“I did a couple of years of law school,” I said. Before I dropped out to marry Bradley. “I can take a look at the will, if you want. If you have a copy of it. At least I’ll be able to tell you whether there’s anything hinky about it. Anything you have to worry about.”
“Would you?”
“I’d be happy to,” I said. “Just as long as you understand I’m not a lawyer. I can’t give you legal advice, and I can’t represent you. But I can look at it and tell you what I think.”
“Thank you.” Yvonne sniffed. “That’s so nice of you.”
“I’m happy to do it,” I said. “Maybe I could come over to your house tonight, after you get off work, to take a look at it? Or we could go somewhere for dinner instead, if you want.”
“Come to the house,” Yvonne said. “I’ll cook. I’m a good cook.”
Fine with me. “Six o’clock?”
“I don’t get off until five-thirty. Better make it seven.”
I told her seven was fine, and then I nudged the pregnancy test and chocolate bar toward her. She looked down, and up again. “You don’t need that.”
“Excuse me?” I was pregnant. I had cravings. If I wanted chocolate, I got chocolate.
“I can tell by looking at you that you’re pregnant,” Yvonne said. “You’re due in a couple of months, aren’t you?”
“More like three.” But yes. I was rather visibly expecting. “It isn’t for me. It’s for a friend.”
Yvonne’s eyebrows arched. “Darcy’s pregnant?”
“No!” Or at least not as far as I knew. And that was a rumor I didn’t want to be responsible for having started. “It’s for a friend in Nashville. She’s seventeen, and afraid the pharmacy will call her dad if she goes to buy a pregnancy test. So I told her I’d get one and give it to her. I’m driving up there tomorrow.”
“Just to give her a pregnancy test? We don’t have to report when someone buys a pregnancy test, you know. Even if that someone looks like a kid.”
“I know,” I said. “It’s not just to give her the test. I have a couple other things to take care of, too, while I’m there.” I mean, I liked Alexandra, but not enough to drive more than an hour back to Nashville just to give her a pregnancy test. If I hadn’t been going anyway, I would have talked her into getting it herself.
“What made you think of Darcy?” I added, while I watched Yvonne scan the barcode on the side of the box.
“Someone saw the two of you at Cracker Barrel for lunch.” She scanned the Kit-Kat and dropped it into the bag on top of the pregnancy test. “I thought maybe she was afraid to buy it herself. You know how people talk.”
Yes, indeed. There’s no privacy in a small town.
And as if to prove it, Yvonne added, “How’s Rafe? I heard you guys had a blow-up at your mother’s party the other night.”
“It wasn’t a blow-up.” Nobody blew up. “And he’s fine. Working. That’s why I’m here.”
“Oh,” Yvonne said, and managed to infuse the single syllable with a whole lot of doubt. “People are saying you’re breaking up.”
“People are wrong.” I hauled the plastic bag off the counter.
“No trouble in paradise?”
“None at all,” I said firmly. “The only reason I’m here, is because Rafe is working on something in Nashville that he doesn’t want me to get involved with. But we talk every day. I spoke to him this morning. Everything’s fine.”
Yvonne nodded. “If you decide you don’t want him anymore, I’d be happy to step in and take him off your hands.”
I’m sure she would.
“I don’t even mind the dreads.” She grinned. “He had cornrows in high school, remember?”
I did remember. And tried hard not to imagine those cornrows in bed with Yvonne. “Mine,” I told her.
“Sure. Tell him I said hi when you talk to him.”
I told her I would. “I’ll see you at seven.”
“You know where to go?”
“As long as you haven’t moved. The house in Damascus?”
Yvonne confirmed that she still lived in the house in Damascus—a little town a few miles up the road from Sweetwater—and I took my plastic bag and headed out. I ate the Kit-Kat in the car, and wished I’d bought another for later. One chocolate bar just isn’t enough.
Six
Mother had plans to have dinner with the sheriff anyway, so she had no problem with me going out to meet a friend. Her nose wrinkled a little when I mentioned Yvonne’s name—the McCoys aren’t ‘our kind’ of people; we’re much like the Hatfields that way—but she confirmed that yes, Beulah had gone on to the big buffet in the sky a couple of weeks back.
“Heart attack, I heard. All that rich food.” She shuddered.
The meat’n three fare at Beulah’s had been artery-clogging, no question. Chicken fried steak, mashed potatoes and gravy, green beans cooked in bacon fat, not to mention the pie crusts...
Then again, my father had also passed away from a heart attack, and he hadn’t been eating bacon fat and chicken fried steak. Mother would never have allowed it.
“Yvonne said Beulah left her the restaurant,” I said, and Mother’s perfectly shaped eyebrows rose.
“You don’t say?”
“I do say. Or at least Yvonne did. I’m going over there, to her house, to take a look at the will tonight. I may not have finished law school, but I’ll be able to tell whether it’s valid or not.”
“Of course you will, darling,” Mother said.
“And if I think she needs a lawyer, I’ll talk to Dix. Maybe he can work something out with her.”
Mother looked pained. She probably remembered Yvonne, and didn’t want to contemplate what kind of something she and Dix might be able to work out.
“Apparently, Beulah’s niece is also after the place,” I added. “She and her mother—Beulah’s sister-in-law—are contesting the will. Do you know anything about them?”
Mother shook her head. “Beulah was quite a few years older than me, you know. We weren’t contemporaries. And I didn’t grow up in Sweetwater. But I can ask Bob tonight, and see what he knows.”
“I wouldn’t mind if you did,” I told her. “If the will is valid, and if Beulah was compos mentis when she wrote it, then I don’t want the sister-in-law and niece to take what’s rightfully Yvonne’s.”
Mother nodded.
“She’s been working in that place since she was eighteen. Beulah was training her to take over. She’d do a much better job of running the place than two women who don’t even live in town.”
They couldn’t possibly live here. If they did, Mother would know them. Or know of them, at any rate.
“I’m sure you’re right, darling,” Mother said. “I’ll mention it to Bob and see what he might know.”
I told her I appreciated it, and that I was going to go upstairs to lie down for a bit before I had to leave again. My ankles were swollen and the baby was sitting on my bladder. I wanted a break.
So I took one, and crawled onto the bed in my room for a while, just enjoying the coolness of the air conditioning and the sunshine coming in through the windows. I even took a quick nap for thirty minutes or so, until I was interrupted by the telephone.
Waitin’ for some lover to call...
I dove for it. “Rafe!”
I hadn’t expected to hear from him so soon, or at all tonight, so this was a nice surprise.
“Evening, darlin’.”
It wasn’t quite evening yet, but I guess he’d had a long day.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“Not much. I had a minute and figured I’d give you a call before I get too busy.”
“I appreciate that,” I said, making myself comfortable against the pillows with the phone to my ear. “Have you had a good day?”
“Eh.” He didn’t sound thrilled with it.
“Is the meth lab still up and running.”
“So far. I’ve seen’em come outside to smoke a couple tim
es.”
Smoke? “Lots of people go outside to smoke because they don’t want the smell to linger in the furniture.”
“And folks who cook meth in their kitchens don’t wanna blow up themselves and their whole operation if the chemicals catch fire, so they go outside to smoke, too.”
That made sense. And he probably knew more about it than I did.
Correction: he definitely knew more about it than I did.
“Yvonne says hi,” I told him. “She says, if we’re not able to work things out after I insulted you the other day, she’s ready and willing to console you.”
Now he sounded amused. “You don’t say?”
“I don’t. She did. I’m having dinner with her tonight. At her house. You don’t think she’ll try to poison me to pave the way to you, do you?”
“No, darlin’. There ain’t a mean bone in Yvonne’s body.”
“You’d know,” I said, and then grimaced. Not jealous, huh? “I ran into her at the drugstore this afternoon. She works there now. Beulah died, and they had to shut down the restaurant while they figure out probate. She left the place to Yvonne, but her sister-in-law and niece are contesting the will.”
“That can’t be good,” Rafe said.
“I don’t imagine so. I’m going to take a look at the will, and see if there’s anything about it that makes me think it isn’t valid. If it is, Yvonne might need to hire a lawyer of her own.” One who had actually finished law school. “I thought I might sic her on Dix. Or maybe Catherine would be better.”
Yvonne would undoubtedly prefer to deal with Dix, but Dix might prefer that Catherine handle it. And Catherine can be ruthless. When Bradley and I divorced, she would have nailed his ears to the wall if I hadn’t stopped her. My sister takes unfairness in a deeply personal way. If Yvonne needed legal representation, she could do a lot worse than Catherine.
“Have a good time,” Rafe said.
“Thank you. So you think the food will be safe?”
“I’m sure it’ll be fine. She don’t really want me.”
“She said she’d be happy to take you off my hands.”
“She was joking,” Rafe said.
“You slept with her once.”
“When we were bored and had nothing better to do. It didn’t mean nothing.”
He’d said that before, perhaps in those exact words. I should probably believe him. “I’ll tell her you said hi. And tomorrow Darcy and I are driving up to Nashville.”
There was another beat. “Why?” The question was halfway between suspicious and what I’d call a tacit warning to me to be careful what I said.
“We’re going to see Grimaldi,” I said. “And look through the records they confiscated from St. Jerome’s Hospital last year. It turns out Darcy is adopted. She’s trying to figure out where she came from.”
“And you think she came from St. Jerome’s?”
“I think there’s a good chance she did. Her parents said they got her from Nashville. And her birth certificate has her adoptive parents listed as her birth parents, the way St. Jerome’s did. The way David’s birth certificate looks.”
“Other places mighta done the same thing.”
I nodded, even though he couldn’t see me. “I know. But we know St. Jerome’s did. And I don’t think the investigation turned up any other hospitals that were involved in the baby-selling ring. It was just St. Jerome’s and Dr. Seaver in Columbia.”
Rafe grunted something that might have been agreement or the opposite.
“Anyway,” I added, “it’s somewhere to start. And something to do. It’s a little boring down here. I miss you.”
His voice warmed. “I miss you, too, darlin’.”
“Does that mean maybe I’ll get to see you tomorrow? Since I’ll be in Nashville anyway?”
He hesitated. “I guess that depends on what’s going on. If we take care of business tonight, I might could be available tomorrow.”
“We’re having lunch with Alexandra Puckett,” I offered. “At the barbeque place on Main Street. One o’clock, if you want to join us. I’m sure she’d be happy to see you.”
It was probably best if I didn’t mention anything about the pregnancy. Or the possible pregnancy. Alexandra might not be pregnant. If she tended toward having irregular periods, she might just be a bit late, and the worry was playing tricks with her body and making her think she was seeing signs of pregnancy when they weren’t there.
No, much better to wait to say anything until I knew for sure. Especially since Alexandra’s pregnancy had absolutely nothing to do with Rafe and he had other worries at the moment.
“Tell you what,” he said. “I’ll talk to you in the morning. I’ll have a better idea of what’s left of the cleanup and whether I can take an hour for lunch and a quickie with my wife.”
The quickie hadn’t really been on the table—no pun intended—since I’d have a teenager with me and Darcy to get back to Sweetwater in one piece, and I couldn’t really ask her to make herself comfortable in the restaurant while Rafe and I went out to the car to make love. Not that the idea didn’t have appeal.
But even so— “That’ll work,” I told him. “Do what you have to do tonight, and call me in the morning. If you can get away for lunch, that’ll be great. If not, I’ll just see you when I can.”
“Sounds good. Have a good time tonight. Tell Yvonne I said hi.”
I said I would. “You have a good time, too. If that isn’t the wrong thing to say about a gang war sting operation.”
“Oh,” Rafe said grimly, “I’m gonna have a great time. The more people end up in prison and the less people die, the happier I’ll be. I love you, darlin’.”
“I love you, too,” I told him, and let him go.
I’d been to Damascus a few times before. Elspeth Caulfield lived there—the woman who gave birth to Rafe’s son David—and I had accompanied Dix to her house the day after she died to look for her will.
I’d even been to Yvonne’s house before, and once Rafe and I had kept her from bleeding out on her living room floor.
That was almost a year ago now. The last time we’d stopped by had been on occasion of my high school reunion in May. People had been dying then, too—people were always dying, it seemed—and we’d thought that maybe Yvonne could shed some light on why.
I knew the place would look different from the first time I’d seen it. After Yvonne almost died, she had bought new furniture and rearranged the room. The sofa was up against the wall now, instead of in front of the window, and the carpet was shaggier than it used to be.
She met me at the front door. “C’mon in.” She stepped aside to let me pass through into the house. “It’s so hot I didn’t go crazy on the food. But there’s plenty of it. I figured, if you’re pregnant, you probably eat a lot.”
Not the most flattering way to put it—I much prefer to think that I’m eating for two—but OK.
“It looks great,” I said.
She had set up the dining room table—small and round—with a big bowl of salad bristling with vegetables, a plate of grilled chicken, a big pitcher of iced tea brimming with ice cubes, and what looked like homemade rolls.
“Wow,” I added. “It smells great, too.”
It did. The air was redolent of baked bread and grilled chicken.
Yvonne flushed with pleasure. “Thanks. I don’t entertain a lot. I wasn’t sure if it was too much or not enough.”
“It looks perfect to me.” As if to concur, my stomach rumbled.
Yvonne giggled. “C’mon. Sit down.”
I made my way over to the table and sat. It really did look great. And the Kit-Kat bar was a very long time ago.
“We should eat before the chicken gets cold,” Yvonne said, “and then I’ll show you the will later.”
Sure. She didn’t have to ask me twice.
So we ate and made small-talk. I told her about life with Rafe—without most of the titillating details. In justice to Yvonne, she didn’t ask
me for them, either. And she told me about life in Sweetwater, which hadn’t changed much from when I grew up here.
“So are you dating anyone?” I asked between stuffing bites of chicken and salad into my mouth. “This is delicious.”
“Thanks.” She shook her head. “No. After what happened—” She gestured to her chest, where the scars from the knifing were still visible above the low-cut neckline of the T-shirt she was wearing, “I decided that life’s too short to waste on losers. I’m gonna take over Beulah’s and make it into the best damn meat’n three in the state, and the next guy I get involved with is either going to get behind me or get out of my way.”
“That sounds like a good plan.” I reached for another roll. I was eating in ways unbecoming a lady, but Mother wasn’t here to see me, and I was starving. I may have felt a little frisson of guilt, but it wasn’t enough to make me stop. “I’m sorry about Beulah. I didn’t know her, other than to say hello when I saw her, but you’d worked with her a long time. You must have been close.”
Especially if Beulah had willed Yvonne her business instead of leaving it to relatives.
“She was a little bit like a mother to me,” Yvonne said. “Or a gramma, anyway. She was older, you know. But my own mama’s never been much good, and ever since I started working for her, Miz Beulah took care of me.”
I nodded.
“She wanted me to have her place. Because she knew I cared for it the same way she did. That she’d be leaving it in good hands.”
We sat in silence a few moments.
“What happened?” I asked. “I mean... was she ill? Or in bad health? I know she wasn’t young, and I guess it’s been a while since I’ve seen her, but she didn’t look like she was dying.”
“It was sudden,” Yvonne said with a sniff into her napkin. “Sorry. I just can’t believe she’s gone, you know? Every day when I got to work she was there, and now the place is locked up and I can’t even get inside. And when I went to the funeral, you shoulda seen the looks those two gave me. Like I didn’t have the right to be there. Like working for Miz Beulah for a dozen years didn’t give me the right to go to her funeral.”
Uncertain Terms (Savannah Martin Mysteries Book 12) Page 7