Free An Ice Cold Grave by Charlaine Harris Page B

looked at me skeptically. His eyebrows had risen so far that they looked like part of his hairline. “Right. And Xylda just happens to have a vision telling her that a woman he wants—he thinks you’re hot, don’t pretend you don’t know that—needs her help. You don’t think he had something to do with that?”
    Actually, I felt a little shocked. “No,” I said. “I think he came because Xylda said to.”
    Tolliver practically sneered. I felt a strong dislike for him, just for that moment. He shot to his feet and walked around the little hospital room.
    â€œProbably he can’t wait until his grandmother dies. Then he can stop carting her around, and be your agent instead.”
    â€œTolliver!”
    He stopped speaking. Finally.
    â€œThat’s an awful thing to say,” I said. We’d seen the flawed side of human nature over and over, no doubt about it. But I liked to think we weren’t wholly cynical.
    â€œYou can’t see it,” he said, his voice quiet.
    â€œYou’re seeing something that isn’t there,” I said. “I’m not an idiot. I know Manfred likes me. I also know he loves his grandmother, and he wouldn’t have hauled her out into this cold weather with her failing, unless she told him he had to.”
    Tolliver kept his head down, his eyes to himself. I felt I was trembling on the edge of saying something that would push our little barrel over the waterfall, something I’d never be able to take back. And Tolliver was suffering under some burden of his own. I could read the secrets of the dead, but I couldn’t tell what my brother was thinking at that moment. I wasn’t completely sure I wanted to.
    â€œThis past Christmas, just us alone, that was a pretty good Christmas,” he said.
    And then the nurse came in to take my temperature and my blood pressure, and the second was gone forever. Tolliver straightened out my blanket, and I lay back on my pillows.
    â€œRaining again,” the nurse remarked, casting a glance out at the gray sky. “I don’t think it’ll ever stop.”
    Neither of us had anything to say about that.
    The sheriff came by that afternoon. She was wearing heavy outdoor clothes and her boots were coated with mud. Not for the first time I reflected that there were worse places to be than this hospital. One of those places was digging through nearly freezing dirt for clues, breathing in the reek of bodies that were in different stages of decay, telling the bad news to families who’d been waiting to hear about their missing boys for weeks, months, years. Yes, indeed. A concussion and a broken arm in the Doraville hospital were far preferable to that.
    The sheriff may have been thinking the same thing. She started off angry. “I’ll thank you to keep your media-seeking friends away from here,” she said, biting the words out as if they were sour lemons.
    â€œI’m sorry?”
    â€œYour psychic friend, whatever her name is.”
    â€œXylda Bernardo,” Tolliver said.
    â€œYes, she’s been down at the station making a scene.”
    â€œWhat kind of scene?” I asked.
    â€œTelling anyone who’d listen how she’d predicted you’d find these bodies, how she’d sent you up here, how she knew you were going to be hurt.”
    â€œNone of that is true,” Tolliver said.
    â€œI didn’t think it was. But she’s clouding the issue. You know—you show up, of course we’re all skeptical, we all think the worst. But then you came through for us somehow. You did find the boys, and we know you couldn’t have had prior knowledge of their burial place. Or at least if you did we haven’t figured out how.”
    I sighed, tried to make it unobtrusive.
    â€œBut then she showed up with that weird grandson of hers. She acts out, he just smiles.”
    There was nothing else he could do, of