Grave Surprise Page 0,15

associates.

"From the get-go," Joel said, his voice resigned. "After nosing around Vic for a while, they got the idea that Diane was guilty."

I could almost see why they'd suspect Joel, even Victor. But Diane?

"How could that be?" I said incautiously, and she flushed. "I'm sorry," I said instantly. "I'm not trying to dredge up bad memories. I was sure, always, that you and Joel were telling the truth."

"Tabitha and I had a fight that morning," Diane said. Big fat tears ran down her cheeks. "I was mad because we'd just given her a cell phone for her birthday, and she'd already exceeded her minutes. I took her cell away from her, and then I told her to go outside to water the plants around the front door, just to get her out of the house because I was so angry. She was furious, too. Spring break, and no way to communicate with her three hundred best friends. She was just into that 'Mo-THER!' stage, the eye-rolling thing." Diane wiped her face with Joel's handkerchief. "I didn't think we'd get to that until she was fifteen, and here she was, eleven years old, giving me the whole routine." She smiled in a watery sort of way. "I hated to tell the police about this really trivial conversation, but one of my neighbors overheard us arguing when she came over to ask if we were through with our paper. So then I had to relate the whole thing to the police, and they turned hostile so quickly, as if I'd been withholding important evidence from them!"

Of course, to the police, this was important evidence. The fact that Diane couldn't see that only proved what I'd suspected about her when I'd met her: Diane Morgenstern was no rocket scientist. I was willing to bet that she never read crime fiction, either. If she had, she'd have known that any such revelation would make the police suspicious.

All the incident really proved was that Diane was out of touch with popular culture, in the reading-and-television-watching category.

"When did you move to Memphis?" Tolliver asked.

"About a year ago," Joel said. "We couldn't wait there, in that house, any longer." He sat up a little straighter, and as if he were reciting a credo, he said, "We had to accept the fact that our daughter was gone, and we had to leave that house ourselves. It wouldn't be fair to the new family we're starting, to have the baby there. I actually grew up in Memphis, so it felt like coming home, to me. My parents are here. And Felicia was here, along with her parents, my first in-laws. She and Victor are very close, and we figured the move would be a good thing for him. He's had a very tough time."

So everyone was happy here, except possibly Diane. It hadn't been coming home for her. It had been a move to a strange city that held many memories for her husband, memories of his first wife.

"We'd had a lot of therapy, the whole family," Diane said softly.

"We all went, Diane and I and Victor," Joel said. "Even Felicia drove over to Nashville from Memphis to go to some of the sessions."

I'd been to therapy, too.

The high school guidance counselor had been horrified when Cameron's disappearance had exposed the conditions under which we lived. "Why didn't you come to me?" she'd asked, more than once. And one time she'd shaken her head and said, "I should have noticed." I didn't blame her for not noticing; after all, we'd gone to great efforts to conceal our home life, so we could stay together. Maybe a part of me had hoped that our substandard parents would be taken away and we would be given good parents, instead; but that hadn't happened.

"When is the new baby due?" Art asked in the cheerful voice parents used when they weren't going to be having any more babies themselves.

"In five weeks," Diane said, an involuntary smile curving her lips even under the circumstances. "A healthy boy, the doctor says."

"That's great," Tolliver and I said, more or less in unison. I eyed Felicia Hart, who'd risen to stand behind the love seat. Felicia was looking less than ecstatic, perhaps even impatient. Maybe she thought the new baby would mean even more attention was diverted from Victor. It was also possible the childless Felicia was even more creeped out by pregnant women than I was.

"Today, we have to deal with Tabitha," Diane said, to give