Grave Secret

Sixteen

I went into the bathroom and locked the door. I closed the toilet lid and sat on the toilet. I didn’t turn on the light. I didn’t want to see my reflection.

Matthew was somehow connected to the Joyces, though I had no idea how. And he was also Cameron’s stepfather. And as near as I could ascertain, not that long after Mariah Parish’s baby had been born, Cameron had disappeared. It had never, ever occurred to me that anyone in our family had anything to do with Cameron’s disappearance. When the police had questioned my mother and Matthew, and Mark and Tolliver and me, I had raged at them because they were wasting time that should be spent tracing the real killer or killers.

I had suspected the boys at our high school, particularly Cameron’s last boyfriend, who hadn’t taken their breakup with good grace. I’d suspected Laurel and Matthew’s druggie friends. I’d suspected a random stranger, any stranger, who’d seen Cameron walking home alone and decided to rob her/rape her/abduct her. I’d suspected the guys who’d sometimes blown wolf whistles at us when we’d been out together. I’d constructed hundreds of scenarios. Some of them were wildly implausible. But they all gave me a possible answer to the terrible mystery of the disappearance of my sister, an answer that didn’t involve feeling even more pain from another personal loss.

I felt a deep conviction that even if I couldn’t see the connection, even if it seemed incredible, two such incidents could not happen that close together without there being some kind of connection, not if the same man was involved in both incidents.

Was I grossly overreacting? I tried to think, though my brain was cloudy with rage. My stepfather knew something about the Joyces. He knew enough to know the name of the doctor who’d “treated” Mariah Parish.

He knew. And I believed he also knew what had happened to my sister. All these years, he’d kept it from me.

I felt it in my bones.

I couldn’t go into the living room and grab him by the neck. He was too strong for me. Tolliver wouldn’t let me kill his father. Probably even Manfred, who had no personal stake in the matter, would feel obliged to intervene. But Tolliver was weak and injured, and Manfred would leave sooner or later.

It took all the self-control I could muster to break away from seriously considering how to kill my stepfather.

For one thing, it would be wrong. Maybe. For another thing, a much more important thing, I didn’t know enough. I wanted to find my sister’s final resting place. I wanted to be sure I knew what had happened to Cameron.

To that end, I had to be prepared to tolerate Matthew’s presence.

I worked on it, there alone in the dark. I schooled myself to be strong. And then I got up and turned on the light and washed my face, as if I could wash the new knowledge off of it and return to what had been my happy ignorance.

I went out into the living room, having to move slowly. I felt I’d been kicked in the ribs-fragile, and sore with the suspicion and loathing I carried inside.

I could tell immediately that Matthew wanted Manfred to leave so he could talk to his son alone, and Manfred had not wanted to leave until he spoke to me again. He looked from Matthew to me as I came into the room, and he shuddered. Whatever Manfred saw in me, neither Tolliver nor Matthew could see. That was a good thing.

“Manfred,” I said. “I’m sorry I flaked out on you. Thanks for going with me today.”

“No problem,” Manfred said, leaping to his feet with an alacrity that told me how anxious he was to get out of this hotel room. “Would you like to go out and get a cup of coffee with me? Or do you need me to take you to the store? Got enough… potato chips?” He was reaching, there. We never ate potato chips. I felt a smile twitch at the corners of my mouth. “Thanks, Manfred.” I debated quickly inside myself. Manfred wanted to talk to me about what I now realized was our mutual recognition of Matthew, but I didn’t know yet what I was going to do. Better to avoid the tête-à-tête until I had made a plan. “I guess I’ll stick around here in case Tolliver needs me.”

I hugged him, acting on an impulse. His bones felt small as my arms circled his body. Somewhat hesitantly, he hugged me back. He was floundering under the psychic image he’d gotten from me. If he could see anything like the way I felt, then he’d seen something awful and murderous. “Don’t do it,” he said into my ear, and I let go of him and stood back.

“Don’t worry, we’ll be fine,” I said reassuringly. “I’ll call you if I need help, I promise.”

“Well… okay. I do have some readings to work on this afternoon. But my cell phone’s always charged up and in my pocket. ’Bye, Tolliver. Mr. Lang.” And with a last hard look directly into my eyes, Manfred was out the door, walking swiftly down the hall without a backward glance.

“What a flake,” said Matthew. “Tolliver, you hang out much with people like that? He must be a friend of yours, Harper.”

“He is a friend of mine,” I said. “His grandmother was, too.” I felt really strange, kind of out of myself. Matthew was sitting beside Tolliver on the couch, so I took the chair. I crossed my legs and wrapped my hands around my top knee. “It was really messy outside this morning, wasn’t it, Matthew?”

He looked surprised. “Yeah, traffic was a bitch. It always is in Dallas. Raining, too.”

“Did you have errands to run this morning?”

“Oh, a few things I had to do. I have to be at work at two thirty.”

Was he really working at McDonald’s? Or was he meeting one of the Joyces? Had he always been in their pay?

And the man I loved most in the world, the only person I truly loved, was this man’s son.

That might bother Tolliver, but it didn’t make any difference to me. More than most people, I understand the difference between the children and the parents. I had been brought up by the same woman who’d neglected her two little girls so much that her older children had had to take care of them.

I liked to think I’d turned out a little better than my mother.

And yet, if I killed Matthew Lang, would I be any better than my mother?

Well, at least I’d have made my decision with a clear head.

That’s hardly true, said my saner self. Aren’t you so choked with hatred that you can’t even swallow?

True. But wasn’t it better to kill someone when you really hated them? Was there a virtue to waiting until you were calm and collected?

I’d certainly have a better chance of getting away with it. And of living a life with Tolliver, rather than getting friendly with a bunch of women in prison. That was how my mother had lived out her life… and I wasn’t like my mother. I wasn’t.

I’m sure my expression was strange while I was going through this process, though it wasn’t really continuous, but flashing through my head in flickers.

Judging by Tolliver’s face, he clearly wanted to ask me if I was all right, but just as clearly he didn’t want to do that in front of Matthew. Matthew was sitting turned toward Tolliver so his back was mostly to me, which was a good thing.

I tried to blank out my mind so I could listen to them talk. Matthew was asking Tolliver if he’d ever thought of finishing college, if he’d consider enrolling in one of the many colleges around the Dallas area when we moved here. He thought Tolliver would be able to find a good job if he got his degree, and then he wouldn’t need to live off of me anymore.

Trust Matthew to plant a poisonous spin on our relationship. Tolliver looked shocked. “I don’t live off of Harper,” he said.

“You don’t have a job other than traveling around with her while she does… whatever she does,” his dad said.

“I make sure she gets there to do that job,” Tolliver said. I realized it wasn’t the first time he’d had this conversation; it was just that none of the previous times he’d had it were in my hearing. I was almost shocked out of my shell of hatred. “If I weren’t with Harper, she couldn’t do that job at all.”

“He’s absolutely right,” I said. “I get sick when I work, and without Tolliver, no telling what would happen to me.” I tried to make my words a simple statement of fact. I didn’t want to sound defensive when there was nothing to defend.

“You can tell yourself that,” Matthew said to Tolliver, ignoring me, “but you know a man’s got to make his own way in the world.”

“Like you did?” I said. “You made your own way by selling drugs, by letting your wife auction me off to the highest bidder? You made your own way by giving up a law practice to go to jail instead?”

Matthew flushed. He couldn’t pretend I wasn’t there. “Harper, I’m trying to be a good father. I know it’s too late, and I know I did things that make me sick to remember, but I’m trying to mend my relationship with my son. I know he ‘loves’ you, but sometimes you just have to butt out and let me talk to him.”

You could hear the quotation marks around “loves.”

Tolliver said, “Harper never has to butt out. I do love her. It is too late, and you did things that made all of us sick to our stomachs. You would have let Harper die if I hadn’t been there that day when the lightning hit.”

I felt a rush of relief. Some small part of me was frightened that someday Tolliver would listen to his dad, would believe him, would be suckered again.

“Mark, at least, will let me talk to him,” Matthew said, getting up.

He was going to leave, and I still hadn’t killed him. I was going to let him walk out.

I had to. I had only my bare hands. And I had to discover what he’d done with Cameron, and why he’d done it. I didn’t think he’d wanted to have Cameron sexually. Some of his friends had wanted to have sex with us, but not Matthew. At least, I was fairly sure of that. But there was a reason, and I had to know it. I stood up, my hands clenched at my sides, debating whether or not to hit him.

Matthew picked up on the hostility in the way I was standing. I guess if you spend time in jail, you’re on the alert for stuff like that. He edged around me on his path to the door. “I don’t know what’s wrong with you today, Harper. I’m just trying to mend fences, here.”

“Not working,” I said through clenched teeth.

“Yeah,” he said, with a nervous laugh. “I can see that. Son, I’ll talk to you later. I hope you’re better. Call me if you need me.” And he was out the door and it shut behind him. And he was still alive.

“Sit here,” Tolliver said, his voice so low I almost didn’t hear him. “Sit here, and tell me what’s in your head.”

“He was at the doctor’s office building,” I said. “Your father was there, this morning, going out the door across the lobby as we were coming in.”

I stood still until Tolliver processed that. Then he patted the couch beside him again. “Okay, let’s figure it out,” he said, and I could have done handstands and cheered, because he got it completely.

I told Tolliver about Dr. Bowden. I related the doctor’s story, adding my own commentary. And he listened, God bless him, he listened to every word without interrupting. He abandoned his snit as quickly as he could toss it overboard. I told him how glad I was that Manfred had been there, had heard the same story, because otherwise I’d find it hard to believe it myself.

“So why did that lead to you wanting to disembowel my dad?”

“Because I don’t believe in coincidences that huge. What was Matthew doing in that office building? He had to have been seeing Tom Bowden. And why would he know about Tom Bowden? He had to have had a connection with the Joyces, or at least whichever of them wanted to keep Mariah’s pregnancy and the birth of the child secret.”

“But did he have to?” Tolliver asked. “I mean, did Dad really have to have been in cahoots with the Joyces, one or all of them? We don’t know who it was who took the doctor to the ranch that night. But we do know, from Victoria ’s files, that Chip Moseley was arrested in Texarkana once, so we can assume he was there pretty often. And we know that the Joyce family had some doctors there, according to Tom Bowden, so they had some connections there, too. That’s a slim tie, but it’s a tie.”

“And when we met the Joyces, I thought the two men looked familiar. Just a little.”

“Chip and Drex?”

I nodded. “I know that doesn’t seem as conclusive, because I can’t place them firmly. But most people I’m that fuzzy on, it’s because they came to the trailer, and I hate to remember that time. Plus, I tried not to look, because I knew it was dangerous to know who was buying and selling drugs.”

“Yes,” Tolliver said heavily. “It was dangerous, every day, to be living there.”

“So all this is why I think your dad is involved. And I’m wondering if he got in touch with Mark so Mark’s intervention would lead to your dad’s getting to see you.”

Tolliver mulled that over. “Could be,” he said. “I would never answer his letters or take his phone calls, so he might have used Mark. He’d know I’d never lose touch with my brother.” There was a little pain in Tolliver’s face; even now, he’d had a tiny flicker of hope that his dad was trying to do the right thing, that Matthew had really and truly reformed.

“But what happened?” I asked, frustrated. “Why was he involved with the Joyce family? And how did Cameron get involved in that?”

“Cameron? Why do you think he would hurt Cameron? Not my dad.” Tolliver shook his head. “He had an alibi, remember. At the time the old woman saw Cameron getting in the truck, Dad was playing pool with that asshole and his girlfriend.”

“I remember that guy,” I said. “Come on, let’s get you into the bed. We can talk about it tomorrow.”