Home Stretch

by Jenna Bennett

  And this was upsetting.

  I swallowed hard. “Is she hurt?”

  While I’d been starting at Mrs. Jenkins, Rafe had found yesterday’s T-shirt and pulled it on. Now he shook his head. “She says no.”

  I lowered my voice. “Whose blood is it?”

  Whoever it belonged to had lost quite a bit of it. More, I’d guess, than they could easily afford to lose.

  Certainly a lot more than would result from a nosebleed. Or something like a skinned knee.

  To lose this much blood, someone would have to have been shot. Or stabbed. Or otherwise very badly hurt.

  “Don’t know.” And he sounded grim.

  “We have to call Tamara Grimaldi,” I said.

  He gave me a look of active dislike. “Why?”

  Wasn’t it obvious? “She’s a homicide detective. If someone’s dead, she’d know about it.” Or she would want to know about it.

  “You gonna sic the police on my grandma, darlin’?”

  “It’s not like Mrs. Jenkins—” I began. And trailed off. “Have you lost your mind? Your grandmother didn’t kill anyone. Why would she? How would she? It’s not like they leave scalpels sitting around the place. Or butcher knives. And anyway, she wouldn’t have had the strength to stab anyone enough times to cause this.”

  Don’t ask me how I know. Let’s just say that I’ve seen more than my fair share of dead bodies.

  “Besides,” I added, “why would she want to kill anyone? Who would she want to kill?”

  “Until we figure out who’s dead,” my husband told me grimly, “there’s no way to know.”

  “I still say we should call Grimaldi.”

  He shook his head. “I’m not talking to Tammy about this. Not until I know what’s going on.”

  I glanced at Mrs. Jenkins. She was paying no attention to us, just sat on the sofa with her hands in her lap, staring at nothing. Dripping. Her eyes were vacant and her mouth slack. Hard to say whether she was scared, or felt guilty, or really had no idea what was going on.

  I turned back to Rafe and lowered my voice. Just because she didn’t look like she was paying attention, didn’t mean she wasn’t listening. “She wouldn’t arrest your grandmother. Especially not in her condition.”

  “She’d put her away,” Rafe responded, his own voice also low. “Into some sort of facility. Where they’d lock her in.”

  They would. They’d have to. She had this habit of wandering off, so the doors had been locked at the facility where she’d been staying, too.

  Until some point yesterday, when she’d found a way out.

  Strange that they hadn’t called us—or called Rafe—to notify us that she was missing.

  But he had other things to worry about at the moment, so I didn’t mention that particular wrinkle. There’d be time enough to deal with it tomorrow. Or later today, since we were past midnight. Instead I went back to the main point.

  “We have to call some kind of authority. With this much blood, something’s happened to somebody. We can’t just ignore it.”

  “I ain’t saying we ignore it. I’ll figure it out.”

  “I don’t think you have the authority to do that,” I told him. “If it’s a police matter, the police are supposed to be involved. They ask you for help if they need it. Not the other way around.”

  My husband works for the TBI, the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation. And while he’d worked with the police on many occasions before—including with our friend, homicide detective Tamara Grimaldi—the chain of events had always started with the MNPD asking the TBI for help. Not the other way around. And certainly not with the TBI refusing to call in the MNPD on what I suspected—what he had to suspect—was a murder.

  “I’ll take care of it.” He got to his feet. “I need you to get her cleaned up and into bed. I’ll mop up the floor.”

  I stared at him. “Wouldn’t that be destroying evidence?”

  “I’m not telling you to incinerate her clothes. Just give her a shower and dry her off. I’m not calling the cops tonight. And I don’t want her going to sleep with blood all over her.”

  It sounded like destroying evidence to me. But he was a TBI agent, and I wasn’t. So while I questioned his judgment, there wasn’t much I could do about it. I wasn’t about to go over his head—or behind his back—and call Grimaldi, no matter how much I thought we should. “OK.”

  He looked relieved. Apparently he didn’t like arguing any better than I did. “Thanks, darlin’.”

  “No problem,” I said, although between you and me, I wasn’t so sure. I had a feeling we were in for a bumpy ride, and I was pretty sure his actions tonight wouldn’t make things any easier.

  Two

  I hosed Mrs. Jenkins down and got her situated in the lavender bedroom upstairs. It had been hers during the month or two she lived here with Rafe last year, although to be honest, I couldn’t tell whether she recognized it or not. I wasn’t sure whether she recognized me, or knew where she was. She went along with me upstairs, and did everything I told her to do. Got undressed, got into the shower, scrubbed, dried, put on one of my (short) nightgowns—she’s a lot smaller than me—and got into bed.

  “We’re right across the hall,” I told her, as I prepared to turn the light out. “If you need anything, just yell.”

  “Yes, baby.” She gave me a toothless smile. I turned the light out and closed the door.

  A moment later, I staggered back into our room—only to find the bed empty.

  I stared at it for a moment, slowly processing the thoughts.

  Rafe wasn’t there.

  I wanted to go back to sleep, but I didn’t want to sleep in an empty bed.

  Rafe must still be downstairs.

  I made my slow way down the stairs, and found him sitting on the sofa in the parlor. The blood was gone, and the sofa was mostly dry again. “Problem?”

  He arched a brow.

  “Beyond the obvious. Don’t you want to come back to bed? It’s still early.” Or late. Not time to get up.

  “Not sure I could sleep,” he told me.

  Lucky guy. I was dead on my feet, and couldn’t wait to shut my eyes again. But I did the right thing. I staggered across the floor, in mostly a straight line, and sat down across from him. “Want to talk about it?”

  He looked at me for a second. “She asleep?”

  “She’s in bed. I’m not sure she’s sleeping. But she looked pretty beat, so I don’t think it’ll be long.”

  He nodded. “Anything I need to know about?”

  “I didn’t see any marks on her,” I said, “if that’s what you mean. No scratches, no wounds. A few bruises, but that could be from anything, really. People bruise more easily when they’re older.”

  It didn’t mean that she’d been in a fight. Not at all.

  “She’s wearing one of my nightgowns,” I added. “I left her clothes on the floor upstairs. I thought you might want them.” To run DNA on the blood, or something. “They’re nasty.”

  He still didn’t say anything, and I continued. “It took a lot of blood to make them look like that, Rafe.”

  He nodded. “I know.”

  “Could somebody lose that much blood and still survive?”

  He shrugged. Hard to say whether it was anger, or helplessness, or just frustration.

  “What are you going to do?”

  He just looked at me for a second. I got the sense that maybe he was weighing what he wanted to tell me. Or deciding what he didn’t want me to know. Or maybe he was just trying to figure things out.

  “Right now,” he said eventually, “I’m gonna stay down here. Just in case.”

  “In case of what?”

  “In case she wakes up and comes downstairs. Or in case someone knocks on the door. Who knows if someone followed her here?”

  He sounded angry. Not with me, I assumed, but with the situation. Or the position it had put him in.

  And me pushing him wasn’t likely to help. So I just nodded
. “I’m going to go upstairs and try to get some more sleep, while I still can. Maybe we can talk more about it in the morning.”

  He nodded, and looked relieved. Maybe he didn’t know exactly what he was going to do yet, and me asking him made him worry.

  I got up and went over to kiss him. “I love you.”

  His arms held on for a second longer than necessary before he let go. “I love you, too.”

  “We’ll figure it out.”

  He nodded.

  “I’ll see you in the morning,” I said, and headed for the hallway and the stairs. He didn’t say anything to call me back, and when I glanced into the parlor on my way up the stairs, he was staring straight ahead, his face grim.

  We might figure it out, but even when we did, I had a feeling the outcome wasn’t necessarily going to be a good one.

  * * *

  I slept late the next morning. I usually sleep late, and with the excitement in the middle of the night, I was extra tired. It was past nine by the time I rolled out of bed and into the shower. Mrs. Jenkins’s clothes from last night were gone from the tile floor. Rafe must have picked them up. The door to the lavender bedroom was still shut, so hopefully Mrs. Jenkins was asleep. I could hear the sound of the TV from downstairs—the news—so Rafe was awake. And maybe checking to see whether there were any breaking stories about murder overnight.

  I went through my morning ritual in a hurry, and made my way downstairs, with my hair still wet and my makeup undone. By now, the door to the lavender bedroom was open, and the bed empty, so Mrs. J must be downstairs. I wondered whether she’d headed down in my nightgown, or whether she’d dug up something else to wear.

  My nightgown, as it turned out. They were in the kitchen: Rafe at the stove scrambling eggs, and Mrs. Jenkins at the table, wreathed in toothless smiles. “Morning, baby,” she told me when I came in.

  “Good morning, Mrs. J,” I said politely. Her gray hair was still sticking out every which way, but at least it was clean. And the nightgown—several sizes too big, even before I got pregnant—hung off one bony shoulder all the way down to the elbow. Her feet under the table were bare.

  Her avid little raisin eyes fastened on my stomach. “How’s that grandbaby of mine?”

  So that answered the question I hadn’t asked. And couldn’t ask, because to ask would be rude, and anyway, she wouldn’t be able to answer. But it wasn’t her grandbaby I was carrying. Rafe was her grandbaby. This was her great-grandbaby. She was back in time today, thirty-two years or so. To when LaDonna—whom Tondalia Jenkins had never actually met—had been pregnant with Rafe.

  “He’s fine,” I told her. “Not much longer now.”

  She frowned. “You sure that’s a boy, baby? You’re carryin’ kinda high for a boy.”

  Rafe was definitely a boy. But of course I had no idea how LaDonna had looked pregnant. I wasn’t born yet. As for my own baby, during the latest ultrasound, the tech had informed me she wasn’t able to observe a penis, so it might be a girl, but the baby could just be contrary. He or she hadn’t been terribly cooperative with the wand that was trying to nudge him or her around. At the moment, I had to rely on wives tales to guess the gender of my baby, and even there things were mixed. You’re carrying high, so you’re having a girl. You crave salty things, so you’re having a boy. You’re more moody than usual, so you’re having a girl. You were the more aggressive partner during sex when you conceived, so you’re having a boy.

  For the record, I don’t know who was more aggressive, because I’m not entirely sure when I conceived. These things aren’t accurate to the hour, and we’d had sex a lot. I had cravings for spicy food, which aren’t either salty or sweet, but I wasn’t turning down ice cream or pretzels either. Often together. Logically, I should be having twins. However, I knew I wasn’t. If nothing else, the ultrasound had been clear on that point.

  As for being moody, I figured that was unavoidable, whatever the gender of the baby. When you walk around looking and feeling like a small hippo, it’s hard to feel good about yourself, no matter how miraculous you are for growing a baby inside you.

  “Show me your hands,” Mrs. Jenkins demanded. I figured she was going to do some sort of woo-woo palm reading, so I extended them palms up. She crowed. “Aha! I knew it! It’s a girl!”

  It might be a girl. But in this case I was supposed to be LaDonna, who had definitely had a boy. He was looking at me from in front of the stove, eyebrows arched.

  “Don’t forget to scramble,” I told him, before I addressed Mrs. Jenkins. “I’m pretty sure it’s a boy, ma’am.”

  Her sparse brows pulled together, and I hastened to add, “We’ll find out in a couple of weeks. What do you think I should call him?”

  “I called my boy Tyrell,” Mrs. Jenkins said, with a fond gaze at Rafe, who smiled back. She beamed. “But if I’d had a girl, I’da called her Oneida.”

  Oneida Collier. I rolled it around in my mouth and tried to imagine my mother’s reaction. It wasn’t on the—short—list of names I had in mind for a potential girl, but it wasn’t bad.

  I wasn’t calling my potential boy Tyrell, though. Rafe might like that, but you have to draw the line somewhere. Tyrell Collier did not roll off the tongue the way I’d like it to.

  “How about William? We could call him Liam. Liam’s a popular name these days.”

  Rafe rolled his eyes. We’d talked about this before. If we named our child Liam, he’d be going to school with five more Liams, since it’s one of the most popular names around at the moment. That wasn’t why I liked it, but I saw his point. No proud parent wants his or her child to be one of six. We all want them to be unique.

  Tyrell Collier would be unique.

  Mrs. Jenkins pursed her lips. “William’s all right. William Jenkins. That sounds nice.”

  It sounded just fine, but since the baby wouldn’t be a Jenkins, it didn’t matter. Liam Collier sounded all right to me.

  And then I wondered if Rafe had ever considered taking his father’s name. Rafael Jenkins. Rafe Jenkins.

  I’d be Savannah Jenkins. The baby might be William Jenkins, if he ended up being a boy.

  Rafe had never mentioned it to me, if he had. Considered changing his last name, I mean. He’d grown up as Rafe Collier, son of LaDonna Collier and grandson of Old Jim. He hadn’t known his father’s name until after LaDonna died. It was last summer, and at that point, Rafe had been thirty. I’m not sure he’d ever considered being anyone else.

  I liked being Savannah Collier. I wasn’t sure I wanted it to change.

  While I’d been pondering, Rafe had served Mrs. Jenkins scrambled eggs. Now he looked at me. “Breakfast?”

  I was hungry, but scrambled eggs didn’t sound good. “I’ll make myself some oatmeal,” I said.

  He shrugged and began cracking eggs into the pan for his own breakfast. I headed to the pantry for a packet of instant oatmeal. Apples and cinnamon.

  Maybe I really was having a girl.

  We ate in mostly companionable silence. Mrs. Jenkins shoveled in eggs like she hadn’t eaten for a week. I didn’t think they starved her at the place she’d been living, but if they’d let her just walk away, who knew what had been going on? It had always seemed like a nice place whenever I’d been there—Rafe wouldn’t have left his grandmother in the care of anyone incompetent—but given the situation, I was starting to worry what else had been wrong that we didn’t know about.

  Rafe waited until Mrs. Jenkins had finished eating, and then he asked, casually, “Do you remember what happened yesterday?”

  Mrs. J looked confused for a second. I could tell from her expression that she was thinking hard. Eventually, she must have remembered something, because she said, triumphantly, “We had ice cream for dessert!”

  That wasn’t what Rafe was looking for, of course, but at least it answered the question I’d had. No, they hadn’t been starving her.

  “That’s great,” Rafe said. “Chocolate or vanilla?”

  It had bee
n both, as a matter of fact. Or maybe strawberry.

  “Neapolitan?” I suggested. Neapolitan sounded good, actually. I wondered if we had any.

  Mrs. Jenkins started to look confused again, so Rafe reined the conversation back in. “Was that for dinner?”

  Mrs. Jenkins nodded. Her steel-gray hair bobbed. I determined to get a comb and some pins and put it together more neatly, but not until I’d heard the end of the conversation. If she remembered dinner, and didn’t remember wrong, she had been at the facility at least through the evening meal last night. Her escape must have been affected later.

  It was a long way from there to here. From one side of town to the other. She couldn’t have walked. There wouldn’t have been enough time, even if she’d left right after dinner. And she would have gotten lost, anyway. Probably not far from the facility.

  It was a minor miracle that she’d even set out in the right direction. I wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d ended up in Franklin instead of Nashville.

  “Do you remember what happened after dinner?” Rafe asked.

  She looked confused again, and we could see her mind spinning back. She stuck her bottom lip out. I wasn’t surprised when she shook her head.

  “Did someone get hurt?” Rafe tried.

  Mrs. J blinked at him. “Miz Bristol got hurt. She fell down the stairs.”

  A fall down the stairs didn’t seem like it could have caused all the blood we’d seen on Mrs. Jenkins’s clothes.

  But maybe, if the victim—Ms. or Mrs. Bristol, in this case—had broken a femur, it had broken the skin, and opened a jugular while it was at it, I guess it was possible.

  “Yesterday?” Rafe tried.

  Mrs. J looked confused. She probably had no idea what had happened yesterday versus last week versus twenty or thirty years ago.

  “Is Ms. Bristol all right?” I tried.