“Why?”
“Because it might have something to do with what’s happened. If someone got raped that night, and now she’s back in town, looking for revenge...”
“I wasn’t raped,” Charlotte said.
“I wasn’t accusing you of anything.” Surely I’d know if my best friend was capable of cold-blooded murder. Wouldn’t I? “But are you sure...?”
“Yes! I’d know it if I were raped, Savannah!”
Fine. “Who else was there? I need names.”
“A lot of people,” Charlotte said. “Some of the cheerleaders. The other popular girls. Some of the groupies. You know, the ones who liked the jocks.”
“Darlene?”
She shrugged.
“Epiphany? Mary Kelly? Jan?”
“I can’t remember,” Charlotte said. “I’m not joking, Savannah. I have no idea what happened between the time I got there and the time I woke up the next morning. I don’t remember Danny Emerson taking me home. I don’t remember getting home or going to bed. I don’t remember anything.”
That made things rather more difficult.
“And,” Charlotte added, “they had parties all the time, you know. Almost every weekend. You don’t know that whatever happened—if anything happened—happened the weekend I was there.”
No, I didn’t. “Something happened. Darlene West was raped. But you’re right. I don’t know whether it happened the night you were there or not.”
Charlotte’s eyes were the size of silver dollars. “You think Darlene killed all those people?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“She’s strong enough,” Charlotte said.
Yes, she was. Strong enough to inflict the deeper of the wounds Cletus had talked about. While someone else—Rhonda, or maybe Epiphany—had inflicted the lesser. Epiphany, like Rhonda, was slender and not overly muscular. Epiphany’s lovely dress had been sleeveless the night before, so I’d had ample opportunity to notice her arms. And while they were toned, she didn’t look like she wrestled steer for a living. Nor did Rhonda.
“Wow,” Charlotte said, her eyes unfocused with the possibilities.
“We don’t know that it’s her.”
“I bet it is,” Charlotte said. “She asked me about it the day after the party.”
“You said no one talked about it.”
She blew out a breath. “I was trying to be nice, OK? I didn’t want to gossip. But Darlene asked me whether I’d been at the party that weekend.”
“Do you remember seeing her there?”
Charlotte shook her head. “But it has to be her. Whoever did it has to be in town for the reunion, right? That’s what you said. And Darlene lives in Birmingham.”
“She’s not the only person who’s back in town for the reunion. There’s Epiphany. Tina. You. Me.”
“I didn’t do it,” Charlotte said. “Did you?”
“Of course not. I wasn’t even there. I had no reason to want anyone dead.”
“See? You and I weren’t raped. But Darlene was. It has to be her.”
It didn’t have to be. But given what we knew right now, she was a likely suspect, I’d give Charlotte that.
“You can’t tell anyone about this,” I warned her. “She told me in confidence.” Sort of. Or in closed company. I’m sure she wouldn’t want the news—even if it were very old news—to get around. She certainly wouldn’t want it to get to the Columbia PD, who might think it gave her a motive for murder.
“I feel better,” Charlotte said.
“Good.” I felt worse. I liked Darlene. Both personally—she was upbeat and happy and nonjudgmental, and she had accepted Rafe without a quibble—and because her turning gay and bringing her girlfriend to the high school reunion had made me look and feel like less of a freak for taking up with the town hellion.
“I think I can sleep now,” Charlotte said, putting her glass on the table.
I watched as she prepared to get to her feet. Was this what had been bothering her? What she came to talk to Dix about? “Glad I could help.”
She flushed. “I’m sorry I wasn’t nicer to you about... you know.”
“Rafe?” It probably wasn’t a good sign if she couldn’t even bring herself to say his name.
She nodded.
“I understand.” Except I didn’t. Not really.
The old me understood. The me from before I recognized the truth. “I love him. I’m sorry that offends you. And I’m sorry you can’t be happy for me. But I love him, and we’re together, and I’m happy. And when it comes down to it, that’s really all that matters.” So if she couldn’t get onboard, she could get out of my way.
Not that I’d be rude enough to actually say that. I trust it was implied, though.
Charlotte didn’t say anything, just got to her feet.
“I’ll see you out,” I said.
We walked in silence to the front door, where Charlotte stopped. “Thanks for talking to me.”
As if I’d refuse. It wasn’t me driving this wedge between us, it was her.
“Do you want me to tell Dix you were here?” I asked.
She shook her head. “That isn’t necessary.”
“Are you still planning to leave tomorrow?”
“I haven’t been told I can’t,” Charlotte said. I wondered whether that was a subtle jab—don’t even think about talking to the sheriff about what we discussed, because I don’t want to get stuck here—or whether my mind was just running away with me.
“Have a good trip.”
She smiled politely. “You, too.”
“Let me know the next time you’re in town.”
She nodded, and I imagine she was probably thinking exactly what I was thinking she was thinking. When hell freezes over.
“Be careful driving home,” I said. “Call me if you need anything.”
She said she would—not that I believed her—and then I stood there and watched until she was in the car and the car had rolled off down the street. Only when it was out of sight did I go inside and close and lock the door behind me.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Rafe and Dix walked in just before eleven, none the worse for wear. My brother’s hair was a little mussed, as if someone had run her fingers through it. I arched my brows. Rafe grinned. “He met a girl.”
“Woman,” Dix muttered, his cheeks warm. “And I only endured it for the sake of getting information.”
I looked Rafe up and down. “What about you?” There’s not enough hair on his head to guess whether anyone had had her fingers in it or not.
“You don’t want to know,” Dix said, possibly in retaliation for Rafe’s dig.
“You’re probably right about that. So what kind of information did you get for your trouble?”
As soon as the words were out, the atmosphere changed. Rafe’s eyes went flat, and Dix looked uncomfortable. “I’ll go change,” he said, avoiding my eyes as he walked away, toward the bottom of the stairs. “Look in on the girls. Give you a chance to talk.”
I arched my brows at Rafe, who shook his head. We waited until Dix was gone, out of sight and hearing on the second floor, before continuing the conversation.
Even so, I kept my voice low. “He’s OK, isn’t he?”
“He’s fine. Nothing happened, other than that a woman with very few teeth cuddled up to him. He handled it.”
“And you?”
“I’m fine, too. Nobody cuddled up to me that I couldn’t handle.”
I didn’t doubt it. “I meant...”
“I know what you meant. It wasn’t easy finding anyone who’d open their mouth. They all remembered me.”
“Any new scars?”
It was a private joke. Or not a joke, exactly, but a comment on Rafe’s propensity for leaving and then coming back to me shot or stabbed.
“Not tonight.” He smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes.
I moved closer and looked up at him, my hand on his arm. The muscles under my fingers were grani
te hard. I stroked gently. “What is it, Rafe? What happened?”
“Other than that a couple of ‘em accused me of murder?” He blew out a breath and ran a hand down his face.
“You’re kidding?”
He shook his head. “And then there were the ones who thought I was there to cause trouble.”
“I’m sorry.” I moved in close. His arm came around me, automatically, and I could feel some of the tension leaving his body as I leaned into him. He rested his cheek against my hair, and I could feel his breath ruffling the strands.
“It’s all right,” he said after a minute, his voice a little less tight. “I oughta be used to it. It just don’t happen that much anymore.” Now that he had put undercover work behind him and was a legitimate TBI agent, I assumed. And now that he didn’t deal with so many people with preconceived ideas day in and day out. “Guess I’m outta practice.”
“You were gone awhile. So they didn’t chase you out of there with torches and pitchforks.”
“No. They talked. Eventually.”
And now some of that tension crept back into his body. I put my head against his shoulder and rubbed my cheek against the softness of cotton. “What did they say?”
His voice came to me in tandem, through his chest and through the air. “That Billy Scruggs did for my mama.”
Did for...?
It took a second for his meaning to penetrate, and then I straightened, so quickly I narrowly missed the top of my head connecting with his chin. “They said that Billy Scruggs killed your mother?”
He nodded.
“I thought your mother died of a drug overdose.”
“That’s what the sheriff said.”
“Do you think he’s wrong?” Or lying?
He shook his head. “I’m sure they checked. Unattended death and all. Billy prob’ly gave her the drugs. We know he was dealing.”
“So she bought the drugs she took from him? That doesn’t sound like it’s his fault.” Not in the sense that he’d killed—done for—her.
Rafe shook his head. “Unless he gave ‘em to her.”
For free? “Why would he do that?”
Drug dealers don’t give away their merchandise, do they? Unless they’re trying to build a new customer base, of course, but from what little I knew about it, LaDonna Collier had had problems with drugs and alcohol for years before she died.
“Dunno.” He shivered, like a dog shaking off water.
I wrapped my arms around his waist. “Let’s go home, OK? Back to the mansion. Let’s go to bed.” And maybe there, I could give him some solace. Something more than I was able to offer standing in my brother’s foyer.
He nodded. I guess he must want the comfort as much as I wanted to give it. “Don’t we wanna tell your brother we’re leaving?”
“He’ll figure it out.” I steered him toward the door. “Once he gets down here and sees we’re gone.”
“You sure he’s gonna be down? I don’t wanna leave his house unsecured.”
“He’s checking on his girls. He’ll be down to lock up once he’s changed.” I opened the front door. “We’ll slam the door when we leave so he’ll hear us.”
“Ain’t that gonna wake up the kids?”
“They’re children. They’ll sleep through anything. And anyway, he’s probably waking them up to say goodnight right now.” I slammed the door. Rafe winced, but didn’t object.
“Do you want me to drive?” I asked when we were on the sidewalk.
He glanced at me. “Why? I made it here, didn’t I?”
“Of course you did. I just thought maybe you’d prefer not to drive any farther.”
“I ain’t drunk, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“Of course not.”
“I just had a beer. Or two.”
I nodded.
“I’m fine.”
“I know you are. Let’s go, if you’re ready.”
He opened the door for me. “Tired?”
“It’s been a crazy day.”
He nodded. “Baby all right?”
I put a hand on my stomach. “As far as I can tell. Everything feels normal.”
He closed my door and walked around the car. Up at the house, Dix opened the front door, saw us making our getaway, and lifted a hand. I waved back, and watched him close—and presumably lock—the front door. After a moment, the light in the foyer went out.
“Charlotte stopped by,” I told Rafe when he’d gotten in beside me and closed his door.
“Here?”
I nodded.
“She come to see you? Or your brother?”
“Dix.”
He arched a brow, and I added, “She said she wanted to see him in his professional capacity. She wanted someone with attorney-client privilege, who couldn’t pass on whatever information she told him.”
“Woulda been better to hunt up a Catholic priest.” He pulled away from the curb.
“We don’t have a lot of those around here.” Sweetwater is pretty firmly Southern Baptist, with a few Methodists and Jehovah’s Witnesses thrown in for good measure.
“What’d she want?”
“I have no idea. I’m not an attorney. And she could have been lying, anyway. Maybe there’s trouble in paradise—in North Carolina—and she wants to talk about leaving her husband.”
“You think?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Nothing really surprises me anymore. She told me she went to a party with Ethan, Matt and Willem once. Without me. Without telling me anything about it.”
He glanced at me, and gauged—accurately—my feelings. “Sorry, darlin’.”
“She said Danny Emerson brought her home. Or so her parents told her. She doesn’t remember anything between getting to the party and waking up the next morning.”
“Those’re some strong drugs.”
Yes, indeed. “She says she wasn’t raped. I figure she ought to know.”
“Prob’ly so.”
“But apparently there were other girls there, too. Some of the cheerleaders and what she called the popular girls. She doesn’t remember whether Darlene was one of them.”
“We already know about Darlene,” Rafe said, turning the car onto the Columbia Highway in the direction of home. Part of me wished he could just keep going until we hit the interstate bound for Nashville, but I knew that was impossible. But hopefully by tomorrow we’d be able to leave. Charlotte was headed home, after all. Surely the sheriff must be getting ready to tell Rafe he could go, too. It wasn’t like he could have killed Billy Scruggs when he was in Nashville when Billy died.
“Charlotte seems pretty sure Darlene is the killer,” I said.
He shrugged.
“You don’t think so?”
“She don’t seem angry enough to kill three people,” Rafe said. “And she’s moved on. Found her place. Found a girlfriend.”
“You don’t think she blames Ethan for turning her gay?”
“From what she said, she was gay already. And anyway, what’d she be blaming him for? She don’t seem to mind being gay.”
No, she didn’t. Darlene seemed pretty happy with her lot.
“Besides,” Rafe added, “she didn’t say nothing about Matt or Willem. Just Ethan. Why’d she kill them?”
“To make it seem like Ethan wasn’t the intended target? Like someone was after all of them?”
He didn’t answer, and I continued, “Or maybe she thought they all needed to die. Even if only Ethan raped her, she could have heard that the others did the same thing to other girls.”
“I suppose.”
He sounded dissatisfied. But he didn’t say anything else, and I settled back into the seat while the car moved through the darkness.
It isn’t a long drive from Copper Creek to the Martin Mansion. It was just a couple of minutes later that we turned into the driveway and pulled the car to a stop behind a big, black truck parked there. Beyond it, Rafe’s Harley gleamed in the moonlight.
“Look
s like your mama’s got company,” Rafe commented as he opened the door for me.
I nodded, before leaning into the backseat to snag the Walmart bag from earlier in the day. “Probably entertaining her gentleman friend.”
“Sheriff Satterfield?”
“It looks like his truck.”
Rafe muttered something. It probably didn’t have anything to do with the truck, but more with that fact that the sheriff isn’t his favorite person—or vice versa.
I ignored it. “We don’t have to talk to them. We’ll just take our stuff upstairs and go to bed.”
I closed the car door and headed for the steps with him right behind. He put a hand on the hood of the truck on his way past. “Still warm.”
“What does that mean? He hasn’t been here long?”
“An hour, maybe. No more.” He followed me up the stairs to the front door and took the plastic bag so I could dig the house key out of my purse.
“Hopefully we won’t walk in on anything,” I said over my shoulder as I twisted key and knob.
I had no idea whether my mother was in the habit of having her boyfriend stay over when I wasn’t around. Whenever I’d been home for a visit, he hadn’t, but that didn’t mean the sheriff didn’t spend nights here when I was in Nashville. He had Todd to deal with at home, after all. After Pauline Satterfield died and Todd moved back home to Sweetwater, he moved back into his dad’s house. To the best of my knowledge, he was still there.
The idea of my mother and Todd’s dad doing the dirty in the mansion was a little disturbing. I mean, I know they weren’t old—the sheriff’s around sixty, my mother a few years younger; neither one of them at death’s door—but the two of them together in what had been my mother’s and father’s bedroom when I was a girl, was not something I liked to think about.
The idea of them having sex on Great-Aunt Ida’s peach velvet sofa in the formal parlor was even more disturbing in its own way.
I pushed the front door open and walked through. Rafe came in behind me and closed and locked it.
We both looked around.
The foyer was dark and quiet.
“Let’s just hurry—” I began, and stopped when a door down the hallway opened, and the sheriff stepped out. A second later, my mother followed. They both looked grim, and I could feel Rafe brace himself.
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