"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.
Chapter 3
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.