Home Stretch

by Jenna Bennett

  For the first couple of months after the baby was born, I probably wouldn’t be able to work anyway.

  I put my hand on my stomach, where the baby was still sleeping peacefully. And since he or she was, I went back to sleep, too.

  When I woke up again, it was two hours later. After eight, sliding toward half past. And it was a case of opening my eyes, wide awake, from one second to the next. None of the leisurely stretching and waking slowly.

  Usually, that happens as a result of hearing something. I focused, but didn’t hear anything at all.

  Which was a little suspicious in and of itself, actually. Sure, Rafe was gone. But Mrs. Jenkins was here. Or was supposed to be.

  I rolled out of bed. As soon as my feet hit the floor, I figured out my balance—a little different every morning, as the baby grew bigger—and padded toward the door.

  The door to the lavender bedroom stood open. I didn’t even need to look inside—although I did—to know that Mrs. Jenkins wasn’t there.

  The bed was empty. So was the bathroom. The door was unlocked, to I was able to check.

  I stuck my head into the yellow room at the end of the hall, just in case she’d decided to visit the nursery, but the room was also empty. Normally, I would have taken a second to admire the bright walls and the white crib (borrowed from my sister Catherine along with a matching dresser/changing table), and the colorful quilt hanging over the side of the crib... but today I didn’t. I just turned on my bare heel and headed for the stairs to the first floor.

  I guess I should have stopped to put on some clothes, or at least a dressing gown. But to be honest, I was worried. I think I mentioned that Mrs. Jenkins had a habit of wandering off. She used to do it when she’d lived here before. And I was in charge of keeping her safe. I didn’t know how I’d be able to tell Rafe the news if I’d allowed his grandmother to vanish.

  The hallway was empty. I stuck my head into the parlor—maybe she’d decided to come downstairs and watch some more HGTV—but the sofa was also empty. The TV screen was black.

  I padded down the hallway toward the kitchen. “Mrs. Jenkins?”

  On the way, I stuck my head through the door into the library. More than a year ago, when I first met Rafe again (twelve years after he left Columbia High), there’d been a dead body in this room.

  Today there wasn’t. Nor was there a live body anywhere.

  I burst into the kitchen stomach first. When I got up to speed, my mass kept me going, and I ended up several steps into the room, looking around.

  My heart sank. There was no Mrs. Jenkins here.

  On the plus-side, the stove wasn’t on, and we weren’t in danger of burning the house down. That kind of thing can be a concern when you’re dealing with people who forget what they’re doing. But if she’d been in this room, she hadn’t left any sign of her passing.

  The basement door was locked and bolted. The back door was also locked. No one had come through here.

  I headed back down the hallway to the front. “Mrs. Jenkins?”

  It was stupid to think she’d answer. I’d already called for her on my way down, and she hadn’t answered then. Besides, I’d checked the house, and she wasn’t here. So how would she hear me?

  We do have a third floor. There’s one big room up there, at the top of the house. Back when the Victorian was built, in the 1880s sometime, they’d used it as a ballroom. It was possible that she’d gone up there rather than down.

  I hesitated at the bottom of the stairs, debating. It was a long way up. Lots of steps. It would take a while to drag myself up there.

  And then I saw that the front door was unlocked. Rafe wouldn’t have left it that way. He wouldn’t have been able to put on the security chain from outside, but he’d have locked the door when he left. Now it wasn’t locked. Which meant that someone else had gone out.

  I grabbed my coat off the hook and pulled it on over the nightgown. Then I stuck my bare feet into boots and headed out into the yard. “Mrs. Jenkins!”

  She was nowhere to be seen. But if what I’d heard—the sound that woke me—had been the front door opening and closing, she had a five minute head start by now. She could be a block away.

  Or she could be in the backyard, looking at her sadly decimated vegetable garden, or the overgrown gazebo.

  But if she wanted to go there, surely she would have gone out the back door, wouldn’t she?

  I ducked back inside for long enough to grab my purse and keys. I didn’t use them to lock the door, though. If Mrs. Jenkins came back before me, I wanted her to be able to get inside.

  The Harley-Davidson was gone, of course, but my pale blue Volvo was parked on the gravel at the bottom of the stairs. I peered inside—maybe Mrs. Jenkins had decided to go for a ride—but the interior was empty. So I fit myself, with some difficulty, behind the wheel and turned the key in the ignition. The engine came to life, and I rolled down the circular driveway toward the street, looking left and right.

  We live in East Nashville, in what my real estate colleagues would call a transitional neighborhood. It hasn’t transitioned as far as some other parts of East Nashville—the areas on the other side of Ellington Parkway have become insanely expensive, especially when you cross Gallatin Road—but over here, we’re still up-and-coming. There are renovations going on, and infills being built—historic-looking buildings on empty lots, that fit in with the architecture in the neighborhood—but the prices are still on the affordable side.

  As a result of not being quite transitioned, we’ve also got more crime and grime and general unpleasantness. There are more pitbulls chained in more yards, and more plaid couches on more porches, than across the parkway, where they take their designer dogs to doggie day care and wouldn’t be caught dead sitting on plaid.

  I decided to go right. It was the direction of downtown, and of the Milton House Nursing Home, down on the corner of Potsdam and Dresden, where Mrs. Jenkins had spent some weeks last fall. (Horrible place. Rafe had wasted no time getting her out of there as soon as he could prove he was her grandson.) It was also the direction of Brentwood, and where she must have come from the other night.

  And anyway, one guess was as good as another. I had to pick a direction, and I chose that one.

  The sunlight glinted on broken glass on the sidewalk as I made the turn. Hopefully Mrs. Jenkins had circumvented it, if she’d come this way. And hopefully she was at least wearing socks. I had no reason to think she’d put on shoes before she left—we didn’t have any that would fit her; I’d have to remedy that today—but even an oversized pair of shoes would be better than none. And would slow her down some, too, which was only to the good.

  I cruised slowly, looking into yards as I went.

  Most of the houses around the Victorian are the cracker-boxes that were put up in the 1940s. There was less money then, and most of the houses that were built during that decade were small.

  Houses had gotten progressively smaller for a while, as a matter of fact. My ancestral home, the Martin Mansion, was built around 1840, and boasts around five thousand square feet. Mrs. Jenkins’s Victorian, from the 1880s, has around three thousand square feet. The 1920s and 1930s cottages and bungalows tend to be around two thousand, give or take a few hundred square feet. And by the late 1930s, the Great Depression had made its mark, and then came World War Two, so by the mid-40s, houses were barely a thousand square feet each.

  At any rate, I drove down a street lined with small houses. I’d never looked into the history of Mrs. J’s house, not beyond the time when she’d bought it, but I wondered whether, if I went back far enough, I’d learn that all this land had belonged to the original owners of the house at one point, and they had sold off parcels of it in the 1940s. I wouldn’t be surprised.

  Mrs. Jenkins was nowhere to be seen. I passed the first cross-street and continued down toward Dresden, looking left and right.

  It was still fairly early, so there was little traffic. After another block, I wound up behind a
bus belching clouds of exhaust into the air.

  Could Mrs. Jenkins have gotten on the bus?

  She’d have had to have money for the fare, then. Or must have found a sympathetic driver who didn’t care. It was possible.

  I thought about following the bus into downtown.

  I also thought, for a crazy second, about buzzing around it, and pulling up in front, so it would have to stop. And so that I could check and see whether Mrs. Jenkins was onboard.

  Rafe would have. I could see him in my mind’s eye, screeching to a halt in front of the bus and moving up the steps, flashing his badge. It was a very sexy vision that, frankly, left me a little breathless.

  However, Rafe wasn’t here. There was just me. And I didn’t know how I’d be able to explain things to him, if I couldn’t get his grandmother back.

  The bus lumbered to the corner of Dresden and stopped to wait for the light to change. I idled behind it. When the bus moved forward, I did, too.

  Potsdam dead-ends into Dresden, right where the Milton House Nursing Home is located, so I had to choose to go left or right. The bus was going right, probably toward the main bus station in downtown. I did the same. And as I crept around the corner in its wake, I happened to catch a glimpse of movement out of the corner of my eye.

  Something blue. Like the T-shirt dress I had lent Mrs. Jenkins yesterday.

  It could have been anything, of course. The parking lot outside the Milton House was full, and I could have seen any number of people coming to visit their loved one. Or one of the nurses, beginning or ending a shift. Or a health inspector, planning to shut the place down. It needed it. I still felt horrible every time I thought about Mrs. Jenkins having been forced to live there.

  At any rate, I waited until the bus moved past the entrance to the Milton House, and then I zipped across oncoming traffic and into the parking lot. And crept toward the entrance to the building while I looked around.

  It was a good thing I was looking, because Mrs. Jenkins stepped out from between two parked cars with no warning. And it was a good thing the car was moving very slowly, because if I’d gone any faster, I wouldn’t have had time to stop before I hit her.

  My stomach met the steering wheel with an oomph. I ignored it and shoved the door open. And shoehorned myself out. “Mrs. Jenkins!”

  She’d kept moving, and had to turn to look at me.

  “It’s me,” I added. “Savannah.”

  Even when she thinks I’m LaDonna, I don’t actually tell her I am. I won’t argue with her, because I know I wouldn’t be able to convince her otherwise anyway, but I won’t tell her I’m LaDonna when I’m not.

  In this case, it looked like she had no idea who I was. She blinked at me, her lower lip thrust out.

  “You left without a coat,” I added. “And without shoes.”

  The fluffy socks I’d given her yesterday were probably worn through on the bottom. She wasn’t bleeding, though. Or at least I couldn’t see any evidence of blood spots where she’d walked. But her skinny arms were all over goose pimples.

  “We should go home, so you won’t freeze.”

  “I live here,” Mrs. J told me, with a gesture toward the Milton House.

  I shook my head. “Not anymore. Rafe came, remember? Your grandson. And he brought you home. Back to the house.”

  No sense in confusing her with the other nursing home she’d spent the past year in. If she thought she still lived at the Milton House, she wouldn’t remember the other place.

  Mrs. Jenkins looked unsure.

  “You remember the house, don’t you? And Rafe? And me?”

  I don’t think she did. But I also don’t think she wanted to admit it. And if nothing else, she wasn’t moving away from me anymore, so maybe there was some part of her that at least subconsciously knew who I was.

  “It’s warm in the car,” I told her. “And when we get home, I’ll make you some breakfast. You must be hungry. You left before I got up.”

  Mrs. Jenkins hesitated, before shuffling closer. I opened the passenger side door and helped her in. Her fingers were cold enough from the walk that she needed help buckling her seat belt. Or maybe that was just because her fingers are old.

  A few seconds later, we rolled out of the parking lot, through the stoplight, and back up Potsdam Street.

  “What happened?” I asked Mrs. Jenkins.

  She looked at me, blankly.

  “Did you wake up and not recognize where you were?”

  She looked faintly guilty, so maybe that was what had happened.

  “Next time,” I told her, as the circular tower on the corner of the Victorian came into view over the bare branches of the trees up ahead, “wake me up instead of going off. I was worried.”

  She didn’t promise she would, and I hadn’t expected she would. And then I forgot all about it, as I turned the car into the driveway and—a second too late—noticed the burgundy sedan parked in the place where the Harley usually sits, at the bottom of the stairs.

  It had a couple of extra antennae, but other than that, and the government license plate, there wasn’t much to distinguish it from any other car on the road.

  I recognized it, though. I’d seen it before, many times. I didn’t need to see the woman who opened the door and swung long legs out to know I was busted.

  Five

  Tamara Grimaldi didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to. She just watched while I parked the Volvo behind her unmarked police car. She didn’t look surprised to see Mrs. Jenkins in the passenger seat, although her brows did arch when she saw that I was wearing my nightgown under my coat, and that Mrs. Jenkins was shoe-less and without one.

  “She left while I was in bed,” I explained while I helped Mrs. J out of the car. “The door opening and closing woke me up. By the time I’d checked the house and realized she wasn’t there, she’d made it several blocks. I found her making a beeline for the Milton House.”

  “But she hasn’t lived there for more than a year.”

  I nodded. “I know that. But she didn’t remember.”

  We headed up the steps to the porch. “The door should be open,” I told Grimaldi. “I thought that if she came back while I was out looking for her, I wanted her to be able to get in. Maybe you’d be so kind...?”

  She nodded and pulled her gun out of the holster at her waist. I don’t think either of us really expected anyone to have gone into the house during the few minutes I’d been out, but better safe than sorry.

  While Grimaldi went through the house, I filled a basin with warm water and peeled Mrs. Jenkins’s socks off.

  I was right; she had worn holes right through the soles. The socks ended up in the trash can. Mrs. Jenkins’s feet went into the water. I turned on HGTV to keep her occupied—hopefully between that and the basin, she’d stay in place long enough for me to run upstairs and change my own clothes.

  By the time I came back down, in pregnancy leggings and an oversized sweater, with my teeth and hair brushed, Grimaldi had finished her search of the house and was sitting in the parlor with Mrs. J, her gun neatly tucked out of sight. Since there was no hogtied body lying in front of the door, I assumed the house had been empty.

  “I called your husband,” she told me when I came into the room. “He’s on his way.”

  I winced. He probably wouldn’t be happy. “There was no need for that. I got her back.”

  “That’s not why I need to talk to him,” Grimaldi said.

  Uh-oh. “What’s going on?”

  “I’ll tell you when he gets here. That way I won’t have to say it twice.”

  That made sense, even if it made me nervous. “Would you like something to eat?” I asked, for something to do while we waited. “Mrs. Jenkins and I haven’t had breakfast yet.”

  Grimaldi said she’d already eaten. She’d probably been up since the crack of dawn.

  “I’m going to go fix something. I’ll be right back.”

  She nodded. “I’ll stay with her.”

/>   Mrs. Jenkins looked settled for the moment, her eyes on the screen and her feet in the water, but it was better not to take any chances. Take your attention off her for a second, and she might be gone. I nodded.

  Since Rafe was coming soon, and I didn’t want to miss any of the conversation, and since I was hungry and didn’t feel like waiting, I made breakfast simple. Two bowls of oatmeal with cinnamon sprinkled on top and raisins folded in, and I was back in the parlor.

  “I hope you like oatmeal,” I told Mrs. Jenkins as I handed her one. She smiled, so she might. Or maybe she just, like most people of her generation who wasn’t spoiled the way mine was, would eat pretty much anything, because food wasn’t always plentiful. When you’re hungry, it doesn’t much matter what someone puts in front of you. As long as it’s food, you don’t turn it down.

  I curled up in the other corner of the sofa and went to work on my own oatmeal. It’s not my favorite, but I don’t mind it. And I certainly don’t want to come across as spoiled, although I’m sure I am. Compared to the way Rafe had grown up, in a trailer in one of the poorest parts of Sweetwater, with a single, teenage mother and a frankly pretty hateful grandfather, I’d been brought up in the lap of luxury, wanting for nothing.

  So I ate my not very exciting oatmeal—it was good for the baby—and then I cleaned up the bowls and dried Mrs. Jenkins’s feet. I’d found another pair of fluffy socks for her, that she could wear until we could make a trip to the store and find something better.

  By the time I had finished doing that, the Harley was pulling up outside. When I heard Rafe’s boots on the porch, I went to undo the security chain on the door and let him in.

  I could tell he wasn’t happy. He leaned down and brushed my cheek with his lips, but he didn’t lean in for a lingering kiss the way he usually does, even with an audience. He did put a hand on my stomach for a second, though, warm even through the sweater. “Everything all right?”

  I nodded. “Your grandmother escaped this morning, but I caught her. She was on her way to the Milton House. She thought she lived there.”