Page 101 of Deeper Than the Dead

“On the way to the lab in Nashville.” He shook his head. “I really am sorry about that, Vee. I wish I could have stopped it.”

“Some things just can’t be stopped.”

Like this momentum toward a crash and burn the Boyett sisters seemed headed for.

“Unfortunately, you’re right about that.” He exhaled a big breath. “The FBI has requested a meeting at five thirty in my office. Can you be there? I can put them off maybe another day.”

She should just get it over with. It wasn’t like she didn’t know how to handle the feds. “No, don’t put them off. I’ll be there.”

“See you then.”

“Yeah.”

She could just imagine the fun they were going to have.

As she drove away from Bent’s place, she called Eve and got her voicemail. Vera ended the call. “Damn it, Eve.”

She set a course for Barrett’s. As she drove, she replayed all that had happened since her return. So much about their family history was suddenly upside down or in question. What happened to that happy family they once were? How could this thing have turned all her good memories into questions or potential cover-ups?

Looking back, she wondered when it had all started to fall apart.

Her mother’s smiling face slipped into the midst of the other jumbled images. She’d been such a joyful and upbeat person. Always found the bright side.

There was no one like her.

Florence Higdon’s words echoed in Vera’s brain. She’d said something very close to that when she and Beatrice Fraley delivered the food. Another memory punched through the thought. Vera’s mother and two other women laughing and drinking lemonade in the backyard. But that had been before her mother died.

Vera mulled over the memory. Talking to Eve would have to wait ... there was something Vera had to do first.

Her foot bearing down harder on the accelerator, Vera drove straight to the farm. Why hadn’t Beatrice or Florence called to convey their sympathy that her mother had been exhumed? She and Beatrice had just chatted on her front porch, and she hadn’t said a word. Florence had come by that once with the casserole, and then radio silence. Such good friends should have been horrified by the news.

Or maybe, Vera decided, they were afraid of being presumed guilty by association.

She thought of this morning’s conversation with her father, when he was so worried about something her mother had done ... something no one could know ... that could take her away from the girls. He even mentioned understanding that she thought she was doing the right thing.

Vera parked in front of the house. Obviously her mother had done something wrong, maybe illegal. Her father had been afraid for her. Vera got out of her SUV and hurried to the front door. Her fingers fumbled as she unlocked it. The house was quiet, so no one else was home yet.

Vaguely she considered that there had been an intruder, and they still didn’t have a security system. The thought prompted an ache in her hip. She should not just rush into the house without thought.

Forget that. This could not wait. She kicked the door shut and went straight to the library room. She grabbed as many photo albums as her arms would hold and carried them to the table in the center of the room. One by one she flipped through the pages. She alternately smiled and cried. Right there was proof of all those happy memories. They really had been happy. Smiles like the ones in the photographs couldn’t be faked. The love so obvious between her parents could not have been an act.

Vera’s lips drifted down into a frown. What happened to change everything?

Her father had said it was his place—he should have done the protecting. What could he have meant? Vera replayed the conversation yet again. He was worried that Evelyn had done something wrong. Vera refused to believe her mother had harmed anyone, much less murdered two women. She had to have been protecting Vera’s father. And someone else knew ... maybe that someone was threatening her. Or was involved somehow.

Who better to know a secret than one’s best friends?

There were literally dozens of photos of her mother with her two best friends. Florence Higdon and Beatrice Fraley. Best friends who had, obviously, spent a great deal of time with her. All the way up to the year before she died, there was evidence of the three’s closeness.

Vera frowned. Why had those two abandoned her mother during her most profound time of need? She had suffered with that damned cancer for just over a year, yet there was not one photo of her friends gathered around her. Now that she considered it, Vera could not call to mind a single instance of the two dropping by or bringing food.

What had happened to destroy their friendship?

A secret ... one that could destroy one or all of them.

Maybe her mother hadn’t been protecting her father.

Bent and even Walt Fraley insisted that whoever put those bodies in the cave was someone her father knew well. Teresa Russ said Latesha Johnson’s sugar daddy was someone important ... someone wealthy.

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