Grave Secret (34 page)

“So what happened?” I asked.

“She didn’t plan on getting pregnant, but when she did, she put off doing anything about it until it was too late. She wore loose clothes and overalls and such because she didn’t want the old man to know she was somebody else’s bedmate. And she was afraid he’d find out if she had an abortion. She was tough, but she wasn’t tough enough to do that. Chip went nuts when he found out. She was maybe eight months along by then. He came over to Texarkana to get some dope; he wanted to be numb for a while, not think about it. While he was at my place, Drex called on his cell to say that he was all alone in the house with Mariah, and something had gone wrong. Mariah had had the baby all by herself, but she wouldn’t stop bleeding. And by the time he’d cut the cord and wrapped up the baby—he’d helped deliver calves and foals—she was near dead. Chip bolted out and the next I heard from him was when he called me about taking the kid off his hands.”

“Chip didn’t want her at all.”

“No,” said Matthew. “He didn’t.”

“And you offered to help him out, maybe thinking that someday you might get some money out of the Joyce girls by saying that the baby was their grandfather’s.”

“I know it was pretty low,” Matthew said. His deep-set eyes looked shadowed. “I know that. But you know how I was then. It sounded like a good moneymaking scheme, one I could leave on the back burner, in case we ever needed it.”

“And your own baby was about to die because you hadn’t taken her to a doctor,” I said. “Or was she already dead when Chip called?”

“That’s where you got the different baby!” Mark said. I’d never seen so much emotion on his face. “Dad, why didn’t you tell me?”

Now it was Matthew’s turn to look confused. “You knew it wasn’t really Gracie?” he said to his son. “I never worried about you! You were hardly ever around. How’d you know?”

And all of a sudden, everything clicked into place.

“I know how,” I said. “Cameron told him. She didn’t know right away, any more than the rest of us did. It took her a while to figure it out. But when she did her senior biology project, she did it on eye color and genetics. You and my mom couldn’t have had a green-eyed child.”

Mark collapsed onto the couch. His legs simply gave out from under him. “Dad, she was going to call the police,” he said. “She was going to tell them you’d kidnapped a kid to take Gracie’s place, because Gracie had died.”

“It was you, Mark,” I said, feeling that my voice was coming from somewhere very far away. “It was you. You picked her up when she was on her way back from school. You told her—what did you tell her?”

“I told her that you’d had an accident,” he said. “I was on my motorbike that day, so I told her to leave the backpack by the road. She didn’t ask any questions. She got on. I went toward the hospital, but I pulled off at an empty gas station because I told her something was wrong with my bike. I told her to go around back to see if there was an air pump. I went after her.”

“How did you do it?” I said, very quietly.

He looked up at me with an expression I hope I never see again. He was ashamed, he was horrified, and he was pleased. “I choked her to death,” he said. “I have big hands, and she was so small. It didn’t take long. I had to leave her there, because I couldn’t get her back on the bike. I went later, with Dad’s truck. I wanted to leave her there, but I was afraid you’d find her, you freak.”

My head swam and I sat abruptly on the armchair. Tolliver hit Mark with everything he had, and Mark collapsed sideways, bleeding from the mouth. Matthew was standing exactly where he’d been, his mouth literally hanging open.

“I did it for you, Dad,” Mark mumbled. He spat out blood and a tooth. “Dad, I did it for you.”

“And then they arrested me anyway,” Matthew said, as if that was the important part of the story.

“Where is she, Mark?”

“You and your family,” he said. “You’ve been nothing but trouble. First the baby, then Cameron going to call the police on Dad, and now you getting Tolliver to marry you.”

“Where is my sister, Mark?” I wanted to bury her, finally. I wanted to know where her bones were. I wanted to recognize her one last time. Somewhere over in Texarkana, she waited for me. I just wanted a location so I could get in the car and start driving. I could call Pete Gresham and ask him to meet me there.

“I’m not going to tell you,” he said. “You can’t have me arrested unless you find her, and I’m not going to tell you. My dad won’t say a word, and my brother won’t, either. Our word against yours.”

Matthew was still staring at Mark as if he’d never seen him before.

“Of course I’ll tell the police,” Tolliver said. “Why wouldn’t I, Mark?”

“We’re family, Tol. If you tell them about Cameron, then we’ll have to tell them about Gracie, and she won’t belong to anybody but Chip. Iona and Hank would have to give her up. You can imagine what Chip will do with her.”

“Chip’s dead, Mark. He killed himself yesterday.”

Mark looked blank for a minute. Then he said, “So then she’ll go to foster care, like Harper had to.”

“You’re trying to blackmail me into keeping quiet about my sister’s death by threatening my other sister? Mark, you are lower than a snake’s belly,” I said. “I can’t imagine you being related to Tolliver.”

“That’s the deal,” Mark said, and his mouth set in a mulish way.

There was a knock at the door. Talk about bad timing.

I was the only one who could move, apparently, so I got up and went to the door. It was a relief to be facing away from Mark and Matthew.

I was so numb I wasn’t even startled to see Manfred. “This is a very bad time,” I said, but I waited for him to tell me why he was there.

“He’s got a rental shed under another name,” Manfred said. “He brought her body with him. I know where it is.”

We all froze in place. Finally I said, “Oh, thank God.” Tears were running down my cheeks.

We called the police. I thought it took them hours to get there, though only a few minutes passed. It was really hard to explain what had happened.

We’d taken Mark’s plastic key from his wallet before we climbed into Manfred’s car. Tolliver was sitting in the backseat. He’d explained to the patrol car officers that his brother had just confessed to murdering his stepsister, and he was sure his dad would want to stay to be with his son, and then we were out the door. We got into the storage compound by using the key, and when the gate rolled away, we drove in, leaving it open behind us. There was a police car on its way, but we weren’t going to wait any longer.

“I knew it was him, after I touched the backpack,” Manfred said, trying to suppress the pride in his voice. “So I followed him.”

“That’s what you’ve been doing the past couple of days.”

“He came here twice in that time,” Manfred said.

I found that amazing. Did Mark feel so guilty that he had to keep revisiting Cameron’s body? Or was he like a squirrel storing something choice for the winter, so afraid someone would steal it that he had to keep checking?

I had never known Mark at all. And if I felt that way, how must his brother feel? I looked back at Tolliver, but I couldn’t read his face.

Manfred stopped in front of the garage-style unit numbered 26 and used the key again.

The room wasn’t half full. There were things I vaguely recognized as being from the trailer, and I wondered why anyone would save such things. Evidently, Mark had thought Matthew would want them someday. I looked at the clutter, closed my eyes, and began searching.

The buzzing came from a large blanket chest at the back of the unit. There was a box of magazines on top of it, and some pots and pans. I knocked all of them off. I put my hands on the lid. I couldn’t open it. I reached inside with my lightning sense and . . .

I found my sister.

THE
legal mess surrounding Gracie—the girl I’d always thought was my sister Gracie—may take some time to unravel. With both her natural parents dead, it’s not like her custody was in doubt. After all, Iona and Hank had legally adopted both girls. To them, it was irrelevant that one of the girls wasn’t exactly who they’d thought she was. Iona and Hank, after a few minutes of shocked surprise, made up their minds they’d keep Gracie, no matter what. After all, Iona told me, when God had told her to take on the raising of those girls, he hadn’t specified what their parentage was. If Gracie had really been the daughter of Rich Joyce, the complications would have been tremendous, and it was really just as well for Gracie that she wasn’t. At least, that’s what I thought.

Matthew went back to jail, though not for long enough. He hadn’t murdered his own baby; not that anyone could prove. The real Gracie’s tiny skeleton had vanished from the place where he said he’d buried her, in a public park off the interstate.

His story was that he’d set off to take Gracie to the hospital, but she’d died in the car on the way. He’d buried her and lied to us all about the ICU and the rest because he’d been afraid that my mom would go crazy if she knew Gracie was dead. (Since my mother had already been crazy for years by that time, I didn’t believe him.) He’s stayed away for a few days to give credence to his story that Gracie was in the hospital in ICU. When Chip called him, Matthew had been more than glad to take a baby whose dubious background he thought might come in handy someday; and of course, producing a healthy girl baby would also keep him from being accused of negligence. We’d expected to get Gracie back from the hospital. Only Cameron suspected that Matthew had sunk low enough to substitute another child.

Cameron’s throat was crushed; there was enough left in the trunk to determine her cause of death. Mark confessed that she had shown him the genetic chart she’d made that proved my brown-eyed mother and her brown-eyed husband couldn’t have a green-eyed daughter. Cameron hadn’t known whose baby “Gracie” was, but since she had started with the certainty the child wasn’t the same baby, Cameron’s realization had explained several puzzling things about Gracie’s different behavior since she’d come back “from the hospital.” After Mark killed Cameron, he’d taken her body to the freezer of the restaurant where he worked and put her in a box at the back of the shelf in the meat locker for a couple of days. Then he’d rented the storage unit in Dallas and driven over there with her in the blanket chest, at the height of the hubbub over her disappearance. There she’d stayed, and he’d tossed in the items from the trailer when he’d moved himself to Dallas. He’d watched over her bones ever since.

Poor Cameron. She’d trusted the wrong person. Mark was the oldest, and steady; it was natural she would turn to him. She’d underestimated his devotion to his father. But she’d been sharp enough to put together all the puzzling things about the green-eyed baby living in our trailer.

I had noticed some puzzling changes, too. After all, I’d taken daily care of Gracie. But it had literally never occurred to me that the baby I was tending to wasn’t my sister. I can only attribute that to the stress and strain caused by the lightning strike, and the fact that I couldn’t imagine that Matthew would do such a thing, even as low as he got. I do remember marveling at how much Gracie’s health had improved. It seems incredible now; I attributed it all to modern medicine.

Mark confessed—what choice did he have, after all. He’s doing time now, hard time. I don’t think I could stand to ever see him again.

Manfred got a load of free publicity, which I fed with as much fuel as I could. He got the offer of an appearance on one of those ghost-hunting shows, and he looked great on camera. He gets marriage proposals every week.

We never found out who the woman at the Texarkana mall had been. We didn’t recognize the voice on the police tape, either. At least from now on, we can ignore any Cameron “sightings.”

Tolliver and I went back to St. Louis and got his shoulder checked out by a doctor there, who found all was well. We were glad to see our apartment. We turned down a job offer or two so we could stay home for a while.

We got married.

The girls might be disappointed because they didn’t get to wear pretty dresses and pose in pictures, but we got married all by ourselves in front of a judge. I still call myself Harper Connelly, and Tolliver doesn’t seem to mind.

When Cameron’s remains were released, I brought them up to St. Louis to bury. We bought her a nice headstone. Oddly enough, that didn’t make me feel as wonderful as I thought it would. I visited her every day for a while, until I realized that for me, she’d be forever frozen in the moment of her death. I could not move on until I quit going to the grave. Still, at last I know what happened to her.

We’ll hit the road again, soon. After all, we have to make some money.

And they’re all out there waiting for me. All they want is to be found.