you need us, man," he said, and Manfred nodded.
"I don't think she'll last the night," he said. "She's tired out. But at least she had a last moment in the sun yesterday. She told me she thought the boy definitely killed the animals, but that something else was going on there, too."
"Like what?" I'd been moving away, but now I turned back to face Manfred. This was bad news.
He shrugged. "She never told me. She said the whole property was surrounded by a swamp of evil."
"Hmmm." Well, "swamp of evil" sounded pretty bad. What could Xylda have meant? See, this is what makes me nuts about psychics.
"She used a different word."
"Than what?"
"Than swamp. She called it a…miasma? Is that a word?"
Manfred wasn't stupid, but he wasn't much of a reader, either. "Yeah, it is. It means, like, a thick unpleasant atmosphere, right, Tolliver?"
Tolliver nodded.
Had I missed something, like a body? Had I made a mistake? The idea was so strong, so shocking, that I hardly noticed the bitter cold as we made our way to our car. "Tolliver, we've got to go back to that property."
He looked at me as if I were nuts. "In this weather, you want to go poke around private property?" he asked, getting all his objections in one sentence.
"I know the weather is wrong for this. But Xylda… "
"Half the time Xylda was an old fraud, and you know it."
"She wouldn't be about this." A thought occurred to me. "Do you remember when we were in Memphis, she said, ‘In the time of ice you'll be so happy?'"
"Yeah," he said. "I do remember that. And it is the time of ice and up until you wanted to go trespassing, I was happy." He didn't look happy. He looked worried. "As a matter of fact, I wanted to go back to the cabin and stoke up the fire and get happy again."
I smiled. I couldn't help it. "Why don't we just ask?" I said.
"Just ask this guy if we can look over his property again? Just ask him if he snuck some bodies in there while we weren't looking? Because there's a miasma of evil around it?"
"Okay, I get your point. I just think we have to do something."
Tolliver had started the car the minute we got in and the heater was finally working. I bent over a little to let the hot air blow directly on my face.
"We'll go by, have a look," he said, very reluctantly.
"Then we'll follow your plan about the cabin."
"Okay, that part sounds good."
We traced our route of yesterday and alternately slid and bumped our way through the nearly deserted streets to the back of Tom Almand's property. The area where all the police and media vehicles had parked was a churned-up mess, the black mud hardened into a sea filled with black crests. Tolliver parked where it would be very hard to see our car from the house. I got out of the car and moved carefully to the barn. What had I missed there?
Inside the barn, the air was cold and still and stale, and there were several holes in the dirt floor. This was where the sacrificed animals had been exhumed. I thought about the boy, Chuck, but then I banished the picture of his sad eyes from my mind, and I concentrated on opening myself to the vibration that came uniquely from the dead—the human dead.
When I opened my eyes, Chuck Almand was standing in front of me.
"Oh, God, you scared me, boy!" I said, raising a gloved hand to my throat.
He was wearing heavy boots and a heavy coat, a hat and gloves and a scarf, so he was appropriately dressed for the weather, at least.
"What are you doing here?" he asked. "Did you think you'd missed something? "
"Yes," I said. I had no reasonable story to tell. "Yes, I wondered if I'd missed something."
"You thought there might be dead people here?"
"I was checking."
"There aren't any. They're all dug up, out at Davey's old farm."
"You don't know of any others?"
His eyes flickered then, and I heard someone else outside. Thank God.
The door of the barn opened, and my brother came in. "Hey, Chuck," he said casually. "Honey, you finished?"
"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
