Grave Secret - Charlaine Harris [29]
And yet, he was obviously waiting for our reaction.
“None of this is news to us,” Tolliver said.
“Laurel and I were addicted,” Matthew said. “That’s not an excuse for our negligence, but a . . . confession, I guess. We did bad things. I’m asking for your forgiveness.”
I wondered if this was something Matthew was obliged to do as a step in some rehabilitation program. If so, he’d gone about it the wrong way entirely. Stalking his children, following me to get to Tolliver, this was not the way to express contrition.
After another moment of silence, I said, “Do you remember the night Mariella got so sick, and we tried to sneak out of the trailer to take her to the doctor, and you blocked the door and wouldn’t let us leave because you didn’t want the hospital to call social services? We were willing that night to be separated, if we could just get help for her.”
“She got better!”
“Because we stayed up all night putting her in a cool bath and giving her baby Tylenol!”
Matthew looked blank.
“You don’t remember anything about it,” Tolliver said. “You don’t remember the night we had to sleep under the trailer because it was full of your friends. You don’t remember when Harper got hit by lightning and you wouldn’t call an ambulance.”
“I do remember that.” Matthew looked straight at Tolliver. “You saved her life that day. You did CPR.”
“And you did nothing,” I said.
“I loved your mother,” he said to me.
“Yeah, I’m really glad you were there for her at the end,” I said. “When she died alone, and you were in another jail.”
“Were you there?” he said, swift as a striking snake.
“I didn’t claim to love her.”
“Did you go to the funeral?”
If he thought he was heaping coals on my head, he could think again. “No. I don’t go to funerals. For obvious reasons.”
Matthew still didn’t get it. He’d fried a few of his own brain cells over the course of the past years. He narrowed his eyes at me, asking a question.
“Presence of the dead. It’s a real issue for me.”
“Oh, bullshit. You don’t have to pretend. This is me, here. I know you. You can fool other people, evidently, but not me.” Matthew made a face that was meant to let me know that we were all in a big conspiracy together.
“Leave,” Tolliver said.
“Oh, come on,” Matthew said, incredulous. “Son, you’re not claiming this corpse-finding thing is real. I mean, you can pretend in front of other people, but your sister is anything but some kind of occult witch.”
“She’s not my sister, at least not by blood,” Tolliver said. “We’re a couple.”
Matthew’s face reddened. He looked like he was going to throw up. “You make me sick,” he said, and instantly regretted it.
Now nearly everyone we had told had had that reaction, to a greater or lesser degree. If I’d cared about how they felt, I might have been worried about our relationship just about now.
Fortunately, I didn’t give a shit.
“Time to go, Matthew,” I said, easing away from Tolliver. “For a reformed junkie and alcoholic, you’re not very tolerant of other people’s little differences.” I held open the room door.
Matthew looked from me to his son, waiting for Tolliver to cancel my suggestion. Tolliver jerked his head toward the open door. “I think you better go before I get any madder than I am,” he said, in a voice with no emotional weight whatsoever.
Matthew gave me a furious look as he walked by me on his way out the door.
I closed it and locked it behind him. I took a step over to Tolliver, hugged him, and looked up at his locked-down face. “You’d think somebody would be happy for us,” I said, to break the silence. I didn’t know what Tolliver was feeling. Was he having second thoughts?
It was now completely dark outside, and the blank window seemed like a big eye looking into the room, especially since we were on the ground floor. Tolliver gave me a little hug and stepped to the window to draw the curtains. I’d feel better when the night was blocked out and Tolliver and I were alone together.
Tolliver was standing in the