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.
Eleven
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.
"I've got him on speed dial," Tolliver said.
"Or maybe," Rockwell said, overriding our voices, "you found Chuck and decided to punch him back." She was looking at Tolliver as she said this, as if I were accustomed to sending Tolliver to do my punching.
"We were here all night," Tolliver said. "We got a phone call at—what time did Manfred call us, Harper?"
"Oh, about three," I said.
"What evidence is a phone call on a cell phone?" Rockwell asked. "And did Manfred talk to you?" She was looking at Tolliver with no friendly face.
"He talked to me, but Tolliver was here."
"He won't say he talked to Tolliver, then."
"Well, he may have heard him in the background. But he didn't talk to him directly, no." Calling our lawyer in Atlanta was beginning to seem like a possibility we should bear in mind. Art Barfield had made a mint off us lately, and I was sure he wouldn't mind making a little more.
"I'm not in the habit of abducting boys," Tolliver said. "But of course there's someone here in town who is. Why are you looking at me instead of trying to find out who took all the other boys? Isn't it far more likely that that's who's got Chuck Almand? And if that's so, isn't the boy running out of time? "
I figured Sheriff Rockwell was grinding her teeth together in frustration, from the tensed look of her face.
"Do you think we're not looking?" she said, almost biting the words out. "Now that he doesn't have the use of his usual killing ground, where would he have taken the boy? We're searching every shed and barn in the county, but we have to check out all other possibilities. You were one of them, and a pretty likely one at that."
I didn't think we were so damn likely, but then, we'd had the run-in with Chuck and his dad. There was something more I could tell the law.
"He told me he was sorry," I said to the sheriff.
"What?"
"The boy said he was sorry. For hitting me. He told me to find him later."
"Why? Why do you think that was? What sense does that make?" The tall
