Grave Secret

"While Tolliver slept, I wondered if it was possible that Cameron was still alive...At first, I'd thought she'd been abducted by a gang, sold into slavery, something lurid and horrible. Then I'd wondered if maybe she'd simply been fed up with her life: the tawdry parents and the tacky trailer, the sister who limped and looked abstracted, the baby sisters who never seemed to stay clean. Most days, though, I was sure she was dead."
Lightning-struck sleuth Harper Connelly and her stepbrother Tolliver take a break from looking for the dead to visit the two little girls they both think of as sisters. But, as always happens when they travel to Texas, memories of their horrible childhood resurface...
To make matter worse, Tolliver learns from his older brother that their father is out of jail and trying to reestablish contact with other family members. Tolliver wants nothing to do with the man - but he may not have a say in the matter.
Soon, family secrets ensnare them both, as Harper finally discovers what happened to her missing sister, Cameron, so may years before.
And what she finds out will change her world forever...
"ALL right,” said the straw-haired woman in the denim jacket. “Do your thing.” Her accent made the words sound more like “Dew yore thang.” Her hawklike face was eager, the anticipatory look of someone who is ready to taste an unknown food. We were standing on a windswept field some miles south of the interstate that runs between Texarkana and Dallas. A car zoomed by on the narrow two-lane blacktop. It was the only other car I’d seen since I’d followed Lizzie Joyce’s gleaming black Chevy Kodiak pickup out to the Pioneer Rest Cemetery, which lay outside the tiny town of Clear Creek. When our little handful of people fell silent, the whistle of the wind scouring the rolling hill was the only sound in the landscape.
There wasn’t a fence around the little cemetery. It had been cleared, but not recently. This was an old cemetery, as Texas cemeteries go, established when the live oak in the middle of the graveyard had been only a small tree. A flock of birds was cackling in the oak’s branches. Since we were in north Texas, there was grass, but in February it wasn’t green. Though the temperature was in the fifties today, the wind was colder than I’d counted on. I zipped up my jacket. I noticed that Lizzie Joyce wasn’t wearing one. The people who lived hereabouts were tough and pragmatic, including the thirtyish blonde who’d invited me here. She was lean and muscular, and she must have tugged up her jeans by greasing her legs. I couldn’t imagine how she mounted a horse. But her boots were well-worn, and so was her hat, and if I’d read her belt buckle correctly, she was the previous year’s countywide barrel-riding champion. Lizzie Joyce was the real deal."