Uncertain Terms (Savannah Martin Mysteries Book 12)

by Jenna Bennett

  “You’re Ora?” fell out of my mouth.

  Audrey’s lips trembled into something that came within throwing range of being a smile. “I was telling them my name. At the hospital, when I was checking in to have the baby.”

  Her eyes flickered across the table and back, and she corrected herself. “To have Darcy. And at the last minute, I remembered that Denise had told me not to put my own name on the birth certificate. I’d already started talking. So I changed Audrey to Aura. They spelled it O-R-A, and I didn’t correct them.”

  “And you took the last name Sweet and Water Street from Sweetwater?”

  She nodded. “Denise said it was to be a closed adoption, so I shouldn’t put my real information anywhere.”

  Of course she had. I wasn’t even surprised. What she’d really done, of course, was safeguard herself against anyone changing their minds later. Once the baby was adopted, she didn’t want the mother to be able to show up and stake a claim, and maybe be able to back it up. False information on the birth certificate ensured that the mother couldn’t prove it was her baby.

  I knew it was wrong, but I thought I might just hate Denise Seaver a little.

  “Why didn’t you want me?” Darcy asked from the other side of the table. At the sound of the question, Audrey’s eyes filled with tears.

  Mother took her hand and held it. Best friends for more than thirty years. Audrey having had a child out of wedlock before she even knew Mother wasn’t likely to change that.

  “You were of age,” Darcy continued, her voice shaking. “You must have had a job. You could have supported us. And women weren’t stoned for being single mothers thirty-four years ago.”

  Audrey shook her head. “It wasn’t that. But your father...”

  She trailed off, with a glance at the sheriff.

  Mother glanced at him, too.

  Uh-oh. If the sheriff had had an affair with Audrey while he was married to Pauline, I didn’t think Mother would find that particularly endearing.

  Audrey turned back to Darcy, her eyes steady. It was easy to see that she was uncomfortable, but she also seemed determined to see this through. “Your father and I were friends. We grew up together. We went to school together. I was a bit of a tomboy as a child, so we fished together and climbed trees together. And as we got older, I fell in love in him.”

  Mother patted her hand.

  “He didn’t feel the same way about me,” Audrey said. “I always knew that. But we started a relationship anyway. We were both twenty-five. Neither of us had found anyone else. We were afraid of growing old alone, I guess. We got along well. It made sense.”

  “What happened?” Darcy sounded reluctantly sympathetic.

  Audrey’s eyes filled with tears. “He met someone else. From one day to the next, everything changed. He took one look at her and knew she was the one.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I told him I was happy for him,” Audrey said, and now it was her voice that was shaking, “and wished him the best. And then I stepped aside. Two weeks later I found out I was pregnant.”

  “Did you tell him?”

  Audrey shook her head. “He was back in Nashville by then. Back in school. This all happened during the summer. He was there, with her, and I was here alone. So I made the decision not to say anything to him about you.”

  “And he never found out?”

  “When he came home for Christmas,” Audrey said, “he brought her. His girlfriend. They were engaged by then. Nobody thought it was strange that I stayed away. When I gained weight, everyone just thought it was because I was depressed and overeating. It was fairly easy to hide the pregnancy.”

  There was a moment’s pause.

  “I understand why you couldn’t keep me and stay here,” Darcy said, “but didn’t you think about going somewhere else? Keeping me and settling down somewhere, just the two of us?”

  Apparently not, because Audrey stared at her for a moment as if she couldn’t quite process the question. “This is my home. My parents were here. I had just taken over my grandmother’s business. I couldn’t leave.”

  She probably could have, to be honest. But some people don’t think about it. I’d gone to Nashville to study and had ended up marrying Bradley Ferguson, and when that ended I had stayed. Going back to Sweetwater hadn’t crossed my mind. Or let’s say I hadn’t considered it, because Mother had certainly made sure to bring it up plenty.

  But Catherine had also gone to Nashville to study, and had married Jonathan, and they had ended up back here. Dix hadn’t considered living anywhere else, either, as far as I knew, after college. And of course Dad had done it first. Studied law at Vanderbilt, and then come home to take over the family business.

  But I was digressing. Badly. I couldn’t imagine Audrey living anywhere but Sweetwater, and she obviously hadn’t been able to, either.

  “I didn’t want to give you up,” she said. “I was there when they... when your parents came and took you away. Watching them walk out with you is one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do.”

  Her voice broke, and I, for one, believed her. I have no idea whether Darcy did. She was on the same side of the table as I was, and it was hard to get a good look at her. Catherine and I exchanged a glance, though, and I think she believed Audrey, too.

  “So you sent me the Help Wanted ad from the local newspaper,” Darcy said.

  Audrey nodded. “It took a while before I found you. At first I didn’t want to. You had a new mother and a new father, and you were better off. I tried to forget about you, but I couldn’t. So when you were eight or so, I started to subscribe to a couple of the local papers in Alabama. The nurse at the hospital wouldn’t tell me the names of your parents, but she said they were from Mobile. When you were eleven or twelve, I found a picture of you. You looked just like I did at that age. And I found your name.” She smiled through the tears. “I was going to call you Rose, after my grandmother. Darcy’s better.”

  I had to agree. Darcy looked nothing like a Rose. Not that it isn’t a pretty name, but it wouldn’t have suited Darcy at all.

  “After that,” Audrey said, “I tried to keep up with what went on in your life. I found some more pictures, and I also took a vacation and went to Mobile for a few days.”

  “You were there?”

  Audrey nodded. “I saw your house. I saw you, and your mother and father. You looked happy. You had friends you spent time with. But I didn’t stay long. You weren’t mine anymore.”

  I think by now they had both forgotten that there were other people in the room. They were just talking to one another.

  “I saw where you graduated from college,” Audrey said, “and when your engagement was announced. I saw that your parents died. But you were married by then. You were starting a family of your own. And you needed time to grieve. So I didn’t contact you. And besides, I was afraid. You had no reason to want anything to do with me. I gave you up.”

  Her eyes brimmed over, and tears trickled down her cheeks. Catherine pushed a box of tissues down the table.

  “But when I realized you were getting divorced,” Audrey said, “I sent you the advertisement from the Reporter. I was afraid you’d go back to Mobile, and I wanted you here, where maybe I could get to know you—and you could get to know me—before I told you the truth. Maybe by then—if you’d gotten to like me a little—you wouldn’t mind if it turned out I was your mother.”

  There was silence after that. Audrey reached for a tissue to blot her face. Mother patted her arm. We all waited to hear what Darcy was going to say.

  “I don’t mind that you’re my mother,” she said eventually. It wasn’t a ringing endorsement, certainly, but at least it was neutral instead of negative. It could have been worse.

  Audrey sniffed and smiled through it. Everyone else started breathing again.

  Then Darcy turned to the sheriff. “So are you my father?”

  Bob Satterfield flushed. Mother stiffened. Audrey looked surpr
ised. “No,” she said. “Of course not.”

  It was Darcy’s turn to look surprised. “He’s not?”

  Audrey shook her head. “Not at all. When I got pregnant with you, Bob was already married to Pauline. We were friends. I would never have interfered with that.”

  “I wouldn’t have let you,” Bob Satterfield informed her. She almost smiled, and he looked a little better, too. A little less grim.

  “So who is he?” Darcy asked. She looked around, as if expecting him to materialize out of thin air.

  “No one you’ve ever met,” Audrey said firmly. “No one you know. No one who’s here anymore.”

  “Did he move? Do you know where he went? Can we find him?”

  “He passed away,” Audrey said. “A few years ago now. I’m sorry.”

  This time, it was Darcy’s eyes that filled with tears. “So I won’t be able to meet him?”

  “I’m afraid not.” Audrey’s voice was gentle. “There’s just me.”

  “You said he was engaged. Did he get married? Did he have children? Do I have...” She hesitated before the last word, “—siblings?”

  Audrey looked away from her, over at Catherine, Dix, and me, ranged together on the other side of the table. Siblings can be a pain in the posterior, but we all had each other’s backs. Darcy had grown up alone. So had Audrey, it sounded like. I wondered whether Darcy’s question had hurt Audrey. Whether, maybe, she thought it meant that she, Darcy’s mother, wasn’t enough. Or wasn’t as good as having siblings.

  And I didn’t think that was the case at all. Darcy had been without family for a few years now. Without anyone she was related to. It was hard to blame her for being excited about the possibility of more relatives.

  “Yes,” Audrey said, and it sounded like she had to squeeze the words past an obstruction in her throat, like she didn’t want to say them. “He had other children.”

  “More than one?”

  “Three,” Audrey said. “You have two sisters—half-sisters—and a half-brother.”

  Darcy’s eyes widened and her mouth dropped open. Mine did, too, but probably not for the same reason. Next to me, Catherine gulped.

  “I’m sorry, Margaret,” Audrey said, turning to her. “It was before he met you. Once he did, there was nobody else for him.”

  Mother didn’t say anything—she didn’t look like she was even breathing—and Audrey added, “It has nothing to do with you.”

  Mother’s pale cheeks flushed. “Nothing to do with me? My husband and my best friend had a child together that I knew nothing about, and it’s not about me?”

  “Robert didn’t know, either,” Audrey said. “He couldn’t have told you. He didn’t know.”

  “But you did! How many years have we been friends? And you never told me you’d had my husband’s child?”

  Audrey alternated between deathly pale and flushed. “You were pregnant yourself. Was I supposed to tell you, while you and Robert were over the moon about Catherine, that she wasn’t his first daughter? That he already had a daughter somewhere else, growing up with strangers, and he’d never get to meet her?” She shook her head, her eyes full of tears. “I couldn’t do that. To either of you.”

  “And you!” Mother turned to—or on—Bob Satterfield. “You and Robert were close. The four of us spent a lot of time together. You never told me he had another child!”

  “I didn’t know,” Bob said. “While you and Robert were courting, Pauline and I were newlyweds trying to start a family. But we had a hard time of it. She had a couple of disappointments around that time.”

  Disappointments being a euphemism for miscarriages, I assumed. Bob was too delicate to use the word. And I knew all about what that was like, having had two of my own.

  Audrey nodded. “I didn’t say anything to you or Pauline. She was struggling to stay positive. And I was carrying a baby I wasn’t going to keep. Telling her that I was giving up what she would give anything to have, would be like rubbing salt in her wounds.”

  Mother looked from one to the other of them. It was easy to see that she was fighting for composure. She was most likely close to tears, but refused to give in to them. I think she probably understood where Audrey was coming from, but she also felt betrayed, and who could blame her? It would be like finding out, when Rafe and I were pushing sixty, that Tamara Grimaldi had had his baby thirty-five years ago, and neither of them had told me.

  Mother evaded Bob Satterfield’s hand and pushed away from the table. “Excuse me.” She didn’t look at anyone when she got to her feet and headed for the door.

  “Mom,” Catherine began. Mother didn’t turn around, but she lifted a hand. Catherine subsided.

  I think we were all a bit floored, to be honest. Not to diminish Mother’s shock and pain, which were very real, but I hadn’t expected to come face to face with a sister I never knew I had. Or to learn that the woman I’d always thought of as an honorary aunt had had a child with my father back in the recesses of time, and hadn’t told any of us about it.

  Bob made to get up, and Audrey put a hand on his arm. “I’ll go.” She glanced at Darcy across the table. “Well talk more later.”

  Darcy nodded, and looked as shell-shocked as the rest of us. I examined her face for any resemblance to Dix or myself, but I couldn’t see any. To Catherine... maybe a little.

  Audrey swept out, leggy and elegant on fire-engine red heels. After a moment, the sheriff excused himself and followed.

  The door shut after them.

  Nobody spoke.

  Jonathan withdrew himself from the corner where he’d been standing—I had forgotten all about him being there—and wandered over to the table, where he pulled out Audrey’s chair and sat down in it. Opposite from Darcy. He looked at her for a moment. She looked back.

  “Welcome to the family,” Jonathan said.

  And Darcy put her head down on her arms and burst into tears.

  Nineteen

  “You’ll never guess who Darcy’s parents are!” I told Rafe an hour later, on the phone.

  “I don’t even wanna try. Lay it on me.” He sounded a bit stressed out, to be honest, but I couldn’t keep the news to myself any longer.

  “Audrey!”

  There was a beat of silence. Then— “I can see that.”

  I could, too. Now. Funny how it hadn’t struck me as a possibility before it had hit me in the face, so to speak. “I know. I can’t believe I never noticed before. Too close to both of them, maybe. But that’s not the worst of it.”

  “What’s the worst of it?”

  “Her father!”

  “What about him?”

  “He’s my father, too!”

  This time there was a longer beat. Then— “You’re fucking with me.”

  I winced. He usually censors those words when he’s talking to me. He must be quite shocked to have forgotten. “I’m not. My dad and Audrey had a fling just before he met Mother. Then he dropped Audrey like a hot potato as soon as Mother showed up. He and Mother got engaged and then married. Audrey never told him she was pregnant, and because he was in Nashville and she was in Sweetwater, he never figured it out.”

  “Shit,” Rafe said.

  “I know. Darcy’s my sister. Half sister.”

  “Shit.” He pondered for a moment. “Does your mama know?”

  “She was there when we found out. We broke into Doctor Seaver’s house last night—”

  “You committing B&E without me now?”

  “With Darcy and Dix,” I said. “It was going to be just Darcy and me, but then Dix followed us. And then the sheriff caught us coming back with the files. He realized we were close to figuring it out on our own, so he contacted Audrey and, I guess, told her she had to tell Darcy the truth. So this morning the two of them showed up at the law office. They brought Mother, too. At first I thought it was because the sheriff was going to confess to being Darcy’s father, and he wanted Audrey there as moral support for Mother when she found out. Then, when Audrey confe
ssed, I thought Mother was there to support her. And then Darcy asked who her father was. And I realized that Mother wasn’t there for any of those reasons.”

  “Shit,” Rafe said again. Still taking it in, I guess. I was still taking it in myself, if it came to that. “How’d she handle it?”

  “About as you’d expect. Shock. Anger that nobody had told her. That she and Audrey have been friends for thirty-three years, and Audrey never told her she’d had my father’s child. That Mother and Bob Satterfield and Pauline and Dad were friends for years, and none of them told her he’d had a thing going with Audrey. Never mind the fact that nobody knew about the baby.” Except Audrey, of course. “And then she got up and walked out. Mother, I mean. Audrey went after her. Then the sheriff left, too. I have no idea whether either of them caught up to her.”

  They hadn’t been outside on the square when I came out an hour later. Not that I’d expected them to be. It was hot.

  They hadn’t been inside Audrey’s store, either—it had been shuttered and dark, with the ‘Closed’ sign in the window. And although I’d checked the Café on the Square, I hadn’t seen any of them inside.

  So now I was on my way back to the mansion. I came to an intersection and looked both ways before proceeding, steering the car with one hand and holding the phone to my ear with the other. “All the others stayed at the law office. Dix offered to let Darcy go home, but she said she wanted to stay. If she went home, she’d have too much time to think, she said. And Catherine and Jonathan have appointments. Besides, it’ll give them some time to work things out while going about their normal business.”

  I pondered for a second, and added, “I guess Dix will have to give Darcy a pay raise now.”

  Rafe chuckled. “How do you feel?”

  “Numb,” I told him, honestly. “I didn’t see that coming. I realized she looked familiar. And now that I know, I can see Audrey in her. But I didn’t realize she looked like us!”