Close to Home

by Jenna Bennett

  She looked pale and very still, her eyes sunken and her lips slack. If she’d had make-up on when they found her—and I couldn’t imagine she’d left home without it—someone had cleaned it off. Her eyelashes were soft and fair against her skin, almost invisible, and her lips were pale and seemed thinner than usual.

  “You OK?” Detective Grimaldi’s voice reached me from far away. I nodded. “It’s her?”

  “Oh, yes. But you knew that.”

  “It’s good to get an official identification,” Grimaldi said, pulling the sheet up over Sheila’s face again. “Let’s go sit in the lobby until your brother gets here.”

  I nodded, and let myself be steered out of the viewing room and down the hallway and up in the elevator to the lobby. We settled into a small grouping of sofa and chairs where I’d found Tamara Grimaldi waiting for me the first time I’d been here. For a few minutes neither of us spoke. I was sipping my Coke, trying to settle my stomach while bringing some sort of order to my rampaging thoughts. It was like herding cats. Meanwhile, Detective Grimaldi must have been thinking about what would be happening later.

  “Tell me about your brother,” she said.

  “Dix?”

  “Do you have any other brothers?”

  I shook my head. “It’s just the three of us. I’m twenty seven, Dix is... he’s thirty by now, he just had a birthday; and Catherine is thirty one. She’ll be thirty two in the spring.”

  “He’s a lawyer, right?”

  I nodded. “They all are. Martin and McCall, in Sweetwater. Dixon Calvert Martin and Jonathan McCall. Catherine’s husband.”

  “Dixon Calvert Martin?”

  “The Calverts are an old Georgia family,” I said. “My grandmother was Catherine Calvert. My mother was a Dixon before she married my dad. This is the South. Everything that goes around, comes around.”

  “So who are you named for?”

  I grimaced. “My mother’s home town. And it could have been worse. She could have been born in Augusta. Or Alma.”

  “Or Hortense,” the detective said. “How long had your brother and Sheila been married?”

  I thought back. “Seven years, give or take. They met in college and got married while Dix was in law school. They have two daughters. Abigail is five and Hannah is three.” They were beautiful children, and they’d be devastated to lose their mother. Sheila was a stay-at-home mom who’d never used her nursing degree for anything. Once she married Dix and started a family, that was it. She spent all her time with Abby and Hannah.

  “Any problems you know of?”

  “None aside from what I told you,” I said. “According to Dix, they’ve been trying for a couple of years for another baby, and they’ve had two miscarriages. Sheila’s been reluctant to try again. It makes sense that she’d be scared.”

  Tamara Grimaldi nodded.

  “Both my siblings married well. I did too, for that matter. Until Bradley turned out to be a lying, cheating scumbag. But you already know about that.”

  “Of course,” Grimaldi said blandly.

  “Catherine and Jonathan met in law school, at Vanderbilt. So did Sheila and Dix, except Sheila was attending the nursing school instead.”

  “What about you and Bradley?”

  “We met at Vanderbilt too. It’s family tradition. Catherine is the eldest, she went first. Then Dix, then I. Jonathan was the only spouse my parents objected to. He’s a Yankee, you know. From Boston. But they never had a problem with Sheila or Bradley. Sheila’s...” I swallowed and corrected myself. “Sheila was perfect. A Southern Belle, born and bred in Virginia. Beautiful, polished, lovely. Never a hair out of place. Always the consummate daughter-in-law. She was more like mother than either Catherine or I could ever hope to be.”

  Dix and the girls wouldn’t be the only ones devastated. Mother had loved her like her own, and this would hurt her terribly.

  “Were you close?” Tamara Grimaldi asked.

  I shook my head. “Not really. She and Dix met while I lived in Charleston—I did a year of finishing school there before college—and by the time they got married, I’d met Bradley and spent all my time with him.” He’d been my date to the wedding. Todd had been best man, and he hadn’t been happy, I remembered. “When Dix finished law school, he and Sheila settled in Sweetwater, while Bradley and I stayed in Nashville. Sheila and I got along just fine, but I wouldn’t say we were best friends or anything. She was probably closer to Catherine and mom.”

  “Can you think of anyone else she might have been close to? Any other friends she had?”

  “She went to the gym. Took aerobics classes or something like that. She probably has friends among Abby’s and Hannah’s friends’ mothers. But you’d have to ask Dix about it. I didn’t know her as well as maybe I should have. And now I never will.”

  My voice was shaking by the time I got to the end of the sentence.

  Tamara Grimaldi must have realized that my sanity was hanging by a shred, because she thanked me for the information without pushing for more, and then started taking and making phone calls. Left to my own devices, I stayed on the sofa until the doors to the outside opened, and Dix came through. The woman he held the door for was my sister Catherine.

  I don’t know why I was surprised to see her. It made sense that she’d be here, actually, if I’d only stopped to think about it. Dix wouldn’t bring the girls, not to the morgue to identify their mother’s body, so he’d have had to leave them somewhere while he drove to Nashville. And he wouldn’t have called mother, because he wouldn’t want to tell her about Sheila until there was absolutely no doubt. Catherine and Jonathan have three kids of their own, and being together would make all five of them happy and above all, occupied.

  But of course Catherine would refuse to stay home once she learned what had happened. She’d leave Jonathan to take care of the kids, and insist on driving to Nashville with Dix. She’s fiercely loyal, both to him and to me. I’d have done the same thing in her position. So really, I should have expected her.

  Catherine is four years older than me, and while Dix and I take after mother’s family, the Calverts, Catherine takes after the Martins. Dix and I are taller and fair; Catherine is short and dark and just a little plump, after carrying and giving birth to three children. Mother doesn’t give her a hard time about it, partly because Catherine is married, to a man who clearly adores her and who couldn’t care less whether she weighs fifteen pounds more or less, and partly because Catherine is just built differently from mom and me.

  Her personality is different, too. Mother brought me up to be your stereotypical Southern Belle: sweet, docile, pliant—at least on the outside—and I swear she did the same to Catherine, but it doesn’t seem to have stuck. Maybe it’s Jonathan’s influence, but Catherine is nowhere near as sweet and docile as I am. When I divorced Bradley, it was Catherine who represented me, and who insisted on taking him for a good chunk of change and the Volvo. I just wanted out of the marriage, and I would have paid him to leave if I’d had any money to pay him with, while Catherine wanted to shout his infamy from the rooftops.

  She was the one who took charge now too, while Dix just looked lost. “Savannah.”

  “Catherine.” We embraced cautiously.

  “Are you all right? You look pale.”

  She looked me up and down. I folded my arms self consciously over my stomach. “This isn’t a pleasant situation.”

  “You got that right,” Catherine said, and looked past me to Detective Grimaldi. “Is that your friend?”

  I nodded. “Tamara Grimaldi, Metro Nashville PD. This is my sister Catherine and my brother Dix.”

  “Nice to meet you both. Sorry for the circumstances.” Detective Grimaldi shook hands with them both before focusing on Dix. “Why don’t we get this done as quickly as possible, Mr. Martin? If you’ll come with me, please.”

  Dix nodded. So far he hadn’t said a word. Catherine and I exchanged a look before joining the procession toward the elevator.
/>   I won’t bother to give a blow by blow account of what happened downstairs. We went inside the same viewing room as before, and flanked the gurney. Dix obviously felt the same way I did—that even thought I’d identified her, there might be a chance I was wrong and it wasn’t really Sheila—and although he was prepared, the sight of her came as a shock. For a second he reeled, as if from a punch in the gut, and Catherine and I both had to grab hold of him. Unlike me, he reached out and touched Sheila’s cheek, and then jerked his hand back when he realized she was cold to the touch. There were tears in his eyes when we rode the elevator back upstairs again, but he held it together until we were back in the lobby. Then he turned to Detective Grimaldi.

  “What happened?”

  Grimaldi told him the same things she’d told me, and got the same reaction.

  “Absolutely not. Not Sheila. I’d have noticed.”

  “The autopsy will tell us for sure,” Grimaldi said, her voice unusually gentle. “In the meantime, I need you to tell me everything that happened yesterday, and everything you know about your wife’s friends and interests.”

  “Sure,” Dix said listlessly. Tamara Grimaldi reached out and put a hand on his arm. He didn’t know it, but I’d seen enough of her to know it was an almost unprecedented show of sympathy.

  “I’ll figure out what happened to your wife, Mr. Martin. I promise.”

  Dix swallowed and nodded. My heart broke.

  Chapter 7

  Dix and Catherine drove back to Sweetwater around noon. By then, both had been interviewed by Detective Grimaldi and had told her everything they knew. It wasn’t much, since Sheila hadn’t told either of them that she was going to Nashville, let alone what she was doing there. When Grimaldi asked whether Sheila had friends in Nashville, we all drew a blank.

  After they were done in interview, we went and grabbed a quick bite to eat at a downtown restaurant. It was a quiet meal. Dix didn’t eat much, and also didn’t speak unless one of us asked him a direct question. He seemed to be in shock. Catherine and I did our best to make sure he ate, but it was difficult to force food down his throat when he kept saying, numbly, that he wasn’t hungry. In spite of my current predicament, I didn’t have much appetite myself. Talking about Sheila would only serve to upset him, so I didn’t bring her up, yet at the same time she was the only thing on any of our minds, so we couldn’t really focus on anything else.

  When I had waved them off, with Catherine at the wheel—a silent concession to just how upset Dix was; under normal circumstances he’d never have let anyone else drive—I went back inside police headquarters and upstairs to Detective Grimaldi’s office. “They’ve left. I guess I’m going, too.”

  She looked up from the pile of paperwork on her desk. “They didn’t take you home?”

  “Why would they... Oh.”

  I’d driven to the medical examiner’s office with her, and into downtown with them. Now I was stuck without a car.

  Grimaldi sighed. “Give me a couple of minutes, and I’ll take you home.”

  I shook my head. “I’d rather you spend the time trying to figure out what happened to Sheila.”

  “How do you plan to get home? Taxi? Bus?”

  “I’ll walk,” I said.

  “Across the bridge?”

  Police headquarters are in downtown, just across the Cumberland River from East Nashville. My apartment was less than two miles away, straight down the road. It wasn’t a very pleasant walk: along a busy four-lane road, across the bridge, past a trailer plaza and a few seedy motels, and through an underpass for the interstate before coming out in a still slightly rough residential-slash-industrial area. But it was also high noon, bright and sunny, and it wasn’t like anything was likely to happen to me along the way.

  “Sure,” I said. “Why not?”

  “No reason,” the detective answered with a shrug. “I just didn’t think you’d be the type.”

  “I’m usually not. But I’m eating everything in sight and gaining weight quicker than I want to. Maybe some exercise will help.”

  Tamara Grimaldi leaned back on her chair and contemplated me. “When do you plan to tell him?”

  I tried to convey an insouciance I didn’t feel. “That depends.”

  “On what? Whether you take the pill or not?” The abortion pill she’d found in my apartment.

  “And on whether he comes back. And how he acts when he does.” But mostly on whether I decided to stay pregnant. “If I go ahead and... um... terminate, I probably won’t ever tell him. It’ll be a moot point by then, and not something he needs to know.”

  Her eyebrows rose.

  “Well, it isn’t,” I said defensively. “Is it?”

  “You’re asking me?”

  I shrugged.

  “Then yes. I think it’s something he needs to know.”

  “Why?”

  “Isn’t it his choice, too? I don’t know him well—certainly not as well as you...”

  She’d better not, I thought, and then I bit down on the moment of jealousy.

  “...but he strikes me as someone who hasn’t had a whole lot of good happen in his life. Mostly it’s been one damn thing after another, as they say.”

  They did say that. And it was true that Rafe hadn’t had an easy life. What’s more, it was getting more complicated all the time.

  “A baby might be just what he needs,” Grimaldi said.

  “He’s not going to want a baby.”

  She cocked her head. “How do you know?”

  “He told me. He’s made sure not to have any kids because he can’t be there for them.”

  “What if he could be there for this one?”

  Rafe Collier facing mother across the Thanksgiving turkey...

  “I’ve got to go,” I said. Grimaldi blinked, but didn’t question my sudden need for speed.

  “Walk carefully,” she said.

  “I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  She opened her mouth and I added, “I know you’re not supposed to tell me what’s going on with an open case, but Sheila was family. I’m not asking for anything privileged, just updates. OK?”

  “OK,” Tamara Grimaldi said. I thanked her and headed out.

  The walk across the river, under the interstate and home, was everything I expected it to be and more. I was approached by several homeless people asking for handouts. I was propositioned by a slouching African-American youth whose pants would have been around his ankles if he hadn’t had a tight grip on them. A middle aged portly gentleman in a Chrysler, who looked like an accountant, seemed to think I was a prostitute, because he sidled up alongside me and flicked the lock on his door to signal that I was welcome to get in. I ignored him the same way I ignored everyone else.

  Halfway across the bridge I stopped, stepped up to the railing, and peered down into the muddy water far below.

  What a horrible day it had turned out to be. Not that I hadn’t known it would be from the second I’d seen Tamara Grimaldi outside my door this morning. Even if the news she brought hadn’t been as bad as I originally feared.

  That thought immediately filled me with guilt. What kind of person was I, to be relieved that it was ‘just’ my sister-in-law who was dead? Instead of a man I shouldn’t care about, but whom I had nonetheless allowed to take up much too much real estate in my thoughts and my heart.

  Ruthlessly, I wrenched my thoughts away from Rafe. I’d spent enough time thinking about him; right now, I needed to focus on my family.

  Was it possible that Sheila had had a secret life none of us had known about? That she’d been using drugs and had come to Nashville, to a deserted parking lot by the river, to buy more?

  Pushing off from the railing and continuing down the other side of the bridge, I reflected that it was difficult to imagine. Surely the others—surely Dix—would have noticed, if something like that was going on?

  But Dix had noticed, hadn’t he? Not drug use, certainly, but that Sheila had changed in past few months.
r />   I thought back. The last time I’d seen her had been at Dix’s birthday at the end of October. Five weeks ago. And she’d seemed completely normal then. Busy, of course. The party was at their house, a big brick McMansion in Copper Creek, and the whole family had been there, including Bob Satterfield and Todd.

  Sheila had worn a short-sleeved blouse with ruffles, and if there had been track marks in her arms, I sure hadn’t noticed. I hadn’t noticed anything else wrong, either.

  Come to think of it, that wasn’t actually the last time I’d seen her. She’d been at Dr. Seaver’s office two days ago. Was that something I should have shared with the detective, in case it had something to do with what Sheila was doing in Nashville yesterday?

  It probably was. But when I dug in my purse for my phone and couldn’t find it, I realized I must have left it at home in my hurry to get out of the apartment and up to the morgue earlier. So much for that idea. I’d call her when I got home instead.

  Or maybe what I should do was call Dr. Seaver first. There was that pesky doctor-patient confidentiality thing to get around, but if I pretended that I actually knew something about what was going on, maybe Dr. Seaver would open up and let something slip. Especially if I shared a little something private myself. There’s nothing quite like the mutual sharing of secrets to build instant rapport. That way I’d have some solid to share with Grimaldi when I called her.

  Well-pleased with my decision, I ignored the panhandler who was calling to me from the other side of the street, and hustled up Main Street toward my building in the distance.

  Once I got upstairs I found my cell phone lying in the middle of the dining room table, and when I turned it on, I realized I had missed a call from Alexandra Puckett. I’d forgotten all about her and Austin and Elspeth’s heir in the stress of the morning.

  “Hi, Savannah,” the voice message said. “We have to go to Cookeville with my dad and Maybelle today, so we can’t meet you. I’ll give you a call tomorrow, OK?” She hung up. Her voice still changed when she said Maybelle’s name, as if she screwed up her face as she said it.