An Ice Cold Grave (3 page)

“The last one was three months ago. Jeff McGraw. It was because of his grandmother that we called you in. Twyla didn't think we were getting anywhere, and she was right.”

It galled the sheriff to say that, but she said it.

“Twyla Cotton donated a lot of money and raised some more from the families, the ones that could help. And she got some money from some people who just want this to stop, people not related to the missing boys in any way.” Sandra Rockwell shook her head. “I've never seen anything like the time and energy she put into this. But Jeff was her oldest grandson….” Her attention strayed from us to the cube of pictures on her desk. Rockwell was a grandmother, too. Her gaze shifted to the last photograph in the row of faces: a boy with freckles, reddish brown hair, a school sports jacket. Jeff McGraw had lettered in basketball and football. I was willing to bet he'd been a local hero in Doraville. I knew my southern towns.

“So you're like the frontman for this consortium of local people who've donated money to a fund to find the boys,” Tolliver said. “Since the county, I'm guessing, didn't have the money.”

“Yes,” Sheriff Rockwell said. “We couldn't spend county money on you, or state money. Had to be private. But I wouldn't have you here unless they let me interview you. And I'm ambivalent about the whole thing.”

Whoa, big words from the sheriff, in more ways than one. I'd never heard a law enforcement professional admit to being doubtful about a course of action involving me. Angry, disapproving, disgusted, yes; doubtful, no.

“I can see how you would be,” I said cautiously. “I know you've done your best, and it must be, ah, galling to be asked to call in someone like me. I'm sorry about that. But I swear I'll give it my best shot, and I swear I'm not a fraud.”

“You'd better not be,” Sandra Rockwell said. “And now, I've arranged for you to meet with Twyla Cotton. It only seemed right. After that, we'll pick the place you start to search.”

“Okay,” I said, and that was that.

 

TWYLA
Cotton was a very heavy woman. You read about fat people who walk very lightly; she wasn't one of them. She walked ponderously. She answered her door so quickly I figured she'd been standing right inside, since we'd called her to tell her we were on our way from the sheriff's department.

She was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt that read “Number One Grandma.” Her face was bare of makeup, and her short dark hair had only a few threads of gray. I put her in her midfifties.

After shaking our hands, she led the way through the house. She didn't match the décor. Some designer had worked here, and the result was very pretty—lots of peaches and creams and beiges in the formal living room, dark blues and chocolate browns in the family room—but not very personal. The kitchen was Twyla's natural domain, and that was where she led us. It was full of exposed brick, stainless steel, and gleaming surfaces. It was warm and cozy after the chill gray of the morning. It was the homiest room in the house.

“I was Archie Cotton's cook,” she said. She smiled at me as if she'd been reading my mind.

I'd had a white-collar upbringing for my first decade, but after that my parents had descended pretty quickly through blue collar and down below, so you could say I was a medley. It had been a case of riches to rags. Twyla Cotton had gone the better way, the rags-to-riches way.

“And then he married you,” I said.

“Yep, we got married. Have a seat, hon,” she said to Tolliver, and she pointed at a chair for me. There was also a formal dining room, but this gleaming round table was positioned in a bay window at one end of the kitchen, and the chairs were wide, comfortable, rolling chairs. There was a newspaper and a few magazines, a little pile of bills, handy to the most convenient chair. Tolliver and I both knew not to pick that one. “Can I get you-all a cup of coffee? Some coffee cake?” our hostess asked.

“I'd like some coffee, if it's already made,” Tolliver said.

“Me, too, please,” I said. I sank into a chair and rolled up under the table.

In short order, we had mugs of coffee, spoons, napkins, and cream and sugar close to hand. It was very good coffee. The morning improved, just a bit.

“Archie had some children, already grown and gone,” Twyla said. “They didn't come around as much after his wife died. He was lonely, and I'd been working for him for years. It just came natural.”

“Any hard feelings from his children?” Tolliver asked.

“He gave 'em some money, quieted them down,” Twyla said. “He laid it out to them about the will, and who would get what, in front of two lawyers. Got 'em to sign papers saying they wouldn't contest the will, if I survived him. So I got this house, and a good bit of cash, plus a lot of stock. Archie Junior and Bitsy got their fair shake. They don't exactly love me, but they don't hate me, either.”

“So why did you want us here, Mrs. Cotton?”

“I've got a friend you helped a couple of years ago. Linda Barnard, in Kentucky? Wanted to know what had happened to her little grandbaby, the one who was found a mile away from home, no marks on her?”

“I remember.”

“So I thought about calling you in, and Sandra researched you-all. Talked to some policewoman in Memphis.”

“Jeff, your grandson. Is he your son's son? He's sixteen?” Tolliver asked, trying to lead Twyla to the subject we'd come to discuss. Though almost everyone we looked for turned out to be dead, Tolliver and I had learned a long time ago to refer to the missing person in the present tense. It just sounded more respectful and more optimistic.

“He was sixteen. He was the older boy of my son Parker.”

She'd had no hesitation in using the past tense. She read the question in our faces.

“I know he's dead,” Twyla said, her round face rigid with grief. “He would never run away, like the police say. He would never go this long without letting us hear.”

“He's been gone three months?” I asked. We already knew enough about Jeff McGraw, but I felt it would be indecent not to ask.

“Since October twentieth.”

“No one's heard from him.” I knew the answer, but I had to ask.

“No, and he had no reason to go. He was already playing varsity football; he had a little girlfriend; he and his mom and dad got along good. Parker—Parker McGraw, that was my last name before I married Archie—Parker loved that boy so much. He and Bethalynn have Carson, who's twelve. But you can't replace any child, much less your firstborn. They're all broken up.”

“You understand,” I began carefully, then paused to try to find some other way of saying what I needed to say. “You understand, I need some idea of where to search, or I might wander around this town forever without getting a location. The sheriff said she had an idea where we should start.” America is so big. You never realize how big, until you're looking for something the size of a corpse.

“Tell me how you work,” she said.

It was great to meet someone so matter-of-fact about it.

“If you have an area you think is more likely than any other, I just start walking around,” I said. “It may take time. It may take a lot of time. I may never be successful.”

She brushed that aside. “How will you know it's him?”

“Oh, I'll know. And I've seen his picture. The problem is, there are dead people everywhere. I have to sort through them.”

She looked astonished. After a thoughtful moment, she nodded. Again, not the reaction I was used to.

“If he's in any of the areas you pick for me to search, I'll find him. If he isn't, I'm not going to lie to you—I may never find Jeff. What have you got, in terms of pinning his whereabouts down?”

“His cell phone. It was found on the Madison road. I can show you the exact spot.” She showed me Jeff's picture anyway. It wasn't the same one I'd seen at the police station. It was a posed studio picture of Jeff and his whole family, plus his grandmother. My heart used to break when I saw the image of them alive, cradled in the arms of their nearest and dearest. Now, I just register the features, hoping I'll see them again, even if they're just scattered bones. Because that's how I make our living.

This particular gig in Doraville felt different. Time isn't much of a factor when you're dealing with the dead. They're not going to go anywhere. It's the living who are urgent. But in this case, time was important. If the sheriff was right, we were dealing with a serial killer who might snatch another boy at any moment. His pattern didn't include winter, but who's to say his pattern wouldn't change, that he wouldn't take advantage of this slushy time between snows; plan a final spree before a hard freeze.

I found myself hoping that if I were able to find the missing boys, then something about the way they were buried, something about the location or what was buried with them, would lead to the discovery of their killer. I know better than anyone that death comes to us all. I hate the murderers of the young, because they rob the world of a life that still held potential. This doesn't really make sense, I know; even a dissolute alcoholic seventy-five-year-old can push a woman out of the path of a speeding car, and change a bit of the world forever. But the death of children always carries its own particular horror.

TWYLA
Cotton had a Cadillac, only a year or two old. “I like a big car,” she said.

We nodded. We liked it, too. We were bundled up for the weather, and Twyla looked like a ball of fudge in her dark brown coat.

“Do your son and his wife know we're here and what we're doing?” I asked cautiously.

“Parker and Bethalynn do know, but they don't believe it will lead to anything. They think I'm wasting my money. But they know it's my money to waste, and if it makes me feel better…”

I hoped they were as philosophical about it as Twyla made it sound. Families can give us an awful lot of trouble—which I guess isn't too surprising, since they usually believe we're defrauding their grieving relative. Still, we've had a bellyful of trouble in our lives, and we don't want any that we can avoid. I exchanged a glance with Tolliver, who was in the back seat, and one glance said all this between us.

“Have you ever had a child, Harper?” Twyla asked.

“No, I've never been pregnant,” I said. “But I know how you feel. My sister has been missing for eight years.”

I didn't normally tell people that. Of course, some of them already knew it. It had made a big splash in the papers when it happened. But I was a high school student then, not a…whatever I was now.

“You have other family?”

I said, smiling brightly, “Well, I have Tolliver. I've got a half brother, Mark, and two half sisters, little ones, Mariella and Gracie. They live in Texas with our aunt and her husband.” Mark wasn't my half brother any more than Tolliver was. He was simply Tolliver's older brother. But I wasn't in the mood to spell it out.

“Oh, I'm so sorry. Your parents already passed?”

“My mother has. My father is still living.” In jail, but living. Tolliver's mother had died before his father met my mom, and Tolliver's father was out of jail and drifting…somewhere. Considering my mom and dad and Tolliver's father had all been attorneys, they'd had a long way to fall. They'd really thrown themselves into it.

Twyla looked a little shocked. “Well, how awful. I'm so sorry.”

I shrugged. That was just the way it was. “Thanks,” I said, but I knew I didn't sound sincere. Couldn't help it. When I heard that my mother had died, I was sorry, but not surprised, and not unrelieved.

We were quiet after that until we pulled up by the side of the road. Twyla glanced down at the list she'd taken down during a quick phone call with Sandra Rockwell. Sure enough, Sandra Rockwell had a prioritized list of places to check. This was place number one.

We were behind the high school at the football practice field, a stretch of barren level ground. One of those devices that the boys push around was still sitting by the side of the field, though football season was over. The field house was closed and locked until next year. Basketball would be the sport in play now.

“This is where his truck was,” Twyla said. “We'd just gotten it for him. It was an old second-hand Dodge.”

Sheriff Rockwell had said less about Jeff than about any of the other boys, perhaps because she'd known we'd be talking to his grandmother. Looking around now, I didn't see anyone. Not a soul. So an abduction at this point wasn't out of the question, though risky. At any moment, someone might come out of the school. But there weren't any houses nearby. The lane behind the practice field was just a bare strip of ground before a steep hill that had been sheared away to build the school.

Though it might be a fair spot for an abduction, I seriously doubted someone had killed the boy on the spot and buried him here, but I wanted to show I was willing. I stepped out, sent out that part of me that made me unique. There was no response. I was getting the tiniest tingle, which meant some incredibly old human remains were somewhere in the area. It was a feeling I'd learned to ignore in my search for modern bodies. Though the range would be almost the same, not enough to make a difference, I walked the length of the property and kept getting the same reading. I shook my head silently and climbed back into the Cadillac. We drove, Twyla pointing out this or that town landmark as we passed it. I didn't listen, concentrating instead on what I was picking up as we moved. The local cemetery provided a huge mass of static, but we had to stop there because that was where Tyler's hat had been found.

Of course there were tons of bodies here, and some of them were very fresh. It was way too cold to pull my shoes off, but I followed my instincts and went to the freshest graves. There was a heart attack, and there was a death by old age. Sometimes, you know, you just give out. Those were the most recent deaths. But Tyler Lassiter had been gone about two years, if I was remembering correctly, so I had to check out a lot more bodies. None of them turned out to be Tyler. They were all exactly who they were supposed to be according to their headstones. I was glad Doraville wasn't bigger, and glad some people were buried in the newer cemetery, which was south of Doraville.

We were now on the western edge of town, and Twyla once more pulled to the side of the road.

“The man that lives there was arrested for attacking a boy,” she said, pointing to a dilapidated white frame house barely visible behind a tangle of vines and young trees. “He's been questioned over and over.”

I wasn't getting anything from the car. I got out and took a couple of steps forward, closing my eyes. I picked up a buzz from my left, much farther back in the woods, but it was the faint buzz I associated with old cemeteries. I heard Tolliver's window roll down. “Ask her if there's an old church back there with its own cemetery,” I said.

“Yes,” Twyla called to me. “Mount Ararat is back there.”

I got back in the car and said, “Nope.”

Twyla inhaled deeply, as if about to play her last card. She put the car in drive and we pulled out, heading even farther out of the small town of Doraville. We drove northwest, the readout on Twyla's car told me, and the ground began to climb. I looked up at the mountains and I thought that if Jeff's body were up there, I would never find it. I did not want to go hiking in those mountains, especially in this weather. I had a brief selfish thought: Why couldn't Twyla have called me in two months ago? A month, even? I shivered, and thought of the biting cold, the snow that lay in patches on the ground, the predictions of bad weather in a few days. We began to go up, though the pitch of the ground was not so steep here.

And then Twyla stopped again. I noticed how stiffly she sat in the driver's seat, how white she'd gotten.

“This is where the phone was,” Twyla said. She jerked her thumb to the right. “I put that rock there, to mark where it was exactly, after the sheriff showed me.”

There was a big rock with a blue cross on it, dug into the earth at the side of the road.

“You put it in pretty deep,” Tolliver said.

“The mowers had to pass over it,” she said. “That was three months ago.”

Practical.

I got out of the Cadillac and looked around, pulling on my gloves as I did so. It was freaking cold up here, no doubt about it. The Madison road rose steeply ahead of us, cut out of the rising mountain to the left. On our side, there was a fairly level narrow strip, perhaps a half acre to an acre of land, before the rolling slope began its rise. In that half acre lay the site of an old home. The house had been abandoned years before. The plot wasn't in a neat rectangle because it followed the contours of the hill. It was long and thin in spots.

We were parked on the shoulder, and if I took a step I'd roll down the slope of a deep ditch. The driveway into the plot ran over a culvert so the flow of rainwater wouldn't be impeded. The remains of this driveway passed through the remains of a fence. Now, with all the leaves fallen, the stands of weeds were golden or brown with winter's death, and the occasional young pine looked startlingly green. The weeds and small trees appeared to be holding up the fence.

The house had been a humble one. The roof wasn't caved in, but there were holes in it, and the porch was sagging. There wasn't any glass in the windows. There was a listing two-car garage off to one side, with wide doors that hung ajar. Once it had been painted white, like the house. The whole thing was southern gothic picturesque decay personified.

The water in the drainage ditch was dark and would be very cold. There'd been a lot of rain the past couple of weeks. And I felt the raw chill of more rain coming.

I could tell from the inclination of Tolliver's head that he expected me to walk down the side of the road to where the hill leveled into the valley. He expected that someone had dumped the body on the more accessible ground and had tossed its accessories off while driving upward into the mountains. And under other circumstances, that's exactly what I would have done.

But there wasn't any need.

The minute my foot had touched the ground, I'd known I was going to have news for Twyla Cotton. The buzzing was intense, increasing as I stepped closer to the eroded driveway. This was not the signal from a single corpse. I began to have a bad feeling, an awful feeling, and I was scared to look at Tolliver. He took my hand, wrapped it around the crook of his elbow. He could tell I'd decided to go into the tangled area that had been the yard of the old house.

“The ground is rough in there. I wish we'd worn our high boots,” he said. But I couldn't register what he was saying. I watched a blue pickup pass, slowing down for the curve, fading away from view. It was the only other vehicle we'd seen on this road.

After the sound of its motor died away, I could hear only the increasingly irrelevant registers of the two live people and the increasingly more compelling signals of the dead. I walked forward, pulling Tolliver with me. Maybe he tried to pull me back a little, but I kept on going, because this was my moment—my connection with the power, or ability, or electrical short, that made me unique.

“You better get the flags,” I said, and he went back to get the lengths of wire topped with red plastic flags.

In the cold damp I stood in the middle of the former yard, between the fence and the ruined house. I turned in a circle, feeling the buzzing rising all around me, as they clamored to be found. That's all they want, you know. They want to be found.

I tried to speak, choked, gasped.

“What's wrong?” Tolliver asked distantly. “Harper?”

I stumbled to the left a couple of steps. “Here,” I said.

“My grandson? Jeff's there?” Twyla had forged her way onto the property.

I moved six feet northwest. “Here, too,” I said.

“He's in
pieces
?”

“There's more than one body,” Tolliver told her.

I held my hands up to sharpen my focus. I turned again, more slowly, my eyes closed, my hands raised, counting. “Eight,” I said.

“Oh, my Lord in heaven,” Twyla said. She sat down heavily on an old stump. “I'm going to call the police.”

She must have given Tolliver a glance of sudden misgiving, because he said, “You can bank on it. Harper's right.” I heard the little beeps as she began punching in numbers.

“What happened to them?” he asked me quietly. He knew I was listening though my eyes were still closed.

I didn't say anything. It was time for me to find out, but I didn't want anyone else to watch while I did it. “Okay,” I said, to steady myself. “Tolliver?” I wanted him to be ready.

“I'm here,” he said. “I've got a hold.” I could feel his grip on my arms.

I stepped directly onto the ground above the corpse, and I looked down through the soil and rocks, caught a glimpse of hell. That was the last thing I remember.