I inquired at the motel desk, and the clerk gave me really good directions to a large and clean place about a mile away. We always keep a stock of quarters, and we carry detergent and dryer sheets in the trunk. I was good to go.
There was an attendant in the Laundromat, an older woman with crisp white hair and a comfortable body. She was sitting at a little table, reading, and she glanced up when I came in to give me a nod of acknowledgment. Since it was the weekend, the place was busy, but after a little searching I spotted two empty machines side by side. I found a plastic chair and dragged it over, and after I'd loaded the machines and gotten them started, I sat down and pulled my book out of my purse.
I could read, now that I was away from Tolliver's brooding presence. I don't know why that was so. But it was kind of nice to have bustle and people around me, and it was reassuring to have the achievement of clean clothes.
I was at peace. There weren't any bodies around. For a blissful period, I couldn't hear any buzz at all in my head.
From time to time I looked around me to make sure I wasn't in anyone's way, and I saw a woman about my own age looking at me when I raised my head when the spin cycle was almost over.
"Are you that woman?" she asked. "Are you the psychic woman who finds bodies?"
"No," I said instantly. "I've heard that before, but I work at the mall."
That's what I always said when I was in an urban area. It had always worked before. There was always a mall, and it provided a reasonable explanation for the questioner to have seen me before.
"Which mall?" the woman asked. She was pretty, even wearing her weekend sloppy clothes, and she was persistent.
"I'm sorry," I said, with an appropriate smile, "I don't know you." I shrugged, which was supposed to mean, I'm sure you're okay, but I don't want to discuss my personal information with you anymore.
This gal just didn't pick up on the cue. "You look just like her," she said, smiling at me as if that ought to make me happy.
"Okay," I said, and began pulling clothes out of the washers. I had already appropriated one of the rolling carts.
"If you were her, your brother would be somewhere around," the woman said. "I'd sure like to meet him; he looks hot."
"But I'm not her." I rolled my cart away with everything else thrown in it along with the wet clothes. I had to stay long enough to dry them. I couldn't leave now. If there was anything in the world I didn't want to do, it was talk to this woman about my life, my activities, and my Tolliver.
The woman watched me the rest of the time I was in the Laundromat, though she didn't approach me again, thank God. I pretended to read while our clothes tumbled, I pretended to be absorbed in folding them when they were dry, and I made up my mind that as far as I was concerned, she simply wasn't there. This technique had worked for me in the past.
By the time I was ready to load the clothes into the car, I figured I'd gotten clean away. But no-here she came, following me out into the parking lot.
"Don't talk to me again," I said, shaken and at the end of my rope.
"You are her," she said with a smug nod of her head.
"Leave me alone," I said, and got in the car and locked the door. I waited to drive away until after she'd reentered the Laundromat. I hoped that someone had stolen her clothes while she'd come out to look at me some more.
At least now I knew she couldn't follow me. But I did look into the rearview mirror a few times, just to be sure, which was how I noticed the car that actually was following me. It was hard to be sure, since it was dark by now, but since the area was so urban and well lighted, I was sure I was seeing the same gray Miata in my rearview mirror. I pressed the speed dial number for Tolliver.
"Hey," he said.
"Someone's following me."
"Then come straight back here. I'll go outside and wait."
So I did go straight to the motel, and he was standing in an empty spot right outside our room, to make sure it stayed empty. I parked, leaped from the car, and sped into the room while he waited outside.
After a minute, Tolliver called my name. I checked through the peephole. He wasn't alone.
"It's okay," he said, but he didn't sound happy.
So I opened the door, and he came in with his father in tow.
Crap.
Tolliver turned to face his dad, standing side by side with me.
"What do you want?" he asked Matthew. "Why'd you follow Harper here?"
"I just want to talk to you, son." Matthew glanced at me, tried to look apologetic. "Alone? This is family stuff, Harper."
He wanted me to leave my own motel room.
"Not possible," Tolliver said. He put his arm around me. "This is my family."
Matthew's eyes flicked from Tolliver to me, then back again. "I understand," he said. "Listen, I got to apologize to you. I was a terrible father. I let you down, and I let down Laurel 's kids, too. And worst of all, I let down our children that we had together."
Tolliver and I stood together silently, our sides touching. I didn't even need to look up at my brother, because I knew how he felt. Matthew didn't need to tell us who he'd let down. We knew all about it.
And yet, he was obviously waiting for our reaction.
"None of this is news to us," Tolliver said.
"Laurel and I were addicted," Matthew said. "That's not an excuse for our negligence, but a... confession, I guess. We did bad things. I'm asking for your forgiveness."
I wondered if this was something Matthew was obliged to do as a step in some rehabilitation program. If so, he'd gone about it the wrong way entirely. Stalking his children, following me to get to Tolliver, this was not the way to express contrition.
After another moment of silence, I said, "Do you remember the night Mariella got so sick, and we tried to sneak out of the trailer to take her to the doctor, and you blocked the door and wouldn't let us leave because you didn't want the hospital to call social services? We were willing that night to be separated, if we could just get help for her."
"She got better!"
"Because we stayed up all night putting her in a cool bath and giving her baby Tylenol!"
Matthew looked blank.
"You don't remember anything about it," Tolliver said. "You don't remember the night we had to sleep under the trailer because it was full of your friends. You don't remember when Harper got hit by lightning and you wouldn't call an ambulance."
"I do remember that." Matthew looked straight at Tolliver. "You saved her life that day. You did CPR."
"And you did nothing," I said.
"I loved your mother," he said to me.
"Yeah, I'm really glad you were there for her at the end," I said. "When she died alone, and you were in another jail."
"Were you there?" he said, swift as a striking snake.
"I didn't claim to love her."
"Did you go to the funeral?"
If he thought he was heaping coals on my head, he could think again. "No. I don't go to funerals. For obvious reasons."
Matthew still didn't get it. He'd fried a few of his own brain cells over the course of the past years. He narrowed his eyes at me, asking a question.
"Presence of the dead. It's a real issue for me."
"Oh, bullshit. You don't have to pretend. This is me, here. I know you. You can fool other people, evidently, but not me." Matthew made a face that was meant to let me know that we were all in a big conspiracy together.
"Leave," Tolliver said.
"Oh, come on," Matthew said, incredulous. "Son, you're not claiming this corpse-finding thing is real. I mean, you can pretend in front of other people, but your sister is anything but some kind of occult witch."
"She's not my sister, at least not by blood," Tolliver said. "We're a couple."
Matthew's face reddened. He looked like he was going to throw up. "You make me sick," he said, and instantly regretted it.
Now nearly everyone we had told had had that reaction, to a greater or lesser degree. If I'd cared about how they felt, I might have been worried about our relationship just about now.
Fortunately, I didn't give a shit.
"Time to go, Matthew," I said, easing away from Tolliver. "For a reformed junkie and alcoholic, you're not very tolerant of other people's little differences." I held open the room door.
Matthew looked from me to his son, waiting for Tolliver to cancel my suggestion. Tolliver jerked his head toward the open door. "I think you better go before I get any madder than I am," he said, in a voice with no emotional weight whatsoever.
Matthew gave me a furious look as he walked by me on his way out the door.
I closed it and locked it behind him. I took a step over to Tolliver, hugged him, and looked up at his locked-down face. "You'd think somebody would be happy for us," I said, to break the silence. I didn't know what Tolliver was feeling. Was he having second thoughts?
It was now completely dark outside, and the blank window seemed like a big eye looking into the room, especially since we were on the ground floor. Tolliver gave me a little hug and stepped to the window to draw the curtains. I'd feel better when the night was blocked out and Tolliver and I were alone together.
Tolliver was standing in the center of the window, his arms extended to bring the curtains together. I was standing a little to the side and behind him, just about to sit on the bed to unlace my shoes. And then a hundred things happened in tiny layers of seconds. There was a huge noise; my face and chest stung; I was sprinkled with wetness. A gust of cold air blew across my face as Tolliver staggered backward, knocking me down on the bed. He landed on top of me and then slithered to the floor in a boneless way.
I catapulted back to my feet so fast I wobbled, aware that cold air was pouring in the window, inexplicably. I looked down at my cold chest. It was wet-not with rain, but with red spots. My T-shirt was ruined. I don't know why I cared. But I think I screamed, because I already understood on a subterranean level that Tolliver had been shot, that I was cut with glass and covered with blood, and that our world had completely changed in the space of a second.
Chapter Six
I must have unlocked the door in answer to the pounding, because Matthew was in the room, and I was not being any help to Tolliver because I was standing there looking down at him, my hands held out in front of me because I'd touched my face and my hands were covered with blood. Since my hands were dirty I didn't want to touch Tolliver.
Matthew was on his knees beside his son. I pulled my phone out of my pocket and hit 911, though it required more concentration than anything I'd ever done. I gasped out the motel and its location, and I think I said we needed an ambulance immediately, and I said "sniper," because I was thinking of the word.
In a thought that went by so quickly I couldn't catch its trailing ends, I was sorry I'd mentioned a sniper because maybe the ambulance wouldn't come because the driver was scared, and then I tossed that idea overboard and joined Matthew on the carpet, facing him over Tolliver's body.
I'd been shot at through a window before, and it had been frightening. I'd had glass all over me then, too. But this was so much worse, terrible, it was the worst thing that had ever happened to me, because it had happened to Tolliver. That was all I could think of, the eeriness of such a thing happening twice, but I tried to yank myself out of the horror and I tried to help. Matthew was pulling off his shirt and folding it, and he pressed it to the bloodiest spot.
"Hold this, you idiot," he said, and I put my hands on the pad formed by the shirt. It was soaking through with blood under my fingers.
If he hadn't rushed back to the door so quickly, I would have accused him of doing this to Tolliver, but I just didn't think. It was an idea I definitely would have adopted if it had even occurred to me.
Tolliver's eyes opened. He was pale, bewildered. "What happened?" he said. "What happened? Honey, are you okay?"
"Yes, okay," I said, pressing down with all my might. "Listen, they're coming, baby." I couldn't remember ever calling Tolliver "baby" in all the years we'd known each other. "They're coming, and they'll fix you up. You're not hurt bad, you're going to be okay."
"Was there a bomb?" he said. "Was there an explosion?" His voice faltered. "Dad, what happened? Harper's hurt."
"Don't you worry about Harper," Matthew said. "She's fine. She's going to be okay." He was examining Tolliver's wounds with his fingers, pulling Tolliver's shirt up to examine the skin.
Then Tolliver's eyes rolled up and his face went slack.
"Oh, Jesus!" I almost moved my hands, but even in the panic of the moment I knew I mustn't. I'd held on for what felt like hours. It was no time to let go.
"He's not dead," Matthew yelled. "He's not dead."
But he looked dead to me.
"No," I said. "He's not dead. He's not. He can't be. It's his right shoulder, and that's not the heart. He can't die from this." I knew what a fool I was being, but there was no shame in it right at that moment.
"No, he won't die," his father said.
I opened my mouth to scream at Matthew, though I don't know what I would have said, and then I clamped my lips together because I heard an ambulance.
There were people crowding in the door to the room, and they were talking and exclaiming, and I heard some of them shouting at the ambulance driver Come over here, come over here, and if I turned my head to my left, I could look out the window and see the flashing lights. More than anything else I'd ever wanted, I wanted someone who knew what the hell they were doing to come into this room and take the hell over, someone who could fix my brother and stop this bleeding.