Grave Surprise Read Online Free PDF Page B

newspaper accounts and even more on my own experience, that was a logical assumption. In fact, I’d been fairly sure the child had been dead since scant hours after her disappearance.
    That didn’t mean I was happy to be right. I’m not callous about death; at least I don’t think I am. I think of myself as more…matter-of-fact. And I’d seen the Morgensterns’ anguish first-hand. Because of my sympathy for them, I’d persisted longer in the search than I’d thought was reasonable, and certainly long enough to cut into our profit very severely. Tolliver didn’t even charge them the full amount; he didn’t say anything to me, but when I went over our profits and expenses at the end of the year, I’d noticed.
    Since Tabitha had been dead all this time, I thought it would be better for Joel and Diane to know what had happened to their daughter.
    I could only hope that the sentiment I’d sprouted so glibly to the detective was valid. I could only hope that knowing for sure what had happened to Tabitha gave the Morgensterns some relief. At least they would know she wasn’t in the hands of some madman, actively suffering.
    I found myself wishing I’d had longer with the body. I’d been so startled at the identity of the grave’s unauthorized inhabitant that I hadn’t spent enough energy evaluating thegirl’s last moments. I’d only seen the blue cushion, a flash of the long seconds as Tabitha slipped into unconsciousness and then passed away—as she passed from the imitation of death to death itself.
    I don’t believe that death and life are two sides of the same coin. I think that’s bullshit. I’m not going to say Tabitha was at peace with God, because God hasn’t let me know on that one. And there’d been a strange feeling to my connection with the body; a sensation I’d seldom experienced before. I tried to analyze the difference, but I didn’t come up with anything. That would bother me until I understood it.
    I have seen a lot of death—a lot. I know death the way most people know sleep, or eating. Death is a fundamental human necessity, a solitary passage into the unknown. But Tabitha had made her passage years too early, at the end of a painful and frightening ordeal. I was sorry for the manner of her death. And something about it had marked her during that transition, in a way I had yet to understand. I filed it away to consider later; maybe another trip to the cemetery would help. It was hardly likely I’d be in contact with the body again.
    I turned onto my side and stretched back to prop a pillow against my shoulders. I turned my thoughts down a mental path so familiar that it had ruts worn in it. That path led to my sister Cameron. Her face was fuzzy in my memory now, or it took on the contours of her last school picture, which I carried in my wallet.
    Somehow, discovering Tabitha’s corpse in such an indirectand unexpected way gave me hope that someday I might find my sister Cameron’s remains.
    Cameron has been gone for six years. Like Tabitha, she was snatched out of the stream of her life, leaving her backpack behind on the shore as witness to her departure. When Cameron had become way overdue at home that day, I started looking for her. I’d roused my mother enough to feel she could watch Mariella and Gracie for at least a little while, and I’d trudged through the sweltering heat, following the route Cameron took when she walked home from the high school. It was getting to be twilight by then. Cameron had stayed at school later than I because she was helping to decorate for a dance; the senior prom, I think.
    I’d found her backpack, fully loaded with the schoolbooks, notebooks, notes passed to her in class, broken pencils, and small change. And that was all that was left of Cameron. The police had kept it for a long time, gone through its compartments, asked me about the