Close to Home

by Jenna Bennett

“Denise Seaver told me she testified. That Marley neglected her child and was a bad mother.”

  “That’s what she said.”

  “Doesn’t it strike you as odd that Sheila would be friends with her?”

  Sheila had been a great mother. She’d doted on Abigail and Hannah. And I found it hard to believe that she’d develop, let alone continue, a friendship with someone who was neglectful of her own child.

  “Maybe she didn’t know,” Todd said.

  “I don’t mean then. I mean now.”

  “Now?”

  “I spoke to Marley on Friday. She said she and Sheila were still friends. That Sheila didn’t believe Marley did anything to Oliver.”

  “That doesn’t sound like Sheila,” Todd said.

  I wanted to ask him if he’d known Sheila well enough to make that determination, but the truth was that I hadn’t known Sheila well enough myself. She’d been married to my brother for seven years, and we’d always gotten along reasonably well when we saw one another, but that was only rarely, and we were both brought up as Southern women: effusive and warm on the outside, cool and watchful below. We tend to be mistrustful, cautious, and slow in developing attachments, especially to other women. There’s a very catty, competitive sort of attitude to being a woman in the South. Below the surface, at least.

  On the other hand, once we do get attached, we stick like molasses. If Sheila stood by Marley Cartwright, it could only be because Sheila truly believed that Marley hadn’t hurt little Oliver. And if Sheila thought so, I wanted to know why.

  “Sheila knew Marley. If she believed Marley was innocent, don’t you think there might be something to it?”

  “That isn’t my call, Savannah,” Todd said. “The county makes the choice to prosecute and I do the job, that’s all. It doesn’t matter whether I believe it or not.”

  Yet another reason I wouldn’t have made it as a lawyer. In my mind there’s always a right and a wrong, and I wouldn’t feel good about prosecuting someone I honestly believed might be innocent.

  “Surely you don’t want her to go to prison if she isn’t guilty.”

  “That’s not up to me,” Todd said. “A jury of her peers will determine her guilt or innocence. All I do is present the prosecution’s case. The defense has the opportunity to present their own. I don’t make any determinations beyond that.”

  “But...” I stopped and shook my head. It wasn’t worth it. Sometimes I felt like Todd was speaking a different language; that he understood my words but not my meaning. I suspected he felt the same about me. “So how do you feel that things are going?”

  “No way to know,” Todd said, “until after the defense has presented its case next week.”

  “Did you feel like you made your case?”

  “We can’t prove she did it,” Todd said, sounding annoyed by that fact, “but on the other hand, they can’t prove she didn’t. Dr. Seaver’s testimony had an effect on the jury, I believe. Nobody likes a bad parent.”

  True. Although he didn’t have to sound so pleased about it.

  “Along with the fact that her husband divorced her after the baby disappeared, it’s a strong indictment.”

  “It doesn’t prove she did anything, though. Just that he might have thought she did.” I thought for a second and added, “Maybe he did it. If he was planning to divorce her anyway, and he didn’t want her to get custody of Oliver, he could have stolen the baby and given him to his new girlfriend to keep. Or his mother. Or somebody else. And then, when he’d divorced Marley, he took the baby back.”

  “I think we would have known if Oliver was alive and well and living with his father, Savannah,” Todd said, with what I can only describe as a patronizing little smirk.

  “Have you checked?”

  Todd admitted that he hadn’t.

  “Then how do you know?” All right, so I didn’t seriously think that Mr. Cartwright had kidnapped his own son and left his ex-wife to go to prison for murder, but did Todd have to be so condescending about it? If Sheila believed in Marley’s innocence, there had to be a reason.

  “There’s no sign of Oliver, Savannah,” Todd said. “Dad checked everywhere when he disappeared. The child dropped off the face of the earth. His mother killed him and hid the body.”

  “What if she didn’t?”

  “Then the jury will find her innocent and she’ll be released.”

  I squinted at him. “Do you believe that?”

  “I believe she did it,” Todd said, “and I believe the jury will agree with me. And I hope Marley Cartwright ends up spending the rest of her life in prison.”

  Well, then. There didn’t seem to be anything I could say after that, so we sat in silence. Dix and the girls, along with Catherine, Jonathan, and their three kids, came through the door shortly, and Todd excused himself to go greet his best friend. They sat down together, and Todd didn’t return to the chair next to mine. I spent the meal helping Abigail with her scrambled eggs and hash brown casserole instead.

  On our way outside after lunch, Dix pulled me aside. “I thought you’d like to know,” he said, his voice low, “that Sam Flannery called me this morning.”

  My heart jumped. “Is everything OK? David hasn’t run off again, has he?” Jumped a bus to Atlanta to try to find Rafe? Now that would be bad.

  “Everything’s fine,” Dix said. “They called to tell me they’ve decided to go ahead with the DNA test.”

  Oh. “That’s great. You can finally settle Elspeth’s estate.” And prove once and for all what we all already knew to be true, that Rafe was David’s father.

  Dix nodded. “I’ll get her DNA from a hairbrush or something at her house. I wanted to ask about your boyfriend.”

  I made sure my voice was steady. “What about him?”

  “Will he want to have his DNA matched? There’s not much need, when everyone knows the truth already, but it would make it legal.”

  “You’d have to ask him,” I said. If I had to guess, I’d say he’d probably want to, but it wasn’t my place to make that kind of decision on his behalf.

  “I don’t know how to get in touch with him,” Dix said. “I thought you would.”

  I shook my head. “He always just comes and goes. If you call Tamara Grimaldi, she can probably get a message to him.”

  “I’ll do that,” Dix said, but he sounded dissatisfied. “Thanks, sis.”

  He walked off.

  Chapter 20

  Mother drove me to Denise Seaver’s office on Monday. My car was parked outside my apartment in Nashville, and I was getting royally sick and tired of not having my own mode of transportation. But Sheila’s car was still in the impound lot, because Dix hadn’t made arrangements to pick it up, and there were no other empty cars sitting around. So when mother informed me that she’d be coming to the gynecologist with me, it wasn’t like I could say no.

  I did draw the line at the waiting room door, though. She was welcome to drive me to the doctor’s office, and if she wanted to talk to Dr. Seaver after the examination, she could feel free to do so, but it was my appointment, my body, and my miscarriage, and I was damned if I’d let my mother into the examining room with me while the doctor poked at my female parts. So mother took up station in the waiting room, sporting a dog-eared copy of Southern Living and a long-suffering attitude, while I went into the clinic with the nurse.

  “Everything looks good,” Denise Seaver said after checking me out and telling me I could sit up again. “Just a little bit of discharge that should go away in the next few days. Any discomfort?”

  “Only occasionally. If I spend a lot of time on my feet, I bleed more and there’s a little pain.”

  She nodded. “Be sure to get enough rest. It’s been less than a week; you’ll probably feel it for a few more days. Do you have pain medication left, or do you need a new prescription?”

  “I have a couple of pills left,” I said. I’d been taking them sparingly, only when I felt I really needed them, and there were still a
few rattling around the bottom of the glass. They made me feel all floaty and nice when I took them, but they didn’t only take away the physical pain, they made the grief easier to handle too, and because I knew I’d be dealing with the emotional ramifications of this for a while, I didn’t want to get used to medicating the symptoms.

  “Let me know if you need more.”

  I promised I would. “I don’t suppose you have any idea why this happened? Was there anything in the file from the hospital?”

  “I’m afraid no one can tell you that,” Dr. Seaver said apologetically. “Most of the time, with a first trimester miscarriage like you had, it’s because the baby wasn’t developing properly and your body rejected it.”

  “But this was my second miscarriage. Is it possible there’s something wrong with me?”

  “It’s possible,” Dr. Seaver said, “but unlikely. Studies show that one in four pregnancies end in miscarriage. If you include loss that occurs before a positive pregnancy test, some estimates say that 40% of all conceptions result in loss. Every year, more than a million women miscarry. Some don’t even know it.”

  “But I’ve had two miscarriages,” I said.

  “About one in thirty six women will have more than one. It doesn’t usually mean anything other than chance. Your sister-in-law had two as well, and after having two healthy children. There was nothing wrong with her.”

  That made me feel a little better. At least until I remembered that Sheila was dead, and would have no more babies.

  “If it happens again,” Dr. Seaver said, “we’ll have to do some tests. But for now, I don’t think you have to worry. Especially since you’re not in a permanent relationship.”

  “Right,” I said. “Um... I think my mother wants to talk to you. She’s out in the waiting room.”

  Dr. Seaver nodded. “Just come out and join us when you’ve finished getting dressed.”

  I said I would, and she left the room, hem flapping, and shut the door behind her. I slid off the examining table and went to exchange the paper gown I had on for my own clothes again.

  By the time I made it out to the waiting room, mother and Dr. Seaver were deep in conversation, their heads together over my file. I arched my brows, but didn’t comment. It was probably too much to expect Denise Seaver not to share her findings with my mother, doctor-patient privilege or no. They’d known each other as long as mother and Audrey, even if they weren’t as close. And mother already knew everything anyway. Everything important. The one piece of information I’d been most eager to keep from her was Rafe, and that ship had sailed.

  And now it appeared it had sailed as far as Dr. Seaver was concerned, too. When I approached, she looked up at me, a tiny wrinkle between her brows. “You didn’t mention that the man you’ve been involved with was Rafael Collier, Savannah.”

  “I didn’t think it was important,” I said, when what I was thinking was, I didn’t think it was any of your business. Of course I couldn’t actually say that. Especially with mother here.

  “I was there when he was born,” Dr. Seaver said; I guess in an attempt to explain why she was interested. “One of my first deliveries. He almost killed his mother during labor.”

  Mother clicked her tongue. I rolled my eyes. It isn’t as if you can blame a baby for being born, after all, is it? Even when the baby is Rafe Collier, who’d always been blamed for everything that went wrong in his vicinity.

  Dr. Seaver continued, “When LaDonna was pregnant, I did my best to talk her into giving the baby up for adoption. The Bog wasn’t a place where one would want to see an innocent child brought up. Especially to a girl who was just a child herself.”

  Mother nodded in agreement.

  “She refused, though. Insisted on keeping him. Said the baby’s father would be back to marry her.” She shook her head. “Of course, he never came.”

  “He couldn’t,” I said. “He was dead. Old Jim shot him when he realized that Tyrell was black. And if you ask me, it took a lot of guts for LaDonna to keep her baby. She was only fifteen. And it wasn’t like having a colored baby was easy back then.”

  “It wouldn’t be easy now,” mother murmured.

  I glanced at her. “Easier than thirty years ago. Maybe not in our family particularly, although we’re not as bad as Old Jim Collier. But society as a whole is a lot less prejudiced these days.”

  Dr. Seaver nodded. “I realized once I saw the baby that it was for the best. It would have been hard to place a baby like that for adoption. If no one wanted him, he might have ended up in a children’s home, and there’s no way to know whether that would have been better or worse than what he had.”

  “His mother loved him,” I said. “And he loved her. I don’t think he fared too badly.”

  He’d grown up to be a hell of a man, pardon my French. And between LaDonna and the Bog, and a children’s home somewhere, I was pretty sure I knew what his choice would have been. He might not wish his own childhood on anyone else, but I doubted he would have traded it, either. I felt the same way about it. I hated the fact that he’d suffered, but growing up the way he did, where he did, made him who he was, and I liked the person he’d become. If his life had been different, he might—would probably—have become someone else.

  “It’s a lot easier these days,” Denise Seaver said. “The Swedish supermodel syndrome is still in effect, of course—”

  “Swedish supermodel syndrome?”

  She glanced at me. “Blonde, blue-eyed babies, especially boys, are most in demand.”

  Of course.

  “But with the world a more inclusive place these days, it’s become easier to place minority and mixed race children. Just look at...”

  “David Flannery,” I finished when she trailed off.

  “Exactly. One couldn’t wish for more devoted adoptive parents.” Dr. Seaver smiled and got to her feet. “If there’s nothing else I can do for you, I guess you’re ready to go. You should be back to normal within another week, Savannah. If you have any problems, call me. If not, I’ll see you at your regular check-up.”

  I nodded. “Before you go, doctor...”

  “Yes?” Dr. Seaver said.

  “The other day, at Sheila’s funeral, you said that Marley Cartwright had neglected her baby. That she was an unfit mother.”

  Denise Seaver nodded. “I testified to that at her trial last week.”

  “Are you sure?”

  She just stared at me, and I added, “See, she and Sheila were friends. And Sheila was a fabulous mother. I have a hard time believing she’d remain friends with a woman who neglected and killed her child.”

  “Maybe they weren’t friends anymore,” Denise Seaver suggested.

  “They had lunch together last week after Sheila’s appointment with you. And she called Marley from Nashville the day she died.”

  This piece of news seemed to shock both Dr. Seaver and mother. “Oh, dear,” mother murmured. Denise Seaver shot her a look before focusing back on me.

  “I can only speak to what I saw, Savannah. When Marley brought little Oliver with her for her postpartum appointments, she was having trouble adjusting to life as a mother. She told me more than once she felt out of her depth with the baby, that she was concerned about not being able to take care of him properly.”

  “But isn’t that usual for a new mother? Babies don’t come with instructions. Don’t we all worry about doing something wrong?”

  Mother nodded, a faint smile curving her lips. I guess she was thinking of her own experience with Catherine, trying to figure out motherhood for the first time. Rather nice of her, to tacitly admit to having vulnerabilities. It’s not something I get from my mother a lot.

  “A lot of women have what we call the baby blues,” Dr. Seaver agreed, “but this was more severe. Marley had trouble sleeping. She stopped eating. She had feelings of guilt and inadequacy. She felt sadness and hopelessness, and suffered from low self-esteem. I prescribed antidepressants.” She sighed. “I’ll never for
give myself for not realizing that the postpartum depression had segued into postpartum psychosis. I should have seen the signs, but I didn’t. If I had, perhaps things would have turned out different.”

  We sat in silence for a moment. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe her exactly, but this still didn’t explain why Sheila, consummate mother that she was, had remained friends with Marley after Marley supposedly killed Oliver.

  “I think I’ll have to talk to Marley again,” I muttered.

  Both mother and Dr. Seaver looked at me.

  “The trial is still going on,” Dr. Seaver reminded me. “She’ll be in court.”

  “I guess it’ll have to wait until tonight. Any idea where she lives?”

  “Still in the same house where she lived when Oliver disappeared,” Dr. Seaver said. “And if that doesn’t tell you what kind of person Marley Cartwright is, I don’t know what will. To stay in the same house where she murdered her baby...” She shook her head, her lips tight.

  Unless she didn’t murder her baby.

  I didn’t say it. Dr. Seaver clearly knew in her own mind what had happened, and I didn’t think there’d be any sense in trying to change her perception. Not that I necessarily even wanted to. She’d known Marley; I didn’t. Chances were she knew what she was talking about. I just wanted to understand why Sheila and Marley were still friends after what had happened, because it didn’t compute with the Sheila I knew.

  The doctor disappeared back into her clinic, and mother and I went outside and got in the car. “What did the two of you talk about?” I wanted to know as soon as we were alone and mother’s Chrysler was purring along the road back to Sweetwater.

  Mother glanced at me. “Just your health, darling.”

  I thought about reminding her that I was almost twenty eight and that my gynecological health was my own business, but I bit my tongue. She wanted to know because she cared, even if she sometimes had a funny way of showing it, and griping would only make me sound like the little girl she still treated me as.

  “What does Rafe Collier have to do with my health?” I asked instead.