Charlaine Harris - Grave Secret

“She believed him.”

Tolliver made a derisive sound, practically a snort. “Let’s see if we can talk to Pete Gresham,” he said, and I headed for the police department. There are two police departments in one building on State Line Avenue, the Texas and the Arkansas police. There are two different police chiefs. I don’t know how it all works, or who pays for what.

We found Pete Gresham working at his desk. We’d been given permission to go up to his office, and he was poring over a file on his desk, a file he shut when he saw us standing before him.

“You two! Good to see you! I’m sorry the tape didn’t pan out,” he said, standing and leaning over the desk to shake Tolliver’s good hand. “I hear you had a little trouble in Big D.”

“Well, the outskirts of Big D,” I said. “We were in the neighborhood, and we thought we’d stop by to ask what you knew about the anonymous caller who tipped you off about the woman who looked like Cameron.”

“Male, call came in from a pay phone.” Pete Gresham, a big man who was a little bigger every time I saw him, shrugged. He still didn’t wear glasses, but as Rudy Flemmons had told us, there wasn’t a hair on Gresham’s head. “Not much to tell.”

“Could we hear it?” Tolliver asked. I turned to look at him. That had come out of nowhere.

“Well, I’ll have to track the recording down,” Pete said. He got up and headed toward the elevator, and I said, “What made you think of that?”

“We might as well,” Tolliver said.

But Pete was back too quickly. I know my bureaucracies, and he couldn’t have found the recording that quickly. “Sorry, you two,” he said. “The guy who stores all that stuff is off today. He’ll be in tomorrow. Can I call you and play it over the phone to you?”

“Sure, that’d be fine,” I said. I gave him my cell phone number.

“You making a good living finding corpses?” he asked.

“Yeah, we do okay,” Tolliver said.

“Hear you stopped a bullet,” Pete said. “Whose toes did you step on?”

“Hard to say,” Tolliver said, and he smiled. “Matthew’s out of jail, by the way.”

The detective looked a lot more serious. “I forgot he was due to get out. He turn up in Dallas?”

I nodded.

“Don’t let him get you down,” Pete said. “He’s one of the bad ones. I’ve known guys like him my whole working life, and as a rule, they don’t change none.”

“I agree,” I said. “And we’re doing our best to keep away from him.”

“How’s those little sisters?” We were walking to the elevator now, and Pete was escorting us.

“They’re good. Mariella just turned twelve and Gracie is going on nine.” Maybe she was younger. In fact, I was sure she was younger. It was a strange moment to think it, but I realized that Gracie’s being classified as lagging behind in her age group might be an incorrect diagnosis. The lag in her development that we’d attributed to her low birth weight and her persistent bad health might actually have been due to her real birth date being three or four months later than we’d believed.

“I can’t imagine them that old.” Pete shook his head at the passage of time, and I pulled myself back into the here and now to say, “By the way, I talked to Ida the other day.”

“Ida? The woman who saw the blue truck? What did Ida have to say?”

When I told him about Ida’s conversation with the Meals on Wheels woman, he cursed a blue streak. Then he apologized. “Idiots,” he said. “Now I gotta call the woman and then I’ll have to go see Ida again. I swear someday I’m not going to get out of that house. She’ll say she don’t want any visitors, and once I get there, she’ll talk and talk until I think I’m going deaf.”

I tried to smile, but I couldn’t squeeze one out. Tolliver just nodded.

“I see what that does to the timeline, Harper. I promise you, any time I get a lead I chase it down. I want to know what happened to your sister about as much as you do. And I’m sorry your asshole of a father ever got out of jail.”

“I am, too,” I said, not sure if I could speak for Tolliver or not. “But we don’t think he took Cameron.”

“I don’t either,” Pete said, which surprised me quite a bit. “I know what you can do, Harper, and I remember seeing you and Tolliver riding around after you graduated from high school. I know you were looking for her. If you didn’t find her, I don’t think she’s here to be found. If Matthew did it, he’d have had to bury her close, real close, and he didn’t have much time. You would’ve found her.”

I nodded. “We tried,” I said. “Unless someone took her from the parking lot at the high school and just dumped her bag along the route back to the trailer, which would widen the search area…”

“We did think of that,” Pete said mildly.

I flushed. “I’m not…”

“It’s okay. You want to find your sister. I do, too.”

“Thanks, Pete,” Tolliver said and shook his hand again.

“You get better now, you hear,” Pete said and turned to walk back to his cubicle.

“We’ve wasted a lot of time here today,” I said. I was depressed and wondering what to do next.

“I don’t know about that,” Tolliver said. “We’ve learned a little. You want to drop by to say hello to the Clevelands?”

I thought about it. My foster parents were good people, and I respected them, but I wasn’t in the mood for catch-up conversation. “I guess not,” I said. “I guess we ought to head back to Garland.”

The cell phone rang. “Hello,” I said.

“Harper, this is Lizzie.”

She sounded shaky. Though our acquaintance was limited, I’d never heard Lizzie sound less than positive and forceful.

“What’s wrong, Lizzie?”

“Oh, gosh, nothing! We were wondering where you were… if you could stop by the ranch for a minute.”

Stop by the ranch? When for all they knew, we were two hours’ drive away in Garland?

“We’re in Texarkana right now,” I said, thinking furiously but not coming up with anything. “I guess we could come by. What do you need?”

“I just wanted to touch base with you. About poor Victoria, and a couple of other things.”

I relayed all this to Tolliver in fewer words. He looked as taken aback as I felt. “Do you feel up to this? I can tell her no,” I said.

“We might as well stop by. We’re in the area, and they know a lot of people.” The Joyces knew a lot of people with disposable income who might want to have some graves read.

I found myself wondering if we’d see Chip again. There was definitely something about the ranch manager/boyfriend that interested me, and it wasn’t a physical attraction. At least not in the “I want to jump your bones” sense. But bones had something to do with it…

We didn’t talk much as we drove out of Texarkana. I was puzzled and worried by Lizzie’s odd request, and Tolliver was thinking about something that worried him, too. I could tell by the way he sat and the tense muscles of his face. We took the exit off the interstate without any further discussion.

We drove by Pioneer Rest Cemetery and turned off onto the long driveway that ran between wide rolling fields. We could see miles in every direction, even with evening drawing in. Finally, we reached the gate to RJ Ranch, and Tolliver insisted on jumping out to open and then close the gate after I drove through.

I noticed that I couldn’t see anyone, anywhere. On our previous visit, we’d been able to see people moving around in the distance.

We pulled up in the large paved parking area in front of the big house. We got out of our car and looked around. Everything seemed still. It was a warm day; in fact, it felt like it was spring. But the hush seemed abnormal. I shook my head doubtfully, but after a shrug, Tolliver led the way up the brick-paved path.