Page 24 of The Graveyard Girls (Detective Ellie Reeves #11)

TWENTY-THREE

Tilly Higgins pulled her Braves baseball hat lower over her forehead to shield her face as she watched Ida Bramble storm in and make a scene with her daughter at the counter.

Tilly remembered high school. Ida had been pregnant when Ruth disappeared, but no one knew it at the time. She married Joe shortly before the baby came.

After the scandal that summer and the suspicions cast on her father, Earl, Tilly would have expected Ida to flee town like she did. But she supposed her roots ran deep in the heart of this dreadful town.

The daughter, a pale girl with hair the color of soot and a short skirt that rode up her butt, stomped behind her mother, as rebellious as Ida and Hetty had been. Tilly almost laughed at the irony. Karma’s a bitch, Ida. You reap what you sow.

Except Tilly hadn’t been one of the mean girls and look how her teenage years had gone.

All because Ruth had been a mischievous flirty girl who the boys all wanted and female classmates envied.

Not Tilly. She’d been the mealy, mousy, invisible little sister who no one ever noticed and probably didn’t remember.

She buried her nose in her phone as the detective continued combing the room asking questions about the murder case she’d come to investigate. She’d heard they’d IDed the girl in the grave.

It wasn’t her sister.

A mixture of relief and sadness filled her.

The fact that it wasn’t Ruth meant there was a slim possibility her sister was still alive.

Although Tilly had lost real hope of that years ago.

The disappointment each time a report surfaced of the discovery of an unidentified dead girl was too much to handle.

Over and over her parents had their hopes raised, only to have them brutally crushed.

She still wanted answers though. Tomorrow she’d start digging around, pushing people to talk. She’d already obtained a copy of the police report from the original investigation.

She pulled it from her briefcase and skimmed through it one more time. There had to have been something the cops had missed. Someone they hadn’t even looked at as a suspect or dismissed too quickly.

Either that, or someone in town knew who’d taken Ruth and was covering for them.