Grave Secret

Seventeen

TOLLIVER was stunned and exhausted. I had to help him climb into the bed. I called room service for some soup and salads for both of us after I got him settled. I sat on the side of the bed while we waited for the food to come.

“I can believe a lot of bad stuff about Matthew,” he said, “but I don’t believe he hurt Cameron.”

“It had never occurred to me, either,” I said. “Honestly, I don’t want to believe it. But if he did have a connection to her disappearance and he’s been letting us wonder all these years, I want him to die.” With Tolliver, I wasn’t going to worry about how saying such a thing would make him think of me. He knew me. Now he would know me a little better.

Tolliver understood. “He’d deserve to die, if he hurt Cameron,” he said. “But there’s not one single thing to tie him to Cameron’s disappearance, and he had no motive at all. For that matter, we don’t have any proof that he’s involved in the mess with the Joyce family. We need something more than the sight of a man’s back as he walks out of a public building.”

“I understand,” I said-and I really did, even if I hated his logic. “So we have to figure out a way. We can’t go on living our lives unless we get rid of this, one way or another.”

“Yes,” said Tolliver, and then he closed his eyes. Amazingly, he fell asleep.

I ate supper by myself, though I saved his in case he woke up to eat it. After I was through with my salad, I did something I hadn’t done in at least a year. I went out to our car, opened the trunk, and got my sister’s backpack out of it. Back inside our room, I sat on the couch and unzipped the backpack. We’d thought it was so cute when Cameron picked it out. It was pink with black polka dots. Cameron had gotten a black jacket and black boots, and she’d looked wonderful. No one had to know that everything had come from the secondhand shop.

The police had finally let us have the backpack, after six years. It had been fingerprinted, turned inside out, examined microscopically… for all I knew, they’d x-rayed it.

Cameron would be very nearly twenty-six now. She’d been gone for almost eight years.

It was late spring when she’d been taken. She’d been decorating the school gym for the prom. She’d had a date with-oh, God, I couldn’t remember. Todd? Yes, Todd Battista. I couldn’t remember if I’d had a date or not. Probably not, because following the lightning strike, my popularity had plummeted. My new ability had thrown me completely out of whack, and it had taken me almost a year to adjust to the buzz of dead people. And then I’d had to learn how to conceal my strange ability. During that awful time, I’d earned a well-deserved reputation for being very strange.

She’d been so late that day. And that wasn’t like Cameron. I remembered making my mother rouse enough to watch the girls, whom I’d collected from day care. Though it wasn’t smart to leave them alone with her, I couldn’t take them with me. I hurried down the road, past all the other trailers, following the route we always took coming home.

Tolliver and Mark had been at their respective jobs, and Matthew, as it turned out, had been playing pool in the home of one of his wonderful friends, a junkie named Renaldo Simpkins. The police would never have believed Renaldo, but his girlfriend, Tammy, had been there, too, and she said she’d walked in and out of the room at least five times during the pool game. She was sure that Matthew had never left between around four and six thirty. (The six thirty was firm, because that was when she’d gotten a phone call from a neighbor, telling her that there were police cars all around the Lang trailer, and Matthew better get his ass home.)

Around five thirty, I’d found my sister’s backpack-the one now sitting before me on a hotel coffee table-by the side of the street. It was a residential street lined with very small houses. About half of them were abandoned. But there was a woman living in the house across the street from the spot where I’d found Cameron’s backpack. Her name was Ida Beaumont.

I’d never talked to Ida Beaumont before, and despite all the times I’d walked past her house, I don’t think I’d ever seen her out in her yard. She was afraid of all the teenagers in the neighborhood, and maybe she had good reason. This was a part of town where even police looked over their shoulders. But I met Ida Beaumont that day. I’d walked across the street and knocked on her door.

“Hi, I’m sorry to bother you, but my sister hasn’t come home from school and her backpack is there, under that tree.” I pointed over to the bright splotch of color. Ida Beaumont peered at it, her eyes following my finger.

“Yes,” she said cautiously. She was in her early sixties, and the newspaper articles told me later that she was living on some kind of disability check and what remained of her dead husband’s pension. I could hear her television going. She was watching a talk show. “Who’s your sister?” she asked. “Is she that pretty blond girl? I see you two walking home all the time.”

“Yes ma’am. That’s her. I’m looking for her. Did you see anything happen over there this afternoon? She would have been coming home sometime within the past hour, I think.”

“I stay at the back of the house, mostly.” Ida seemed to put emphasis on that, because she didn’t want to be seen as a busy-body. “But I seen a blue pickup, an old Dodge, about half an hour ago. The man in it was talking to a girl. I couldn’t really see her, she was on the other side of the pickup. But she got in, and they took off.”

“Oh.” I tried to make sense of this, tried to remember if anyone we knew had an old blue pickup. But no one popped up in my memory. “Thanks. That was about half an hour ago?”

“Yes,” she said, very positively. “Yes, that was when it was.”

“She didn’t look like she was… like he was making her do it?”

“I couldn’t say about that. They talked, she got in, they left.”

“Okay. I appreciate your taking the time to talk to me.” And I turned and walked back across the street. Then I reversed myself. Ida Beaumont was still standing at her doorway.

“Do you have a phone?” I asked. We lived in a neighborhood where you couldn’t take that for granted.

“I do.”

“Will you call the police and tell them what I just told you, about my sister? Ask them to come? I’ll be standing over there, by the backpack.”

I could see reluctance in Ida’s face, knew the older woman was wishing she hadn’t come to the door. “All right,” she said finally, exhaling loudly. “I’ll call ’em.” And without closing the wooden door, she went to a telephone that was mounted on the wall. I could see her dialing the police, and I could hear her part of the conversation.

I’ll say this for the police: they were there very quickly. Initially, of course, they were doubtful about Cameron really being missing. Teenage girls often found better things to do than go home, especially to a home in this neighborhood. But the abandoned backpack seemed to speak to them, to testify that my sister hadn’t been willing to leave.

Finally, I’d broken down crying, explained to them that I had to get home, that my mom couldn’t be trusted to take care of my sisters, and that had made everything more serious, right away. They let me call my brothers, who both left work immediately to come home. That neither Mark nor Tolliver was skeptical that Cameron had been abducted also convinced the police that my sister hadn’t gone away willingly or intentionally.

Going into the trailer with the cops would have been humiliating under any other circumstances. But I was so frightened by then that I was only glad they were there. They saw that my mother had passed out again on the couch and that the girls were crying. She’d started to put a diaper on Gracie and hadn’t finished taping it shut. Mariella was trying to mash some banana for Gracie (who’d just started eating real food) and she was standing on a chair to reach the counter. It was clean, or at least as clean as an old dilapidated trailer could be, but of course we were very crowded in there, and the sheer amount of stuff made it look incredibly cluttered.

“Is it always like this?” asked the younger cop, looking around him.

“Shut up, Ken,” said his partner.

“Cameron and I try,” I said, and I began crying again. My bitterness ran out of me in a stream of explanation. I’d already realized, on some level, that our life there was over, so the pretence was over, too.

While I cried and talked, I was getting Gracie diapered and making a peanut butter sandwich for Mariella. I mashed the banana for Gracie and mixed it with a little formula and put it in a bowl for her. I got her little spoon out of the drainer. My mother never moved, except once. Her hand went out to the spot where Gracie had been, and she patted the air vaguely. I put Gracie in her infant seat and began feeding her, pausing from time to time to wipe my face.

“You take care of your sisters,” the older cop said in a friendly way.

“My brothers make enough to take them to day care while we’re at school,” I said. “We’ve tried real hard.”

“I can tell,” he said. The younger cop turned away with his mouth pressed together and his eyes hot. “Where’s your daddy?” he asked after a minute.

“My stepfather,” I corrected automatically. “I have no idea.”

When Matthew got home, he acted stunned that the police were there, agonized that Cameron was missing, appalled that his poor wife had slept through such hubbub and turmoil.

This had never happened before, he told the cops. There were several more at the trailer by now. One of them had arrested Matthew before, and he snorted derisively when Matthew finished his performance.

“Yeah, buddy,” the officer said. “And where were you this afternoon?”

Later, Tolliver and I sat together on the couch after my mother had been taken to the hospital. Mark paced, as much as you can pace in a trailer. A woman from Social Services had come to get our sisters. Matthew had been arrested because he had some joints in his car. The drugs were the excuse the cops used; I think they just wanted to arrest him after they saw the trailer and talked to me. Mark and Tolliver had confirmed everything I said: Mark very reluctantly, Tolliver with a matter-of-fact air that said a lot about our lives. But I found Mark crying outside that night, after the police had gone. He was sitting in the lawn chair right at the bottom of the trailer steps, and he had his face in his hands.

“We tried so hard to stay together,” he said, as if he had to explain his distress.

“That’s all over now,” I said. “That’s all gone, now that Cameron’s been taken. There’s no more hiding things now.”

For a month after that, Cameron had been “seen” numerous times around Texarkana, in Dallas, in Corpus Christi, in Houston, in Little Rock. A teenage panhandler in Los Angeles had been hauled in because she looked like Cameron. But none of those sightings had ever come to anything, and her corpse had never been found. I’d gotten excited about three years after she’d gone, when a hunter had found a girl’s body in some woods around Lewisville, Arkansas. The corpse-what there was left of it-was female, and the right size to be Cameron. But after close examination, the bones appeared to be that of a woman somewhat older than my sister, and the DNA wasn’t a match. That body had never been identified, though when they’d let me close to her I’d known she’d been a suicide. I didn’t share that, because I had limited credibility with the police.

Tolliver and I had started our traveling by then, and we were building up our business. It had taken a long time for word of mouth to get around and for the Internet to pick up on what I was doing. The cops thought I was a scam artist. The first two years were very difficult. After that, my career took on a certain momentum.

But now was not the time to think about my own journey, but about Cameron’s. I touched the backpack lovingly, and I took out everything inside. I’d examined every item a hundred times. We’d leafed through every page of the textbooks inside, looking for a message, a clue, anything. All the notes Cameron had been passed by other students were stuffed in a pocket, and we’d pored over them, trying to read something in them that would tell us what had happened to our sister.

Tanya had wanted Cameron to notice how stupid Heather’s outfit was, and Tanya had also remarked on the fact that Jerry had said that Heather had had SEX with him when they’d gone out the weekend before. Jennifer thought that Cameron’s brother Tolliver was HOT, and was he dating anyone? And wasn’t Mr. Arden a stupid idiot?

Todd had wondered when he should pick her up for the prom, and would she be getting dressed at Jennifer’s house, like she had last time?

(If Cameron could manage it, she got her dates to pick her up somewhere else. I didn’t blame her at all.)

There’d been a note from Mr. Arden, asking Cameron to tell her parents that one of them needed to come up to the school and explain that they knew the attendance policy. Just bringing a signature back to the school from home wasn’t enough. (Mr. Arden had told the police that Cameron had missed his class once over the acceptable limit, and he’d wanted to lay eyes on one of Cameron’s parents to make sure someone was aware that Cameron couldn’t skip any more or she might not graduate.)

She hadn’t been skipping the class out of senior giddiness. It was her last class of the day, and sometimes we had to leave early to pick up the girls at day care if Tolliver or Mark couldn’t.

Of course, all the teachers we’d had had professed their shock and horror at our living conditions, except Miss Briarly. Miss Briarly had said, “And what would you have had us do? Call the police so the kids wouldn’t have even had each other?”

That was exactly what the press thought Miss Briarly should have done, and she’d gotten reprimanded by the principal. It had made me so angry. Miss Briarly had taught Cameron her favorite class, advanced biology. I remembered how hard Cameron had worked on her senior project about genetics, charting the eye colors of everyone in the neighborhood. She’d gotten an A. Miss Briarly had given me the paper after Cameron’s disappearance.

Ida Beaumont had had to tell her story over and over. She’d become such a recluse, as a result, that she’d stopped answering her door and got a church lady to deliver her groceries.

My mother and Tolliver’s father had been sentenced to jail on multiple charges of child endangerment and assorted drug offenses.

Tolliver had been given permission to move in with Mark. I’d gone to a foster home, where I’d been treated very decently. It had been marvelous, to me, to be in a home where the floors were solid, where I only had to share a room with one other girl, where everything was clean without me having to clean it personally, and where study time was mandatory. I still sent the Clevelands a Christmas card every year. They’d let Tolliver come to visit me on the Saturdays he wasn’t working.

By the time I graduated, we’d developed our plan for using my weird new talent to make our living. We’d spent hours at the cemetery, practicing and exploring the limits of my strange ability. Even weirder than our plan was the fact that this had actually been a very happy time in my life, and I think in Tolliver’s, too. The biggest flaw in that new life was the loss of all my sisters. Cameron was gone, and Mariella and Gracie had moved away to live with Iona and Hank.

I opened Cameron’s math book. She’d been taking precal; she’d hated it. Cameron had poor math skills. She was good at history, I remembered. She’d liked that. It was easier to study people’s lives when they were all dead, their troubles all past. Cameron was a good speller, and she’d enjoyed all her science classes, too, especially the advanced biology class she’d been taking.

The newspapers had gone on and on about the sad condition of the trailer, the depravity of Laurel and Mark, the arrest records of their frequent visitors, the lengths we kids had gone to in our attempt to stay together. Truthfully, I don’t think our home was so very unusual. In the unspoken way kids communicate, we’d learned of a dozen or more kids in our school who had it just as bad or worse.

People often can’t help being poor, but they can help being bad. We were unfortunate in having parents who were both.

I flipped open one of my sister’s notebooks. Her class notes were still in place. The grubby ruled pages covered in her handwriting were all that I had left of her. Cameron had been the only one, besides me, who could remember the good days-the days when our mom and dad were still married and they hadn’t started using. If my dad was still alive, I doubted he’d remember much of anything.

I shook myself. I was not going to get maudlin. But it was necessary to think about the day Cameron had vanished. If she’d gotten into that pickup voluntarily, then I might as well forget about tracing her. Not only would that make her a stranger to me, but there would be no body to sense, unless something had happened to her in the meantime. If Cameron was dead, ironically enough, one of these days I might find her.

I wondered if Ida Beaumont was still alive. I’d been so young then, she’d looked positively tottering on the edge of her grave. Now, I realized she had been no more than sixty-five.

Obeying an impulse I couldn’t fathom, I called information in Texarkana and discovered that she still had a listing. My fingers punched in the number before I could even explain to myself why I was doing this.

“Hello?” a creaky voice said suspiciously.

“Mrs. Beaumont?”

“Yes, this is Ida Beaumont.”

“You may not remember me,” I said. “I’m Harper Connelly.”

Dead silence.

“What do you want?” the voice said.

That wasn’t exactly the question I’d anticipated.

“Are you still in the same house, Ms. Beaumont? I was thinking I might come by to visit you,” I said, making this up on the spot. “I was thinking I might bring one of my brothers.”

“No,” she said. “Don’t come here. Don’t ever come here. The last time you came, I had people knocking on my door all day and night for weeks. And the police still come by. You stay away.”

“We have some questions to ask you,” I said in a voice that I hoped was pitched somewhere between anger and simple determination.

“The police have already asked me plenty of questions,” she snapped, and I knew I’d gone the wrong way. “I wish I’d never answered the door that day when you come knocking.”

“But then you couldn’t have told me about the blue truck,” I said.

“I told you, didn’t I, that I didn’t see the girl clearly?”

“Yes,” I said, though in my mind, over the years, I’d pretty much disregarded that. I was missing a girl, she’d seen a girl get into a pickup, and Cameron’s backpack was there on the spot.

Over the line, I heard a deep sigh. Then Ida Beaumont began speaking. “A young woman started coming by from Meals on Wheels about six months ago,” she said. “Those meals, they’re never any good, but at least they’re free, and sometimes they bring enough to last another day. Her name’s Missy Klein.”

“Okay,” I said, since I had no idea what else to say. My heart was sinking into my stomach, because I knew this was going to be bad.

“And she said to me, she says, ‘Mrs. Beaumont, you remember all those years ago when you saw a girl getting into a blue pickup?’ And I says, ‘Yes, sure, and it was a curse to me.’ ”

“All right.” The dark feeling grew inside me.

“So she tells me it was her, getting into the truck with her boyfriend, who she wasn’t supposed to be seeing because he was in his twenties.”

“It wasn’t my sister.”

“No, it wasn’t. It was that Missy Klein, and now she brings me Meals on Wheels.”

“You never saw my sister.”

“No, I didn’t. And Missy, she tells me that the backpack was sitting there when she came along and got in his truck.”

I felt like a ton of bricks had fallen on me. “Have you told the police?” I said finally.

“No, I don’t go calling the police. I suppose I should have, but-well, they come by to see me every so often, take me back over that day. Peter Gresham, he comes by. I figured I’d tell him the next time he stopped in.”

“Thank you,” I said. “I wish I’d known this before. But thank you for telling me.”

“Well, sure. I thought you’d be mad at me,” she said, which I thought was kind of amazing.

“I’m glad I called. Goodbye,” I said. My voice was as numb as my heart. Any minute now, the feeling would come back. I wanted to be off the phone with this woman when that happened.

Ida Beaumont was saying something else about Meals on Wheels when I clicked my phone shut.

Lizzie Joyce called me then, before I could think through the implications of what I’d just heard. “Oh, my Lord,” she said, “I can’t believe Victoria is dead. You were a friend of hers, right? You-all went way back? Harper, I’m so sorry. What do you think happened to her? You think it had anything to do with looking for the baby?”

“I don’t have the slightest idea,” I said, though that wasn’t the truth. I didn’t think Lizzie Joyce had anything to do with Victoria’s murder, but I thought someone close to her was involved. I found myself wondering why she’d called me. Lizzie Joyce, wealthy beyond imagining, didn’t have a BFF to call? Where was the sister, and the boyfriend, and the brother? Why didn’t she call all the people she sat on boards with, the people who worked for her, the people who did her hair and polished her nails when she was going somewhere fancy, the people who set up the barrels for her competition practice?

After I’d listened for a minute, I realized Lizzie wanted to talk to someone she didn’t have to brief, someone who had known Victoria; and I was the person who fit the bill.

“I guess I’m going to the firm of detectives my granddad’s company always uses,” she said. “I thought it would be helpful to talk to a woman out on her own, someone who wasn’t up on our business, not involved in the family saga. But I think I caused her death. If I’d gone to our usual firm, she’d still be alive.”

There was no rebuttal to offer on that. “How come you have a private detective firm on call?” I asked instead.

“Granddaddy started that when he became the head of a big enterprise. More than a rancher. He liked to know who he was hiring, at least for key positions.” Lizzie sounded surprised that I needed to ask.

“So why didn’t he get them to check out Mariah Parish?”

“Granddaddy had met her when she worked for the Peadens, and when he needed someone, and she was free, it seemed like a natural fit. I guess he felt like he knew her and didn’t need to have her investigated. After all, she wasn’t going to be writing checks on our account or anything.”

He wouldn’t have trusted her with his checkbook, but he would trust her to cook his food without poisoning him, and he would trust her to clean his house without stealing his possessions. Even suspicious rich people have their blind side. Given what we’d learned about Mariah from reading her file, I found that ironic.

I hadn’t known that Rich Joyce had actually met Mariah before she moved into his house. Drexell hadn’t mentioned that at our dinner with Victoria. Maybe Rich had seen a good way to sneak a mistress into his house under his kids’ eyes. Maybe his friend who’d first employed Mariah had told Rich he’d been bedding her. Nudge nudge, wink wink. Here’s a good woman who can cook, count your pills, and warm up your sheets, Rich. And she can stay right there in the house.

“And you didn’t even think about investigating her the way you would any other employee?”

“Well,” Lizzie said, clearly uncomfortable, “she and Granddaddy had everything worked out by the time we knew about it. He was sure in his right mind, so we didn’t say anything.”

All the Joyce grandchildren had been scared of the patriarch. “You didn’t have her checked out afterward?”

“Well, he would have known. That was when I should have hired an outside source. I gotta tell you the truth, at the time, I didn’t think too much about it. That was years ago. I was younger, and less confident, and of course, I expected Granddaddy to live forever.” Lizzie stopped short, probably realizing she’d been oversharing. “Well, I just wanted to tell you how sorry I am about your friend. And how’s your brother doing? This whole thing just keeps getting messier and messier.”

“Do you wish you’d never contacted me?”

A moment of silence. “Truthfully, yes, that’s what I wish,” she said. “Seems like a lot of people have died and they didn’t need to. What’s changed? What more do I know? Nothing. My grandfather saw a rattlesnake and died. We don’t know if anyone else was there for sure. He’s still dead. Mariah’s dead, and in my head she’s not resting in peace anymore, now that I know she died in childbirth. Where’s that baby? Is the baby an aunt or uncle of mine? I still don’t know. Maybe I’ll never know.”

“Someone’s sure trying to make sure you don’t,” I said. “Goodbye, Lizzie.” And I hung up.

Manfred stopped in, and I was glad to see him, but I wasn’t in a mood for talking. He asked me about the backpack.

“It’s my sister’s,” I said. “She left it the day she vanished.”

I turned away to answer Tolliver’s call. He’d woken up briefly and asked for a pain pill. He drifted back to sleep before he even took it.

When I came back in the living room, Manfred was withdrawing his hand from the backpack. He looked sad. “I’m sorry this happened to you, Harper.”

“Well, thanks for the kind thought, Manfred, but it happened to my sister. I was just caught up in the aftermath.”

“I’ll see you soon. Don’t worry if I don’t call for a couple of days. I’ve got a job to do.”

“Oh… okay, Manfred.” I hadn’t thought about worrying. He gave me a peck on the cheek when he left, and I was glad to shut the door behind him. I sat and thought about my sister.

It was a long night. I finally fell asleep after midnight.