When Matthew came into the living room and walked over to his son while I was still holding the door open, my eyes followed him, and I froze with my hand still on the door. Matthew was the man I’d seen leaving Dr. Bowden’s office that morning. He’d been going out the doors across the lobby as we’d been entering. Same clothes, same walk, same set of the shoulders.

Manfred’s eyes followed mine, and his widened. He asked me a silent question. After a moment, I shook my head. There was no point in having a confrontation-at least, my scrambled head couldn’t instantly see any advantage.

If Matthew admitted he’d been there, he’d simply tell us that he was visiting another doctor, or a lawyer, or an accountant, in the same building, for whatever reason. It would be hard to disprove. But his presence in Tom Bowden’s building was more coincidence than I could bite off and chew.

It had never occurred to me that Matthew’s reappearance in his children’s lives had anything to do with the Joyces.

Instead of joining the three men, I went into the bedroom and sat on the side of the bed. I felt as if someone had just slammed a car door on my legs, when I was only half in. I tried hard to focus on one idea out of the dozens that were suddenly percolating in my head. My whole world had shifted, and regaining my balance in that world was almost impossible.

Mariah Parish was dead. She had died in childbirth.

Rich Joyce was dead. He’d been shocked to death, if you could call it that.

Victoria Flores, whom Lizzie Joyce had hired to investigate Mariah’s death, was dead, too.

Parker Powers, who’d been investigating the case, was dead.

My stepfather had been to the doctor’s office, the doctor who was present when Mariah Parish had died.

And what else had happened only a couple of months after the mysterious birth of the mysterious baby eight years ago?

My sister Cameron had vanished.

Sixteen

I went into the bathroom and locked the door. I closed the toilet lid and sat on the toilet. I didn’t turn on the light. I didn’t want to see my reflection.

Matthew was somehow connected to the Joyces, though I had no idea how. And he was also Cameron’s stepfather. And as near as I could ascertain, not that long after Mariah Parish’s baby had been born, Cameron had disappeared. It had never, ever occurred to me that anyone in our family had anything to do with Cameron’s disappearance. When the police had questioned my mother and Matthew, and Mark and Tolliver and me, I had raged at them because they were wasting time that should be spent tracing the real killer or killers.

I had suspected the boys at our high school, particularly Cameron’s last boyfriend, who hadn’t taken their breakup with good grace. I’d suspected Laurel and Matthew’s druggie friends. I’d suspected a random stranger, any stranger, who’d seen Cameron walking home alone and decided to rob her/rape her/abduct her. I’d suspected the guys who’d sometimes blown wolf whistles at us when we’d been out together. I’d constructed hundreds of scenarios. Some of them were wildly implausible. But they all gave me a possible answer to the terrible mystery of the disappearance of my sister, an answer that didn’t involve feeling even more pain from another personal loss.

I felt a deep conviction that even if I couldn’t see the connection, even if it seemed incredible, two such incidents could not happen that close together without there being some kind of connection, not if the same man was involved in both incidents.

Was I grossly overreacting? I tried to think, though my brain was cloudy with rage. My stepfather knew something about the Joyces. He knew enough to know the name of the doctor who’d “treated” Mariah Parish.

He knew. And I believed he also knew what had happened to my sister. All these years, he’d kept it from me.

I felt it in my bones.

I couldn’t go into the living room and grab him by the neck. He was too strong for me. Tolliver wouldn’t let me kill his father. Probably even Manfred, who had no personal stake in the matter, would feel obliged to intervene. But Tolliver was weak and injured, and Manfred would leave sooner or later.

It took all the self-control I could muster to break away from seriously considering how to kill my stepfather.

For one thing, it would be wrong. Maybe. For another thing, a much more important thing, I didn’t know enough. I wanted to find my sister’s final resting place. I wanted to be sure I knew what had happened to Cameron.

To that end, I had to be prepared to tolerate Matthew’s presence.

I worked on it, there alone in the dark. I schooled myself to be strong. And then I got up and turned on the light and washed my face, as if I could wash the new knowledge off of it and return to what had been my happy ignorance.

I went out into the living room, having to move slowly. I felt I’d been kicked in the ribs-fragile, and sore with the suspicion and loathing I carried inside.

I could tell immediately that Matthew wanted Manfred to leave so he could talk to his son alone, and Manfred had not wanted to leave until he spoke to me again. He looked from Matthew to me as I came into the room, and he shuddered. Whatever Manfred saw in me, neither Tolliver nor Matthew could see. That was a good thing.

“Manfred,” I said. “I’m sorry I flaked out on you. Thanks for going with me today.”

“No problem,” Manfred said, leaping to his feet with an alacrity that told me how anxious he was to get out of this hotel room. “Would you like to go out and get a cup of coffee with me? Or do you need me to take you to the store? Got enough… potato chips?” He was reaching, there. We never ate potato chips. I felt a smile twitch at the corners of my mouth. “Thanks, Manfred.” I debated quickly inside myself. Manfred wanted to talk to me about what I now realized was our mutual recognition of Matthew, but I didn’t know yet what I was going to do. Better to avoid the tête-à-tête until I had made a plan. “I guess I’ll stick around here in case Tolliver needs me.”

I hugged him, acting on an impulse. His bones felt small as my arms circled his body. Somewhat hesitantly, he hugged me back. He was floundering under the psychic image he’d gotten from me. If he could see anything like the way I felt, then he’d seen something awful and murderous. “Don’t do it,” he said into my ear, and I let go of him and stood back.

“Don’t worry, we’ll be fine,” I said reassuringly. “I’ll call you if I need help, I promise.”

“Well… okay. I do have some readings to work on this afternoon. But my cell phone’s always charged up and in my pocket. ’Bye, Tolliver. Mr. Lang.” And with a last hard look directly into my eyes, Manfred was out the door, walking swiftly down the hall without a backward glance.

“What a flake,” said Matthew. “Tolliver, you hang out much with people like that? He must be a friend of yours, Harper.”

“He is a friend of mine,” I said. “His grandmother was, too.” I felt really strange, kind of out of myself. Matthew was sitting beside Tolliver on the couch, so I took the chair. I crossed my legs and wrapped my hands around my top knee. “It was really messy outside this morning, wasn’t it, Matthew?”

He looked surprised. “Yeah, traffic was a bitch. It always is in Dallas. Raining, too.”

“Did you have errands to run this morning?”

“Oh, a few things I had to do. I have to be at work at two thirty.”

Was he really working at McDonald’s? Or was he meeting one of the Joyces? Had he always been in their pay?

And the man I loved most in the world, the only person I truly loved, was this man’s son.

That might bother Tolliver, but it didn’t make any difference to me. More than most people, I understand the difference between the children and the parents. I had been brought up by the same woman who’d neglected her two little girls so much that her older children had had to take care of them.