Charlaine Harris - Grave Secret

After I’d listened for a minute, I realized Lizzie wanted to talk to someone she didn’t have to brief, someone who had known Victoria; and I was the person who fit the bill.

“I guess I’m going to the firm of detectives my granddad’s company always uses,” she said. “I thought it would be helpful to talk to a woman out on her own, someone who wasn’t up on our business, not involved in the family saga. But I think I caused her death. If I’d gone to our usual firm, she’d still be alive.”

There was no rebuttal to offer on that. “How come you have a private detective firm on call?” I asked instead.

“Granddaddy started that when he became the head of a big enterprise. More than a rancher. He liked to know who he was hiring, at least for key positions.” Lizzie sounded surprised that I needed to ask.

“So why didn’t he get them to check out Mariah Parish?”

“Granddaddy had met her when she worked for the Peadens, and when he needed someone, and she was free, it seemed like a natural fit. I guess he felt like he knew her and didn’t need to have her investigated. After all, she wasn’t going to be writing checks on our account or anything.”

He wouldn’t have trusted her with his checkbook, but he would trust her to cook his food without poisoning him, and he would trust her to clean his house without stealing his possessions. Even suspicious rich people have their blind side. Given what we’d learned about Mariah from reading her file, I found that ironic.

I hadn’t known that Rich Joyce had actually met Mariah before she moved into his house. Drexell hadn’t mentioned that at our dinner with Victoria. Maybe Rich had seen a good way to sneak a mistress into his house under his kids’ eyes. Maybe his friend who’d first employed Mariah had told Rich he’d been bedding her. Nudge nudge, wink wink. Here’s a good woman who can cook, count your pills, and warm up your sheets, Rich. And she can stay right there in the house.

“And you didn’t even think about investigating her the way you would any other employee?”

“Well,” Lizzie said, clearly uncomfortable, “she and Granddaddy had everything worked out by the time we knew about it. He was sure in his right mind, so we didn’t say anything.”

All the Joyce grandchildren had been scared of the patriarch. “You didn’t have her checked out afterward?”

“Well, he would have known. That was when I should have hired an outside source. I gotta tell you the truth, at the time, I didn’t think too much about it. That was years ago. I was younger, and less confident, and of course, I expected Granddaddy to live forever.” Lizzie stopped short, probably realizing she’d been oversharing. “Well, I just wanted to tell you how sorry I am about your friend. And how’s your brother doing? This whole thing just keeps getting messier and messier.”

“Do you wish you’d never contacted me?”

A moment of silence. “Truthfully, yes, that’s what I wish,” she said. “Seems like a lot of people have died and they didn’t need to. What’s changed? What more do I know? Nothing. My grandfather saw a rattlesnake and died. We don’t know if anyone else was there for sure. He’s still dead. Mariah’s dead, and in my head she’s not resting in peace anymore, now that I know she died in childbirth. Where’s that baby? Is the baby an aunt or uncle of mine? I still don’t know. Maybe I’ll never know.”

“Someone’s sure trying to make sure you don’t,” I said. “Goodbye, Lizzie.” And I hung up.

Manfred stopped in, and I was glad to see him, but I wasn’t in a mood for talking. He asked me about the backpack.

“It’s my sister’s,” I said. “She left it the day she vanished.”

I turned away to answer Tolliver’s call. He’d woken up briefly and asked for a pain pill. He drifted back to sleep before he even took it.

When I came back in the living room, Manfred was withdrawing his hand from the backpack. He looked sad. “I’m sorry this happened to you, Harper.”

“Well, thanks for the kind thought, Manfred, but it happened to my sister. I was just caught up in the aftermath.”

“I’ll see you soon. Don’t worry if I don’t call for a couple of days. I’ve got a job to do.”

“Oh… okay, Manfred.” I hadn’t thought about worrying. He gave me a peck on the cheek when he left, and I was glad to shut the door behind him. I sat and thought about my sister.

It was a long night. I finally fell asleep after midnight.

TOLLIVER woke up the next morning feeling much better. He’d slept for twelve hours straight, and when he woke me up he let me know that he was full of energy. We had to be careful, but with me on top, sex was doable. Very doable. An absolute delight, in fact. And I thought the top of his head was going to fly off, he enjoyed it so much. He lay there panting afterward, as if he’d done the work, and I collapsed beside him, laughing in a breathless kind of way.

“Now I feel like myself,” he said. “Somehow it makes you feel even less like a man, when you’re bedridden and then you can’t even stand the physical part of having sex. Reduces you to a kid.”

“Let’s just get in the car and go,” I suggested. “Let’s go to the apartment. We could be in St. Louis in a day. You could ride that long, I bet.”

“What about staying here to visit more with the girls? What about finding out if my father was connected to the Joyces and Cameron?”

“Maybe you were right. Maybe we need to leave the girls to Iona and Hank. They’re stable, in every sense. We travel so much. We’ll never be a constant in their lives. And your dad? He’s going to hell anyway. If we drop all this, it’ll just take him a little longer. We could be free of him.”

Tolliver looked thoughtful. “Come here,” he said, and I put my head on his good shoulder. He didn’t wince, so that was all right. I stroked the part of his chest not covered with a bandage. Looking back on the time between my discovery that I loved him as a man and the time I found out he felt the same and we acted on it, I wondered how I had survived. We were incredibly lucky, and I knew there was a part of me that I found somewhat scary, the part that would do anything to prevent what we had from being jeopardized.

“You know what we ought to do,” he said.

“What?”

“We ought to take a day trip.”

“Oh, where to?”

“To Texarkana.”

I froze. “Are you serious?” I said, raising my head to look him in the eyes.

“Yeah, I am. It’s time we went back to just look around and let go.”

“Let go.”

“Yeah. We’ve got to realize that we’re not going to find Cameron.”

“I’ve got some things to tell you about that.”

“Oh?” His voice had an apprehensive edge. If I hadn’t liked what he’d said, he was going to dislike what I had to say even more.

“I made some calls yesterday,” I said. “And I got some calls. While you were asleep. I’ve got to tell you about them.”

An hour later, Tolliver was saying, “That woman was wrong? All the time they were looking for the wrong thing? She was just mixed up ?”

“She never said she saw Cameron clearly, only that the backpack was there after she saw a blond girl get into a blue truck,” I said. “Who knows? So we’re back to square one. In fact…” I thought for a second. “In fact, that throws the whole timeline off. She said Cameron had been picked up thirty minutes before I talked to her, and I set out to look for Cameron almost exactly at five o’clock. But now we can be pretty sure Cameron was picked up by someone even earlier.”