Charlaine Harris - Grave Secret

“And when we met the Joyces, I thought the two men looked familiar. Just a little.”

“Chip and Drex?”

I nodded. “I know that doesn’t seem as conclusive, because I can’t place them firmly. But most people I’m that fuzzy on, it’s because they came to the trailer, and I hate to remember that time. Plus, I tried not to look, because I knew it was dangerous to know who was buying and selling drugs.”

“Yes,” Tolliver said heavily. “It was dangerous, every day, to be living there.”

“So all this is why I think your dad is involved. And I’m wondering if he got in touch with Mark so Mark’s intervention would lead to your dad’s getting to see you.”

Tolliver mulled that over. “Could be,” he said. “I would never answer his letters or take his phone calls, so he might have used Mark. He’d know I’d never lose touch with my brother.” There was a little pain in Tolliver’s face; even now, he’d had a tiny flicker of hope that his dad was trying to do the right thing, that Matthew had really and truly reformed.

“But what happened ?” I asked, frustrated. “Why was he involved with the Joyce family? And how did Cameron get involved in that?”

“Cameron? Why do you think he would hurt Cameron? Not my dad.” Tolliver shook his head. “He had an alibi, remember. At the time the old woman saw Cameron getting in the truck, Dad was playing pool with that asshole and his girlfriend.”

“I remember that guy,” I said. “Come on, let’s get you into the bed. We can talk about it tomorrow.”

TOLLIVER was stunned and exhausted. I had to help him climb into the bed. I called room service for some soup and salads for both of us after I got him settled. I sat on the side of the bed while we waited for the food to come.

“I can believe a lot of bad stuff about Matthew,” he said, “but I don’t believe he hurt Cameron.”

“It had never occurred to me, either,” I said. “Honestly, I don’t want to believe it. But if he did have a connection to her disappearance and he’s been letting us wonder all these years, I want him to die.” With Tolliver, I wasn’t going to worry about how saying such a thing would make him think of me. He knew me. Now he would know me a little better.

Tolliver understood. “He’d deserve to die, if he hurt Cameron,” he said. “But there’s not one single thing to tie him to Cameron’s disappearance, and he had no motive at all. For that matter, we don’t have any proof that he’s involved in the mess with the Joyce family. We need something more than the sight of a man’s back as he walks out of a public building.”

“I understand,” I said-and I really did, even if I hated his logic. “So we have to figure out a way. We can’t go on living our lives unless we get rid of this, one way or another.”

“Yes,” said Tolliver, and then he closed his eyes. Amazingly, he fell asleep.

I ate supper by myself, though I saved his in case he woke up to eat it. After I was through with my salad, I did something I hadn’t done in at least a year. I went out to our car, opened the trunk, and got my sister’s backpack out of it. Back inside our room, I sat on the couch and unzipped the backpack. We’d thought it was so cute when Cameron picked it out. It was pink with black polka dots. Cameron had gotten a black jacket and black boots, and she’d looked wonderful. No one had to know that everything had come from the secondhand shop.

The police had finally let us have the backpack, after six years. It had been fingerprinted, turned inside out, examined microscopically… for all I knew, they’d x-rayed it.

Cameron would be very nearly twenty-six now. She’d been gone for almost eight years.

It was late spring when she’d been taken. She’d been decorating the school gym for the prom. She’d had a date with-oh, God, I couldn’t remember. Todd? Yes, Todd Battista. I couldn’t remember if I’d had a date or not. Probably not, because following the lightning strike, my popularity had plummeted. My new ability had thrown me completely out of whack, and it had taken me almost a year to adjust to the buzz of dead people. And then I’d had to learn how to conceal my strange ability. During that awful time, I’d earned a well-deserved reputation for being very strange.

She’d been so late that day. And that wasn’t like Cameron. I remembered making my mother rouse enough to watch the girls, whom I’d collected from day care. Though it wasn’t smart to leave them alone with her, I couldn’t take them with me. I hurried down the road, past all the other trailers, following the route we always took coming home.

Tolliver and Mark had been at their respective jobs, and Matthew, as it turned out, had been playing pool in the home of one of his wonderful friends, a junkie named Renaldo Simpkins. The police would never have believed Renaldo, but his girlfriend, Tammy, had been there, too, and she said she’d walked in and out of the room at least five times during the pool game. She was sure that Matthew had never left between around four and six thirty. (The six thirty was firm, because that was when she’d gotten a phone call from a neighbor, telling her that there were police cars all around the Lang trailer, and Matthew better get his ass home.)

Around five thirty, I’d found my sister’s backpack-the one now sitting before me on a hotel coffee table-by the side of the street. It was a residential street lined with very small houses. About half of them were abandoned. But there was a woman living in the house across the street from the spot where I’d found Cameron’s backpack. Her name was Ida Beaumont.

I’d never talked to Ida Beaumont before, and despite all the times I’d walked past her house, I don’t think I’d ever seen her out in her yard. She was afraid of all the teenagers in the neighborhood, and maybe she had good reason. This was a part of town where even police looked over their shoulders. But I met Ida Beaumont that day. I’d walked across the street and knocked on her door.

“Hi, I’m sorry to bother you, but my sister hasn’t come home from school and her backpack is there, under that tree.” I pointed over to the bright splotch of color. Ida Beaumont peered at it, her eyes following my finger.

“Yes,” she said cautiously. She was in her early sixties, and the newspaper articles told me later that she was living on some kind of disability check and what remained of her dead husband’s pension. I could hear her television going. She was watching a talk show. “Who’s your sister?” she asked. “Is she that pretty blond girl? I see you two walking home all the time.”

“Yes ma’am. That’s her. I’m looking for her. Did you see anything happen over there this afternoon? She would have been coming home sometime within the past hour, I think.”

“I stay at the back of the house, mostly.” Ida seemed to put emphasis on that, because she didn’t want to be seen as a busy-body. “But I seen a blue pickup, an old Dodge, about half an hour ago. The man in it was talking to a girl. I couldn’t really see her, she was on the other side of the pickup. But she got in, and they took off.”

“Oh.” I tried to make sense of this, tried to remember if anyone we knew had an old blue pickup. But no one popped up in my memory. “Thanks. That was about half an hour ago?”

“Yes,” she said, very positively. “Yes, that was when it was.”

“She didn’t look like she was… like he was making her do it?”

“I couldn’t say about that. They talked, she got in, they left.”