Oh, Lord. She wasn’t from around here—hadn’t been here more than a couple of years, as far as I knew—so she hadn’t grown up with Rafe or the stories about LaDonna Collier and the fate that can befall a girl who isn’t ‘careful.’
“He grew up in the Bog,” I said, since I assumed Darcy was fishing for information about Rafe and the fact that I had married the man everyone in Sweetwater had always thought of as LaDonna Collier’s good-for-nothing colored boy. “The trailer park on the south side of town. It isn’t there anymore—Ronnie Burke bought the land last summer and was going to put up affordable housing there, so it’s called Mallard Meadows now, although the project is on ice for the next twenty-five to life—”
Just like Ronnie.
“I heard about that,” Darcy nodded. “Your brother was quite upset about the fact that Todd Satterfield was a suspect.”
“He had an alibi. And as soon as he coughed it up,” and threw Marley Cartwright under the bus, “it was obvious that he couldn’t have done it.”
Maybe Mother was wrong and it wasn’t Dix Darcy had her eye on. Maybe it was Todd.
I wasn’t sure I liked that idea much better. If Marley wanted Todd, I wanted her to have him. She’d been through enough; she deserved some happiness with a guy who wanted her. Assuming Todd could be convinced he did.
“Anyway,” I said, “that’s where Rafe grew up. In a trailer in the Bog. With his mother and grandfather. And of course I grew up in the mansion.”
Darcy nodded. “I grew up in Mobile.”
“Alabama?”
She nodded, and waited while the waitress placed two glasses of iced tea on the table and withdrew, with the assurance that our food would be right out. “I haven’t lived here long. I worked in Birmingham until a couple of years ago.”
“How did you end up here?” Sweetwater is a nice enough place, but it isn’t exactly the center of the world. I don’t know many people who have moved here to work. A few to get married, like Mother—who’s from Savannah originally, and one of the Georgia Calverts. But most of the population is here because they were born here.
“Your brother was advertising for a new receptionist,” Darcy said, “and I applied.”
“Was something going on in Birmingham you wanted to get away from? Or were you just looking for a change of pace?” Or had the ad perchance included a picture of my brother and she’d been struck by lust?
“My husband had left me,” Darcy said, “so I was looking for something different. But I wasn’t looking up here. I was thinking I’d go back to Mobile.”
“What changed your mind?”
Something had. She was here, after all.
“This came in the mail.”
She dug into her bag and came out with an envelope. From it, she pulled a folded-up piece of newspaper.
It was a bit like déjà vu. On our first date, Rafe had done the same thing. His newspaper clipping had been about the shooting death of a young man by the name of Tyrell Jenkins thirty-one years ago, before Rafe himself was born. Tyrell had been Rafe’s father and LaDonna’s boyfriend, and Old Jim Collier was the one who shot him. The clipping had come from LaDonna’s possessions in the trailer in the Bog after she’d died.
Darcy’s clipping wasn’t as exciting. When she unfolded it, I saw it was part of a page from the classified section of the Sweetwater Reporter. The name of the newspaper was up in the corner. An ad halfway down the page was circled in black magic marker.
“Receptionist needed for Maury County law office. Two years experience necessary. Law background preferred. Send resumes to Martin and McCall...”
I handed it back. “Who sent it to you?”
“That’s just it,” Darcy said, folding the clipping and sliding it back into the envelope. “I have no idea. But I sent in my resume and was invited to come in for an interview. Then they offered me the job.”
“And you never found out who sent you the ad?”
She shook her head. “I asked your brother if he knew—after he’d hired me—and he looked at me like I was crazy.”
I could well imagine. “The most likely explanation is that it was one of your friends in Birmingham.”
“Yes,” Darcy said, “but how would one of my friends in Birmingham know about a job in a little town in Tennessee?”
“We’re not that far from Birmingham.” A couple hours. “And people from here do go there occasionally. I went to high school with a girl who lives there now. Darla. She teaches gym.”
“I don’t know her,” Darcy said. “And anyway, I asked them. They said they hadn’t.”
That was a little weird, then. It wasn’t like any of her friends would have a reason to lie. At least not on the surface of it.
“The envelope was mailed from here,” Darcy added.
“Sweetwater?”
“That’s why I asked your brother if he’d mailed it. I thought maybe he’d heard about me or something like that, and wanted to make sure I applied for the job.”
“But he said no?”
Darcy nodded.
“When was this? A couple years ago, you said?”
“More like two and a half,” Darcy said, which meant that Sheila had been alive and well at the time. She might have sent the clipping, if somehow she had known about Darcy. We’d never know now, since we couldn’t ask her. But Dix certainly hadn’t had any reason to do it, or to lie.
“That’s interesting,” I said politely, as the waitress approached with two salad bowls, “but I don’t know anything about it. I wasn’t even in Sweetwater two and a half years ago.”
At that time, if memory served, I had just managed to ditch Bradley and was working at the makeup counter at the Green Hills Mall to make ends meet. “I didn’t send the clipping,” I added, “and I don’t know who did.”
The waitress deposited a Cobb salad in front of each of us, cast an experienced eye over the glasses of tea to determine the need for a refill, and took herself off.
“I didn’t think you did,” Darcy said, lifting her fork preparatory to digging in. “That’s not what I wanted to ask you.”
“What did you want to ask?” I armed myself with my own fork and plunged it into the lettuce while I waited for Darcy to search out the words she wanted. It took a few seconds.
“You’ve had to investigate some murders and things,” she said eventually.
“I wouldn’t say I had to,” I answered, since I’d mostly inserted myself where I had no business being, “but yes, I have.”
“When your sister-in-law was killed, you were the one who figured out what happened.”
With a little help from Marley Cartwright and a few other people, including Rafe. But yes, I had figured it out, and had had occasion to pepper-spray the murderer, too. It had felt good, even if I’d gotten shot for my trouble.
“And when Todd’s ex-wife was killed, you were the one who figured out who did it.”
With, again, a lot of help from a lot of people.
“That was personal,” I said. “Sheila was family. And Jolynn died in my bed. It might have been me. We were concerned it was supposed to be me. I had to do something about it. But I’m not a PI or anything. I don’t have a license to snoop.”
“I’d like to hire you to look into something for me.”
“I’m not sure I can do that,” I said. “And not just legally. Rafe wants me to be careful. I’m pregnant. I can’t go chasing murderers around.”
Darcy shook her head. “There are no murderers. I just want some help figuring out where I came from. And how I ended up here.”
I put my fork down. “You told me you grew up in Mobile. And you ended up here because someone sent you that newspaper clipping. And I can’t think of any way we can possibly figure out who. Not more than two years later.”
The staff at the post office wouldn’t remember who came in to mail a letter that long ago. And that was if anyone had come in at all. It’s easy to stick a stamp on an envelope and drop it in the mailb
ox. Unless you need postage, you never need set foot inside the post office.
Darcy nodded. “That’s not what I want. I want you to figure out where I was born, and who my parents were.”
I opened my mouth again, and she continued, before I could tell her that her parents were the people in Mobile who had brought her up, “I was adopted. My birth certificate says that my parents are my parents, so growing up, I never knew any different.”
“So how do you know you’re adopted?”
“My parents died,” Darcy said. “Suddenly, in a car accident. Four years ago now.”
“Both of them at once?”
She nodded. “I was the executrix for their estate. I found a letter in their effects, that they had left me. One of those ‘to be opened after my death’ things you read about.”
You certainly do read about them. But to be honest, I had thought those appeared only in books.
“They hadn’t wanted to tell me as long as they were alive,” Darcy said. “They wrote that they were afraid it would make me feel different toward them. But when they were dead, they wanted me to know the truth.”
I pushed my salad bowl away. The lettuce was wilted, and anyway, I had inhaled most of it. “I’m so sorry.”
Darcy shrugged. “The letter said I was born at a hospital in Nashville, but they didn’t tell me which one, and they said they weren’t told who my real parents were. I guess that’s common.”
I’d come face to face with a lot of adoption practices, good and mostly bad, during the investigation into Sheila’s murder, and yes, closed adoptions are common. Thirty-plus years ago, they would have been more common. Open adoptions, where the adoptive parents know the birth parents and vice versa, are a fairly new thing.
“It is,” I said. “Rafe has a thirteen-year-old son named David, who was adopted away at birth. Rafe didn’t know about him until last year, and anyway, he was in prison when David was born.”
Darcy swallowed wrong, and went into a coughing fit. I pushed the glass of iced tea at her.
“He served two years for assault and battery. I’m sorry. I thought you knew.”
Darcy shook her head, dashing tears away from her eyes with he knuckles.
“While Rafe was eighteen and in prison, this girl he’d knocked up the previous spring had a baby. It was taken away from her and given to someone else, and she was told the baby was stillborn. It took her years to track him down.”
“That’s terrible.” Darcy had gotten the coughing under control and was wiping the last of the tears away with her napkin. “What happened?”
“She died,” I said. “David’s still with his adoptive parents. They’re great. He and Rafe are getting to know one another. He was here for the wedding. Best man. You saw him, didn’t you?”
Darcy nodded. “He looked like a miniature version of your husband. I thought maybe they were brothers. Or half-brothers.”
I shook my head. “Father and son. Although I guess their relationship is really more fraternal. David already has a father. Sam’s great. None of us want to change that. David’s happy. And we all want him to stay that way.”
Darcy nodded.
“At any rate, it wasn’t just a closed adoption, it was a secretive and pretty much illegal one. The people responsible are either in prison or dead now. But closed adoptions are common. Your parents probably had no idea who your biological parents are.”
“Thank you for that,” Darcy said. “I don’t want to resent them, you know? They were my mother and father. They brought me up. And I can understand that it would upset them to think that I’d want to know where I came from and who my other parents are. I understand why they chose to wait until after they died to tell me. But I have a right to know who I am, don’t I?”
It was hard to argue with that. And at any rate, I didn’t have a chance to, because my phone jingled.
“I’m sorry,” I said, digging into my purse for it, “but I might have to take this.” It wasn’t Rafe’s ring tone—just my generic incoming call—but it could still be important.
“No problem.” Darcy pushed her chair back. “I’ll go freshen up before heading back to the office.”
That’s code for hitting the bathroom, as I’m sure you know. I nodded and looked at the phone.
Alexandra Puckett, it said.
Alexandra was the sixteen-year-old daughter of my colleague Brenda Puckett when Brenda was murdered last fall. We’d struck up a kind of friendship in the aftermath of Brenda’s demise, and Alexandra would call me once in a while, when she had a question or needed something, or just wanted to talk.
Usually about something she didn’t feel comfortable talking to her dad about.
I put the phone to my ear. “Hi, Alexandra.”
“Hi, Savannah,” Alexandra said.
I waited a second, but when she didn’t go on, I asked, “What’s up?”
“Where are you?”
“A Cracker Barrel off the interstate in Sweetwater,” I said, glancing out the window to where the RVs and trailers were parked.
“You’re not in Nashville?”
Obviously not. “I’ll be back in a couple of days. Rafe’s working on something this weekend, and he wants me out of the way. Is something wrong?”
Once, a couple of days after her mother’s murder, Alexandra had called me late at night and asked me to pick her up from a party that hadn’t turned out the way she had wanted it to. As it happened, I’d been on my way home from having dinner with Rafe when she called, so I took him with me. It turned out to be a good move on my part, since the neighborhood where the party was, wasn’t one I’d have been comfortable traversing on my own back then.
As it happened, it wasn’t too far from where I’d ended up living. And I’d still think twice before venturing down that particular street.
“No,” Alexandra said. And amended it to, “Maybe.”
“Do you need help? Where are you?”
“At home,” Alexandra said. “I was sick this morning, so I had to stay home from school. And I don’t need help. Or not right now. But I’d like to talk to you about something.”
She and everyone else.
I glanced around, at the full dining room, the waitresses milling back and forth, and Darcy, making her way back to the table. “This isn’t a great time for me. Like I said, I’m at a Cracker Barrel. There are people everywhere. Can I call you back? Maybe in an hour or so, when I’m back at the house?”
“Your mother’s house?”
“Yes,” I said as Darcy took her seat across the table again. “I’ll call you when I’m back at my mother’s house.”
“OK,” Alexandra said, although she sounded a little forlorn.
“Are you sure you’re all right?”
“I’m fine. I just want someone to talk to.”
“Boyfriend trouble?” That had been the problem last year. At that party I’d had to rescue her from, she had seen a check her mother had written to her boyfriend the morning Brenda was murdered. I’m not sure whether it had upset Alexandra more that her boyfriend might have killed her mother, or that he had taken money to stop seeing Alexandra, but either way, she’d been distraught.
Now she made a sound that sounded a bit like a sob, but I think it was actually a laugh. At least she didn’t sound like she was crying when she told me, “You could say that.”
Darcy arched her brows on the other side of the table.
“I’ll call you back,” I told Alexandra. “Just hang on. I’ll call you later, and then we’ll figure it out. OK?” Whatever it was, it couldn’t be that bad. She was only seventeen.
“OK,” Alexandra said.
“I’ll talk to you then.” I disconnected and dropped the phone back in my bag. “Sorry about that.”
“No problem,” Darcy said. “Trouble?”
“A sort of friend of mine. She was down for the wedding, too, so you probably saw her. Tall girl, seventeen years old, with long, black hair. Her brother Austin goes to sc
hool with David Flannery.”
“I think I may have noticed them. Is she all right?”
“She said she was. She just wants to talk. And she doesn’t have a mother to talk to. Sometimes she talks to me instead.” I guess I was a sort of an older sister substitute, or something. “I’ll call her back later and find out what’s going on.”
Darcy nodded.
“To get back to where we left off when the phone rang, I agree that you have a right to know where you came from. But I’m not sure how to go about figuring it out. If your parents didn’t know, and your birth certificate says that they’re your biological parents...”
A bell rang faintly in the back of my head and I trailed off.
“What?” Darcy said, tilting her head. For a second, the expression on her face was familiar, and I wrinkled my brows. “What?” she said again.
I shook it off. “Nothing. David’s birth certificate says that Ginny and Sam are his biological parents, too. And when Marley’s baby was stolen and given to someone else, their birth certificate said that Oliver was theirs.” Although they’d called him Owen, if memory served.
“So?” Darcy said.
“So that was something St. Jerome’s Hospital did. That’s where David was born. St. Jerome’s Hospital in Brentwood. It’s about forty, forty-five minutes from here.”
“We could go there,” Darcy said.
We could. Although I didn’t think it would do any good. “None of the doctors who were involved in the adoption ring are there anymore. And I think the police confiscated all the records for the adopted babies, so they aren’t at the hospital anymore. I could call my friend Tamara Grimaldi and ask her about them...”
“Would you?” Darcy asked eagerly.
“Sure. Maybe, if she’s available, we could run up to Nashville tomorrow and go through what they have. See if the records go back far enough that you might have been one of the babies born there.”
“Do you think your friend will let us?”
Maybe, maybe not. Detective Grimaldi likes me, but at the same time, she can be a stickler for procedure. “I’ll call her and ask. Just be prepared that it might be a big waste of time. We may not find anything.”
Darcy nodded. “But we could get lucky.”
Uncertain Terms (Savannah Martin Mysteries Book 12) Page 5
