“I’m glad he listened to me,” I said. “I told him I needed help. I told him I needed you. I just didn’t think he’d listen.”
“I’m glad he did.”
Me, too. “Thank you for saving my butt again. And Charlotte’s. And Tina’s.”
“You saved Charlotte’s butt just fine on your own,” Rafe said. “And you woulda saved Tina’s too, if I hadn’t happened by.”
“Or I would have gotten all three of us blown up.”
His arms tightened around me for a second. “I’m glad I got there when I did.”
I nodded. Me, too.
Up on the road, I could hear sirens coming closing. Sheriff Satterfield must be coming back. And it sounded like he’d called the fire department, too.
“Let’s go to the hospital,” Rafe said.
I nodded. Let’s.
Chapter Twenty-Six
That evening found us still at the mansion. I had wanted to go back to Nashville, but as Rafe had pointed out, Billy Scruggs’s murder was still up in the air and Billy’s murderer at large, and he—Rafe—hadn’t technically been given permission to leave Maury County. The sheriff had let him out of jail, but he hadn’t been formally released. Between that and the time we spent in the hospital, plus the fact that the sheriff had told us he’d be by in the evening to update us, we decided we could survive another evening with my mother.
Everything had gone well at the hospital. The baby was still alive and kicking. Or maybe not kicking—no legs yet—but alive and well. As the doctor put it, my body had cushioned the blow. I guess that extra few pounds were good for something. “Best as I can tell, there’s nothing to worry about here,” she told us. “Looks like a perfectly normal pregnancy to me.”
So that was one load off my mind.
Charlotte and Tina were also in the hospital, Tina with her wrist handcuffed to the bedrail. I don’t know how the sheriff imagined she’d escape when she could barely lift her head from the pillow, but I guess he figured he’d be better off safe than sorry.
Mary Kelly was in the county jail, where Rafe had been before the sheriff broke him out to chase after me. While we waited for the ambulance and fire engine, Rafe had explained it all to me.
“I’m not sure he was totally sold on what you said, darlin’, but he came to ask me what I thought about it, whether I thought it was true or you were just trying to get me outta jail.”
“I can’t believe he’d think I would lie.”
“You wouldn’t lie to get me outta jail?”
“No offense,” I said, “but you’ve said yourself that I’m a lousy liar. I don’t think he’d believe me if I tried.”
“He almost didn’t believe you this time.”
I snuggled closer. “How did you convince him?”
“I believed you,” Rafe said. “I guess he could tell. So we went off looking for you. When we saw the car peeling away from the curb, we almost went after it. Except it didn’t look like you.”
“What didn’t look like me?” Mary Kelly?
“Taking off like a bat outta hell like that. Besides, we saw the tire tracks. So I made him slow down long enough for me to jump out before he took off after her.”
So that was the explanation for the second squeal of tires I had heard. And the thump when the cruiser’s door slammed. “I’m glad you did.”
“Me, too.” His voice was rough. “I can’t believe you’d be this stupid, Savannah. Don’t you know better than to go after a killer on your own?”
He should talk. “You were in jail,” I said. “And she had Charlotte. I couldn’t let her kill Charlotte.”
“I hope she appreciates it,” Rafe said, with a glance at Charlotte, who at that point was on the ground a few feet away.
As it happened, she did appreciate it. She was still very groggy, but when we stopped by her hospital room after finishing the ultrasound, she blinked gluey eyelids open long enough to squeeze my hand. “Thank you.”
I shook my head. “It was my fault. If I hadn’t left you at Beulah’s, this wouldn’t have happened.”
“If you hadn’t left, we’d probably both be dead,” Charlotte whispered. “And it was my fault. I shouldn’t have said the things I did.”
She moved her head on the pillow so she could look at Rafe. “I owe you an apology. I was horrible to Savannah because of you, and I hope you’ll forgive me.”
He nodded, and wisely waited until we were out of there to ask me what she’d said.
I hooked my hand through his arm. “That you’re not good enough for me.”
“I already know that.”
“That’s ridiculous,” I said. If anyone wasn’t good enough for someone else, it was I who wasn’t good enough for him.
“Why? You’re the princess from the mansion on the hill. I’m—”
“If you call yourself the swineherd, I think I’ll kick you.”
He arched a brow at me. “Why’d I wanna do that?”
“Isn’t that who the princess falls in love with in the fairy tales?”
“No idea. Not sure I know what a swineherd is.”
“Someone who herds swine, I imagine.” I shook my head. “You’re not a swineherd. You’re a hero. You’ve saved my life. And Charlotte’s. And Danny Emerson’s. Even Tina’s. I’m lucky that you’re willing to have anything to do with me.”
“Let’s hope your mama can be made to agree with you,” Rafe said.
But of course she didn’t. Dinner was uncomfortable.
It was just the three of us. The Albertsons were spending the night in the hospital with Charlotte, and once she was cleared for travel, all three of them would be driving to North Carolina, to stay there while the house was fixed and made secure again.
So there we were, the three of us, in the big, high-ceilinged, fancy dining room in the mansion, ranged around the huge, heavy, mahogany table. Mother sat at one end. Rafe and I sat at the other, across from one another. There was approximately twelve feet and one gargantuan centerpiece separating us. Mother couldn’t have made it much clearer that she didn’t want anything to do with either of us. She didn’t even query the fact that Rafe was out of jail. And since she didn’t ask, I didn’t volunteer any information. The result was that when the sheriff knocked on the door in the middle of dessert, she had no idea what he was doing there.
I could hear her voice through the open door. “Bob! I didn’t know you were stopping by.”
“Gotta talk to the kids,” Sheriff Satterfield’s voice said.
There was a beat. “The kids?” my mother answered blankly.
“Your daughter and her boyfriend.”
There was another beat. Maybe Mother had expected the sheriff to refer to Rafe in more inflamatory terms.
By now I had reached the door to the dining room myself. If Mother wasn’t going to be gracious, by damn, I would. “Come on in, Sheriff. Tell us what’s going on. Have you had dinner?”
The sheriff moved past my mother with a murmured apology. “Can’t say as I have.”
“Let me get you a plate.” I headed to the kitchen with Mother in hot pursuit.
“What’s going on?” she hissed as soon as the door had shut behind us.
I lifted a plate out of the cabinet and opened the silverwear drawer with my other hand. “He’s just coming to update us on what’s happened since this morning.”
“Why would he update you?”
“I’m sure you don’t mean that the way it sounds,” I said charitably—or fake-charitably, since I was sure she meant it exactly the way it sounded. “The sheriff arrested Mary Kelly this morning, while Rafe and I saved Charlotte and Tina Foster from being burned to a crisp.”
Mother’s mouth opened, but nothing came out. I left her to stand there, gaping like a goldfish, while I went back into the dining room.
We got the sheriff set up with his own dinner, and went back to eating our own. It seemed that Bob must have worked through lunch, because he fell on the food like a starving beas
t. A starving beast with exquisite Southern manners, admittedly, but he was clearly very hungry. Mother, who had been turning her nose up at Rafe’s table manners—which are just fine, in case you wondered—opened her eyes very wide, but didn’t say anything.
It wasn’t until Sheriff Satterfield crossed his knife and fork in the middle of his empty plate and leaned back on the chair with a happy sigh, that I opened my mouth. “Long day?”
He nodded. “You know it.”
“Has Mary Kelly been giving you trouble?”
“Not the kind you mean.” He shook his head. “I thought she might lawyer up. But she’s been talking my ear off ever since I arrested her. Started in the car going back to the station, and hasn’t stopped since.”
“I don’t mean to interrupt,” Mother said, doing exactly that, “but you arrested Mary Kelly Hollingsworth? Why?”
The sheriff glanced from me to Rafe and back. “You didn’t tell her?”
We both shook our heads.
“Why not?” He didn’t wait for an answer, just proceeded to fill Mother in on this morning’s excitement. “I dropped Collier off,” he finished, “so he could help Savannah, and went after Mary Kelly myself.”
Mother turned to me, eyes big. “Savannah?”
“I’m fine,” I said. “Charlotte and Tina are fine, too. And Rafe’s fine. Although of course Tina is under arrest.”
I added, to the sheriff, “Have you spoken to her yet?”
“Briefly. To tell her the jig was up and I was arresting her for murder. She said Mary Kelly made her do it.”
That was more or less what I’d expected her to say, to be honest. “What did Mary Kelly say to that?”
“That they did it together. Every step of the way.”
Of course she did. And she was probably right. Although I still thought Mary Kelly was the driving force behind the murders, and Tina the willing sycophant. “But she didn’t try to deny anything?”
The sheriff shook his head. “She admitted it. All of it. And more. I couldn’t get her to shut up.”
“How close did I come?”
“Pretty damn close,” the sheriff said, and immediately apologized to my mother for his language. “They went to a party at Matt Perkins’s house in high school, and got themselves in trouble. The same party that Charlotte left before anything could happen to her.”
“Thanks to Danny Emerson.”
He nodded. “They blamed him for that. For taking Charlotte home, but leaving them there. But since he hadn’t actually done anything to either of them, they couldn’t justify killing him the way they killed the others. So they hit him over the head with a wrench and turned the car on.”
“It’s still murder, isn’t it? Or would have been, if he died?”
“Sure. We’re charging them with three counts of first degree murder and four more of attempted murder. Plus two more for Mary Kelly.”
That was a lot of murders. Sweetwater had its first serial killer. Or killers.
“Who are the four attempted?” No sooner had I said the words than I realized the answer. “Never mind. Danny, of course, plus Charlotte and her parents.”
He nodded. “That’s right. Mary Kelly was worried that Charlotte remembered that night and would suspect them, so she thought she’d better get rid of her. And since they had killed everyone else they planned to, she thought it would be a good time to get rid of the clothes they’d worn over their party dresses on Saturday night, too.”
“But Tina’s smock didn’t burn.”
The sheriff shook his head. “Mary Kelly’s housecoat did. It’s a good thing she confessed, because I have physical evidence to charge Tina, but not Mary Kelly.”
“Other than that the fact that I saw her try to set fire to Tina’s car with Charlotte and Tina inside.”
“Your word against hers,” the sheriff said. “The murder weapon was in Tina’s car. Looks like Mary Kelly might have planned to pin it on Tina all along.”
No doubt. She wasn’t stupid, so she couldn’t have imagined she’d be able to get away with it. Someone would go down for the murders eventually, and if she could point the finger away from herself, she’d be that much better off.
“I guess that’s it, then.” All the murders solved, and Danny Emerson’s attack plus the fire at the Albertsons’ accounted for.
“Not quite.” The sheriff turned to Rafe, his expression sober. My heart gave a hard thud. Now what? “I owe you an apology, son.”
I wasn’t the only one who blinked. Rafe did, too. Before he gathered himself. “That’s OK, Sheriff. You were just doing your job.”
“That’s mighty gracious,” Sheriff Satterfield said, “but the truth is, I’ve always been ready to believe the worst of you. You were a damn cocky teenager, always mouthing off whenever you got in trouble, and I guess I never got past that.”
“It’s all right. I guess you had reason.”
“Be that as it may,” the sheriff said, “when Billy Scruggs got himself shot, I didn’t look much past the obvious. And when I got a phone call saying I could find the gun in your toolbox, it seemed like an open and shut case to me.”
Rafe shrugged.
“I shoulda given you the benefit of the doubt.”
“In the circumstances,” Rafe said, “I prob’ly woulda arrested me, too.”
“And you let him out the next day,” I added.
The sheriff turned to me. “Only because I knew your mama would kill me if something happened to you, if he coulda prevented it.”
“He did prevent it.” My hero. “I wouldn’t have been able to get both Tina and Charlotte away from the car myself. I would probably still be trying when the car blew up.”
Sheriff Satterfield nodded. “I got something to tell you,” he told Rafe, who nodded. “Mary Kelly confessed to shooting Scruggs, too.”
“Mary Kelly?”
It came from Mother, not me, although that was only because she got the words out first. Our eyes met for an uncomfortable instant before we both looked away.
“Mary Kelly shot Billy Scruggs?” I added. “Why?”
“She explained that. She hired him a year ago to get rid of LaDonna.”
I risked a glance at Rafe. He sat as still as a statue on the other side of the table. I could barely see that he was breathing. And I couldn’t reach him to take his hand.
“Stonegate Development needed the Bog empty,” Sheriff Satterfield continued, “and LaDonna wasn’t moving. So Mary Kelly hired Billy to take care of the problem. She knew he dealt prescription drugs and she thought he could make it look like LaDonna had died of an overdose.”
Which, indeed, it had. That had been the official verdict last summer.
“She said that Billy let it slip he’d been the one to supply the boys with whatever they used to drug the girls twelve years ago. That was just after he’d gotten out of the hospital, and he had a large supply of drugs. Up until then, last summer sometime, Mary Kelly said she’d had no recollection of who’d been involved. She knew what had happened because of the physical evidence, but she didn’t know who had been involved. When Billy told her about it last summer, she decided to do something about it.”
And here we were, with Ethan, Matt, and Willem dead.
“Why did she shoot Billy?”
“He figured out what she was up to. Overheard her talking to Tina on the phone, maybe. She didn’t know. Just that he asked her for money to keep quiet. Ten grand. She said she’d meet him at the Bog on Saturday morning and give it to him, and when she got there, she shot him dead instead. She figured the body wouldn’t be discovered for a couple days—probably not until the bulldozers got there on Monday—and nobody would make the connection to the other murders. But when you showed up,” he nodded to Rafe, “she decided to frame you because of that old business.”
Rafe nodded. “So what happens now?”
“Mary Kelly and Tina get formally charged. We’ll push the trial through quickly. Nobody wants this to drag out. They
’ll probably end up in Southern Belle Hell, out there in West Nashville.”
Not too far from where Rafe had spent two years in Riverbend Penitentiary.
“I’ll reopen your mama’s case, and make sure the paperwork reflects that Billy killed her. We’ll add the conspiracy charge on Mary Kelly, too. It won’t make no difference to nothing, but it’s good to know.”
Rafe nodded. Maybe he’d been thinking all along that it hadn’t been an accident. Speaking for myself, I had thought the sheriff was grasping at straws when he tried to prove it was murder. And now it turned out he’d been right all along, he’d just been trying to pin it on the wrong man.
“What about us?” I asked.
“You’re free to go home. Thanks for your help.”
I looked at Rafe. He looked at me.
“We can be home by nine,” I said.
“You feel up for it?”
“The doctor said I was fine. No reason I can’t live a perfectly normal life. And it isn’t much more than an hour’s drive.”
“Doctor?” my mother said.
Rafe’s eyebrow arched. “You didn’t tell her?”
Damn. I mean... darn.
“Tell me what?” Mother asked, looking from me to him and back.
“I didn’t want to do it on my own.” That didn’t come out right, and he must have realized it, because his eyes changed. “I wanted you to be here,” I said. “I wanted us to tell her together.”
“Tell me what?”
“It isn’t you,” I told Rafe. He probably thought I hadn’t told my mother about the baby because I was ashamed, or afraid, or apprehensive. Any one of those A-words. That I was happy to put it off as long as I could, so I didn’t have to deal with her reaction. And that wasn’t the case at all. I’d just wanted him with me when we broke the news. I wanted us to be together, a united front. I wanted Mother to see that he was going to stand by me. “I love you. I’m glad it’s you. I just wanted us to do it together.”
He looked at me for a second before turning to my mother. “We’re having a baby.”
“Another one?”
“It wasn’t an accident this time,” I said steadily. “We want a baby. I want a baby.” Rafe’s baby.
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