one person there.”

Tolliver looked sick.

“I'm sorry for Twyla, then,” he said. “This will be worse than just finding him as a skeleton with a broken leg at the bottom of a steep slope.”

“It's going to get even worse before it gets better.” We'd found plenty of accidental deaths—particularly in the mountains. Most people didn't understand that the terrain could kill you, or perhaps they became complacent in a familiar environment. Hunters, especially, grew so used to carrying guns outdoors that they grew lax about the basic safety rules. They carried their rifles carelessly. They let their cell phone batteries die out. They didn't tell anyone where they were going to hunt. They didn't carry any first aid equipment. They didn't have a hunting buddy. They forgot to wear orange.

But these deaths were far from accidental.

“Yes, it'll be a lot worse,” I said again. “And there'll be someone to blame. Someone around here did this.”

Tolliver stared at me for a minute. “Right,” he said finally. “No one but someone local would bury the bodies there. All together.”

“Yeah, no one from out of town would make a trip back to that site to bury a body eight times.” That seemed like a reasonable assumption to me.

“Were they killed there? Do you know?”

“I didn't read all of them,” I said. “The first one, the first grave—yeah, he died in the old house, or in the shed. Without looking inside, I can't be sure which.”

“He took them in there, did everything?”

I puzzled through the rush of impressions I'd gotten. “Yeah, I think so,” I said doubtfully. There was something about the feeling of the deaths, something a little off.

“Definitely someone local,” my brother said.

“In a small community like this, how is that possible?” I asked.

“You mean, how could a man conceal from other people the fact that he wanted to torture and kill boys?”

I nodded. “And how come the people around here haven't been up in arms about the fact that so many boys are missing?”