Nine

THE restaurant where I met Victoria Flores was crowded, and servers were bustling back and forth. It seemed incredibly lively after the muted sounds of the hospital.

To my surprise, Victoria wasn’t by herself. Drexell Joyce, Lizzie and Kate’s brother, was sitting at the table with her.

“Hey, girl,” Victoria said, rising to give me a hug. I was surprised, but not enough to pull back. I hadn’t known we were on those terms. Somehow, this show was being put on for Drexell Joyce. I’d been picturing a relaxed dinner between two women who found out secrets for a living, not a strategy session with an unknown man.

“Mr. Joyce,” I said as I sat down and stowed my purse under the table.

“Oh, please, call me Drex,” he said with a broad grin. He poured a lot of admiration into his look. I didn’t believe in his sincerity for a second.

“What are you doing away from the ranch?” I asked, with what I hoped was a disarming smile.

“My sisters asked me to come check with Victoria, here, see what she’s found out and how the investigation’s going. If we have a little aunt or uncle out there, we want to find that baby and make sure he’s brought up right,” Drex said.

“You’re simply assuming that Mariah Parish’s child was your grandfather’s?” I found that astonishing, and I didn’t try to hide it.

“Yeah, that’s what I’m thinking. He was an old dog, no doubt about it, but he had a few tricks. My granddad liked the ladies, always did.”

“And you think Mariah Parish would have been agreeable to his advances?”

“Well, he had a lot of charisma, and she might have thought her job depended on saying yes. Granddad didn’t like to hear ‘no.’ ”

Charming. I couldn’t think of anything to say, so I didn’t speak.

“So, how’s your brother?” Victoria asked, her voice warm and concerned.

I was disappointed. I was sure now that Victoria had asked me here for some secret purpose of her own. She hadn’t simply wanted my company, after all. “He’s doing much better, thanks,” I said. “I hope he’ll be out of the hospital in another day.”

“Where will you go next?”

“Tolliver usually handles our bookings, and I’ll have to go over our schedule with him when he feels up to it. We had originally planned on staying here at least a week, so we could see our family.”

“Oh, you got folks in this area?” Drex leaned forward, all interest.

“Yes, our two little sisters live here.”

“Who’s bringing ’em up?”

“My aunt and her husband.”

“They live right around here?”

It could be true that Drex was simply fascinated by all things Harper, but I didn’t credit his interest as personal. “Does your family spend a lot of time in Dallas?” I asked. “I saw your sisters the other day, and now you’re here. That’s lots of driving.”

“We have an apartment here, and one down in Houston,” Dex said. “We’re on the ranch around ten months out of the year, but we all need to see the bright lights from time to time. ’Cept Chip. He loves running that ranch. But Kate and Lizzie sit on about ten boards apiece, from banks to charities, and those meet in Dallas.”

“Not you?” Victoria asked. “You don’t do charity work?”

Drex laughed, his head thrown back. I suspected that was so we could see his handsome jawline from another angle. I wondered what he would do when he got older and that jawline wasn’t quite as firm. I know from my own experience that no one looks pretty in the grave.

“ Victoria, I guess most boards are smarter than to ask me to be on ’em,” he said. He had a down-home twinkle in his eye. Just one of the good ol’ boy millionaires. “I’m not too good at sitting still, and I’d go to sleep if I had to listen to all them speeches.”

How could Victoria listen to all this bullshit? She gave every appearance of being genuinely charmed by this asshole.

“But Victoria, to get back to the topic, how’s the search going?” Drex asked, with the air of a man who had to abandon his bit of fun to return to grim business.

“Pretty well, I think,” Victoria said, and I went on the alert. Victoria sounded calm and competent, and more than a little cagey. “I’m working on a complete biography of Mariah, and it’s not as easy as I thought it would be. What kind of background check did you run on her before she was hired to help your grandfather?”

“I don’t guess Lizzie had that done,” Drex said, sounding genuinely startled. “I think it was my granddad who did the hiring. Mariah was living in the house by the time we found out about it.”

“But you’d considered hiring a housekeeper for him?” Victoria asked.

“He needed something more than a housekeeper, but less than a registered nurse,” Drex said. “He needed an assistant. Really, she was like a nanny. Made sure he ate the right food, tried to monitor how much he drank. But he would’ve smacked us silly if we’d called her that. She took his blood pressure every day, too.”

Victoria pounced on that. “Mariah had a nursing degree?”

“No, no. I don’t think she had a degree at all. She was supposed to make sure he took his medicine, remind him about his appointments, drive him if he didn’t feel well, call the doctor if she noticed anything off a list of warning signals they gave her. She was kind of our human Life Alert, at least that was the idea.”

I exchanged a quick glance with Victoria. So I hadn’t been the only one to detect a note of resentment in Drex’s monologue. By now I wasn’t convinced that Victoria was as interested in Drex as she’d appeared at first. Victoria was playing a deeper game than I could plot and execute.

“She saw her role a little differently?” I asked.

“Hell, yes. She saw herself as a watchdog, I guess,” Drex said. He took a big swallow of his beer. He looked around to see if our server was within hailing distance. We’d placed our orders a few minutes before.

“Why did your family pay for her funeral and put her in the family plot?” I asked. It was a subject I’d wondered about a couple of times. “Where were her people?”

“We looked through all her stuff after she died, and we couldn’t find anything with any names and addresses on it,” Drex said. “Lizzie asked all of us what she’d said about her family, where she came from, and no one could come up with anything. We asked Chip, and none of his kinfolks could remember anything.”

“What about her Social Security Number? As her employer, your granddad had to have that.”

“He paid her under the table.”

It baffled me why a man as rich as Richard Joyce would choose to do that. The Joyces had to have accountants and business people who would jump at the chance to be useful.

Drex said, “When Lizzie met Mariah, she told Granddad she thought Mariah wouldn’t work out. Granddad thought she’d stay, but he could tell we didn’t like Mariah that much. He didn’t want to go to the trouble of setting something up, only to have to fire Mariah.” He sounded defensive, and I could understand why. I exchanged a long look with Victoria.

“So your granddad hired someone he didn’t know, paid her under the table, and didn’t know anything about her previous work history, and he had her living in his house with him.” If I sounded incredulous, pardon me. “Did you say you asked Chip to talk to his family after Mariah died?” I heard thunder and looked over at a window to see rain hitting the glass.

“Yes, they knew her. It was Chip who told us Mariah would be good for the job.”

There was a long silence, while Drex looked around some more for our server and Victoria and I were absorbed in our own thoughts. I didn’t know what was going through Victoria ’s mind, but I was thinking that I hoped my family took better care of me than the Joyces had of their patriarch, Richard.

“How long has Lizzie been seeing Chip?” Victoria asked, as if she was introducing an entirely new topic, a little social side trip.