“She only wants what’s best for you,” Dix said.
“She wants what she thinks is best for me. She doesn’t care what I want!”
In my excitement, I raised my voice, and both Satterfields glanced our way. I flushed and moderated my tone. “You know it’s true, Dix. Mother treats me like a child, like she has to constantly remind me of the proper thing to do, just in case I’ve forgotten. As if I ever could, with the childhood I had.”
Dix shrugged.
“Let’s talk about something else,” I said. “I haven’t wanted to bring it up while you thought that Rafe was dead, but I’ve been wondering whether you ever made any headway on finding that boy in the picture?”
I didn’t have to explain to Dix which boy in which picture. Seven weeks ago, on the night when Jorge Pena died and Rafe got shot, a woman named Elspeth Caulfield also died. She was someone we’d all gone to school with. She was a year older than me, a year younger than Dix, and she’d once had a one night stand with Rafe. A one night stand which, according to Todd, had resulted in a pregnancy. Either that, or a nervous breakdown. I’d been inclined to believe in the breakdown, since I—and more importantly, Rafe—had never heard a word about a child. But I’d had to revise my stance when her will stated that she wanted everything she owned to go to her son. Since no one knew she had a son, and since Martin and McCall were her attorneys, Dix had gone to her house to look for information. And since that was the same morning he’d had to tell me that Rafe was dead, he took me with him, and I was the one who found the photograph in Elspeth’s bedside table. A boy, maybe nine or ten years old, with Rafe’s dark eyes and bright grin. A boy none of us had known existed until then.
The photograph had had no name attached, no identifying characteristics, and Elspeth’s house was filled to the brim with paperwork. She’d been a writer, and writers love their paper. I knew Dix had been looking for the boy ever since, between other work he had to do, but I hadn’t wanted to question him about it, since I didn’t want to give him the idea that A) Rafe was still alive and, B) I was still thinking about him.
But now, of course, both of those were out on the table, and Dix knew exactly why I was asking.
“Did you show him the picture before he left?” he wanted to know.
I nodded. It had taken some doing, since the TBI, especially, didn’t want anyone to make the connection that Jorge Pena was dead and Rafe was taking his place. Rafe had to cut all contact with me, with his grandmother, and with anyone else he might know in Nashville. But I couldn’t let him leave without telling him that he had a son. Or that he might have a son, since we didn’t know that the boy in the picture wasn’t just some kid Elspeth had seen on a trip to the grocery store and had glommed onto because he looked so much like Rafe. She’d been crazy enough to do something like that. For all I knew, she could have imagined the whole pregnancy and birth and relationship, when she’d never really been pregnant at all.
If it hadn’t been for the photograph, that’s what I would have assumed had happened. Now I wasn’t sure.
“What did he say?”
I shook off the thoughts. “What do you think he said? He was shocked. He’d had no idea she was pregnant. She didn’t tell him.”
“But he thinks the kid’s his?”
“With the resemblance it’s hard to deny,” I said. “Do you have any idea who he is?”
Dix shook his head. “I’ve been able to go through most of the paperwork in Elspeth’s house, but there’s nothing there. No name or address, no other photos, no adoption paperwork. Her Rolodex and Christmas card list seem to be all writers. I don’t think she had much of a social life. I contacted her literary agent in New York, but the woman had no idea about Elspeth’s personal life. We don’t even know when this child was born, and even if we did, there would likely be too many babies born on that day in the U.S. for us to be able to pinpoint who he was. I’ve checked Elspeth’s medical records, but they don’t go back that far.”
“If her parents were trying to hide the fact that she had a baby, they probably wouldn’t involve a doctor or a hospital anyway. Her father was a preacher in some fundamentalist church, wasn’t he? Maybe they shipped her off to Utah or Arizona, to have the baby the old-fashioned way. With pain and suffering.”
“If so,” Dix said, “we have no hope of finding him. Whoever took him in got him at birth, and probably just registered him with the state as their own.”
“Is that possible?”
“It’s illegal,” Dix said, “but those communes take some liberties with both the truth and the law, from what I understand. And honestly, it wouldn’t be hard to do, even here. The hospital files the birth certificate with the Department of Health. All they’d have to do is put the wrong names on it.”
“The boy didn’t look like his parents were in a commune. He was dressed in normal clothes, and there was a nice car behind him and houses in the background.”
“I haven’t really examined the photo that closely,” Dix said. “Maybe I should. Maybe there’s something there that would help.”
“He was wearing what looked like part of a school uniform. A shirt with some kind of logo on the chest. I only have the picture I took to show to Rafe—” I rooted in my bag for my cell phone, “and I doubt it’s clear enough, but if you look at the photograph itself, maybe you can make out the logo. If you can match it to a school, you might be able to find him that way. Here.”
I scrolled through my photographs to the picture I’d taken of the photo from Elspeth’s bedroom, and handed the phone across the table. Dix peered at it.
“Too blurry. But there’s definitely something there. And if I look at the photograph, or I have the photograph enlarged, you’re right; I might be able to match it to a school. Good call.”
He handed the phone back. I looked at the screen for a second—the familiarity of the boy’s smile and his dancing dark eyes tugging at me—before I put it back in my bag. “Where’s the original? Still at Elspeth’s house?”
“At the office,” Dix said. “Let me get the check and order Jonathan’s sandwich, and then we can go back. If I could find this kid and settle the Caulfield estate, at least that would be one thing off my mind.” He caught the eye of the waitress, who bustled over, pulling her order pad out of her pocket as she went.
Chapter 4
I got back to Nashville in time to stop by the office before it closed for the day.
When I first got my real estate license, I went to work for Walker Lamont Realty, a mile or two from my apartment on East Main Street. After Walker killed several people and went to prison, Timothy Briggs took over as head broker, and the name of the company changed to Lamont, Briggs & Associates, to remove some of the stigma of Walker’s name. By now, that had become LB&A, and I was on my third set of new business cards. If I knew Tim—and I did—it wouldn’t be long before the L disappeared altogether, and we’d be Timothy Briggs and Minions.
Nothing else had changed. We were still located in the same building just down the street from the FinBar in the heart of East Nashville, and my office was still a converted broom closet off the lobby, where Brittany, the dippy twenty two year old blonde receptionist, answered the phone between polishing her nails, updating her Facebook, and tweeting.
I have nothing against blondes. I am one myself, and I’m certainly not stupid. Brittany isn’t either. She’s just young, and doesn’t care about much except Devon, her musician boyfriend. When I walked in, she looked up from a catalogue she was perusing with Heidi Hoppenfeldt, Tim’s assistant. Once she’d ascertained that I wasn’t anyone important, she looked down again, without greeting me.
“Hello to you too,” I said. Heidi must have misunderstood and thought I said ‘you two,’ because she addressed me quite civilly.
“Hi, Savannah.”
Heidi is about my age, and about twice my size, with lots of frizzy brown hair and a penchant for leaving crumbs on her voluminous chest. One of those girls about whom it
is said, “She’s got such a pretty face.” Followed, at least here in the South, by ‘bless her heart,’ the obligatory disclaimer for when you’re pointing out something not so complimentary about someone. She must have gained a hundred pounds carrying that baby. Bless her heart.
Pregnancy weight wasn’t Heidi’s problem. She was single, unattached, childless... she just liked to eat. The afternoon snack must have consisted of Fritos, judging from the residue on the front of the green sweater.
“Hi, yourself,” I said, heading for the mail slots on the wall. “Anything exciting going on?”
“We’re looking at a maternity catalogue,” Heidi said.
For a second, my heart stood still. I hadn’t told anyone I worked with about the pregnancy. But last Monday I’d had to excuse myself in the middle of the weekly sales meeting to run to the bathroom after someone brought in sausage biscuits and the odor turned my stomach. Had they caught on to what was wrong?
“Is somebody pregnant?”
I held my breath while I waited for Brittany to give me her patented ‘you’re such an idiot’ look. When it didn’t happen, I started breathing again.
“My sister,” Heidi said. “It’s her birthday next month, and I want to buy her a gift.”
“That’s nice. When is she due?” There was nothing interesting in the mail, just a bunch of circulars and postcards about other people’s listings. I wandered around the desk to peer over Heidi’s shoulder and Brittany’s head at the catalogue.
“March,” Heidi said. “It’s a boy.”
My due date was in July. But it was much too early to know whether I was carrying a boy or a girl yet. “Congratulations. You’ll be an aunt. Is it your first time?”
Heidi nodded, her round face beaming.
“It’s better when you can give them back to their parents,” Brittany said with a toss of her ponytail. Heidi and I both looked at her. She shrugged. “Well, it is. And who wants to look like that, anyway?”
She used one poison-green fingernail to indicate a rather stunning model-type, rail thin except for her breasts and what looked like a basketball in her stomach, in a beautiful sheath-dress. She was almost glowing with health, and I imagined many women would have killed to look like that. Heidi’s expression was wistful.
“What do you mean?” I said. “She’s gorgeous.”
“She’s fat,” Brittany said.
“She’s pregnant. It isn’t the same thing.”
Brittany shrugged. “Her body’ll never be the same again. From now on, she’ll have stretch marks and saggy boobs and maybe even a pouch.” She shuddered.
“You’re thinking of kangaroos,” I said, although I’ve been brought up to eat like a bird to maintain that Scarlett O’Hara wasp waist myself. Not that I’ve got one. Or was likely to keep even the waist I had for much longer. I’d already noticed certain of my clothes getting a little tight around the middle. If I wasn’t careful with what I put in my mouth, someone would guess my secret before I had decided what to do. And then it would be too late. At least too late to make the situation go away without anyone being the wiser.
Brittany shrugged. “Why don’t you buy her a necklace,” she suggested. “Something to distract people from her stomach.”
“I think when women are pregnant, they want people to notice their stomachs,” Heidi said, but she didn’t sound sure. Either way, she removed the catalogue from Brittany’s desk preparatory to going back to her own office.
“Wait a second. Before you go...” I put the mail down and rooted around in my bag, “has either one of you seen this before?”
I pulled out a sheet of paper and held it in front of them.
“What is it?” Brittany said, her head tilted.
I looked at it, too. Wasn’t it obvious? “It’s half a monogram or logo. I copied it from a photograph. It was on someone’s shirt pocket. But the picture cut off without showing it all.”
“So what are you trying to do?” Brittany asked, leaning back on her chair and crossing one skinny leg over the other.
I held the paper in front of Heidi while at the same time addressing Brittany. “I’m trying to figure out what the logo is and where it belongs. I think it’s a school. Could be anywhere.”
“That should be easy,” Brittany said.
“Could be BGA,” Heidi suggested, tilting her head. “Battleground Academy. Or MBA, Montgomery Bell Academy. Or FRA. Franklin Road Academy.”
“Nashville private schools?” Very snobby ones, from what I knew of them.
Heidi nodded. “The last letter looks like an A. Many private schools are called Something Academy.”
The almost half a letter I could see at the end of the monogram did look like an A. The two preceding letters, however, might be almost anything at all. For all I knew, the letters might be L, B, and A, for Lamont, Briggs, and Associates. The configuration worked.
“That’s a start, anyway. Thanks.”
“Glad to help,” Heidi said and marched down the hallway with her catalogue, the hem of her skirt flouncing around her thick calves.
I headed in the opposite direction, into my little cubby, where I opened the drawer in the desk and dug out a biscotti to nibble while I waited for the laptop to boot up. I had taken to keeping snacks in the desk for emergencies. It had been almost four hours since lunch, and I was ready to chew the wallpaper. If I didn’t watch out, I reminded myself—as I bit into the biscotti, scattering crumbs—I’d end up looking like Heidi, as broad as I was tall and wearing the remains of my food.
A Google search for schools with the word ‘academy’ in their names netted me such a glut of results I might as well not have bothered. There were thousands across the country, and I had no way of knowing where the photograph of Elspeth’s son—if he was Elspeth’s son—had been taken. Since it was all I could do, I forced myself to focus my attention on the local schools and on ignoring the others.
There were quite a few local academies in addition to the ones Heidi had mentioned. Davidson Academy, St. Bernard Academy, Smithson Craighead Academy. St. Cecilia’s Academy for girls. And that was without counting the academies in surrounding counties.
But the internet made everything easier. All the schools had websites, and most showed their logos. Several had photographs of students wearing school shirts. I narrowed down the logo in the picture to either St. Bernard’s Academy or MBA. If the boy was local, he’d be at one of those. Or he’d be at one of a thousand schools somewhere in the rest of the big place that’s the United States of America.
School was out for the day, so there wasn’t anything else I could do tonight, but I made a note of where each school was located and determined to go there tomorrow, to see if anyone could identify the boy. That done, I headed home to cook myself dinner and crawl into bed. The baby wasn’t any bigger than a blueberry, or so Dr. Seaver had told me, but so much went into creating it that I felt exhausted all the time. I nodded off over my latest romance purchase before the clock even struck eight o’clock, and I slept dreamlessly until morning.
Since I hadn’t had time to think about much of anything last night before falling asleep, I thought now, lying in bed. The first few minutes of the day were usually nice, at least as long as I lay still. It was when I got up and started to move around, that the nausea started.
The tiny life inside me was seven weeks old, going on eight. It was basically a blob right now, but it would turn into a baby. A baby that would most likely look a whole lot like its father. A baby that might reasonably expect to inherit a chunk of his personality, as well. But while the idea of having a small version of Rafe in my life didn’t fill me with the kind of dread that perhaps it should—he’d been a real hellion as a child, from what I knew about it—there was a bit of apprehension and not a little worry mixed in regarding the possibility.
All right, so Dix was on my side. That was one point in my favor. Catherine loved me; she’d probably support me too. Jonathan was slightly less hidebound than the rest
of the family, so he might not be shocked out of his wits if Savannah had a ‘colored’ baby. Sheila... well, Sheila was almost as uptight as mother, but she was Dix’s wife, and if Dix sided with me, there wasn’t much Sheila could do about it if she wanted to stay on her husband’s good side.
Not that that seemed to matter a whole lot to her at the moment, actually. I couldn’t believe that she hadn’t even told my brother that she was going to the OB/GYN. What if she really was pregnant? Didn’t he have the right to know?
Doesn’t Rafe have a right to know? a tiny voice asked in the back of my head. I ignored it.
Todd would be devastated by the situation, of course. And not just devastated, but insulted and angry. His father would be insulted and angry on Todd’s behalf, and he’d be shocked and dismayed right along with mother. Sheriff Satterfield had never liked Rafe. Whenever something went wrong anywhere in Maury County, the sheriff tended to blame Rafe for it. Not totally surprisingly, since for a few years at least, whenever something went wrong anywhere in Maury County, it was usually Rafe’s fault.
And Sheriff Satterfield wasn’t the only person in Sweetwater who felt that way. There was Todd, of course, who loathed Rafe, but there was also everyone else in town, who had spent years lamenting LaDonna Collier’s colored boy and the trouble he caused. Rafe had told me once that when he went to prison at eighteen, it was partly because he’d been so sick of everyone waiting for him to screw up that he’d figured he might as well just give them what they wanted and be done with it. If I had Rafe’s baby, everybody in town would be whispering.
Could I handle the stares and whispers? The pointed fingers? The fact that everyone would know what I’d done, and with whom?
On the other hand, if I didn’t have the baby, no one would know anything. Dix wouldn’t tell anyone, not if I begged him not to. I wouldn’t have to tell my family. No one would stare or whisper. And Rafe wouldn’t have to know.
Rafe...
I missed him. More than I thought I would. More that I’d thought possible. He’d gone away before, and I’d missed him then too, but this was different. This time, it was like a part of me was gone.
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