Close to Home

by Jenna Bennett

That eliminated both tiredness and snark. I imagined her sitting up straight, coming to attention. “Whose child? Not one of your brother’s?”

  “God, no.” After Sheila, Dix would fall apart if something happened to Abigail or Hannah. What a horrible suggestion. “Not Dix’s child. Rafe’s.”

  There was a beat. Then—

  “How can it be missing?” Tamara Grimaldi asked, her voice somewhere between reasonable and a second away from calling in the men in the white coats. “Isn’t it in your stomach?”

  “Not that child.” Sheesh. And yes, it was still in my stomach. “His son. Almost twelve years old. David Flannery.”

  “He has a son?”

  “It’s a long story. Rafe knocked up a girl named Elspeth Caulfield when he was in high school. You remember Elspeth; she died two months ago.”

  “Of course,” Grimaldi said. We’d both been there when Elspeth died—Grimaldi outside the trailer and me hiding in the closet—and I figured neither of us were likely to forget it. At least not so soon.

  “Elspeth had a will. She left everything to her son. Dix is her executor. He has spent the past couple of months looking for the boy. We finally found him, and talked to his parents last night. He must have overheard, and realized he was adopted. They hadn’t told him. Now he’s gone. He left school early instead of going to basketball practice, and nobody knows where he is.”

  “If he wasn’t abducted, we can’t issue an Amber Alert,” Tamara Grimaldi said. “I’m sorry, but those are the rules.”

  “They already know that. I thought maybe you could do something. Unofficially. Tell the patrol cars to look out for him, or something.”

  “I can do that,” Grimaldi said. “Tell me about him.”

  “I have a picture on my phone. I’ll send it to you when we’re finished talking. But he’s eleven and ten months. Five six. A hundred and five pounds. Dark hair, brown eyes, medium skin. He looks like Rafe. When he left home this morning, he was dressed for school, so he must have had on khakis, a white shirt, and maybe a blue blazer.” Unless he kept that in his locker at school and put it on when he got there.

  “Hopefully he’s wearing more than a blazer now,” Tamara Grimaldi said. “I’ll put out an APB to the patrol cars and let you know if anything happens. Anything else I can do for you?”

  I hesitated. “I know Rafe isn’t supposed to have any contact with anyone in Nashville while he’s pretending to be Jorge Pena. But do you think you could get a message to him? It’s his son. And he doesn’t even know we’ve found him.”

  “Does he know the boy exists?”

  “I showed him the picture before he left,” I said. “Remember when I said I needed to talk to him before he left town?”

  “I remember,” Detective Grimaldi said, “although I must admit I thought the big emergency was something else.”

  I blushed. OK, yes. I’d wanted to touch him just to make sure he really was alive and breathing and I’d been misinformed when I was told he was dead. I’d also wanted to kiss him again. But in addition to that, I hadn’t thought it fair to let him leave town without telling him that he might have a son. “Please. Just ask Wendell if it would be OK to have him call me. Just this once. I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important.”

  Tamara Grimaldi said she’d contact Wendell Craig and ask, and meanwhile, she’d do what she could to let every patrol car in Nashville know to keep an eye out for David. I gave her the Flannerys’ number and settled in to wait for the phone to ring.

  It never did. Eventually I fell asleep on the sofa with the TV still on and the sound muted, and the phone on the coffee table two feet from my ear, but by the time I woke up, it hadn’t made a sound.

  It was, as they say, déjà vu all over again, except this time it was barely four thirty in the morning, and still dark outside. The only reason I knew the time at all, was because of the digital display on the bottom of the TV. Someone was at the door, but unlike last time, when Detective Grimaldi had been knocking, quietly but persistently, this time whoever was out there really was hammering.

  I scrambled off the sofa and fought back a wave of nausea as I staggered to my feet. Maybe it was David. Maybe he’d finally made his way across town and had found me.

  I didn’t look out the peephole before I unhooked the chain and pulled the door open. Maybe I should have. If I had, I would have been better prepared for what I saw outside.

  For a second I didn’t believe my eyes. Then the nausea won out, and I turned on my heel and scurried into the bathroom, where I spent the next few minutes hanging over the commode. By the time I got back out into the living room, Rafe had walked inside, locked the door, and made himself comfortable in a chair.

  “That ain’t quite the welcome I was hoping for, darlin’,” he said when I walked through the door.

  “Sorry.” Since there was no chance he’d want to kiss me now, I curled up on the sofa again, at a safe distance, and tucked my bare feet up under myself.

  “You sick or something?”

  “Something. But don’t worry, it isn’t contagious.”

  He grinned, white teeth against golden skin, and my stomach did an appreciative swoop. Or maybe it was just morning sickness. “Remind me to make it up to you when you’re feeling better.”

  “I’ll do that.” I managed a smile back, but it was pretty wan. We sat in silence for a moment, just looking at one another.

  I knew what I looked like—pale, with my hair lank, no makeup, and dressed in yoga pants and an oversized T-shirt that hung past my hips and covered the tiny baby bump I’d started to develop.

  Rafe must have driven—or more likely ridden his Harley—through the night to get here, but he looked none the worse for wear. Although he resembled Jorge Pena rather more closely than I liked. I’d only met Jorge once, but he’d scared the bejeebers out of me. Rafe’s hair was longer than usual, nicely cut and gelled, and the match to Jorge’s little goatee that he’d started the last time I saw him, had grown in completely now. I liked him better without the facial hair. In deference to the colder weather, he was wearing a Henley instead of his usual T-shirt, with the sleeves pushed up to bare muscular forearms. A black leather jacket was tossed carelessly over the back of one of my dining room chairs, and at the moment he was leaning back, long legs stretched out, arms folded across his stomach, smiling.

  “That my shirt, darlin’?”

  I looked down at it. “Um... yes.”

  He quirked a brow. Just one, the other didn’t even twitch. “Miss me?”

  “I guess maybe a little.”

  “Looks like maybe more than a little.”

  This conversation was familiar to me. We’d had the same one, practically verbatim, two months ago, when he’d come back from another trip to Memphis to find me sleeping in his bed. Just the thought of what had happened next had me blushing, and from the curve of his lips, I thought he probably remembered too.

  “I didn’t expect to see you,” I said.

  He shifted on the chair, and tamped down the heat in his eyes. “Tammy called.”

  Rafe is the only person in the world who calls Tamara Grimaldi Tammy and gets away with it. Not even her mother calls her Tammy, or so she says. I’ve told him she doesn’t like it, and I don’t doubt that she’s told him the same thing herself, but Rafe is nothing if not persistent.

  “I figured as much,” I said. “But I didn’t expect you to drop everything and come running.”

  If I had, I would have made sure to wear something more attractive. Although it was entirely possible that no lacy nightgown in the world could compete with the knowledge that I slept in his shirt because I missed him.

  “Jorge got called away on a job,” Rafe explained. And added, “Did you think I’d sit on my hands in Atlanta while my kid’s running loose in Nashville?”

  “I didn’t really think about it at all,” I admitted. “I just thought you should know what was going on.”

  “You wanna tell me?”

  “
I’ll tell you what I know. It isn’t much.” I ran through the past couple of months: Dix’s failed efforts to track down Elspeth’s heir and my eventually finding him through the logo on his shirt coupled with the lucky coincidence that I happened to know Austin Puckett, who happened to go to the same school as David. “Dix and I went to talk to the Flannerys two days ago. David’s birth certificate says that he’s Virginia and Sam’s son, but they admitted that they’d adopted him soon after birth. There are no adoption records anywhere, so the only way to prove that he’s Elspeth’s son—and yours—is through DNA. But they haven’t told David he’s adopted, so they weren’t sure they wanted to do it. They asked for time to think about it.”

  Rafe nodded. His jaw was tight, and he looked a little pale, but it could have been just the flickering light from the TV playing across his skin.

  “When she called this evening, I thought she was going to tell me they’d decided to go ahead. Instead she said that David is missing. He went to school, skipped basketball practice, and apparently hit the road. Either that or someone snatched him.”

  “Who’d snatch him?” Rafe asked, with the sort of calm that isn’t reassuring at all.

  “No idea. But when a kid goes missing, there’s always that possibility. Even if he left on his own, someone could have grabbed him along the way.”

  Rafe nodded, his lips tight. “So where do you think he is?”

  “I have no idea,” I said. “I’m hoping he’s just upset and needs some time alone to think. That he’s holed up somewhere. At church, maybe. It can’t be easy, at almost twelve, to realize your parents aren’t your parents after all.”

  “I know what I woulda done,” Rafe said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Gone to Sweetwater. Elspeth’s dead, but he knows where she was from, right?”

  I nodded. If David had heard the conversation, he would have heard that Elspeth died in Sweetwater.

  “If this kid’s anything like I was at twelve, he’s there by now.” He got to his feet.

  “Wait!” I scrambled to my feet. “I have to change.” And my stomach was rebelling again.

  “Make it quick,” Rafe said. “I wanna get there before he moves on.”

  Fifteen minutes later we were in the Volvo heading down Interstate 65. Rafe was driving. I’d had to talk him out of getting back on the Harley. He thought it would be faster, but if we found David down there—and Rafe seemed pretty certain we would—how would we get him back to Nashville? Three of us wouldn’t fit on the bike, and I had no intention of being left behind. So I gave him my keys and told him he could get us there faster than I could.

  For the first few minutes of the drive, neither of us said anything. I was too busy fighting back nausea while absorbing the fact that he was back, even if it probably wasn’t for long. There were so many things I wanted to talk to him about—Sheila’s death, my pregnancy, the fact that the Flannerys, including David, thought he was dead—that I had no idea where to start. So I fell back on something else instead; something he’d said earlier. At the time, it seemed less fraught with difficulty than any of the other subjects I could bring up. I suppose that says rather a lot about where my mind was at that moment.

  “You said something earlier, about maybe David being like you when you were twelve.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Old Jim died that year, didn’t he?”

  He shot me a look out of the corner of his eye. “So?”

  “The sheriff told me once that he thought you might have had something to do with it.”

  “Sheriff Satterfield?”

  I nodded.

  “Thinks I killed my grandfather?” From his voice it was impossible to tell whether he was offended, horrified, or amused. Maybe a little of all three. Or maybe he was just curious.

  “I think it’s more that he thinks your mother might have,” I said apologetically. “And that you helped.” Apparently they’d been one another’s alibi at a time when Old Jim had wandered outside dead drunk and drowned in the Duck. The river, that is. A small branch of it runs through the Bog, the sad and sorry little trailer park where Rafe spent his formative years.

  “That what you think, darlin’? That I helped my mama kill her daddy?”

  “I don’t know what to think,” I said. “I know if you did, he probably deserved it. Everyone says he wasn’t a very nice man.”

  Although that didn’t make it all right to kill him.

  “He was a mean son of a bitch,” Rafe corrected, “and he deserved to die slowly and painfully with lots of time to think about all the shit he put everyone in his family through. Drowning was too good for him.”

  Yikes.

  “But I had nothing to do with it. I was inside, watching TV. So was my mama. And we didn’t hear nothing, and we didn’t see nothing, and we didn’t know nothing. Not until the next morning, when one of the neighbors found him.”

  “You didn’t go looking for him?”

  “Why’d I go looking for him?” Rafe said. “We were just happy he was gone.”

  I had no answer to that, and after a few seconds he took his eyes off the dark road in front of us to glance over at me. “Listen, Savannah.”

  If he called me by name, I knew I’d better pay attention. He only did that when he was dead serious about something. The rest of the time he called me by that old Southern catch-all phrase, darlin’.

  “Yes?”

  “I ain’t a murderer. I may have killed some people—” Like Perry Fortunato and Jorge Pena, “—but that was cause I didn’t have no choice. It was them or me, or them or you. Did you want me to let Perry do what he wanted to do to you?”

  “Of course not,” I said with a shudder. I was glad Perry was dead. He was a double murderer—would have been a triple if Rafe hadn’t saved me—and although seeing him rot in jail for the rest of his life should have been sufficient, and might have been sufficient had things turned out differently, I’d been relieved when he died.

  “Then don’t ask me things like that, darlin’. I’m liable to take it personal.” He flashed a grin, but it didn’t reach his eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  He shrugged. We drove another few minutes in silence.

  “My sister-in-law is dead.”

  At first I got no reaction, then—”Your brother’s wife? Cute little blonde?”

  I nodded.

  “You gonna ask me if I killed her too?”

  “Of course not,” I said, piqued. “I’m sorry I hurt your feelings, but that was uncalled for.”

  “Sorry.”

  “I forgive you. She died on Friday. Drowned in the Cumberland River. After getting robbed and hit over the head. Tamara Grimaldi thinks she was there to buy drugs.”

  “Your sister-in-law?”

  “I don’t think she used drugs,” I said.

  “No kidding,” Rafe answered. After a second, he added, “What’s that gotta do with any of this?”

  “As far as I know, nothing. Sheila was in Nashville for a doctor’s appointment. With an obstetrician.”

  “She pregnant?” I tried to read something—anything—into his tone of voice, but if he had feelings about pregnancy, or about pregnant women, one way or the other, I couldn’t tell.

  “So it seems,” I said. “She hadn’t told Dix yet.”

  “You sure he was the father?”

  I blinked. “Of course I’m sure.” The only reason she hadn’t told him anything was because she was afraid of another miscarriage. Sheila would never cheat on Dix. Would she?

  “Whatever you say,” Rafe said with a shrug. “But if he wasn’t, and he found out that she’d been screwing around on him...”

  “My brother is not a murderer!” And besides, he’d been in Sweetwater that afternoon. Hadn’t he?

  “Fine,” Rafe said. “So maybe she’d gotten involved with someone else. Someone she shouldn’t have been. And when she got pregnant, that guy killed her.”

  “Where would she m
eet someone else? She spent all her time in Sweetwater.”

  “Maybe she was doing the nasty with Satterfield,” Rafe said with a grin. “That’d be interesting.”

  I snorted. “You’d love that, wouldn’t you? Seeing Todd go to jail for murdering Sheila?”

  He shot me a glance. “No chance of that happening, darlin’. Not with Sheriff Satterfield working the case.”

  “He isn’t. It happened in Nashville. It’s Tamara Grimaldi’s case.”

  “Tammy’ll find whoever did it,” Rafe said.

  “I hope so.”

  He must have heard something in my voice, because he sent me a sharp look. “You ain’t getting mixed up in it, are you, darlin’?”

  “Of course not,” I said. Having lunch at Sara Beth’s wasn’t getting mixed up in anything. And I had a perfect excuse for calling obstetricians. Not that I was about to tell him that. Not yet. Right now, Rafe’s and Elspeth’s child was more important than Rafe’s and mine; he had enough on his mind and I didn’t need to add anything more.

  So I returned to the real issue, the important one. “When we get there, where are we going to go?”

  “I can think of three places,” Rafe said, “Elspeth’s house, my mama’s house, and the graveyard.”

  I nodded.

  “If he’s trying to figure out who he is, he’s gonna wanna see where his folks came from. And he’s probably gonna wanna see where they are now.”

  “You’re not there,” I said. When he ‘died,’ Tamara Grimaldi had told Sheriff Satterfield that Rafe’s grandmother wanted the body brought to Nashville for burial. The sheriff hadn’t quibbled. Probably happy to get rid of him, even dead.

  Rafe shook his head. “Nope.”

  “What’ll he do when he realizes it?”

  “No idea. We’ll figure it out as we go.”

  I nodded. “Damascus is closer than Sweetwater. Do you want to start there?”

  “May as well,” Rafe said.

  Chapter 12

  We got to Elspeth’s house a few minutes after six o’clock. Damascus was just starting to wake up; there were lights in a few windows along the way, and we met a car or two on the road, but it was still dark and mostly quiet. The big Victorian behind its picket fence showed no signs of life.