Close to Home

by Jenna Bennett

  “Stay here,” Rafe said when he opened the car door.

  “Don’t be silly.” I did the same on my own side. “This is an eleven year old boy. And I’m sorry, but you’re scary.”

  He turned to look at me as I swung my legs out. “Scary?”

  “To someone who doesn’t know you. At least he knows who I am.” I stood and slammed the door. Rafe did the same, and came around the car.

  “At least stay close,” he said.

  “No problem.” I hooked a hand into the back pocket of his jeans, and tagged along behind him as he opened the gate—it squeaked—and moved up the walk toward the house.

  I thought he’d go up on the porch and knock on the door, but he didn’t. He took a sharp right instead, through the dead grass and scattered leaves. We walked slowly, with Rafe’s eyes scanning the yard and house. I did my best to look around too, but my night vision isn’t fantastic, and I had no idea what to look for.

  About halfway around, he stopped. I stopped to, per force, when I bumped into his back. The leather jacket was soft against my cheek, and I could smell it, mixed with a spicy, citrusy scent I recognized from the shirt I’d been sleeping in. The smell of Rafe.

  “What?” I whispered.

  I thought I’d been pretty quiet, but he still put a finger to his lips to warn me to pipe down. Then he used the same finger to indicate a broken cellar window.

  I nodded. There was no way to know, of course, but the window might mean that David had been here. And that he might still be here. Inside, sleeping.

  We made our way back around the house and onto the porch, where Rafe stopped in front of the door. I let go of his jeans to let him work unhampered.

  It wasn’t the first time I’d seen him pick a lock, but he must have practiced since last time. Or perhaps the equipment he carried in his pocket made it easier than the bobby pins he’d removed from my hair then. Either way, it was just a few seconds before the front door was unlocked. Rafe pushed it open carefully, while I held my breath hoping the hinges wouldn’t squeal.

  We moved into the foyer, with its soaring ceilings and hardwoods floors. Rafe pushed the door shut behind us—the lock caught with a soft click—and looked around.

  “Holy shit,” he breathed. I followed his gaze and smothered a giggle.

  “I forgot about that.”

  ‘That’ was a giant reproduction of a romance novel cover, blown up to thirty times its paperback size, and displayed in an ornate gold frame above the fireplace mantel. The name Barbara Botticelli was emblazoned across the top in crimson letters, while over the bottom, the words “Slave of Passion” curled.

  The cover was the usual sexual confection: the swooning heroine, her long blonde hair undone and the bodice of her hoop-skirted gown gaping, was clasped in the hero’s brawny arms, her soft white hands clutching his muscular shoulders and her head thrown back, the better to allow him access to the pounding pulse at the bottom of her throat. He was naked to the waist, of course, and bore an uncanny resemblance to Rafe. All of Barbara Botticelli’s heroes did. It wasn’t until I realized that Barbara was Elspeth, or vice versa, that I understood why. Until then, I’d just thought it was my own fixation that saw him in every book by my favorite author. I hadn’t picked up a Barbara Botticelli romance since Elspeth died, and I didn’t think I’d ever want to read one again. Now that I knew that Elspeth had pictured Rafe every time she’d written a love scene, having to read them set my teeth on edge.

  He glanced at me, a curious combination of shock and fascination on his face. “Is that...?”

  “Elspeth. And the closest approximation the artist could make of you, without a picture.” Or, alternatively, Elizabeth and Benjamin, the hero and heroine of “Slave of Passion.”

  He looked at it again, wincing slightly. “Why?”

  “You know why. She was hung up on you. Enough that she shot Marquita and tried to kill both Yvonne and me for being too close to you.”

  “She was crazy,” Rafe said. “I slept with her once, more than twelve years ago. We were kids. It didn’t mean shit.”

  “Obviously it meant more to her than to you. You told me she’d been pursuing you for months. And in justice to her, if she wanted to keep the baby—David—and someone took him away from her, she had the right to be upset.”

  “Upset, maybe,” Rafe conceded. “But she didn’t have the right to try to kill you. Or anyone else.”

  “Of course not. I’m not saying she did. Or that you did anything wrong. She was old enough to know what she was doing when she threw herself at you. But she probably didn’t think about the fact that she might get pregnant.” I know I hadn’t. “And I guess she couldn’t help feeling the way she did about you afterwards.” Any more than I could help the way I felt about him now.

  “I never promised her anything—” Rafe began, and I shushed him.

  “I know you didn’t. And we should talk about this later. If David’s here, we have to try to find him.”

  He looked like he might want to keep talking about it, but he nodded. “Where?”

  “Bedrooms upstairs, living room through there.” I pointed to a door down the hallway to the right.

  “I’ll go up. You take the living room.” He started up the stairs, his heavy boots somehow not making the slightest noise as he ascended. I headed for the hallway, doing my best to be equally quiet.

  In the end it didn’t matter. The house was empty. We searched it from top to bottom, and no one was there. Not David, nor anyone else.

  Someone had been there, though. There was an empty can of Diet Coke and a container that had once held a microwaveable macaroni and cheese meal in the trash can. Rafe’s lips curved in appreciation when he saw it.

  “Looks like he can take care of himself.”

  “Are you sure it was him?”

  He glanced at me. “Who else could it be? It’s recent. The drops of Coke are still tacky, and the cheese hasn’t hardened. Someone did this last night. If it was somebody homeless, they’d still be here. No reason to think anyone’d come by and find them at six in the morning.”

  “Do you think he slept here?”

  “Doesn’t look that way,” Rafe said, looking around. “He probably got here pretty early. Ate something and figured he’d have time to get to the next place he was going before dark.”

  “Which was?”

  “Sweetwater. Either the cemetery or the Bog.”

  “I vote for the Bog,” I said as we made our way toward the front door. “He’s just a kid. I don’t think he would have chosen to visit the graveyard at night. The Bog is scary enough.”

  Rafe nodded. He glanced at the picture above the mantel one last time. “I don’t really look like that, do I?”

  I looked up, too, cocking my head. The male model they’d gotten to pose for Benjamin was stunning. Tall and dark, with skin the color of caramel and muscles in all the right places. His face was beautiful, with perfectly chiseled lips, a narrow blade of a nose, elegantly arched eyebrows, and big, dark eyes.

  No, Rafe didn’t look like that.

  “Not really. At first glance, maybe a bit. The coloring, the height, the...” I waved my hand. Muscles. “But he looks a little too soft.”

  “Soft?” He looked again.

  “Pretty. You’re not pretty. And he doesn’t look dangerous at all.”

  “And I do?”

  I turned to examine him. Six three, with muscles that put Benjamin’s to shame. Long legs, broad shoulders, slim hips. Dark eyes that could switch from liquid heat to stone in an instant. Straight brows, straight nose, and lips that looked like they were made for kissing... when they didn’t look like they were carved from stone. And those weren’t even the things that warned people off. It was the way he moved, the way he always seemed aware of what was going on around him, of who else was nearby and what they were doing. That edge, that told everyone around him that this was a man who was used to taking care of business, and who wouldn’t scruple to use any means
necessary to achieve his ends.

  Funny how that part of him made me feel safe rather than threatened.

  “What?” he said now.

  I did my best to wipe the smile off my face, not quite succeeding. “There’s nothing soft about you.”

  “Hell, no.” He smiled back.

  “That’s not what I meant.” I blushed.

  “Sure,” Rafe said and winked. “If you’re good, I’ll show you later. Let’s go, darlin’. I don’t wanna miss him.”

  I nodded, and preceded him out the door.

  The Bog is on the south side of Sweetwater, off the road to Pulaski. Damascus is on the northwest, halfway to Columbia. It took us twenty minutes to drive the distance between the two. By the time we reached Beulah’s Meat’n Three, the sun was on its way up over the trees, and Beulah’s was open for business.

  “Hungry?” Rafe asked as the Volvo approached.

  I averted my eyes from the cinderblock building as my stomach objected to the thought of grease-laden eggs and grits and biscuits. “No.”

  He gave me a closer look. “You all right, darlin’?”

  “Fine,” I said. “Just a temporary thing.”

  “Sure.” He didn’t say any more. We continued toward the Bog in silence.

  For years and years, the Bog housed the undesirables of Sweetwater. The Colliers, white trash if ever there were, lived there, in a singlewide trailer, among others of their ilk. Big Jim, according to the sheriff, had drunk and fornicated his way through life, knocking his wife and his kids around the whole time. Rafe’s Uncle Bubba died in prison. LaDonna got herself in the family way at fourteen, and Rafe himself was in trouble practically from the day he was born.

  A year ago or so, someone had bought the land and slowly evicted everyone who lived there, with the idea of building a new subdivision of affordable homes. LaDonna had been the last to leave, in a body bag last summer. No connection to anything; she had a drinking and drug problem, and the official verdict was that she’d accidentally overdosed. Sheriff Satterfield, spurred on by Todd, had done his best to prove that Rafe had had something to do with it, but there was no evidence, and Rafe said he didn’t, so there was nothing the sheriff could do. He seemed fine with it; it was Todd who’d been more upset.

  Anyway, when the real estate market took a further dip, the subdivision plans had been put on hold. These days, the Bog was a ghost town. No one lived there, and Sweetwater doesn’t have a big problem with homeless people wandering around looking for a place to crash, so when we pulled up next to the Colliers’ old single-wide mobile home, there wasn’t a living soul to be seen.

  “It looks deserted,” I said as I got out of the car.

  Rafe nodded, glancing around. He appeared relaxed, hands in his pocket and a pair of dark glasses shading his eyes from the sun that was now peeking over the cypress trees, but there was tension in his shoulders and in the set of his mouth. “I’ll have a look around.”

  He started to walk away.

  “Rafe?”

  He turned around. “Yeah?”

  “Something wrong?” He had well-honed instincts from his life of crime, and if he thought there was reason to worry, I’d like to know.

  He looked at me for a second before he grinned. “No. Just a lot of bad times I’d rather forget about.”

  “So there’s nobody lying in wait for us with a gun, or anything?” Like the last time I’d been here.

  “Not unless David brought a water pistol,” Rafe said and sauntered off to investigate the nearest abandoned clapboard shack.

  I turned my attention to the Collier trailer.

  The last time I’d been here, two months ago, was the night Elspeth and Jorge Pena had died. Everything looked about the same as it had then, with the exception of the sparse tufts of grass and other vegetation. Back in early October, it had still been green. Now the grass was yellow and the trees were bare. The ground was dusty and hard, and dry leaves rustled across the toes of my shoes. There were no footprints or tire tracks worth mentioning.

  “How do you suppose he’s getting around?” I asked Rafe over my shoulder, but he was gone. Inside one of the buildings, probably. I hoped David wasn’t doing anything stupid, like hitch-hiking, but at eleven, it was hard to imagine any other way he’d be able to travel. He might have caught a Greyhound bus from Nashville to Columbia, but from there, it was either walking or hitching a ride.

  Or bicycling. A red bike, girl type, was leaned up against the back wall of the trailer. It hadn’t been here last time I was.

  The kitchen door into the Colliers’ old trailer still hung wide open. I climbed through into the decrepit kitchen, and glanced around. It looked just as it had the last time I was here: chintzy pressed-wood cabinets with shiny brass handles topped by a faded laminate countertop. An almond colored scratch-and-dent refrigerator and a dirty stove, still encrusted with old food stains, completed the look. Dead cockroaches with their legs in the air lay here and there on the chipped vinyl floor. I wrapped my arms across my chest as a shudder of revulsion brought on another wave of morning sickness. I needed to eat something soon, or I’d pass out.

  A sound from the back of the trailer brought my head up again. It was a sort of scramble, quickly suppressed, as if someone had heard me and had thought of making a run for it, but then reconsidered.

  “David?”

  There was no answer. And no more sounds. I exited the kitchen and headed down the hallway, my boots sliding across the dirty shag carpets. The black mold growing on the baseboards seemed to have taken over another few inches of wall since the last time I was here, and the low ceilings felt like they were pushing down on me. My heart was beating fast; it was impossible not to remember the last time I’d walked down this hallway, and what had happened then.

  The big pool of dried blood just outside the door to Rafe’s room brought on another almost-dash to the bathroom. Bile rose in my throat and I had to push it back down. When I stepped over the blood and into the doorway, I saw David. He was standing under the centerfold from a long ago dirty magazine that the teenaged Rafe had kept tacked to his wall: a well-endowed blonde with a few scraps of white lace covering her considerable assets gazed limpidly out of china blue eyes. David wasn’t looking at her. He was staring at another big blood stain in the middle of the room, and didn’t look up until I said his name again.

  He really did look a lot like Rafe. Tall for his age, and already starting to develop a more masculine shape. He had Rafe’s dark eyes, those same straight eyebrows, and the same shape to his face, although David’s cheeks and jaw still had the softness that Rafe’s had lost. A dusting of dark fuzz adorned his upper lip. I already knew he had Rafe’s smile, although it wasn’t in evidence at the moment.

  I assumed he recognized me from the other night, but he didn’t greet me. On the other hand, he didn’t ask me who I was, either. Instead he glanced back down at the dried blood on the floor. “Is this where my mom died?”

  There was a quaver in his voice that reminded me that no matter how mature he looked, and how cool he played it, he was just a child.

  I looked at the floor too, and for a second I could see Elspeth’s small body splayed there in the aftermath of the shooting, a crimson stain spreading across her chest. I swallowed. “Yes.”

  “What about over there?” He glanced at the blood in the doorway. “My dad?”

  His voice caught on the last word. In the span of thirty minutes two nights ago, his whole world had come tumbling down. He had learned that the two people he’d trusted above all others, his parents, weren’t really his parents at all, and had been lying to him for almost twelve years. And on top of that, he’d heard that his real parents, his biological parents, were both dead, both in the last few months. Now he was standing in his father’s old room, looking at his mother’s blood, with a mixture of eagerness and fear in his eyes, and I found I couldn’t lie to him anymore. Party line be damned; after everything he’d been through in the past two days,
he deserved the truth.

  I shook my head. “The man whose blood is over there was named Jorge Pena. He shot your mother. Your biological mother, Elspeth. Ginny is still your real mother, just as Sam is your real father. Jorge came here to shoot Rafe, and Elspeth wouldn’t get out of the way. She died trying to protect him.”

  And yes, she’d been a homicidal nutcase. But this was a scrap of comfort I could give the boy. His mother had died heroically, trying to protect Rafe, and I owed her for that. David didn’t need to hear that she was a murderess herself, and that she would almost certainly have spent the rest of her life in prison, or a mental institution, had she not been killed.

  “Where was he?” David looked around.

  I pointed to Rafe’s bedroll, still lying against the wall. He’d been sitting there in the dark waiting for Jorge, naked to the waist so Jorge could see just how vulnerable he was, how easy it’d be to shoot and kill him, and he’d taken my breath away when I walked in on him. I’d begged him to leave, to let Tamara Grimaldi take care of Jorge, and he had refused. Then he’d stuck me in the closet while he took care of Jorge himself. I’d stood there listening to what was going on outside, to the threats and the shots, and when the bullets stopped flying and I stepped out of the closet and into the room, it had been with no idea what I’d find. For the first few seconds I’d been sure Rafe was dead, and the relief when I realized he wasn’t had been stronger than any I’d felt before in my life. Until the next day, when I’d spent eight hours thinking he’d died after all, only to learn he hadn’t. The relief from that had blown anything else out of my head and out of existence for a while.

  There were a few drops of blood on the bedroll, from Rafe’s shoulder wound, but nothing like the pools of dried blood on the carpet. From the crumpled state of the blankets, I assumed the bedroll was where David had slept until I woke him. He was a brave boy; you couldn’t have paid me to spend the night here.

  “So this guy Jorge shot my mom,” David said. “Who shot Jorge?”