Grave Surprise by Charlaine Harris Read Free Book Online Page B

truth. “I’m sorry I found her so late, and I’m sorry the circumstances make life even more difficult for you.” It made life ahell of a lot more difficult for us, too, but this didn’t seem like the moment to dwell on it.
    â€œYou’re right, this doesn’t look good for us,” Joel said. He took Diane’s hand. “We were already under suspicion. Not Felicia, of course, but Diane and I and Victor, and now that…” He had trouble going on. “Now that her body has been found here—of all the places on earth—I think the police are going to decide it was one of us all along. I almost don’t blame them. It just looks bad. If I didn’t know how much we loved Tabitha…” He sighed heavily. “Maybe they think we conspired together to kill our daughter. They’re paid to be suspicious. They can’t know it’s the last thing in the world we’d do. But as long as they’re focusing on us, they won’t be looking for the son of a bitch who actually took her.”
    â€œExactly,” Diane said, and her hand rubbed her stomach in a circular motion. I yanked my gaze away.
    â€œHow long have the police suspected you?” Tolliver asked. When we’d been there, Tabitha had been missing for several weeks, and the police hadn’t been around so much any more. But we’d been impressed at how cordial the relationship that had formed between Detective Haines, who’d been the Last Man Standing on the case, and the Morgensterns had seemed. I should have realized that the other cops might have developed other suspicions. Haines had actually gotten to know the Morgensterns a lot better than her associates.
    â€œFrom 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?
    â€œHow 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.”
    â€œTabitha 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 neverread 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.
    â€œWhen did you move to Memphis?” Tolliver asked.
    â€œAbout a year ago,” Joel said. “We couldn’t wait there, in that house, any