An Ice cold Grave Page 0,54

The mist in the air began to get heavier, become almost-rain. I was miserable.

Finally he straightened up, and without a word to me, he clicked the doors open. I stepped down from the curb to the door on the passenger side, opened it and got in, pulled it closed. Thank God it was my left arm that was out of whack. Still silently, Tolliver leaned over me to pull my seat belt around and click it shut.

"Where?" he said.

"The doctor's office."

"You hurting?"

"Yes."

He took a deep breath. He held it for a minute. Let it out. "I'm sorry," he said, leaving it open as to what he was sorry about.

"Okay," I said, not really sure what ground we were walking on. I had a few ideas. Some of them were more frightening than others.

Tolliver had pinpointed the location of the doctor's office earlier on one of his drives to and from the hospital. Dr. Thomason's red brick office was small, but the parking lot contained at least six cars. When I went in, I anticipated a long wait. The man who was not my brother went up to the window, told the woman behind it who I was and that I'd seen the doctor at the emergency room.

"We'll have to work her in, hon, it may take a little bit," she said, reaching up to push her glasses back on her nose. Then she patted her helmet of sprayed hair lightly, to make sure it was still in good shape, I guess. Tolliver was working his old magic. He brought back a clipboard with forms to fill out.

"Apparently, we'll have plenty of time to do this," he said, for my benefit. I was in a blue molded plastic chair against the far wall, and he came to join me. In the waiting room with us were a young mother and her baby, who was blessedly asleep, an elderly man with a walker parked in front of him, and a very nervous teenage boy, who was one of the tribe of foot jigglers.

A nurse in teal came to the door and called, "Sallie and Laperla!" The young mother, hardly more than a teenager herself, got up with the infant carrier cradled in her arms.

"I wonder if she knows La Perla is a brand of underwear," I murmured to Tolliver, but that barely got a smile from him.

The boy scooted down the line of chairs until he was within conversational distance of us. "You the one found the bodies," he said.

We both looked at him. I nodded.

Now that he'd told me who I was, he was stumped to think of something else to tell me. "I knew all them," he said finally. "They was good boys. Well, maybe Tyler got into a little trouble now and then. And Chester, he wrecked his dad's new Impala. But we went to youth group together, at Mount Ida."

"All of you?"

"'Cept Dylan, he's a Catholic. They got their own youth group. But the rest of the churches, they all go together at Mount Ida."

Ordinarily, I'd be bored stiff by this conversation, but I wasn't today.

"Did you read the stories in the paper today?" I asked.

"Yep."

"You ever met those two boys from out of town?"

He looked surprised. "No, never," he said. "I never heard of 'em. I think they were hitching or something. They were from way far away."

I hadn't read the whole story. "Way far away" to this boy might mean Kentucky or Ohio. He meant only that the two out-of-towners weren't from North Carolina.

The young mother came out, her baby crying now. They stopped at the window for a minute, then went out the front door. I could see the rain increasing. She would have to run for her car. The nurse called the old man, who got slowly and carefully to his feet. He shuffled through the door to the inner sanctum preceded by his walker, which had sliced-open tennis balls fixed on the front feet. It gave the walker a jaunty air. As soon as he was through the door, the nurse also called, "Rory!" Our companion jumped to his feet and hurried back.

Now that we were by ourselves, I thought Tolliver would talk to me, but he leaned back and closed his eyes. He was shutting me out on purpose, and I didn't know what to make of it. If he was just in a snit over some unknown issue, then I could be in a snit right back. If I'd hurt him