Grave Secret - Charlaine Harris [31]
There was more yelling outside, as the police got there right along with the ambulance and began urging everyone to move back, move back, and then the ambulance guys were there inside the room and Matthew and I had to get out of the narrow space so they could work.
The police took me outside, and I could not remember a single face after that night. “Someone shot him through the window,” I said, to the first face that seemed to be asking me a question. “I was standing behind him and someone shot him through the window.”
“What relation?” asked the face.
“I’m his sister,” I said automatically. “This is his dad. Not my dad, but his.” I don’t know why I made the distinction, except I’d been making it clear to people for years that I had no kinship to Matthew Lang.
“You need to go to the hospital, too,” said the face. “You need to get that glass pulled out.”
“What glass?” I said. “Tolliver got shot.”
“You have glass in your face,” the man said. I could see now that he was a man, that he was an older man in his fifties. I could see that he had brown eyes and deep creases radiating from their corners, and a big mouth and crooked teeth. “You gotta get that pulled out and cleaned.”
I needed to start wearing safety goggles if I was going to keep on getting glass in my face.
Then I was at the hospital, sitting in a cubicle, and someone had taken my wallet from my purse to get the insurance information. About a hundred people were asking me questions, but I couldn’t talk. I was waiting for someone to come to tell me how Tolliver was doing, and there was no point in talking until I knew what had happened to him. The doctor who was removing the glass seemed a little scared of me. She tried to keep talking, maybe thinking I’d relax if her voice kept going.
“You need to look down while I get this piece out,” she said finally, and when I looked down I could feel the tension go out of her body. I must have been staring. I was wishing that I could let go of my body and float down the hall to see what was happening to my brother. If I promised to give him up if he lived, would that help? The bargains you make when you are frightened are probably a true measure of your character. Or maybe just an accurate measure of your primitive nature, what you would be like if you’d never been to a mall or gotten a paycheck or relied on someone else to provide your food.
A woman in a pink smock asked me if there was anyone else she could call for me, anyone who would like to stay with me, and I knew I would start screaming if I saw Iona or Hank, so I said no.
They let his dad go in with him. Not me! I had to get the glass out! I was so angry I thought the top of my head was going to come off when my brain exploded. But I didn’t scream. I kept it inside me. When the doctor and the nurse had finished with me, and they’d given me a couple of pills because they thought I’d have an uncomfortable time of it for a while, I nodded to them and went in search of Tolliver. I found Matthew sitting in a waiting room, talking to a policeman.
He looked at me when I came in, and I could see the caution in his face.
“This is Tolliver’s stepsister. She was in the room with him, standing behind him,” Matthew said, as if he were the master of ceremonies introducing the lineup.
The policeman was a detective, I guess, since he was in slacks and a shirt and a Windbreaker. He was very tall, and he looked to me like a former football star, which in fact turned out to be the case. Parker Powers had been a famous high school football player from Longview, Texas, who’d gotten injured two years into his contract with