If you have to be in South Carolina, it's beautiful in the late spring and the early summer. Unfortunately, we were nearly at the end of an especially nasty January. The ground was cold and gray and slushy from the melt of the previous snow, and there was more predicted in a few days. I was driving very carefully because traffic was heavy and the road was not clear. We'd come up from mild and sunny Charleston. A couple there had decided their house was uninhabitable due to ghost activity, and they'd called me in to find out if there were any bodies in the walls or flooring.
The answer was clear: no. But there were bodies in the narrow back yard. There were three of them, all babies. I didn't know what that meant. They'd died so soon after birth that they hadn't had much consciousness for me to tap into, so I hadn't been able to name the cause of death, which is usually quite clear. But the Charleston homeowners had been thrilled with the results, especially after an archaeologist dug up the meager remains of the tiny bodies. They would dine out on the dead babies for the next decade. They'd handed me a check without hesitation.
That's not always the case.
Tolliver said, "Where you want to stop to eat?"
I glanced over. He wasn't fully awake. He reached over to pat my shoulder. "You tired?" he asked.
"I'm okay. We're about thirty miles outside Spartanburg. Too far?"
"Sounds good. Cracker Barrel?"
"You must want some vegetables."
"Yeah. You know what I look forward to, if we really do buy that house we talk about? Cooking for ourselves."
"We do okay when we're at home," I agreed. We had bought a few cookbooks at secondhand bookstores. We picked very simple recipes.
Our apartment in St. Louis was hanging in the balance right now.