Uncertain Terms (Savannah Martin Mysteries Book 12)

by Jenna Bennett

  Uncertain Terms

  Savannah Martin Mystery #12

  Jenna Bennett

  Contents

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Savannah’s husband, TBI agent Rafe Collier, is back in disguise and undercover, getting into the middle of a gang war. And since he wants to keep his pregnant wife out of harm’s way, Savannah agrees to spend a couple of days under her mother’s roof in her quaint and quiet hometown of Sweetwater, Tennessee.

  * * *

  But out of harm’s way doesn’t necessarily mean out of trouble.

  * * *

  When her brother’s receptionist asks Savannah’s help in looking for her birth parents, Savannah is happy for the distraction, even when the search takes them to places she’d rather not go again. From Doctor Denise Seaver and the Tennessee Women’s Prison, to St. Jerome’s Hospital and then back to Sweetwater again, the hunt is on.

  * * *

  But when the final denouement reveals lifelong deception and betrayal much too close to home, Savannah wonders whether knowing the truth really is better than blissful ignorance.

  One

  My husband showed up to my mother’s birthday party with dreadlocks halfway down his back, a big, fat gold hoop in his ear, gold chains around his neck, and two gold teeth that hadn’t been part of his smile when I said goodbye to him the day before.

  I had made the hour-and-a-little-more drive from Nashville to Sweetwater the previous afternoon, to have dinner with Mother and to be there in the morning to admit the caterers so she could go to the spa and get prettified for her party later on.

  Rafe, meanwhile, had stayed in Nashville, and—it turned out—had taken the opportunity to get in character for his latest undercover mission.

  My new-minted husband—we’d been married just a bit less than two months—had spent ten years undercover for the Tennessee Bureau of Investigations before we met. Or before we met again, I should say, since Rafe also grew up in Sweetwater, and we’d gone to high school together for a year before he graduated, went to prison, and then disappeared into the TBI’s undercover program.

  It’s a long story. Suffice it to say that we’d met again a year ago, just before my mother’s birthday last August, and he’d retired from undercover work the previous Christmas, after his cover was blown sky high. The only reason he was going back into it now, in a very limited capacity, was because one of the rookies he was training had gotten himself recruited by a street gang, and Rafe felt responsible enough for the young man to want to back him up as he set about infiltrating.

  And since his ten years undercover had been spent trying to root out the biggest SATG—South American Theft Gang—in the Southeast, it was unlikely that anyone in the Crips or Bloods—or whichever street gang Jamal was affiliated with—would know Rafe from Adam. They’d traveled in very different circles up until now.

  So I had driven to Sweetwater by myself yesterday, and Rafe had stayed behind in Nashville to work. He was supposed to come down for the birthday party, and as people started arriving, I kept my ears peeled for the sound of the big Harley-Davidson he rides. When I heard it rumble up to the front steps of my ancestral home, the Martin Mansion, I excused myself and went out to greet him.

  Only to stop, with my jaw unbecomingly slack, on the top step. “What happened to you?”

  He arched a brow. That ability hadn’t changed, anyway.

  “It’s my mother’s birthday,” I added. “And you look like some sort of combination between Captain Jack Sparrow and Bob Marley.”

  That got me a grin, and a flash of gold.

  I moved a step closer and squinted. “Oh, my God! What did they do to your teeth?”

  He chuckled. “It’s just decoration. It’ll come off.”

  “Can you take it off now?”

  He shook his head. “Sorry, darlin’. The dentist’s gonna have to do that. It’s stuck till then. But it’s just for a couple days. Until we get this business with Jamal sorted.”

  Sure.

  “No big deal.”

  Easy for him to say.

  “It’s my mother’s birthday!” I said. Or perhaps ‘wailed’ would be a better word. “Everyone’s here. My brother and sister. The sheriff.” My mother’s boyfriend. “Todd.” The sheriff’s son, and the man my mother had intended for me to marry before I chose Rafe instead. The man who had intended to marry me, before I said no. “Half the town. And you look like the worst stereotype of what they’ve accused you of being all these years!”

  He didn’t say anything for a moment, just stood there at the bottom of the steps next to the Harley and looked up at me.

  “This is terrible!” I insisted.

  “I can leave.”

  His voice had all the calmness mine lacked. In fact, it was devoid of emotion. So was his face.

  I took a breath. And another one. “No. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean...”

  But I couldn’t finish the sentence, because—yes—I had meant exactly what I said.

  “I don’t want you to leave,” I added. “I just...”

  “Don’t wanna walk in there with me looking like this.”

  Right. And yet not exactly right.

  “I love you,” I said. “I don’t care what you look like.” Not for my own sake. “If you want to keep the teeth and the dreadlocks after this is over, you can.” Although I hoped he wouldn’t. I might not stop loving him if he sported dreads and two gold teeth, but I wasn’t particularly turned on by the new look, either. “It’s just that this is Sweetwater. These are the people who didn’t have a good word to say about you your whole life. Mother has just started liking you. I don’t want that to change.”

  “Here’s the thing,” Rafe told me. “There ain’t much I can do about it. The gold veneers are stuck until the dentist takes’em off again. The hair is stuck until the hair dresser cuts it off. I can take out the earring and pull up my pants—”

  I think I may have neglected to mention that he was wearing baggy jeans of the sort that were belted under his butt, exposing a pair of plaid boxers, with the crotch hanging somewhere in the vicinity of his knees. He looked like his legs were a foot-and-a-half long. I had no idea how he’d even managed to straddle the bike on the way here.

  “That would help,” I said. “You couldn’t have waited until tomorrow to do this?”

  “Wendell didn’t know it was your mama’s birthday when he scheduled it, darlin’.”

  Wendell Craig is Rafe’s superior in the TBI. While Rafe was undercover, Wendell was his handler. And while I have all the respect in the world for Wendell, at the moment, I wanted to kill him.

  “Couldn’t you have told him about the party? And put the makeover off for a day?”

  “Not really,” Rafe said. “This stuff takes time. I bet I spent more time getting worked on today than your mama did.”

  My mother had spent several hours at the spa, having her hair tinted and her face and nails polished. And yet, given the transformation, it wouldn’t surprise me if
Rafe had spent more.

  At least now I understood why he hadn’t buzzed his hair the way he usually does for the past couple of weeks. It was so the extensions could have something to hang onto.

  “That’s a lot of hair,” I said, eyeing it.

  “Gives me a headache.”

  I didn’t doubt it. He was used to being almost bald, his hair so short it felt like fuzz against my palms. This had to be close to ten pounds of dreadlocks weighing down his head.

  I hated to think what would happen when they got wet. He might fall on his butt from the weight.

  And having a constant headache didn’t bode well for our sex life. I was struggling with baby hormones—another way of saying I was frisky a lot of the time, now that the morning sickness had passed—and so far, Rafe had been more than happy to satisfy my needs, whenever and wherever I wanted. But if he was going to be coming home with headaches every night, I might be in for a lonely few days or weeks.

  A car turned into the driveway, and we kept quiet while we watched it come to a stop behind all the others. Mother’s lived in Sweetwater most of her adult life—my father was born here—and she has a fair few friends and acquaintances. There were a lot of cars.

  This last one, a Honda, went silent, and after a moment, the driver’s side door opened and a woman came out. Tall and dark-haired, a few years older than Rafe—around thirty-four or -five, at a guess—in a nice, but not flashy, black dress. Darcy, my brother Dix’s and brother-in-law Jonathan’s paralegal and Jill of all trades down at the law office my great-grandfather started on the square in Sweetwater back when the country was young.

  We watched as she came closer. The dismay crossing her face when she saw Rafe was unmistakable. “Nobody told me this was supposed to be a costume party.”

  I giggled. Rafe rolled his eyes.

  “It isn’t,” I said. “You look lovely, Darcy. And very appropriate.”

  “OK.” Although she didn’t sound sure. “What’s with the... um... ghetto outfit?” She looked him up and down.

  “It’s what I wear to work,” Rafe said.

  “Oh.”

  “He works for the TBI,” I explained. “The Tennessee Bureau of Investigations. Organized crime. This week, he’s dealing with street gangs.”

  “Oh.” Darcy hesitated. “Has your mother seen him?”

  I shook my head.

  “You got here just in time,” Rafe told her. “‘Scuse me.”

  He brushed past us both and headed up the stairs. I scrambled after, and Darcy brought up the rear, obviously determined not to miss anything.

  Rafe’s legs are a lot longer than mine, even in saggy pants. And I was wearing heels, to go with my fancy party dress. Mother’s birthday parties are always semi-formal. The sheriff and his son, as well as my brother Dix and brother-in-law Jonathan, were all wearing tasteful suits with ties. And the women, like Darcy and me, were in cocktail dresses and heels. Diamonds sparkled and pearls glowed dully in ears and around necks.

  I caught up just as Rafe stopped in the doorway to the parlor, where Mother sat on Great-Aunt Ida’s uncomfortable turn-of-the-(last)-century loveseat upholstered in peach velvet, accepting her accolades and well-wishes.

  And I was in time to see the reaction his appearance caused. Mother looked up, and her face went from welcoming to shocked. Her eyes rounded, until I was worried her eyeballs would fall out of her skull and into her lap, and for a moment her jaw dropped, just as mine had. Until she hiked it up.

  By then, everyone else had turned toward the door as well, and now everyone sported the same wide eyes and open mouths. I thought I saw a flicker of amused malice in Todd’s eyes, but it could have been my imagination.

  Mother cleared her throat. “Rafael,” she managed.

  “Sorry, Miz Martin.” His voice was calm. “I can’t stay long. I gotta get back to work. I just wanted to stop by and say happy birthday and give you this.”

  He hauled a little box out of his pants pocket—somewhere down around his knees—and made his way over to the sofa where she was sitting. There, he leaned down to give her a peck on the cheek—she didn’t even flinch, but that could have been because she was still in shock—and dropped the box in her lap.

  And then he withdrew. First from the sofa, then from the room. He glanced at me as he brushed past, but didn’t say anything. I heard his footsteps cross the foyer, and then the sound of the front door opening and closing. It wasn’t until I heard the roar of the Harley’s engine, that I realized he was actually planning to leave.

  I turned and ran, but I was too slow. By the time I had the front door open and made it onto the steps, he was halfway down the driveway. The tires screeched as he made the turn from the driveway onto the Columbia Road, and for a second I was afraid he’d slide and end up in the ditch on the other side. But then he straightened the bike and gunned the engine. The Harley took off up the road with a roar and a screech of tires. I have no idea whether he’d even noticed me standing there.

  By the time I got back inside to the parlor, the shock had worn off and people were talking again. I could hear the buzz of voices as I crossed the foyer. Three guesses as to what they were buzzing about.

  Mother was watching the doorway, and when I came back into the opening, her brows pulled together.

  She straightened them out immediately—there’s a reason she’s fifty-nine and looks ten years younger—but not before I had read distress on her face.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I had no idea he’d show up looking like that.”

  Mother didn’t answer, although everyone else stopped talking and turned to look at me.

  “He has a new undercover assignment he’s been getting ready for.”

  The wrinkle came back. “I thought he was through with undercover assignments.”

  “He is,” I assured her, “for the most part. This is sort of a special case.”

  She looked politely inquiring.

  “One of the boys—Jamal, do you remember him from back in June?”

  Mother had met Jamal, Clayton, and José on what should have been my wedding day, when Rafe didn’t show up at the courthouse to get married, and the police as well as the TBI had joined forces to try to find him.

  “He’s been recruited by a street gang. They’re taking action against another gang, the one that killed Jamal’s brother, so they asked Jamal to go in with them. And he said yes, because he thought he’d be able to feed the TBI some information they could use to take some of these guys down.”

  “And Rafael?”

  My mother is one of only two people I know who use Rafe’s full name. The other is my boss, Tim.

  “He’s backing up Jamal. And since he’s somewhat well known in certain circles, he needed to change the way he looks. But I’m sorry he showed up here looking like that. I didn’t know he was going to do it.”

  “Darling,” Mother said, “he’s your husband. He’s always welcome here, no matter what he looks like.”

  My jaw dropped again.

  This was disconcerting, to say the least. Somehow, when I hadn’t been looking, I had turned into my mother, and she had turned into me.

  How was it that I was the one worried about the way Rafe looked, and she wasn’t?

  She tapped the underside of her own chin—a silent reminder to hike my jaw up—and added, “Did he leave?”

  I nodded.

  “Don’t you think you should go after him?”

  “He’s gone,” I said. “The way he took off, he’s probably halfway to Nashville by now.”

  “He’s your husband,” Mother said.

  Well, yes. He was. But... “I don’t want to miss your birthday.”

  “You were here last night, darling,” Mother told me. “And this morning. Thank you for handling things while I was at the spa.”

  “Of course.” It was the least I could do. I’d done it last year, too.

  She didn’t say anything else, just looked at me. Expectantly.

 
“He’s upset,” I said. And I wasn’t looking forward to having to deal with it. At least not until he’d had a little time to cool down.

  “All the more reason to go and talk to him, darling.”

  I suppose. I just never thought I’d see the day when my mother would encourage me—push me—to go after Rafe rather than stick around for her birthday celebration.

  “What was in the box?” I asked. As a distraction and maybe to get a little time to think. And honestly, because I was curious what my husband had found to buy for my mother, a woman who pretty much had everything.

  She lifted her hand. A slim gold chain dangled from one of her fingers. Necklace. At the end of it hung something that looked a little like a four-leaf clover, or maybe a four-petaled flower, with a stone in the middle.

  “Pretty,” I said. Elegant, and very tasteful. A lot more tasteful than any of the clunky chains Rafe had sported this evening.

  “Looks like a tabono,” Darcy said, craning her neck.

  “A what?”

  She glanced at me. “Tabono. African strength symbol. The loops symbolize oars or paddles. It stands for strength and perseverance.”

  Probably because that’s what it takes to row a boat. Strength and perseverance.

  Not that rowing a boat was why Rafe had given my mother a strength symbol. Mother wouldn’t be caught dead rowing. But two months ago, she’d run afoul a serial killer bent on taking out Rafe and anyone else he had to, to get to him. Including Rafe’s son David, who had made his way to Sweetwater and my mother’s house.

  It’s a long story. I had gotten there in time to save Mother and David, and Rafe had gotten there in time to save me, so it was all good. But Mother was still feeling a bit rocky about the whole experience—as was I—and I imagined the charm for strength and perseverance had come out of that.

  Very thoughtful of him, too. And it was elegant enough that Mother might actually wear it.

  She looked at me. “Savannah, dear...”

  I rolled my eyes and got to my feet. “I’m going.”