Uncertain Terms (Savannah Martin Mysteries Book 12)

by Jenna Bennett

  “If Denise Seaver wants to press charges from prison,” Dix told the sheriff, “feel free to arrest us. But until then, I don’t think you can.”

  The sheriff gave him a steely stare. “I’m the sheriff. I can. I might not make it stick, but I can throw you in jail for the rest of the night.”

  “Catherine would have us out on bail tomorrow morning,” Dix said calmly. “And just imagine what would happen when Aunt Regina got hold of the story of how you jailed your ladyfriend’s son and pregnant daughter. Not to mention what Mother would say about it.”

  The sheriff looked harassed, but certain that he didn’t want to bring that particular nightmare down on his own head. I guess we weren’t getting arrested tonight.

  “I’ll have to take the files.”

  “You can’t!” I said. “They’re our only shot at trying to find Darcy’s mother. Darcy has a right to know who her mother is. Especially if her mother is the one who brought her here.”

  “What?” Both Dix and the sheriff asked simultaneously. I explained about the newspaper clipping, for what felt like the thousandth time.

  Dix shook his head. “I don’t remember anybody pushing Darcy at us. We had three or four applicants for the job, and she was the most qualified. But it was me, Jonathan, and Catherine making the decision. Sheila had some input, I guess...”

  There was a moment’s pause while we all stopped to remember Sheila and that she was no longer with us.

  “But I don’t remember talking to anyone else about it. You weren’t here.” He looked at Todd, who shook his head. Todd had still been working in Atlanta then. And he’d been married to Jolynn, who was—pardon the callousness—as dead now as Sheila.

  Dix turned to me. “And you were in Nashville. I think you were in the process of divorcing Bradley. Or struggling to get back on your feet again after the divorce. I offered you the job, didn’t I?”

  “Mother did. I said no. I didn’t want to crawl back to Sweetwater with my tail between my legs.”

  And that’s what it would have amounted to.

  “We need those files,” I told the sheriff. “After all this, you can’t take them away from us. It would be different if Darcy’s mother didn’t want to get to know her, but I think she does. She’s probably just worried that Darcy doesn’t want to get to know her.”

  I glanced at Darcy, who nodded.

  The sheriff looked from her to me and back. His gaze lingered. “Fine,” he said after a moment. “I can get them from you tomorrow. Afternoon.”

  “Thank you.” I shared a triumphant look with my partners in crime. Not only would we have the chance to go through what we’d found, but the sheriff would take on the trouble of returning the evidence to Doctor Seaver’s house. It was like a double win.

  “I’ll hang onto them until tomorrow,” Dix said, “and bring them to the office in the morning. We can go through them there. Together.”

  If he had thought that would deter me, he was very wrong. “I’ll be there at nine.”

  “Get outta here,” the sheriff growled. “And take your files with you. And when you’re done with’em, call me so as I can get them back where they belong.”

  So Dix hoisted the box, and Darcy and I carried the extra files, and off we went. The sheriff could have offered to drive us, I thought, but maybe he wanted to spend some more time with his son and the woman who looked like she was getting under Todd’s skin.

  Or maybe he just couldn’t wait to get rid of us. He might even be reassessing his relationship with Mother based on her criminal relatives.

  “Are you sure we couldn’t just take a peek tonight?” I asked Dix as we trudged along the sidewalk.

  “No.” He was adamant. “It’s late. Catherine is dropping the girls off in a few minutes. Darcy’s tired. And you look ready to drop.”

  I was ready to drop. But I could drop into a comfortable chair in Dix’s house with a stack of files and be just fine.

  “Maybe we should just put them in my car. It’s parked outside your house.”

  “No,” Dix said again. “I don’t trust you. If you take them, you’ll stay up all night and go through them.”

  So?

  “That’s not fair to Darcy,” Dix said. “It’s her mother. The choice should be hers. What do you want to do, Darcy?”

  Darcy looked overwhelmed. And wrung out. Unlike Dix and me, who were just caught up in the excitement of the chase, this was personal for her. “I guess it’s OK if we wait until tomorrow. It’s getting late.”

  And destined to become later, at least if I were any judge. As soon as we turned off Marley’s street and onto Dix’s, a police car slid up to the curb next to us and kept pace. The window rolled down.

  I expected to see Cletus Johnson or one of Bob Satterfield’s other deputies. Instead, Lupe Vasquez’s face peered out at us. “Whatcha got there?”

  “Files,” I said. Should have taken a closer look at the car. It wasn’t a sheriff’s vehicle at all, but a Columbia PD squad car.

  One that had no business being here, incidentally. We were well outside the city limits. Unless Bob Satterfield had called on the Columbia PD for help.

  “Officers Vasquez and Nolan,” I added, in an effort to be friendly, “my brother, Dixon Calvert Martin.”

  Vasquez nodded. “Pleasure. Those wouldn’t be files you took out of the residence of Doctor Denise Seaver, would they?”

  “The sheriff let us go,” I said. “And you’re out of your jurisdiction, Officer.”

  Lupe Vasquez grinned. “I’m just giving you a hard time. When we heard about a robbery in progress at Doctor Seaver’s house, we thought it might be you. We figured we’d take a look.”

  She was very careful not to glance at Nolan, which gave me the impression that coming here might have been his idea.

  “Darcy’s on her way back to Columbia in a few minutes,” I said. “If you want to hang around and give her an escort.”

  “We can do that.”

  “That’s her car right up there.” I turned to Darcy. “Go ahead and give me your files. I’ll put them with the ones Dix has. And we’ll see you tomorrow.”

  Darcy nodded. “Thanks, Savannah.” She sounded exhausted. Emotionally as well as physically.

  Tomorrow, God willing, she’d find out who her biological mother was. And right now she must be wondering whether she really wanted to know. Once she knew, she couldn’t go back to not knowing. And what if the information wasn’t what she wanted to hear?

  “Go home and get a good night’s sleep,” I told her. I didn’t add, “If you can,” but I thought it. “We’ve had a long day. I’m ready to drop, too.”

  Darcy managed a weak smile. “I’ll see you tomorrow. Dix.” She nodded, and then headed for her Honda. The squad car waited until she’d reversed and was going in the right direction for home, and then glided out of the subdivision after her.

  “That was interesting,” Dix said.

  I assumed he meant the officers, and not the whole evening, so I told him about the visit to Fiestas de Mexico yesterday, and how Patrick Nolan had seemed quite taken with Darcy.

  “They’ll make sure she gets home safely.” And this time I wasn’t worried that anyone would come after her. At the moment, I was more concerned that she was so tired and distracted that she’d run off the road from simply not paying attention.

  “Come on,” Dix said and led the way to his own front door, where he put the file box down long enough to dig the key out of his pocket and unlock the door. “Let’s just put this in the car.”

  “Are you sure you don’t want to take a quick look first?”

  I certainly did. And I had assumed, when Darcy left, that Dix would agree to a peek.

  He looked at me. “We’re looking for Darcy’s mother. Not yours. You already have a mother. The sheriff’s probably called her and told her you were caught breaking into Doctor Seaver’s house.”

  I grimaced. I wouldn’t be surprised.

  “This is about
Darcy’s life. Not yours. You don’t get to walk into my office tomorrow morning already knowing what she has yet to find out.”

  “Fine,” I said. Since he put it like that. “I’m curious, OK? It may be Darcy’s mother, but it’s probably someone we both know. Someone we’ve seen our whole lives. Hell... heck, I went to Aunt Regina’s house this afternoon to see if maybe she’d had a baby out of wedlock a year or two before she married Uncle Sid!”

  Dix gave me an astonished look over his shoulder as he led me down the couple of steps from the kitchen into the garage. “Why Aunt Regina?”

  “She’s a couple of years older than Denise Seaver. Aunt Regina wasn’t married when Darcy was born. She didn’t meet Uncle Sid until later. I can’t imagine our grandparents being happy about their only daughter getting pregnant out of wedlock, can you? And you’ve looked at Darcy, right? One of her parents, if not both, had to be part black.”

  Dix dumped the file box into the back of his SUV and turned to me. “How did that make you think of Aunt Regina, for God’s sake?”

  “She’s a Martin,” I said. “She looks like Catherine. And like great-great-grandfather William.”

  Dix shook his head. “The fact that great-great-grandfather William was half black would make Aunt Regina something like one-sixteenth black. She wouldn’t have a child who looked like Darcy. It would take more than that.”

  Maybe. Maybe not. “It wasn’t her, anyway. She didn’t seem guilty at all, when I asked her. And she didn’t remember anyone else who was pregnant at the time. No one who didn’t end up with a baby later.”

  Dix nodded and took the lid off the file box and turned it upside down. “You can put those in here.”

  I off-loaded my files where he said to and watched him close the rear of the car. “Are you sure you won’t come out here later and go through them on your own?”

  “Positive,” Dix said. “I have more patience than you. And anyway, Catherine is bringing the girls home soon. I’ll be busy getting them ready for bed. When they’re asleep, I intend to sit down with a beer and forget this night ever happened.”

  “Until tomorrow.”

  He sighed. “Yes, Sis. Until tomorrow.”

  Eighteen

  The sheriff had indeed called to inform Mother that he had caught both Dix and me breaking and entering. You’d think we were still in grade school, getting ratted out by the sheriff.

  Mother talked at me about it for a while—setting a good example, being above reproach, how dare I drag my brother into my wild schemes... never mind the fact that he was the one who had followed me after I’d specifically lied to him so he wouldn’t.

  When she could see that I was dead on my feet and wasn’t really paying attention to whatever she was saying, she let me go to bed. I crawled upstairs and collapsed, and I didn’t even have time to lament the fact that Rafe hadn’t called again before I sank into oblivion.

  When I woke up, it was morning. The sun beat against the windows, and the world was already steaming. There was pretty much no point in drying off after my shower, since I’d be damp the moment I set foot outside the door again.

  I made it to the law office by nine o’clock. Darcy was already there, looking worse than I did.

  Oh, she was nicely dressed, in an elegant summer-weight skirt and elbow length white blouse that probably would have set off her complexion beautifully on any other day. But she was paler than usual, and had dark circles under her eyes that even the makeup she had put on couldn’t hide.

  We locked eyes across the desk for a silent acknowledgement that we both looked like something the cat dragged in, and we might as well not mention it.

  I glanced at the door to the inner sanctum. “Is Dix here?”

  Darcy nodded. “He’s setting up in the conference room.”

  “Setting up what? You mean he’s started looking at the files already?” I made to head that way, but she shook her head.

  “He’s just carrying things in from the car. He said we wouldn’t start until you got here.”

  OK, then. “How about some coffee?”

  I couldn’t have any—not good for the baby—but that didn’t mean she couldn’t.

  Darcy shook her head. “No, thank you. My stomach’s a little upset.”

  And no surprise. Nerves, no doubt.

  I tried for a bright smile. “Well, I’m here now. How about we go in?”

  “Just let me get Catherine out here.” Darcy reached for the phone.

  “Catherine?”

  She nodded. “Your brother talked to your sister last night. She’s going to sit at the desk for the time that it takes us to do this.”

  You’d think that Jonathan would be able to do that, but OK. The kids were probably all in school of some sort today, anyway. Mother’s Day Out for the little ones who hadn’t graduated to real school yet.

  “She’s coming,” Darcy said and put down the receiver. “We can go.”

  We headed down the hallway toward the conference room, and ran into Catherine halfway there. “You look like hell,” she told me on the way past.

  “Thanks ever so. Do you remember being pregnant?”

  “I glowed,” Catherine said, in blatant disregard of the truth. There had been times when she’d looked as much like a limp dishrag as I did right now. I remembered them.

  She grinned at me over her shoulder. “Yvonne called. I’m meeting with her at one.”

  “Good for you.” And Yvonne. “Do your best for her, OK? I’m sure she would have rather had Dix.”

  “I’m sure Dix would rather she work with me,” Catherine said before she disappeared around the corner into the reception area. “And I always do my best,” floated back to us, disembodied.

  We walked the few steps to the door of the conference room, and pushed it open.

  As Darcy had said, Dix had already carried the files in from the car. He had also taken them out of the box and piled them in three equal piles: one on each end of the long table, and one in the middle.

  “I didn’t look at the files,” he informed us. “I have no idea which stack has Darcy’s mother in it. I don’t know who Darcy’s mother is. It’s all random. I guess we just pick a stack and start. Darcy?”

  “I’ll take the one over here,” Darcy said, and walked to one end of the table.

  “Savannah?”

  “I don’t care. I can take the other end. You get the middle. You’re already there.”

  Dix shrugged. “Tell me again what we’re looking for.”

  “Caucasian female,” I said, pulling out my chair and taking a seat, “mid-twenties, pregnant, with a due-date sometime during the first two weeks of April. Let’s start there. If you find one, pull it out of the stack and set it aside. Then we’ll go over those together when we’ve eliminated everyone else.”

  Dix nodded. So did Darcy. I pulled the first file off the top of the stack and went to work.

  With the three of us, the job didn’t take long. Less than twenty minutes later, we had eliminated all but a handful of the files.

  “Three,” Dix said, fanning them out on the table before leaning back on his chair. “You ready for this?”

  He looked at Darcy. She was watching the folders as someone would watch a snake coiled to strike, but she nodded.

  Dix pulled the first one toward him, and flipped it open. But before he could read the first name, there was a quick rap on the door. Catherine pushed it open.

  “Sorry.” She avoided looking at any of us, just came inside, and suddenly the whole world stepped in. First came Audrey, with Mother right behind. The sheriff made up the rear, although at the last second before the door closed, Jonathan squeezed through, too. Catherine sent him a look that said clearly, “You’re supposed to be holding down the fort,” and Jonathan shrugged sheepishly, but didn’t leave again. Although he did find a spot as far away from Catherine as he could, and leaned against the wall.

  Dix took charge, after looking from one face to the next. “What’s
going on?”

  I was glad he could speak, because I couldn’t. Maybe the sheriff had changed his mind and was going to arrest us after all. And when she couldn’t talk him out of it, Mother had brought Audrey for moral support.

  “Let’s all have a seat,” the sheriff said.

  At least we weren’t in imminent danger of being hauled off to the slammer. Good. If he arrested all of us, there’d be no one left to bail us out.

  Everyone sorted themselves into chairs. All except Jonathan, who stayed in the corner. Catherine came around the table to sit next to me, leaving the three of us and Darcy facing off against the sheriff, Mother, and Audrey on the other side.

  There was a moment of silence as we sized each other up. It felt like the showdown at the OK Corral. It also felt like I wanted to be somewhere else. Anywhere else. Because whatever was going to happen, didn’t feel like something I was going to like.

  “What’s going on?” Dix asked again. And since the sheriff hadn’t answered him the last time, he turned to Mother.

  She seemed game, if confused. “They asked me to be here, darling.”

  So no help there. But at least Mother wasn’t about to confess to being Darcy’s mother.

  Not that I had thought she was.

  “After we spoke last night,” the sheriff said, “I contacted Audrey. And this morning, the two of us got your mother. She should be here for this.”

  Uh-oh. Maybe I’d been right last night. Maybe the sheriff was going to tell us he was Darcy’s father, and he wanted Audrey here as moral support for Mother when she found out about it. It would be a shock to her, no doubt. I mean, Darcy clearly wasn’t Pauline Satterfield’s child. She didn’t look anything like Todd.

  Had the sheriff cheated on Pauline? Or had Darcy been born before the Satterfields had gotten married?

  “I’m your mother, Darcy,” Audrey said.

  What?

  My head whipped from the sheriff to look at her, so fast I courted whiplash.

  And yes, I could see the resemblance, now that she’d said it. Something in the eyes and the cheekbones. Darcy’s were less chiseled than Audrey’s, her face rounder and softer, but she might get there in another twenty-five years. And they were both tall and lanky, with long legs and slim figures. Audrey’s hair was also jet black. I’d always assumed she dyed it, but maybe not. Or if she dyed it now, maybe she hadn’t had to when she was younger.