"You'll have to ask Victor that," I said. Considering Victor had spent months thinking his father might have had something to do with Tabitha's disappearance, he was a model of mental health. He'd seemed so relieved to share the burden. He'd also seemed happy to tell someone about his sexual orientation. Victor needed a therapist. I couldn't believe he hadn't been visiting one. I said as much.

"Oh, he went for a while," David said, anxious to assure me that they'd done their best by the boy. "But Fred, he's an old-school kind of guy. He thought Victor should suck it up and get on with his life. I guess maybe he talked Joel and Diane around to his point of view, because when Victor moved here from Nashville, they never got him another therapist. Truth be told, Victor did seem a lot better once he was in Memphis."

"So Fred didn't want him talking to anyone," I said.

David looked surprised. "Not to a therapist. He's just an old fashioned man, the kind who thinks you need to keep your problems to yourself and let time heal you."

I was ready for David to be gone. In fact, I really didn't want to see any more of this extended family. In fact, I wished I'd never heard of Tabitha Morgenstern. I wished I'd never stood on the grave in the corner, but I couldn't help having the idea that I'd been herded toward that grave, I'd been asked to Memphis to find the child, and I'd done exactly what somebody wanted me to. All along, I'd been manipulated.

"Goodbye, David," Tolliver said, and David actually looked a bit startled that we were ready for him to leave.

"Once again," he began as he stood up.

"I know. You're sorry," I said. I felt so tired I thought my flesh might fall off my bones. It wasn't bedtime yet, and I didn't think I'd eaten since a long-ago light breakfast.

Finally David was out the door, and Tolliver said, "We're getting food right now." He called room service and placed an order, and though we'd called at a strange time, our food arrived quickly.

As we ate silently, I thought. We have a lot of thinking time, since we're on the road so much. Somehow when we're in a town, when we're not moving, we do anything but think.

I went back over everything I knew.

Tabitha Morgenstern. Eleven. The much-loved child, as far as I could tell, of upper-class professional Jewish parents. Abducted in Nashville, to end up interred in an old Christian cemetery in Memphis. Neither of her parents, the papers had told me, had ever been arrested for anything. Her older half brother, either. But that half brother thought he'd seen his father's car close to the house the day Tabitha had disappeared.