Change of Heart

by Jenna Bennett

  “We decided to take care of things ourselves instead,” Neil said. “We got pictures of the way I looked, and we told him we had DNA he’d missed, that proved he was guilty. He offered to pay, but not enough. And I didn’t want his money. I wanted him to suffer.”

  “So Erin married him?”

  Neil smirked. “She got access to everything he owned. No prenuptial agreement. Full reign of everything. And she could make his life as miserable as she wanted. As we wanted. He’s had to keep his pecker in his pants for six years now. No going around hurting anyone who couldn’t fight back.”

  “But then they moved to Nashville?”

  Neil nodded. “And my stupid sister started fucking the help. And when Brian found out, he moved out and filed for divorce. Adultery is still reason for divorce in this God-forsaken backwater. There was nothing Erin could do. I wanted to kill her.”

  “You would have lost everything. The money. The hold over Brian. The chance to make him suffer.”

  He nodded. “Couldn’t have that. The bastard had to go, before he could leave us with nothing.”

  “So you and Erin decided it was time to kill him.”

  He shrugged, as if it was no big deal. “I always assumed we’d have to. I was looking forward to it. This just meant picking up the pace a little.”

  Of course. He had to assume Brian was looking for a way out, and would find one sooner or later. I was honestly surprised Brian hadn’t just killed Erin first, and gotten out from under. Then again, he couldn’t have imagined he’d get away with that, I guess. He probably figured Neil would get him if he did. “So you came to Nashville too. And made friends with Beau?”

  Neil’s mouth twisted. “We had so much in common. Even drove the same kind of car.”

  Sure. “So what happened Friday night?”

  “We went to Chaps,” Neil said. “I figured Brian would be there, and I was going to give him Beau. Beau deserved it, after ruining everything.”

  “I didn’t think Beau was gay.”

  Neil giggled. “You slip enough roofies in a guy’s drink, he doesn’t care what he does. Or who.”

  Yowch. I tried not to let my reaction show, but I’m afraid I didn’t quite manage.

  Neil didn’t seem to notice. “But then we saw Brian hitting on this guy who wanted nothing to do with him, and Beau told me it was the real estate agent. The fucker who was selling my sister’s house.”

  “It wasn’t his fault about the house,” I said. “The realtor has nothing to do with it.”

  “Bullshit,” Neil answered succinctly. “When he left, I told Brian I’d make a deal with him. I’d get him the guy if he’d stay married to my sister.”

  “And he believed that?”

  “Of course not,” Neil said. “But he believed that I believed it.”

  Ah.

  “He said he would, and I took Beau and followed the realtor to the Cock-Pit.”

  “Didn’t Beau think that was strange?”

  “I told him I wanted to meet the guy,” Neil said with another elegant shrug. “So Beau introduced us.”

  “Why doesn’t Tim remember that?”

  “Probably because of the roofies I put in his drink.” He smiled.

  Roofies. Rohypnol. And here I thought only women had to worry about that.

  It certainly explained why Tim couldn’t remember anything that happened Friday night, though. I’ve never been on the receiving end of date rape drugs, but I’ve heard they make you do things you’d never do under normal circumstances, and that they have the additional benefit—to whoever slips them to you—of making you forget everything you did, and with whom.

  “Beau showed me where the realtor lived,” Neil continued, “and then he left. I got the guy inside and into the bedroom. He was so out of it by then, he had no idea what was happening. When I let Brian in he didn’t say a word.”

  God. My face twisted. And I wanted to ask whether he’d let Brian have his way with Tim before he—Neil—killed him, but on the other hand I didn’t want to know, so I didn’t ask. Tim had said no, so I figured I’d just go with that.

  “And then I stabbed him and left him there,” Neil said, in the same tone of voice as he’d told me about Beau showing him where Tim lived before driving away. As if it were no more significant than that.

  I pulled it together enough to ask another question. “What about the phone call to your sister? You were her alibi, right? I guess nobody realized, when she spoke to her brother in California, her brother was actually just a few miles away.”

  He smiled, as if I’d complimented him. In a sense, I guess I had. “That was my idea. She couldn’t leave the house. The police would see that the alarm system had been turned on and off and on again in the middle of the night. But I wanted her to hear him scream.”

  I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. After a second I closed it again.

  During this conversation, Rafe had been so quiet I had almost forgotten he was there. Now he spoke into the silence. “And then you had to kill Beau cause he knew you’d been at Tim’s house that night?”

  Neil nodded. “I used the sleeping pills from six years ago. Turns out they were still strong enough to knock him out. And then I mixed up a little gas to finish the job. Cleaned up after myself and left.”

  He sounded so cool and calm about it all. So reasonable, like it all made perfect sense and only someone with no sense of reason or justice could possibly object to what he’d done.

  “I suppose you didn’t have a choice when it came to shooting Tim, either.” I could hear the edge in my voice; I just hoped Neil wouldn’t take objection to it.

  “He might remember something,” Neil said earnestly. “He saw me, you know. Spoke to me. Might remember that I took him home.”

  “But why shoot him? How did you think you’d get away with that?” Surely random violence would be stretching credulity a yard or two too far at this point.

  “It was supposed to look like he shot himself,” Neil said, irritated. “I had it all planned out. He’d be found, whenever he was found, with the gun beside him. Everyone would think he’d committed suicide out of guilt for killing Brian and Beau.”

  “With your gun? Or is it your sister’s gun?”

  Neil smirked. “It’s Beau’s gun. I took it with me from his place.”

  Of course. And since it was supposed to look like Tim had killed Beau as well as Brian, it would make perfect sense that he’d kill himself with Beau’s gun. When in actuality, Tim had been nowhere near Beau’s house at all. The ‘friend’ he’d been staying with all along had been the absent Walker.

  “So what happened? This morning?”

  Neil’s face darkened. “You were there. I didn’t see you until it was too late. I couldn’t finish the job when you were there.”

  So we’d actually saved Tim’s life. That made me feel a little better about not telling Grimaldi that he was camping out at Walker’s place last night. I hadn’t risked his life by not speaking up; I had actually saved it by being at Fort Negley.

  “I guess that’s it,” Rafe said with a glance at me across the Mini’s roof rack.

  I nodded. I’d gotten all my questions answered, and there was no sign of the cavalry. “What now?”

  “Now,” Neil said, “we get in the car and drive somewhere where I can kill you without alerting the neighbors.”

  Rafe smirked. “Hard to get away with much in these upscale neighborhoods.”

  Indeed. “That isn’t going to work,” I told Neil when he made shooing motions toward the Mini.

  He squinted at me. “Why is that?”

  “My car is parked in the alley. It’s blocking your garage doors. You won’t be able to get out.”

  Chagrin crossed his face, or maybe it was annoyed petulance, like the look Dix’s youngest, three-year-old Hannah, gets, when she’s refused another cookie.

  “I can go move it,” I suggested, while I reflected that if we didn’t get out of this situation alive, I c
ould forget about getting to Sweetwater for Abigail’s birthday party tomorrow.

  If I were found in a ditch tomorrow morning, my mother would probably blame Rafe. And Rafe would probably agree with her, except he’d be dead too. He’d got to his death believing he’d failed in protecting me, though.

  However, the fact that Rafe was with me, actually made me feel better about my chances—our chances—of survival. We’d taken down Perry Fortunato together. And Hector Gonzales. And most recently, Desmond Johnson. Bigger baddies than Neil Donnelly could ever hope to be.

  The only reason he was still in the driver’s seat, metaphorically speaking, was because of the gun. If I could get the gun away from him, he didn’t stand a chance against Rafe. Rafe had him by five inches or more, and probably thirty or forty pounds, all of it muscle. If it hadn’t been for the gun, and especially for the fact that it was pointed at me, Neil would have been a smear on the concrete by now.

  He was, understandably, more concerned about Rafe than he was about me. Which meant that when he told us we’d take my car, and gestured with the gun toward the doorway, most of his attention was on Rafe. “You go first.”

  The gun was on me, as insurance that Rafe wouldn’t do anything stupid on his way through the door, but Neil wasn’t actually looking at me. He was watching Rafe, preparing for an attack. Which made it pretty easy, everything considered, to swing my purse and knock the gun out of his hand.

  It went off, of course, and the bullet whizzed past me with a few inches to spare before punching through the blue metal of the Mini Cooper, leaving a jagged hole. And the car wasn’t the only thing that took a hit. A second later, Rafe’s fist hit Neil’s jaw with enough force to knock the young man off his feet and onto the concrete garage floor. I had to jump out of the way to avoid being felled like a bowling pin. Rafe landed on top of him, and if Neil hadn’t already been unconscious, from the double whammy of a fist to the jaw and the back of his head meeting the concrete, that would have done it.

  Rafe glanced up at me. “You OK, darlin’?”

  He wasn’t even breathing hard.

  “Fine,” I said. “Should I get the gun?” It had landed a few feet away, halfway under the car.

  He shook his head. “He ain’t going nowhere for a while. And when he does, that gun’s gonna be the least of his concerns. Toss me that fishing line over there.”

  I fetched the line from the hook on the wall and handed it to him, and watched as he secured Neil’s hands, none too gently. Unconscious, with his face smooth and those angry eyes closed, Neil looked younger than twenty two, almost innocent.

  “Don’t start feeling sorry for him,” Rafe said, clearly reading my face, or else my thoughts. “He did this to himself.”

  “Of course. Although it was horrible, what happened to him. What Brian did to him.”

  Rafe shrugged. “Stuff happens. That ain’t no excuse for killing innocent people.”

  It wasn’t. “I’ll go try see what’s taking Spicer and Truman so long,” I said. “And if I can’t get hold of them, I’ll call 911 and request a pickup for Neil.”

  Rafe nodded. “I’ll stay with him. If he wakes up, I’ll put him back under for a while. Don’t wanna risk him trying to escape.”

  No, indeed. “Enjoy yourself,” I told him, and headed out of the garage and into the alley, where I hoped the cell phone reception would be better.

  Chapter Twenty Five

  I went to Abigail’s birthday by myself the next evening, since Wendell had called to say that Rafe’s interview with the TBI had been scheduled for 4 o’clock that afternoon. Inconvenient, but I didn’t want him to miss it, so I told him that of course he had to go, and I’d see him when I got home. Part of me hadn’t expected him to come with me anyway, although of course I’d been hopeful. But it was going to take time, I was slowly coming to realize that. We’d jumped one hurdle this week, and made it safely to the other side. Getting him used to dealing with my family, and them used to seeing him, could wait. God willing, we’d have plenty of time yet to accomplish that.

  So I made the drive to Sweetwater by myself.

  It’s a small town a little more than an hour south of Nashville, southeast of Columbia and on the way to Pulaski, famous for being the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan. Pulaski, I mean, not Sweetwater. Sweetwater isn’t the birthplace of anyone or anything particularly well known, unless it’s Rafe. He was certainly infamous in and around Maury County ten or fifteen years ago.

  My siblings and I grew up in the Martin Mansion, a big antebellum house on a little knoll outside town, on the Columbia Highway. Back in the day, it was a full-fledged working plantation, and after the Civil War, during which the then-owner of the mansion perished, my great-great-great-grandmother Caroline had a relationship with one of the grooms, which resulted in my great-great-grandfather William. My mother doesn’t know this, but that’s the reason my sister Catherine, who takes after our father, is short and curvy with sallow skin and coarse, dark hair. Dix and I, who take after the Georgia Calverts, mother’s family, are taller and blond.

  I’m keeping the information in reserve, for whenever mother steps inexcusably out of line as far as Rafe is concerned.

  I wasn’t going to the mansion. I would end up there later, after the family party, to spend the night in my old room, but Abigail’s birthday celebration was at Dix’s house.

  He lives in a pseudo-Tudor in a subdivision of other brick McMansions: English manor homes and French Chateaus and Tuscan villas. They’re all located on postage-stamp sized lots, with so little room between them that you could stand in the living room in one and hand a cup of sugar to your neighbor in the other without ever leaving your house... had it not been for the fact that there are no windows. All the windows are either in the facade or the back wall. If there were windows in the side walls, you could also stand at your own window and look directly into your neighbors bedroom, and nobody wants that.

  I was the last one there when I pulled up to the curb just before six. The usual rush hour traffic had been made even worse by the rain, and I’d been delayed by two separate accidents, one of which involved multiple cars. Best as I could make out, it was just a chain reaction of fender benders and nothing serious. But it had blocked a couple of lanes, and backed up traffic for several miles.

  Dix’s driveway was full of cars. I recognized my sister Catherine’s minivan, my mother’s Chrysler, and Sheriff Satterfield’s truck. My heart sank when I recognized Todd’s SUV.

  I had expected him to be here, of course. Not only because his father is my mother’s main squeeze, but because Todd has been Dix’s best friend since they were both in diapers. And with Sheila gone, Dix needed all the support and love he could gather around himself and his daughters.

  Nonetheless, I wasn’t happy to realize I would have to deal with Todd. We hadn’t spoken since Christmas, since Rafe and I made things official between us. It was funny, but for someone who had suspected I had feelings for Rafe long before I had recognized anything but curiosity and a certain self-destructive fascination myself, Todd had been remarkably unwilling to take my word for it once I had admitted it to myself. For several months last autumn, he had clung stubbornly to the hope that my feelings for Rafe was something I’d outgrow if he gave me enough time. He’d probably be watching me like a cat at a mousehole all evening, just waiting for a sign of weakness, so he could explain to me, yet again, why I’d be happier with him. The fact that I was here alone would definitely fuel that fire. And not just for Todd, but for mother too.

  There was nothing I could do about it, though. I couldn’t turn around and drive back. Especially not after the curtains fluttered and someone realized I was there. I pulled the key out of the ignition, grabbed my purse and Abigail’s gifts from the passenger seat, and stepped out.

  It was Catherine who met me at the door.

  She peered over my shoulder into the road. “Are you alone?”

  If I hadn’t known better, I’d have said she so
unded disappointed. Or maybe that’s unfair: when we had Christmas dinner at Catherine’s house on Christmas Day, and I insisted that Rafe accompany me since he was in Sweetwater anyway, the two of them had gotten along rather well. Well enough that I’d felt just a touch of jealousy because of the easy way my sister related to my new boyfriend.

  My siblings may have had some reservations about my new relationship initially. Not like mother, but enough to cause concern, Dix in particular was hesitant to give us his blessing, both out of loyalty to Todd and because he’s my brother and as such doesn’t appreciate Rafe the way another woman would. But Catherine is a year older than Rafe, so the two of them spent three years together at Columbia High before my sister graduated. She knew him a lot better than I did back then, which is probably why that meeting at Christmas went so well.

  “Rafe had an appointment with the TBI this afternoon,” I explained. “We didn’t know how long it was going to take, so I came down on my own.” He and Wendell would probably grab a beer and some food later, hopefully to celebrate.

  “Bummer,” Catherine said and relieved me of my coat.

  “Why is that?”

  “Todd’s here. It amuses me to see them together.” She grinned.

  I lowered my voice, with a guilty look at the door to the dining room. “I thought you liked Todd.”

  “I don’t mind Todd. I just don’t like him for you. You were so miserable with Bradley even I could see it—”

  “I wasn’t miserable,” I protested, but not very strongly, since I knew she had a point. If I hadn’t been exactly miserable, at least I’d been a bit unfulfilled.

  Catherine shrugged. “I’m just glad you found someone who makes you happy. Never in my wildest dreams did I think it would be Rafe Collier, but if he’s who you want, more power to you.”

  “He’s who I want. And I wish he could have been here. Mother won’t ever learn to accept him if he’s never around. But this meeting was important.”