Home Stretch

by Jenna Bennett

  Mother nodded and held up a finger to silence the discourse on the green beans. “Where’s your grandmother-in-law?”

  “I put her in front of the TV,” I said. “She’ll probably take a nap, too. It’s been a big day.” A lot bigger than my mother realized.

  Mother nodded. “I’ll go in and sit with her when we’re done here.”

  I told her I appreciated it. “I’ll probably be down in an hour or so. I just need to get off my feet for a while.”

  I hobbled out and down the hallway, while Mother and the caterer returned to the food prep. In the parlor, Mrs. Jenkins’s eyelids were already getting heavy.

  “I’m going upstairs,” I told her. “Mother’s in the kitchen. She’s coming in here as soon as she’s finished talking to the caterer.”

  Mrs. J nodded. “You go on and lie down. Don’t want nothing to happen to that baby.”

  No, we didn’t.

  Not that anything was likely to. It was my ankles that hurt, not my stomach. But I did need to take a break for a moment. It had been a big day for me, too.

  * * *

  By the time I came back downstairs, it had been a lot longer than I’d planned. While I’d only intended to put my feet up for a bit, I’d actually fallen asleep. And snoozed away a couple of hours, while God knew what was going on downstairs.

  Although nothing much had gone on, I discovered when I descended the stairs. Mrs. Jenkins was still sitting in front of the TV. Mother had joined her. The caterers had left. And Pearl was curled up on a pillow in the corner, with her nose buried in her tangle of legs. When I left, she’d been following the catering staff around, trying to trip them up while they were carrying plates to the table, rumbling deep in her throat.

  When I staggered into the parlor, Mother gave me a bright smile. “Feeling better, dear?”

  I was, and told her so. “I’m so ready for this to be over. Just a few more weeks.”

  “I remember,” Mother said sympathetically. “With Catherine, I felt like it took forever before she was born. With you and Dix I knew what to expect, so it was easier to be patient.”

  “I’m not sure I’m ever going to want to do this again,” I told her, as I dropped onto the sofa next to Mrs. J. The old springs groaned and Mother frowned. Mrs. Jenkins bounced and then settled back down.

  “Give it time,” Mother said. “You might change your mind.”

  I might. But Rafe already had David. Now he’d have another child. He might think that was enough. And at the moment, I couldn’t imagine putting myself through this again.

  “Some people only have one child.” Like LaDonna. And Audrey. And Oneida, who had probably been afraid she wouldn’t get lucky the second time, and would have a darker-skinned baby that would give away her secret.

  I turned to Mrs. J. “You only had Tyrell.”

  She nodded. “Yes, baby. He was my only one.”

  “Didn’t you want any more?”

  Mrs. Jenkins shrugged. “We were poor, baby. Better to feed one baby well, than more babies poorly.”

  Hard to argue with that. Rafe and I weren’t all that well off, either. I didn’t make much, and people in law enforcement are notoriously badly paid. But we lived cheaply, in Mrs. Jenkins’s paid-off house that she’d bought a long time ago, when housing in that area was a lot more affordable than now. And we could probably afford to feed more than one baby. Whether we could afford to send more than one—or two, if David needed help—to college, was another story entirely.

  “How about we just take it one baby at a time? Let’s get this one to a year old, maybe two, and see how I feel?”

  Catherine, Dix, and I are all more than a year apart, so that’s what Mother must have done. She nodded. “What’s this I hear about Audrey?”

  Mrs. Jenkins must have told Mother about Oneida. No wonder my mother was confused. Even if Mrs. J had told the honest truth, with all the details available, it was still fairly unbelievable.

  “Audrey’s mother was Mrs. Jenkins’s older sister,” I said. “Oneida Jefferson.”

  Mother shook her head. “I remember Audrey’s mother. She wasn’t...” She stopped, just as I had done earlier.

  “Black,” I said. “Actually, she was. Or the same amount black as Mrs. Jenkins. Or so I assume. Did you and Oneida have the same parents, Mrs. J?”

  Mrs. Jenkins nodded. “Yes, baby. Same mama and daddy.”

  “Oneida was just lighter-skinned,” I told my mother. “So she spent fifty years or so in Sweetwater pretending to be white.” So people like Mother wouldn’t treat her like a second class citizen.

  Of course I didn’t say that. Not only would Mother have had my hide for rudeness, and rightly so, but it would have been hurtful. She’s changed. Maybe not as much as she could—or should—change, but she wasn’t the same person she’d been a year ago, when I’d sat right here in the parlor and told her I loved Rafe and no matter how much she wanted me to, I was never going to marry Todd Satterfield. She hadn’t taken it well. And now she loved Rafe, and was looking forward to being the grandmother of his baby.

  So yes, she was changing.

  “In other news,” I told Mrs. Jenkins, “Doctor Fesmire is dead.”

  Her mouth dropped open.

  “You remember Doctor Fesmire?”

  I hadn’t been sure she would. When we’d seen him at the funeral yesterday morning, it hadn’t seemed as if she knew who he was. Although she’d known that it was him in the BMW, so who knew?

  Really, trying to keep up with what Mrs. Jenkins remembered at any given time was a full-time job.

  “How’s he dead?”

  “He drowned,” I said.

  She stuck her bottom lip out. “Like Julia.”

  Julia’s COD—cause of death—had been the cut throat. But Mrs. Jenkins might not realize that.

  “Did Doctor Fesmire hurt Julia?”

  “Doctors don’t hurt people,” Mrs. Jenkins said. “Doctors help.”

  All right. “When Julia was hurt, did Doctor Fesmire try to help?”

  Mrs. J looked blank.

  “Remember?” I prompted. “You said you had to get help for Julia. That Julia was hurt. Did you go get Doctor Fesmire to help Julia?”

  “Who’s Julia?” my mother wanted to know.

  I gave her a quick glance. “Night nurse at the home where Mrs. Jenkins has been living. She was killed last Saturday night.”

  Mother shuddered. Visibly. “I saw that on the news. A terrible shame. Such a young, pretty woman.”

  Was she? I hadn’t even seen a picture of Julia, so I had no idea.

  “But what did your grandmother-in-law have to do with it?” Mother wanted to know.

  “Nothing, as far as we know.” She’d better not. “But she was there. At the home that night. And she said that Julia was hurt. I’m trying to figure out who hurt Julia. And who went to get help for her.”

  I turned to Mrs. Jenkins. But it was obvious that we’d lost her attention during the aside between the two of us. She was looking at the TV screen and humming, her face peaceful.

  “Maybe she’s blocked it,” Mother whispered. “It was too traumatic for her to remember, so she blocked the memory.”

  I wouldn’t be surprised. I’d seen Brenda Puckett’s cut throat more than a year ago, and I can’t tell you how many times I’d wished I could block that memory.

  “Mrs. Jenkins?” I tried one more time. “Was Doctor Fesmire there the night Julia was hurt? At the nursing home? Did you see him that night?”

  “Julia drowned,” Mrs. Jenkins said. “In the car. In the water.”

  “Do you remember who drove the car into the water?”

  “Nobody drove the car,” Mrs. Jenkins said. “The car drove itself.”

  Of course it had. I wanted to bang my head against the coffee table, but I refrained. I’d get a bruise, and anyway, I couldn’t bend that far anymore. “Do you remember who drove the car to the river? With you and Julia inside?”

  “We have to g
et help for Julia,” Mrs. Jenkins said. “Julia’s hurt.”

  I gave up. Mother gave me a sympathetic look and a ‘what are you going to do?’ sort of shrug. I settled back into the sofa to watch HGTV.

  * * *

  “Your grandmother can’t confirm that Alton Fesmire was there the night Julia Poole was killed,” I told Rafe later that night. As I’d told him I would, I called him before bed to say goodnight and to hear anything else that had happened since we last spoke.

  “His wife says he wasn’t. That he was home all night. But she’s figured out that we’re looking at him for Julia Poole’s murder, so it’s in her best interest to lie.”

  “If he cheated on her,” I said, “wouldn’t she be more inclined to nail his hide to the wall?”

  Excepting the fact that said hide was already on a slab in the medical examiner’s office, of course. That might make a difference. She might be Southern, like me, and have been brought up not to speak ill of the dead.

  Rafe sounded amused when I said so. “Under the circumstances, would you worry about speaking ill of the dead?”

  “If you cheated on me,” I said, “and murdered your girlfriend, I’d call Grimaldi myself.”

  “Good to know. To answer your question, we’re not sure. Somebody got there around midnight. Someone who had the code to the gate. Fesmire had the code, and nobody woulda thought it was strange to see him there. Even at that time of night.”

  Right.

  “And Mrs. Fesmire—her name’s Mary Carole—might wanna avoid the notoriety of being married to a murderer. Double murderer, if you’re right about Miz Bristol.”

  “Did you talk to the Bristols? Or whatever their names are?”

  “Hammond,” Rafe said. “If you’re talking about the twins. There’s a niece named Mrs. Roberts. And one named Mrs. Wilkerson. And yes, we’ve been all over town talking to them. From Madison to Bellevue to Hermitage and back.”

  From north to west to east, in other words. From one corner of Nashville to another.

  “I guess the folks in Madison picked the funeral home.” Madison’s up the road from Inglewood and the Phillips-Robinson funeral home by a few miles. But a lot closer than either Bellevue or Hermitage. “Did any of them think it was likely that their relative was murdered?”

  “They were shocked and appalled,” Rafe said. “That’s a direct quote. Why would anybody wanna murder poor Auntie Beverly?”

  “Fesmire,” I answered, “if she’d come across him and Julia having sex on his office desk.”

  Rafe made a humming, sort of ‘don’t be too sure’ noise. “You gotta remember it’s a memory facility, darlin’. Miz Bristol had problems with reality, too.”

  “Your grandmother doesn’t have problems with reality,” I told him. “She just has more realities than we do.”

  “Yeah, well, Beverly Bristol had a few different realities, too. If she told somebody she’d seen Fesmire having sex with Julia, I don’t know that anybody woulda believed it.”

  “So that wouldn’t have been a reason to kill her? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “Dunno,” Rafe said. “Depends on whether Fesmire thought anybody woulda believed her or not. But he prob’ly had simpler ways of getting rid of a patient than breaking their neck and tossing them down the stairs. If he’d given her a pill or something, some random night, he coulda just pretended like she fell asleep and never woke up. The way old folks do sometimes. Nobody woulda thought anything of it. And he’d get to put natural causes on the death certificate.”

  Good point. I wasn’t willing to give up on my idea quite yet, though. “Was there another reason to get rid of Ms. Bristol? Did she have money? Did the nursing home inherit any?”

  “She had some money,” Rafe said. “She had a good job back in the day, and no kids of her own to spend the money on. She died with almost a million dollars in her bank account.”

  “That’s enough money to kill for.”

  “To some,” Rafe said, “a twenty-dollar-bill is enough to kill for. But Fesmire ain’t getting any of it. It goes to the family. Besides, Fesmire had more than that.”

  That didn’t mean he wouldn’t want more. “I don’t suppose there’s any chance his wife killed him? For the money, and because he’d cheated on her?”

  “Anything’s possible,” Rafe said. “It’s Tammy’s case. I’m sure she’ll figure it out.”

  She would. No question about it. “So what happens now?”

  “Now I get some sleep,” Rafe said. “And less’n something happens overnight—and I don’t see what could, with Fesmire on a slab at the morgue—I get up in the morning and make my way to Sweetwater. We have dinner with your family and the next day, we have lunch with my family. And then we go home. And by then Tammy oughta have things tied up, so my grandma’ll be safe again.”

  That sounded good to me. “How do you feel? About having family you didn’t know about?”

  “It’s gonna take a little getting used to,” Rafe said. “But at least they’re nice people. Like you said, it coulda been worse.”

  “There might be others, you know. Family. Your grandmother had two other siblings. And your mother probably has relatives around here, too.”

  “If they ain’t crawled outta the woodwork in thirty-one years,” Rafe said, “they can stay there.”

  After a second he added, “I got you. And a baby on the way. And your family. And my grandma. And her family. And David. And the Flannerys. I got all I need.”

  Well, then. “I’ve got all I need, too,” I told him, sniffing back a tear. “As long as I’ve got you, it’s all I need.”

  I could hear the smile in his voice. “Thanks, darlin’.”

  “You’re welcome.” I sniffed again.

  “Hormones?”

  “Something like that.” I did a last sniff and moved on. “So when should we expect you tomorrow?”

  “I’ll call you in the morning before I leave. Just to let you know I’m heading out.”

  Lovely. “I’ll talk to you then,” I said.

  “Get some sleep, darlin’. Take care of my baby.”

  I promised him I would, and let him go. And crawled into bed and fell asleep.

  * * *

  I’m not sure what woke me, whether I heard a noise, or I just had to use the bathroom again.

  I did have to use the bathroom. But there was also a noise in the hallway outside my room. One of the boards squeak—not unusual in house that’s almost two hundred years old; there were squeaky boards in Mrs. Jenkins’s house, too—and if you don’t know where it is, it’s hard to avoid.

  I rolled out of bed, and I mean that in the literal sense. If I sharpened my ears, I could hear soft footsteps on the stairs.

  It might have been Mother, going for a midnight—or three AM—snack. Or Mrs. Jenkins, ditto.

  Or maybe the sheriff had shown up after I fell asleep, and he and Mother had spent the first part of the night together, and now he was on his way home.

  Or maybe it was someone who wasn’t supposed to be here.

  I opened my door carefully. It squeaks, too, unless Mother oils it regularly. She must have done so recently, because the hinges stayed silent. I stepped out into the hallway.

  Nothing moved. Quietly, I made my way to the top of the stairs and peered over the railing into the foyer. And caught my breath quickly when I caught sight of a small, white shape flitting down the last couple of steps and across the floor toward the door.

  When I was younger, my brother Dix used to regale me with ghost stories. True ghost stories; the South is rife with them.

  For some reason, there are no ghost stories associated with the mansion. You’d think there’d be, it being such an old house. But we don’t have ghosts. I’ve never once experienced anything weird or creepy inside the house.

  Of the supernatural variety, I mean.

  The grounds are a different matter. I mentioned the old Martin graveyard in the woods behind the house. Rumor has it, one of the
Martin daughters walks there. She died young, in the influenza pandemic of 1918. Her name was Marjorie, and she was eleven. I’ve never seen her, but Dix once said he did. He was much younger then, though, and probably just trying to scare me, and anyway, how would he have managed to be out in the woods in the middle of the night to see anything at all? It’s not like Mother let any of us—even Dix—camp in the woods at night.

  We also have an old slave cabin on the property. Restored now, of course. The local school children come to see it as part of their American history class each year. It’s an eerie little place, and I wouldn’t be surprised if someone told me it was haunted, too.

  But what I was looking at, was neither little Marjorie Martin, nor one of the slaves. As the apparition reached out a small, brown hand for the doorknob, I raised my voice. “Mrs. Jenkins!”

  You’re not supposed to wake sleepwalkers. But I wasn’t sure she was sleepwalking, and anyway, I couldn’t let her run outside in bare feet and just a thin nightgown. She’d already done that once this week—twice if you count the adventure on Monday morning—and besides, if she did, I’d have to run after her. And I didn’t want to.

  Mrs. Jenkins froze with her hand on the knob. And my voice must have woken Pearl, whose deep, threatening barks increased in volume as she came scrabbling down the hallway from the kitchen.

  “No!” I screamed as I navigated the stairs as quickly as I dared. “Pearl, don’t! No!”

  Pearl burst through the opening from the hallway to the foyer. And she did try to stop. Her nails scrabbled ineffectually on the slick floors. It wasn’t her fault. She didn’t launch herself at Mrs. Jenkins. She slid into her. And they both crashed into the wall before landing in a heap on the floor.

  Seventeen

  It took a little time to get things sorted out. Nobody was hurt, at least not badly, but Mrs. Jenkins was upset and so was Pearl. I tried to make her feel better, but I’d yelled at her earlier, and she felt bad about it. She slinked back to her doggie bed in the kitchen, stub of a tail tucked as far between her legs as she could reach, and although she deigned to accept a biscuit, she wasn’t happy.