"Yeah, I think so," I said. "Negative results, like we expected."
Chuck Almand's light, bright eyes were fixed on me. "Don't be scared of me," he said.
"I don't believe I am," I said, trying to smile. And it was true I wasn't exactly frightened of the boy. But I did feel very uncomfortable around him, and I was concerned about him in an impersonal kind of way.
Then I heard another voice calling from outside, "Chuck! Hey, buddy, you in there? Who's here?" To my bewilderment, Chuck's face changed in the blink of an eye, and the boy punched me in the stomach as hard as he could. His lips moved as he hit; I saw them on my way down to the floor.
"Get out of here!" he screamed as I stared up at him from my kneeling position on the cold dirt. "Get out! You're trespassing!"
Tom Almand dashed in, the door to the old barn creaking and groaning as it kept moving after he'd shoved it. "Son, son! Oh, my God, Chuck, what did you do?"
Tolliver was at my side, helping me up. "You little son of a bitch," he said to the boy before me. "Don't touch her again. She wasn't doing anything to you."
I didn't say anything, I only stared up into his eyes, my good arm across my middle. He might hit me again. I wanted to be ready this time.
But the only thing that happened was a lot of talk. Tom Almand apologized over and over. Tolliver made it clear he wasn't going to let anyone else pound on me. He also made it clear that he didn't want the boy anywhere around me again. Tom thought we shouldn't have been trespassing. Tolliver said the police had been glad to welcome us here to this same spot the day before. Tom informed us that it wasn't the day before and that we needed to get the hell off his property. Tolliver said we'd be glad to, and he was lucky we weren't calling the police to report his son's assault on my person.
I sagged against Tolliver as he helped me out to the car. He was in a complete state. He was trying so hard not to say "I told you so" that he was practically bursting at the seams. But God bless him, he managed not to say it.
"Tolliver," I said, when we were safely in the car and on our way back to the cabin.
He stopped in mid rant. "Yes?"
"Right after he hit me, before he started yelling at me, the boy said, 'I'm sorry. Come find me later,'" I said.
"I didn't hear him say that."
"He said it real low, so you wouldn't hear. So his dad wouldn't hear."
"He said you should come find him?"
"He said he was sorry. Then he told me to come find him later."
"So is he schizophrenic? Or is he trying to persuade his dad that he is?"
"I think he's trying to persuade his dad of something, I'm not sure what."
The rest of the drive back to the cabin, we were silent. I don't know what was in Tolliver's head, but mine was busy trying to understand what had just happened.
When we parked at the top of the slope again, we noticed that the Hamiltons' place was silent and still except for the smoke rising from the chimney. Maybe they were taking a nap. That sounded like a good idea.
"I'm not pleased with myself, thinking like a seventy-year-old," I grumped as we made our way down the drive to the steps up to the door.
"Oh, I bet we'll think of something to do that the Hamiltons aren't doing," Tolliver said, in such an intimate voice I felt all of my blood rushing to a critical point.
"I don't know; the Hamiltons are pretty hale and hearty for people in their seventies."
"I think we can give them a run for their money," Tolliver said.
We started right away, and with pauses to throw some more wood on the fire and lock the door, we managed to make a good effort. I don't know how the Hamiltons' afternoon went, but ours went just fine. And we did eventually get the nap.
That night we made more hot chocolate and ate more peanut butter. We also had some apples. I like to think we would have talked to each other just as much if the electricity had been working, but maybe we wouldn't have. There's an intimacy to being alone together in the near darkness, and every time we made love I felt surer of him, and our new relationship became more solid. Neither of us would have taken the step off the edge of the cliff if we hadn't been after more than yet another one-night stand.
"That last waitress in Sarne," I said. I gave him a narrow-eyed stare. "That was the one I really minded, and for a couple of weeks I couldn't figure out why."
"Well, two things. I was hoping you'd come in on us, clobber the woman, and throw her out and tell me I was your one and only; and barring that, I was horny," Tolliver said. "Plus, she offered. Okay, that's three things."
"I was tempted," I admitted. "But I never felt I could risk it. I kept thinking, What if I ask him not to, and he asks me why not? What can I say back to him? No, don't do it, I love you? And you would say, Ohmigod, I can't travel with you anymore."
"I was thinking you'd say the same thing," he said. "You'd say that you couldn't be with someone who wanted to go to bed with you all the time, you had to have a clear head to do your job, and you didn't want to fog it up with dealing with lust. After all, you picked fewer bed partners than me."
"I'm a woman," I said. "I'm not gonna go around sleeping with whoever wants to sleep with me. I need a little bit more than that to go on."
"Not all women are like that," he said.
"Yeah, well, lots of them are."
"Do you hold it against me? Those random women?"
"Not as long as you're disease free. And I know you are." He got tested as regularly as he could, and he always used a condom.
"So," he said, "we're together now."
He was asking a question. "Yes," I said. "We're together."
"You're not gonna go with anyone else."
"I'm not. You?"
"I'm not. You're it."
"Okay. Good."
And just like that, we were a couple.
It seemed strange to get ready for bed and then climb into Tolliver's.
"We don't always have to sleep in the same bed," he said. "Some beds are going to be narrow and even lumpier than this one. But I want to sleep with you. Really sleep."
I wanted to really sleep with him, too, and it was easier than I thought. In fact, hearing his breathing beside me seemed to help me doze off faster than I normally did. I hadn't slept in the same bed with anyone for a long time; and maybe not for a whole night since I'd shared a bed with my sister Cameron. When I'd stayed with a guy, I often hadn't made it through till morning.
I did wake up a few times during the night, record my new situation, and fall right back to sleep. On one of these moments of wakefulness, I saw that my phone was vibrating against the floor by the bed. I reached down and scooped it up.
"Hello?" I said quietly, not wanting to wake Tolliver.
"Harper?"
"Yes."
"She died, Harper."
"Manfred, I'm so sorry."
"Harper, maybe someone killed her. I wasn't in the room."
"Manfred! Don't say that out loud. Don't say that where anyone can hear you. Where are you?"
"I'm standing outside the hospital."
"Why do you think that?"
"I think that because she was getting better. The nurse even said she thought Grandmother was going to speak. Then she died."
"Manfred, you need us to come in?"
"Not until morning. It's too bad out there. There's nothing you can do. You stay in bed. I'll see you in the morning. My mother should be here then, too."
"Manfred, you need to go back to the motel and lock the door. Don't eat or drink anything at the hospital, all right?" I tried to think of more advice to give him. "And don't be alone with anyone, okay?"
"I hear you, babe." He sounded barely conscious. "I'm getting in the car now, and I'm going to drive to the motel."
"Hey, call me when you get there."
He called again within ten minutes to tell me he was safely locked in his room. Furthermore, he'd seen some reporters who were up drinking, and he'd told them someone had been following him. So they were as alert as drinking people could be, and they all professed to be disgusted that someone was following him around on such a sad night. Somehow they all knew already that Xylda had passed. Maybe they were paying one of the hospital staff to be a news clearinghouse.
None of this woke Tolliver, which surprised me until I recalled he'd been outside helping Ted Hamilton earlier. Plus, we'd had our own share of vigorous indoor exercise.
It was after three in the morning when I talked to Manfred the last time. I lay awake praying for him for a few minutes. Since I knew he was safe, and Xylda was beyond my help, I slept again.
Chapter 11
SOMETIME during the night, or rather toward the early morning, the electricity came back on. I'm sure it happened after dawn, because it didn't wake us up. I was lying there wondering why the lamp across the room was on, when I realized the miracle of electricity was once again visiting us. I had mixed feelings about electricity, for obvious reasons, but on this day I was glad to see it. I stuck a toe out from under the mound of blankets, and it didn't freeze immediately. I smiled. This was really good. And my arm was much better.
I hauled myself out of bed and went into the bathroom. I brushed and sponged, and changed my clothes, managing to do everything but deal with the bra. That I just left off. It wasn't that noticeable anyway since I was wearing both a tank top and a sweatshirt, so who was going to know?
The police, that's who. Just as I was trying to figure out how to put on clean socks, there was a knock at the door. I realized I'd heard the feet coming up, I'd just been thinking so hard about dressing myself I hadn't paid attention.
I was glad I was awake to answer the door, especially since I'd introduced Tolliver as my brother to the police chief, and she was here right now, and only one bed was in use. It was credible that I could have gotten up first and made my bed, and I just didn't want to have to explain or endure the horrified stare I'd get otherwise.
Sandra Rockwell had bigger fish to fry than worrying about our sleeping arrangements, as it turned out. Tolliver sat up and looked as she pushed past me into the cabin, looking around her as she did so. "Sheriff," I said, "what's up?"
Sandra looked under the beds, in the bathroom, and then she opened the trapdoor and went down in the storage shed underneath. When she came up, she looked more relaxed, if not any happier.
"Okay, I'm not happy with you doing this," I said, and Tolliver barely bothered turning his back while he pulled off his sleep pants and pulled on his jeans. She gave him a good enough look that I knew she could replay the moment later, and I felt like whaling her one.
"Have you seen Chuck Almand?" she asked.
I was very surprised, which was a massive understatement.
"Not since yesterday. We saw him then. Why would we have seen him? What's happened to him?"
"Can you tell me exactly what happened?"
"Ah. Okay. I wanted to be sure I hadn't overlooked anything in the barn. It just seemed like one of those loose ends, you know? So I went back. I knew it was a stupid thing to do, but I hoped I could just slip in and out without anyone knowing. Chuck came in while I was in there. He got mad at me, and hit me."
"Hit you?" But she wasn't surprised, not at all. She'd heard all this from Chuck's father, no doubt.
"Yeah, he slugged me in the stomach."
"I imagine you were pretty angry about that."
"I wasn't happy."
"I'll bet your brother wasn't happy, either."
"I'm right here," Tolliver said. "No, I definitely wasn't happy. But his dad came in, and the boy just seemed so disturbed, we left."
"And you didn't call us to report the whole thing?"
"No, we didn't. We figured you-all had more important things to be doing." She knew we hadn't called. She was just underscoring all the mistakes we'd made. I felt worse and worse. Going back to the barn had been my fault, my bad decision, and if the boy was gone, maybe that was my fault, too.
"So no one knows where he is?" Tolliver asked. "Since when?"
"One of the other counselors from the health center came by, maybe an hour after the incident in the barn, as close as I can make out. This is a close friend of Tom's, and he wanted to talk to Chuck to see if he could help." The sheriff made a face. She didn't believe counseling would make any difference in Chuck's case, it was clear. "So Tom starts looking for the boy to get him to talk to the counselor, but Chuck wasn't there. So the counselor insisted Tom call the police. He did, and then he began calling Chuck's friends. No one had seen the boy."
"You haven't had any luck finding someone who saw him around town?"
"No luck. But we thought he might have tried to find you, to finish what he'd started. Or to apologize. With a kid that messed up, who knows what he was going to do."
Deputy Rob Tidmarsh came in, stomping his feet just like the sheriff had done. "Didn't see nothing, Sheriff," he said.
So she'd been distracting us while her minion checked out the property. Well, there was nothing to find, and there was no point getting angry about it. She'd done what she had to do.
"We might need to call our lawyer," I said.