Grave Secret (10 page)

He wanted me to leave my own motel room.

“Not possible,” Tolliver said. He put his arm around me. “This is my family.”

Matthew’s eyes flicked from Tolliver to me, then back again. “I understand,” he said. “Listen, I got to apologize to you. I was a terrible father. I let you down, and I let down Laurel’s kids, too. And worst of all, I let down our children that we had together.”

Tolliver and I stood together silently, our sides touching. I didn’t even need to look up at my brother, because I knew how he felt. Matthew didn’t need to tell us who he’d let down. We knew all about it.

And yet, he was obviously waiting for our reaction.

“None of this is news to us,” Tolliver said.

“Laurel and I were addicted,” Matthew said. “That’s not an excuse for our negligence, but a . . . confession, I guess. We did bad things. I’m asking for your forgiveness.”

I wondered if this was something Matthew was obliged to do as a step in some rehabilitation program. If so, he’d gone about it the wrong way entirely. Stalking his children, following me to get to Tolliver, this was not the way to express contrition.

After another moment of silence, I said, “Do you remember the night Mariella got so sick, and we tried to sneak out of the trailer to take her to the doctor, and you blocked the door and wouldn’t let us leave because you didn’t want the hospital to call social services? We were willing that night to be separated, if we could just get help for her.”

“She got better!”

“Because we stayed up all night putting her in a cool bath and giving her baby Tylenol!”

Matthew looked blank.

“You don’t remember anything about it,” Tolliver said. “You don’t remember the night we had to sleep under the trailer because it was full of your friends. You don’t remember when Harper got hit by lightning and you wouldn’t call an ambulance.”

“I do remember that.” Matthew looked straight at Tolliver. “You saved her life that day. You did CPR.”

“And you did nothing,” I said.

“I loved your mother,” he said to me.

“Yeah, I’m really glad you were there for her at the end,” I said. “When she died alone, and you were in another jail.”

“Were you there?” he said, swift as a striking snake.

“I didn’t claim to love her.”

“Did you go to the funeral?”

If he thought he was heaping coals on my head, he could think again. “No. I don’t go to funerals. For obvious reasons.”

Matthew still didn’t get it. He’d fried a few of his own brain cells over the course of the past years. He narrowed his eyes at me, asking a question.

“Presence of the dead. It’s a real issue for me.”

“Oh,
bullshit
. You don’t have to pretend. This is me, here. I know you. You can fool other people, evidently, but not me.” Matthew made a face that was meant to let me know that we were all in a big conspiracy together.

“Leave,” Tolliver said.

“Oh, come on,” Matthew said, incredulous. “Son, you’re not claiming this corpse-finding thing is real. I mean, you can pretend in front of other people, but your sister is anything but some kind of occult witch.”

“She’s not my sister, at least not by blood,” Tolliver said. “We’re a couple.”

Matthew’s face reddened. He looked like he was going to throw up. “You make me sick,” he said, and instantly regretted it.

Now nearly everyone we had told had had that reaction, to a greater or lesser degree. If I’d cared about how they felt, I might have been worried about our relationship just about now.

Fortunately, I didn’t give a shit.

“Time to go, Matthew,” I said, easing away from Tolliver. “For a reformed junkie and alcoholic, you’re not very tolerant of other people’s little differences.” I held open the room door.

Matthew looked from me to his son, waiting for Tolliver to cancel my suggestion. Tolliver jerked his head toward the open door. “I think you better go before I get any madder than I am,” he said, in a voice with no emotional weight whatsoever.

Matthew gave me a furious look as he walked by me on his way out the door.

I closed it and locked it behind him. I took a step over to Tolliver, hugged him, and looked up at his locked-down face. “You’d think somebody would be happy for us,” I said, to break the silence. I didn’t know what Tolliver was feeling. Was he having second thoughts?

It was now completely dark outside, and the blank window seemed like a big eye looking into the room, especially since we were on the ground floor. Tolliver gave me a little hug and stepped to the window to draw the curtains. I’d feel better when the night was blocked out and Tolliver and I were alone together.

Tolliver was standing in the center of the window, his arms extended to bring the curtains together. I was standing a little to the side and behind him, just about to sit on the bed to unlace my shoes. And then a hundred things happened in tiny layers of seconds. There was a huge noise; my face and chest stung; I was sprinkled with wetness. A gust of cold air blew across my face as Tolliver staggered backward, knocking me down on the bed. He landed on top of me and then slithered to the floor in a boneless way.

I catapulted back to my feet so fast I wobbled, aware that cold air was pouring in the window, inexplicably. I looked down at my cold chest. It was wet—not with rain, but with red spots. My T-shirt was ruined. I don’t know why I cared. But I think I screamed, because I already understood on a subterranean level that Tolliver had been shot, that I was cut with glass and covered with blood, and that our world had completely changed in the space of a second.

I
must have unlocked the door in answer to the pounding, because Matthew was in the room, and I was not being any help to Tolliver because I was standing there looking down at him, my hands held out in front of me because I’d touched my face and my hands were covered with blood. Since my hands were dirty I didn’t want to touch Tolliver.

Matthew was on his knees beside his son. I pulled my phone out of my pocket and hit 911, though it required more concentration than anything I’d ever done. I gasped out the motel and its location, and I think I said we needed an ambulance immediately, and I said “sniper,” because I was thinking of the word.

In a thought that went by so quickly I couldn’t catch its trailing ends, I was sorry I’d mentioned a sniper because maybe the ambulance wouldn’t come because the driver was scared, and then I tossed that idea overboard and joined Matthew on the carpet, facing him over Tolliver’s body.

I’d been shot at through a window before, and it had been frightening. I’d had glass all over me then, too. But this was so much worse, terrible, it was the worst thing that had ever happened to me, because it had happened to Tolliver. That was all I could think of, the eeriness of such a thing happening twice, but I tried to yank myself out of the horror and I tried to help. Matthew was pulling off his shirt and folding it, and he pressed it to the bloodiest spot.

“Hold this, you idiot,” he said, and I put my hands on the pad formed by the shirt. It was soaking through with blood under my fingers.

If he hadn’t rushed back to the door so quickly, I would have accused him of doing this to Tolliver, but I just didn’t think. It was an idea I definitely would have adopted if it had even occurred to me.

Tolliver’s eyes opened. He was pale, bewildered. “What happened?” he said. “What happened? Honey, are you okay?”

“Yes, okay,” I said, pressing down with all my might. “Listen, they’re coming, baby.” I couldn’t remember ever calling Tolliver “baby” in all the years we’d known each other. “They’re coming, and they’ll fix you up. You’re not hurt bad, you’re going to be okay.”

“Was there a bomb?” he said. “Was there an explosion?” His voice faltered. “Dad, what happened? Harper’s hurt.”

“Don’t you worry about Harper,” Matthew said. “She’s
fine
. She’s going to be okay.” He was examining Tolliver’s wounds with his fingers, pulling Tolliver’s shirt up to examine the skin.

Then Tolliver’s eyes rolled up and his face went slack.

“Oh,
Jesus
!” I almost moved my hands, but even in the panic of the moment I knew I mustn’t. I’d held on for what felt like hours. It was no time to let go.

“He’s not dead,” Matthew yelled. “He’s not dead.”

But he looked dead to me.

“No,” I said. “He’s not dead. He’s not. He can’t be. It’s his right shoulder, and that’s not the heart. He can’t die from this.” I knew what a fool I was being, but there was no shame in it right at that moment.

“No, he won’t die,” his father said.

I opened my mouth to scream at Matthew, though I don’t know what I would have said, and then I clamped my lips together because I heard an ambulance.

There were people crowding in the door to the room, and they were talking and exclaiming, and I heard some of them shouting at the ambulance driver
Come over here, come over here,
and if I turned my head to my left, I could look out the window and see the flashing lights. More than anything else I’d ever wanted, I wanted someone who knew what the hell they were doing to come into this room and take the hell over, someone who could fix my brother and stop this bleeding.

There was more yelling outside, as the police got there right along with the ambulance and began urging everyone to move back, move back, and then the ambulance guys were there inside the room and Matthew and I had to get out of the narrow space so they could work.

The police took me outside, and I could not remember a single face after that night. “Someone shot him through the window,” I said, to the first face that seemed to be asking me a question. “I was standing behind him and someone shot him through the window.”

“What relation?” asked the face.

“I’m his sister,” I said automatically. “This is his dad. Not my dad, but his.” I don’t know why I made the distinction, except I’d been making it clear to people for years that I had no kinship to Matthew Lang.

“You need to go to the hospital, too,” said the face. “You need to get that glass pulled out.”

“What glass?” I said. “Tolliver got shot.”

“You have glass in your face,” the man said. I could see now that he was a man, that he was an older man in his fifties. I could see that he had brown eyes and deep creases radiating from their corners, and a big mouth and crooked teeth. “You gotta get that pulled out and cleaned.”

I needed to start wearing safety goggles if I was going to keep on getting glass in my face.

Then I was at the hospital, sitting in a cubicle, and someone had taken my wallet from my purse to get the insurance information. About a hundred people were asking me questions, but I couldn’t talk. I was waiting for someone to come to tell me how Tolliver was doing, and there was no point in talking until I knew what had happened to him. The doctor who was removing the glass seemed a little scared of me. She tried to keep talking, maybe thinking I’d relax if her voice kept going.

“You need to look down while I get this piece out,” she said finally, and when I looked down I could feel the tension go out of her body. I must have been staring. I was wishing that I could let go of my body and float down the hall to see what was happening to my brother. If I promised to give him up if he lived, would that help? The bargains you make when you are frightened are probably a true measure of your character. Or maybe just an accurate measure of your primitive nature, what you would be like if you’d never been to a mall or gotten a paycheck or relied on someone else to provide your food.

A woman in a pink smock asked me if there was anyone else she could call for me, anyone who would like to stay with me, and I knew I would start screaming if I saw Iona or Hank, so I said no.

They let his dad go in with him. Not me! I had to get the glass out! I was so angry I thought the top of my head was going to come off when my brain exploded. But I didn’t scream. I kept it inside me. When the doctor and the nurse had finished with me, and they’d given me a couple of pills because they thought I’d have an uncomfortable time of it for a while, I nodded to them and went in search of Tolliver. I found Matthew sitting in a waiting room, talking to a policeman.

He looked at me when I came in, and I could see the caution in his face.

“This is Tolliver’s stepsister. She was in the room with him, standing behind him,” Matthew said, as if he were the master of ceremonies introducing the lineup.

The policeman was a detective, I guess, since he was in slacks and a shirt and a Windbreaker. He was very tall, and he looked to me like a former football star, which in fact turned out to be the case. Parker Powers had been a famous high school football player from Longview, Texas, who’d gotten injured two years into his contract with the Dallas Cowboys. That made him very nearly a star, certainly a notable. I got all that within ten minutes of meeting him, thanks to Matthew Lang.