Charlaine Harris - Grave Secret

Grave Secret — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "Grave Secret" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Georgia Tahoma Arial Verdana

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

1234567...58

Table of Contents

Ace Books by Charlaine Harris

The Sookie Stackhouse Novels

DEAD UNTIL DARK
LIVING DEAD IN DALLAS
CLUB DEAD
DEAD TO THE WORLD
DEAD AS A DOORNAIL
DEFINITELY DEAD
ALL TOGETHER DEAD
FROM DEAD TO WORSE
DEAD AND GONE

MANY BLOODY RETURNS
edited by Charlaine Harris and Toni L. P. Kelner

WOLFSBANE AND MISTLETOE
edited by Charlaine Harris and Toni L. P. Kelner

Berkley Prime Crime Books by Charlaine Harris

SWEET AND DEADLY
A SECRET RAGE

The Harper Connelly Mysteries

GRAVE SIGHT
GRAVE SURPRISE
AN ICE COLD GRAVE
GRAVE SECRET

The Lily Bard Mysteries

SHAKESPEARES LANDLORD
SHAKESPEARES CHAMPION
SHAKESPEARES CHRISTMAS
SHAKESPEARES TROLLOP
SHAKESPEARES COUNSELOR

The Aurora Teagarden Mysteries

REAL MURDERS
A BONE TO PICK
THREE BEDROOMS, ONE CORPSE
THE JULIUS HOUSE
DEAD OVER HEELS
A FOOL AND HIS HONEY
LAST SCENE ALIVE
POPPY DONE TO DEATH

To my son Patrick, simply because I think hes great.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My thanks to Ivan Van Laningham, Kerry Hammond, Ashley McConnell, Mary Fitzsimons, Gina and her anonymous friend, Beth Groundwater, my assistant and friend Paula Woldan, Nancy Hayes (my Gun Angel), and Dr. Ed Uthman, a college crony, for their assistance in getting the details right. Any mistakes are my own, as much as I would love to blame someone else.

One

ALL right, said the straw-haired woman in the denim jacket. Do your thing. Her accent made the words sound more like Dew yore thang. Her hawklike face was eager, the anticipatory look of someone who is ready to taste an unknown food.

We were standing on a windswept field some miles south of the interstate that runs between Texarkana and Dallas. A car zoomed by on the narrow two-lane blacktop. It was the only other car Id seen since Id followed Lizzie Joyces gleaming black Chevy Kodiak pickup out to the Pioneer Rest Cemetery, which lay outside the tiny town of Clear Creek.

When our little handful of people fell silent, the whistle of the wind scouring the rolling hill was the only sound in the landscape.

There wasnt a fence around the little cemetery. It had been cleared, but not recently. This was an old cemetery, as Texas cemeteries go, established when the live oak in the middle of the graveyard had been only a small tree. A flock of birds was cackling in the oaks branches. Since we were in north Texas, there was grass, but in February it wasnt green. Though the temperature was in the fifties today, the wind was colder than Id counted on. I zipped up my jacket. I noticed that Lizzie Joyce wasnt wearing one.

The people who lived hereabouts were tough and pragmatic, including the thirtyish blonde whod invited me here. She was lean and muscular, and she must have tugged up her jeans by greasing her legs. I couldnt imagine how she mounted a horse. But her boots were well-worn, and so was her hat, and if Id read her belt buckle correctly, she was the previous years countywide barrel-riding champion. Lizzie Joyce was the real deal.

She also had more money in her bank account than I would ever earn in my life. The diamonds on her hand flashed in the bright sunlight as she waved toward the piece of ground dedicated to the dead. Ms. Joyce wanted me to get the show on the road.

I prepared to dew mah thang. Since Lizzie was paying me big bucks for this, she wanted to get the most out of it. Shed invited her little entourage, which consisted of her boyfriend, her younger sister, and her brother, who looked as though hed rather be anywhere else but in Pioneer Rest Cemetery.

My brother was leaning against our car, and he wasnt going to stir. Until Id done my job, Tolliver wouldnt pay attention to anything but me.

I still thought of him as my brother, though I was trying to catch myself when I called him that out loud. We had a much different relationship, now.

Wed met the Joyces that morning for the first time. Wed driven down the long, winding driveway leading between wide, fenced-in fields, following the excellent directions Lizzie had sent to our laptop.

The house at the end of the driveway was very large and very beautiful, but it wasnt pretentious. It was a house for people who worked hard. The Latina whod answered the door had been wearing nice pants and a blouse, not any kind of uniform, and shed referred to her boss as Lizzie, not Ms. Joyce. Since every day on a ranch or farm is a working day, I hadnt been surprised to see that the big house felt pretty empty, and the only glimpses I caught of other people had been distant ones. As the housekeeper led us through the house, Id seen a Jeep coming up one of the tracks that ran between the huge fields at the rear of the house.

Lizzie Joyce and her sister, Kate, had been waiting in the gun room. I was sure they called it the den or the family room, or something else to indicate it was where they gathered to watch television and play board games, or whatever really rich people did with their evenings when they lived way the hell out in the sticks. But to me, it was the gun room. There were weapons and animal heads all over, and the dcor was supposed to imply this was a rustic hunting lodge. Since the house had been built by the Joyce grandfather, it reflected his taste, I guessed, but they could have changed it if theyd objected. Hed been dead for a while.

Lizzie Joyce looked like the pictures Id seen of her, but the impression was strictly practical. She was a working woman. Her sister, Kate, called Katie, was a scaled-down version of her big sister: shorter, younger, less seasoned. But she seemed just as confident and hard. Maybe being brought up with gobs of money did that to you.

The gun room had a wall of French doors leading out onto a wide brick porch. There were urns that would be filled with flowers in the spring, but it wasnt time yet. The temperatures still dipped below freezing sometimes at night. I noticed that the Joyces had left their rocking chairs outside during the winter, and I wondered what it would be like to sit out on the roofed brick porch in the morning in the summer, drinking coffee and looking out over all that land.

The Jeep came to a stop at the foot of the gentle slope leading up to the back porch, and two men climbed out and came in.

Harper, this is the manager of RJ Ranch, Chip Moseley. And this is our brother, Drexell.

Tolliver and I shook hands with the men.

The manager was rugged, weathered, and skeptical, green eyed and brown haired, and he was as ready to leave as the brother. Both of them were only here because Lizzie wanted them to be. Chip Moseley gave Lizzie a casual kiss on the cheek, and I realized he was her man as well as her manager. That might be awkward.

The brother, Drexell, was the youngest of the Joyces and the most anonymous looking. Lizzie and Katie both had a certain hawk-nosed flamboyance, but Drexells round face was still a bit babyish. He didnt meet my eyes as his sisters had.

I had a niggling feeling that Id seen both men somewhere before. Since the huge Joyce ranch wasnt too far from Texarkana, and Id grown up there, it wasnt beyond the realm of possibility that Id met Chip and Drexellbut the last thing I wanted to do was bring up my previous life. I hadnt always been the mysterious woman who could find bodies because shed been fried by lightning.

Next page

1234567...58

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Georgia Tahoma Arial Verdana

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «Grave Secret»

Look at similar books to Grave Secret. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.

Charlaine Harris

Sweet and Deadly aka Dead Dog

Charlaine Harris

Dead as a Doornail

Charlaine Harris

Sweet and Deadly

Charlaine Harris

A Fool and His Honey

Charlaine Harris

Poppy Done to Death

Charlaine Harris

Grave Surprise

Charlaine Harris

Dead to the World

Charlaine Harris

Three Bedrooms, One Corpse

Charlaine Harris

Dead Until Dark

Charlaine Harris

Shakespeares Champion

Charlaine Harris

Club Dead

Charlaine Harris

A Bone to Pick

Discussion, reviews of the book Grave Secret and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.