Grave Secret (9 page)

“But I’m their real father,” Matthew said.

“You gave them up,” I reminded him, giving each word a lot of weight.

“There was a lot of pressure.” He reached out as if he wanted to stroke Mariella’s hair, but she flinched back, still gripping her brother’s hand as if she would lose him if she let go.

The rink wasn’t really crowded, but people had begun to cast sideways glances at our tense little group. I didn’t give a damn about the spectators, but the last thing I wanted was any confrontation, physical or verbal, in front of the girls.

“You need to leave,” I said. “We’re taking the girls back to their home right now. You’ve ruined our good time. Don’t make it any worse.”

“I want to see my children,” he said again.

“You’re looking at ’em. You’ve seen them. Now go.”

“I’m only leaving because of the little ones,” he said, nodding toward Mariella and Gracie, who were confused and miserable. “I’ll see you again soon, Tolliver.” And he turned on his heel and left the rink.

“He followed us,” I said stupidly.

“I guess he was waiting somewhere around Iona’s house,” Tolliver said. We stared at each other, silently postponing more discussion. Simultaneously, we took deep breaths. It would have been funny if we hadn’t been so jangled.

“Well,” I said to my sisters, trying to sound brisk and upbeat, “I’m glad that’s over. We’ll talk to your mom about this, okay, tell her all about it? It won’t happen again. We had a good time until this happened, right?” I sounded like an idiot, but at least the girls began stirring, removing their skates. They stopped looking quite so much like deer in headlights.

Our sisters were subdued on the ride back to their house—no big surprise there—and they scrambled out of our car and into the door under the carport as if they were afraid of snipers. Tolliver and I followed more slowly, not eager to relate what had happened to Iona and Hank—though it was no fault of ours.

We weren’t too surprised to find our aunt and uncle standing in the kitchen waiting for us.

“What happened?” Iona asked. To my astonishment, she didn’t seem angry, only worried.

“My dad showed up at the rink,” Tolliver said, plunging right in. “I don’t know how long he was watching before we knew he was there.” He shrugged. “He wasn’t high; he wasn’t hostile. But the girls were shaken up.”

“We were having a good time until we saw him,” I said, realizing that sounded weak. But it was a point I felt obliged to make.

“We got a letter from him last week,” Hank said. “We didn’t answer him. I never thought he’d do this.”

So they were shouldering their own share of guilt, for not warning us they knew Matthew was out of jail.

Though I was reluctant to lose the advantage, I said, “He’s been out of jail for a while. When we had dinner with Mark, he told us that much. But he didn’t say any more than that Matthew had a job and was straight.”

“Oh, Mark’s in contact with his dad?” Iona frowned and sat heavily in one of the kitchen chairs. Cautiously, we sat down, too. We were surprised that the Gorhams weren’t throwing us out and blaming us for the whole incident. “That Mark, he’s too tender-hearted where his dad’s concerned,” Iona said.

I secretly agreed. Or maybe not so secretly—Tolliver gave me a look. He could read me almost too easily.

“Could you tell what he wanted?” Iona asked me suddenly.

“What do you mean?”

“With your whatever sense?” Iona waved a hand in front of her like she was waving off a gnat.

“I’m not psychic, Iona, or I’d be glad to uncover what Matthew wants. I wish I knew myself. All I can do is find corpses.” Too late, I saw Mariella over Iona’s shoulder. She’d come in from the hall to the bedrooms. Her eyes were open wide. But this couldn’t be too big a shock to her, right? What on earth had Iona and Hank been telling her? She spun and ran out of the kitchen.

Well, that just made the day perfect.

“Well, what is that sense telling you?” Iona was nothing if not persistent.

“Nothing helpful, right at the moment,” I said. “There’s not a dead person around here, if that’s what you’re asking. The nearest corpse is so old it probably predates statehood, and it’s way under the soil of your neighbor’s front yard. Indian, probably. I’d have to get closer to be sure.”

I had finally shut them up. My aunt and uncle simply gaped at me. This was not moving us forward in our discussion. “But that doesn’t have anything to do with Matthew showing up at the rink today,” I reminded them. “Should you get a court order against him? I mean, he doesn’t have any legal rights over the girls anymore, am I right?”

“That’s correct,” Hank said, recovering much more quickly than his wife. “We’ve adopted them. He gave up his rights.”

“And I don’t want to call the police,” Iona said. “We’ve talked to the police enough to last us the rest of our lives.”

“So you want him to show back up again? Scare the girls again?”

“No! But we had enough to do with the police when your sister was taken! We don’t want them coming around here again.”

I understood what it felt like to want to glide below the police radar, though most of the law-enforcement people I’d met had simply been human beings trying to do a tough job with less money than they needed. But I also understood that, aside from Iona and Hank’s revulsion at the prospect of having police cars parked in front of the house again, my sisters were seriously upset. Maybe seeing the police arrive would make the girls fear they were in more danger than Matthew actually represented. After all, he had no reason to harm Mariella and Gracie. Maybe Iona and Hank were right, though for the wrong reason.

“Then there’s nothing else we can do,” Tolliver said, having reached the same conclusion I had. “We’ll be on our way.”

“How long are you going to be in town?” Iona said, sounding a little desperate. “Do you have another job to go to?”

She’d never been anxious for us to stick around before. In fact, she couldn’t get us to leave fast enough, every other time we’d visited.

“We could be here a few more days,” I said, after a glance at Tolliver. As a matter of fact, we didn’t have anything on our schedule now, though that could change tomorrow.

“Okay,” she said, nodding as if we had a bargain. “So we’ll call you if he shows up again.”

What were we supposed to do? I opened my mouth to protest, but Tolliver said, “All right. We’ll talk to you again tomorrow, anyway.”

“I’m going to talk to the school principal,” Iona said. “I hate for them to talk about us, but at least the girls’ teachers need to know that Matthew’s around.”

That was a relief. I noticed that my aunt was sitting as though she were exhausted, and that Hank was looking worried. I remembered she was pregnant. Hank caught my eye and jerked his head toward the door. I tried not to be exasperated that he thought we didn’t have enough intelligence to leave when we needed to.

Tolliver said, “Talk to you tomorrow, then. ’Bye, girls!” he called down the hall. After a second, I saw the girls peeking out of Mariella’s room, and I waved at them. They waved back, a little hesitantly. They were not smiling.

We got into our car in silence. I didn’t know what to say.

“We’ve got to stay a little while, to make sure he’s not bothering them,” Tolliver said after we’d gone a block.

“So what’s to stop him from waiting a couple of days after we leave and then showing up again?”

Tolliver shook his head as if a bee was buzzing around it. “Nothing will keep him away if he wants to follow them around. I don’t know what to do.”

“He can outwait us, and he will. Besides, what are we, a private army? Why are we suddenly so much protection?”

“I guess they see us as—worldly and much tougher than they are,” Tolliver said, after some thought.

“Well, they’re right about that. But that’s not saying a whole hell of a lot, huh?”

“He’s my dad. I feel like I have to do something.”

“I can see that you feel that way,” I said, which was as tactfully as I could put it. “And I can see you want to stay a couple more days, and that’s fine with me. But we can’t stay here forever, camping outside their house, waiting for your dad to approach the girls again. Unless he gets arrested again—and let’s face it, he probably will be, because he’ll start using again—there’s nothing to do about him trying to see them, unless Iona and Hank will go to the police. Even then, the police can’t watch the girls all the time.”

“I know.”

Tolliver’s tone was abrupt. I snapped my mouth shut on any more words I might have uttered. Neither of us said anything else, all the way back to our motel.

If there’s anything that makes me nervous and scattered, it’s dissension with my brother. I reminded myself again to stop thinking of Tolliver as my brother, because that was just creepy, but it was a hard habit to break.

When we were in the room, I couldn’t settle on an occupation. I didn’t want to read, and television is a wasteland on Sunday evening unless you like sports. I couldn’t focus on my crossword puzzle. I gathered up our laundry bags. “I’m going to find a Laundromat,” I said and left the room. If Tolliver said anything, I was out of there too fast to hear it. We needed a break from each other.

I inquired at the motel desk, and the clerk gave me really good directions to a large and clean place about a mile away. We always keep a stock of quarters, and we carry detergent and dryer sheets in the trunk. I was good to go.

There was an attendant in the Laundromat, an older woman with crisp white hair and a comfortable body. She was sitting at a little table, reading, and she glanced up when I came in to give me a nod of acknowledgment. Since it was the weekend, the place was busy, but after a little searching I spotted two empty machines side by side. I found a plastic chair and dragged it over, and after I’d loaded the machines and gotten them started, I sat down and pulled my book out of my purse.

I could read, now that I was away from Tolliver’s brooding presence. I don’t know why that was so. But it was kind of nice to have bustle and people around me, and it was reassuring to have the achievement of clean clothes.

I was at peace. There weren’t any bodies around. For a blissful period, I couldn’t hear any buzz at all in my head.

From time to time I looked around me to make sure I wasn’t in anyone’s way, and I saw a woman about my own age looking at me when I raised my head when the spin cycle was almost over.

“Are you that woman?” she asked. “Are you the psychic woman who finds bodies?”

“No,” I said instantly. “I’ve heard that before, but I work at the mall.”

That’s what I always said when I was in an urban area. It had always worked before. There was always a mall, and it provided a reasonable explanation for the questioner to have seen me before.

“Which mall?” the woman asked. She was pretty, even wearing her weekend sloppy clothes, and she was persistent.

“I’m sorry,” I said, with an appropriate smile, “I don’t know you.” I shrugged, which was supposed to mean,
I’m sure you’re okay, but I don’t want to discuss my personal information with you anymore
.

This gal just didn’t pick up on the cue. “You look just like her,” she said, smiling at me as if that ought to make me happy.

“Okay,” I said, and began pulling clothes out of the washers. I had already appropriated one of the rolling carts.

“If you were her, your brother would be somewhere around,” the woman said. “I’d sure like to meet him; he looks hot.”

“But I’m not her.” I rolled my cart away with everything else thrown in it along with the wet clothes. I had to stay long enough to dry them. I couldn’t leave now. If there was anything in the world I didn’t want to do, it was talk to this woman about my life, my activities, and my Tolliver.

The woman watched me the rest of the time I was in the Laundromat, though she didn’t approach me again, thank God. I pretended to read while our clothes tumbled, I pretended to be absorbed in folding them when they were dry, and I made up my mind that as far as I was concerned, she simply wasn’t there. This technique had worked for me in the past.

By the time I was ready to load the clothes into the car, I figured I’d gotten clean away. But no—here she came, following me out into the parking lot.

“Don’t talk to me again,” I said, shaken and at the end of my rope.

“You are her,” she said with a smug nod of her head.

“Leave me alone,” I said, and got in the car and locked the door. I waited to drive away until after she’d reentered the Laundromat. I hoped that someone had stolen her clothes while she’d come out to look at me some more.

At least now I knew she couldn’t follow me. But I did look into the rearview mirror a few times, just to be sure, which was how I noticed the car that actually
was
following me. It was hard to be sure, since it was dark by now, but since the area was so urban and well lighted, I was sure I was seeing the same gray Miata in my rearview mirror. I pressed the speed dial number for Tolliver.

“Hey,” he said.

“Someone’s following me.”

“Then come straight back here. I’ll go outside and wait.”

So I did go straight to the motel, and he was standing in an empty spot right outside our room, to make sure it stayed empty. I parked, leaped from the car, and sped into the room while he waited outside.

After a minute, Tolliver called my name. I checked through the peephole. He wasn’t alone.

“It’s okay,” he said, but he didn’t sound happy.

So I opened the door, and he came in with his father in tow.

Crap.

Tolliver turned to face his dad, standing side by side with me.

“What do you want?” he asked Matthew. “Why’d you follow Harper here?”

“I just want to talk to you, son.” Matthew glanced at me, tried to look apologetic. “Alone? This is family stuff, Harper.”