Close to Home

by Jenna Bennett

  I managed, somehow, to push mother out of my way and stagger into the hallway.

  Things were already heating up. Rafe and Todd were squaring off. Todd looked every inch the lawyer, in his charcoal gray suit and with his cold eyes and clipped diction, while Rafe was clearly hot under the collar and spoiling for a chance to hit someone. Anyone. He’d probably prefer to hit Todd, but if Todd didn’t oblige, he’d settle for hitting someone else. His hands were curled into fists, and tension radiated from every line in his body. Dix was hovering on the sidelines, seemingly not sure what to do, or whom to interfere with.

  Before I could get any closer, the manure hit the fan. Todd said something that must have pushed Rafe over the edge, because the next thing that happened, was that Todd bent double from a jab in the solar plexus, and then crumpled to the floor from an uppercut to the jaw. Rafe snarled something I didn’t catch, and brushed past Dix and toward the door.

  “Rafe!”

  I wasn’t able to put much power behind the word, but it was enough. He heard me. And stopped; turned.

  If I live to be a hundred, I don’t think I’ll ever forget the look on his face. Usually, he’s almost too adept at hiding his feelings, but this time, for whatever reason, he wasn’t so successful.

  The anger was obvious, in the tightness of his jaw and the flat blackness of his eyes. But it didn’t quite mask the other emotions. There was pain lurking at the back of his eyes, and vulnerability in the curve of his mouth. And bleakness overlaying everything else. Like he felt the same staggering sense of loss that I did.

  He looked at me for a moment, but when I didn’t say anything else—when I couldn’t, because the look on his face had blown every coherent thought out of my head—he turned away. I tried to get my voice to cooperate, but it wouldn’t. I tried to reach for him, but it was too late; his back was already turned. I wobbled.

  Catherine moved to catch me. I shook her off. Managed a whisper. “Go. T alk to him...”

  She looked at me for a second. Glanced at mother. Went.

  The others surged around me, cutting Catherine off from view. I tried to crane my neck, to see her—them—but it didn’t work. Mother hustled me back into the hospital room again, and back into bed , while Dix and Bob Satterfield set Todd upright and followed . I let them all bustle around trying to make me feel comfortable , because I really was feeling horrible. Doubly horrible now that Rafe had walked out on me a second time. And this time I wasn’t sure I could trust him to come back.

  Chapter 15

  I left the hospital the next morning. There was no need to stay and nothing more anyone could do for me. The excessive bleeding had stopped, and horse sized pills were keeping the pain at bay. I had enough for only a few days; after that I guess I was expected to be OK. Physically I thought I probably would be; emotionally I wasn’t so sure.

  Rafe never came back, and it took all my powers of persuasion to convince Todd not to press charges. In the end I think I succeeded only because Dix told Todd that if he had said to him, Dix, what he’d said to Rafe, Dix would have hit him too.

  “What?” I’d asked, looking from one to the other of them. Neither had obliged me. Todd blushed, while Dix simply shook his head, his lips tight. Whatever it was, it must have been bad if he didn’t feel he could repeat it in front of mother.

  “I thought he was dead,” Todd said, bending an accusatory eye on his father. “You said he’d been shot.”

  “So I was told,” the sheriff answered, fixing me with a beady eye. “Young lady?”

  Mother’s lips tightened, as if she wasn’t quite sure I merited the honorific after what she’d just found out about me.

  “He did get shot,” I said. “And that first day I thought he was dead, too. Dix can tell you. He was the one who gave me the news, and he knows I really believed it.”

  Dix nodded.

  “It wasn’t until later that I found out it was something the TBI and the police cooked up to send him back undercover for a while.”

  “Back?” the sheriff said.

  “He’s been feeding the TBI information for ten years. Since they arranged for him to be released from prison early.”

  “I always thought that was suspect,” Todd sniffed. “Hard to imagine Rafe Collier getting time off for good behavior.”

  I ignored him. It seemed safer. Instead I turned to Catherine, who walked back into the room at that point. “Did you catch him?”

  She nodded.

  “Did you ask him to come back inside?”

  She nodded again.

  “Well, where is he?”

  “He said he’d take your car back to your place and pick up his bike. Then he had to get on the road.”

  “He’s not coming back?”

  Catherine shook her head.

  “I think,” Dix said, with rather admirable restraint, “that he might have preferred to have heard the news from you and not Catherine, sis.”

  Probably so. “There just hasn’t been time. He showed up at the crack of dawn,” earlier, actually, “and then we had to rush right out and look for David. You didn’t hear about that, did you?” I explained about the phone call from Virginia Flannery I’d received a day ago. “We found him in Sweetwater. He’d already been to Elspeth’s house, and when we found him he was asleep in the trailer in the Bog.”

  “What was he doing in Sweetwater?” Dix wanted to know.

  “He wanted to see where he came from. He and Rafe talked for a while, and then we had to take him back to his parents, and Detective Grimaldi was there, so we went to breakfast with her, and then I talked Rafe into coming with me to St. Jerome’s Hospital in Brentwood. It’s where David was born, and it’s also where...”

  I stopped before I could blurt out that it was where Sheila had been on Friday afternoon. I wasn’t sure Dix had heard about the pregnancy, and I didn’t want to be the one to tell him. I thought I’d leave that dubious chore to Grimaldi, who was used to giving people bad news. And besides, thoughts of pregnancies made me cry right now.

  “Who’s David?” Todd wanted to know.

  Dix turned to him. “The boy in the picture we found in Elspeth Caulfield’s house. Savannah tracked him down. We’re trying to prove that he’s Elspeth’s son. That way I have someone to give her estate to.”

  “Is he Collier’s son too?” Todd wanted to know, through what sounded like gritted teeth. Dix’s voice didn’t change its calm cadence.

  “We assume so. We won’t know anything for sure until the parents agree to let the kid take a DNA test.” He turned to me. “Any word on that?”

  “They saw Rafe,” I said, “and I told David the truth. If they refuse now, it’ll be because they won’t want to admit it. There’s no question that they already know.”

  “I thought you said you didn’t know for sure,” Todd objected.

  I glanced at him. “You didn’t see them together. Dix will need the DNA to prove that David is Elspeth’s son, but there’s no doubt whatsoever that he’s Rafe’s. Everyone could see it.”

  Todd subsided. I turned my attention back to Dix. “Anyway, after the hospital we went back to my apartment, and then we got into an argument, and Rafe walked out and left me there, and by the time he got back I had started bleeding, so we came here. There just wasn’t time to tell him.”

  Although that wasn’t quite true and I knew it, even if Dix didn’t. I could have told Rafe the truth when his arrival caused me to run to the bathroom. Or after the trip to St. Jerome’s, when he complimented me on my dishonesty. I could have stopped the proceedings in my apartment to tell him. A quick warning—“Be gentle; you don’t want to hurt the baby,”—would have done the trick. And maybe if I had, this wouldn’t have happened. I had asked both the doctors and the nurses, and they’d all told me the sex, no matter how enthusiastic, had had nothing to do with the miscarriage, that the baby had already been dead, but I couldn’t shake the guilt. I wondered if maybe Rafe couldn’t either.

  “He had to go ba
ck to Atlanta,” I told the nurse when she asked about him the next morning. “I’ll be staying with my mother for a couple of days.”

  It wasn’t my choice. I’d rather have gone back to my apartment to lick my wounds in private. If I stayed with mother, she would lecture me on safe sex and prevention and not giving the milk away for free—not that I thought she’d entertain the notion of Rafe actually paying for the proverbial milk. Not the usual way, by marrying me. But the hospital staff had been adamant about my having someone with me. Maybe they were worried that the temptation to end it all would be too much if I didn’t have supervision.

  They needn’t worry. I was distraught, short-tempered, and prone to tears, but I wasn’t suicidal. No, I was channeling that other famous Southern Belle, Scarlett O’Hara, and trying to convince myself that tomorrow was another day, and another chance to set things right with Rafe.

  Todd and his father had left the previous night. The realization that Rafe was alive, and more, that I had been pregnant with his child, seemed to have brought home the point once and for all that I wasn’t likely to marry Todd anytime soon. I guess he probably felt he had no business being there, and I was honestly glad to see him go. I liked him, and I thought it might be nice if we could end up being friends someday, but until he was ready for that, it was easier for both of us if he’d just stay away.

  Dix spent the night in my apartment. Abigail and Hannah were settled with Catherine and Jonathan for the night, so he had nothing to get back to, and I could imagine he might prefer to stay at my place rather than face the empty bed at home. When I told him he’d have to change the sheets on my bed, he didn’t bat an eye, although mother winced.

  Bob Satterfield had offered to drive her back to Sweetwater, and Dix offered to bring me to her in the morning, but she insisted on staying in the hospital with me. I don’t know why, because it wasn’t as if she attempted a heart to heart or anything. Maybe she just felt maternal because I was upset and in pain.

  I was in a wheelchair on my way toward the exit the next morning when my cell phone rang. Of course my first though was that it might be Rafe, so I scrambled to dig the phone out of the depths of my handbag. When I finally had it in my hand, I saw that it wasn’t Rafe calling at all, it was Tamara Grimaldi. That, then, gave me something else to worry about.

  “Detective?”

  “Ms. Martin.”

  “Is he OK?”

  “That depends on which he you’re talking about,” the detective said grimly.

  Cold fear clutched at my heart and made it difficult to talk. “I was talking about Rafe. He rode out of here last night not in a good frame of mind, and he drives like a bat out of hell even under the best of circumstances, which these weren’t.”

  “What happened?” Grimaldi asked.

  “He found out about the baby. In the worst possible way.”

  “What’s the worst possible way?”

  I swallowed. “I had a miscarriage.”

  She was silent for a moment. “I’m sorry. You still hadn’t told him you were pregnant?”

  “It’s worse. Remember that pill you saw at my place?”

  “Mifepristone,” the detective said. “Used for abortions up to nine weeks.”

  “Also used for the morning after as an emergency contraceptive. He thought I’d bought it to avoid getting pregnant. So he told me to be sure I took it, because we didn’t want any little accidents. He tore out of my apartment in a hurry, and by the time he came back I was bleeding. So he brought me to the hospital thinking I’d taken the damn pill and had a bad reaction to it. And instead he found out that I’ve been pregnant for two months without telling him. By now I’m sure he’s figured out what the pill was really doing there—that I was considering getting rid of the baby; his baby—and he went back to Atlanta. He didn’t even say goodbye. Catherine spoke to him before he left, but he didn’t come back inside to talk to me.”

  By now I had tears running down my face, and the nurse, who had started out looking embarrassed, like she was trying not to listen, looked deeply sympathetic, while mother gazed at me like she had never seen me before.

  “I’m sorry,” Grimaldi said. “When I have a free minute, I’ll contact Mr. Craig and make sure everything’s OK and Mr. Collier got safely back to Atlanta.”

  “I’d appreciate that.” I sniffed.

  “Meanwhile, something else has happened. You didn’t tell me you were planning to visit St. Jerome’s Hospital yesterday.”

  “It was a spur of the moment thing,” I said, just as we reached the car. I got out of the wheelchair with my best attempt at a smile and a thank you for the nurse, and crawled into the front of Dix’s SUV. The passenger seat had already been reclined. Dix closed the door behind me, and opened the back door to hand mother into the back seat.

  “Learn anything interesting?” Grimaldi asked.

  “Dr. Rushing had a picture of David Flannery on his cork board. And my sister-in-law was there on Friday afternoon.”

  Dix shot me a look as he got behind the wheel and turned the key in the ignition.

  “What did you talk to the doctor about?” Detective Grimaldi asked.

  I thought back. “Nothing, really. Nothing specific. Why?”

  “He’s dead,” Grimaldi said bluntly.

  “Dr. Rushing? You’re kidding. He was fine yesterday.”

  “I’m sure he was. This wasn’t natural causes.”

  I should have known. MNPD Homicide doesn’t get called in for just any death.

  “Seems he did it himself,” Grimaldi added. “Single gunshot to the head.”

  Ouch.

  “When I started investigating, I happened upon your name in the visitor’s log. Were you there alone?”

  “Rafe was with me,” I said. Both mother and Dix glanced at me. We had left the hospital now, and were headed toward the entrance to Interstate 65.

  “You said you and he were together most of yesterday afternoon,” Grimaldi said; I nodded, although I knew she couldn’t see me. “When did he leave and come back? Between which times?”

  “Oh, come on! You thought he’d killed Brenda Puckett, and then you thought he’d killed Lila Vaughn. You even told me you thought he might have killed Marquita. Now you’re trying to pin this on him?”

  “I don’t think he killed Dr. Rushing,” Grimaldi said calmly. “Any more than I thought he’d killed Lila Vaughn or Marquita Johnson. Brenda Puckett, yes. But that was before I knew who he was.”

  “So what are you suggesting, then?”

  “I’m suggesting,” Grimaldi said, “that although you may not have talked to Dr. Rushing about anything upsetting, your boyfriend might have gone back there to ask a few more questions about David. He might have put the wind up the good doctor. I’m sure we can agree that Mr. Collier can be persuasive when he wants to be?”

  He can. Both when it comes to sweet-talking women and when it comes to convincing people to admit things they’d rather keep to themselves. I had seen him in action once before, and poor truculent nineteen-year-old Maurice Washington, Alexandra Puckett’s unsuitable boyfriend, had sung like a canary. If Rafe had decided to lean on poor old Dr. Rushing, the old man would have folded like a bad hand of cards.

  “If he did, he didn’t say anything about it.” But then he’d had other things on his mind both coming and going, so maybe that wasn’t surprising. And I could certainly imagine that, coming out of my apartment after that argument, he might have wanted to take his frustrations out on someone. He couldn’t take them out on me—nothing anyone could say would make me believe that I’d ever be in any kind of danger from Rafe—but if he’d remembered Dr. Rushing’s refusal to admit anything about David, he might have thought that a second trip to St. Jerome’s made sense.

  “Guess I’ll have to ask him,” Detective Grimaldi said. “Thanks, Ms. Martin. I’ll be in touch.” She made to hang up.

  “Wait!”

  “What?”

  “When did Dr. Rushing die? Did he
leave a note? Did he say anything about...” I hesitated, shooting a glance at Dix out of the corner of my eye, “...anything?”

  “If there’s a note, we haven’t found it yet. I won’t know about time of death until the M.E. has finished the autopsy. It seems Dr. Rushing stayed after business hours last night. The desk nurse left at five, and he was still in his office then. She thought he must be doing paperwork, because his appointments were over for the day.”

  “Who found him?” I asked.

  “She did. When she came to work this morning she noticed that his car was still parked in the same spot. Apparently it wasn’t his usual spot. When he came back from lunch yesterday, someone had taken it and he had to park somewhere else. This morning his car was still there, while the usual spot was empty. Ms. Murphy thought it was strange, so she went to check on him. She found him slumped over his desk.”

  I winced at the image my mind supplied. I’d been in that office less than twenty four hours ago; I could picture the space and Dr. Rushing’s head only too well.

  “Is there anything we can do? Dix and I and mother are on our way down I-65 toward Sweetwater. We’ll be passing Brentwood in a few minutes. We could stop by.”

  Grimaldi hesitated. “Are you sure you feel up for it?”

  “Honestly? I’m hopped up on so much morphine I don’t feel a thing.” I felt detached, like I was watching the world through glass, but I was pain free. And something like this might take my mind off my own misery for a while.

  “I’m not sure what you can do,” Tamara Grimaldi said, “but if you were here yesterday, you might notice something. Sure, if you don’t mind, feel free to stop by.”

  “We’ll be there in a few minutes.” I put the phone away and instructed Dix to exit the interstate in Brentwood.

  “A crime scene?” mother asked from the back seat. “Really, darling, don’t you think you should just go home and rest and not get involved in such unpleasantness?”

  “This might have to do with Sheila. She was there Friday afternoon. Now the man she had an appointment with is dead. I’m sorry if you think it’s unladylike of me, but if there’s anything I can do to help, I’m going to do it.”