Grave Secret

I drove back to the hotel, and Tolliver sat in silence. Now that it was dark, I had to concentrate more on navigating, and we made one false turn before we got back. It was easily corrected, and soon I was helping Tolliver out of the car. I could tell he was tired, but he was moving better.

We were crossing the lobby when he said, “Hank said Dad took pictures of the girls.”

“That’s what Iona told me. I think they were smart to let the girls see Matthew with them both around, so they could kind of put him in perspective.”

“Yeah, that was a smart move,” Tolliver said, but not as though he was giving it any thought. “But why would he really want pictures of them?”

“I don’t think your dad is the kind of guy who puts pictures of his kids on Facebook, do you? So I can’t imagine.”

“Oh, I doubt he’d do that,” Tolliver said matter-of-factly. “Listen, you took care of the girls when they were little.”

“You know I did. Cameron and me. Especially Gracie, she was so frail.” The automatic doors swooshed open and we went into the lobby. The desk clerk was eating a cookie. She glanced up at us, then went back to her book.

“Do you remember when Gracie went to the hospital?” Tolliver said.

“Sure I do. I was scared to death. She was maybe three months old, still real little. Her birth weight was low, remember? She was so sick, and she had been ru

“How do you know that?”

I unlocked the room door and pushed it open. “What do you mean, how do I know that? He took her to the hospital. He brought her back after a couple of weeks. They’d had her in ICU, so we couldn’t see her. He stayed with her. How could it not have been true? When he brought her back Gracie looked so much better, I could hardly believe it was…” I froze.

“You couldn’t believe it was Gracie, could you?” Tolliver said after a long silence.

I put my hand over my mouth. Tolliver carefully sat down on the edge of the couch.

When I could move, I sat down on the chair and our eyes met. “No,” I said. “I couldn’t believe it was Gracie. Her eyes were a hazy blue, but a few weeks after her stay in the hospital, they turned out to be green. So I figured she was older than most babies when their eyes change to their real color. And Matthew said that the doctors told him to put her back on just the bottle, even though she’d started to eat some baby food…”

“You took care of Gracie more than Cameron did.”

“Yeah, I did. Cameron was so busy that year, it was her senior year, and I was home more because of the lightning strike.”

“Were you still having trouble with the aftereffects?”

“Oh, yeah, you remember, I had trouble for months. Before I learned to cope. I had terrible headaches, and a lot of pain. But I did my best for Gracie and Mariella,” I said, knowing I sounded defensive.

“Of course you did. You kept all of us going. But my point is, there might have been things you didn’t notice because you were having so many physical problems and you were so distracted by sensing the dead people.”

That had certainly been a terrible time in my life. Teenagers are ill equipped to cope with a huge gaping difference between themselves and other teens. “Your point is that I might not have noticed some changes in the baby? You think Matthew left with one baby and came back with another. You’re saying the real Gracie is dead.”

He nodded. “It was Chip who came to the trailer some,” he said. “I’m pretty sure I remember him. Maybe Drex, too, but Chip for sure. He had some drug deals with my dad.”

“Oh, my God,” I said. “I thought they looked a bit familiar. And if one of them took Dr. Bowden out to the ranch that night, and they wanted to get rid of a baby without killing it…”

“They might have called Matthew, who had a real sick baby that wasn’t going to make it.”

“How could they? How could they imagine that Matthew would switch babies? Why would they want to, anyway?”

“If the baby was the biological child of Rich Joyce and Mariah Parish, then she would be literally worth millions.”

I couldn’t speak for a minute. “But why not just kill her, and then the millions would stay where they were? With the three Joyce grandchildren?”

“Maybe they didn’t want to murder an infant.”

“They were willing to let Mariah die when she could’ve been saved.”

“There’s a difference between letting someone die and killing someone. And between a grown woman who was pretty unscrupulous and an infant child. More practically, they might not have realized how close to death Mariah was until it was too late.”

I shook my head, dazed. “So, if this is true, what do you think Matthew did with the real Gracie, his real daughter? Do you think he deliberately left with her that evening and exposed her or something?”

“I have no idea, and I’m not sure I really want to know… though I think we have to try to find out,” Tolliver said, and he sounded like an old man. “But I wonder if he ever really intended to take her to the hospital.”

“The pictures?”

“He wants pictures of Gracie. He just took some of Mariella to give his story some weight,” Tolliver said.

“How did you figure this out?”

“He might have showed up at the skating rink thinking he could take pictures of the girls without us knowing, but we spotted him before he could do it, and the girls were scared of him. He’d already started trying to open communication with Iona and Hank by writing them a letter. When he didn’t hear back, he probably thought he could sneak around them. After that didn’t work out, he decided to try an open approach, and it worked. Iona and Hank wanted to demystify him so the girls wouldn’t be so freaked, so they acted like his visit was normal. They were doing the right thing, but they couldn’t imagine what his motives were.”

“What will we do?” I had my elbows resting on my knees, and now I buried my face in my hands. “I can’t wrap my head around all this. How did Cameron fit into all this? Was it just a coincidence that she went missing then?”

“Maybe we made the whole conspiracy up,” Tolliver said. “Maybe we’re as bad as those people who think JFK was shot by Martians.”

“I wish,” I said. “I wish.”

“I wonder if Mark knows anything,” Tolliver said.

“We could call him.”

“Yeah, but Dad’s staying there now.”

“Maybe he could meet us somewhere.”

“We’ll call him tomorrow. After we go to Texarkana.”

“You sure you’re up to that? You’re not nearly finished with the antibiotics.”

“I think I’m enough better.”

“Sure, Dr. Lang.”

“Hey, there are other things we need besides being super careful about my shoulder.”

“We’ll see what the doctor says in the morning,” I told him, and he called me bossy. It felt nice, taking care of him. As upset as I was about the suspicion and the uncertainty surrounding Tolliver’s dad, I felt a little proud that I had managed so far. We went to bed after some more rounds of fruitless discussion, and I don’t think either of us slept very well that night. When Tolliver did fall asleep, he talked out loud; he only does that when he’s really upset.

“Save her,” he said.