“Any reason she hasn’t gotten a job?”
“She’s tried,” I said. “But it’s hard. That’s why we came up with this idea of flipping a property. Darcy has money. I have a real estate license. And Charlotte is willing to work. It seemed like a good idea at the time.”
“Until Steve Morris showed up,” Jarvis said.
Yes. Until then.
“How upset was Mrs. Whitaker last night?”
Sounded like Charlotte had filled him on what Steve Morris had threatened to do. No reason I needed to do that, then.
“Not all that much,” I said. “We were both surprised, of course. And disconcerted. It came as a bit of a shock. But it wasn’t like we’d lose money. He’d have to pay us back for the price of the house plus ten percent if he wanted it back.”
“Had you spent the ten percent above the purchase price?” Jarvis wanted to know.
I made a face. “More or less. “
“So there’d be no profit in it for you.”
No. “But we wouldn’t be losing money either.” Or not much. “So it could have been worse.”
“Perhaps not for your friend,” Jarvis said blandly. “Your sister would get her investment back. You probably didn’t care as long as that was taken care of. But your friend lost the opportunity to make some much-needed cash.”
There wasn’t much I could say to that—he’d nailed it—so I didn’t try. “Did you talk to the neighbors?” I asked instead.
Jarvis nodded. “Mrs. Oberlin saw Mrs. Whitaker arrive when she was out walking Chester before bed. She didn’t think anything of it, as she’s seen Mrs. Whitaker come and go for the past week.”
My heart gave a hard thud, and then another. “Did Mrs. Oberlin see Mrs…. I mean Charlotte, leave again?”
“No,” Jarvis said. “Mrs. Whitaker went inside the house. Mrs. Oberlin waited for Chester to take care of business, and went inside her house. When she looked out her bedroom window while pulling the curtains, the minivan was still there.”
“But she didn’t see Mr. Morris?”
Jarvis shook his head. “What was your friend doing inside the house so late, Mrs. Collier?”
“She said she was looking for an earring she lost,” I said.
Jarvis pursed his lips. He opened his desk drawer and pulled out a small plastic baggie. “Is this the earring?”
I leaned forward to peer at it. It was a diamond stud, or at least it looked like a diamond stud, so it matched the description of what Charlotte said she’d lost. I couldn’t honestly remember whether I’d seen her wear it or not. It wasn’t something I would have worn to renovate a house, but that didn’t mean Charlotte wouldn’t have. “I guess. Where did you find it?”
“In the den,” Jarvis said. “Underneath the body.”
Underneath—? “Maybe it fell off earlier in the day, and lay there for a few hours, and then Morris happened to land on top of it.”
“Do you remember seeing the earring?” Jarvis asked.
“On the floor?” I shook my head. “No. But I don’t know if I went into the den yesterday. We were working in the front part of the house.”
“But Mrs. Whitaker went back there?”
“She must have,” I said, “if her earring was there.”
Jarvis didn’t respond to that, just swept the baggie back into the desk drawer. “Anything else you can tell me, Mrs. Collier?”
“Just that Charlotte wouldn’t kill anyone. Although I expect it’ll take more than just my word to convince you of that.”
He didn’t say anything, and I added, “Anything else I can tell you, Detective?”
“Not at the moment,” Jarvis said. “Your sister wasn’t with you at the house yesterday?”
“When Morris showed up? No. But I told her about him. She spent the night with Patrick Nolan, though. He would have noticed if she went someone and killed someone, I’m sure.”
“I’m sure,” Jarvis said blandly and got to his feet. “Thank you for your time, Mrs. Collier.”
“Thank you, Detective.” I shrugged into my coat and grabbed the baby carrier. “Let me know if there’s anything else I can do to help.”
Jarvis told me he’d be sure to do just that, and escorted me down the hallway and into the lobby, where Officer Robinson watched me walk out. She looked gleeful. Maybe she thought Jarvis was building a case against me, and I was about to be arrested, leaving the path to Rafe clear for her. Or maybe she was just looking forward to telling him that his wife had spent several minutes locked in Detective Jarvis’s office while Rafe was in Lawrence County. Given the glee with which she had told me that he had left with Grimaldi this morning, I wouldn’t put it past her.
Eleven
“Did anything exciting happen?” I asked Rafe a few hours later, when he walked through the back door of the mansion in the late afternoon. “Did you see any neo-Nazis? Get to follow anyone home?”
He shook his head. “Quiet as the grave. Just like last week.”
“Maybe they’ve figured out that you’re on to them, and they’ve found somewhere else to congregate.”
He shook his head. “Prob’ly just aren’t there every weekend. Once a month or every couple months is enough. If you have weirdos in skull masks running around shooting off guns every weekend, somebody’d get wise and put a stop to it. This way, they skim under the radar longer.”
Perhaps so. “I guess you’ll be going back next Saturday.”
“I imagine I will.” He leaned in to drop a kiss on my mouth, and slanted a sideways look at the laptop. “What’s going on?”
“I’m researching a murder,” I said.
Rafe’s eyebrows arched, both of them this time, and I added, “Steve Morris—the guy who ended up dead in our garage conversion overnight—was released from jail a few days ago. That’s why he lost the house to foreclosure. He was incarcerated, and was probably saving all his money for his second trial.”
“And he got out?”
I nodded. “Hung jury the first time. Acquittal the second. And then he showed up here the next day, wanting his house back.”
“Who was killed?” Rafe asked, scooting up on the stool next to me and turning the laptop so he could get a look at the screen.
“A girl named Natalie Allen. She lived on Fulton Street with her family. Nineteen when she died. Rape and strangulation. The body was found a couple of blocks away.”
Rafe was scanning the article I had pulled up, originally printed in the local paper. “And Morris did it?”
“That’s what the police thought at the time. Jarvis said he had a record for statutory rape.”
“There’s a database for that. The TBI runs it.” Rafe took the laptop away from me, opened up another browser, and started pecking. “Steven with a ph or a v?”
I had no idea, and said so.
“Let’s just go with Morris, S.” He hit enter, and we waited. Eventually Rafe shook his head. “If he was convicted of statutory rape, it wasn’t in Tennessee.”
“Another state, then?”
“There’s a national registry,” Rafe said, and pecked at the keyboard again. We waited. “Any of these guys look familiar?”
He turned the computer toward me. I scanned the row of faces, all belonging to men named Steven or Stephen, or in one case Stefan, Morris. “No.”
“Then he don’t have a record,” Rafe said.
“What does that mean?” Jarvis made a mistake? Or had Jarvis lied?
He shrugged.
“He said the Natalie Allen case was his investigation. And that the evidence pointed to Morris. He should know, right?”
“He should,” Rafe agreed. And left it there.
“I don’t suppose… Is there a chance Morris was a suspect because he’s black?”
“Your guess is as good as mine,” Rafe said. After a second he added, “But I don’t imagine it hurt.”
No. It probably hadn’t. Although there had to be more to it than that. Jarvis couldn’t just make up a
record for sexual misconduct and run with it. Whatever color the suspect was.
“I told Jarvis what you told me to tell him,” I said. Might as well change the subject since there wasn’t much more to say about Morris’s record, or lack thereof, of previous sexual offense. “That we wouldn’t have lost any money if Morris took his house back. Although Jarvis made it clear that it didn’t absolve Charlotte of suspicion.”
“I didn’t figure it would,” Rafe said and opened the fridge. He peered into it for a second and then brought out a carton of orange juice. He shook it, listening to the juice slosh around inside the cardboard. “Mind if I finish this off?”
I shook my head, and watched his throat move as he chugged the last of the juice and then took the carton to the sink to rinse it before two-pointing it into the recycling bin. When he turned, he caught me looking, and grinned. “Hold that thought, darlin’.”
No problem. “I wonder if Todd would share any information from the trial? If I asked nicely? He was still in Atlanta the first time, so he wouldn’t know anything about that, but he’s here now, and was probably around for this trial…”
It would explain the little double take he’d given me, when I’d mentioned Fulton Street the morning Darcy and I had gone to pay for the house, and I had run into Todd on the square. He’d probably been in the middle of the trial, and thought it was quite a coincidence that we’d picked up a foreclosure on Fulton.
Maybe Rafe and I could run over to Marley’s house, and I could take a look at the two of them and determine what their relationship was like, too, just so I could reassure myself that Todd had proposed to Marley for the right reasons. That way, I could stop worrying about it.
Not that I thought it would be a good idea to mention any of that to Rafe. He’s not jealous of Todd, exactly. Certainly not anymore. But he’s always had a weird little hang-up where Todd is concerned.
As evidenced by the next words out of his mouth.
“You don’t need Satterfield for that. Court cases are public record. If you go to the courthouse and pay a fee, they’ll give you a transcript.”
“Just like that?”
He nodded. “Can’t do nothing about it till Monday, though.”
No. I couldn’t. “So how would you like to spend the rest of the day?”
He grinned and waggled his eyebrows.
* * *
We spent the next morning sleeping in and having a leisurely breakfast together, and then Rafe stayed home with Carrie so I could go meet Darcy and Charlotte for lunch at Beulah’s.
“Are you sure you wouldn’t like to come?” I asked as I pulled my coat on. “You know Yvonne likes to see you. And the baby.”
He smiled, but didn’t deny it. “You spend all your time with Carrie, darlin’. I don’t. Let me take her for a couple hours and give you a break.”
“If you’re sure.”
He said he was sure. “Your brother’s invited me over to watch the game. He won’t mind if I bring her. He’s already brought up two girls. If I don’t know what I’m doing, he will. Your brother-in-law’s prob’ly gonna be there, as well, and he has a girl of his own, too. Between us, we’ll figure out how to handle one baby.”
“I wasn’t worried about that,” I said. “I assumed you’d know what to do. It just feels weird not to be taking care of her.”
But he’d had none of this with David, his son. David had been almost thirteen when Rafe—when all of us—learned he existed. Rafe had missed all those years and milestones. Their relationship was still more big brother/little brother than father and son, although at least they had a relationship now. And anyway, David already had a father in the man who’d brought him up. He didn’t need anyone trying to take Sam’s place. But if Rafe wanted to spend time with Carrie, on his own and away from me, who was I to complain? He had every right, and every reason.
So I left Rafe the Volvo with the car seat, and called Charlotte to ask if she’d mind picking me up on her way north out of Sweetwater instead of the other way around, and that was that. I kept myself from going over and over the same instructions for how to deal with Carrie if she got hungry, if she got wet, if she fell asleep, if she didn’t—and just kissed my husband goodbye. “Have fun. Enjoy the game. Don’t drink too many beers.”
“Not with the baby in the car,” Rafe said and nudged me out the door when the minivan made the turn into the driveway and crunched its way up toward the front doors. “You have fun, too, darlin’. Don’t do nothing I wouldn’t do.”
“At Beulah’s? It’s not exactly somewhere you go to dance on the tables.”
He shook his head. “Although I’d pay to see that.”
“When I come home, maybe I’ll show you.” I waited for him to shut the door, and then I descended the steps and reached for the car door as the minivan pulled to a stop beside me.
”Good morning.”
Charlotte made a sound that most of all sounded like a grunt. I gave her a closer inspection. “You don’t look so good. If you don’t mind my saying so.”
She gave me a look out of bloodshot eyes. The bags beneath could have held groceries for a family for a week. “I didn’t sleep well.”
No kidding. “Something on your mind?”
I fastened my seatbelt as we rolled back down the driveway toward the road again.
Charlotte rolled her eyes. “Nothing at all. How could you possibly think that?”
I opened my mouth, but she went on before I could say anything, her voice so brittle I half expected it to crack. “Richard called, to ask me whether I’d reconsidered coming home. I said no, and had he reconsidered allowing me access to the bank accounts so I could feed his children. He told me he’d be happy to provide for the children as long as they lived with him. But as I was the one who had taken them and left, he was waiting for a judge to determine what was fair.”
“Bastard,” I said. “Is he trying to take the kids away from you?”
Charlotte stared out the window at the road with her jaw clenched so hard it hurt to look at it. “It’s starting to sound like that. It’s the first time he’s mentioned anything like that, but it sounds like he’s thinking about it.”
It did.
“And if he finds out that I’m a suspect in a murder case,” Charlotte said bitterly, “what would you give for my chances of keeping them?”
Not much, to be honest. She already had a strike against her by being unemployed and unable to provide for the kids. She didn’t have a home of her own, but was living with her parents. The murder would be the final nail in the coffin. “You didn’t tell him, did you?”
She shot me a glance. “I’m not stupid. But if I’m charged, he’ll find out. You know he will.”
I’m sure he would. “We’ll make sure that doesn’t happen,” I said, with more confidence than I felt.
“Yeah?” She gave me another look. “How?”
It was clearly meant as a rhetorical question, because she continued before I had a chance to respond. “That Detective Jarvis called me in to the police station yesterday. And kept asking me questions about Richard and the kids and my ‘situation’…” She took her hands off the wheel for the second it took to make air quotes around the word. “—and what I’d been doing in the house on Fulton last night.”
I had my own questions about what she’d been doing in the house on Fulton last night, to be honest. The story about the earring was a little too far fetched, and not only because I couldn’t remember seeing the earrings in her ears during the day. It didn’t make any sense that she’d be wearing diamond earrings to renovate a house, and it didn’t make sense that she’d be wearing anything Doctor Dick had given her. It would make more sense that she’d either hock the diamonds or if not that, at least leave them in a drawer so she didn’t have to look at them.
But I didn’t say any of that. “I spoke to Jarvis yesterday,” I told her instead. “I don’t think you have to worry about being arrested anytime soon.”
“He
sounded like he thought I might have done it,” Charlotte said.
“He has to keep an open mind and investigate all the angles. But there are likelier suspects than you.”
“Who?” Charlotte wanted to know, as she turned the minivan into the gravel lot that fronts Beulah’s Meat’n Three. We bumped over some ruts and rolled into an empty space next to a pickup truck with a Confederate flag sticker glued to the tailgate and a pair of steel balls in a sack hanging from the trailer hitch.
I grimaced at them—what kind of guy finds it necessary to hang a pair of stainless steel testicles from the back of his truck, and what is he trying to prove?—and told Charlotte, “Wait until we’re inside. I’ll tell you and Darcy the story at the same time. She might have been called in for a second interview, too. We can compare notes over lunch.”
I pushed my door open and got out. On the other side of the minivan, Charlotte did the same, and we headed for the entrance to Beulah’s side by side.
It’s a little old cinderblock building, long and low, that’s clearly seen better days, but it’s popular with the locals. Mother gives it a wide berth, of course—she’s much too refined for Beulah’s—but I’ve always rather enjoyed slumming.
“Have you been here before?” Charlotte asked, glancing around the parking lot.
I looked at her, surprised. “Of course. Haven’t you?”
The place has been her since before we were born. Not that I’d spent much time in it growing up. It wasn’t the kind of place the Martins frequented. But it wasn’t my first time, either.
Charlotte bit her lip. “Is it…” She hesitated, lowering her voice another degree, “—rough?”
Rough?
I bit my tongue on the first, instinctive response that came to mind. Charlotte couldn’t help it that she was still stuck with the old mindset I had mostly managed to jettison since I met Rafe.
“If you’re looking for bone china and Michelin stars I suppose it is,” I said instead. “But it isn’t a bar. Nobody’s going to get drunk and start a fight.”
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