“Hell, yes. She saw herself as a watchdog, I guess,” Drex said. He took a big swallow of his beer. He looked around to see if our server was within hailing distance. We’d placed our orders a few minutes before.

“Why did your family pay for her funeral and put her in the family plot?” I asked. It was a subject I’d wondered about a couple of times. “Where were her people?”

“We looked through all her stuff after she died, and we couldn’t find anything with any names and addresses on it,” Drex said. “Lizzie asked all of us what she’d said about her family, where she came from, and no one could come up with anything. We asked Chip, and none of his kinfolks could remember anything.”

“What about her Social Security Number? As her employer, your granddad had to have that.”

“He paid her under the table.”

It baffled me why a man as rich as Richard Joyce would choose to do that. The Joyces had to have accountants and business people who would jump at the chance to be useful.

Drex said, “When Lizzie met Mariah, she told Granddad she thought Mariah wouldn’t work out. Granddad thought she’d stay, but he could tell we didn’t like Mariah that much. He didn’t want to go to the trouble of setting something up, only to have to fire Mariah.” He sounded defensive, and I could understand why. I exchanged a long look with Victoria.

“So your granddad hired someone he didn’t know, paid her under the table, and didn’t know anything about her previous work history, and he had her living in his house with him.” If I sounded incredulous, pardon me. “Did you say you asked Chip to talk to his family after Mariah died?” I heard thunder and looked over at a window to see rain hitting the glass.

“Yes, they knew her. It was Chip who told us Mariah would be good for the job.”

There was a long silence, while Drex looked around some more for our server and Victoria and I were absorbed in our own thoughts. I didn’t know what was going through Victoria’s mind, but I was thinking that I hoped my family took better care of me than the Joyces had of their patriarch, Richard.

“How long has Lizzie been seeing Chip?” Victoria asked, as if she was introducing an entirely new topic, a little social side trip.

“Oh, man, years now. They knew each other from the ranch, of course. And they’d see each other when they were both rodeoing. After a few years, and Chip’s divorce, they just clicked. He was at a rodeo in Amarillo, calf roping. She was barrel riding. She was having trouble with her trailer hitch, and he came up to help her.”

“So Mariah had worked for Chip’s family?”