Grave Sight Page 0,35

to consider.

"Where was this tornado?"

"In Texas," I said. "Went right down the main street of this little town. I can't remember if the siren had gone off or not - or if it just came so suddenly there wasn't a chance to sound the siren. For whatever reason, this woman, her name was Molly Mathers, was running from her business to her car with her baby in one of those plastic carrying things with a handle. Little bitty baby."

"Storm took the baby?"

I nodded. "Snatched the carrier right out of Molly's hand."

We kept a moment of silence together.

"Everyone was sure the baby hadn't survived, of course, but the mom just couldn't let go of the idea that the baby was still in the carrier, maybe in some field, and was going hungry." I said this very evenly, because it was a hard thing to think of, a hard memory to carry around with me.

"You find the baby?"

I nodded, my lips pressed hard together.

"Deceased?"

"Sure. Up in a tree. She was still in the carrier."

"God."

I nodded again. Nothing you could say about that. "But mostly it's not so bad," I said, after a long moment of allowing the memory to dissipate. "Mostly it's girls who don't come home, or older people who wander away. Sometimes abducted kids - not too often, because if someone picked them up in a vehicle, of course there's no way to guess where the body would be."

"So you take cases where the body location is known?"

"Well, if it can be pinned down to a reasonable area. You couldn't say, 'Hey, he was hiking somewhere in the Mojave Desert,' and expect me to find anything. Unless you had unlimited money for the amount of time it'd take me."

"What's it like?"

"What?"

"The feeling, when a body's close."

"It's like a buzzing. A humming. In my bones, in my brain. It almost hurts. The closer I get, the more intense it gets. And when I'm close, when I'm in the body's presence, I see the death."

"How much of the death?"

"I see the few seconds before it. But the only person I see is the one who died. Not any other people around. At the same time, I'm in that person, feeling it. So it can be pretty... unpleasant."

"That seems like an understatement." He took a long sip of his beer.

I nodded. "I wish I could see the face of the murderer, but I never do."

"Couldn't prosecute on your word alone, anyway."

"Yeah, I get that, but still." I shrugged. "I'd be more useful."

"You look on your job as useful?"

"Sure. Everyone needs closure, right? Uncertainty eats at you; well, I meant 'you' in the general sense, but didn't it make you feel better when you knew what had happened to your wife? Plus, if people believe me, I can save lots of money. Like, 'Don't dredge that pond or send in divers. No body there.' Or, 'You don't need to search through the landfill.' Stuff like that."

"If people believe you."

"Yeah. Lots don't."

"How do you handle that?"

"I've learned to let it go and walk away."

"It must be tough."

"At first it was. Not now. What about your job?"

"Oh about what you'd expect. Drunk drivers, mostly. Neighbor disputes. Sometimes some shoplifting. Burglary. Not too much that's mysterious or even very serious. Every now and then a wife-beater, or someone with a gun on a Saturday night. I never get to see anyone at their best." He gave me a crooked half-smile.

I'd wondered what we could possibly find to talk about, but the next couple of hours went easier than I'd anticipated. He talked about deer hunting, and told me about the time he'd fallen out of his shooting stand and gotten nothing worse than a sprained ankle, the same year his friend John Harley had fallen from a stand and broken his back. I had once hurt my back playing basketball. He had played basketball in high school. He'd had a great time in high school, but never wanted to revisit those days. I didn't either. I had spent my high school years trying to keep my head down and my mouth shut so no one would find out how truly weird my life was. Because of my mother and my stepfather, I didn't want to bring anyone home with me. I'd managed pretty well until Cameron vanished. Her disappearance had been so spectacular, so media-saturated, that it had drawn a lot of unwanted attention to me.

"Seems like I remember that," Hollis said thoughtfully. He was on his