Change of Heart
Page 27
“Finalizing things?” Catherine asked, and waved me to follow her down the hallway to the family room in the back.
It trotted along while I answered her question. “The opposite, actually. He’s going back to work for the TBI.”
She glanced at me over her shoulder. “Undercover?”
I shook my head. “Oh, no. We’re not sure as what. Trainer, maybe. Or handler. But not undercover. Too many people know who he is, for that to be possible.”
“So he’s going straight?”
“He’s always been straight,” I said, and stepped around the corner to see every eye in the room focused on me. “Oh. Sorry.”
Catherine grinned, of course, and went to sit by Jonathan.
“Savannah,” mother said, her lips tight.
I nodded back. “Mother.”
She too glanced past me. “Are you alone?”
“I wouldn’t talk about him if he were here. That would be rude. If he were here, I would expect him to speak for himself.”
Mother’s lips compressed, but she didn’t say anything else. I nodded to the man next to her. “Good evening, Sheriff.”
He nodded back, a tall, gray-haired version of his son.
“Todd.” I smiled, while making sure I only met his eyes for a tenth of a second; just long enough to keep up appearances.
“Savannah.” Todd inclined his head in what was more than a nod, but not quite a bow. I was relieved that he remained seated. Had he still been courting me, he would have gotten up. So maybe something was finally starting to sink in.
“Dix.” I grinned at my brother, who grinned back. He’s only a year and a half older than me, so we’ve always been close. I lifted the gift bags in my hand. “Where’s your daughter?”
“The kids are up in the bonus room,” Catherine said, before Dix could open his mouth. “We’re opening presents a little later.”
Sure. “I have ours and one from Det... um... Tamara.”
Dix, bless him, blushed. “Just put it with the others.”
“Tamara?” mother repeated, a tiny wrinkle between her elegant brows. “Isn’t that the woman who gave the girls those horrid dolls for Christmas?”
“I had Barbies when I grew up,” I said, and went to sit next to Catherine and Jonathan in the sofa. “They’re not horrid. I mean, I know they give little girls a skewed image of women, with those perfect breasts and that impossibly tiny waist and those permanently deformed feet...”
Mother sniffed.
“...but they’re much less damaging these days. There are Attorney Barbies now. Veterinarian Barbies. Police Barbies.” Those same Police Barbies mother objected to. “G.I. Barbies. You know, the kinds of professions that little girls can actually aspire to these days.”
Next to me, Catherine—herself an attorney—was vibrating with suppressed mirth. I grinned at Todd, in the other sofa. “How many women in the district attorney’s office in Columbia, Todd?”
“Four,” Todd, assistant to the D.A., said, a little stiffly. He doesn’t like being made to disagree with mother.
“See?” I smiled sweetly. Mother eyed the bag with Grimaldi’s gift balefully. I put it beside me for safe-keeping rather than leaving it with the others, as Dix had told me to do. I didn’t want to turn around and find it missing, after all.
I behaved after that, though. I didn’t pick any fights, and I didn’t bandy Rafe’s name about when it wasn’t absolutely necessary, just so I could watch mother’s eyes narrow. I didn’t even bring up controversial subjects, like Police Barbies or murder. It wasn’t me who asked about Brian Armstrong and Neil Donnelly a few minutes later.
“I hear they made an arrest in the murder of the orthodontist,” Sheriff Satterfield said.
Mother clucked and shook her head, probably at the idea that someone could murder a dentist. In mother’s world, our kind of people—doctors, lawyers, and dentists—aren’t victims of violent crime. One might have thought that Sheila’s murder, at the hands of a doctor, had cured her of that tendency, but one would be wrong.
I nodded. “Tamara Grimaldi arrested the brother-in-law yesterday.”
“His brother-in-law did it?”
“His brother-in-law stabbed him. His wife listened on the phone.”
Mother winced, and so did all the lawyers. The sheriff didn’t. “So it was the money?”
“Partly. But it was revenge more than anything. See, Brian Armstrong—the dentist—raped Neil Donnelly when Neil was sixteen. He was a sexual sadist, and to hear Neil explain it, he was lucky to get out alive.”
“How do you know that, Savannah?” mother asked.
I decided to pretend I hadn’t heard her. “Instead of reporting him to the police, Neil and his sister forced Brian to marry Erin. They were busy making his life a living hell—”
“Savannah, dear...” mother protested weakly.
I glanced at her, but didn’t stop talking. “—until they moved here, and Erin started sleeping with her housecleaner. He was the second victim.”
“Did Donnelly kill him too?” the sheriff asked.
“Neil Donnelly killed everyone. Brian threatened to divorce Erin, since adultery is reason for divorce in the state of Tennessee, so Neil and Erin decided to kill him. Beau—the housecleaner—happened to know that Neil was there the night Brian was killed, so Neil had to kill him too. And then Neil had to try to kill my broker, who was supposed to be the fall guy for everything.”
Well, really, I guess it was Beau who had been supposed to be the fall guy for everything. And if Neil had stuck to his original plan, things might have worked out better for him. He could have taken Brian to Beau’s place, killed him, left him for Beau to deal with—Beau, who wouldn’t remember anything thanks to the dose of roofies Neil had given him—and he’d have been home free. It was improvising—deciding to frame Tim after the public argument at Chaps—that had tripped him up.
“How do you know this, Savannah?” mother asked again, and this time I had no choice but to answer.
“It was Rafe and I who figured it out.”
“Savannah...!”
I wasn’t entirely sure whether the undertone was shock, exasperation, or horror. In any case, I was happy when the doorbell rang and I had an excuse to jump up. “I’ll get it.”
“It’s probably the pizza,” Dix said. “It’s already paid for. I gave them my credit card number when I placed the order.”
“Pizza?” Mother sounded as if he’d offered her gruel.
“It’s Abigail’s birthday,” Dix said. “She likes pizza.”
I hid a smile. “I’ll be right back.”
I barely made it around the corner before I started giggling. Pizza! My mother would be eating pizza. With her fingers. Maybe even from a paper plate. Mother, who was used to foie gras and Chardonnay, and who could differentiate between a dozen different tableware patterns by sight. I could barely wait.
I had a big grin on my face when I yanked the door open. It didn’t diminish at all when Rafe grinned back. “Evening, darlin’.”
My heart gave an actual skip. “You came!”
“It’s been long enough. We gotta deal with this sooner or later.”
True. Even if I still had a hard time wrapping my brain around the fact that he was actually here. “Come in, then. Let me take your coat. How did it go this afternoon?”
He shrugged out of a rather upscale wool peacoat and let me hang it next to mine in the coat closet. Under it, he was still dressed in the dark suit and white shirt and tie he’d been wearing to the interview.
“You look wonderful.” Not as wonderful as he would later, naked in my bed at the mansion, but pretty darned good.
He grinned at me. “I thought your mother would appreciate the suit.”
She wouldn’t. It made him look too respectable, and that would challenge mother’s preconceptions. But if nothing else, it would show her that he cleaned up rather nicely. “You didn’t answer my question. How did it go? Do you have a job again
?”
“What are you gonna do if I say yes?”
“Kiss you,” I said, since I hadn’t yet.
“What if I say no?”
I’d probably kiss him then too. Since I hadn’t yet. But— “You got the job, didn’t you?”
“Would you be worried if I did?”
“I want you to be happy. As long as you’re happy—and as long as you come back to me at the end of the day—I can deal with a little worry.”
“In that case—” He took a breath. “I took the job.”
“Trainer?”
He nodded.
“Handler?”
He shook his head. “Not yet. I haven’t been off the streets long enough. They’re gonna keep me behind the scenes awhile.”
“Nine to five?”
He nodded.
“I’ll dig out the pipe and slippers.”
“Let’s get a dog,” Rafe said. “That way you can stay in bed. Naked.”
He grinned at me. I grinned back. “Remember what I said?”
“You were gonna kiss me?”
Precisely. I was on my way up on my toes when Dix appeared at the other end of the hallway. “Sis? What happened to the... oh.”
Rafe laughed against my lips, but by then it was too late to pull back. His hands were at my waist, I was swaying toward him, and his lips were close enough to mine that all I had to do was stretch another centimeter to get what I wanted.
The last thing I heard before it all faded to black was Dix’s voice down at the end of the hall. “Sorry, folks. False alarm.”
# # #
About the Author
Jenna Bennett writes the Savannah Martin mystery series, as well as the bestselling Do-It-Yourself home renovation mysteries from Berkley Prime Crime under the pseudonym Jennie Bentley. A former Realtor® and home renovator, she makes her home in Nashville with a husband and two boys, a hyper-active dog, a dive-bombing parakeet, two African dwarf frogs and two goldfish. A native of Norway, she’s spent more than twenty years on US soil and still hasn’t managed to kick her native accent.
For more information, please visit Jenna’s website: www.JennaBennett.com
Copyright
CHANGE OF HEART
Savannah Martin mystery #6
Copyright © 2013 Bente Gallagher
All rights reserved.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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