Probably not. And as someone who’d spent a few years there, I figured Rafe should know.
“I’ll call you,” I said.
“Yeah?”
“Sure. If he doesn’t show up, I’ll call both you and Grimaldi. I promise.”
He nodded, seemingly satisfied. “I’m gonna go.” He leaned in to kiss me goodbye. The kiss turned into a little more than a quick peck, and I was breathless by the time he straightened. If it hadn’t been for the sales meeting, I would have gone over backwards and dragged him down on top of me. He knew it too, judging from the unholy gleam in his eyes. “Hold that thought.”
“No need,” I informed him. “It’ll be back the next time I see you. Like clockwork.”
He grinned. “Call me.”
“I will. Be careful.”
“It’s home renovation,” Rafe said. “What could happen?”
A whole lot of things could happen, but he walked away before I could list them. It was probably better that way. Considering the dangers he’d lived with every day for ten years, the threat of accidentally hitting his thumb with a hammer probably wouldn’t loom large, and I couldn’t blame him.
I made it to the office with a few minutes to spare, and dropped my coat and bag in my office—actually a converted coat closet off the lobby—before heading into the conference room, where a half dozen people were ranged around the big table.
We’re not a big company. We’ve only got about two dozen agents, all told, and more than half of those do real estate part time, in the evenings and on weekends. A lot of real estate happens then anyway, since a lot of people work 9-to-5 during the week, and evenings and weekends is when they have time to go looking for property. And then there were the ones who had taken on steady jobs to supplement the real estate income. It’s not an easy business to get ahead in, as I had learned to my detriment. I’d had my real estate license for six or seven months by now, and I’d only pulled a half dozen closings out of my hat. I wasn’t getting rich. I wasn’t even making ends meet. If Rafe hadn’t moved in, I might have had to beg my brother for a handout to pay my bills. (I couldn’t have asked mother, because she would have told me to marry Todd so I wouldn’t have to worry.)
Anyway, the handful of people seated around the table were the full-timers, the ones who weren’t bagging groceries or pouring coffee or cutting grass at nine on a Monday morning.
I gave everyone a friendly wave, and took a seat on one side of the table. “Is Tim not here?”
“I haven’t seen him,” one of the women said.
“Probably just running late,” one of the men added.
Sure. I settled back to wait. No sense in making waves until I knew anything for sure.
By 9:10 Tim still hadn’t shown up. Someone else had started the meeting ‘while we wait,’ and we’d gone around the table and shared good news and new listings and the like. Since Tim wasn’t there to give sales stats for the business as a whole, it turned into a short meeting. By twenty after, we had broken up and everyone had flown the coop, heading back to work. I stopped in front of Brittany’s desk in the lobby. “No word from Tim?”
She didn’t even look up from the latest issue of Cosmo, just shook her head.
“Doesn’t that bother you?”
She tossed her ponytail. “Why would it?”
“He’s the broker. He missed the sales meeting. It isn’t like him.”
“So?” Brittany said. “What do you want me to do about it?”
I sighed. “Nothing. I’m going to go check his office.”
She giggled. “Do you think he’s hiding under his desk?”
“Maybe his desk calendar says something about a weekend trip, or something.” Before I called Detective Grimaldi and accused Tim of murder, I should probably make sure there wasn’t some innocent explanation for everything.
“Sure,” Brittany said and waved her hand. “Knock yourself out.”
That made it easier, anyway. Not that I needed her permission, but I also didn’t need her running after me, screaming that I had no right to snoop in Tim’s inner sanctum.
Tim’s office used to belong to Walker Lamont, founder of LB&A and our previous broker. Walker left us in August, and is now cooling his heels in medium security prison. It’s a long story, and although he tried to kill me at one point, we’ve always gotten along fairly well. I’ll always be grateful to Walker for unknowingly reintroducing me to Rafe. If he hadn’t killed Brenda Puckett, Rafe wouldn’t have called the office the first Saturday in August, and I wouldn’t have gone out to meet him, and we wouldn’t have found Brenda’s body, and so on and so forth.
When Walker went to prison, Tim took over as broker, and moved his stuff into Walker’s corner office. It has a nice mahogany desk and an expensive ergonomically correct chair, not to mention a whole lot of filing cabinets and folders everywhere.
I stopped just inside the door and looked around. Tim had removed Walker’s tasteful landscapes and had livened up the walls with a handful of framed Playbills—he spent a few years in New York trying to get on Broadway before coming back to Nashville and becoming a realtor—and also a panoramic view of Manhattan above one of the filing cabinets. A framed photograph on the desk piqued my interest, but when I walked around to look at it, it turned out to be Tim’s own face smiling out at me from a silver frame. An old headshot, maybe, all bright eyes and bright teeth.
The rest of the desk was pretty clean. There was no big flat desk calendar taking up space in the middle of the blotter, but when I opened the desk drawer, I found a smaller, sheet-a-day calendar tucked away there. For good reason: Tim occasionally brings clients to the office, and they might not appreciate seeing a calendar of scantily clad men on their (male) realtor’s desk. East Nashville is diverse, but I’m not sure it’s quite that diverse. I was frankly surprised he’d brought the calendar to the office at all, but maybe he amused himself by looking at it during downtimes.
I lifted it out and put it on the desk. The sheet on top of the stack was Saturday’s, and there were no notations of meetings or appointments on it. No early visit to a construction site, for instance. On Sunday, the open house at the Armstrongs was penciled in, below a picture of a dusky-skinned hunk not too dissimilar to Rafe, who made me blush.
I’d seen Tim very early on Saturday morning. Brian Armstrong had died overnight, sometime late Friday or in the early hours of Saturday. Grimaldi would know more definitely, but she hadn’t seen fit to share that information with me. Either way, if Tim had scheduled a meeting with Armstrong—or with someone else—it would probably have been for Friday night, not Saturday morning.
The small trashcan under the desk was empty save for a used breath mint strip. Tim must have emptied it before he left on Friday.
Getting up from the chair—a lot more comfortable than mine—I tucked the X-rated desk calendar back into the drawer and closed it, before heading to the kitchen. The trashcan there is the biggest in the office. If Tim hadn’t taken his trash outside to the dumpster at the back of the lot—and I was hoping the cold weather might have prevented him—he’d have emptied his stuff in it.
Digging through was an unpleasant task. We recycle anything recyclable, and shred anything sensitive, but that still leaves a lot of nasty garbage to go into the kitchen trashcan. I picked through sticky candy wrappers and empty TV-dinner trays, used paper plates and wadded-up paper towels. It would have been worth it if I’d found the Friday sheet from Tim’s calendar, but I didn’t. All I got for my trouble was sticky hands and a pain in my lower back from bending over.
While I was in the middle of it, my phone rang, and I ended up smearing sticky nastiness all over that, as well. And it wasn’t even Rafe calling. It was my mother, so I couldn’t very well ignore it. You never know; something might be wrong.
“Hello, darling,” she said when I’d identified myself. Her ‘darling’ sounds very different from Rafe’s. My mother is Southern to the bone—born and bred in Savannah, my namesake—
but she doesn’t drawl. At least not sexily.
“Mother. What can I do for you?”
“I just wanted to see how you were, darling,” my mother said.
“I’m fine. Why wouldn’t I be?”
“No reason,” mother said smoothly. “There’s no cause to be defensive, Savannah.”
Sure.
“We’re fine,” I said again, with the emphasis on ‘we’ this time. Yes, there was cause for me to be defensive. My mother hated my boyfriend. She was probably hoping I’d tell her he’d hit me or cheated on me or something, so she could feel vindicated and I could be free to marry Todd Satterfield.
There was a slight pause while mother regrouped and reconsidered her mode of attack. “Will we see you at Abigail’s birthday party this weekend, darling?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Dixon invited you, didn’t he?”
Of course he did.
Abigail is my brother Dix’s oldest daughter. She was turning six, and he was planning a big party for her. Abigail and Hannah, her two years younger sister, had lost their mother in November. Christmas had been tough without her, and I guess maybe Dix was going all out to take Abigail’s mind off the fact that Sheila wouldn’t be there to celebrate her birthday this year. There would be a huge little-girl party on Saturday afternoon, with bouncy castles and balloon animals and all of Abigail’s little friends from school, along with Hannah and Annie, my sister Catherine’s daughter. I’m sure Dix had invited Catherine’s boys too, but Cole and Robert had probably declined the pleasures of the Cinderella bouncy castle. They’re not yet old enough to think that girls are anything but icky.
The family party was scheduled for Friday night, the evening before the big day, since Dix had told me he expected to be beat after the Saturday shindig and was looking forward to a bottle of scotch and a quiet evening at home to recover.
“Do you have other plans?” mother asked.
I didn’t. “I’m just not sure I’ll be able to make it.”
I could almost hear my mother’s eyes narrow. “I don’t like the way he’s keeping you away from your family, darling. We haven’t seen you since Christmas.”
“He’s not keeping me away,” I said. “I just don’t like to choose between my family and my boyfriend.”
There was a pause while mother struggled with what to say. She could tell me that of course Rafe was welcome in Sweetwater too, but we both knew better. He makes my mother uncomfortable. She makes him a bit uncomfortable too, I think, even if he doesn’t readily admit it.
“He has bad memories of Sweetwater,” I added when I couldn’t handle the silence anymore. Mother brought me up to put people at their ease, to diffuse difficult situations, and although part of me really wanted her to feel bad for not welcoming the man I loved to the family, the other part bowed to conditioning and good manners.
Rafe and I grew up in the same hometown: Sweetwater, Tennessee, just over an hour south of Nashville, between Columbia and Pulaski. But while I spent my formative years in what Rafe calls the ‘mausoleum on the hill,’ the Martin Mansion, he grew up in the Bog, the trailer park on the other side of town. While my family can trace their antecedents back to the War Between the States and beyond, Rafe only recently discovered who his father was. And while I’m as close to antebellum aristocracy as it’s possible to come, the Colliers were—not to put too fine a point on it—white trash, and then LaDonna compounded that offense by getting herself in the family way at fourteen by a colored boy. A colored boy her daddy, Big Jim Collier, promptly shot to death.
It wasn’t what you’d call an auspicious beginning, and Rafe was in trouble almost from the time he was old enough to talk. He didn’t stop until he landed himself in prison at eighteen for assault and battery.
To all of Sweetwater, including my mother, he’ll always be LaDonna Collier’s good-for-nothing colored boy. And since everyone knows about his prison sentence, but very few people know that he’s spent the past ten years doing undercover work for the TBI, risking his own life to put bad guys behind bars, most everyone also thinks he’s a danger to himself and others. People stare at him sideways and talk in whispers when he shows up in Sweetwater. Why would I want to subject him to that?
There was nothing mother could say, of course, and she wasn’t about to tell me I was wrong and that she really wanted to see Rafe. If she never saw him again, I’m quite sure it wouldn’t be soon enough. And to be honest, I could never quite make up my mind which was the lesser evil: dragging him to Sweetwater with me, making everyone (including him) uncomfortable just so I could make my point, or leaving him in Nashville while going to Sweetwater myself, thereby letting my mother win. So far, I had refused to make the decision one way or the other, and had stayed in Nashville with Rafe rather than going to Sweetwater to see my family. But that was a temporary fix at best; the only reason I’d gotten away with it for the past two months, was because there had been no birthdays or major holidays since Christmas.
Until now.
“I’ll talk to him,” I said. “If he ends up coming with me, I want you to promise to be nice to him.”
“When am I not nice?” mother asked, offended.
“When my boyfriend walks into the room. You’re cold enough to freeze his testicles off.”
“Savannah!” mother exclaimed, shocked.
“I’m sorry. But it’s the truth. You’re perfectly correct, but you make it clear you think he’s beneath you.” And me. “And I don’t appreciate it.”
Mother was silent. I guess she couldn’t very well deny feeling that way, but at the same time, she wasn’t about to apologize for it, not when it was her opinion that he damn well was.
“I love you,” I said. “And I love Dix and Catherine and Jonathan and the kids. I hate missing out on family occasions. But I won’t have my boyfriend insulted and made to feel unwelcome. I love him too, and until you can learn to be nice to him, I think it’s probably better that we both just stay away.”
There was a pause.
“I’ll talk to Dix,” I said when mother didn’t speak. “And now I have to go. I’m in the office. Thanks for calling.”
Mother pulled herself together. “Take care of yourself, darling.”
I said I would and hung up, while I reflected that it might have been nicer if she’d told me to take care of Rafe and trusted him to take care of me.
There was no calendar page in the kitchen trash. I washed my hands—and the phone—in the sink, and wondered whether I ought to put an out-of-order sign on the bathroom faucet and turn off the water to the sink in there, just in case there were blood traces to be found in the drain.
I really should call Detective Grimaldi. I just wanted to find that calendar page first, if I could.
Tim might have shredded it. We have several shredders: one in the lobby for Brittany to use, and a huge one in the copy room for everyone else. A few of the agents have individual ones in their offices, as well.
I went back to Tim’s office and looked around. He did have a small shredder tucked away between two of the filing cabinets. It was full of thin strips of paper, like black and white confetti. Most were long strips, legal or letter size paper. But some were shorter, and brightly colored. When I saw what I thought was half a nipple on one of them, it convinced me to gather as many of the colored strips as I could.
Tim had envelopes on his desk, and I snagged one and filled it up with all the naked men shreds I could find. There were a lot. He must have been in the habit of shredding calendar pages. Maybe he didn’t want anyone to know that he had pictures of scantily clad men in his office. Maybe he was afraid someone would think it was dirty magazines instead of a perfectly—mostly—innocent calendar.
Whatever. Once my envelope was full to bulging point, I headed back to my own office. It was time to make phone calls. If I waited until I had matched the thousands of shreds and managed to recreate Friday’s calendar page, it would be the end of the day. If I were going to
call Grimaldi, I had to call her now.
But first I had to call Rafe.
It took him a couple of rings to pick up. When he did, his voice echoed hollowly, the way it does when you’re standing in an empty, high-ceilinged room with no furniture and no rugs to absorb the sound. “Morning, darlin’.”
“Hi,” I said, as his voice, as usual, sent pleasurable shivers down my spine.
When I didn’t say anything else, he added, “Something wrong?”
I pulled myself together. “No. Or maybe. My mother called.”
“Everything OK?”
“Everything is fine,” I said. “It’s my niece’s birthday this weekend. Dix is having a big party for her. To take her mind off Sheila, I guess.”
Rafe made a sort of auditory nod. It wasn’t quite a word, nor a grunt or anything so base, but it was an encouragement to go on.
“Mother called to ask whether I... whether we were planning to be there.”
“You should go,” Rafe said. I could hear from his voice, and from the sounds behind him, that he was continuing to work while we talked. I couldn’t tell what he was doing, but I could hear that he was doing something.
“I know I should. I just wanted to know if you’d like to come with me.”
“Your mama hates me, darlin’,” Rafe said.
“She doesn’t. She just...”
“Wanted you to marry Satterfield instead.”
Well, yes. “She’ll get used to you. If she ever gets to know you, that is.”
There was a beat. And another. When he didn’t tell me he’d go with me, just let the silence hang, I relented. “I really called to tell you that Tim didn’t show up for the meeting.”
“Have you called Tammy?” Rafe asked.
“Not yet. I’ve been looking for his calendar, to see if he had any appointments scheduled Friday night. Grimaldi will want to know that, too. This way I’ll have saved her the trouble.”
“Did he?”
“Not sure yet. He shredded his calendar pages. They have dirty pictures on them.”
Change of Heart Page 6