Close to Home

by Jenna Bennett

  Not that I mind subdivisions, of course. I’m a realtor; they’re my bread and butter. And most of my family lives in subdivisions. Mother is still in the mansion, but Catherine and Jonathan and their three kids live in a subdivision called Summer Point, while Dix and Sheila and the girls are in Copper Creek.

  My entire family, save for mother, Sheila and I, are lawyers. Dad was a lawyer, and his dad before him. My great-grandfather founded the family firm, on the square in Sweetwater. When Catherine married Jonathan McCall, whom she met in law school, his name was added to the front window in gold letters. Martin and McCall, attorneys at law. Catherine still has a license, and she keeps it current, but these days she spends most of her time at home with the children. Martin and McCall is Dix and Jonathan, for the most part.

  When I walked through the door a few minutes before noon, Jonathan was manning the front desk in the lobby.

  My brother-in-law is a Yankee from Massachusetts, a bit of an anomaly here where most people can trace their ancestry back to the War Against Northern Aggression. Mother and dad gave him a difficult time when he first started dating Catherine, but after he proved himself to be a gentleman in spite of his unfortunate origin, he was accepted with open arms. It wasn’t his fault that he’d been born above the Mason-Dixon line, and his Boston Brahmin family turned out to be just as old-fashioned and uptight as ours. He and Catherine are a match made in heaven.

  It helps that he’s good looking, in that tall and skinny, pale Northern way. Dark hair, brown eyes, pointy nose, narrow face. Sort of aristocratic. The total opposite of Dix, who’s about average height, fair haired, blue eyed, and a little stocky. Not overweight, just sort of square. He appeared in the door to his office approximately five seconds after I’d walked into the lobby, just as soon as he heard my voice saying hello to Jonathan.

  “What are you doing here?” he demanded.

  “Goodness,” I said, blinking, “is that a way to greet your favorite sister?”

  “I thought Catherine was your favorite,” Jonathan said.

  “She is. Believe me.” Dix scowled. “Savannah?”

  When his eyes dipped down to my stomach for just a second, I scowled back. “Dix.” It wasn’t like there was anything to see there. Not yet, anyway.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I had an appointment,” I said, “in Columbia. I thought you might want to have some lunch. Both of you. Either of you.”

  They exchanged a glance. “Are you buying?” Jonathan wanted to know.

  “Are you crazy?” I answered. “I can hardly feed myself. And what would your wife say if she knew you let me pick up the tab for lunch?”

  “She’d never let me hear the end of it,” Jonathan said. “You two go ahead. I’m waiting for a phone call.”

  “Don’t you have a cell phone?”

  He did. “But I also have a lot of paperwork I have to refer to, and it’s easier to keep it here. You can bring me something back, if you don’t mind.”

  “What do you want?”

  “That depends on where you’re going,” Jonathan said.

  “Café on the Square?” Dix suggested. It was the closest place to get something to eat; just a few doors down from the law office. It was also a favorite hangout of mother’s, not to mention of mother’s best friend Audrey, who owned a boutique on the town square. The last time I’d had lunch at the café, I’d been with both of them. I wondered what my chances were of meeting both or either today.

  “We could go to Beulah’s,” I said.

  Dix and Jonathan exchanged another look. “Why would you drive all the way to Beulah’s Meat’n Three when you can eat at the café?” Jonathan wanted to know, and turned to Dix. “Bring me back a roast beef on rye and a bag of chips.”

  “Will do.” Dix disappeared into his office just long enough to fetch his jacket. He was in the process of shrugging into it when he came back through the door. “Ready, Savannah?”

  “Whenever you are,” I said, and let myself be ushered back out of the office and down the sidewalk to the café on the square.

  Chapter 3

  I got lucky. The café was mercifully free of people I knew, and Dix and I were able to snag the last table for two in a quiet corner. We arrived just as the previous occupants got up to leave, and we swooped in and sat down even as the waitress was clearing off used flatware and her tip. Five minutes later, we were munching rolls and waiting for our food to finish prepping. Cobb salad for me, turkey on whole wheat for Dix.

  “So what’s up?” my brother asked, watching me demolish a roll as though I hadn’t eaten for days.

  I glanced up. “Nothing. Why would something be up?”

  “You didn’t say anything about coming to Sweetwater.”

  “I was in Columbia. To see Dr. Seaver. I figured I was so close I might as well come down.”

  “That’s true, I guess,” Dix said.

  “And besides, I saw Sheila at the doctor’s office. I asked her to have lunch with me, and she said no. So I figured I’d ask you instead.”

  His brow clouded. “Sheila was at the doctor’s office?”

  I reached for another roll. Usually I avoid having one, let alone two, but I was starving. “Didn’t you know?”

  He shook his head. “She hasn’t said anything about it.”

  “Any chance you’re pregnant again?”

  “None,” Dix said.

  I blinked. He sounded so definite. “You’re not... you know...?”

  “Not for a while.”

  It was difficult to know what to say to that, so I said nothing. After a longish pause, he added, “She had a miscarriage about four months ago.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “It wasn’t the first,” Dix said. “She had another last year. We knew it could happen again, so we didn’t say anything to anyone when she got pregnant this last time.”

  No sense in getting everyone’s hopes up only to dash them, I supposed.

  “Ever since then, she hardly ever goes to bed when I do anymore. The only reason I know she’s been there, is because her side of the bed’s been slept in. And she’s always up before me, too. I think she’s afraid, you know?”

  I nodded. “It’s hard, losing a baby. Maybe not as much for the father—” at least Bradley hadn’t seemed to understand my sense of loss, “but our bodies change, and we actually feel the difference, long before anything’s visible on the outside.”

  “I tried to be sensitive,” Dix said. “And I haven’t been pressuring her.”

  “I’m sure you haven’t. Maybe she’s ready to try again, and she wanted to check with the doctor that it would be OK.” That might make my brother happy, anyway. Men seem to like regularity in that aspect of their lives.

  “Maybe,” Dix said. “Don’t you think you ought to slow down a little, sis?”

  I pulled my hand back from the basket of rolls. Two were probably enough, anyway. “I can’t help it. I’m hungry all the time. And I feel like I could sleep twelve hours a night.”

  “You may as well,” Dix said. “If you go through with this, it’s the last sleep you’ll get in a long time.”

  I shook my head. “I can’t go through with it. What would mother say?”

  “You should have thought about that before you slept with him,” Dix said.

  “I did. It was worth it.”

  “Too much information,” Dix said. “Listen, Savannah. If you want to keep this baby, and you want to raise it on your own, I’ll do my best to support you. You’re my sister, and I love you. I’m not saying it’ll be easy, or that mom won’t have all sorts of fits, but she’ll come around eventually. She dotes on her grandchildren.”

  “Your children and Catherine’s don’t have Rafe Collier for a father.”

  “No,” Dix admitted. “But it isn’t your baby’s fault who its father is. And it’ll help that everyone thinks he’s dead.”

  Great. So if I could deal with the stigma and the stares, my baby mi
ght eventually be accepted by my relatives. Although my baby’s father was better off dead. “You know, there are times when I hate our family.”

  “You don’t mean that,” Dix said.

  “Not really, no. But this would be a lot easier if I had the kind of family who adored me and thought I could do no wrong. Or if I’d had a couple of older siblings who hadn’t done everything perfectly in their lives. You and Catherine are a lot to live up to.”

  “Catherine married Jonathan,” Dix said. “A damn Yankee.”

  “But she’s a lawyer. And she has three perfect children. And Jonathan turned out to be pretty perfect, too, in spite of being from Boston. And you married Sheila, mother’s ideal of a daughter-in-law. Sheila will be just like mom in thirty years.”

  “Hopefully not just like her,” Dix said, and leaned back as the waitress moved in to put his sandwich in front of him. I smiled appreciatively as she came around the table with my salad.

  I had just lifted my fork to dig in when I heard a voice I knew. The very last voice I wanted to hear, if I had thought about it.

  No, it wasn’t mother’s voice, or even her friend Audrey’s. It wasn’t my aunt Regina’s or my sister Catherine’s. It was worse. Much worse.

  “Savannah!” Todd said, surprise laced through every syllable. “Dix.”

  I closed my eyes for a second. When I opened them, Dix was looking at me with concern. I pasted on a smile, the same bright, polite, social smile mother drilled into me when I was but a wee little Southern Belle in the making, and turned on my chair. “Todd! How delightful to see you!”

  Todd Satterfield is the assistant district attorney for Maury county. He works out of the courthouse in Columbia, twenty minutes away. The fact that I might run into him down here hadn’t even crossed my mind.

  Dix stood up, and the two men shook hands and slapped backs with every evidence of pleasure. They’ve been friends since elementary school, and if they’re not as close now as they used to be, what with Sheila and the kids placing more demands on Dix’s time, they’re still plenty close enough.

  Todd and I used to be close, too. We were boyfriend/girlfriend his last year of high school, my sophomore year, and before he left for college, he asked me to marry him. I was sixteen at the time, and thought he was joking. Two years later, I went off to finishing school in Charleston and then university in Nashville, and at twenty three I dropped out to marry Bradley Ferguson. Shortly after that, Todd married a girl named Jolynn Lowry; mother says because she looked like me. Two years later I divorced Bradley, and it wasn’t but a few months later that Todd divorced Jolynn. Now he wants to try again. He proposed to me back in September, and I think he was pretty sure I’d say yes. It must have come as quite a shock when I didn’t.

  That was the night I ended up in Rafe’s bed. I’d known that Todd was thinking of asking me to marry him, and there was even a part of me that wanted him to, because by getting myself engaged, I thought maybe I’d be able to exorcise those conflicting feelings I had for Rafe. But when I was sitting there across the table from Todd, faced with the actual question and the look in his eyes, I couldn’t bring myself to say yes. So I’d told him I had to think about it. And then I got in my car to go back to the Martin mansion for the night, and instead had found myself driving until I reached Nashville and Rafe. And the rest is history, except it was history that had come back to bite me in the butt.

  “I didn’t know you were coming to Sweetwater,” Todd said now.

  “I had an appointment in Columbia. I thought I’d see if Dix was free for lunch.”

  “You want to join us?” Dix asked. He probably meant it sincerely. But we were sitting at a table for two, and there was no way to squeeze in another chair, let alone another place setting. Todd shook his head.

  “I’m meeting dad. He’s over there.” He gestured to the other side of the café. I looked over and saw the grizzled Sweetwater sheriff raising a hand to us from a table by the opposite wall. I waved back, wondering when on earth he’d arrived and what he might have heard before we realized he was there. If he’d caught any part of our conversation, this could get ugly in a hurry.

  “We’ll be going over the Cartwright trial,” Todd added.

  Dix nodded, like he knew what Todd was talking about. I didn’t. “The what?”

  “It happened a couple of years ago,” Todd said. “That was before I came to work here, so I’m meeting with dad to go over some of the details. When I get Marley Cartwright up on the stand, I want to be able to nail her.”

  “Who’s Marley Cartwright and what did she do?”

  “Killed her baby,” Todd said. “Then she dumped the body somewhere and told everyone the baby was kidnapped. There was a big to-do for days, trying to find any trace of him.”

  “Sheila was fit to be tied,” Dix added. “She knew Marley. They’d been in exercise classes together, or something. Hannah was less than a year old when little Oliver was born, and I guess Sheila thought it might have been Hannah.”

  I shuddered. I could imagine the fear such news might strike into a mother’s heart. Sweetwater is such a small place; nobody expects something like that to take place here. “So what happened? They found the baby?”

  Dix and Todd both shook their heads. “The baby’s gone,” Todd said. “She never admitted doing anything to him. Her husband wasn’t around when whatever it was happened.”

  “And what did she say that was?”

  “The baby was asleep in the swing on the back deck. Marley went inside to take a shower. When she came out a couple of minutes later, he was gone.”

  “But you don’t believe her?”

  “She did something to him,” Todd said. “And then she hid the body somewhere until she could get rid of it. At first everyone thought she might be telling the truth, that someone had kidnapped him. Every available volunteer scoured the neighborhood for hours. The police interviewed witnesses and watched security tapes of any unfamiliar cars that had been in the area. A couple of days went by. Plenty of time for Marley to dump the body and clean the house from top to bottom to get rid of any evidence.”

  “She did that?”

  “Top to bottom,” Todd nodded. “Floors, walls, ceilings. By the time dad started to suspect her, there wasn’t a speck of physical evidence left in the house.”

  “Sounds like a simple case, then.”

  I’d come up against a few murder cases of my own in recent months—it had been quite the season on Nashville realtors earlier in the fall; two of my coworkers had died, as well as my close friend Lila, who also was an agent—and they’d all been a lot more complicated than this.

  Both the men shook their heads. “There’s no body,” Dix said.

  Todd added, “That’s why I want all the ammunition I can get. Dad worked the case, and I’m hoping he can tell me something that isn’t in the official statements. Some insignificant little detail that might rattle her.”

  I nodded. Now that they had reminded me, I did recall having heard about the disappearance of Oliver Cartwright, but it had been just after Bradley and I divorced, and I’d had other things on my mind than the disappearance of a baby I didn’t know, even if it was in my old hometown. I didn’t remember hearing that the investigation had turned from abduction to murder, though. But if Marley Cartwright had harmed her son, I hoped Todd nailed her to the wall.

  “Are you staying the night?” he wanted to know.

  I shook my head. “I’m driving back to Nashville after lunch.”

  Todd looked disappointed. “I thought maybe I could talk you into having dinner with me at the Wayside Inn tonight.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “But I really have to get back. Work, you know.”

  “I understand.” He thought for a second. “How about tomorrow? If I drove up to Nashville, would you go to dinner then?”

  Dix looked at me. I avoided his eyes.

  Todd had reiterated his offer of marriage several times in the past two months. At this point,
he couldn’t think of any logical reason why I’d keep turning him down. Like everyone else in Sweetwater—with the exception of Dix, now—Todd thought that Rafe was dead, and since he’d always suspected that I had a soft spot for Rafe, and that Rafe was the reason I didn’t want to marry him, he was quietly thrilled at the turn of events.

  I was fairly certain I’d be faced with another proposal if I went out with him tomorrow night, and I was tired of telling him to hold on, I needed more time. But by the same token, I didn’t want to hurt his feelings by refusing to go out with him. He couldn’t help the fact that he was ready to get married and I wasn’t. It wasn’t his fault that he was everything I should want in a man, but nothing I wanted.

  So I said the only thing I could say. “Of course, Todd.”

  “I’ll pick you up at seven,” Todd said, with a smile that was just as much relieved as exultant. I smiled back, feeling my heart dropping all the way down to my toes.

  “You’re not being fair to him,” Dix said when Todd had sat down across from his father, all the way on the other side of the restaurant.

  I sighed. “Don’t you think I know that? It’s not like I enjoy hurting his feelings, Dix. I like Todd. I’m just not ready to marry him.”

  “So tell him so,” Dix said. “It’ll be quicker and cleaner than stringing him along like this, hoping he’ll get the message and stop proposing. Just say no and get it over with. He’s a big boy. He can handle it.”

  “I can’t just say no! Mother would kill me.”

  “Mother will have to handle it. Just because she’s dating Bob Satterfield, doesn’t mean you have to marry his son.”

  I put down my fork. The food that had looked and smelled so good before Todd showed up, suddenly tasted like ashes in my mouth. “There’s more to it than that, and you know it. Mother always wanted me to marry Todd. She and Pauline probably planned it when we were in the cradle, like Sleeping Beauty’s mother and what’s-her-name. She could hardly even wait for me to divorce Bradley properly before she started pushing Todd at me again.”