A Cutthroat Business

by Jenna Bennett

  My mother was born Margaret Anne Dixon. Her mother was Catherine Calvert, of the Georgia Calverts. If you haven’t heard of them, don’t feel bad; it’s only down here in Dixie that it’s important to be able to trace our ancestry back to the War Against Northern Aggression, to prove that our families were on the right side in that epic conflict. (I’ll give you one guess as to which side is the right one. Down South, folks consider themselves to be American by birth, but Southern by the grace of God.)

  My dad was Robert Lee Martin, native of Sweetwater, who met my mother when they both attended Vanderbilt University. He was studying law, she was studying English. Then they got married and produced my siblings and me. I have two: Catherine is the eldest, and was named in honor of our maternal grandmother. Two years after Catherine, my brother was born, and ended up with the name Dixon Calvert Martin. Everyone except mother calls him Dix. She calls him by his full name and considers herself lucky that the rest of the world doesn’t say Dick. I’m the youngest, and was named for mother’s hometown in Georgia. And I will remain eternally grateful that she wasn’t born in Alma or Augusta or Hortense.

  My dad died a few years back, of a heart attack. It was after that, that mother started marketing the house. Not because she needs the money; she has plenty, both her own and from my dad, but I guess it’s something for her to do. Up until the time of dad’s death, she stayed busy hosting parties and organizing fundraisers and being the perfect lawyer’s wife, but things are a lot slower and lonelier now than they used to be. I wasn’t surprised to see her standing in the open door when I drove up to the front of the house.

  I extricated myself from the car and ran up the stairs and threw my arms around her. “Mother!”

  She hugged me back, a little less vigorously. “Darling. So good to see you.” Her lips were cool against my cheek, and she smelled wonderfully of roses.

  “You look great!”

  She did. My mother is turning fifty eight, and looks ten years younger. Her skin glows, and is practically wrinkle-free; her hair gleams, she has kept her petite figure, and sets it off to full advantage in silk dresses and high heels. It takes a good bit of effort — not to mention money — to maintain the illusion, but it isn’t like she can’t afford it, after all.

  Mother simpered. “Come in, darling. Your room is ready. Dinner is cooking. Would you like a drink while we wait?”

  She meant a mint julep or glass of sherry or something equally ladylike. I shook my head. “I’ll take my things upstairs first, if you don’t mind. But you go ahead.”

  “No, no, darling. I’ll just sit here and wait for you.” She smiled. I smiled back and headed up the stairs with my overnight bag.

  My room tonight was the same room I grew up in, and it hadn’t changed appreciably in the nine years since I left it. It hadn’t changed much in the hundred and fifty before that, either. I’d had a few low-brow posters hanging on the wall at one time, and they had disappeared, but otherwise everything was the same. The bed that my great-grandfather Richard Martin was born in still stood against the wall, and Grandmother Eloise’s wardrobe was in the corner. I hung my clothes in it and headed back down the stairs for that drink and conversation with my mother.

  We spent the cocktail hour catching up, and over dinner we discussed my new career. I had been back home only once since I got my real estate license less than two months ago — for the July 4th family picnic — but at that point everything had been so new that I’d had very little to say about it. I was more forthcoming this time. “It’s a nice place to work. I’m glad my friend Lila suggested it, and not only because it’s so convenient to my apartment. Walker is very professional and knowledgeable — there are rumors that the governor is considering him for a spot on the real estate commission next year — and most of the others are decent and helpful, too. I’m not making any money yet, but times are tough for everyone, and I’m sure things will get better soon.”

  “Any personable young men?” my mother wanted to know. I snorted and pretended it was a sneeze.

  “Excuse me. Oh, yes. Any number of them, starting with Walker himself. He’s not that young — around 45, maybe — but he’s very well off, absolutely gorgeous...”

  “Seventeen years isn’t so much,” mother murmured. I smiled.

  “...and gay. Tim is a turd, but a very successful turd, and also gorgeous and gay. As are more than half the other men. The rest are either married or involved, too young or too old. Except for James.”

  “And what’s wrong with him?” mother asked, resignedly. I grinned.

  “Not a thing. He’s 32 and very handsome. Makes a good living, owns a condo in Green Hills, and drives a Beamer. Dresses well and works out regularly. He’s single, straight, has no ex-wives or children, and is looking for the right woman.”

  “So why aren’t you snatching him up?” mother asked.

  “He’s not interested in me,” I answered.

  “Well, I never...!” Mother sniffed, insulted on my behalf. “Whyever not?”

  “He’s black,” I said. “He wants a black girlfriend.”

  In fact, I should probably tell Lila Vaughn about him the next time she and I got together for one of our tax-deductable real estate power-lunches. Not that she was interested in settling down, having just escaped from a much worse marriage than mine, but she was always interested in making the acquaintance of a good-looking man. If it came to that, I should tell her about Rafe, as well.

  “By the way, mom,” I said, toying with my cobbler, “you’ll never guess who I ran into the other day.”

  “Who?” mother said suspiciously. She could tell from my tone that this wasn’t likely to be good news.

  I told her, and watched her wrinkle her brows. “Who?”

  “Rafe Collier. Come on, mom; you can’t have forgotten him. He’s three years older than me and you knew his mother slightly. I think she may have worked some parties here back in the old days.”

  Mother’s immaculately made-up eyes widened a fraction. “The one who got herself pregnant by the colored boy?”

  “The same,” I said.

  “LaDonna Collier. And you saw her son? How did that come about?”

  “He called,” I said. “Not me personally; the office. He wanted to see a house. I’ll tell you all about it later. When we’re finished eating. I don’t want to spoil dessert.”

  I devoted myself to my cobbler. Mother subsided.

  Later, when we were sitting in the formal parlor, on Great-Aunt Ida’s uncomfortable turn-of-the-(last)-century sofa upholstered in peach velvet, I told her the whole story from beginning to end. Including the part she hadn’t heard yet, in which I found the body. And then I watched her turn pale under the meticulously laid make-up.

  “How awful for you, Savannah.”

  “It wasn’t pleasant,” I admitted.

  “That presumptuous, ill-bred young boor. To talk to you like that!”

  “Not that. Finding Brenda was awful. Rafe Collier is merely annoying.” And then some.

  “Well, of course, dear. Naturally, finding a butchered body,” she shivered delicately, “couldn’t possibly compare to having to deal with young Mr. Collier, rude though he may be. Still,” she lowered her voice, “you think he may have had something to do with it?”

  “The police seemed to think so. Or at least they seemed very interested in him. Kept him for a long time after they finished with me. He was there, after all, and he wouldn’t be what I’d consider a particularly law-abiding person, I think.”

  “No,” my mother agreed, with a genteel shudder, “I imagine he wouldn’t be.”

  “He went to prison once, didn’t he? Right after he left high school?”

  Mother nodded. “For assault, dear. Or maybe it was battery.”

  “Good grief!” I said. I had assumed it had been for stealing a car or forging a check or something relatively — comparatively — innocent; not something as frighteningly violent as assault and battery. “What happened?�
�

  “A bar fight, I believe.” Mother clucked. “He was arrested, of course. There was no doubt that he was guilty. It was a particularly brutal beating, from everything I heard at the time. Practically killed the poor man.”

  We sat in silence for a moment.

  “Do you ever see her?” I asked. “LaDonna?”

  “Dear me, no,” my mother said, smoothing a hand over her impeccably styled, blond hair. “She was common as dirt, bless her heart. We didn’t associate. And now she’s passed on, of course.”

  I blinked at her. “Passed on? Dead, you mean?” Mother nodded. “But she can’t have been very old. If she was only fifteen when Rafe was born, and he’s three years older than me…” I counted rapidly on my fingers, math not being my strong suit, “she’d only be in her mid-forties. What happened?”

  “It was quite a to-do, dear. I’m surprised you didn’t hear about it on the news up there in Nashville.” Mother lowered her voice delicately. “She died of an overdose of some drug or other. At home. By the time someone found her, she had been dead for several days, or maybe as much as a week.”

  “And nobody went looking for her for all that time? What about the neighbors? And where was Rafe? Didn’t she have a job?”

  “She worked at the distillery when she was younger,” mother said, referring to the Jack Daniels whiskey distillery outside Lynchburg, some 45 minutes away, “but she has been collecting disability for at least ten years. And she lived alone. There’s no telling how long she was lying there. She might have called out, but if she did, no one heard her. The Bog is mostly empty these days, and I haven’t seen her son since he went off to prison.”

  “Did it happen recently? LaDonna’s passing?”

  Mother nodded. “They found her almost two weeks ago now, I’d say. With the heat and all, it can’t have been a pleasant task for poor Bob. Here, have some brandy, dear; you’re as white as a ghost.”

  She poured some into a glass and handed it to me. I don’t like brandy, but I gulped some anyway. It burned its way down to my stomach and I coughed. “Oh, gosh!”

  “What’s wrong?” mother asked, concerned.

  I took a deep breath. “I chastised him — Rafe — because he didn’t seem very upset about Brenda. Like it didn’t faze him at all to see her lying there, bathed in blood. I told him that nobody deserves to die that way, alone and scared. And then it turns out that his own mother...”

  I could still see Rafe’s expression when he turned to look at me, his gaze pitch black and threatening; and I remembered recoiling, away from the icy anger in his eyes.

  We sat in silence until I had finished the brandy and was feeling more like myself again. “So tell me about the plans for the party,” I said, forcing myself to sound upbeat and normal. “You told me that Todd Satterfield is coming, but who else, except for the family? Who’s doing the food?”

  We lapsed into small talk about the upcoming birthday party, and nothing more was said about LaDonna or Rafe Collier that night. But the next morning, after I had dropped mother off at the spa, where she was spending a half day being pampered for her party later on, I contemplated the hours stretched out before me, and the catering crew currently taking our house apart, and decided to go for a drive.

  Rafe had been correct when he told me that I probably hadn’t come down his way a lot growing up. I’d never been to the area known as the Bog, but I knew where to find it: on the other side of Sweetwater from the Martin plantation. We’re on the north, or Columbia side; they’re on the southern road to Pulaski. And if the town of Pulaski sounds familiar to anyone, it’s probably because it was the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan. We have so much to be proud of here in middle Tennessee.

  I’d driven past the Bog before, looking through the windows of dad’s Cadillac, but this was the first time I’d turned off from the highway onto the rutted one-lane track leading down through the trees.

  For all that it’s in the South, Tennessee is not like Louisiana or Mississippi. We’re a rocky state, for the most part. Even in the flatter areas, there isn’t much in the way of wetlands. The Bog was not actually a bog, just a rather dank and dismal place. A small creek — or crick, as we say in these parts — ran through it, a tiny branch of the Duck River. But where it could have been picturesque and pretty, it was just sluggish and muddy brown. It looked unhealthy, like it was carrying disease. A half dozen rusted trailers — mobile homes in my new, professional lingo — were scattered through the spindly trees, and a few shacks squatted here and there among them. Clapboard shacks, low-slung and dilapidated, with leaking roofs and leaning walls. The few cars were American, old and rusted; some had missing parts or sat on cinderblocks, and none looked like they had been driven in the last few years. My immaculate Volvo — the only thing I had gotten in settlement after my short-lived marriage to Bradley Ferguson, aside from the chunk of change that was currently evaporating out of my savings account with every month that went by — was as out of place here as a prize brood mare among mules.

  I turned off the engine and got out. The slam of the car door sounded very loud in the silence. And it was very silent here. No birds singing, no children playing, no conversations or music. The brook didn’t even babble. Very quiet.

  Maybe too quiet, as they say in the movies. But I was here, so I looked around anyway. There were no names or numbers anywhere, or for that matter any mailboxes. Nothing to indicate in which of these depressing shacks LaDonna Collier had lived and died. If these people ever got mail, it must all arrive together in the big box up on the main road, and be distributed once someone had carried it all down here. Every place looked deserted, and just as neglected and derelict as the next. There was no sign of life, and no one I could ask directions of.

  Just for kicks, since I was here anyway, I made my way over to the nearest of the shacks and peered through its dirty window. The interior was empty, save for some debris on the floor. Wire-hangers, crumpled papers, roach motels. It didn’t look as if anyone had lived there for a while.

  Stepping carefully around broken bottles, crumpled beer cans and twigs, I moved to the next home. It was empty, too. Mother was right; people had been deserting the Bog like rats fleeing a sinking ship. There was nothing for me to do here but to go home. I turned on my heel to go back to the car, and stopped with a gasp.

  He had moved so quietly through the dry grass that I hadn’t heard him, and now he stood between me and the Volvo. For a second, with the sun in my eyes, all I could see was a tall, dark figure, and I recoiled.

  He didn’t move. Not when I stumbled back, not when the heel of my insensible shoe got caught in a snake hole, and not when I ended up on my derriere on the dusty ground, with my skirt twisted around my hips and my thighs on display. The only thing that moved was his eyes, from my face to my feet and back, with insolent appreciation.

  “Didn’t your mama teach you better manners?” I inquired coldly, in spite of my burning cheeks. The tiny smile on his lips transformed into a full fledged, dangerous grin.

  “Hell, no. My mama always said, grab what you can get, ‘cause it’ll be gone afore you know it.”

  He held out a hand. I hesitated, trying to remember whether anyone had ever said anything about Rafe Collier being in the habit of forcing himself on women.

  “Or you can stay there,” he added, pointedly. I took the hand and let him haul me to my feet. We stood contemplating one another in silence for a moment.

  “Are you following me?” I asked, finally.

  “Why’d I be following you? This is my place.”

  “I thought you were in Nashville,” I said.

  “I thought you were in Nashville.”

  “It’s my mother’s birthday. I came down for the party.”

  He didn’t answer. After a second I added, awkwardly, “I heard about what happened to your mother. I’m sorry.”

  “So you came to offer your condolences?” His voice was dry.

  I shrugged. It wasn’t as if I could
tell him that I had come to the Bog out of idle curiosity, because I wondered if there might be a connection between LaDonna’s death and Brenda Puckett’s murder.

  In the silence that followed, the sound of a car engine, backfiring badly, came closer. Turning, I could see an older model Chevy come bumping down the track. It stopped a few feet away, and the driver’s side door opened with a screech. An African-American woman shoehorned herself out from behind the steering wheel and waddled toward us.

  She was about my height and age, and approximately three times my weight. Her breasts were the size of watermelons and she had a behind you could have left a tray of drinks on, with no worries that they’d spill. All of her was poured into a hot pink spandex dress with spaghetti straps, which must have been made for a woman half her size. Her hair was bleached yellow and curled into big, fat sausage curls, and her lips were painted a deep cherry red. She looked like a black drag-queen parody of Shirley Temple. Her eyes were small and half buried in fat, but she managed to give me a dirty look anyway, before turning to Rafe. “Who she?”

  He opened his mouth, but I intercepted him. “I’m Savannah Martin. Who are you?”