Good thing my mother wasn’t here; it was the kind of faux pas I’d never live down.
Lydia nodded. “A few days ago, from what I understand.” She shook her head and clicked her tongue. “Poor Erin.”
No doubt. I’d only had one husband, and for only two years. I hadn’t liked him much towards the end, but I would have been upset to learn he had died, at least while we were married. And Rafe... we weren’t married, but for those few hours back in September, when I’d though I’d lost him, let’s just say I’d been a wreck.
The last thing a grieving widow would think to worry about, was getting in touch with a realtor to call off an open house. This wasn’t Tim’s fault. It must have slipped the unknown Erin’s mind, and who could blame her?
Was there a proper etiquette for accidentally crashing a funeral of someone you didn’t know? Sneak out before the family noticed, or pay your respects to the widow?
If Tim wasn’t here, maybe someone should represent the company?
I squared my shoulders. We Southern Belles may look soft, yielding and docile, but there’s steel underneath. “Where is she?”
Lydia was busy chomping on a chicken leg, so she merely gestured to a woman on the other side of the grand piano. I turned in that direction and examined the lady of the house.
She was about my age, and she looked great. Slender figure, tanned, set off to perfection in a black dress that just missed being too sexy by a hair. It was probably a cocktail dress that she’d pulled out of the closet on short notice, since she didn’t look like the kind of woman who’d keep mourning attire tucked away, just in case she needed it.
She looked like she played tennis. In one of those very short skirts and with a diamond tennis bracelet twinkling around one wrist. A perfect combination of athletic and mercenary, with a little California golden girl thrown in for good measure. Heather Locklear in black crepe.
When I stopped in front of her, she looked me up and down. “Do I know you?”
It could have been my imagination, but I thought her voice had an edge of something more than hostility. It sounded like liquor. Maybe she had fortified herself for the occasion.
“I don’t believe we’ve met,” I answered politely, since a Southern Belle never descends to their level, wherever that may be. “My name is Savannah Martin. I work at LB&A. With Tim Briggs.”
Something moved in her eyes for a second. Then the light must have come on, because her tone changed. “Oh, no. The open house.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know about...” I gestured around to the crowd.
“Didn’t Tim tell you...?” She trailed off, since obviously he hadn’t. If he had, I wouldn’t be here. “I’m sorry, Ms.... Martin, was it? My husband passed away unexpectedly. The police called me yesterday morning. I called Tim... eventually. Maybe around four yesterday afternoon? It slipped my mind until then. Until I came back home and saw the sign in the yard.”
Naturally. Cancelling an open house wouldn’t have been the first thing on my mind, either.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “He didn’t call me. Maybe he didn’t get your message.” Admittedly, that wasn’t like him. Tim is usually pretty good about answering his phone. My own experience of a few minutes ago notwithstanding. “Did he call you back?”
She shook her head. “I haven’t heard from him.”
That was strange, too, but I’d worry about it later. “I’m sorry for your loss,” I said formally. “And I’m sorry for having intruded. I’ll go now.”
She didn’t try to stop me. Instead, she walked me out the door and onto the steps, the skin on her arms pebbling in the cold air. She lowered her voice. “When you talk to Tim, tell him I have to see him next week. About the house. Now that Brian’s gone... I mean, I’m sure there are issues to deal with when someone dies.”
“Of course.” I did my best to sound like I was paying attention, but it wasn’t easy. “I’m sorry, but... did you say your husband’s name was Brian?”
She nodded. “And I’m Erin. Erin Armstrong.” She offered her hand, and I took it numbly while I ran the names over and over in my head.
Armstrong. Erin Armstrong. Brian and Erin Armstrong.
“Something wrong?” Erin said, from far away.
I pulled myself together and forced a smile. “Not at all. I’m sorry for your loss. I’d better go try to track down Tim.”
She nodded, although I do think she may have looked at me a bit a strangely. “It was nice to meet you, Savannah. Do tell Tim I need to talk to him when he has a moment.”
I promised I would and headed for the front door, my mind churning.
Chapter Four
The first thing I did when I got into the car was dial Tim’s number again. There was no answer, again. Or rather, the voicemail kicked in and told me Tim’s mailbox was full, so I couldn’t even leave another message.
I sat behind the wheel for a few minutes after that, thinking.
Yesterday morning, I had found Tim rinsing blood off his hands in the office bathroom, a half dozen miles away from where he lived on the south side of town.
Sometime just before that, someone had stabbed Brian Armstrong to death, rolled him in a sheet, and dumped him in Shelby Park.
Now I had just learned that the Armstrongs were Tim’s clients.
Add the fact that Tim wasn’t answering his phone and hadn’t called to tell me the open house was cancelled, and it all added up to a pretty damning picture.
Maybe I ought to call Detective Grimaldi.
I had the phone in my hand, but part of me rebelled against the thought of using it. I like Tamara Grimaldi—I like her better than I like Tim, if it comes to that—but he was, for all intents and purposes, my boss, and besides, I could be wrong. All the things I thought I knew hung together quite well, but what if Tim had really just had a nosebleed? If I sicced the police on him, he wouldn’t be happy with me. And when Tim was unhappy, he could make everyone else very unhappy indeed.
Maybe what I should do was pay him a visit instead. Maybe something was wrong. Perhaps that nosebleed I had dismissed betokened a brain hemorrhage or some such, and he was at home, unconscious, unable to answer the phone. If I went there, I might save his life.
Or at least be able to give him a piece of my mind about not calling me to cancel the open house.
In pondering it, I realized I didn’t know where he lived. I knew it was somewhere in the 12 South area—around 12th Avenue on the south side of town, in another historic district much like this one—but more precisely than that I wasn’t sure. I’d offered to drop off some paperwork to him once, but he had declined, and so I’d never pinpointed it more specifically than just the neighborhood.
I could stop by the office to check the employee roster, but that would be going out of my way. First, I decided to try accessing the information from where I was sitting. Property assessments are a matter of public record, at least in Nashville, and our powers that be, in their infinite wisdom, have laid them out on the internet. And with all the iIntelligence these days, all I had to do was cue up the internet on my phone, go to the courthouse records system, and search Tim’s name. The phone obliged me with an address.
It took me under twenty minutes to get there, on a lazy Sunday afternoon. Football season was over for the year, so there were no road closures due to Stadium traffic. I was able to slide right onto the interstate at Shelby Avenue, and it didn’t take me long at all to exit again at Wedgewood. Pretty soon I was wending my way down 12th Avenue looking for Tim’s street.
Like the Five Points area in East Nashville, 12th Avenue is all up and down little funky clothing stores and bars and coffee shops. On a sunny day in the spring, the sidewalks are full of hip young things with piercings and tattoos. Today, with the sky overcast and gray mist in the air, the area was pretty deserted.
There was no sign of life on Tim’s street, either. Nobody working in their yards on such an unpleasant afternoon. No children playing outside, nobody jogging.
People stayed inside.
Tim’s house turned out to be one of the old Victorian cottages: extremely prissy, practically dripping with gingerbread trim, and painted—of course—his favorite baby blue. Like his eyes, or so he’d probably tell me if I asked. The landscaping was immaculate, green even in the middle of winter, and manicured to within an inch of its life.
I pulled the Volvo into the driveway and cut the engine. Everything was quiet. There was a porch light on, glowing yellow through the mist, but maybe that wasn’t so surprising, given the general grayness of the day. Someone could be forgiven for keeping a light on on an afternoon like this.
I made my way out of the car and up the flagstone walkway to the porch. The skinny plank flooring was slippery with water, and my hand got wet from dragging through the rain on the banister. I shook off as much of the water as I could, but was forced to wipe the rest off on my skirt, which I did with a grimace.
There was no newfangled doorbell beside Tim’s door; instead, he still had the original handle mounted in the middle of the heavy, carved wood door. When I twisted it, a chime rang through the house, pure and clear.
I took a step back, off the welcome mat, and waited.
Nothing happened.
After a minute I rang again. Then I tried the door. It was locked, of course. I did check under the mat—after surveying the neighborhood to make sure no one was watching me—but there was no key underneath. Ditto for the big flower pot in the corner. The porch swing was stripped of its pillows for the winter, so there was nowhere there to hide anything, and running my fingers across the top of the lintel likewise produced no results. Obviously, Tim hadn’t seen the need to leave a hide-a-key on his porch, or if he had, he’d found a hiding place that was more inventive than I’d guessed.
That left the back door.
I made my way around the house to the rear, where, indeed, there was a kitchen door. Knocking on it produced no results either, and like the front door, it was locked. All I could see through the window was the laundry room. A washer, a dryer, a table for folding, and a sliver of the kitchen through the open door. Tim had dark espresso cabinets, stainless steel appliances, and a granite countertop. And no key hidden anywhere, that I could find.
If I’d truly been afraid for Tim’s health and wellbeing, I would have broken the window and stuck my arm through to unlatch the door from inside. But I wasn’t quite at that point yet. I was worried, certainly, but I wasn’t yet at the point of wanting to commit B&E.
So instead I wandered through the misting rain to the garage. There was a window at the top of the roll-back door, but it was too high for me to reach. And this door, likewise, was locked. At least I got no movement when I slipped my fingers under the edge of it and heaved. And because it was an electronic door—or so I assumed—there was no handle I could tug.
As a last resort, I headed around the garage to the rear, the heels of my shoes sinking into the soggy ground, and finally came across a small door set into the side wall. It was locked too, but it had a window, through which I was able to ascertain that the garage was empty. Or not empty, exactly—there were gardening supplies and a bicycle and a variety of boxes and plastic crates stacked along one wall—but there was no sign of the Jaguar, nor of Tim.
He definitely wasn’t here.
On the one hand, that was good news. At least I could stop worrying about him bleeding to death inside the house.
On the other hand, it was worrisome, taken in combination with Saturday’s blood and dead body, the overflowing voicemail box, and the fact that he hadn’t contacted me about the open house.
If I’d been able to get into his place more easily, I would have gone in. But since I couldn’t, not without actually breaking in, I had a choice to make. Would I be better off calling Tamara Grimaldi right now and telling her what I knew—what I suspected—and let her make the decision as to whether Tim’s house warranted further investigation? Or would it be better to wait a bit longer and see if Tim turned up at the weekly sales meeting at the office tomorrow morning? He was the broker-in-residence, so under normal circumstances he should be there. And it wasn’t like I knew that something had happened to him. It was the middle of the afternoon, and there was nothing here that suggested foul play. Maybe he’d found a new friend and things had gotten a little rough, and that’s where the blood had come from. Or maybe he really had killed Brian Armstrong, and now he was on the run.
But either way, Tim didn’t seem to be in any immediate danger. And since I couldn’t use that as an excuse to break into his house to make sure everything was all right, it was probably better just to wait until the morning to call Grimaldi. If he didn’t show up at the weekly sales meeting, and he hadn’t told Brittany that he’d be gone, then we’d have something to worry about. But until then, I could just be making things up.
I scribbled a note for Tim to call me on the back of a business card and tucked it between the door and the jamb on the back door. If he parked in the garage—and with the nasty weather, he probably would—he was more likely to enter the house through the back than the front. After a moment’s hesitation, I added one to the front door, as well. Better safe than sorry.
I fully expected Rafe to slink in after I’d turned out the lights and attempted to go to sleep for a second night in a row. Imagine my surprise when he showed up around dinner time, as I was curled in a chair in the living room, deeply invested in another romance novel I had picked up at the grocery story this afternoon along with the hot chocolate and the cookies. I was enjoying a cup of cocoa and a few of the cookies too, since they’d only go to waste if I didn’t eat them.
The book was your classic tale of contemporary love, between the cold-hearted, money-grubbing billionaire and the sweet woman who turned him human. The tall, blond, gray-eyed hero had quite a lot in common with my ex-husband Bradley, not to mention Todd Satterfield, my brother’s best friend and the man my mother had designated as my second husband.
My mother isn’t terribly fond of Rafe. Not to put too fine a point on it, but if there existed a list of all the men in the world my mother could imagine me getting involved with, Rafe would not be on it.
There are lots of reasons for this, beginning with his mother, his father, his grandmother, the rest of his family, his illegitimate child, his skin color, his past, his present, the fact that he seduced me, the fact that he knocked me up, the fact that he left me, the fact that he came back, the fact that he’s risked my life more times than mother is comfortable with—never mind the fact that he’s saved it a few times too. Most of all, it’s simply because he isn’t Todd. Mother wanted me to marry Todd. She’s dating Todd’s daddy, Sweetwater sheriff Bob Satterfield, while my brother Dix remains Todd’s best friend. If I were to marry Todd, it would set mother’s world to rights. And when I chose Rafe instead, let’s just say she wasn’t best pleased. Our relationship became official on Christmas Eve, and she hasn’t quite gotten over it yet. I’ve done my best to keep the two of them apart since then, since my life is a lot easier that way.
Anyway, I was sitting there reading when Rafe walked in. First I heard the key in the door, and then steps in the hallway. A couple of thuds were the sounds of his boots hitting the floor. A rustle was his leather jacket being hung on one of the hooks. And then I heard his footsteps padding down the hallway toward me, past the kitchen and the half bath, into the living room/dining room combination.
I looked up from the book, but I didn’t say anything. He didn’t either, for the first few seconds. We just looked at one another. And as usual, even in the midst of my worry and anger, the sight of him took my breath away.
It’s not just because he’s beautiful, although he is. LaDonna Collier was a blue-eyed blonde like me, while Tyrell Jenkins was black, and the combination is gorgeous. Rafe has golden skin, melting dark eyes, and hair the color of espresso. It’s a coloring that has served him quite well in his ten years of undercover work. He can look African-American, he can look Hispanic
, he can look Middle Eastern or Greek, and dressed up in a suit and tie, he fits in quite well with the upper crust, too, as long as he tones down that far-from-upper-class Southern drawl.
At the moment he was dressed in another black T-shirt that pulled tight across his arms and shoulders, and a matching pair of cargo pants. With his hair in its usual barely-there crop, and with the viper tattoo on his arm peeking out from under the sleeve of the shirt, there was nothing refined or civilized about him at all. He looked hot as hell, and he also looked dangerous. I recognized the getup from early December, when he’d used it to play bouncer at La Havana nightclub.
As if to complete the picture, he reached behind him to pull out a gun and lay it on the dining room table, as easily and without fanfare as if it were an everyday occurrence. For him it was. I wasn’t quite there yet myself, especially since I hadn’t seen that gun much lately.
I was still staring at it, trying to guess what its presence might mean, when he sauntered toward me, to brace his hands on the arms of the chair I was sitting in, one on each side of me. “Evening, darlin’.”
When he leaned in to kiss me, I turned my face aside. “You smell like smoke.”
There was a beat while nothing happened, and I could feel his breath against my cheek. Then he straightened. “Yeah?”
I already wished I could take it back, but it was too late. He didn’t wait for me to answer, just turned on his heel. “Guess I’d better take care of that.” He peeled the T-shirt up over his head as he sauntered toward the door to the bedroom and the shower beyond. Muscles moved smoothly under golden skin, and my tongue got stuck to the roof of my mouth. So much for pretending I was unaffected.
I thought he might disappear into the bedroom without looking back, but I guess he knows me too well. When he glanced over his shoulder as he passed through the doorway, the look on my face must have told him everything he needed to know, because he winked. “Hold that thought, darlin’.”
No problem. I closed the romance novel and used it to fan myself.
Change of Heart Page 4