[Cutthroat Business 01.0 - 03.0] Boxed Set

by Jenna Bennett

  The temptation was too much for me.

  Looking over my shoulder first, to make sure there really weren’t anyone else around to see me, I ducked under the crime scene tape and detoured around the oil spot, making my way over to the door. I pushed it open. It creaked, of course. In a place like this, it would. The trailer looked like no one had ever cared enough to perform even the most basic maintenance, and the atmosphere and oppressive silence was eerie and made the small hairs at the back of my neck stand up.

  I held my breath as I climbed up the two metal steps and ducked inside.

  The back door led directly into the kitchen, classic 1970s vintage. Chintzy pressed-wood cabinets with shiny brass handles, faded green laminate countertop, bottom-of-the-line faucet and sink. Almond colored scratch-and-dent refrigerator, chipped vinyl floor. Dead cockroaches with their legs in the air. I shuddered. It never ceases to amaze me how some people live.

  The rest of the place was just as bad. Wandering down the narrow hallway, I tried not to feel like filth was crawling up my shoes from the dirty shag carpets. Ugly paneling and uglier wallpaper covered every wall, black mold dotted the baseboards, and the low ceilings felt like they were pushing down on me. Rafe probably had to duck his head to get past the cheap brass and wood ceiling fans.

  I found what I assumed would have been his room down at the other end of the long structure. Another low-ceilinged room with thick, green shag rugs on the floor, dirty and spotted, and with a hole in the wall from when someone, sometime, had put a fist or something else through the thin material. The metal window frame was buckled and the window itself was cracked. I pegged it for Rafe’s room not because of the fist-sized hole in the wall—that might equally well have been made by his Uncle Bubba, during one of Bubba’s periods of parole, or by Old Jim, who wasn’t averse to taking fists or his belt or whatever else was handy to both his daughter and his grandson when the mood struck him. No, whoever had cleaned the place out after LaDonna died—Rafe, as far as I knew—had either forgotten, or left on purpose, a centerfold pinned to the wall.

  I wasn’t sure how I felt about that.

  Here’s the thing: I may be naive, but I know that most men like to look at naked women. Rafe had never made a secret of the fact that he does, although I’d always gotten the impression that he preferred them living and breathing, in the flesh, to two-dimensional. Dix had hidden dirty magazines in the old slave cabin when we were teenagers, so Mother wouldn’t find them, and Todd might even have had the odd issue of Playboy stuck under his mattress, too. Bradley certainly had. And it had always made me feel weird when he leafed through a dirty magazine and then wanted to make love to me. And of course I’d come across Perry Fortunato’s collection of nastiness a month or so ago, and been appropriately disgusted and appalled.

  I knew that Perry’s obsession was sick, and that it had contributed to two murders and his own death. But Dix seemed well-adjusted enough, and although Bradley’s interest in looking at other women had been disconcerting—how could I possibly measure up to the wasp-waisted over-endowed bottle-blondes in the pictures?—he certainly wasn’t a pervert. Rafe had never struck me that way, either.

  The picture wasn’t disturbing in any way, other than the simple fact that it was there. As soft porn goes, and compared to some of the stuff I’d seen in Perry’s house, this was squeaky clean. It wasn’t much worse than the covers of Barbara Botticelli’s romance novels, if it came to that. Except for the missing hero with the well-developed chest, of course. Although I had no problem picturing him. Especially in this space.

  I don’t know why I should have been surprised by the fact that the woman in the picture was white. Caucasian. Blonde and blue-eyed, with pink lipstick and a French manicure. Dressed—sort of—in virginal white lace.

  In my mind, and the minds of lots of people in Sweetwater, Rafe was defined by the fact that his father had been black. He was LaDonna Collier’s colored boy. Different from us, from me. I had teased him about Marquita and thought about introducing him to Lila Vaughn because they were black. Now I realized, with something of a shock, that maybe Rafe didn’t consider himself black. And I realized, with even more of a shock, that the two women I knew for a fact that he’d been involved with, Yvonne McCoy and Elspeth Caulfield, were both fair-skinned and blue-eyed: Elspeth a blonde like me, and Yvonne a redhead.

  Coming face to face with your own racial prejudices isn’t a comfortable feeling. It is, however, more comfortable than coming face to face with someone else in an empty house.

  I turned around blindly, my mind spinning along with my body, and stopped with a shocked exhale when I saw someone in the doorway.

  After a second, I was able to catch my breath again. I even managed an unsteady laugh. Think of the devil... “Goodness, you startled me. What are you doing here?”

  “What are you doing here?” Elspeth Caulfield answered.

  “I’m visiting my mother. In Sweetwater. And I... um... heard about Marquita Johnson and got curious. And when I got here, I saw that the door was open, so I went in.”

  I walked toward her. For a second, I wasn’t sure she would step out of the way to let me through. If she hadn’t, and I’d had to, I could probably have pushed her aside. She was small and slim, no taller than she’d been at sixteen. A mere five feet three inches or so to my five eight, although she wore sensible sneakers instead of my high heeled slingbacks, and jeans instead of my flouncy pink skirt, and if it came to running away from her, I wouldn’t have a prayer.

  She stepped aside, so it didn’t become an issue. I brushed past her and walked down the narrow hall toward the kitchen, the skin between my shoulder blades prickling. I didn’t draw a deep breath until I was outside, under the carport.

  Elspeth stepped down after me. We looked at one another.

  “So how are you?” I ventured.

  The fact that she was here at all was freaking me out a little, and those pale blue, unblinking eyes were even more disconcerting. I would have liked nothing better than to just get in my Volvo and drive off, but that would have been rude, so I made an effort to be polite instead.

  Her answer had that same dreamy calm I’d noticed last time I spoke to her. Like she wasn’t quite living in the same world as the rest of us. “I’m wonderful, thank you. And you?”

  “I’m pretty good too, everything considered.”

  She still hadn’t told me what she was doing here, but I didn’t think it would do any good to ask again, since she’d proven herself to be quite adept at stonewalling. Plus, I figured I could make a pretty accurate guess. She was still hung up on Rafe, and for all I knew, she might have had a habit of coming over here to gaze at the place he used to live. Twelve years seemed like an extraordinary amount of time to be carrying a torch, but after those brief couple of minutes yesterday morning, I was willing to accept the fact that Rafe might be the type of man to haunt a woman’s dreams for years after the fact. He was certainly haunting mine at the moment.

  Before I could think too hard about that and start hyperventilating, I thought I’d better speak up again. “Horrible what happened to Marquita, isn’t it? I saw Cletus yesterday, when Mother and I dropped off a casserole, and he looked absolutely devastated.” A slight exaggeration, considering that they’d been separated for a while, but it’s the way it’s supposed to be, after all. “And those poor kids, having to grow up without their mother.”

  A shadow crossed Elspeth’s smooth face. “Very sad, when children have to grow up without their mothers. Do you have any children, Savannah?”

  I shook my head. “Bradley and I didn’t have time to have any.” That wasn’t strictly true—I’d gotten pregnant and had a miscarriage—but it wasn’t any of Elspeth’s business. “We were married for less than two years.”

  “Sometimes it takes a lot less than that,” Elspeth said. I was tempted to pursue the remark, to try to pin her down again and get her to tell me one way or the other whether she’d gotten pregnant that one time she s
lept with Rafe twelve and a half years ago, but before I had the opportunity, she continued. “Have you seen Rafael lately?”

  “Rafe Collier?” I shook my head, lying without really thinking about it. “He left Nashville five or six weeks ago. I saw him before that, but I haven’t seen him or heard from him in the time he’s been gone.”

  OK, so the only real lie was the head-shake. The rest of it was true. He had left five or six weeks ago, and I hadn’t seen or heard from him in the time he was gone. The fact that he was back now, and that I’d seen him since, was something I’d just as soon keep from Elspeth. If she was still stuck on him, she didn’t need to hear what he and I had been doing yesterday morning. I hadn’t been above poking Marquita, but poor Elspeth seemed so fragile, I couldn’t find it in my heart to say anything that might upset her.

  “I should get going,” I said. For good measure, and just to make sure there were no misunderstandings, I added, “I’m having dinner with Todd Satterfield tonight. You remember Todd, don’t you? From high school? You two were in the same year, I think.”

  “Of course.” Elspeth nodded, making that cute, little, blonde ponytail bob. “Have a good time, Savannah. Tell Todd I said hello.”

  I said I would. Although I’d have to rewrite the story a little before I presented it to Todd. Leave out the fact that Elspeth and I had run into one another in the Bog, while I’d been standing in the middle of Rafe Collier’s old bedroom. Todd didn’t need to know that. “Well... it was nice to see you again. Take care of yourself.”

  “You too,” Elspeth said, smiling sweetly. She stayed where she was, under the carport on the back of the trailer, while I walked around the corner, got into my car, and drove away. It wasn’t until I was off the track and onto the road that it occurred to me that I hadn’t noticed her car anywhere.

  * * *

  The Wayside Inn, where Bob Satterfield had taken Mother the night before, is the best restaurant in Sweetwater. Naturally, that was where Todd wanted to go as well.

  I didn’t mind. The food is wonderful, and I’m as fond of excellent food—that someone else is paying for—as the next financially strapped woman. Plus, I wanted a place that would do justice to my new dress.

  Although I had to admit, at least to myself, that I was no longer sure I wanted to wear it. At least not for the purpose I’d originally intended. With last night’s dreams at a more comfortable distance than when I’d just woken up, and with most of another day between me and that episode with Rafe yesterday morning, marrying Todd solely to avoid sleeping with Rafe did seem, as Tamara Grimaldi had put it, a little drastic. So maybe I didn’t need to actually make him propose tonight. Maybe I just needed to go have dinner with him, and enjoy his company, and remind myself what a nice, handsome, well-educated, perfect-for-me man Todd was. Why do anything rash, after all?

  But of course there was no way to explain to my mother why I no longer wanted to wear the new subliminally powerful dress, so I didn’t have a choice but to put it on. Along with a pair of strappy silver sandals Audrey had had sitting around the shop, that just happened to look fantastic with the dress while they just happened to be my size. The result was that Todd was extremely complimentary when I walked into the Wayside Inn a few minutes after seven, to find him waiting at a table for two.

  “Savannah!” He stood up, blue eyes admiring as he looked me over, from loosely piled hair to skimpy dress to shoes and back. “You look beautiful!”

  “Thank you, Todd.” I went up on my toes to kiss him on the cheek.

  Normally I try to avoid touching him, since I’ve been trying to keep him from proposing. But I was thinking that if I got a little closer to Todd, maybe that’d help to make the closeness to Rafe feel a little less momentous. Maybe the problem was, at least partially, that in the two years since Bradley and I got divorced, I hadn’t been in any kind of relationship. Todd took me out to dinner and kissed me goodnight; but a kiss outside the door at the end of the evening doesn’t make a physical relationship. So maybe I’d just been so overcome by Rafe’s nearness because I hadn’t, to put it bluntly, gotten any for quite a while.

  Todd looked surprised, and actually touched his fingers to his cheek for a second, as if he couldn’t quite believe I had kissed it. I felt my heart sink. This wasn’t going to end well.

  Although things started out well enough. Todd ordered for both of us: white wine for me, red for himself. Grilled chicken for me, steak for himself. Black coffee for me, cheesecake for himself. Todd is partial to cheesecake. So am I, if it comes to that; I just can’t eat it while I’m out with him. It’s been firmly ingrained in me that a Southern Belle has a sixteen-inch waist and eats like a bird. So when Todd and I go out, I pick at my food and have black coffee for dessert, while I watch him enjoy his cheesecake. Yes, I resent it, but it’s life. I’m used to it by now.

  While we ate, we talked about the obvious things. Todd’s seminar—a proper Southern Belle always turns the conversation first, last, and always back to the man she’s with—and the break-in at my apartment and the fact that I hadn’t been there when he came to pick me up two nights ago. Todd was quite concerned, he assured me.

  “You should have called me, Savannah,” he said, for what was at least the third, if not the fourth time. “It’s not that I mind driving to Nashville to see you, but to arrive at your apartment and find someone else there... And not just anyone else, but an undercover police officer!”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, also for the third or fourth time, “it just slipped my mind. I was rattled, and there were arrangements to make, and I didn’t even remember that I’d promised to have dinner with you until later. I’m really very sorry, Todd.”

  “I understand, Savannah,” Todd said. And added, “But you really should have called me.”

  “I know I should. And I’m sorry. It just slipped my mind.” I took another sip of coffee for something to do, other than apologize again. Todd is the perfect Southern gentleman, really he is, but he’s a lot like a dog with a bone as well, and sometimes I just wish he’d let go of whatever it is he’s gotten his teeth into and give me some peace.

  The truth was that sitting here with him, I had no desire whatsoever for him to propose. He was still tall, blond and handsome, still healthy, wealthy, and perfect for me, but he was also driving me slowly up the wall. He loved me, I knew that. He wanted to marry me, and take care of me, and support me financially, and protect me from harm, and do all those things that husbands want to do to and for their wives. And I appreciated it. Sadly, though, he felt more like a smothering blanket than the safe haven I’m sure he intended to be. He was wrapping me in warm, supposedly comforting folds of caring, but I found myself clawing to free my face and be able to breathe.

  The thing is, I’d gone directly from my parents’ house to finishing school to university to Bradley’s house, and this was the first time in my life I’d been on my own for any length of time. For the first time ever, I was responsible for myself, for paying my own rent and buying my own groceries and putting gas in my own car, and it was frequently nerve-wracking and I worried almost daily about what would happen when the money from my divorce settlement ran out. But I’d also found that I liked the independence. I could go home and not have to worry about looking perfect, or behaving a certain way, or owing anything to anyone else. I could do what I wanted when I wanted. I could wear ugly sweatpants, eat all the ice cream I wanted, and watch Cheaters on TV if I wanted, without having to worry about what anyone thought. I could read Barbara Botticelli to my heart’s content without having anyone complain that my literary tastes were too low-brow. And I could get mixed up in murder investigations and hang out with Tamara Grimaldi and babysit Mrs. Jenkins and kiss Rafe... and there was nobody around to tell me I wasn’t behaving properly.

  So the fact that Todd made no move to propose was just fine with me.

  When the cheesecake was devoured, he returned to one of his favorite subjects of conversation.

  No, not t
he break-in at my apartment. For now, at least, it seemed we had moved past that.

  “Any news from Collier?”

  He asked the same question pretty much every time we got together. The fact that Rafe had left and stayed gone, that every time Todd asked I’d had to tell that him that no, I hadn’t heard a word, had made Todd very happy.

  But all good things must come to an end. I’m a terrible liar, and Todd knows it; I didn’t even try to prevaricate. “He’s back.”

  Todd sat up straight. “He is?”

  “He came back yesterday. I saw him for a few minutes.”

  Todd’s eyes narrowed.

  “Marquita Johnson died,” I said. “She was taking care of Mrs. Jenkins. Now that there’s no nurse, Rafe had to come back to make other arrangements.”

  “What other arrangements?”

  “I have no idea,” I said. “We didn’t talk much.”

  Todd didn’t answer. I could see from his expression that he was thinking dark thoughts. “I was hoping to have more time,” he muttered.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I was hoping for more time. That he wouldn’t come back so soon. Or ever.”

  I’m sure. “Why would you care that Rafe Collier is in Nashville? You don’t have to see him.”

  Todd made an impatient sound. “I know I don’t. But when he’s around, you can’t seem to stay away from him. Or he from you.”

  Here it was again, that awful burden of proper behavior. “I don’t mean to be rude,” I said, “but I’m not sure that’s any of your concern, Todd.” I would have put it more strongly, but I held back.

  “I would like to make it my concern,” Todd said.

  As if he hadn’t already done that. “That’s nice of you, but...”

  But please don’t say what it sounds like you’re going to say!