Hollis looked thoughtful. "If it came to that, it was before my time on the force. You'd have to ask one of the older guys about that. One of 'em runs the hotel where you're staying at, Vernon McCluskey? He'd know about that."
We weren't exactly popular with Vernon McCluskey, if he was the skinny older guy in overalls that was usually behind the motel counter, the one who'd hinted broadly that we weren't welcome anymore.
Tolliver got up to dump the trash from the tray into the garbage bin. One of the uniformed workers, a woman about twenty-five, watched him from her spot at one of the cash registers, an avid look in her eyes. She was short and dumpy and the McDonald's uniform didn't suit her. I'll give her this, she had outstandingly beautiful skin, something Tolliver's a real sucker for, maybe because of his own scarred face. I don't think it would occur to Tolliver to list "good skin" if someone asked him to make a list of things he found attractive, but I'd noticed that everyone he hit on had a clear complexion.
Today, this woman longed in vain, because Tolliver never once glanced her way. He went to the men's room, and while he was gone, Hollis asked me if I would see him again that night. "We can go to the gospel singing on the lawn at the courthouse. It's the last of the season. There won't be many tourists there, and you might enjoy it."
"I might, huh?" I thought about Annie Gibson's recommendation, and his big hand covered mine.
"Please," he said. "I want to see you again."
There were a lot of things I almost told him, but I didn't say them.
"All right," I finally said. "What time?"
"I'll take you out to eat first, okay? See you at the motel at six thirty," he said. His radio squawked, and he rose hastily, telling me goodbye at the same time he was taking his own tray to the stand by the door. As he pushed open the glass door, he was talking into his shoulder set.
Tolliver came back, swinging his hands in an exaggerated arc. "I hate those damn hot-air dryers," he said. "I like paper towels." I'd heard him complain about hot-air dryers maybe three hundred times, and I gave him an exasperated look.
"Rub your hands on your jeans," I said.
"Well, you got another date with lover-boy?"
"Oh, shut up," I said, mildly irritated. "Yes, as a matter of fact, I do."
"Maybe he's talking his boss into keeping us here so he can have another date with you."
Tolliver sounded so serious that I actually considered the idea for a minute, before I caught my brother's smirk. I smacked him lightly and got up, hanging my purse on my shoulder. "Jerk," I said, smiling.
"You two gonna go watch the sidewalks roll up?"
"No, we're going to a gospel singing on the courthouse lawn, evidently." When Tolliver raised his eyebrows, I said seriously, "It's the last one of the season." He laughed out loud.
I felt a little ashamed of myself, though, and when we were going back to the motel I said, "He's a nice guy, Tolliver. I like him."
"I know," he said. "I know you do."
nine
WE talked about approaching Vernon McCluskey when we were back at the motel. I was redoing my fingernails in a deep brown, and Tolliver was working a puzzle in a New York Times Sunday crossword collection. I knew what I was getting Tolliver for Christmas: some book containing the Hebrew alphabet. The Hebrew alphabet was a major feature of crossword puzzles, at least according to Tolliver, and he was totally ignorant about it. I might get him a world atlas, too. That way, if the question was "river in Siberia" he could damn well look it up, instead of asking me.
"Why are we talking to this asshole?" Tolliver asked. "He's made it clear he wants us out of here. Do we really need to find out about Helen Hopkins' relationship to her ex-husband? Why don't we just lie low until the sheriff lets us go? How long can he actually keep us here? Not long. One phone call to a lawyer, and we're out of here."
I looked at Tolliver, the polish brush suspended over my little fingernail. "We don't want to be remembered here as people who were released because they couldn't find anything to pin on us, do we? You know how we operate. People will be calling Branscom to find out what kind of job we did. They'll ask him how cooperative we were. We need to look as though we're taking him seriously, that we're trying to get to the bottom of these deaths, too. That we care."
"Do we care?" He tossed his pencil on top of the crossword puzzle book. "I think you do."
I hesitated, taken aback by what sounded very much like an accusation. "It bothers you?"
"That depends on what you care about."
"I kind of liked Helen Hopkins," I said at last, very carefully. "So, yeah, I'm upset that someone cracked her skull. I care that two young people were shot, that they died out in the woods, that people think the boy killed her and then himself. That's not what happened."
"Do you feel like they're asking you to investigate?"
"They?"
"The dead people."
I felt a big light bursting behind my eyeballs. "No," I said. "Not at all. Nobody knows better than I do that dead is dead. They're not wanting anything. Well, maybe Helen Hopkins was, but now she's released."
"You don't feel an obligation?"
I polished my little fingernail. "Nope. We did what we were paid for. I don't like thinking about someone getting away with murder, but I'm not a cop, either." I wished immediately that I hadn't added the last phrase.
Tolliver got to his feet, suddenly in a hurry. "I'm going to go wash the car. I'm pretty sure there's an Easy Klean right off Main Street. But I'll stop by the office to ask the McCluskey guy for the location. It'll give me an excuse to talk to him. I'll be gone about an hour, more or less."
"Sure, that sounds good. You don't want me to talk to McCluskey?"
"No. He thinks you're the great Satan, remember? I'm just Satan's assistant."
I smiled at him. "Okay, thanks. You want me to tell Hollis you're coming with us, tonight?"
"No, Harper. You go enjoy being a girl for a while."
He didn't sound like he meant it. "What's that supposed to mean?"
"Did you ever stop to think we could settle down in a town like this? We could quit what we're doing? We could get regular jobs?"
Of course I'd thought of it. "No," I said. "It's never crossed my mind."
"Liar. You could date some guy like Hollis for real. You could work in a department store, or in an office. Somewhere with live people."
I looked away from his face. "You could date a hundred Janines, or even wait for Mary Nell Teague to grow up," I countered. "You could get a job at a Home Depot. You'd be manager in no time."
"Could we do that?" he asked. He didn't mean, could we do it if we had the option; we had the option, all right. He meant, was it possible for us to settle down to being regular citizens.
"It would be pretty hard," I said, after a pause, in a noncommittal voice.
"Getting a house might be the first step," he said.
I shrugged. "Could be."
He shut the door behind him very quietly.
We didn't talk much about the future.
Of course, I'd had plenty of opportunities to think about it. We spent a lot of time driving. Though we listened to audiobooks and the radio, inevitably there were long periods of silence.
Though I didn't want to tell Tolliver this, I thought way too much about our past. I tried not to dwell on the squalor of daily life in that house in Texarkana. Maybe if I hadn't been raised so gently to start with, it wouldn't have bothered me quite so much. But the descent from pampered princess to virgin pussy peddled for drug money had been too shocking, too abrupt. I hadn't seasoned slowly enough. I'd acquired a hard brittle shell instead of toughening all the way through.