Grave Secret

The drive into Dallas was easy, with only a few traffic snarls. We had to find Mark’s house, which we’d visited only once before. Mark was a solitary man, and I wondered how he and Matthew were getting along together.

To my surprise, Mark’s car was parked in the little driveway. His home was smaller than Iona ’s, which made it mighty small indeed. I automatically noted the buzz around the neighborhood, and it was faint. No dead people here.

There was a narrow raised strip of concrete ru

Mark answered the door. “Hey, what you two doing over here in my neck of the woods?” he said. “You come to see Dad?”

“Yes, we have,” Tolliver said. “He’s here?”

“Yeah. Dad,” Mark called. “Tolliver and Harper are here.” He moved back so we could step inside. He was wearing sweatpants and an old T-shirt. Clearly, he wasn’t going in to work today. He caught me looking. “Sorry,” he said, “it’s my day off. I didn’t dress for company.”

“We didn’t give you any warning,” I said. The living room was almost as basic as Renaldo’s: a big leather couch and matching chair, a big-screen TV, and a coffee table. No lamps for reading. No books. One picture, a framed one of the five of us kids, taken at the trailer. I had forgotten there was one of all of us.

“Who took that?” I asked, surprised.

“Some friend of your mom’s,” Mark said. “Dad packed it away with the other stuff when he went to jail. He just got it out when he got the stuff out of storage.”

I stood looking at the picture, tears in my eyes. Tolliver and Mark were standing side by side. Mark wasn’t smiling. Tolliver’s lips were turned up slightly, but his eyes were grim. Cameron was by Mark, and she had her arm around him, and she was holding Mariella’s hand. Mariella was smiling; like most very little kids, she’d loved to have her picture made. I was holding Gracie, and she was so little! Which Gracie was it? Gracie after the hospital.

“This was taken not long before,” I said.

“Not long before what?”

“You know,” I said, astonished. “Not long before Cameron was gone.”

He shrugged, as if I might have meant something else.

We were still standing when Matthew came in. He was wearing jeans and a fla

Thanks, but no.

“We went to see the Joyces yesterday,” I said. “Chip and Drex were talking about you.”

I wasn’t imagining the alarm that flashed across Matthew’s face then. “Oh, what did they have to say? That’s that rich family, right? On the ranch?”

“You know who they are,” Tolliver said. “You know they came by the trailer.”

Mark looked from his brother to his father. “Those rich guys?” he said. “They’re who you and Harper went to work for last week?”

“We’ve had conversations with quite a few people recently,” I said. “Including Ida, remember her?”

“The old woman who saw your sister getting into a blue truck,” Matthew said.

“Except she didn’t,” I said. “Turns out it wasn’t Cameron.”

The surprise on their faces seemed more or less genuine. That is, they were surprised about something.

“I saw you at the doctor’s office,” I said to Matthew.

He was surprised again. “I went to see a doctor a couple of days ago,” he said cautiously, “about this cough I’ve had since I got out of-”

“Oh, shut up,” I said. “We know you took Mariah’s baby. What we don’t know is what happened to the real Gracie.”

There was a long moment of silence; there seemed to be no air in the cramped living room.

“That’s crazy talk, Tol,” Mark said. “Who’s this Mariah?”

“Dad knows, Mark,” Tolliver said. “Tell us all, Dad, who is the little girl living with Hank and Iona?”

“That little girl,” Matthew said, “is the daughter of Mariah Parish and Chip Moseley.”

This was so not what I’d expected. “Not Rich Joyce and Mariah,” I said, just to be sure I understood.

“Chip told me old Mr. Joyce never had sex with Mariah,” Matthew said. “Chip said the baby was his.”

Mark was looking from speaker to speaker, and he really didn’t seem to know what we were talking about.

“Chip had been buying drugs from me,” Matthew said. “He and Drex liked to come to our part of town to party. Chip was always smart and hard. He’d been raised in foster homes, and he was determined to make a place for himself with the rich people. So he started work for Rich Joyce, started out low, worked his butt off until Rich really depended on him. After his divorce, he gradually got Lizzie interested in him. He knew Mariah; she was in the foster home with him. Chip helped her get the job with the Peadens, and she learned a lot while she was there. Chip made sure Rich got to know the Peadens well enough that he was able to introduce him to Mariah. Then when old Mr. Peaden died, it was natural for Mariah to ask Rich if he had a job for her. He’d had the stroke, and he knew his family wanted him to have someone. It tickled him to have someone as young and pretty as Mariah around, even if he didn’t plan on making any moves on her. She knew his heart was weak. She knew he was fond of her. She just hoped he’d leave her some money. She liked the old man.”

“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.”