Normally, Savannah took this desertion in stride. Cats were, after all, fickle creatures who loved you more than anything in the world... except food, pets, and sunshine.
But without the moonlight or the cats’ quiet warmth and comfort, she felt especially lonely.
“Don’t be like Maggie,” she whispered into the dark silence.
Surprisingly, she felt someone, something listening there in the quiet. A presence that she was aware of deep, deep in her soul. Somehow, someone was listening. Someone had heard.
So she said it again. “Daisy, please, please, honey... don’t be like Maggie.”
And finally, her burden shared, she drifted off to sleep.
Chapter 6
The next morning, Savannah’s mood was a bit more optimistic. Homemade biscuits and gravy could do that to you. So could having some of the people you loved most in the world seated around your table.
Savannah’s favorite thing was cooking and feeding hungry people. And they didn’t even have to be hungry. She would happily feed them anyway.
Gran sat at the head of the table—Savannah wouldn’t have it any other way—digging gleefully into a generous helping of grits.
Dirk sat at the other end of the table, totally grits free. He’d never actually tasted Savannah’s grits. But he had made it clear early in their relationship that even a chowhound like him wasn’t going to put something into his mouth named grit.
He didn’t know what he was missing.
Tammy sat on one of the side chairs, her laptop on the table in front of her, a fruit smoothie in a mug next to her.
Tammy didn’t eat grits either, or anything with saturated fat, processed flour, granulated sugar, preservatives, or artificial anything in it.
And that ruled out ninety-nine percent of Savannah’s cooking.
Having breakfast, lunch, or dinner at Savannah’s house usually meant that Tammy brought her own bag of “real food,” as she called it. And while Savannah would never admit it, over the years she had come to realize the value of a smoothie made from the recently sun-kissed fruits of the earth.
Especially if you threw a big scoop of Ben and Jerry’s Vanilla Heath Bar Crunch into the mix.
Savannah got up to replenish the biscuit basket. Dirk was hungrier than usual, having spent most of the night driving up and down San Carmelita’s streets, highways, and byways, looking for Daisy’s 1991 Honda Accord.
Taking another sip of her smoothie, Tammy studied the computer screen, then said, “According to this, Andrew Dante just married that gal, Robyn. They’ve been together only a couple of years. It says here that he left his wife for her, and that’s why Tiffy hates her.”
“Well, I could have told you that,” Gran said, reaching for the peach preserves. “I keep up on all that stuff. That Robyn was Dante’s travel agent. Any time he went any place, she set everything up for him.”
“For his work or when he went away with his family?” Savannah asked.
“Both.” Gran took time to savor her first bite of the preserves and biscuit before elaborating. “And then his wife figured out that she was making travel arrangements for him and herself, too. Hanky-panky stuff, if you know what I mean. The kind that’ll get your tallywhacker snipped off if you’re married to the wrong woman...if you know what I mean.”
“Yep, we gotcha, Gran,” Savannah said, hiding a smile.
Gran prided herself on her subtlety.
Subtle as the Cotton Belt freight train that blew its horn from one end of McGill, Georgia, to the other every Thursday night about eleven forty-five.
“You’re not saying much,” Savannah said to Dirk when she sat down in the chair across from Tammy and began her own breakfast.
“I’m worn out,” he said. “I should have just gone on home early last night and gotten a full night’s sleep, for all the good it did me.”
“I’m sorry you didn’t find the car,” she told him.
She could have mentioned that she hadn’t slept much herself, but Dirk got irritated if you hogged any of his misery, so she kept it to herself and let him wallow alone.
“Yeah, me, too,” he said. “We need that car. If we could find it, we’d at least have a starting place.”
“Did you check her credit cards or ATM card yet to see if there’s been any activity?” Tammy asked.
“Credit card?” Dirk barked. “What credit card? She’s a kid, for Pete’s sake. She wouldn’t have a—”
“Yes. She does.” A light came on in Savannah’s brain as she flashed back to finding the pregnancy test in the bottom of Daisy’s desk drawer. “I remember seeing a receipt for something she bought at the drugstore there where she works. It had the last four digits of a credit card on it. It’s either hers, or her mom lets her use it. Either way, Tammy’s right. We need to check that.”
Savannah stood, left her food on the table, and walked over to the kitchen wall phone. “What’s Pam O’Neil’s phone number?” she asked Dirk.
He pulled his notebook from his shirt pocket and read it off to her.
Pam O’Neil answered before the second ring.
Savannah felt a ping of pity for her when she heard the hopeful tone in her “Hello?”
“This is Savannah, Pam. And we don’t have anything new, I’m sorry to say,” she said, ending the suspense for the poor woman as quickly as possible. “But I do have a quick question for you. Does Daisy have her own credit card?” She smiled and nodded to those at the table. “Can you please give me the number if you know it? We need to run a check on it and see if there’s been any activity.” She paused. “Sure, I can wait.”
A moment later, Pam gave her the long number; Savannah wrote it down on a notepad and confirmed it. Then she asked, “And can you tell me what bank it’s drawn from and her pin number? That way we can check it right away without all the legal red tape.”
Savannah frowned. “Oh, you don’t. Well, let me ask you a few questions about Daisy.”
A few minutes later, Savannah was back at the table, notes in her hand.
“Okay, Tammitha,” she said, “here’s where you get to shine. Hack this account for me, would you? Here’s her boyfriend’s name, her birthday, her social security number, her favorite color, and the name of her dog.”
Tammy took the list and glanced over it. “People are so unoriginal. Luckily for us.”
“No kidding.”
Savannah wasn’t even finished with her first biscuit until Tammy had exhausted the list and still hadn’t found Daisy’s password.
“I felt sure it would be the dog’s name,” Tammy said. “People always use their pets’ names.”
Savannah mentally reran her conversation with Pam. “Yeah, I thought that would be it, too. Pam said that’s the second boxer she’s had named Oscar. The current one is the first one’s son. I saw a picture of Daisy and one of the dogs there in Pam’s living room.”
“Hm-m-m...he’s the second Oscar she’s had,” Tammy said thoughtfully. “Let me try Oscar2.”
Her fingers clicked away on the keyboard. She squinted at the screen. “That didn’t work either. I’ll try Oscar2nd.”
Having no luck, she typed in OscarII.
“Drats,” she said. “It’s telling me now that if I don’t get it right the next time, the security system is going to lock me out for twenty-four hours.” She looked around the table. “Any suggestions for my final attempt?”
Gran dumped a second heaping teaspoon of sugar into her coffee and said, “Well now, where I come from, if you name a boy young’un after his daddy, you call him Junior. Yeap, south of the Mason-Dixon Line, we’re up to our tail feathers in Juniors.”
Tammy brightened. “Okay. Let’s try that one.”
She typed in OscarJr. And a moment later, Daisy’s private financial history was displayed before them in detail.
Tammy danced in her chair for a moment. “I got it! I got it!” But just as quickly, her smile faded, and her enthusiasm evaporated.
“What is
it?” Savannah asked.
“It’s nothing,” Tammy replied.
“What do you mean, ‘nothing’?” Dirk wanted to know.
“I mean that she hasn’t charged anything or withdrawn a single dollar. Her last purchase was at a local nursery a week ago.”
Savannah nodded. “She’s quite the botanist. Her room is filled with plants.”
“That’s too bad,” Dirk said. “A person who’s spending money right and left is a person who’s easy to track down.”
“Not to mention the fact that spending money means they may still be alive,” Savannah added.
“May be?” Granny asked.
Savannah cleared her throat. “Unless the person who’s doing the spending stole the card from them and...well...”
“Yeah.” Dirk sighed. “I wasn’t going to mention that.”
His cell phone went off, and Savannah recognized the personalized tone. It was the station calling.
They all held their breath as they listened to his side of the short conversation.
“Yeah? Where?”
He scribbled in his notepad. “Okay. I’ll be there in ten. Have Donaldson secure it. Tell him nobody goes near it.”
He snapped his phone closed. “They found her car. It’s up at the end of Canyon Park where the hiking trails into the hills begin.”
Savannah didn’t want to ask, but she had to. “Any DB?”
“No,” Dirk said, “thankfully.”
They both jumped up from the table.
Savannah started to grab her purse, then paused and turned back to Gran. “I’m sorry, Gran. Here I go off half-cocked, and I didn’t even stop to think that you’d like to—”
“Shoo.” Gran waved a biscuit at her. “Get out of here, and don’t waste time being silly. Go find that girl, and catch me a bad guy.”
“Thanks, Gran. I love you.”
“I love you, too, sweet cheeks. Make tracks.”
Gran waited until Savannah and Dirk had left the room before she leaned across the table and whispered to Tammy, “DB. Does that stand for what I think it does?”
Tammy hesitated a second, then said, “Um...it’s police code for dead body.”
“That’s what I figured.” Gran nodded and looked self-satisfied. “And we can certainly thank the good Lord for that.”
Tammy grinned. “Amen.”
Gran reached for another helping of grits. “You said it, Sister Tammy. Tell it like it is.”
Most small towns the size of San Carmelita did well to have one nice city park. But San Carm, as the locals called it, had three.
One was downtown in the quaint part of the city, near the old mission. And it was used mostly as a gathering place when the town fathers and mothers deemed it necessary to throw a craft fair, an art show, or any other sort of shindig to raise revenue.
The second was an exclusive hideaway up in the hills, not too far from the Dante estate. And even though it was a city park and therefore open to the public, it was pretty much understood that if you wanted to use the tennis courts, take a dip in the pool, or picnic on the perfectly manicured lawns, you had to behave yourself.
Then there was the third park. A long canyon that stretched deep into the foothills, the park was a stone’s throw across and two miles long. And picnickers here were far more likely to be swilling beer or smoking pot than sipping Chardonnay.
Police did patrol the canyon and throw out the rowdiest of visitors, but not enough to cramp anybody’s style.
It was pretty well-known that if you wanted to park and make out or blare your boombox and foist your questionable taste in music onto your fellow park attendees, this was the place to do it.
Savannah decided to give Dirk a break and drove him to the park in her Mustang. He didn’t particularly like being a passenger—typical male thing—but he was in love with the 1965 ’Stang, and she wouldn’t let him drive it. So, on a day when he was tired, she could sometimes convince him to let her chauffeur him for a change.
And when he didn’t try to tell her how to drive, when he just sat back and shut up and enjoyed the drive, it went pretty well, and they didn’t fight... too badly.
“Why don’t you just pass that friggen guy?” he said as they followed a car that was creeping along at a mere twenty miles over the speed limit. “We’re never going to get there if you don’t—”
“Dirk, do not even start with me. Or I swear, you’ll be hoofin’ it back to my house to get your own jalopy. Roll down the window, take a deep breath, and chill, son.”
“I’ll bet it’s a woman driver,” he grumbled. “When they hog the left lane like that and won’t get over to let you pass ’em, it’s always a woman.”
“It’s a man.”
“How can you tell?”
“I can see his mustache in his rearview mirror, and he just about ran off the road looking at that female jogger in the hot pink short shorts we just passed. Call it a hunch.”
“Oh.”
“And they gave you a detective’s badge?”
“Lay off me, woman, or I’ll fly into a blind rage.”
“Yeah, yeah. You’d have to gather up your strength just to spit right now.”
He sighed. “That’s true.”
“Well, don’t tell Tammy. She’ll start shoving vitamin pills at you.”
“No kidding. Great big ones that smell like horse manure. Or she comes at you with those Chinese herbs that taste like frog pee.”
Savannah chuckled. He was right. Tammy did have a healing effect on people. People around her tended to remain healthy, no matter what. They didn’t dare do otherwise. Her remedies were to be avoided at all costs . . . even if it meant pretending you were feeling dandy when you had a full-fledged case of the whooping, bubonic diabetes.
As Savannah turned off the foothill road and into the park, she saw several teenagers eyeing her car with admiration mixed with envy. She knew she had a hot ride and enjoyed driving the classic car. And although the engine was old and in constant need of some sort of repair, the exterior was cherry. You could see the red Pony SS coming a mile off. And unless you were tailing somebody and trying to blend, or black, smelly smoke was belching out of the tailpipe, driving it around was pretty darned awesome.
As she drove down the narrow two-lane road that ran the length of the park, her anxiety began to build. Maybe there was no DB reported, but that didn’t mean the car wouldn’t reveal something they didn’t want to see.
They passed the sandboxes, the swings, the slides, the picnic tables, and barbecue pits that were pretty much empty. It was a bit early in the morning for the parkers, the potheads, and the frankfurter brigades to be out and about.
The road twisted through the canyon with its steep, wooded hills on either side. And as they drove deeper into the valley, the arroyo became more and more narrow, the trees and brush thicker, the mown lawn more sparse.
And up ahead, at the end was a large gate—the gate marked “No Trespassing,” the gate that absolutely everyone ignored and climbed over. Because just beyond the gate were some of the nicest hiking trails in the county.
In the spring, Savannah loved going back there and being waist high in the wildflower splendor. Yellow daisies and sage bloomed in glorious profusion—a feast for the eyes and admittedly, a challenge to the allergic.
Unfortunately, rattle snakes bloomed rather profusely, too, but she carried her Beretta with her, along with a totally unsophisticated Southerner’s disrespect for the sanctity of reptilian life.
She might have wept at the sight of a dead bunny rabbit, but she could blow a rattlesnake to smithereens without batting an eyelash.
There would be no nature walk today. At the end of the road sat Daisy’s old Honda and next to it, a police radio car, its blue lights flashing.
“Donaldson,” Dirk mumbled. “Rookie kid. Always with the drama. I swear, he lights up when he’s scooping roadkill.”
She grinned, remembering the days when Dirk had used his siren and lig
hts for absolutely any reason at all. And if he was in a squad car right now, he’d have the siren going and lights flashing.
It was a testosterone thing.
They parked the Mustang at least 60 feet from the other two vehicles and walked over to the fresh-faced, eager young cop who was standing guard.
Savannah liked Frank. She couldn’t help it. He had been out of the academy two years, but the newness hadn’t worn off for him. He was one of those guys who would absolutely love being a cop until the day he died. Unlike most people, Frank had found his passion in life, and he lived it daily. Life didn’t get better than that.
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