Grave Secret by Charlaine Harris

to start talking about Mark’s perfidy in renewing contact with their dad. Tolliver booted up the laptop and went to a fan website that tracks my activities; he monitors it regularly because he’s worried that I might acquire a crazy stalker. I never look at it, because there are posts from guys who want to do things with me and to me; and that’s scary, not to say repellent. Now, I was worried that Matthew might be reading it at the same moment Tolliver was; he’d be looking for clues on how to find his son.
    A nagging pain interrupted my worry session.
    I rummaged through my medicine bag to unearth some Icy Hot to rub into my right leg. That’s where I feel the long-term effects of getting struck by lightning most of all. I pulled off my shoes and jeans and sat on the bed, stretching out the aching muscles and joints. My right thigh is covered with a tracery of red lines—broken capillaries or something. It’s been like that since I got hit, when I was fifteen. It’s not pretty.
    I worked the cream into my skin for a while in silence. I rubbed hard, trying to get the muscles to give up the discomfort. After a few minutes of massage, I felt some relief. I lay back on the pillows, telling each muscle group to relax in turn. I closed my eyes. “I’d rather be out in the snow finding a corpse than talking to Iona and Hank, just in general,” I said. “And sometimes talking to Mark is just as hard.”
    “Last night at Iona’s . . .” Tolliver said, then paused. When he resumed, he sounded cautious. “Hank pulled me aside while you were in the bathroom and asked me if I’d gotten you knocked up.”
    “He did not. ”
    “Oh, yeah. He did. He was serious, too. He was like, ‘You gotta marry her if you got her pregnant, boy. If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime.’ ”
    “Great perspective on marriage and fatherhood.”
    Tolliver laughed. “Well, this is the guy who calls Iona his ‘ball and chain.’ ”
    “Married, not married, I don’t care,” I said, before I realized this was a less than tactful way to put it. “I do care,” I said hastily. “I mean, I love you and being with you is what I want. I don’t care about the marriage part of it. Shit, that wasn’t right either.”
    “We’ll do what’s right when the time comes,” Tolliver said, in a voice heavy with elaborate unconcern.
    Apparently he did want to get married. Why couldn’t he just say so? I put my hands over my face, which felt strange because they were tingling from the Icy Hot.
    Of course I would marry him, especially if it was a make-or-break issue of our relationship. I would do almost anything to get him to stay.
    That wasn’t a romantic realization. I lay there thinking, listening to Tolliver’s fingers touch the keyboard. I thought, If anything happens to him, I might as well die. I wondered if that said a lot for Tolliver—or not much for me.
    There was a knock at the door of our room. We looked at each other, puzzled. Tolliver shook his head; he wasn’t expecting anyone, either.
    He got up and pulled the curtain back a little. He let it drop back into position. “It’s Lizzie Joyce,” he said. “With her sister. Kate, right?”
    “Right.” I was as startled as he was. “Well,” I said. “What the hell?” We gave each other little shrugs.
    Tolliver, having decided they weren’t armed and dangerous, let the Joyce sisters inside. I pulled my jeans back on and rose to greet them.
    You’d think they’d never seen a middle-of-the-road motel before. Kate and Lizzie examined the room with nearly identical slow scans. The sisters looked a lot alike. Katie was a little shorter than Lizzie, and maybe two years younger. But she’d colored her hair the same blond as Lizzie’s, and her brown eyes were narrow like Lizzie’s, and her lean build was the same, too. They were both wearing jeans, boots, and jackets. Lizzie had slicked her hair back into a ponytail at the nape of her neck, while Katie’s was