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We were now on the western edge of town, and Twyla once more pulled to the side of the road.
"The man that lives there was arrested for attacking a boy," she said, pointing to a dilapidated white frame house barely visible behind a tangle of vines and young trees. "He's been questioned over and over."
I wasn't getting anything from the car. I got out and took a couple of steps forward, closing my eyes. I picked up a buzz from my left, much farther back in the woods, but it was the faint buzz I associated with old cemeteries. I heard Tolliver's window roll down. "Ask her if there's an old church back there with its own cemetery," I said.
"Yes," Twyla called to me. "Mount Ararat is back there."
I got back in the car and said, "Nope."
Twyla inhaled deeply, as if about to play her last card. She put the car in drive and we pulled out, heading even farther out of the small town of Doraville. We drove northwest, the readout on Twyla's car told me, and the ground began to climb. I looked up at the mountains and I thought that if Jeff's body were up there, I would never find it. I did not want to go hiking in those mountains, especially in this weather. I had a brief selfish thought: Why couldn't Twyla have called me in two months ago? A month, even? I shivered, and thought of the biting cold, the snow that lay in patches on the ground, the predictions of bad weather in a few days. We began to go up, though the pitch of the ground was not so steep here.
And then Twyla stopped again. I noticed how stiffly she sat in the driver's seat, how white she'd gotten.
"This is where the phone was," Twyla said. She jerked her thumb to the right. "I put that rock there, to mark where it was exactly, after the sheriff showed me."
There was a big rock with a blue cross on it, dug into the earth at the side of the road.
"You put it in pretty deep," Tolliver said.
"The mowers had to pass over it," she said. "That was three months ago."
Practical.
I got out of the Cadillac and looked around, pulling on my gloves as I did so. It was freaking cold up here, no doubt about it. The Madison road rose steeply ahead of us, cut out of the rising mountain to the left. On our side, there was a fairly level narrow strip, perhaps a half acre to an acre of land, before the rolling slope began its rise. In that half acre lay the site of an old home. The house had been abandoned years before. The plot wasn't in a neat rectangle because it followed the contours of the hill. It was long and thin in spots.
We were parked on the shoulder, and if I took a step I'd roll down the slope of a deep ditch. The driveway into the plot ran over a culvert so the flow of rainwater wouldn't be impeded. The remains of this driveway passed through the remains of a fence. Now, with all the leaves fallen, the stands of weeds were golden or brown with winter's death, and the occasional young pine looked startlingly green. The weeds and small trees appeared to be holding up the fence.
The house had been a humble one. The roof wasn't caved in, but there were holes in it, and the porch was sagging. There wasn't any glass in the windows. There was a listing two-car garage off to one side, with wide doors that hung ajar. Once it had been painted white, like the house. The whole thing was southern gothic picturesque decay personified.
The water in the drainage ditch was dark and would be very cold. There'd been a lot of rain the past couple of weeks. And I felt the raw chill of more rain coming.
I could tell from the inclination of Tolliver's head that he expected me to walk down the side of the road to where the hill leveled into the valley. He expected that someone had dumped the body on the more accessible ground and had tossed its accessories off while driving upward into the mountains. And under other circumstances, that's exactly what I would have done.
But there wasn't any need.
The minute my foot had touched the ground, I'd known I was going to have news for Twyla Cotton. The buzzing was intense, increasing as I stepped closer to the eroded driveway. This was not the signal from a single corpse. I began to have a bad feeling, an awful feeling, and I was scared to look at Tolliver. He took my hand, wrapped it around the crook of his elbow. He could tell I'd decided to go into the tangled area that had been the yard of the old house.
"The ground is rough in there. I wish we'd worn our high boots," he said. But I couldn't register what he was saying. I watched a blue pickup pass, slowing down for the curve, fading away from view. It was the only other vehicle we'd seen on this road.
After the sound of its motor died away, I could hear only the increasingly irrelevant registers of the two live people and the increasingly more compelling signals of the dead. I walked forward, pulling Tolliver with me. Maybe he tried to pull me back a little, but I kept on going, because this was my moment—my co
"You better get the flags," I said, and he went back to get the lengths of wire topped with red plastic flags.
In the cold damp I stood in the middle of the former yard, between the fence and the ruined house. I turned in a circle, feeling the buzzing rising all around me, as they clamored to be found. That's all they want, you know. They want to be found.
I tried to speak, choked, gasped.
"What's wrong?" Tolliver asked distantly. "Harper?"
I stumbled to the left a couple of steps. "Here," I said.
"My grandson? Jeff's there?" Twyla had forged her way onto the property.
I moved six feet northwest. "Here, too," I said.
"He's in pieces?"
"There's more than one body," Tolliver told her.
I held my hands up to sharpen my focus. I turned again, more slowly, my eyes closed, my hands raised, counting. "Eight," I said.
"Oh, my Lord in heaven," Twyla said. She sat down heavily on an old stump. "I'm going to call the police."
She must have given Tolliver a glance of sudden misgiving, because he said, "You can bank on it. Harper's right." I heard the little beeps as she began punching in numbers.
"What happened to them?" he asked me quietly. He knew I was listening though my eyes were still closed.
I didn't say anything. It was time for me to find out, but I didn't want anyone else to watch while I did it. "Okay," I said, to steady myself. "Tolliver?" I wanted him to be ready.
"I'm here," he said. "I've got a hold." I could feel his grip on my arms.
I stepped directly onto the ground above the corpse, and I looked down through the soil and rocks, caught a glimpse of hell. That was the last thing I remember.
Four
"SHE ever go
"Harper?" my brother said. "Harper?"
I didn't want to do this, but I had to.
"Okay," I said, and it came out as wobbly as I felt. "You found them yet?"
"Tell me what to do," Sheriff Rockwell said. She sounded as if she didn't want to be there.
I had to open my eyes, and I had to look at the anxious brown eyes under the hat. Sheriff Rockwell was in a padded coat that made her look twice as large.
"They're all there," I said. "If you can wait a minute, I can tell you who's where. And there are eight of them, not six."
"How do you know that?"
I was sitting in the back seat of Twyla's car, my head leaning against the cushion.
"Here, eat some sugar," Tolliver said anxiously, working a piece of candy out of his jeans pocket. He unwrapped it for me, and popped it in my mouth. I knew from experience that I would feel better in a few minutes, especially if I had a Coke.
"You were willing to believe me before I did anything," I said. "Have a little more faith. Dig for them."