Charlaine Harris - Grave Surprise

"Exactly," Diane said, and her hand rubbed her stomach in a circular motion. I yanked my gaze away.

"How long have the police suspected you?" Tolliver asked. When we'd been there, Tabitha had been missing for several weeks, and the police hadn't been around so much any more. But we'd been impressed at how cordial the relationship that had formed between Detective Haines, who'd been the Last Man Standing on the case, and the Morgensterns had seemed. I should have realized that the other cops might have developed other suspicions. Haines had actually gotten to know the Morgensterns a lot better than her associates.

"From the get-go," Joel said, his voice resigned. "After nosing around Vic for a while, they got the idea that Diane was guilty."

I could almost see why they'd suspect Joel, even Victor. But Diane?

"How could that be?" I said incautiously, and she flushed. "I'm sorry," I said instantly. "I'm not trying to dredge up bad memories. I was sure, always, that you and Joel were telling the truth."

"Tabitha and I had a fight that morning," Diane said. Big fat tears ran down her cheeks. "I was mad because we'd just given her a cell phone for her birthday, and she'd already exceeded her minutes. I took her cell away from her, and then I told her to go outside to water the plants around the front door, just to get her out of the house because I was so angry. She was furious, too. Spring break, and no way to communicate with her three hundred best friends. She was just into that 'Mo-THER!' stage, the eye-rolling thing." Diane wiped her face with Joel's handkerchief. "I didn't think we'd get to that until she was fifteen, and here she was, eleven years old, giving me the whole routine." She smiled in a watery sort of way. "I hated to tell the police about this really trivial conversation, but one of my neighbors overheard us arguing when she came over to ask if we were through with our paper. So then I had to relate the whole thing to the police, and they turned hostile so quickly, as if I'd been withholding important evidence from them!"

Of course, to the police, this was important evidence. The fact that Diane couldn't see that only proved what I'd suspected about her when I'd met her: Diane Morgenstern was no rocket scientist. I was willing to bet that she never read crime fiction, either. If she had, she'd have known that any such revelation would make the police suspicious.

All the incident really proved was that Diane was out of touch with popular culture, in the reading-and-television-watching category.

"When did you move to Memphis?" Tolliver asked.

"About a year ago," Joel said. "We couldn't wait there, in that house, any longer." He sat up a little straighter, and as if he were reciting a credo, he said, "We had to accept the fact that our daughter was gone, and we had to leave that house ourselves. It wouldn't be fair to the new family we're starting, to have the baby there. I actually grew up in Memphis, so it felt like coming home, to me. My parents are here. And Felicia was here, along with her parents, my first in-laws. She and Victor are very close, and we figured the move would be a good thing for him. He's had a very tough time."

So everyone was happy here, except possibly Diane. It hadn't been coming home for her. It had been a move to a strange city that held many memories for her husband, memories of his first wife.

"We'd had a lot of therapy, the whole family," Diane said softly.

"We all went, Diane and I and Victor," Joel said. "Even Felicia drove over to Nashville from Memphis to go to some of the sessions."

I'd been to therapy, too.

The high school guidance counselor had been horrified when Cameron's disappearance had exposed the conditions under which we lived. "Why didn't you come to me?" she'd asked, more than once. And one time she'd shaken her head and said, "I should have noticed." I didn't blame her for not noticing; after all, we'd gone to great efforts to conceal our home life, so we could stay together. Maybe a part of me had hoped that our substandard parents would be taken away and we would be given good parents, instead; but that hadn't happened.

"When is the new baby due?" Art asked in the cheerful voice parents used when they weren't going to be having any more babies themselves.

"In five weeks," Diane said, an involuntary smile curving her lips even under the circumstances. "A healthy boy, the doctor says."

"That's great," Tolliver and I said, more or less in unison. I eyed Felicia Hart, who'd risen to stand behind the love seat. Felicia was looking less than ecstatic, perhaps even impatient. Maybe she thought the new baby would mean even more attention was diverted from Victor. It was also possible the childless Felicia was even more creeped out by pregnant women than I was.

"Today, we have to deal with Tabitha," Diane said, to give us an easement back into the grim reality of the body in the cemetery. "How… you know how she died?"

"She was suffocated," I said, not knowing any other way to say it. Severely deprived of air? Terminally oxygenless? I wasn't trying to tell myself jokes, but there are only so many ways to talk about the COD of any individual, even a child, especially to the mother.

The couple did their best to take the news on the chin, but Diane couldn't suppress a moan of horror. Felicia looked away, her face a hard mask concealing deep emotion.

There were many worse ways to die, but that would hardly be a consolation. Suffocation was bad enough. "It would be over in seconds," I said, as gently as I could. "She would be unconscious, after a tiny bit." This was an exaggeration, but I thought Diane's condition called for as much cushioning as possible. I was terrified that she would go into labor right in front of us.

Art had the strangest expression as he looked at me. It was like he'd never seen me before; like the reality of me, of what I did, had just hit him in the portly belly he carried in front of him like an announcement of his own importance.

"We should call Vic," Joel said, in his warm voice. "Excuse me for a moment." He brushed at his eyes and groped in his pocket for his cell phone. Vic, Joel's son by his first marriage, had been a sullen fifteen-year-old at the time of Tabitha's abduction. I'd glimpsed him trying hard to be tough and contained in the face of an overwhelming situation.

Diane, who had seemed very fond of the boy and in fact had largely raised him—she'd married Joel when Victor was very young—said, "If he needs to talk to me, I'm okay," as Joel rose to walk a few feet away, his back to the room, to punch in the number.

"How's Victor done here in Memphis?" I asked Felicia, just to be saying something. Victor and I had shared a strange moment when I'd been trying to find his half sister. The boy had come into the living room of the Morgenstern home and begun to curse a blue streak, evidently thinking he was by himself. When I'd moved, he'd clutched me, crying on my shoulder, having to bend a little to do so. People weren't given to touching me, and I'd been startled. But I knew grief, and I knew release, and I'd held him until he was through. When he'd done crying and my blouse was a blotched mess, Victor had drawn back, appalled at his breakdown. Anything I said would have been wrong, so I'd just given him a nod. He'd nodded back, and fled.

Felicia was giving a surprised look. I supposed she was astonished that I remembered Victor at all. "He's done… middling," she said. "Diane and Joel have sent him to a private school. I help them out a little. He's such a fragile kid, hanging in the balance. At that age, they can go either way, you feel, at any moment. And with this new baby coming…" Her voice trailed off, as if she couldn't imagine how to finish the sentence without criticizing Joel and Diane for their ill-timed fertility.