Charlaine Harris (94 page)

“I need to get out of here,” he said.

“Yes, and you will, soon. The doctor said so. Just don't do anything crazy and fall, okay?”

There was a sketchy knock at the door, and as our heads turned, a short man walked in. He was extraordinary looking—all in black, with platinum spiked hair and piercings in his eyebrow, his nose, and (I knew from the past) his tongue. He was younger than me, somewhere around twenty-one, and he was slim and oddly handsome.

“Hello, Manfred,” Tolliver said. “I never thought I'd say this, but I'm glad to see you.”

MANFRED
seemed a little hurt that I had protested against his coming with me. “You don't think I can be helpful?” he asked, his blue eyes looking a shade too forlorn.

“Manfred,” I began, exasperated, “I just don't know what to do with you.”

“I have some very good ideas,” he said. He waggled his eyebrows.

He was making it funny, but he was serious. I never doubted that at my slightest response, Manfred would be booking us into the nearest hotel as fast as he could whip out his wallet.

The thing was, I'd have to pay for the room, because that wallet was probably empty. I didn't know how Manfred was getting by. His grandmother, Xylda Bernardo, had been a colorful old fraud, but she'd had the genuine gift. It just didn't always speak to her when she needed it to, and when she didn't hear the real voice, she'd make one up. She'd made a poor living at it. She had a flare for the dramatic that had led to some pretty unconvincing overacting.

Manfred was much cannier. And he had the gift, too. I didn't know the scope and depth of Manfred's psychic ability, but I had a feeling that as soon as Manfred found his level and honed his gift, he'd be making money. As far as I knew, that hadn't happened yet.

“First,” I told him, ignoring his innuendo, “I've got to go to my hotel and shower and change. Then we'll go to the other hospital, the one where they took Detective Powers.”

“The Dallas Cowboy? Parker Powers?” Manfred's face lit up in a wonderful way. “I read an article in
Sports Illustrated
about him, when he became a cop.”

“I would never have guessed you were a football fan,” I said. Life is a process of reevaluation, isn't it?

“Are you kidding? I
love
football. I played in high school.”

I eyed him dubiously.

“Hey, don't let my size fool you,” Manfred said. “I can run like nobody's business. And it was a little high school, so they didn't have much choice,” he added honestly.

“So what position did you play?”

“I was a tight end.” And he said it absolutely straight. Manfred did not joke about football.

“That's really interesting,” I said, and I meant it. “Manfred, not to change the subject, but why'd you decide to come all this way after I said I could handle it?”

“I got the feeling you were in trouble,” he said. He looked sideways at me, and then straight out the windshield of his car. We'd decided that if I were being followed (an idea that still seemed incredible to me) taking Manfred's beat-up Camaro might throw my stalker off the trail.

“Really? You saw that?”

“I saw someone shooting at you,” he said. His face was older all of a sudden. “I saw you fall.”

“Did you . . . You didn't know for sure I was alive when you came into Tolliver's room, did you?”

“Well, I'd watched the news, and I didn't see anything indicating you'd been killed. I did hear that a Garland policeman had been shot. They weren't releasing his name then. I hoped you were okay. But I wanted to see for myself.”

“So you drove all this way.” I shook my head, marveling.

“I wasn't that far away,” Manfred said.

There was a little silence, while I waited for him to continue.

“Okay, I'll bite,” I said. “Where were you?”

“I was in a motel in Tulsa,” he said. “I had a job there.”

“You're officially in the business now?”

“Yep. I've got a website, the whole nine yards.”

“How does it work?”

“It's twenty-five dollars for an answer based on one question. Fifty dollars for a consult if they give me their astrological sign and age. And if they want me to travel to them for a private reading, it's . . . a lot more.”

“How are you doing?” I'd definitely been wrong about Manfred's finances.

“Pretty well,” he said, with a slight smile. “Of course, I'm building on Xylda's reputation. God bless her soul.”

“I know you must miss her.”

“I really, really do. My mother is a very nice woman.” He said that with the air of someone doing his duty. “But my grandmother gave me more love, and I took care of her as much as I could. My mother had to work all the time, and I don't remember my father, so Xylda was my real . . . she was my home.”

That was a great way to put it.

“Manfred, I'm so sorry about Xylda. I think of her often.”

“Thanks,” he said, his voice lightening in a conscious attempt to brighten the dark conversation. “She liked you, too. She liked you a lot.”

We were silent for the rest of the ride.

While I showered and changed, Manfred walked down to the place where Parker Powers had been shot the night before. He wanted to see if he could pick up anything there, and he knew I'd be more comfortable if he wasn't in the room while I was cleaning up. I appreciated both ideas. When he knocked on the door, I was dressed, as made up as my healing face would permit, and braced for our next stop. Manfred set his GPS so we could get to the hospital where Parker Powers was a patient. It was called Christian Memorial. I didn't understand why he'd been taken there instead of God's Mercy, where Tolliver was. Tolliver and Parker had both had gunshot wounds, so it couldn't be the level of trauma the emergency room could handle.

I was impressed with Manfred's GPS, and I'd been thinking of getting Tolliver one for his birthday, so we talked about that on the way to Christian Memorial. I didn't want to think about the visit I was about to pay. Fortunately, we had to watch out for everyone else on the road, and that distracted me.

Every city in the world thinks it has the worst traffic. Dallas has grown in such a hurry, and so many people who move to the city haven't driven in an urban area before, that I think Dallas may be right when it claims its traffic is pretty awful. This congestion extends to the dozens of towns that cluster right around Dallas's outskirts. We were maneuvering among those towns now.

When we'd exhausted small talk about the GPS, Manfred asked me about the case we'd been on before we'd come to Dallas. “Fill me in on your last few days” was the way he put it. “You know this shooting is related to something you've done recently. I don't see how the Carolina case can be related.”

I agreed with him. Since Manfred was a colleague, I explained to him about what had happened at Pioneer Rest Cemetery. I wouldn't have broken my unwritten bond with the Joyces, but I'd come to believe they were probably involved in what was happening. More importantly, I knew Manfred would keep it to himself.

“So there are two ways you can go with that,” he said. “You can pursue the missing baby, which one of the men you met may have fathered—though I guess that kid isn't a baby anymore, it'd be in school—or you can pursue the possibility one of them threw the rattlesnake at Rich Joyce, startling him into a heart attack.”

“There are those two possibilities,” I said, relieved to be talking about the whole situation. “And there's the fact that Tolliver's father has shown back up, and he's trying to reconnect with Tolliver. And the girls. And there's the weird thing that after all these years, someone's reported a Cameron sighting.”

I filled Manfred in on our family business.

“So this might have to do with your little sisters, somehow. Or with your missing sister. What if this has something to do with Cameron?”

I was startled. “Why would it?”

“There's a caller claiming to have seen Cameron. Then another caller threatens you. Two anonymous phone calls. Those sure might be linked, don't you think?”

“Yes,” I said slowly, considering it for the first time. “Yes, of course they could.” If I hadn't put this together before, blame it on the fact that people near me kept getting shot. “So this might have to do with Cameron.”

“Or with the caller knowing this was the surest way to get you away from Tolliver. Maybe he thought you would leave, go to Texarkana. He couldn't have counted on the police being willing to show you the tape at the police station.” There was silence for a long minute. “Uh, Harper,” Manfred said. “You sure—for real—that the woman you saw in the tape wasn't your sister?”

“I'm sure,” I said. “Her jaw was different, and the way she walked was different. True, she was blond and she seemed the right height. True, I don't know why anyone would claim to have seen her when the case is cold and no one's looking anymore.”

“You're . . . I guess you've always been convinced that Cameron is dead?”

“Yes, always.” I said that firmly, as if there were no doubt in my mind at all. “She would never let me worry like this, not for all these years.”

“But you said you two had it real hard at home.”

“Yeah, real hard.” I took a deep breath. “She wouldn't do that,” I said. I packed my voice full of conviction. “She loved all of us, all the kids.”

“So your stepdad resurfaces, and suddenly there's a Cameron sighting,” he said, tactfully abandoning the possibility of my sister's voluntary disappearance. “Isn't that quite a coincidence, too?”

“Yes, it is,” I said. “And I don't know what to make of it. I've never thought that he killed her. Maybe I should have considered it. But he was visiting a jailbird friend of his, a guy he did business with, and the time frame excluded Matthew.”

“What kind of business?”

“Drugs, and whatever else they could do to raise money.” I had to stop to remember. Crazy. I would have never believed I'd forget any detail of that day. “That afternoon Renaldo and Matthew were going to take scrap iron to the recycle plant to get some money. But I don't think they ever made it.They started playing pool.”

“What was the friend's full name?”

“Renaldo Simpkins.” I was very unhappy that I had to struggle to recover that memory. “He was younger than Matthew, and he was a nice-looking man; I remember that.” I tried to picture his face. “Maybe Tolliver will remember,” I said finally. I felt that in forgetting even the most minute circumstance of that day, I was betraying the memory of my sister. For the first time, I appreciated the records of that day that the police would have, and Victoria Flores, too.

We pulled into the parking lot of yet another hospital. Christian Memorial was maybe a little newer than God's Mercy, though nothing in that area was very old. We walked into the lobby and asked the lady in the pink smock if she could give us directions. She gave us a practiced smile that aimed at being warm and welcoming. “Detective Powers is up on the fourth floor, but I warn you, it's mighty crowded up there. You may not get to see him.”

“Thanks,” I said, smiling back just as brightly. We made our way across the lobby and into the elevator, where Manfred's facial decorations attracted a certain amount of attention. He seemed oblivious to the startled and fascinated looks that came our way. When the doors opened on the fourth floor, we were confronted by a sea of faces, and the predominant clothing color was blue. There were cops in several different uniforms standing around, and there were men and women who could only be detectives. There was also a football player or two.

Though it hadn't occurred to me to leave Manfred downstairs, I immediately realized I'd made a mistake bringing him up here. He attracted no little attention, and none of it was positive. I stiffened my back. Manfred was my friend, and he had as much right to be here as anyone. A tall woman with broad shoulders and a thick head of brown hair came up to me. She was in charge. She'd be in charge no matter where she was.

“Hello,” she said. “I'm Beverly Powers, Parker's wife. Can I help you?”

“I hope so,” I said, feeling hesitant. Somehow, I hadn't foreseen this crowd and all these eyes fixed on me. “I'm Harper Connelly, and Parker was shot when someone tried to kill me. I'd like to thank him. This is my friend Manfred Bernardo, who's driving for me today while my brother's in the hospital.”

“Oh,
you're
the young woman,” Beverly Powers said, looking at me with a lot more interest. “I'm so glad to meet you. You understand, there are all kinds of stories going around about why you and my husband were out there together, and I very much hope you'll tell me exactly what happened.”