Collateral Damage: A Savannah Martin Novel (Savannah Martin Mysteries Book 19)

by Jenna Bennett

  “So if you saw us,” I told Rafe, referring back to Laurel Hill and this morning, “you must have realized that we saw you, too…”

  A corner of his mouth turned up. “Yeah. Your mama all right?”

  “Fine,” I said. “A little shocked when she first saw you, I think. Maybe a touch inclined to think the worst.”

  “I hope you set her straight, darlin’. Not sure I can afford having your mama think the worst of me.”

  “There’s not much chance that that would happen,” I told him. “My mother’s crazy about you. She wouldn’t believe that you’d misbehave until she had incontrovertible evidence that you were cheating, and even then, she’d probably try to make it my fault. Not giving you enough attention, or something.”

  “I get plenty of attention,” Rafe said, with a gleam of remembered ‘attention’ in the curve of his lips. “Besides, your mama would never blame you if I screwed up. She’d have me tarred and feathered and run outta town on the point of a pitchfork, but she wouldn’t blame you.”

  Maybe not. “So are you going back tomorrow? To Laurel Hill?”

  He shook his head. “I gotta drive up to Nashville tomorrow. The contractor called while I was trying to keep Felicia’s mind on the job.”

  I put the idea of Felicia Robinson aside for the more important matter. “Something wrong?” We had a house under reconstruction in Nashville, and the contractor didn’t usually call. Or if he did, Rafe hadn’t mentioned it before.

  “Nothing too bad. There’s a problem with something—the wiring, I think—and now he wants more money.”

  Of course he did. Home renovation always takes longer and costs more than you think it will.

  We’d suffered a fire in early January—arson—and had moved to the mansion in Sweetwater while repairs were being made to house. The fire had been confined to just the front foyer and living room, but it had taken out part of the staircase, and we couldn’t get up to the bedrooms on the second level. And it’s an old Victorian, so there were historical considerations to take into account. You can’t replace original wood windows with vinyl replacements, for example, or the Historical Commission will have a fit. Besides, it’s not like hundred-and-forty-year-old wood windows come in standard sizes, so we’d spent a fortune on special-order materials so far.

  I wrinkled my nose. “I’d offer to come with you, but I have an open house scheduled at the house on Fulton.”

  On the topic of renovations: Over the past couple of months, my friend Charlotte and I, with some help from my sister Darcy, who had put up the money, had bought and renovated a little house on Fulton Street in Columbia. We had hired professionals to do the complicated things, like wiring and plumbing and anything else we thought might actually hurt us if we fouled it up, but we’d gotten a crash course in painting and hanging tile and operating a floor sander. Even the murder that had taken place in the house a week or so after we bought it, hadn’t stopped us for long enough to matter.

  And now the house was ready for the market, and I would be over there from two to four tomorrow afternoon, greeting visitors.

  “I guess I’ll have to ask Mother or Catherine to mind the baby,” I added. “I thought you’d be here to take care of her. Unless… will you be back by one-thirty?”

  He shook his head. “Sorry, darlin’.”

  “No problem,” I said. “I’ll go to the Wayside Inn for lunch with the family after church, and see who I might inveigle into taking her home with them. Worst case scenario, she’ll just have to come with me. Chances are nobody will really mind if there’s a baby in the house when they walk through. As long as she isn’t crying.”

  Rafe nodded, his lips twitching.

  “It’s no problem,” I told him.

  The twitching turned into a smile. “I didn’t think it was, darlin’.”

  Good. “So about Felicia Robinson…” I said, and Rafe chuckled.

  Two

  The next morning, he rolled out of bed and got dressed in faded jeans and boots and a T-shirt and his black leather jacket. While I was still wiping the drool off my chin, he gave me a wink and sauntered out the door and down the stairs. A minute later, I heard the big, black Harley-Davidson start up with a roar and take off down the driveway toward the Columbia Road. Carrie, next to me in bed—because Rafe had given her to me before he got dressed—made a kind of inquiring noise, and I nodded. “Daddy’s gone for the day, baby. From now on, it’s just you and me.”

  And Pearl, of course. Rafe had let her out, but I fed her and took care of her, and then I bundled Carrie and myself into the Volvo and headed to church in time to hear the end of the sermon. And after that, I went to meet the rest of the Martins and assorted friends and hangers-on for the weekly family brunch at the Wayside Inn.

  It’s Mother’s favorite restaurant, and exactly what it sounds like: a two-hundred-year-old log cabin on the road between Pulaski and Columbia. A German chef took it over a few years ago, so the food is excellent, and Mother enjoys the ambience and the white cloth napkins and sparkling stemware.

  There are quite a few of us when we’re all together, although of course Rafe was missing today. My sister-in-law, Sheila, had died more than a year ago now, and Dix hadn’t officially replaced her yet, so we were down one member there, too. On the other hand, Bob Satterfield was squiring Mother, although his son Todd and Todd’s fiancée Marley were absent. And there was my sister Catherine, her husband Jonathan, and their three kids, plus Dix’s two, and now Carrie.

  “Hello, darling.” Mother aimed a kiss at my cheek and her eyes over my shoulder. “Where is Rafael?”

  “He had to run up to Nashville for something,” I said, and pulled out a chair while Mother made a moue. “I have an open house over on Fulton at two, so I couldn’t go with him.”

  Mother nodded and devoted herself to the next best thing, which was Carrie. I run a distant third behind my daughter and her father in Mother’s affections.

  Dix nodded to me across the table. “Sis.”

  “Bro,” I answered, and made him grin. “Small crowd today.”

  He nodded. “Audrey and Darcy went back to Audrey’s house with Mrs. Jenkins. Marley isn’t feeling great, so Todd took her home.”

  Marley was pregnant, so I wasn’t surprised.

  “I’m looking for a babysitter for Carrie,” I said, “so I don’t have to bring her to the open house.”

  Dix shook his head. “Don’t look at me. We’ve got a birthday party to go to after this.”

  “Us, too,” Catherine said from farther down the table.

  I turned to Mother, who looked up from where she was tickling Carrie’s toes. “Sorry, darling. Bob and I are driving up to Nashville for a concert. We’ll be leaving before you’re finished with your open house.”

  I sighed.

  “Maybe you can ask Charlotte,” Dix suggested.

  I shook my head. “She’ll be there, too. And I can’t ask Mrs. Albertson to take my daughter as well as Charlotte’s two kids. I guess Carrie will just have to come with me.”

  “If you plan to keep your real estate license now that the baby’s born,” Mother said, “she should probably get used to it, don’t you think?”

  I supposed she should. Not that I make a whole lot of money from my real estate license, but I didn’t want Carrie to grow up thinking she didn’t have to work for a living. I’d been brought up to think that all I needed was a man to take care of me, and look where that had gotten me.

  I mean, yes, it had gotten me Rafe. Eventually. But not before I’d wasted my virginity and two years of my life—and my first “I do,”—on Bradley Ferguson.

  “I guess it won’t matter.” Not to Carrie, certainly. She’d be in her car seat, or bouncy seat, or on a blanket on the floor, wherever we were. The surroundings didn’t matter to her. I didn’t want to appear unprofessional, though.

  “Nobody will care,” Mother said firmly. “Besides, who could resist this little face?”

  She tickled Car
rie’s cheek. Carrie gurgled. Mother beamed.

  A year and a half ago or so, when I’d first gotten my license, I’d hosted a lot of open houses. They’re common practice in real estate, and although I’d never had a lot of listings of my own—I just wasn’t that successful—I’d volunteered to sit a fair few for other agents in my brokerage. I’d even picked up a buyer client or three that way.

  After a few not so good experiences—one of which had found me tied to a bed in my underwear by a murderer (and being rescued by Rafe)—I had volunteered for less, though. And then I’d gotten attached to Rafe and had wanted to spend my weekends with him instead. So it had been quite a while since last time.

  Carrie had fallen asleep on the drive from Sweetwater to Columbia, so when I arrived at the house on Fulton, I tucked her away in a corner of the living room before wandering through the house fluffing pillows and picking up specks of dust. We’d decided to have the place staged, at the additional cost of a couple thousand dollars of Darcy’s money, to make it look lived in—some people have a hard time with empty rooms—and the staging did, if I do say so myself, look good.

  We’d done a halfway decent job on the renovations, too, if you ask me. The tile backsplash in the kitchen looked practically professional, and the new cabinet doors—Shaker style, to replace the old slab-fronts that had been there—updated the look of the whole house.

  It was the same thing in the bathroom, where the tile—again, practically professional—made everything look so much better than it had with the old plastic insert. The hardwood floors gleamed, the bulbs in the light figures shone, and everything smelled fresh and new, if a little like paint.

  Charlotte walked in at a couple of minutes to two, in a green silk dress that was probably a leftover from her marriage to Doctor Dick, the cosmetic surgeon. She stopped just inside the door and looked around. “Looks good.”

  I nodded. “I think it was worth the money for the staging. Houses look so much better when they’re lived in. And they echo less. Besides, we wouldn’t have had anything to sit on.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “For now,” I said, “we can just hang out here together. But when people start arriving, one of us should go into the back of the house—the master suite—and be available for questions.” And just so no one decided to stick a staging item into their pocket and walk off with it. I didn’t want to have to pay Michelle the stager for any replacements. “One of us needs to stay here to greet the people who come in.”

  Charlotte nodded. “You do that. I’ll go to the back. That way you don’t have to leave the baby.”

  Another reason why I wanted someone in the living room. Carrie would wake up if I kept moving her around—she might wake up anyway, when people started coming in—and besides, I wanted to make sure no one had the bright idea to walk off with her. That probably wasn’t likely to happen, but why take chances?

  “Do you think we’ll get an offer today?” Charlotte wanted to know, taking a seat on the sofa with her legs tucked to one side, folding her hands in her lap like a proper lady.

  “I’m not sure,” I admitted. “It could happen, but it probably won’t. Most houses take a little longer than that to sell. Although I think we’re priced pretty well.”

  I’d checked the competing properties in the area, and priced ours below some of the more expensive ones, so we’d look like good deal in comparison. And the spring market was warming up, although how that would play out in a small town like Columbia—small in comparison to Nashville, at least—I had no idea. Maybe the spring wasn’t any busier here than the rest of the year.

  “And we look good,” Charlotte said, looking around.

  I nodded, and cut my eyes to the window at the sound of a car door slamming outside. “Looks like the first visitors are here. Let’s get this show on the road.”

  Charlotte got to her feet, smoothing down the skirt of her green dress. “Good luck,” she told me.

  “Same to you.” She needed the money we’d get for the house more than I did, actually. It would make me happy to contribute to Rafe’s and my household expenses, but we were living rent-free, both here in Sweetwater and in Nashville, and Rafe had a job that paid well enough that we were scraping by with a little extra to spare. Charlotte, on the other hand, was in the process of getting back on her feet after leaving her husband, and as he was currently in prison facing kidnapping charges, there wasn’t likely to be much money left for settlement after everything was said and done.

  “If we get an offer,” I told her, “I’m going to squeeze every penny I can out of it.”

  She smiled, and headed off to the back of the house, her heels clicking on the newly-sanded oak floors. I squared my shoulders and marched toward the front door to greet the visitors.

  They kept coming for the next two hours after that. A few of the neighbors stopped by, out of curiosity and to see what we’d done to the place, and a handful of potential buyers walked in and out, commenting on the finishes and the abundance, or lack thereof, of closet space.

  “The two bedrooms at the end of the hall are part of the original house,” I explained. “It’s from the nineteen-forties, and people didn’t need huge closets then. But we created the master suite in the back, and we added a walk-in closet and a big bathroom in there. Unfortunately, there was nothing we could do about the size of the closets that were already here.”

  Toward the end of the open house, Mrs. Allen from down the street came in, followed by her husband and—of all people—Rodney Clark, one of the guys Rafe and I suspected was part of the neo-Nazi group Rafe was hunting.

  Rodney had been dating the Allen’s daughter Natalie when she’d been murdered three or four years ago. Nancy Allen wasn’t all that fond of him, but I knew he had a habit of stopping by their house once in a while. Now he gave me a smirk, while Nancy Allen grabbed me in a hug. “Savannah!”

  She and I, with some help from her husband, had taken out Natalie’s murderer last month. I guess we’d bonded, at least a little.

  I squeezed her back. “How are you?”

  “Better now.” She let me go and stepped back to give me a smile. “No bail. Did you hear?”

  I nodded. Natalie’s murderer was languishing in prison, and was likely to stay there, since if he was let out, he’d be off and running so fast we’d only see the dust. The trial was set for June, but we were all hoping he’d just enter a guilty plea before then and save us all the trouble. There was no chance at all he’d get off, at least not in my opinion.

  “We wanted to see what you’d done with the place,” Gary Allen said, and shook my hand. “Looks good.”

  He glanced around the living room. Nancy and Rodney did the same. Nancy was admiring the sofa—chartreuse velvet; I could see her eyes snag on it—but Rodney zeroed in on Carrie, cooing in the car seat. “That your baby?”

  I nodded, and zeroed in on her, too.

  In case I haven’t mentioned it, she’s gorgeous. And yes, I know that most babies are pretty. It’s even possible I might be a little biased, since she looks a lot like her daddy, and he’s gorgeous, too. But she really is a very pretty baby. Dusky skin, black curls, winged brows, and clear, blue eyes. She got those from me, and everything else from Rafe. I keep expecting them to turn brown, because sometimes that happens to babies born with blue eyes, but so far they’ve stayed blue.

  “She’s beautiful,” Nancy Allen said. Gary Allen nodded.

  Rodney said nothing, and after a second, I gave them all a polite smile. “Feel free to look around. The setup is much the same as in your house.” Most of the houses on Fulton had been built from the same architectural drawing. Small tract houses from WWII. “We turned the garage into a master suite. It was already a rec room by the time we bought the house; we just took it one step further.”

  “That’s where Morris got it,” Rodney said, “wasn’t it?”

  Where Morris got…?

  “Yes,” I said. “It was.”

&
nbsp; The previous owner of the house, the recently-acquitted-but-still-suspected murderer of Natalie Allen, had been killed in what had then been the rec room. It wasn’t something I particularly wanted to dwell on, though. Or something I wanted anyone else to dwell on, either; especially at my open house. Murders tend to be turnoffs for most home buyers, even if Rodney seemed more excited than anything else.

  He headed in the direction of the kitchen. Gary gave me an apologetic smile and wandered after, while Nancy made a face. “Sorry. He’s young.”

  He was. Although not young enough that a bloody murder should appeal to him. Natalie had been his girlfriend, though, and Morris had still been the obvious suspect when he was killed, so maybe I could just chalk Rodney’s ghoulish interest up to that.

  And if not, maybe I could chalk it up to the fact that Morris had been black and Rodney was a racist. That made for an acceptable explanation, too.

  At any rate, they disappeared into the back of the house, where they became Charlotte’s problem. I turned back to the door and greeted the next couple to come through.

  We stayed busy until almost four-thirty. The Allens and Rodney left again, and so did several other people. But at a couple of minutes to four, just as we were thinking it might be time to take down the Open house sign and lock the door, a lady and gentleman around fifty walked in. The guy looked a little familiar, and I thought he might be someone I should recognize. But I didn’t, and by then Carrie had woken up and I had to deal with her, so I just greeted them in the friendliest manner I could manage, and let them pass by me and into the kitchen.

  And then I listened as they proceeded to pick apart the renovation Charlotte and I had done, in excruciating detail and with many unflattering words.