Grave Secret

Hoping profoundly that no one would notice me, I closed my eyes and reached out. So many signals to sort through, so many clamoring to be recognized; I shuddered, but I persevered.



Freshest. Freshest. I needed something brand spanking new. That is, someone who'd passed over yesterday or even a few hours ago. There, out in front of me. I opened my eyes and walked to a grave still strewn with funeral flowers. I closed my eyes again, reached down.



"No," I muttered. "Not her." I was not surprised to find the detective at my elbow. "This is Brandon Barstow, who died in a car wreck," I told him. I reached out again. I felt the pull coming from the care-taker's shed. Very fresh.



"Here we go," I said, to the air in front of me, and I began walking. I watched my feet, because when I was tracking, it was easy to forget where my feet were going. Rudy Flemmons was right behind me, but he didn't know how to help me. That was okay; I could make it by myself.



The grass was wet and the pine needles made the ground slick in some spots. I knew where I was going; now there was no more uncertainty.



"They looked over here already," the detective said.



"Someone's here, though," I said. I already knew the bottom line on this search. "They're going to try to say I knew this somehow," I muttered, "and they'll try to keep me here."



The body wasn't in the shed itself, or right behind it. The ground behind the shed sloped down to a drainage ditch, where earth and grass thinly covered a culvert. Victoria was in the culvert; her body had been stuffed up inside, and it wasn't visible at all. But I could tell she was there, and I could tell she'd been shot and had bled out.



Rudy looked down uncomprehendingly, and I pointed to the mouth of the culvert. There was nothing for me to say. He scrambled down the slope and fell to his knees. He bent over and peered inside.



And he yelled.



"Here! Here!" he bellowed, and they all came running, every law enforcement person on the scene, including the guy who'd been examining the vehicle. Rudy was thinking, I suppose, that there was a chance she was still alive, but he was just dreaming or staving off the truth. I can't find the living.



I got out of their way, and went back to Victoria 's abandoned car.



The trunk was standing open. I found myself staring down into it, trying to look uninterested. There were file folders, lots of loose ones and some in a bundle bound together with a huge rubber band. The top one was labeled Lizzie Joyce, and before I could think about what I was doing I picked up the bundle and tossed it in Rudy's car. There were still plenty of file folders left, I told myself-and I also told myself that we owed it to ourselves to find out about our enemies.



I saw afterward that this had been the wrong action to take, incidentally. I should have left things to the police. But at the moment, it seemed a natural, even clever, tactic. That's all I can say in my own defense. One of these people was shooting at us; I had to find out which one was the most likely.



I got into Rudy's car. He had an old jacket tossed into the backseat, and I pulled it into the front and bundled it around me as though I were cold, which wasn't far from the truth. After a few minutes, a uniformed guy came up and said he was supposed to take me back to the hotel. I had put on the jacket and zipped it up with the files inside, by that time. I got out of Rudy's car and climbed into the squad car.



The uniform, a man in his thirties, had a shaven head and a grim face-not too surprising, considering the circumstances. He said exactly one thing to me on our drive. "As far as we're concerned, we found her during our search," he said, and he gave me a look that was supposed to make me quake in my boots. It was easy to nod in agreement. I must have looked cowed, because he didn't speak after that.



I made a clumsy job of getting out of the car because of the files. He must have wondered if I was physically disabled in some way, but it didn't soften his attitude any. With my arms wrapped across my middle I strode into the hotel, blessing the automatic doors that allowed me to keep my hands in place, my contraband secure, as I made my way to the elevator.



My hands were cold, and I had a hard time fishing out my plastic key card and putting it in the lock the right way, but the door opened and I almost leaped into the room.



"What happened?" Tolliver called instantly, and I hurried into the bedroom. The maid had been in, and the bed had been made; he was in clean pajamas and lying on top of the bedspread, with the blanket from the foldout couch spread over him. The curtains were open on the dismal gray day. It had begun raining while I was in the elevator. That would complicate things at the cemetery. Raindrops were sliding down the window glass. I went up to the bed, leaned over it, and pulled the bottom of Rudy Flemmons's old jacket open. The files landed on the bedspread with a thud.



"What have you done?" Tolliver asked, not in an accusatory way, but more as if he was simply interested. He clicked off the television and reached out for the bundle, but I was there ahead of him. I pulled off the rubber band, putting it aside for future use, and I handed him the top file, the one labeled Lizzie Joyce.



"So she was there," he said. "Dammit, she loved her little girl. This is getting worse and worse. Did it take long to find her?"



"Ten minutes," I said. "A patrolman brought me back."



"You stole the files?"



"Yeah. Out of her trunk."



"How likely are they to come looking?"



"Don't know how hard they'd looked before everyone scrambled to see if she could be revived. Maybe they'd already taken pictures." I shrugged. I couldn't undo it now.



"What are we looking for?" he asked.



"We're trying to find out which one of these people is most likely to be the one who shot you."



"Then you have my undivided attention," he said.



I took off my wet, muddy boots, climbed up on the bed with him, and started in on Kate's file while he tackled Lizzie's.



An hour later I had to take a break and call room service for some coffee and some food. Neither of us had had breakfast, and it was now almost eleven.



We'd learned a lot.



"She was really good," I said. I'd never appreciated Victoria before, but I did now. In a very short time, she'd amassed a lot of information and interviewed quite a few people.



Tolliver was grateful to get a cup of coffee, and he was also glad to get a bran muffin. I slathered it with butter for him, an unusual indulgence. He chewed and swallowed and took another sip of coffee. "God, that tastes good after hospital food," he said. "Lizzie Joyce is a colorful woman, even more colorful than she seemed that day at the cemetery. She really is a barrel-riding champion, several times over, and she's won a lot of other rodeo titles. She was rodeo queen in her teens, all over the state, looks like, and she was also an honor graduate from high school and ranked thirtieth in her class at Baylor."



I didn't know how many people were in a Baylor class, but that sounded pretty damn good to me. "What was her major, just out of curiosity?"



"Business," he said. "Her dad was already grooming her to take over from him. The Joyces own a huge ranch, but the bulk of his money came from oil in the big boom, and it's since been invested, a lot of it overseas. There is a corps of accountants who just look after Joyce holdings. Victoria says they all keep watch over each other, too, so no one can embezzle; or at least, they won't get away with it if they do. The Joyces also have a big interest in a law firm founded by an uncle."



"So, what do they do?" I asked.



Tolliver understood what I meant, which was kind of amazing. "They donate a lot of money to cancer research; that's what took Rich Joyce's wife. They maintain a ranch for disabled children. That's their big charity. It's open five months a year, and the Joyces pay the salaries of the staff, though they accept donations, too. Then they have the main ranch, which the boyfriend, Chip Moseley, is in charge of running. They live there, when they aren't in the Dallas apartment or the Houston apartment. I haven't read the boyfriend's file yet."



"I'll get to it next," I said. "Kate, also known as Katie, is not as smart as her sister. She flunked out of Texas A &M, after majoring in partying, sounds like. In her teens, she had a couple of arrests for driving under the influence, and she smashed the windows on a boyfriend's car when they broke up. Since then, she's grown up a little, apparently. She works on the small ranch set up for the disabled children, she organizes fund-raisers for that ranch, and she shops. Oh, she did a stint as a volunteer at the zoo."



That just sounded boring.



Chip Moseley was more interesting. He'd come up from the rank and file. His parents had died when he was little, and he'd gone into a foster home, which happened to be on a working ranch. He'd learned to rodeo and made a name for himself. Right out of high school, he'd gotten a job on the Joyce ranch. He'd gotten through one marriage and fell in with Lizzie. He'd worked his way up and taken night courses, and now he managed the cattle operations at the ranch and he'd been "dating" Lizzie for six years. Aside from a minor brush with the law when he was in his twenties, he was clean. He'd been arrested in a bar brawl in a dive in Texarkana. To my surprise, I recognized the name of the place. My mother and stepfather had gone there from time to time.



I was tired of reading by then. I flopped back on my pillow. Tolliver told me what was in Victoria 's file on Drex, though I had surmised most of it after ten minutes in Drex's company. The only male Joyce had been a disappointment all the way around. He'd gotten his high school girlfriend pregnant and they'd had a runaway marriage, followed by a divorce in six months. Drex supported the baby and its mother. Drex had joined the Marines right after he'd turned eighteen (take that, Dad!) and he'd made it through basic until he'd developed ulcers. Or maybe the ulcers he'd already had had gotten worse. Anyway, he'd left the service honorably, and gone on to drift around, doing this and that on his father's big ranch. He'd also worked with the disabled kids from time to time, and he'd worked in one of his dad's friend's businesses for a couple of years in an office job. It wasn't clear exactly what he'd done there.



"Probably not much, and probably not well," Tolliver said. "I don't think he's ever gone to college."



"I feel sorry for him," I said. I yawned. "I wonder how old Victoria 's mom is. I wonder if she can bring the kid up on her own. Who's the dad? Did Victoria ever say?"



"I wondered if it was my father," Tolliver said, and I froze in the middle of another yawn.



"You're not kidding," I said. "You mean it."



"Yeah," he said. " Victoria was around a lot after Cameron disappeared, you know. But when I figured it out, the timing was wrong. I think he was already in jail by the time the baby was conceived. I never could figure out why women thought he was so attractive."



"I sure don't," I said, with absolute sincerity.



"Well, good thing. You like men taller and thinner, right?"



"Oh, you bet, bay-bee. I love those string beans!"



Our hands clasped, and I snuggled closer to Tolliver on the bed. There was a little silence while we watched the rain hit the window of the room. The skies had decided to let go in earnest. I felt sorry for everyone who might still be out at the crime scene, and I decided they should be grateful to me for finding Victoria earlier, in time to get her body out of the culvert. I thought about the Joyce family, the kids who had grown up to be typical rich adults, as far as I could tell. They did some things that were quite good, but it was the bad things I was interested in. I thought it was significant that none of them had managed to sustain a happy marriage-though they were all in the prime age range, and one of them might make it yet. I was just about to shake my head over the truism that being rich didn't mean being happy, when I had the unpleasant realization that Mark, Tolliver, Cameron, and I had hardly turned out to be fulfilled citizens, either. Cameron was in some unknown place, Mark had never had a serious girlfriend that I knew of, and Tolliver and I...



"Do you really want to get married?" I asked him.



"Yes, I really do," he said without a second's hesitation. "I'd do it tomorrow, if we could. There's no doubt, is there? Do you have any worries about us being right for each other?"



"No," I said. "I don't. You're sure far from the commitment-phobic guys in the magazines, Tolliver."



"You're not anything like the women in the men's magazines, either. And that's a compliment."



"We sure know each other," I said. "We've probably seen the worst of each other. I can't imagine trying to get through life without you. Does that sound too clingy? I can try to be more independent."



"You are independent. You make a lot of decisions, every day," he said. "It's just easier for me to make the practical arrangements. Then you do your specialty. Then we leave, and it's my turn again."



Somehow that didn't sound completely even.



"Where's Manfred?" he asked, suddenly, as if someone had poked him with a needle.



"Gosh, I don't know. He told me to call him if I needed him. He didn't say where he was going or what he was going to do when he got there."



"He really has a crush on you."



"Yeah, I know."



"How about it? If I was to vanish, would you take up with the Pierced Wonder?"



He said that in a teasing voice, but he wanted a reply. I wasn't foolish enough to actually ponder the question and answer it seriously. "Are you kidding? That'd be like having hamburger after having steak," I said loyally. I admitted to myself that there were days when I sure craved a hamburger, and I didn't doubt there would be times when Tolliver eyed other women with appreciation. If he could just keep that urge to the eyeing level, I could do the same. I knew who I loved.