Matthew went back to jail, though not for long enough. He hadn’t murdered his own baby; not that anyone could prove. The real Gracie’s tiny skeleton had vanished from the place where he said he’d buried her, in a public park off the interstate.

His story was that he’d set off to take Gracie to the hospital, but she’d died in the car on the way. He’d buried her and lied to us all about the ICU and the rest because he’d been afraid that my mom would go crazy if she knew Gracie was dead. (Since my mother had already been crazy for years by that time, I didn’t believe him.) He’s stayed away for a few days to give credence to his story that Gracie was in the hospital in ICU. When Chip called him, Matthew had been more than glad to take a baby whose dubious background he thought might come in handy someday; and of course, producing a healthy girl baby would also keep him from being accused of negligence. We’d expected to get Gracie back from the hospital. Only Cameron suspected that Matthew had sunk low enough to substitute another child.

Cameron’s throat was crushed; there was enough left in the trunk to determine her cause of death. Mark confessed that she had shown him the genetic chart she’d made that proved my brown-eyed mother and her brown-eyed husband couldn’t have a green-eyed daughter. Cameron hadn’t known whose baby “Gracie” was, but since she had started with the certainty the child wasn’t the same baby, Cameron’s realization had explained several puzzling things about Gracie’s different behavior since she’d come back “from the hospital.” After Mark killed Cameron, he’d taken her body to the freezer of the restaurant where he worked and put her in a box at the back of the shelf in the meat locker for a couple of days. Then he’d rented the storage unit in Dallas and driven over there with her in the blanket chest, at the height of the hubbub over her disappearance. There she’d stayed, and he’d tossed in the items from the trailer when he’d moved himself to Dallas. He’d watched over her bones ever since.

Poor Cameron. She’d trusted the wrong person. Mark was the oldest, and steady; it was natural she would turn to him. She’d underestimated his devotion to his father. But she’d been sharp enough to put together all the puzzling things about the green-eyed baby living in our trailer.