Charlaine Harris (105 page)

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.