Taylor is sitting up in bed, back against the headboard. There’s just enough light from the moon coming through her window that I can clearly see her face.
“Tay,” I say from the doorway. “I’m here.”
She turns just slightly.
“I know,” she says. “I can see you.”
She smiles now.
“Nice T-shirt,” she says.
EIGHTY-ONE
IT’S THE FIRST week of school in Cross Rivers, and I’m out for a walk a little past three in the afternoon after spending the morning in the fields with Charlie Hall, helping him hardly at all, when I see the school bus Taylor drives coming up the road.
I smile and wave and then put my thumb out.
She pulls over and opens the bus door for me, and I walk up the steps.
“You’re frankly a little old for my route,” she says.
It’s a week now since her vision returned, and she’s happily back to work.
“But you know what they’ve always said about me,” I tell her. “Young once, but immature forever.”
“Take a seat, big boy,” she says. “Got one last stop for the McGonagle sisters.”
I turn to see two girls, most definitely sisters, around eleven or twelve I’m guessing, sitting next to each other about halfway back.
It’s only a couple of miles to their house, but somehow between here and there Taylor manages to tell me what the girls’ favorite subjects are in school, what sports they play, who their homeroomteachers are at Cross Rivers Middle School, which one of them likes Taylor Swift, and even which boys in their classes they think are cute.
“You girls know who my friend is?” Taylor calls back to them.
The older sister, Mary Beth, raises a hand.
“He’s famous, is who.”
“Anything else?” Tay asks.
Her sister, Maura, says, “He’s Mr. 109.”
I smile at them. “Well, girls,” I say, “I am now giving you both A-pluses. You don’t even have to take the final.”
They giggle.
“They think I’m funny,” I say to Tay.
“So did I when I was their age.”
A half hour later, Tay and I are sitting at Scobee’s having coffee, when she asks the question she’s been waiting to ask.
“Any new leads on Burt’s murder?”
I tell her that sadly there are not, even though Helene Mayes and her people continue to grind away, and Vince and I continue to ask around, trying to find anybody who might have recognized the driver of the Ford Fairlane that day before it got to McDonald’s.
Then she wants to know more about the shooting death of Carlton Fish, and the evidence from the missing girls found at his home.
“At least they know who took them,” Tay says.
