Grave Sight Page 0,44

on the paper napkin. A very young mother went by, carrying one child on her hip. The other hand held a tray full of food and drinks. A boy, maybe five, followed close on her heels. She put the tray down on a nearby table and began getting the children into their places and sorting out the food. She looked harried. Her bra strap kept falling down her arm; both her arms were bare. She was wearing a sleeveless tank top despite the chilly day.

Tolliver was giving me all his attention, now. "You're still thinking Dallas?"

"Or thereabouts. We could find a nice small house, maybe in Longview or even closer to Dallas, to the north. That'd be more central than the Atlanta area, which was the other place we'd discussed."

His dark eyes searched mine. "Dallas is close to Mariella and Grace."

"Maybe they won't always feel the same."

"Maybe they will. There's no point banging our heads against that wall."

"Someday they'll change."

"You think those people will let us see them?" Mariella and Grace now lived with my stepfather's sister and her husband. Tolliver's aunt Iona had never intervened to save me and Cameron, or her blood kin Tolliver and Mark. But when the end came, when Human Services discovered after Cameron's abduction how bad things were in our household and I'd been farmed out to a foster family and Tolliver had gone to his brother, Iona and Hank had swooped down to save poor precious Mariella and baby Grace, in a hail of publicity and denials of all knowledge of how low my mother had sunk.

After living with Iona and Hank two months, our little sisters had gone from regarding us as their saviors and defenders to reacting as if we had visible plague sores.

Out of many painful memories of that short era, the picture of Grace screaming, "I don't want to see you ever again!" when I'd gone to pick her up was the most shattering.

"It couldn't be them," I said for maybe the hundredth time to Tolliver, as we sat surrounded by the smell of cooking oil and lots of primary colors. "They loved us." He nodded, as he had every other time.

"Iona and Hank have convinced them we had something to do with how that household was run," he said.

"Or not run. How it was bungled," I said, out of the deep well of bitterness that separated me from other people.

"She's dead now," he said, very quietly. "He might as well be."

"I know, I know. I'm sorry." I waved a hand in front of my face, to dispel the recurrence of anger. "I just can't help but hope that someday the little girls will be grown up enough to understand."

"It won't ever be the same." Tolliver was my oracle, and he knew. He almost always said the things I was scared to even think. He was right.

"I guess not. But someday they'll need a sister and a brother, and they'll call us."

He bent back to his food. "Some days, I hope not," he said very quietly, and I couldn't think of anything to say.

I knew what he meant. We had no one to answer to. We had no one to take care of. We only had each other. After years of desperately plastering the cracks in our family so no one could see in, just watching out for each other in the here and now seemed relatively simple and even soothing.

Hollis sat down at our table, his meal in a bag in his hand. "I hope I'm not interrupting anything," he said. "I was going through the drive-through and I saw you two in here. You looked mighty serious."

Tolliver gave the policeman a sharp glance. Hollis was in uniform. He looked good in it. I smiled down at what was left of my lunch.

"We're ready to leave this town," Tolliver said. "But we can't go until the sheriff gives us the nod."

"What happened at the funeral home?" Hollis wisely ignored Tolliver.

I told him that Helen had been killed by someone she knew and trusted, which was no revelation. Her little house had been as neat as a house can be that's the site of a violent murder. No one had broken into it. No one had rifled it.

"Someone wearing long sleeves, not a uniform." I knew that.

"That's all you got?"

"No, I released Helen's soul to heaven," I wanted to say. But there are a lot of things that are better left unsaid, and this was definitely one of them.