Contract Pending

by Jenna Bennett

  “I wasn’t planning to gorge myself. But I should be able to eat and still breathe. Todd will think it’s strange if all I do is pick at my food. I won’t have dessert, though.”

  “Of course not, darling!” Mother looked shocked that I’d even thought about it.

  I hadn’t brought that much with me in the bag from the apartment, and in the couple of days I’d spent at Mrs. Jenkins’s house I had dirtied some of what I had, so I stayed around the house for a couple of hours, hanging out with mother and washing clothes. At around eleven we got into the Volvo and headed into Sweetwater proper.

  It’s a cute little place, if you like late Victorian construction and the typical Southern town square with a town hall on one side and three sides of red brick commercial buildings on the others.

  The family business is there, started by my great-grandfather Richard Martin more than a hundred years ago: the law offices of Martin and McCall. The current Martin is Dix; the McCalls are Catherine, who spends most of her time at home with her three children these days, and her husband Jonathan.

  Mother insisted on stopping in to see the family, of course. I tried unsuccessfully to demur, but it turned out all right in the end anyway: Dix was closeted with a client, and only Jonathan was available to see us. And since he knew nothing about my relationship with Rafe, that touchy subject didn’t come up. I was thrilled.

  Audrey’s place is across the square from the law office, and she was waiting for us when we pushed the door open. I’ve only rarely seen a live customer in the store, but Audrey has kept the place running for ten years or more. She doesn’t have a husband to support her, but she lives fairly cheaply, in a small house just a few blocks away, that she inherited from her parents and they inherited from theirs.

  Other than the trip to the drugstore the other day, to replace my lipstick and romance novel, the last store I’d visited was Sally’s House of Security, with Mrs. Jenkins. Stepping into Audrey’s with mother was almost surreal, and for a second I was floored by the realization that my life in Nashville was so different from my life here, from the life I’d been brought up to have. The life I’d be going back to if Todd proposed and I accepted. For a second, I wanted nothing more than to turn on my heel and run out of there, as fast as I could, and never see Todd again.

  Then my good manners reasserted themselves, and I smiled at Audrey. “Hello.”

  “Hi, Savannah!” She grinned.

  Audrey and my mother are pretty much total opposites, at least physically. Mother is shorter than me, blonde, dainty and tastefully elegant. Audrey is tall, almost five ten, with short, dark hair, cut straight across her forehead and severely wedged in the back, coming forward to two points. She has fabulous cheekbones and always wears glossy, bright red lipstick. And of course she’s always dressed to the nines, in dramatic colors and cuts. Today’s outfit was an elegant black pantsuit, with an emerald green shirt underneath, and black and white polka-dotted shoes that put her over six feet tall.

  She and mother air-kissed, so as not to mess up their respective make-up. I’m pretty adept at the air-kiss myself. I leaned in and smacked my lips in the vicinity of Audrey’s cheek too.

  Mother clapped her hands. “Show us the dress, Audrey. Where is it?”

  “Hold your horses,” Audrey said, smiling. “It’s this way. I have it in a couple of different colors. Black, white, red, and blue.”

  “Black,” mother said decisively, following Audrey toward the dressing rooms in the back. “It’s so slimming.”

  I’m a respectable size eight, so it’s not like I’m a heifer, although I will admit to having to lose ten pounds before I’d be comfortable wearing a bathing suit in public. I already own a half dozen little black dresses, though. I wasn’t sure I needed another.

  “But white is so simple, don’t you think?” Audrey retorted. “Pure and evocative?”

  Evocative of wedding dresses, I assumed. Or debutantes.

  “Her eyes are blue...” mother mused, looking at me over her shoulder.

  I own a few blue dresses, as well. And one or two white ones.

  “Red,” I said.

  Both of them turned to look at me.

  “Darling...” mother began.

  “I already own black and blue and white dresses. I even have a wedding gown. And a debutante gown.” That I didn’t fit into anymore. “But I’ve never owned a red dress. I want one.”

  “I don’t know, Savannah...” Audrey said.

  “Can I at least try it on? If it doesn’t look good, I promise I won’t insist.” I looked from one to the other of them. And yes, I do know that at twenty seven, I’m responsible for my own clothes and what I want to look like, and I don’t actually need my mother’s permission to wear a red dress. Habits are hard to break, though.

  They exchanged a look.

  “I suppose it can’t hurt just to try it on...” Audrey murmured.

  Mother agreed, although she didn’t look happy.

  As soon as I looked in the mirror, I knew I had to have the red dress. Even if I had to scrape the bottom of the savings account to buy it. If mother refused to buy me a red dress, then by gum, I was going to buy it for myself.

  It was stunning. Thick, shiny satin, with a tight bodice and a tight skirt, hitting a demure two inches below my knees. And there wasn’t anything special about it other than the fabric and the cut. Simple and elegant. No lace insets, no sequins, no beads. The neckline was square, with straps that fastened behind my neck. Half my back was exposed, and the satin clung to every curve. It managed to be demure and sexy all at the same time, with sexy definitely running ahead. My stomach tightened as I imagined someone’s hands slipping over the slick satin, pulling down the short zipper in the back, lifting my hair out of the way to unhook the halter straps...

  Even as my cheeks heated, I gave myself a mental slap. This dress was supposed to solicit a proposal from Todd, not a knee-jerk sexual reaction from Rafe. He wouldn’t even see me wearing it. By the time I got back to Nashville, I’d be engaged to Todd, and I wouldn’t be seeing Rafe again. Especially not wearing this. But even so, as I turned to mother and Audrey and announced, “I’ll take it!” it was a pair of hot, dark, knowing eyes I saw in my mind.

  Chapter 10

  By the time I made it out to the Bog, it was late afternoon. I’d had to try on all the other dresses, too—mother liked the slimming black, Audrey the bright blue that brought out my eyes—but I had insisted on the red, and eventually they had given in. It did look good on me, and as mother reluctantly admitted, other than the bright color, it really wasn’t common at all. As if Audrey ever carried anything common in her boutique.

  After shopping, we had lunch with Audrey at the café on the square, and then I drove mom home with the dress. And set out for the Bog, under the guise of wanting to look for the contact information of the construction company that was developing the land, but really to take a look at the crime scene.

  Growing up, I had never visited the Bog. I didn’t know anyone who lived there, and honestly, I thought driving down the rutted track from the highway would be like taking my life into my hands. The stories I heard about the Bog made it sound like the Wild West. Shootings, murders, fights... and of course the presence of LaDonna Collier’s son, who was enough in and of himself to scare all us prim and proper future debutantes into a tizzy. Even then, he’d had the kind of sex appeal and charisma that drew women. Or girls.

  The place looked just like it had last time I was here, two months ago. Just after I’d found Brenda Puckett’s butchered body in Mrs. Jenkins’s house. I had come down to Sweetwater for mother’s birthday, and when I mentioned running into Rafe in Nashville, she had told me that LaDonna Collier had died. And my mind had put two and two together and gotten five, and I had driven out to the Bog to see if I could discern a connection between Brenda’s murder and LaDonna’s death. Back then, I would have been perfectly happy to think Rafe guilty of both or either.

  He’d been here, c
leaning out his mother’s mobile home, and we’d been talking—or flirting—when Marquita came driving down the track. That was the first time I’d seen her too, in over twelve years. I’d left shortly after that, with her snapping at my heels like a Rottweiler.

  And now she had died. Here.

  The place looked the same. The small creek—or crick—was still sluggish and brown, the trees were spindly and stunted, and the homes—ancient singlewide trailers and leaning clapboard shacks—were downtrodden and sad. There was no sign of life. Not even the chirp of a bird.

  Of course, there’d been no sign of life last time either, and Rafe had been here then. Probably parked behind his mother’s home. Where Marquita’s car and body had been found. I looked around for the yellow crime scene tape and spied it, behind one of the decrepit fifty-year-old trailers.

  Last time I was here, I had gotten the heel of my shoe stuck in a snake hole and had fallen flat on my butt in front of Rafe, so this time I was careful about where I put my feet. I made it over to the trailer without any trouble, and peeked around the corner.

  There was no one there, and although I hadn’t expected there to be, I was aware of a sense of disappointment. No, I hadn’t really expected him to be here, but I’d been hopeful. Since I couldn’t in good conscience seek him out again, it would be nice of him to oblige by finding me.

  But there was nothing exciting to see behind the trailer. Just the crime scene tape strung around a sort of carport stuck to the back of the structure. I peered down, but saw nothing of interest. The ground was too dry for tracks, and the only thing I noticed was a big splotch of oil that had sunk into the dirt. Marquita’s old Dodge must have had a leak, and over the couple of days it had been sitting there, the drip had made a spot on the ground.

  However, the back door to the trailer stood ajar.

  No reason why it shouldn’t be, of course. No one lived here anymore. LaDonna was dead, and Rafe hadn’t lived here since he was eighteen. Chances were the police had walked through yesterday, to make sure there was nothing inside that seemed connected to Marquita’s murder, and they had neglected to close the door when they left.

  The temptation was too much for me.

  Looking over my shoulder first, to make sure there really weren’t anyone else around to see me, I ducked under the crime scene tape and detoured around the oil spot, making my way over to the door. I pushed it open. It creaked, of course. In a place like this, it would. The trailer looked like no one had ever cared enough to perform even the most basic maintenance, and the atmosphere and oppressive silence was eerie and made the small hairs at the back of my neck stand up.

  I held my breath as I climbed up the two metal steps and ducked inside.

  The back door led directly into the kitchen, classic 1970s vintage. Chintzy pressed-wood cabinets with shiny brass handles, faded green laminate countertop, bottom-of-the-line faucet and sink. Almond colored scratch-and-dent refrigerator, chipped vinyl floor. Dead cockroaches with their legs in the air. I shuddered. It never ceases to amaze me how some people live.

  The rest of the place was just as bad. Wandering down the narrow hallway, I tried not to feel like filth was crawling up my shoes from the dirty shag carpets. Ugly paneling and uglier wallpaper covered every wall, black mold dotted the baseboards, and the low ceilings felt like they were pushing down on me. Rafe probably had to duck his head to get past the cheap brass and wood ceiling fans.

  I found what I assumed would have been his room down at the other end of the long structure. Another low-ceilinged room with thick, green shag rugs on the floor, dirty and spotted, and with a hole in the wall from when someone, sometime, had put a fist or something else through the thin material. The metal window frame was buckled and the window itself was cracked. I pegged it for Rafe’s room not because of the fist-sized hole in the wall—that might equally well have been made by his Uncle Bubba, during one of Bubba’s periods of parole, or by Old Jim, who wasn’t averse to taking fists or his belt or whatever else was handy to both his daughter and his grandson when the mood struck him. No, whoever had cleaned the place out after LaDonna died—Rafe, as far as I knew—had either forgotten, or left on purpose, a centerfold pinned to the wall.

  I wasn’t sure how I felt about that.

  Here’s the thing: I may be naive, but I know that most men like to look at naked women. Rafe had never made a secret of the fact that he does, although I’d always gotten the impression that he preferred them living and breathing, in the flesh, to two-dimensional. Dix had hidden dirty magazines in the old slave cabin when we were teenagers, so mother wouldn’t find them, and Todd might even have had the odd issue of Playboy stuck under his mattress, too. Bradley certainly had. And it had always made me feel weird when he leafed through a dirty magazine and then wanted to make love to me. And of course I’d come across Perry Fortunato’s collection of nastiness a month or so ago, and been appropriately disgusted and appalled.

  I knew that Perry’s obsession was sick, and that it had contributed to two murders and his own death. But Dix seemed well-adjusted enough, and although Bradley’s interest in looking at other women had been disconcerting—how could I possibly measure up to the wasp-waisted over-endowed bottle-blondes in the pictures?—he certainly wasn’t a pervert. Rafe had never struck me that way, either.

  The picture wasn’t disturbing in any way, other than the simple fact that it was there. As soft porn goes, and compared to some of the stuff I’d seen in Perry’s house, this was squeaky clean. It wasn’t much worse than the covers of Barbara Botticelli’s romance novels, if it came to that. Except for the missing hero with the well-developed chest, of course. Although I had no problem picturing him. Especially in this space.

  I don’t know why I should have been surprised by the fact that the woman in the picture was white. Caucasian. Blonde and blue-eyed, with pink lipstick and a French manicure. Dressed—sort of—in virginal white lace.

  In my mind, and the minds of lots of people in Sweetwater, Rafe was defined by the fact that his father had been black. He was LaDonna Collier’s colored boy. Different from us, from me. I had teased him about Marquita and thought about introducing him to Lila Vaughn because they were black. Now I realized, with something of a shock, that maybe Rafe didn’t consider himself black. And I realized, with even more of a shock, that the two women I knew for a fact that he’d been involved with, Yvonne McCoy and Elspeth Caulfield, were both fair-skinned and blue-eyed: Elspeth a blonde like me, and Yvonne a redhead.

  Coming face to face with your own racial prejudices isn’t a comfortable feeling. It is, however, more comfortable than coming face to face with someone else in an empty house.

  I turned around blindly, my mind spinning along with my body, and stopped with a shocked exhale when I saw someone in the doorway.

  After a second, I was able to catch my breath again. I even managed an unsteady laugh. Think of the devil... “Goodness, you startled me. What are you doing here?”

  “What are you doing here?” Elspeth Caulfield answered.

  “I’m visiting my mother. In Sweetwater. And I... um... heard about Marquita Johnson and got curious. And when I got here, I saw that the door was open, so I went in.”

  I walked toward her. For a second, I wasn’t sure she would step out of the way to let me through. If she hadn’t, and I’d had to, I could probably have pushed her aside. She was small and slim, no taller than she’d been at sixteen. A mere five feet three inches or so to my five eight, although she wore sensible sneakers instead of my high heeled slingbacks, and jeans instead of my flouncy pink skirt, and if it came to running away from her, I wouldn’t have a prayer.

  She stepped aside, so it didn’t become an issue. I brushed past her and walked down the narrow hall toward the kitchen, the skin between my shoulder blades prickling. I didn’t draw a deep breath until I was outside, under the carport.

  Elspeth stepped down after me. We looked at one another.

  “So how are you?” I ventured
.

  The fact that she was here at all was freaking me out a little, and those pale blue, unblinking eyes were even more disconcerting. I would have liked nothing better than to just get in my Volvo and drive off, but that would have been rude, so I made an effort to be polite instead.

  Her answer had that same dreamy calm I’d noticed last time I spoke to her. Like she wasn’t quite living in the same world as the rest of us. “I’m wonderful, thank you. And you?”

  “I’m pretty good too, everything considered.”

  She still hadn’t told me what she was doing here, but I didn’t think it would do any good to ask again, since she’d proven herself to be quite adept at stonewalling. Plus, I figured I could make a pretty accurate guess. She was still hung up on Rafe, and for all I knew, she might have had a habit of coming over here to gaze at the place he used to live. Twelve years seemed like an extraordinary amount of time to be carrying a torch, but after those brief couple of minutes yesterday morning, I was willing to accept the fact that Rafe might be the type of man to haunt a woman’s dreams for years after the fact. He was certainly haunting mine at the moment.

  Before I could think too hard about that and start hyperventilating, I thought I’d better speak up again. “Horrible what happened to Marquita, isn’t it? I saw Cletus yesterday, when mother and I dropped off a casserole, and he looked absolutely devastated.” A slight exaggeration, considering that they’d been separated for a while, but it’s the way it’s supposed to be, after all. “And those poor kids, having to grow up without their mother.”

  A shadow crossed Elspeth’s smooth face. “Very sad, when children have to grow up without their mothers. Do you have any children, Savannah?”

  I shook my head. “Bradley and I didn’t have time to have any.” That wasn’t strictly true—I’d gotten pregnant and had a miscarriage—but it wasn’t any of Elspeth’s business. “We were married for less than two years.”

  “Sometimes it takes a lot less than that,” Elspeth said. I was tempted to pursue the remark, to try to pin her down again and get her to tell me one way or the other whether she’d gotten pregnant that one time she slept with Rafe twelve and a half years ago, but before I had the opportunity, she continued. “Have you seen Rafael lately?”