Grave Secret Page 0,6

cent we could to make the down payment on the house we were hoping to buy here in the Dallas area. St. Louis was more centrally located from a business point of view, but we could see our sisters more often if Dallas was our home base. Probably Iona and Hank wouldn't care for that, and they might throw a lot of obstacles in our way. They'd formally adopted the girls. But maybe we could persuade them that the girls would benefit from seeing us as much as we would from seeing them.

Tolliver came into the bathroom and paused to kiss my shoulder. I smiled as my eyes met his in the mirror.

"Police activity down the street," he said. "You know anything about that?"

"As a matter of fact, I do," I said, feeling guilty. I hadn't taken the time to explain to Tolliver before I'd gotten in the shower, and he'd distracted me after that. Now I told Tolliver about the dead man, and I explained about the rock and the window.

"The cops have found him by now, so you did the right thing. I have to say, I wish you'd just left him," Tolliver said.

Pretty much what I'd expected him to say; he was always cautious about being pulled into any situation that we hadn't been paid to deal with. Since I was watching him in the mirror, I saw the subtle changes in his stance that said he was going to switch the subject, and he was going to talk about something serious.

"Do you ever think maybe we should just let go?" Tolliver said.

"Let go?" I finished my right eye and held my mascara wand to the lashes of my left eye. "Let go of what?"

"Mariella and Gracie."

I turned to face him. "I don't understand what you're asking," I told him, though I was very much afraid that I did.

"Maybe we should only visit once a year. Just send Christmas presents and birthday presents the rest of the time."

I was shocked. "Why would we do that?" Wasn't that the whole purpose of saving every cent we could-so we could become a bigger part of their lives, not smaller?

"We're confusing them." Tolliver stepped a little closer and put his hand on my shoulder. "The girls may have their problems, but they're doing better with Iona than they would with us. We can't take care of them. We travel too much. Iona and Hank are responsible people, and they don't use alcohol or drugs. They take the girls to church; they make sure they're in school."

"Are you serious?" I said, though I'd never known Tolliver to be facetious about family topics. I felt blindsided. "You know I've never thought we should take the girls away, even if we could legally manage it. You seriously think we should keep even our visits to a minimum? See them even less?"

"I do," he said.

"Explain."

"When we show up-well, to start with, we come here so... irregularly, and we never stay long. We take them out, we try to show them things they don't get to see, we try to interest them in things that're not part of their daily life-and then we vanish, leaving their, well, their 'parents,' to deal with the result."

"The result? What result? We're the bad fairies or something?" I was trying very hard not to get angry.

"Iona told me last time-you remember, you took them to the movies-that it usually took her and Hank a week to get the girls back into their routine after one of our visits."

"But..." I didn't know where to start. I shook my head, as if that would arrange my thoughts in order. "We're supposed to do things for Iona's convenience? We're the girls' brother and sister. We love them. They need to know the whole world isn't like Iona and Hank." My voice rose.

Tolliver sat down on the bathtub's side. "Harper, Iona and Hank are raising them. They didn't have to take them in; the state would have taken them if Iona and Hank hadn't volunteered. I can almost guarantee that the court would have kept Mariella and Gracie in a foster home rather than giving them to us. We're lucky Iona and Hank were willing to give it a shot. They're older than most parents of kids that age. They're strict because they're scared the girls will turn out like your mom, or my dad. But they adopted the girls. They're the parents."

I opened my mouth, closed it. It was like a dam