Somehow we both ended up in the right car and Tolliver turned on the motor to get the blessed heater started. He pulled my seat belt across me with unnecessary force, and I squeaked because my arm hurt.
"Sorry," he said, not sounding very sorry at all. "He rubs me the wrong way. He just crawls around you. All that stuff in his face and God knows where else! Just waiting to touch you."
Instead of keeping quiet and letting things die down like I ought to have done, I said, "Isn't it okay that someone likes me?"
"Sure! Just not him!"
Tolliver would rather I got together with Barney Simpson or the Pastor Doak Garland? "Why not?"
There was a long moment of silence while Tolliver struggled with that question. "Because he, well, he actually stands a chance with you," he said. "Other guys don't because we're always traveling and you aren't going to see them again, but he understands the lifestyle and he has to travel, too, with Xylda."
I opened my mouth to say, So you don't want me to have anyone? But a power beyond me shut my mouth. I didn't say anything. This was closer to the bone than I'd imagined Tolliver would get, and I was scared to take it any further.
"He's younger than me." I had to say something.
"Not too young," my brother said. We'd changed sides in the Manfred argument, I realized. Suddenly, I was trying not to smile. I realized the pain pill I'd taken at the cabin was definitely working. I had the blooming warm sense of well-being, the chatty feeling of affection for all mankind. If I ever became addicted to any pharmaceutical, pain pills would be my drug of choice. But I didn't plan on becoming addicted. Once the pain was gone, the pills would be. I had to watch myself, after the example my mother had set me.
"The trick to avoiding these pills is not to get hurt," I said seriously.
Tolliver had a little trouble catching up to this conversational line, but he got there. "Yes, you don't want to end up in the hospital again," he said. "For one thing, you can't do your share of the driving while you're on them."
"Oh, yeah, like you care," I said.
He smiled. I felt better. "But I do," he said.
The lot of Mount Ida Baptist Church was already full of cars. One of the local cops was directing the overflow parking. Tolliver asked if he could drop me off right in front of the church, and the cop nodded. I got out of the car awkwardly and stood just inside the vestibule, waiting. As other people passed me and went in, I glimpsed Twyla sitting at a table just inside the door. She had a clear plastic box in front of her, a box with a slot cut in the top.
There was a sign on the front of the box that read "Please help our families bury their children." It was already half full of bills and change.
Twyla glimpsed me, too, and made a beckoning gesture. I maneuvered through the doors and went to sit in the vacant folding chair beside her. She leaned over to give me a half hug.
"How you doing, girl?" she asked.
However I was doing, it had to be better than Twyla. Everything wrong with me would heal. Not so, her. "I'm okay," I said. "They've got you working, I see."
"Yep, they thought it would be more effective if a relative sat here," she said. "So here I am. If you say six of the boys were local, we need at least four thousand dollars for each burial, so our goal is twenty-four thousand. We got these up all over town, but this is a poor place. I think we'll be lucky to get six thousand through these collections."
"How do you expect to make up the rest, or do you think that just won't happen?"
Twyla looked grim. "I think it won't happen. But we're doing the best we can. Maybe if the poorer families can just make a good down payment on the funerals through these donations, each individual family can pay the rest on time."
I nodded. "Good idea." Emboldened by the pain medication, I said, "It's too bad the media don't chip in. After all, they're profiting by the deaths as well, aren't they? They should donate something."
A fire lit in Twyla's eyes. "That's a good idea," she said. "I wonder that I didn't think of it. What happened today at Tom Almand's? I'm hearing some mighty funny things. That boy of his in trouble? Hey, Sarah," she said, lifting her round face to a woman coming in. "Thanks for helping," she added as the older woman dropped a couple of dollars into the slot.
"There are too many people around to talk about it," I said quietly. No one had asked me not to discuss the macabre nature of the findings at Tom Almand's, but I didn't want to be broadcasting it. Chuck Almand would be a pariah soon enough. I wouldn't hasten the process. Though some country people tend to be more practical about animals than city people, plenty of the inhabitants of Doraville would be disgusted at the pain inflicted on cats and squirrels and the odd dog…especially if the cats and the dog turned out to be somebody's pets. "But he's not a boy you'd want to have dating your daughter or granddaughter."
"The sheriff says we won't get the bodies back for a week at least, maybe longer," Twyla said. "It seems hard that we finally discover Jeff, but we can't bury him."
"At the same time," I said, "you want every bit of evidence that can tie his death to the killer."
"I don't like to think about him getting cut up," Twyla said. "I can't think about it."
I didn't know what to say, and the fuzzy golden goodwill the pill lent me did not give me any inspiration. I decided it was best to keep silent. I looked over the crowd in the pews. Mount Ida was a larger church than I'd imagined from the outside. The pews were gleaming with polish, and the carpet was new, too. At the front of the church were easels with enlarged photographs of the dead boys, each with a spray of flowers at the base. I would have liked to look at them, since I'd touched on each of these young men in my very own way, but going up there would have seemed rude and pushy.
There was a knot of law enforcement uniforms in one of the front pews. I recognized Sheriff Rockwell's hair, and I thought I also saw Deputy Rob Tidmarsh, who'd discovered the animal graves.
Somehow the Bernardos had beat us here. I glimpsed Xylda's unruly red head a few pews up and to the right and Manfred's platinum spikes beside her. From the rear view, the two didn't stand out so much. There was plenty of dyed hair in evidence, and several spiky hairdos.
Tolliver came in, his face pinched with cold. He dropped a twenty into the slot. He was surprised to find me seated by Twyla, but he leaned over to shake her hand and to tell her how sorry he was. "We appreciate the use of your cabin," he said. "It made a big difference, having a place to stay." I hadn't even thought of thanking her, and I was angry with myself.
"I'm very sorry Harper got hurt," Twyla said, and I felt better when I realized I wasn't the only one who'd forgotten to mention something fairly major. "I hope they catch who did it, and I'm sure it was the same bastard who killed our Jeff. This is something else I forgot," she said, pressing a check into my hands. I nodded and slid it into Tolliver's chest pocket. We started down the aisle to find a place to sit.
We paused by a pew with some free space in the middle, and when the pew's settlers saw my cast, they were kind enough to all shift down to let us sit on the end. I said "Thank you" several times. It felt good to settle down on the padded pew shoulder to shoulder with Tolliver. We were far enough away from the door to avoid the effects of the constant gusts of cold air with each entrance.
Gradually the murmurs died down and the crowd became silent. The doors didn't open and close anymore. Pastor Garland came out, looking youthful and somehow sweet. But his voice was anything but sweet, or peaceful, as he read the scriptures he'd selected for the occasion. He'd picked a passage from Ecclesiastes, he told us, and he started to read. He began, "To everything there is a season…"