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

by Jenna Bennett

  Shouldn’t you be in school? I texted back.

  Spring break. I’ll come to you.

  Fine by me. If she wanted to make the drive, I wasn’t going to stop her. Although—

  Should you be driving on your own?

  She had to be eight months along by now. And it was a first baby and she was quite young. I hated the idea of her going into labor on the side of Interstate 65 between Nashville and Sweetwater.

  Yes.

  OK, then.

  See you tomorrow, I told her, and started thinking about where I’d be able to take her that she’d enjoy, and where she wouldn’t get dirty looks for being a young—a very young—woman with a baby on the way.

  I was still thinking an hour later when my phone rang. I checked the number and saw that it was Arlene Woods calling back.

  It was only fifteen minutes into their appointment time, so that was either good news or bad, depending. They’d looked at the house again and decided that they loved it enough that they needed to make an offer right now. Or they’d looked at the house again and rejected it as soon as they walked into the master bedroom, because of the specter of Steven Morris.

  Not literally, of course. He didn’t haunt the place.

  Either way, they probably hadn’t had enough time to make a well-reasoned decision. Unless they’d been early. Maybe they’d been excited enough about the prospect of buying our house—Darcy’s house—that they’d shown up thirty minutes early. They knew the house was unoccupied, so they might have.

  I put the phone to my ear with a sense of cautious optimism. “Arlene?”

  “Yes,” Arlene’s voice said grimly. My optimism took a nose dive. “I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I think you ought to come over here.”

  “To the house on Fulton?”

  “Yes,” Arlene said. I mean, it was obvious. I guess I was just trying to put off the inevitable for another few seconds.

  “What happened?”

  She hesitated. “I think I’d rather just let you see for yourself.”

  That didn’t sound good. “I’ll be there in thirty minutes,” I said.

  “I’ll wait for you.”

  There was a beat before she added, “You may want to call the police now. That way you won’t have to wait for them to get here.”

  My mouth opened. I’m not sure whether my jaw dropped or whether I planned to ask her, again, what had happened. Either way, I told her, “I’ll do that,” before I hung up.

  And did that.

  Four

  Rafe was already on-scene when I arrived. The Chevy he drives to work was parked at the curb outside the house, behind Arlene’s much more elegant Mercedes. I guess real estate in mostly-rural Maury County could pay off, too, if you knew what you were doing.

  I parked my less-elegant Volvo in the driveway, since no one else was there, and hauled Carrie and her seat across the grass and up on the stoop. The door stood open, so I walked in and raised my voice. “Rafe? I’m here. What—?... Oh, no!”

  I stopped dead a couple of feet into the living room and looked around, my eyes wide. Steps on the kitchen floor heralded the appearance of my husband in the dining room. His face was grim as he came toward us. “Savannah.”

  He dropped a kiss on my mouth—quick and chaste—and took the car seat out of my hands.

  I relinquished it without even looking down. My voice came out on a pained moan. “What happened?”

  The mid-century sofa the stager had brought in—and charged us through the nose for—was a mess of ripped fabric, with stuffing spilling out, like internal organs from a bad wound, and over in the dining room area, every place setting on the table, plus the centerpiece, lay in broken pieces of ceramic on the floor. My beautiful pearl gray paint was destroyed, and so was the drywall below.

  “The back door’s busted,” Rafe said.

  Just as when Steven Morris had been killed. I felt myself turn pale. “Oh, my God. Rafe. Nobody’s—?”

  He shook his head, clearly understanding what I wasn’t able to get out. “Nobody’s here. Just a lot of damage.”

  A lot of—? “There’s more?”

  “Sorry, darlin’.” He led the way to the kitchen, where the panes of glass in the newly installed cabinet doors lay in shards on the counters and floor.

  “My feet are wet,” I said stupidly.

  Rafe nodded. “They turned the water on and hung the faucet attachment over the edge of the sink. The water went mostly that way—” He indicated the bedroom wing, “and down the AC vent.”

  So not only did we have the water to deal with, we’d have to have the air conditioning ducts cleaned, and maybe even some of the wood floors replaced. The water would make the planks cup, but maybe, if we gave it a few days, they’d settle back down as they dried out.

  “What else?” The first flush of disbelief and tears had faded, and now I was getting angry.

  Rafe didn’t say anything, just pointed me down the hall.

  The hall bath was intact, other than that the mirror was broken—seven years bad luck—and the light fixture that had gotten such a tongue-lashing yesterday had been ripped out of the wall and was dangling by the electrical wires.

  “Remember what I told you last night,” I asked Rafe, as we continued down the hallway past the two secondary bedrooms—slashed comforter in the room that had a bed, broken desk lamp in the one that was set up as an office, “about the guy who was at the auction and his wife—?”

  He nodded. “We’ll talk about it later.”

  That was probably best. In my shock and dismay I’d forgotten that Arlene was still here. And until we knew exactly what was going on, the less we said in front of anyone else, the better.

  So I followed him to the end of the hall in silence, and into the master suite.

  Arlene was there, in the master bedroom, standing in the middle of the floor. Instead of focusing on her, though, I did a quick overview of the damage first.

  The back door was broken and hanging open, just as Rafe had said. Last time, someone had knocked out one of the windows in the fifteen-pane door, stuck their hand through, and unlocked the door from outside. This time, it looked like a simple kick, since the wood next to the lock was splintered.

  Bedding was torn off the bed and tossed onto the floor along with throw-pillows and knick-knacks from the bedside tables. The watercolor above the bed—a seaside scene with sailboats—was torn at a diagonal. And in the bathroom, someone had taken a blunt instrument of some kind to the big panes of frameless, tempered glass surrounding the shower, which had exploded inward into a pile of small glass pieces that covered the tile floor of the shower. Some of them had probably gone down the drain, too, and would have to be gotten back up.

  All that seen and internally logged, I turned my attention to Arlene Woods, who was standing in the middle of the master bedroom, looking up at the fan that was slowly revolving overhead.

  The master suite is the old garage, so it was a big room, even after we had partitioned part of it off for the bathroom and closet. And after some discussion, we had decided to vault the ceiling, so it was a long way up. We had also covered it in stained beadboard, which made a nice contrast to the white walls. The ceiling fan we’d installed was huge, easily four feet across, and it looked like it belonged on the front of a propeller airplane: a real statement piece.

  At the moment, it was sporting a noose fashioned out of one of the bed sheets, which was lazily floating through the air above Arlene’s head.

  “At least it’s empty,” fell out of my mouth.

  They both looked at me like I’d lost my mind. After a second, the corner of Rafe’s mouth curved up, but Arlene continued to look shocked.

  “I’ve found dead bodies before,” I told her, apologetically. “One right there, as a matter of fact.” I pointed to the place where Steve Morris had breathed his last: not too many feet from where Arlene’s suede half-boots were currently parked. “I’ll take a crime scene without a dead body
any day.”

  Rafe had gotten his expression under control, but there was still a little light of… maybe it was approval in his eyes. “If you wouldn’t mind telling Savannah what you told me?” he prompted Arlene.

  She shrugged. “We arrived a few minutes after ten. The front door was locked. Whoever did this must have come and gone through the back.”

  Obviously. Or at least it was obvious that they’d come in this way. If the front door had been locked from the inside, it was logical to assume they’d gone out this way, too. I would have. And I would have parked several blocks away, so nobody would have seen my car in the neighborhood.

  “We saw the damage as soon as we came in,” Arlene added. “We walked back out immediately. My clients left, and I called you. Your husband,” she gave him a look, hard to decipher, “arrived and walked through the rest of the house. Then you came.”

  I nodded. That seemed straight-forward enough. “Thanks for calling me.”

  “I don’t think I have any more questions,” Rafe added, “but thanks for sticking around for Savannah.”

  “No problem.” Arlene gave him a tight smile.

  “It’ll probably take us a week or two to fix the damage,” I told her, “if your clients are still in the market for a house then.”

  She gave me a look. It didn’t quite say ‘I can’t believe you’re stupid enough to suggest that,’ but it was close. “I don’t think so.”

  No, I didn’t, either. “Thanks for trying,” I told her.

  She nodded. “Good luck.”

  She headed out, the heels of her boots clacking against the floors in the hallway.

  I turned to Rafe, who took one look at my face and moved to put his free arm around my shoulders. “Sorry.”

  “I can’t believe this,” I told his leather jacket. “Why does this kind of stuff follow me around? What is this? The third of my places that’s been vandalized? The fourth?”

  “I’m gonna guess more than that.” His voice was perfectly calm. “Look on the bright side, darlin’. Nobody’s dead. The rest of this can be fixed.”

  Yes, it could. With more of Darcy’s money.

  “I have to contact my sister,” I said. “And Charlotte.” Who’d be just as devastated as I was.

  And although I wanted to reject what he was saying, Rafe was right. In addition to having dealt with vandalism more than once, I’d also walked in on more than one dead body, and the fact that there wasn’t one lying on the floor here, or worse, hanging from that noose revolving slowly above my head, was a blessing. Even if everything else about this situation made me feel violated and sick to my stomach.

  “We need to take that down before Darcy sees it,” I said.

  Rafe nodded, eyeing the loop of fabric. It hung low enough that the bottom of the noose just missed brushing the top of his head on each circuit. As it passed overhead, it would cast a shadow across his face for a moment before it revolved away, and then it did it again on the next rotation. His jaw was tight and his eyes flat and hard.

  “Do you think—” I began, and then stopped when he shook his head.

  “I ain’t gonna speculate. Could be something small and stupid—the lady and gentleman who stopped by yesterday decided to mess up your hard work and make sure you can’t get your house sold and your money out with spending more.”

  I nodded. That thought had crossed my mind, too. “Or it could be something else. Someone sending a message to me. Or to Darcy.”

  My half-sister, with her black hair, dark eyes, and café au lait skin.

  “Like I said,” Rafe said, with a last narrow-eyed glare at the noose, “I ain’t gonna speculate. I’m hoping it’s small and stupid.”

  I did, too. “Rodney Clark was here yesterday. Accompanying the Allens.”

  “I’m gonna have to talk to them.” Rafe said. “And all the other neighbors. In case somebody heard or saw something.”

  I nodded. “What about Rodney? Are you going to talk to him, too?”

  He contemplated me in silence for a second. “Not sure yet. On the one hand, it’d make for a handy excuse to have a conversation with him. On the other…”

  He didn’t complete the sentence, just trailed off, his eyes distant.

  “I have a list,” I told him. “Of everyone who was here for the Open house. I’m not sure everyone signed it—if somebody came here with the thought that they’d case the place to do damage to it later, they probably would have written down a fake name and email—but I spent most of the open house in the living room, and I’m pretty sure everyone wrote something.”

  “That’ll be helpful.”

  “The list is at home. When I get there, I’ll scan it to you.”

  “Thanks, darlin’.” He gave me a quick look, and then a slower and more careful one. “You OK?”

  “I’m angry,” I said. “I feel violated. I’m pissed off that now I have to spend more of Darcy’s money to fix what we already spent Darcy’s money to do. And I’m really annoyed that we lost Arlene Woods’s buyers, and we won’t find any others for another few weeks, at least. Every month we have to hang on to this place, the carrying costs mount up. We may even be responsible for the furniture that was destroyed.”

  And that was something else I had to do: call Michelle the stager and tell her what had happened. She wasn’t going to be happy, either. Hopefully she was insured.

  “And on top of that, that thing—” I looked at the noose, “feels a little like a threat. Like this is going to happen again. Or something else will. Something worse.”

  We weren’t strangers to nooses in these parts. The Ku Klux Klan was first formed just about thirty minutes south of here, in the town of Pulaski. And the lynching of Cordie Cheek, accused and arrested, but never indicted, of raping a white girl, took place just a mile or two from where we were standing. What happened to Cordie, and the fear that it would happen to someone else, was what started the Columbia Race Riots in 1946.

  Rafe nodded, his face grim. In the car seat over his arm, Carrie was following the movement of the noose, her eyes wide. To her, it probably looked like another mobile, like the one with the zoo animals hanging above her bed at home. I wished to God I didn’t have to bring my daughter up in a world where she’d encounter this kind of ugliness just because of the color of her skin, but there was no chance of that.

  “What do you think?” I asked Rafe.

  He hesitated. “I’d like to think that this was just somebody having some fun—in their way—and that…” He nodded to the noose, “was an afterthought they came up with once they got here and saw the sheets.”

  “If they’d planned to do it, they might have brought a rope,” I said.

  Rafe nodded. “Mighta. It ain’t proof one way or the other.”

  No. It wasn’t.

  “I’ll call somebody in to go over the place.” He gave one last look around the bedroom before he headed for the doorway, still carrying the seat with Carrie in it. She’d been quiet, except for some cooing noises, this whole time. “I don’t imagine whoever did this was stupid enough to leave fingerprints, but we gotta check.”

  I nodded, trailing him down the hallway toward the kitchen. Of course we did. It was more time and manpower wasted, but yes. He had to check.

  “And I’ll talk to Tammy. We’ll decide whether we wanna keep the place shut down for a few days, or whether you can get back to work on it.”

  I groaned. “It’s not that I don’t understand what you’re saying. But we’ve already spent two months on this house. It’s going to take another couple of weeks to redo everything that’s broken. At least. The sooner we can get started, the better.”

  “I get that, darlin’. For now, just let me talk it over with Tammy. And maybe Bob. He’s been living here longer than either of us. It’s Columbia’s jurisdiction, not his, but he oughta know what’s going on.”

  I nodded. He did. “I guess I’ll drive to Sweetwater and give Charlotte and Darcy the bad news.” And the stager. I wa
sn’t looking forward to that. “Just let me know when we can get in here and start working. I’m sure Michelle will want to see the damage for herself, too.”

  “She can do that anytime,” Rafe said, passing through the front door and out onto the stoop. “There’ll be somebody here for the rest of the day. Just tell her not to start clearing stuff out until we’re done.”

  I assured him I wouldn’t dream of telling Michelle she could remove any of her property before the police was finished with it. Then he gave me Carrie, and I gave him a kiss, and we parted ways. Him to go back into the house to call in the crime scene crew and start talking to people, and me to drive back to Sweetwater to update my two partners in home renovation on what had happened.

  Five

  Michelle the stager was, as expected, livid. “My sofa? My beautiful sofa? That sofa cost me six grand!”

  I’m sure it had. It was—or had been—a lovely sofa. “And your bedding,” I said, helpfully. “And some pillows.”

  Although truthfully, our hit to the wallet—or Darcy’s wallet—was probably worse than Michelle’s. We had to replace doors, walls, paint, tile, shower glass, maybe even floors…

  And if that noose meant something more than just a momentary attempt to upset us and make us feel afraid, we had bigger problems than the money, too.

  Michelle was breathing loudly in and out through her nose. “I’m pulling the rest of my furniture out of there as soon as the police are done,” she told me.

  “Of course.” I’d been prepared for that. I would have done the same thing.

  “And I’m keeping the money you paid me to pay the deductible for the insurance.”

  I grimaced. I’d been prepared for that, too, but that didn’t mean I liked it. “I understand.”

  “Let me know when the police are done so I can get a truck over there.”

  She hung up in my ear before I could respond. I dropped the phone with a wince and concentrated on driving.

  It isn’t a long trip from Columbia to Sweetwater, especially not when traffic is light, which it tends to be in the late morning. It was less than thirty minutes before I pulled up in front of Martin and McCall Law Offices on the town square, and turned off the engine.