"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.
"It's my sister's," I said. "She left it the day she vanished."
I turned away to answer Tolliver's call. He'd woken up briefly and asked for a pain pill. He drifted back to sleep before he even took it.
When I came back in the living room, Manfred was withdrawing his hand from the backpack. He looked sad. "I'm sorry this happened to you, Harper."
"Well, thanks for the kind thought, Manfred, but it happened to my sister. I was just caught up in the aftermath."
"I'll see you soon. Don't worry if I don't call for a couple of days. I've got a job to do."
"Oh... okay, Manfred." I hadn't thought about worrying. He gave me a peck on the cheek when he left, and I was glad to shut the door behind him. I sat and thought about my sister.
It was a long night. I finally fell asleep after midnight.
Chapter Eighteen
TOLLIVER woke up the next morning feeling much better. He'd slept for twelve hours straight, and when he woke me up he let me know that he was full of energy. We had to be careful, but with me on top, sex was doable. Very doable. An absolute delight, in fact. And I thought the top of his head was going to fly off, he enjoyed it so much. He lay there panting afterward, as if he'd done the work, and I collapsed beside him, laughing in a breathless kind of way.
"Now I feel like myself," he said. "Somehow it makes you feel even less like a man, when you're bedridden and then you can't even stand the physical part of having sex. Reduces you to a kid."
"Let's just get in the car and go," I suggested. "Let's go to the apartment. We could be in St. Louis in a day. You could ride that long, I bet."
"What about staying here to visit more with the girls? What about finding out if my father was connected to the Joyces and Cameron?"
"Maybe you were right. Maybe we need to leave the girls to Iona and Hank. They're stable, in every sense. We travel so much. We'll never be a constant in their lives. And your dad? He's going to hell anyway. If we drop all this, it'll just take him a little longer. We could be free of him."
Tolliver looked thoughtful. "Come here," he said, and I put my head on his good shoulder. He didn't wince, so that was all right. I stroked the part of his chest not covered with a bandage. Looking back on the time between my discovery that I loved him as a man and the time I found out he felt the same and we acted on it, I wondered how I had survived. We were incredibly lucky, and I knew there was a part of me that I found somewhat scary, the part that would do anything to prevent what we had from being jeopardized.
"You know what we ought to do," he said.
"What?"
"We ought to take a day trip."
"Oh, where to?"
"To Texarkana."
I froze. "Are you serious?" I said, raising my head to look him in the eyes.
"Yeah, I am. It's time we went back to just look around and let go."
"Let go."
"Yeah. We've got to realize that we're not going to find Cameron."
"I've got some things to tell you about that."
"Oh?" His voice had an apprehensive edge. If I hadn't liked what he'd said, he was going to dislike what I had to say even more.
"I made some calls yesterday," I said. "And I got some calls. While you were asleep. I've got to tell you about them."
An hour later, Tolliver was saying, "That woman was wrong? All the time they were looking for the wrong thing? She was just mixed up?"
"She never said she saw Cameron clearly, only that the backpack was there after she saw a blond girl get into a blue truck," I said. "Who knows? So we're back to square one. In fact..." I thought for a second. "In fact, that throws the whole timeline off. She said Cameron had been picked up thirty minutes before I talked to her, and I set out to look for Cameron almost exactly at five o'clock. But now we can be pretty sure Cameron was picked up by someone even earlier."
"She left the school at four, right?"
"Right. That's what-oh, her friend, what's her name-Rebecca. That's what Rebecca said. But she also said that maybe the time wasn't on the nose. They'd worked all last period decorating the gym and kept going after school was out. I'd always thought she stood around in the parking lot talking to one of her friends, but now I'm assuming she went straight home. You were at work at the restaurant. Mark was driving between his job at Taco Bell and his job at Super Save-a-Lot."
"A seven-minute drive," Tolliver said automatically. We'd talked about it so often.
"Your dad was at Renaldo Simpkins's place from around four to six thirty. My mom was passed out, as usual."
We looked at each other. With the timeline changed, Matthew's ass wasn't as covered as we'd thought.
"No matter what I think of him, I don't want to believe it," I said.
"We do need to go to Texarkana."
"Let's call the doctor's office and see what his nurse says."
The nurse said no. The nurse said Tolliver needed to stay in the hotel room. No matter how many precautions we said he'd take, she said no. She was glad that he felt much better, but he would tire as the day went on.
Of course we could simply have ignored her strictures and done what we wanted, but I was against that. I suspected she was right to say no, and though I would have been glad if Tolliver had been up to traveling, in all conscience I didn't want to get some hours' drive away from the hospital and have some kind of emergency. Certainly there were doctors in Texarkana, certainly there were hospitals, but common sense said the hospital and doctor who'd treated him initially would be best.
We sat looking at each other. We had few choices: postpone the drive to Texarkana until Tolliver was better, ask Manfred if he was in the area and could go with me, or ask Mark if he could take a day off work to ride with me. "Here's a novel thought: I could go by myself," I said. Tolliver shook his head vehemently. "I know you can, and I know you'd do fine," he said. "But when it's about Cameron, we both should go. We'll wait today, and tomorrow, if we have to. Then, no matter what, we go."