Cameron's backpack, left by the side of the road the day she'd vanished on her way home from school, was still in our trunk. The police had returned it to us after a few years. We took it with us everywhere.

I took a sip of water from my green hospital cup. There wasn't any point in thinking about my sister. I'd resigned myself long since to the fact that she was dead and gone. Someday I'd find her.

Every now and then, I'd glimpse some short girl with long blond hair, some girl with a graceful walk and a straight little nose, and I'd almost call out to her. Of course, if Cameron were alive, she wouldn't be a girl any longer. She'd been gone now—let's see, she'd been taken in the spring of her senior year in high school, when she was eighteen—God, she'd be almost twenty-six. Eight years gone. It seemed impossible to believe.

"I called Mark," Tolliver said.

"Good. How was he?" Tolliver didn't call Mark as often as he ought to; I didn't know if it was a guy thing, or if there'd been some disagreement.

"He said to tell you to get well soon," Tolliver said. That didn't really answer my question.

"How's his job going?"

Mark had gotten promoted at work several times. He'd been a busboy, a waiter, a cook, and a manager at a family-style chain restaurant in Dallas. Now he'd been there at least five years. For someone who'd only managed three or four college semesters, he was doing well. He worked long hours.

"He's nearly thirty," Tolliver said. "He ought to be settling down."

I pressed my lips together so I wouldn't say anything. Tolliver was only a couple of years younger, plus a few months.

"Is he dating someone special?" I asked. I was pretty sure I knew the answer.

"If he is, he hasn't said anything." After a pause, Tolliver said, "Speaking of dating, I ran into Manfred at the motel."

I almost asked why that reminded him of dating, but I thought the better of it. "Yeah, he came by," I said. "He told me Xylda had had a vision or something and decided she better come here, too. He told me that Xylda is dying, and I guess he's indulging her as much as he can. He's sure a good grandson."

Tolliver looked at me skeptically. His eyebrows had risen so far that they looked like part of his hairline. "Right. And Xylda just happens to have a vision telling her that a woman he wants—he thinks you're hot, don't pretend you don't know that—needs her help. You don't think he had something to do with that?"

Actually, I felt a little shocked. "No," I said. "I think he came because Xylda said to."

Tolliver practically sneered. I felt a strong dislike for him, just for that moment. He shot to his feet and walked around the little hospital room.

"Probably he can't wait until his grandmother dies. Then he can stop carting her around, and be your agent instead."

"Tolliver!"

He stopped speaking. Finally.

"That's an awful thing to say," I said. We'd seen the flawed side of human nature over and over, no doubt about it. But I liked to think we weren't wholly cynical.

"You can't see it," he said, his voice quiet.

"You're seeing something that isn't there," I said. "I'm not an idiot. I know Manfred likes me. I also know he loves his grandmother, and he wouldn't have hauled her out into this cold weather with her failing, unless she told him he had to."

Tolliver kept his head down, his eyes to himself. I felt I was trembling on the edge of saying something that would push our little barrel over the waterfall, something I'd never be able to take back. And Tolliver was suffering under some burden of his own. I could read the secrets of the dead, but I couldn't tell what my brother was thinking at that moment. I wasn't completely sure I wanted to.

"This past Christmas, just us alone, that was a pretty good Christmas," he said.

And then the nurse came in to take my temperature and my blood pressure, and the second was gone forever. Tolliver straightened out my blanket, and I lay back on my pillows.

"Raining again," the nurse remarked, casting a glance out at the gray sky. "I don't think it'll ever stop."

Neither of us had anything to say about that.

The sheriff came by that afternoon. She was wearing heavy outdoor clothes and her boots were coated with mud. Not for the first time I reflected that there were worse places to be than this hospital. One of those places was digging through nearly freezing dirt for clues, breathing in the reek of bodies that were in different stages of decay, telling the bad news to families who'd been waiting to hear about their missing boys for weeks, months, years. Yes, indeed. A concussion and a broken arm in the Doraville hospital were far preferable to that.

The sheriff may have been thinking the same thing. She started off angry. "I'll thank you to keep your media-seeking friends away from here," she said, biting the words out as if they were sour lemons.

"I'm sorry?"

"Your psychic friend, whatever her name is."

"Xylda Bernardo," Tolliver said.

"Yes, she's been down at the station making a scene."

"What kind of scene?" I asked.

"Telling anyone who'd listen how she'd predicted you'd find these bodies, how she'd sent you up here, how she knew you were going to be hurt."

"None of that is true," Tolliver said.

"I didn't think it was. But she's clouding the issue. You know—you show up, of course we're all skeptical, we all think the worst. But then you came through for us somehow. You did find the boys, and we know you couldn't have had prior knowledge of their burial place. Or at least if you did we haven't figured out how."

I sighed, tried to make it unobtrusive.

"But then she showed up with that weird grandson of hers. She acts out, he just smiles."

There was nothing else he could do, of course.

"Plus, she looks like she's gonna drop dead any minute. At least you-all are adding to our hospital revenue," the sheriff added more cheerfully.

There was a cursory knock at the door and it drifted open to show a big man, his fist still raised.

"Hey, Sheriff," he said, sounding surprised.

"Barney, hey," she said.

"Am I interrupting?"

"No, come on in, I was just leaving," Sheriff Rockwell said. "Back out into the cold and wet." She stood and began pulling her gloves on. I wondered why she had come by. Complaining about Xylda just didn't seem like a meaningful reason. After all, what could we do about her? "Have you come by to throw Ms. Connelly out?"

"Ha-ha. Nope, this is my courtesy visit. I go around to every patient's room after they've been here a day, make sure things are going okay, listen to complaints—and every now and then maybe even a compliment." He gave us a big smile. "Barney Simpson, hospital administrator, so I'm at your service. You're Ms. Connelly, I take it." He shook my hand very gently, since I was the sick person. "And you're…?" He held out his hand to Tolliver.

"I'm her manager, Tolliver Lang."

I tried not to look as surprised as I felt. I'd never heard my brother introduce himself that way.

"I really shouldn't ask if you two are enjoying your stay in our lovely little town," Simpson said. He looked as sad as it was in his nature to look. He was a tall man, and thick-bodied, with thick brushy black hair and a big smile that seemed to be his natural expression. "Our whole community is grieving now, but what a relief and a blessing that these young men have been found."

There was another knock on the door, and yet another man entered. "Oh, I'm sorry!" he said. "I'll come back another time."

"No, Pastor, come on in, I just dropped by to see if these folks had any questions they wanted to ask about the hospital and the service it's given them, the usual thing," Barney Simpson said briskly.

I noticed we hadn't had a chance to do any of those usual things.