"And you think that's gonna happen?"
"Oh, always does when we get a lot of ice and snow like they're predicting for tomorrow night," Ted Hamilton said. "Me and the wife have been getting ready for it all day. Went to town, got our groceries, stocked up on water and got oil for our lanterns, and so on. Checked the first aid kit to make sure we can patch up cuts and so on."
You could tell the oncoming bad weather was a big event for the Hamiltons, and I got the distinct impression they'd enjoyed themselves to the hilt preparing for it.
"We may be on our way tomorrow, with any luck," I said. "Please tell your wife we appreciate her fixing us something. We'll get the dish back to you, of course." We said all this a few more times, and then Ted Hamilton went back down the outside stairs and around our cabin to get back to his. Now that I was listening for it, I could hear his cabin door open and I thought I heard a snatch of his wife's voice raised in eager query.
I took the aluminum foil off the dish to reveal a chicken and rice casserole. I sniffed. Cheese and sour cream, a little onion. "Gosh," I said, feeling respect for someone who could whip up a dish like that in the forty-five minutes Tolliver and I had been in residence in the cabin.
"If you had some leftover chicken," Tolliver said, "it would only take twenty minutes for the rice to cook."
"I'm still shocked," I said. My stomach growled, demanding some of the casserole.
We found plastic forks and spoons and some paper plates, and we ate half the dish on the spot. It wasn't restaurant food. It smelled of home…a home, any home. After we'd put the aluminum foil back on and put the remainders in the old refrigerator, I lay down to take a nap, and Tolliver went out exploring. The fire was crackling in a very soothing way, and I wrapped myself in a blanket. We'd made the beds, working together, my rhythm all thrown off by my bad arm. There hadn't been any pillows here—presumably the family brought their own each time they camped out here—but Tolliver and I each had a small pillow in the car, and once I was swaddled in the blanket and warm and full, I drifted off to sleep feeling better than I had in days.
I didn't wake up until almost four o'clock. Tolliver was reading, lying stretched out on his bed. The fire was still going, and he'd brought more wood up. He'd positioned two wooden chairs close to the fire.
There wasn't a sound to be heard: no traffic, no birds, no people. Through the window above my head, I could see the bare branches of an oak tree motionless in the still air. I put my hand to the glass. It was warmer. That wasn't good. The ice would come, I was sure.
"Did you go fish?" I asked Tolliver, after moving around a little to let him know I was awake.
"I don't know if you're supposed to go fishing in the winter," he said. He hadn't had a bubba upbringing; no hunting and fishing for Tolliver. His dad had been more interested in helping hard men dodge the law, and then in getting high with the same men, than in taking his sons out in the woods for some bonding time. Tolliver and his brother, Mark, had had to learn other skills to prove themselves at school.
"Good, because I have no idea how to clean 'em," I said.
He rolled off his bed and sat on the edge of mine. "How's the arm?"
"Pretty good." I moved it a little. "And my head feels a lot better." I moved over to give him room and he stretched out beside me.
He said, "While you were asleep, I checked our messages on the phone at the apartment."
"Mm-hm."
"We had a few. Including one about a job in eastern Pennsylvania."
"How long a drive from here?"
"I haven't worked it out yet, but I would guess about seven hours."
"Not too bad. What's the job?"
"A cemetery reading. Parents want to be sure their daughter wasn't murdered. The coroner said the death was an accident. He said the girl slipped down some steps and fell. The parents heard from some friends that, instead, her boyfriend hit her on the head with a beer bottle. The friends are all too scared of the young man to tell the cops."
"Stupid," I said. But we encountered stupid people all the time, people who just could not seem to see that elaborate plots almost never worked, that honesty usually was the best policy, and that most people who supposedly died by accident actually had died by accident. If the boyfriend was so frightening that a group of young people were too scared to talk about him, there might be a good chance that this girl's "fall" was an exception.
"Maybe we'll get away from here in time to take it up," I said. "They mention any time constraints?"
"The boy's about to leave town—he's joined the army," Tolliver said. "They want to know if he's guilty before he goes to basic."
"They understand, right? That I can't tell them that. I can tell if the girl was hit on the head, but I won't know who did it."
"I spoke to the parents briefly. They feel that if she was hit on the head, they'll know it was the suspect who did it. And they don't want him to leave before they have a chance to interrogate him again. I said we'd let them know something definite in the next forty-eight hours."
I hated not being able to tell people yes or no right away, but you have to keep the law happy until their demands become unreasonable. My testimony is no good in court, right? So it's very irksome when the law stops me from leaving town. They don't even believe in me, but they can't seem to let me go.
"Damned if you do, damned if you don't," I muttered. I remembered my mother's mother saying that: it was one of the few memories I had of her. I remembered her with a child's affection, though she hadn't been one of those sweet cuddly grandmas you see in TV ads. She'd never baked a cookie or knitted a sweater, and as far as dispensing wisdom, the aforementioned saying was about as profound as she'd gotten. She'd vanished as thoroughly as she could when my mother became a predator because of her drug habit. Of course, dodging her needy and dishonest daughter meant she also lost contact with us; but maybe it hadn't been an easy choice.
"You ever hear from your grandmother?" I asked Tolliver. He didn't follow my line of thinking, but he didn't look startled.
"Yeah, every now and then she calls," he said. "I try to talk to her once a month."
"Your dad's mother, right?"
"Yeah, my mother's parents are both gone. She was their youngest, so they were pretty old when she died. It just took the life out of them, my dad said. They both passed away about five years after my mother."
"We don't have a lot of relatives." The McGraw-Cotton family seemed pretty united. Parker loved his mom, though she'd remarried. She'd stayed loyal to him instead of going all country club with her accession to money. Twyla had said Archie Cotton's adult children were okay with the marriage.
"Nope." Tolliver didn't seem concerned. "We have enough."
I reached up with my good hand to pat him on the shoulder. "Damn straight," I said, with an overly hearty cheer, and he laughed a little.
"Listen, we need to go into town a little early."
"Why?"
"Well, the computer was down at the hospital this morning, and they wanted to check your bill again."
"You mean they let me out without you paying the total?"
"I paid it, but they wanted to be sure there weren't any later charges on it. So they asked me to drop by."
"Okay."
"You due any medicine?"
We checked, and I took a pill. I decided to take the pain medicine with me in my purse. I was able to use the bathroom by myself, but Tolliver had to help me readjust my clothes; and I let him take a swipe at brushing my hair, too. It was very awkward to attempt that one-handed. We managed to camouflage the bandage a little.