“She hasn’t yet,” Mother said. “But if she does, I’d rather make sure I won’t end up with a litter of puppies.”
I didn’t blame her. I liked Pearl, but I didn’t want five of her. Or more. “Sounds good. Why are you asking me?”
“Because she’s technically yours,” Mother said. “You found her.”
“I gave her to you. That makes her yours.”
“You didn’t give her to me,” Mother said. “She chose to stay here.”
“That makes her even more yours.” I shook my head. “Do whatever you want. Just make sure she’s healthy and happy.”
Mother nodded. She took a sip of tea and avoided my eyes. “What plans did you have for this evening?”
I arched my brows. “We didn’t really have any. Are you going somewhere?”
“I made plans to have dinner with Bob,” my mother said.
She’s been dating the Sweetwater sheriff for a while now. A couple of years, maybe? Or maybe more. It took me a while to catch on, to be honest. My brother and sister, who live here in Sweetwater, might have known before me, but I think Mother and the sheriff kept it pretty quiet.
“Of course. Don’t let us cramp your style. Mrs. Jenkins sleeps pretty well, and I don’t wake up until someone stands over me and shakes me these days.” Or until I have to pee. Whichever comes first.
Mother flushed. “If we’re planning to do anything like that, we’ll go to Bob’s.”
I guess ‘anything like that’ probably meant sex. I hadn’t mentioned sex, and I didn’t plan to. “Isn’t Todd there?”
“He spends a lot of time with Marley,” Mother said primly.
Todd—the assistant DA for the county—tried to prosecute Marley Cartwright for murdering her baby once. Around this time last year. It’s very nice of her to overlook that, I think. Although she has her baby back now—he must be around three at this point—so I guess she can afford to be magnanimous. And I’m happy for them. I like Marley. And for a while, I was afraid Todd was never going to move on from asking me to marry him.
“They don’t live together, do they?”
Mother shook her head. “He comes home every night. But they do spend a lot of time together.”
“How does Bob feel about that?”
“Now that we all know that Marley didn’t do anything to that sweet baby,” Mother said, “I don’t think anyone minds.”
Good to know. “Sure,” I said, “go to dinner with Bob. Stay out as late as you want. Is there anything to eat here?”
If not, we could always order a pizza. Or maybe not. In the movies, the bad guy often pretends to be a pizza delivery person.
Not that there was a bad guy. Not here in Sweetwater. Nobody had followed us.
“The fridge is full,” Mother said. “Don’t eat the turkey.”
As if I would. “Any ice cream?”
“Help yourselves,” Mother said, and slipped off the stool. “I should go get ready. I gave Mrs. Jenkins your sister’s room.”
“That’ll work.” I got up, too. “We’ll take the bags upstairs and get situated. And figure out something to eat. And we’ll probably end up watching TV for the rest of the night. You have cable, right?”
“Of course,” Mother said.
“HGTV?”
“Of course,” Mother said.
“Then we’re all set. Don’t be surprised if you come home and find us both asleep in the parlor.”
Mother said she wouldn’t, and we all headed out of the kitchen and down the hall with Pearl’s nails clicking on the hardwoods behind us. I snagged the two overnight bags from beside the door, and carried them upstairs. Mother disappeared down the hall toward the master bedroom, and I dropped my own bag next to the door to my room, and carried Mrs. Jenkins’s over to Catherine’s old room. “Would you like some help unpacking?”
“No thanks, baby.” She patted my arm.
“I’ll just go wash up and put away my own things. I’ll see you downstairs in a few minutes, I guess. The bathroom’s across the hall, if you need it.” I pointed to the door. Mrs. J nodded. “Once Mother leaves, we’ll take a look at what’s in the fridge and see what we can do about dinner.”
While the tea had filled the empty spot inside, it wasn’t going to be long before I needed something more solid. Mrs. Jenkins must be hungry too, because she looked cheered at the prospect.
So I left her bag on the bed, and went into my own room and put away my own clothes. My back hurt, so I curled up on the bed for a few minutes—on my left side—to see if I could get it to go away, but it didn’t. Too much time sitting in the car, maybe, on top of crawling through the tunnel earlier. It had been a long and exhausting day.
I was almost asleep by the time I heard Mother clicking down the hall on her high heels, followed by the softer clicking of Pearl’s nails. Forcing myself awake, I got myself upright and padded downstairs after her.
She was standing in the middle of the foyer putting on her coat, with Pearl sitting at her feet gazing adoringly up.
My mother is pushing sixty, and looks great for her age. She’s a little shorter than me, and at the moment at least, a lot smaller around. Like the rest of the Georgia Calverts, she has blond hair and blue eyes. Dix and I do, too, while Catherine has inherited our father’s dark hair and more sallow skin. So has Darcy, to even more of a degree. Darcy’s coloring is really more like Rafe’s than any of ours. Of course, Audrey also has jet black hair, but I don’t know how much of it owes its hue to nurture versus nature. I imagine she was born with very dark hair, and as she’s gotten older, she’s chosen to keep it dark. Same with Mother. I can’t imagine her hair is quite so naturally blond anymore. But I’ve never even seen a hint of gray.
“You look wonderful,” I said.
“Thank you, darling.” She finished tightening her belt around her waist. Unlike me, she still has one. “We’ll be at the Wayside Inn, if you need me.”
“I figured.” The Wayside Inn is the nicest restaurant in town, and my mother’s favorite. “I doubt we’ll need you, though. We’re just going to find something to eat and then crash in front of the TV. We’ll be fine.”
“I’ll take the dog out when I get home,” Mother said. “Or make Bob do it.”
It would probably be ‘make Bob do it.’ “I don’t mind,” I began.
“Bob doesn’t, either.”
Sure. “How about we just figure it out later.”
“I won’t be late,” Mother said, just as a pair of headlights flashed across the wall in the foyer. Tires crunched their way up to the door.
“Stay as long as you want. We’re both adults. And I’ll make sure the dog is walked and the doors are locked if you’re not home at a decent hour. Does Pearl have the run of the house at night?”
She did. She had a bed in the master suite, and a bed downstairs. She could choose to sleep in either. Or on the sofa, if she preferred. Or anywhere else her little doggie heart desired.
“If I’m not here,” Mother said as she opened the door, “she’ll probably choose to be downstairs to wait for me. That way she can keep an eye on the door.”
And keep a look out in case someone other than Mother should show up, too. Not that we have a lot of crime in Sweetwater. The mansion isn’t a target of burglars very often. But I won’t say it hasn’t happened.
Mother made her elegant way down the stairs toward Bob’s truck. I gave him a wave from the open door. “Evening, Sheriff.”
“Evening, darlin’. I didn’t know you were gonna be here tonight.”
“Change of plans,” I said. “Mrs. Jenkins and I came down a day early. Mother can fill you in. It’ll give you something to talk about over dinner.”
“We always have something to talk about over dinner.” He opened the door for Mother and helped her up into the seat before closing the door behind him and giving me a wink. “Don’t wait up.”
“I wasn’t planning to,” I told him, and stood on the porch and waved until they’d naviga
ted the long driveway. Once I couldn’t see them anymore, I went inside and locked the door and looked around for Mrs. Jenkins.
Thirteen
She wasn’t in the foyer. I had assumed, when she heard my mother go downstairs, she’d follow, the way I had done. But she hadn’t. Maybe she’d fallen asleep.
I headed back up the stairs, with Pearl keeping pace. She looked worried. Maybe I wasn’t moving fast enough for her. My back still hurt, and climbing stairs was getting more and more difficult every day.
“Mrs. Jenkins?”
I entered the second floor stairwell and headed toward the back of the house. Past my open door to Mrs. Jenkins’s—formerly Catherine’s—room.
The door was open there, too. It only took a second to see that the room was empty. The overnight bag was still on the bed where I’d left it. And it didn’t look like Mrs. Jenkins had laid down for a rest the way I had.
“Mrs. J?”
I turned toward the bathroom. The door stood open there, too. Not much chance anyone was inside, but I peered in anyway.
It was empty. The shower curtain was pulled to the side, and no one was hiding in the tub.
“Mrs. J?”
Dix’s old room is on the same side of the hallway as the bathroom. I stuck my head inside. Empty, of course.
She must have waited until my mother left, and then gone into the master suite. I headed that way.
“Mrs. Jenkins?”
There was no answer.
If you’ve ever watched HGTV—and I had watched a lot of it this week—you’ll have noticed that one recurring phenomenon is potential homebuyers walking into the master suite, doing a half turn, and then saying, “I don’t think it’s big enough,” or words to that effect. “I’m not sure our furniture is going to fit in here.” Usually, the master bedroom in new construction is huge. In old houses, like this one, not so much. Back in 1840, people didn’t think of a master bedroom as a retreat the way we do today. It was just somewhere you went to crash after a long day of hard work.
Mother’s room was a little bit bigger than mine, but it wasn’t huge. The attached bath—not 1840s vintage—wasn’t, either. It took me less than twenty seconds to look through it all and determine that once again, Mrs. Jenkins wasn’t here.
I put my hands on my hips and did that HGTV half-turn. So where the hell—excuse me, heck—was she?
I’d been awake the whole time we’d been upstairs. I would have heard her if she went past my door and down to the first floor. I’d heard Mother. I’d followed Mother. Mrs. Jenkins hadn’t been between us, and hadn’t come down while we’d been standing in the foyer.
“Mrs. J?”
There was no answer. I headed for the back of the house and the narrow staircase down to the kitchen.
And that’s where I found her. In the kitchen. With three burners going on the stove—gas, of course; Mother wouldn’t consider cooking with anything but gas—and the island afloat with food stuffs. When I walked into the room, she was mincing something green, super fast, with a knife as long as her arm. Knowing my mother, I’m sure the knife was lethally sharp. And she was humming.
“There you are,” I said, too relived to have found her to yell at her for scaring me. “What are you cooking?”
“Fried chicken,” Mrs. Jenkins said, “mac’n cheese, and collard greens. And biscuits.”
Lovely. Sounded like we were in for a feast. My stomach rejoiced, even as my arteries whimpered.
Another very nice thing, was that she sounded completely lucid. A lot of the time, she sounds a little vague, like she’s not entirely sure where she is, who you are, and maybe even who she is.
Not so now. She was cooking from scratch, humming as she dredged chicken pieces in flour and some sort of crunchy mixture. Bread crumbs, or Corn Flakes, or maybe potato chips.
“Need any help?”
I know how to cook, sort of. Soul food isn’t a strength, though, so I was relieved when she told me, “No, baby. You just sit down and watch.”
I sat down and watched. Kept my eye on the sharp knives and the gas flames on the oven, to make sure she didn’t hurt herself. And on Pearl, whom I had to tell to go lie down in the corner, since her position, on the floor between the island and the stove, might cause Mrs. Jenkins to stumble over her and fall. Pearl grumbled, but went.
An hour later, we had fried chicken and macaroni and cheese—from scratch—and biscuits—ditto—and collard greens. I didn’t like the greens that much. They were wilted and sort of greasy. But everything else tasted like heaven. When we were finished, it was all I could do to stagger into the parlor and collapse in front of the television. “HGTV?”
Mrs. Jenkins nodded. She didn’t look as full as I felt. And she’d eaten as much as I had.
Of course, she didn’t have an almost-full-term baby pushing on all her internal organs, either.
I fell asleep over Property Brothers. Mrs. Jenkins patted me and told me she’d stay with me. I grunted something and fell asleep again, and didn’t wake up until Mother came home. By then it was after ten o’clock and time to go to bed. And I was alone.
“Damn. I mean...” I pushed upright and looked around, frantically. “Where is Mrs. Jenkins?”
“She went up to bed,” Mother said calmly, unbuttoning her coat. “Where you should be, too.”
I should. But before I could, I had to call Rafe. I had told him I would, and if I didn’t, he’d worry. So after dragging myself upstairs and brushing my teeth, I forced my gluey eyelids to stay open long enough to call my husband.
He sounded disgustingly alert. Although, considering that it was only about ten-thirty, maybe it wasn’t surprising. “Evening, darlin’.”
“Ugh,” I said.
His voice turned sympathetic. “Rough night?”
“Rough day. Right from the beginning.” I took a breath, carefully, and added. “The evening was actually pretty peaceful. Mother went out with Bob Satterfield, and we just stayed here. Your grandmother cooked. I ate too much. And fell asleep in front of the TV.”
“Sorry, darlin’.” I could hear amusement lacing through his voice.
“I feel like a beached whale.”
“I know.” The sympathy was back, along with the amusement. “It’ll be over soon.”
It would. And then I’d probably wish I could stuff the screaming, inconsolable, small poop-machine back inside for a while so I wouldn’t have to deal with it. “We’re going sightseeing tomorrow,” I said. “I’m showing your grandmother around. And tomorrow afternoon, we’ll probably help Mother prepare for Thanksgiving. You’re still planning to come, right?”
“Course.”
“Mother asked. She’s looking forward to seeing you.”
“I’m looking forward to seeing her, too,” Rafe said, which had to be a lie. Or maybe not. “So no problems getting there?”
“None at all. Nobody followed us that I could see. Is there anything new where you are?”
He grunted. Annoyed. “We did the door-to-door. Nobody saw nobody at the house. Nobody saw nobody using the payphone. Nobody noticed any strange cars. Nobody noticed a BMW. It was all sedans and trucks and the usual stuff.”
“So we can’t put Fesmire at the house.”
“No,” Rafe said. “And we can’t put him nowhere else, neither. I told José and Clayton to go home at ten.”
“They haven’t seen Fesmire all day?”
Apparently they hadn’t. “He didn’t show up at home or at work so far.”
“So where is he?”
“God knows,” Rafe said. “For all we know, he ran off to Vegas with his mistress.”
“Does he have one?” Had her name been Julia Poole? “Is he married?”
He was.
“He probably doesn’t have a girlfriend, then,” I said.
“You never know,” Rafe answered. “Wealthy doctor like that might look good to some gold-digger twenty-year-old.”
Maybe so. “But you don’t know where he is. O
r where she is, if she exists.” Maybe it was Fesmire’s girlfriend who had called and gotten me out of the house earlier.
“No,” Rafe said. “If he ain’t home or at work by tomorrow morning, Tammy’ll put out a BOLO and see if anybody’s seen him. Until then we wait.”
“You’ll wait carefully, right? Just in case he decides to come back in the middle of the night?”
“I’m sleeping on the sofa,” Rafe said. “With a gun on the coffee table.”
Good. “I’ll let you get to it. And I’ll call you tomorrow morning. Do your best to stay alive so you can answer the phone.”
My husband assured me he would. “Sleep well, darlin’.”
“You, too,” I told him. “I miss you.”
“Miss you, too. But I’m glad you ain’t here.”
I was, too, if it came to that. This afternoon had been scary. I was perfectly happy to stay out of the way until they caught the bad guy, be it Alton Fesmire or someone else. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
“Love you.” He hung up, and saved me the trouble of doing so. I plugged the phone in to charge next to my bed, and crawled underneath the covers.
* * *
When I woke up again, it was morning. Bright sunlight slanted through the curtains, and I could smell coffee and hear voices from downstairs. Mother must be up, and she either had company, or was talking to Mrs. Jenkins.
A quick look at the phone showed me that it was close to nine. I swung my legs over the edge of the bed, and groaned. My back still hurt. Too much activity followed by too much sitting around yesterday, probably, and then falling asleep on Great-Aunt Ida’s uncomfortable loveseat.
Rafe hadn’t called, and that was a little worrisome, since he should certainly be up by now. But when I called him, he answered immediately. “Morning, darlin’.”
“Good morning. Did anything happen overnight?”
I imagined him shaking his head. “Nothing. I slept like a baby.”
Funny. According to Catherine, babies don’t sleep well at all. At least not for the first eight months or so.
“Any news?”
“Nothing so far. Everything’s quiet. José and Clayton have gone south.” To Brentwood and Franklin, I assumed; both of which are south of Nashville. “We’re just keeping on keeping on.”
Home Stretch Page 15