This was such a different reaction from the one I'd expected that I was unable to respond. Luckily, Tolliver was more collected.
'Please, Diane, Joel, sit down,' he said. Tolliver is very reverent toward pregnant women.
Diane had always seemed the frailer partner in the couple, even when she wasn't so obviously carrying a child.
'Let me hug you first,' she said in her soft voice, and she wrapped her arms around me. I felt her distended belly pressing against my flat one, and I felt something wiggle while she was hugging me. After a second, I realized it was the baby, kicking against her stomach. Something deep inside me clenched in a mixture of horror and longing. I let Diane go and backed away, trying to smile at her.
Felicia Hart was no hugger, to my relief. She gave me a firm handshake, though she did put her arms around Tolliver. In fact, she muttered something in his ear. I blinked at that. 'Glad to see you,' she said a bit loudly, addressing an area somewhere between us. Felicia was a single woman. I placed her in her early thirties. She had jaw-length glossy brown hair that curved forward, and her expertly cut bangs stayed where they were supposed to be. As a professional woman on her own, she could spend all her money on herself, and her clothes and makeup showed it. If I remembered correctly, Felicia was a financial adviser employed by a national company. Though I hadn't talked to her at any length, I knew Felicia would have to be both intelligent and bold to hold down so responsible a job with such success.
When we were all seated, Joel and Diane on the love seat, Felicia perched on one arm of it by Diane, and Tolliver and I in wing chairs on the other side of the coffee table, with Art settled uncomfortably on a chair set a bit aside, I realized I had to somehow proceed with a conversation.
'I'm so sorry,' I said finally, since that was the truth. 'I'm sorry I found her so late, and I'm sorry the circumstances make life even more difficult for you.' It made life a hell of a lot more difficult for us, too, but this didn't seem like the moment to dwell on it.
'You're right, this doesn't look good for us,' Joel said. He took Diane's hand. 'We were already under suspicion. Not Felicia, of course, but Diane and I and Victor, and now that…' He had trouble going on. 'Now that her body has been found here—of all the places on earth—I think the police are going to decide it was one of us all along. I almost don't blame them. It just looks bad. If I didn't know how much we loved Tabitha…' He sighed heavily. 'Maybe they think we conspired together to kill our daughter. They're paid to be suspicious. They can't know it's the last thing in the world we'd do. But as long as they're focusing on us, they won't be looking for the son of a bitch who actually took her.'
'Exactly,' Diane said, and her hand rubbed her stomach in a circular motion. I yanked my gaze away.
'How long have the police suspected you?' Tolliver asked. When we'd been there, Tabitha had been missing for several weeks, and the police hadn't been around so much any more. But we'd been impressed at how cordial the relationship that had formed between Detective Haines, who'd been the Last Man Standing on the case, and the Morgensterns had seemed. I should have realized that the other cops might have developed other suspicions. Haines had actually gotten to know the Morgensterns a lot better than her associates.
'From the get-go,' Joel said, his voice resigned. 'After nosing around Vic for a while, they got the idea that Diane was guilty.'
I could almost see why they'd suspect Joel, even Victor. But Diane?
'How could that be?' I said incautiously, and she flushed. 'I'm sorry,' I said instantly. 'I'm not trying to dredge up bad memories. I was sure, always, that you and Joel were telling the truth.'
'Tabitha and I had a fight that morning,' Diane said. Big fat tears ran down her cheeks. 'I was mad because we'd just given her a cell phone for her birthday, and she'd already exceeded her minutes. I took her cell away from her, and then I told her to go outside to water the plants around the front door, just to get her out of the house because I was so angry. She was furious, too. Spring break, and no way to communicate with her three hundred best friends. She was just into that 'Mo-THER!' stage, the eye-rolling thing.' Diane wiped her face with Joel's handkerchief. 'I didn't think we'd get to that until she was fifteen, and here she was, eleven years old, giving me the whole routine.' She smiled in a watery sort of way. 'I hated to tell the police about this really trivial conversation, but one of my neighbors overheard us arguing when she came over to ask if we were through with our paper. So then I had to relate the whole thing to the police, and they turned hostile so quickly, as if I'd been withholding important evidence from them!'
Of course, to the police, this was important evidence. The fact that Diane couldn't see that only proved what I'd suspected about her when I'd met her: Diane Morgenstern was no rocket scientist. I was willing to bet that she never read crime fiction, either. If she had, she'd have known that any such revelation would make the police suspicious.
All the incident really proved was that Diane was out of touch with popular culture, in the reading-and- television-watching category.
'When did you move to Memphis?' Tolliver asked.
'About a year ago,' Joel said. 'We couldn't wait there, in that house, any longer.' He sat up a little straighter, and as if he were reciting a credo, he said, 'We had to accept the fact that our daughter was gone, and we had to leave that house ourselves. It wouldn't be fair to the new family we're starting, to have the baby there. I actually grew up in Memphis, so it felt like coming home, to me. My parents are here. And Felicia was here, along with her parents, my first in-laws. She and Victor are very close, and we figured the move would be a good thing for him. He's had a very tough time.'
So everyone was happy here, except possibly Diane. It hadn't been coming home for her. It had been a move to a strange city that held many memories for her husband, memories of his first wife.
'We'd had a lot of therapy, the whole family,' Diane said softly.
'We all went, Diane and I and Victor,' Joel said. 'Even Felicia drove over to Nashville from Memphis to go to some of the sessions.'
I'd been to therapy, too.
The high school guidance counselor had been horrified when Cameron's disappearance had exposed the conditions under which we lived. 'Why didn't you come to me?' she'd asked, more than once. And one time she'd shaken her head and said, 'I should have noticed.' I didn't blame her for not noticing; after all, we'd gone to great efforts to conceal our home life, so we could stay together. Maybe a part of me had hoped that our substandard parents would be taken away and we would be given good parents, instead; but that hadn't happened.
'When is the new baby due?' Art asked in the cheerful voice parents used when they weren't going to be
