Charlaine Harris - Grave Secret

His eyes were mean beyond belief when he said this.

“You’re going to die?” said Lizzie. “Well, good. I wish Drex had cancer, too. I want you both to die.” She seemed to have shaken off her fear, and I wished I could do the same. I looked at Tolliver, and I thought we would not make it through this. Chip would take us all out, because we were going to live and he wasn’t.

With one incredibly fast motion, Lizzie grabbed a rifle off the wall, the one right by one of the doors. It was pointed at Chip in a split second. “Go on and shoot yourself, since you’re going to die anyway!” She meant it, too, and she was ready with that rifle. “Save me the trouble!”

“I’m not going by myself,” said her lover, and he shot Drexell Joyce in the chest.

Katie shrieked and went over backward in her chair, covered with the mist of her brother’s blood, and as we all looked at the falling dead man, the screaming woman, Chip put the gun barrel in his mouth and fired at the same moment Lizzie did.

I was so tired after the sheriff’s department finished with us that it was hard to focus when I got behind the wheel to drive back to Dallas. In fact, we never did make it to Garland. When I realized there was no real reason why we should, I pulled off at the next exit and got a room. We were just about out in the middle of nowhere, except it was nowhere with an interstate and a motel. It wasn’t a very good motel, but we could be pretty sure that no one was going to shoot us through the window.

I was still confused about several things, but both the shooters were dead.

Tolliver took his medicine, and we crawled into the bed. The sheets felt cold and almost damp, and I got back out of bed to turn the heater up. It made the curtains billow in an unpleasant way. I’ve run into that before, and I keep a big clip in my overnight pack for just such a situation. It came in handy tonight. As I got between the sheets, I realized that Tolliver was already asleep.

When I woke, the sun was up outside. Tolliver was in the bathroom, trying to take a sponge bath, and he was grumbling to himself about it.

“What are you talking about in there?” I asked, sitting and swinging my legs out from under the covers.

“I want to shower,” he said. “I want to shower more than anything.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, and I was. “But we can’t get the shoulder wet for a few more days.”

“Tonight we’ll try taping a garbage bag or a grocery sack over it,” he said. “If we tape it good, I can shower and be out before the tape starts to give.”

“We’ll try,” I said. “What should we do today?”

He didn’t answer.

“Tolliver?”

Silence.

I got up and went into the bathroom. “Hey, you, what’s with the silent treatment?”

“Today,” he said, “we have to go talk to my dad.”

“We have to,” I said, letting only a hint of a question seep into the words.

“We have to,” he said, absolutely positive.

“And then?”

“We’re going to ride off into the sunset,” he said. “We’re going to go back to St. Louis and be by ourselves for a while.”

“Oh, that sounds good. I wish we could skip the part about your dad and go right into the ‘be by ourselves.’”

“I thought you’d be straining to get at him.” He’d started working on his stubble, and he paused, one cheek still gleaming with shaving gel.

I’d thought so, too. “There’s a lot I almost don’t want to know,” I said. “I never imagined I’d feel like this. I’ve waited so long.”

He put his good arm around me and held me close. “I thought about leaving Texas today,” he said. “I thought about it. But we can’t.”

“No,” I said.

I called Dr. Spradling’s nurse that morning and told her, as I’d been instructed, that Tolliver wasn’t running a temperature, wasn’t bleeding, and his wound didn’t look red. She reminded me to make sure he took his medicine, and that was that. Despite the shocks of the previous day, Tolliver looked better than he had since the night he was shot, and I was sure he was going to be fine.

The drive into Dallas was easy, with only a few traffic snarls. We had to find Mark’s house, which we’d visited only once before. Mark was a solitary man, and I wondered how he and Matthew were getting along together.

To my surprise, Mark’s car was parked in the little driveway. His home was smaller than Iona ’s, which made it mighty small indeed. I automatically noted the buzz around the neighborhood, and it was faint. No dead people here.

There was a narrow raised strip of concrete running from the driveway to the front door. There were cobwebs on the lighting fixtures on either side of the door, and the landscaping was nonexistent. It looked like a house that the owner didn’t care about.

Mark answered the door. “Hey, what you two doing over here in my neck of the woods?” he said. “You come to see Dad?”

“Yes, we have,” Tolliver said. “He’s here?”

“Yeah. Dad,” Mark called. “Tolliver and Harper are here.” He moved back so we could step inside. He was wearing sweatpants and an old T-shirt. Clearly, he wasn’t going in to work today. He caught me looking. “Sorry,” he said, “it’s my day off. I didn’t dress for company.”

“We didn’t give you any warning,” I said. The living room was almost as basic as Renaldo’s: a big leather couch and matching chair, a big-screen TV, and a coffee table. No lamps for reading. No books. One picture, a framed one of the five of us kids, taken at the trailer. I had forgotten there was one of all of us.

“Who took that?” I asked, surprised.

“Some friend of your mom’s,” Mark said. “Dad packed it away with the other stuff when he went to jail. He just got it out when he got the stuff out of storage.”

I stood looking at the picture, tears in my eyes. Tolliver and Mark were standing side by side. Mark wasn’t smiling. Tolliver’s lips were turned up slightly, but his eyes were grim. Cameron was by Mark, and she had her arm around him, and she was holding Mariella’s hand. Mariella was smiling; like most very little kids, she’d loved to have her picture made. I was holding Gracie, and she was so little! Which Gracie was it? Gracie after the hospital.

“This was taken not long before,” I said.

“Not long before what?”

“You know,” I said, astonished. “Not long before Cameron was gone.”

He shrugged, as if I might have meant something else.

We were still standing when Matthew came in. He was wearing jeans and a flannel shirt. “I’ve got to get to work in an hour, but it’s great to see you,” he said to Tolliver, then turned his face so his smile could include me.

Thanks, but no.

“We went to see the Joyces yesterday,” I said. “Chip and Drex were talking about you.”

I wasn’t imagining the alarm that flashed across Matthew’s face then. “Oh, what did they have to say? That’s that rich family, right? On the ranch?”

“You know who they are,” Tolliver said. “You know they came by the trailer.”

Mark looked from his brother to his father. “Those rich guys?” he said. “They’re who you and Harper went to work for last week?”

“We’ve had conversations with quite a few people recently,” I said. “Including Ida, remember her?”

“The old woman who saw your sister getting into a blue truck,” Matthew said.

“Except she didn’t,” I said. “Turns out it wasn’t Cameron.”

The surprise on their faces seemed more or less genuine. That is, they were surprised about something .