Grave Secret

Page 32

"How'd you come to think of that, Kate?" I asked.
Kate was clearly in a bad state. Her face was white, her breathing panicky. Her hands were tied to the arms of the chair, and I saw her wrists were chafed raw. It took her a moment to understand the question.
"Drex," she said, her voice jerky. "Drex told me that he'd met you once."
Chip's head whipped around like he was a snake about to strike. "Drex, thanks to you, we've lost everything," he said in a deadly voice. "What were you thinking?"
"It come on the TV when we were watching the news," Drex whispered. "About her being in North Carolina, finding those boys' bodies. I told Kate I'd gone to her trailer when she was living in Texarkana, 'cause I knew her stepfather. I'd met her."
"And you told Lizzie," I said to Kate.
"She's always looking for something new," Kate said. "That's the name of the game, here. Find things for Lizzie, keep her happy."
Lizzie looked absolutely astounded. If we lived through this day, she would have a lot of mental rearranging to do.
"So it's a TV newscaster that brought me down." Chip laughed, and it was an awful sound.
"How much of a snake handler are you, Chip?" I asked.
"Oh, now, that's Drex's strong point," he said, grinning at the man standing beside him.
"Jesus, no!" Lizzie said, shocked out of her senses. "Drex? Chip, are you saying that Drex threw a rattler at Granddaddy?"
"That's what I'm sayin', darlin'," Chip said. His grip on Lizzie's shoulder never wavered.
"Have you gone nuts, man?" Drexell said, and his face looked different now. He didn't look as bewildered and befuddled as he had. He didn't look as weak as he had. He looked craftier and harder. "Why are you telling my sisters lies?"
"Because we're not going to get away with it," Chip said. "You hadn't gotten that yet, I see." Drexell looked blank. "There're too many loose ends, fool. We should have killed the doctor. Yes, you asshole, sometime within the past few years we should have moseyed on over to Dallas and taken care of that old idiot. And we knew Matthew was getting out of jail sooner or later. We should have been waiting outside the gate for him with a gun."
Now there was a sentiment I could agree with.
"You say we're not going to get away with it," Drex said. "So why are you doing this hostage thing? I thought you were playing a deeper game. I thought you had a plan. You're just crazy."
"Yes, I am, and I'll tell you why," Chip said. He let go of Lizzie's shoulder, and she swung around to face him, taking a step backward, closer to the wall covered with guns. "I had me an appointment with a much better doctor than Bowden last week, and you know what he told me? I'm eaten up with cancer. At thirty-two! And I don't give a fuck what happens when I'm not on the earth anymore. I don't have long enough to live for you-all to do anything to me. Since I'm not getting away with anything, I sure as hell don't want ol' Drex to."
His eyes were mean beyond belief when he said this.
"You're going to die?" said Lizzie. "Well, good. I wish Drex had cancer, too. I want you both to die." She seemed to have shaken off her fear, and I wished I could do the same. I looked at Tolliver, and I thought we would not make it through this. Chip would take us all out, because we were going to live and he wasn't.
With one incredibly fast motion, Lizzie grabbed a rifle off the wall, the one right by one of the doors. It was pointed at Chip in a split second. "Go on and shoot yourself, since you're going to die anyway!" She meant it, too, and she was ready with that rifle. "Save me the trouble!"
"I'm not going by myself," said her lover, and he shot Drexell Joyce in the chest.
Katie shrieked and went over backward in her chair, covered with the mist of her brother's blood, and as we all looked at the falling dead man, the screaming woman, Chip put the gun barrel in his mouth and fired at the same moment Lizzie did.
Chapter Twenty
I was so tired after the sheriff's department finished with us that it was hard to focus when I got behind the wheel to drive back to Dallas. In fact, we never did make it to Garland. When I realized there was no real reason why we should, I pulled off at the next exit and got a room. We were just about out in the middle of nowhere, except it was nowhere with an interstate and a motel. It wasn't a very good motel, but we could be pretty sure that no one was going to shoot us through the window.
I was still confused about several things, but both the shooters were dead.
Tolliver took his medicine, and we crawled into the bed. The sheets felt cold and almost damp, and I got back out of bed to turn the heater up. It made the curtains billow in an unpleasant way. I've run into that before, and I keep a big clip in my overnight pack for just such a situation. It came in handy tonight. As I got between the sheets, I realized that Tolliver was already asleep.
When I woke, the sun was up outside. Tolliver was in the bathroom, trying to take a sponge bath, and he was grumbling to himself about it.
"What are you talking about in there?" I asked, sitting and swinging my legs out from under the covers.
"I want to shower," he said. "I want to shower more than anything."
"I'm sorry," I said, and I was. "But we can't get the shoulder wet for a few more days."
"Tonight we'll try taping a garbage bag or a grocery sack over it," he said. "If we tape it good, I can shower and be out before the tape starts to give."
"We'll try," I said. "What should we do today?"
He didn't answer.
"Tolliver?"
Silence.
I got up and went into the bathroom. "Hey, you, what's with the silent treatment?"
"Today," he said, "we have to go talk to my dad."
"We have to," I said, letting only a hint of a question seep into the words.
"We have to," he said, absolutely positive.
"And then?"
"We're going to ride off into the sunset," he said. "We're going to go back to St. Louis and be by ourselves for a while."
"Oh, that sounds good. I wish we could skip the part about your dad and go right into the 'be by ourselves.'"
"I thought you'd be straining to get at him." He'd started working on his stubble, and he paused, one cheek still gleaming with shaving gel.
I'd thought so, too. "There's a lot I almost don't want to know," I said. "I never imagined I'd feel like this. I've waited so long."
He put his good arm around me and held me close. "I thought about leaving Texas today," he said. "I thought about it. But we can't."
"No," I said.
I called Dr. Spradling's nurse that morning and told her, as I'd been instructed, that Tolliver wasn't running a temperature, wasn't bleeding, and his wound didn't look red. She reminded me to make sure he took his medicine, and that was that. Despite the shocks of the previous day, Tolliver looked better than he had since the night he was shot, and I was sure he was going to be fine.
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 running from the driveway to the front door. There were cobwebs on the lighting fixtures on either side of the door, and the landscaping was nonexistent. It looked like a house that the owner didn't care about.
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 flannel shirt. "I've got to get to work in an hour, but it's great to see you," he said to Tolliver, then turned his face so his smile could include me.
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."