An Ice cold Grave Page 0,39

you-all, and she could hardly wait to send you something. You friends of the family?"

"Please come in," Tolliver said, because he had to. "I'm Tolliver Lang; this is my sister Harper."

"Ms. Lang," Ted Hamilton said, bobbing his head at me. "Let me just put this down on the counter here." He set down the dish he'd been carrying.

"Actually, I'm Ms. Connelly, but please call me Harper," I said. "You and your wife live out here year-round?"

"Yep, since I retired, that's what we do," he said. The Hamiltons must live in the small white house next door, to the north. I'd seen the Hamiltons' house out the window and noted it was inhabited. Ordinarily the Hamiltons and the McGraws wouldn't really have to see each other a lot, since the McGraw parking was on the south side of the cabin. The Hamiltons' white frame house was a very ordinary little place that just happened to have been put down at the lakeside, with no concession made to setting or locale. It did boast a very nice pier, I'd noted.

"We're just going to be here a couple of days," I said, pretending to be rueful. "This was awful nice of Mrs. Hamilton."

"I guess you know Twyla, then?"

He was obviously dying to get the scoop on us, and I was just as determined not to spell it out for him. "Yes, we know her," I said. "A very nice woman."

"Just for a couple of days? Maybe we can persuade you to stay longer," Mr. Hamilton said. "Though with the bad weather coming in, you may want to rethink staying out here. You'd be better off with a room in town. It takes them a while to get out here when the electricity goes out."

"And you think that's gonna happen?"

"Oh, always does when we get a lot of ice and snow like they're predicting for tomorrow night," Ted Hamilton said. "Me and the wife have been getting ready for it all day. Went to town, got our groceries, stocked up on water and got oil for our lanterns, and so on. Checked the first aid kit to make sure we can patch up cuts and so on."

You could tell the oncoming bad weather was a big event for the Hamiltons, and I got the distinct impression they'd enjoyed themselves to the hilt preparing for it.

"We may be on our way tomorrow, with any luck," I said. "Please tell your wife we appreciate her fixing us something. We'll get the dish back to you, of course." We said all this a few more times, and then Ted Hamilton went back down the outside stairs and around our cabin to get back to his. Now that I was listening for it, I could hear his cabin door open and I thought I heard a snatch of his wife's voice raised in eager query.

I took the aluminum foil off the dish to reveal a chicken and rice casserole. I sniffed. Cheese and sour cream, a little onion. "Gosh," I said, feeling respect for someone who could whip up a dish like that in the forty-five minutes Tolliver and I had been in residence in the cabin.

"If you had some leftover chicken," Tolliver said, "it would only take twenty minutes for the rice to cook."

"I'm still shocked," I said. My stomach growled, demanding some of the casserole.

We found plastic forks and spoons and some paper plates, and we ate half the dish on the spot. It wasn't restaurant food. It smelled of home...a home, any home. After we'd put the aluminum foil back on and put the remainders in the old refrigerator, I lay down to take a nap, and Tolliver went out exploring. The fire was crackling in a very soothing way, and I wrapped myself in a blanket. We'd made the beds, working together, my rhythm all thrown off by my bad arm. There hadn't been any pillows here - presumably the family brought their own each time they camped out here - but Tolliver and I each had a small pillow in the car, and once I was swaddled in the blanket and warm and full, I drifted off to sleep feeling better than I had in days.

I didn't wake up until almost four o'clock. Tolliver was reading, lying stretched out on his bed. The fire was still going, and he'd brought more wood up. He'd positioned two wooden chairs close to the fire.

There wasn't a sound to be heard: no traffic, no birds, no