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.

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.”

It was good to have a plan of action, excellent to have Tolliver feel up to forming that plan. Iona called and invited us over to supper at their house, if Tolliver was feeling up to the excursion. He nodded, so I told her we’d be glad to come. I didn’t ask if we could bring anything, because I couldn’t imagine what we could bring and she always turned me down anyway, as though anything I brought into their house would be suspect. The day was boring, restless, and interminable.