Close to Home

by Jenna Bennett

  If Dr. Seaver was trying to talk Marley out of using the gun—and where had she gotten her hands on a gun, anyway?—she was going about it all wrong. Reasoning with her wasn’t going to do any good; just like any other normal person waving a deadly weapon, Marley was beyond reason. And given what she’d just found out, it was understandable. I hoped she wouldn’t shoot the doctor, because she’d only complicate things, but I could understand the temptation.

  “You stole my baby!”

  There was a beat of silence, then— “You’re talking crazy, Marley.”

  “No, I’m not! You walked through the backyard and took him, right off the porch.”

  “Now, why would I do that?” Denise Seaver said reasonably. “I know you’re worried about the outcome of the trial, Marley, but accusing me of taking Oliver won’t help your case.”

  “This isn’t about my case,” Marley shrieked. “You stole my baby. I know you did. And you had no right! He was mine!”

  “You’re imagining things again, Marley. Just like you did before Oliver died.”

  “He’s not dead!”

  Dr. Seaver ignored her. “Now, be a good girl about this. Put down the gun, and I’ll get you some medicine that’ll help you.”

  I heard a scuff, as if from a foot, and then a shot and a scream. When my ears stopped ringing, I heard Marley’s voice again, edging into hysterical. “Stay where you are.”

  Uh-oh. Inching forward, I risked a glance around the door jamb into the kitchen to assess the situation.

  Marley was standing on one side of the island, with a gun in both hands, pointed squarely at Dr. Seaver. Her face was pale, but her hands were steady. Her knuckles showed white where they gripped the handle.

  Denise Seaver must have been making dinner when Marley barged in, because a whole green pepper lay on a chopping block with most of a julienned red pepper next to it. Over on the stove, something sizzled and popped. As I watched, Marley removed one hand from the gun and reached down to snag a big knife off the chopping block. She pulled it closer to herself. I surmised Denise Seaver might have been trying to reach for it when Marley shot her.

  She was on the other side of the island, as far away from Marley as she could get, with her back up against the kitchen sink. She was pale and looked frightened, trying to wrap a kitchen towel around her right arm but not having much luck, possibly because her hands were shaking. When the removed the towel to try again, I saw a nice, neat groove skimming her forearm, oozing blood, and for a second my mind slipped sideways and I heard Rafe’s voice—“It’s just a scratch,”—before he peeled his T-shirt up and over his head to show me the damage done when a bullet from Perry Fortunato’s gun had graced his side on its way toward me. He hadn’t died then, or from the bullet that had lodged in his shoulder a month later, so I doubted Denise Seaver was mortally wounded now. I’m sure she knew it too, but her voice shook when she exclaimed, as if in disbelief, “You shot me.”

  “You shouldn’t have reached for the knife,” Marley said.

  There was no arguing with that, so Dr. Seaver didn’t try. “You’ll go to jail for sure after this.”

  “Not once I explain what you did.” Marley’s voice was calm. “How you stole my baby and took him to Nashville and gave him to someone else to raise.”

  Dr. Seaver hesitated. “How do you know that?”

  “Savannah told me,” Marley said. I shrank back against the wall, but she didn’t go on to say that I was right behind her and would be coming through the door at any moment. Maybe she didn’t realize I’d followed her. I thought she’d reacted to my yell earlier, but it had been dark outside and hard to see; maybe I was wrong.

  “Of course.” Denise Seaver sounded displeased. “Did she tell you to come see me?”

  Marley shook her head. “I did that on my own.”

  It could have been my imagination, but I thought this revelation brought on a lessening of tension in Denise Seaver’s voice. “Why don’t you put the gun down, and we’ll talk. I’ll need some bandages to wrap this. You don’t want me to bleed to death, do you?”

  Marley hesitated, and I didn’t blame her. Not only was it one of those ‘are you still beating your wife?’ kind of questions, where you’re damned if you answer yes and equally damned if you answer no, but the truth was that part of her probably did want Dr. Seaver to bleed to death. I know I would have.

  “No,” she said eventually, although she didn’t sound like she meant it.

  “That’s a good girl. I’m just going to open this cabinet over here, next to the microwave—” I heard another scuff of feet, the sound of a cabinet door opening, and then a clang, and bang, and a sort of muffled thump. Then Denise Seaver’s voice.

  “Idiot.”

  Uh-oh, I thought. That didn’t sound good, either.

  It was probably worth risking another peek into the kitchen, so I curled myself carefully around the doorjamb.

  The situation had changed radically from the last time I checked. Marley was now out for the count, crumpled on the floor, her dark hair fanning out across the Mexican tile. Denise Seaver stood over her with the pan from the stove in her hand, breathing hard. As I watched, she put it carefully back on the burner and turned off the heat, before stepping over Marley and scooping up the gun that had fallen from Marley’s lax hand. She turned it on the unconscious woman.

  “Dr. Seaver.”

  The words had left my lips before I was aware of opening my mouth. But really, it wasn’t like I could stand there and let her shoot Marley, was it?

  Dr. Seaver swung around, and for the third time in a few months, I found myself faced with a gun.

  “I got here as fast as I could,” I said, and with the gun pointed at my chest, I didn’t have to pretend to be catching my breath as if I’d been hurrying. There’s something about a loaded gun in your face that makes your breath go all on its own. “Oh, my God, are you OK?”

  Ignoring the gun, as if I thought she’d just forgotten to lower it, I stepped closer to peer at her arm. She hadn’t done anything to wrap it, and the furrow the bullet had punched in the skin was still oozing blood. My stomach turned over, but I swallowed down the nausea. I’d gotten quite good at that over the past two months, and now it came in handy yet again.

  Unfortunately, it was the left arm Marley had hit, not the right, where it might do some good. The gun was still held steady in Dr. Seaver’s right hand. She did lower it an inch or two, from my heart to my stomach. If she shot me there, it probably wouldn’t be fatal. Especially since there wasn’t anyone else in there anymore who might be harmed if she did.

  I looked around. “Do you have something I can use to help you wrap that? Have you called 911 yet? Is someone coming? I’ve got a phone, if—”

  “They’re on their way,” Denise Seaver said. Lying through her teeth. I’d been standing right outside the whole time, and she hadn’t called anyone.

  I glanced at Marley, prone on the floor. “I can’t believe she’d do this. We were just sitting there talking, having a drink, and I knew she was distraught, but I had no idea...”

  I glanced up at Dr. Seaver, doing my best to look horrified and confused. “I got a phone call from my brother, just making sure I was all right, you know? He was a little worried about me going over to Marley’s alone, so he called to make sure she hadn’t gone off the deep end and tried to hurt me. And I didn’t want her to hear me talking to him, so I excused myself to go out into the hallway, and by the time I got back to the family room, the door was open and she was gone. I tried to follow her, but it was dark and she knew the way and I didn’t, and I lost her somewhere in the trees...” I trailed off, pleased that all of this, at least, was true. I’m not a good liar, and every time I’m able to avoid lying, I consider it a victory.

  “She burst in here a few minutes ago,” Denise Seaver said, and finally she lowered the gun to where it wasn’t pointed at me anymore. “This is hers. She tried to shoot me with it. So I hit her with the frying pan and took
it away from her.”

  “You should probably put it down. You’re messing up her fingerprints.”

  I glanced around the kitchen without waiting to see whether she took the advice. “Nice place. Have you lived here long?”

  “Five or six years,” Dr. Seaver said, keeping hold of the gun. “As long as the subdivision’s been here.”

  “I had no idea you lived so close to Marley. Or to Dix and Sheila, for that matter.” I put my hands in my pockets. Dr. Seaver watched me, but when I didn’t bring either of them back out with a weapon, she moved her attention back up to my face.

  “What were you and Marley talking about?”

  “Before my brother called, you mean? Just... things.” I shrugged, to show how unimportant they’d been. “Sheila dying was difficult for her. For some reason Sheila thought Marley hadn’t killed Oliver. Sheila was pretty much the only person who did, from what I understand, and I guess Sheila dying pushed Marley off the deep end.”

  “So you didn’t talk about me?”

  “You?” I blinked. “I guess we might have. A little. Marley said the trial wasn’t going well. You’d testified that she was psychotic back then, and she said that it seemed like the jury believed you. And she said you’d been hounding her when Oliver was a baby. That you came by all the time to see how she was doing.”

  “I was worried,” Dr. Seaver said.

  “Of course. And with reason, as it turned out.” I glanced at Marley’s still form. She hadn’t so much as twitched, but at least her chest was rising and falling. Hopefully Dr. Seaver hadn’t cracked her skull with that heavy cast iron frying pan. “Poor thing. I don’t understand how a mother can kill her own child, do you? But I guess maybe she wasn’t responsible, really. Postpartum psychosis is something like temporary insanity, isn’t it? She did sound pretty paranoid when I spoke to her earlier. She keeps all her windows covered because she says people are staring at her, did you know that?”

  “She’s off her rocker,” Denise Seaver said bluntly. “She came in here screaming that I’d stolen her baby.”

  “That’s crazy.” I looked up, aware of how narrowly she was watching me. “Is it possible that she doesn’t remember what she did? You know, total break with reality? Maybe she doesn’t remember killing Oliver, and she really believes that someone kidnapped him?”

  “Anything’s possible,” Dr. Seaver said. “She said you told her that I did.”

  “Me?” I blinked innocently. “Why would I do that?”

  “I can’t imagine,” Dr. Seaver said dryly. “Could it have something to do with your visit to Emil Rushing’s office?”

  I blinked for real this time. “What do you mean? We just wanted to talk to him about...”

  David Flannery, I was about to say. But suddenly something that had troubled me earlier fell into place. When I first asked her about it, Denise Seaver had told me David was stillborn, and I’d assumed Dr. Rushing and the staff at St. Jerome’s had lied to her, just as they’d lied to Elspeth. But mother had told me earlier today that when she and Dr. Seaver talked, Denise Seaver had described David’s adoption by the lovely, interracial Mr. and Mrs. Flannery. Details she wouldn’t have known if she hadn’t been aware of David’s survival until I told her a few days ago. So she’d lied. And if she’d lied about that, might she not have lied about other things, too?

  I kept coming back to Dr. Rushing’s office and the pictures on the cork-board.

  Sheila might have seen Dix’s picture of David, the one from Elspeth’s house, at the office sometime. If so, she might have recognized David in the picture on Dr. Rushing’s cork-board. If she asked about him, it might have put the wind up Dr. Rushing. But if she had, she would have called Dix on Friday afternoon. And she hadn’t. She’d called Marley. And Marley didn’t know or care about David.

  So what if Sheila had seen someone else instead? What if that missing picture, the little boy on the pony that Detective Grimaldi had tracked to Mt. Juliet, was Oliver Cartwright?

  Had Sheila confronted Dr. Rushing with her suspicions, and he’d killed her and dumped her body in the river?

  But wouldn’t he have taken the picture of Oliver off the cork-board on Friday, then? Why wait three more days, until Sheila’s body was discovered, until a full-fledged homicide investigation was underway, and until Rafe and I had had time to stop by St. Jerome’s? That didn’t make any sense.

  Unless...

  I turned to Dr. Seaver. “It was you. When Marley didn’t pick up the phone, Sheila called you.”

  Denise Seaver smiled, but it wasn’t her usual kind, earth-motherly smile. Instead, it was edged and sharp. The gun was back up and pointing at me again. “Figured that out, did you?”

  “I knew all along,” I said. “Her phone was gone, but the police checked her call records. She called Marley, and then she called you. You told Detective Grimaldi that it had been a follow-up after her appointment. And instead... what?”

  “It was a follow-up to her appointment,” Dr. Seaver said. “We talked about Marley and Oliver and the trial. She wanted to be like you, and solve a mystery.” She chuckled.

  Oh, my God. This was because I’d figured out who killed Brenda Puckett? If I hadn’t, Sheila might be alive?

  “When she called me on Friday afternoon,” Dr. Seaver said, “I told her to sit tight until I could get up to Nashville so we could talk to Emil together. I said she should make sure not to tip anyone off by going back inside, but to find an out-of-the way place where she could stay and wait for me. She spent a couple hours in her car, sitting in the back of the parking lot outside the hospital.”

  My heart was beating hard. “What happened when you got there?”

  She crossed her ankles and leaned back against the island. “By then it was dark. And Emil had left. I told Sheila I knew where he lived, and for her to follow me. Instead, I drove to a parking lot near the river in Donelson, and when she stopped the car, I hit her over the head and threw her in. I tossed her purse in after her, left her car there, and drove home.”

  Her voice was chillingly unemotional.

  “So two years ago you took Oliver off Marley’s back porch, and you drove him to Nashville and dropped him off to Dr. Rushing, and he handed him off to the new parents. St. Jerome’s arranged for a new birth certificate, and everyone probably got paid handsomely...”

  “I didn’t do it for the money,” Denise Seaver said coldly.

  Of course not. And that must be how she managed to sleep at night.

  “It’s hard to argue about David,” I admitted. “Elspeth Caulfield would have made a horrible mother, and Rafe wasn’t in any position to be a father. And God knows poor LaDonna wouldn’t have done any better. David is happy and healthy and has two parents who love him. He’s better off than he would have been otherwise. But you shouldn’t have lied to Elspeth.”

  “It was for her own good,” Denise Seaver said.

  “Yes, but...”

  I broke off without finishing the sentence, and shook my head. I’d seen this kind of blind conviction before, in—ironically—Elspeth herself, and I knew there was nothing I could say that would convince her she’d done anything wrong.

  “Oliver, though. He was Marley’s son. She was an adult. And she was doing her best. Her husband had left her and she was struggling with post-partum depression and a colicky newborn, but she loved her baby. And you stole him. That’s a crime.”

  “I did it for Oliver,” Dr. Seaver said.

  “Why didn’t you call children’s services, if you were concerned about his welfare? They could have helped.”

  “They never do anything. Take a child away for a couple of months, and then give her back to the parents. Right back into the same untenable situation.” She shook her head. “Much better to make a clean break. Find new parents who care.”

  It sounded like she spoke from experience. “Did you grow up like that?”

  “I grew up in the Bog,” Denise Seaver said. “With Wanda.”

&nbs
p; “Wanda?”

  It took me a few seconds of rifling through the archive in the back brain to connect the dots. Then I remembered. Wanda Collier was Old Jim’s wife. LaDonna’s mother and Rafe’s grandmother. She’d died long before he was born.

  “Are you related to Rafe?”

  “Distantly,” Dr. Seaver said. “Second cousins twice removed, or something like it. Not a connection I’ve ever wanted to pursue.”

  Good thing. Not that Rafe’s family tree wasn’t already full of criminals. He might not mind the addition of another.

  “What about Dr. Rushing?” I asked.

  Dr. Seaver smiled. “That’s your fault.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “If you hadn’t gone to St. Jerome’s last week and put the wind up Emil, I wouldn’t have had to kill him. He knew about Sheila, of course, that she was dead, but he had no reason to suspect that I’d had anything to do with it. So he called me as soon as you left, and told me you’d been there asking questions about David Flannery. He was worried that your boyfriend was planning to cause a stink.”

  “Rafe didn’t say a word about being David’s father.”

  “Emil said they looked exactly the same.” Dr. Seaver shook her head in exasperation. “It’s those kinds of things you just can’t predict. Like Emil being stupid enough to put Oliver’s picture on his wall, and Sheila being stubborn enough not to believe that Marley killed him.”

  “So you drove up there again?”

  “I didn’t have a choice,” Denise Seaver said. “Emil waited for me in his office, and after he was dead, I removed the photograph of Oliver from the wall and the paperwork from the filing cabinet.”

  “Why didn’t you remove David’s? That’s why he called you, wasn’t it?”

  “David isn’t important,” Dr. Seaver said. “Too many people know about him already. And there was no crime committed there. The elder Caulfields signed the adoption papers, and it was their idea to tell Elspeth the baby was stillborn. Someone will take the fall for falsifying the birth certificate, but it won’t be me.”

  No, and unless I could figure something out, she wouldn’t take the fall for any of the rest of it, either. Slowly, I lifted my hand out of my pocket. Her eyes narrowed, watching it.