Home Stretch

by Jenna Bennett

  Honestly, I didn’t really care what had happened to Ms. or Mrs. Bristol. She was old; she’d probably just lost her balance and fallen. Of course, if someone had pushed her, I didn’t want them to get away with it. But it wasn’t really any of my business, either way. It wasn’t likely to have had anything at all to do with why Mrs. Jenkins had shown up in our yard in the middle of the night.

  But I had brought it up, and Grimaldi thought she was doing me a favor. So I said thank you, nicely, and hung up. And went back to the parlor to watch Saffron and Gus and their three kids decide between the school bus, a tiny home trailer—“We can park it anywhere!”—and a small cabin in the woods. Neither was above three hundred square feet. I shuddered thinking about it.

  Saffron, Gus, and company went with the school bus. I figured they would. And I figured, in three years, that bus would be parked in the backyard of some cookie cutter subdivision home somewhere, and the kids would be using it as a doll house.

  Another show started, and I went to the kitchen to make lunch. Mrs. Jenkins scarfed down tomato soup and a cheese sandwich like she hadn’t seen food in days, although it was only a few hours since Rafe had fed her scrambled eggs. I have no idea where she put it all. She was as scrawny as a bird, and it wasn’t like she did much. Today, all she’d done was sit in front of the TV. Although I guess she must have expended a bit of energy yesterday, getting from Brentwood to here.

  I didn’t think Rafe had asked, so I decided I would. “Mrs. Jenkins?”

  She nodded. “Yes, baby?”

  Her mouth was full of sandwich, so it came out a little garbled.

  “Can you remember what happened yesterday? When you left the nursing home and came here?”

  “Home,” Mrs. Jenkins said. She lifted a spoonful of soup and slurped it down, loudly.

  I nodded. “Right. You came home. Can you remember how you got here?”

  “Walked,” Mrs. Jenkins said.

  “The whole way from Brentwood?”

  Mrs. J looked confused, like she didn’t know where Brentwood was. Or that she’d been living there for the past year.

  I rephrased. “Did you walk the whole way?”

  Mrs. J shook her head. “Gotta ride.”

  “Did you? What kind of ride? Who was driving?”

  She looked confused again.

  “Did you take a cab?” I asked. The trick, obviously, was making the questions simple. And sticking to one at a time. “Maybe a bus?”

  Mrs. J shook her head.

  “Did you hitchhike?” Would someone have picked up an old lady in a housecoat and slippers in the middle of the night, and just taken her where she wanted to go? Wouldn’t they have driven her to the nearest police station, or the nearest hospital, instead?

  Or maybe not. There are plenty of people out there who mind their own business. Even when maybe they shouldn’t.

  Mrs. J shook her head. She was slurping soup again.

  “Do you know the person who gave you the ride?”

  “No, baby,” Mrs. Jenkins said.

  No. Well, she wouldn’t, if whoever it was had picked her up off the road. And she wasn’t likely to be able to give a description of the person, or of the car, either. At least not a description that would help us find that person.

  And what would we do if we did? He or she hadn’t broken any laws. There are no laws against giving people rides. Even in the middle of the night.

  I devoted myself to my own cheese sandwich, and to watching someone else squeeze their life into a couple hundred square feet.

  A bit later, I heard the rumble of the Harley-Davidson’s engine outside, and left Mrs. Jenkins dozing in front of the TV to greet Rafe.

  The drizzle had gone from soft mist to hard, driving rain while we’d been watching TV, and he was soaked to the bone. I ordered him upstairs to take a hot shower and get into dry clothes while I whipped up another sandwich and bowl of soup. I wanted to know what, if anything, he’d discovered, but I wasn’t going to make him stand in the foyer, dripping on the hardwood floors, while he told me. So I busied myself in the kitchen while I heard the shower turn on and then off again. A couple of minutes later he came down the stairs. I heard him linger in the doorway to the parlor for a few seconds, but I didn’t hear his voice, so Mrs. Jenkins must still be asleep. Then he came padding down the hallway to the kitchen. And grinned at the sight of me, barefoot and pregnant, serving up soup and a sandwich at the table. “Looks good.”

  “I assume you’re talking about the food,” I said, although between us, the soup was out of a can—or at least a pouch—and the bread was store-bought.

  He just winked, and took a seat at the table. I saw his nostrils flare. “Smells good, too.”

  “Tomato soup,” I said, although that was obvious from looking at it. “Grilled cheese sandwich. Your grandmother inhaled hers, so I assume it must taste halfway decent.”

  Mine had, but then I’m so hungry all the time that most things taste good.

  “I’m sure.” He ate a couple of spoonfuls of soup and took a bite of sandwich. And made an approving noise. “M-hm.”

  “I’m glad,” I said, and went to work loading the dishwasher with the dishes Mrs. Jenkins and I had used earlier. When I tiptoed into the parlor to fetch hers, she was snoring gently, her head tipped back and her mouth open. I tiptoed back out, making sure I didn’t click the dishes together.

  “She’s asleep,” I told Rafe when I got back into the kitchen. Mrs. Jenkins hadn’t left so much as a crumb on her plate. I ran some water over it anyway, and slotted it into the dishwasher.

  He nodded.

  “We’ve just been sitting here all day. I tried to get her to tell me how she made it here last night, but I didn’t get much out of her. She said someone gave her a ride, but she couldn’t tell me who. I’m not sure she knew.”

  I pulled out the chair on the opposite side of the table—nothing more I could do until he’d finished eating, since I wasn’t about to take his flatware away from him before he was finished with it—and maneuvered my bulk onto it. “You weren’t gone long.”

  “I didn’t think I would be.” He popped the last crust of cheese sandwich into his mouth and chewed. After he’d swallowed, he added, “Since I couldn’t spend any time with my grandma.”

  I put my elbows on the table and folded my arms. My mother would have frowned, but Rafe didn’t seem to notice. Or care. “What did they give you as an excuse for why you couldn’t see her? Or hadn’t they realized she was gone?”

  “They signed me right in,” Rafe said. “Asked me if I knew where to go. I said yes, and headed down the hall. The room was empty, of course, so I went back to the receptionist and told her so. She didn’t believe me at first. Then she called an orderly, who went back to the room with me to make sure I hadn’t just overlooked something.”

  “But of course you hadn’t.”

  He shook his head. “The orderly agreed that she wasn’t there. He said he had no idea where she was. Maybe outside taking a walk.”

  I glanced at the rain-streaked window. “In this?”

  Rafe lifted a shoulder. “I guess it was the best they could do. I mean, she wasn’t where she was supposed to be.”

  No. She was on the sofa in the parlor.

  “Did you get the impression they were lying?” He’s good at picking up on lies.

  “Those two?” He shook his head. “No.”

  “Someone else?”

  “Someone’s gotta know. Maybe one of the people I met, maybe not. But she was there for the bed check at nine last night. They mark’em all off on a chart.”

  “She could have been marked off without actually being there,” I said.

  He nodded. “Might could. I asked if he could call the night nurse and double-check, but he said he didn’t wanna wake her. She’d been on till seven this morning, so she’d be asleep now.”

  Understandable.

  “He said she’s coming back in at seven tonight—she works three twelve
-hour shifts every weekend—so he’d double-check then, and call me back if anything changed.”

  “That’s helpful,” I said.

  Rafe grunted.

  “Don’t you think so?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t tend to trust helpful people. Specially when their own self-interest is involved.”

  He had a point. “I guess, if he’s lost her—or rather, since he’s lost her, but maybe he doesn’t realize it yet—he has incentive to want to make you believe everything is copacetic.”

  Rafe nodded. “I asked if anybody’d checked on her this morning. If they do a bed check at night, maybe they do a check in the morning, too. You’d think they would.”

  You would. Since, occasionally—according to Grimaldi, anyway—some of the elderly pass on of natural causes. And since some of them probably needed help getting up and dressed. Mrs. Jenkins needed help getting dressed, as I had cause to know, having been the one dressing her both last night and this morning.

  “Was she checked off on the list?”

  “No,” Rafe said. “The day nurse came on at seven, and spent the first hour doing bed checks and serving breakfast. By the time she got to my grandma’s room, it was empty. But since she ain’t confined to bed, they just assumed she was up early and was down in the dining room, eating.”

  It was a logical assumption, although given the facts—she’d made it out of the facility and was fifteen miles away—it seemed to me like they should have taken the disappearance a bit more seriously.

  “Once they finally figured out she was gone,” Rafe said, “they decided to look for her. I tried to stay, but since I ain’t a medical, they can’t have me walking into people’s rooms and such. You and I know that she’s right here, but they don’t, so they’re gonna look for her. From top to bottom. And all across the property. In every room. They can’t explain how she coulda gotten outta the building after bed check without alerting the night nurse, so they’re pretty sure she’s somewhere in the building.”

  “Except she isn’t. She’s here.” So she must have gotten out of the building. Without setting off the alarms.

  Rafe nodded. “She wouldna remembered the codes, even if somebody’d given’em to her. And nobody would have. So somebody musta let her out.”

  “Who would have done such a thing? And why?”

  “Not sure yet,” Rafe said. “But I’m guessing it’s got something to do with the blood on her clothes. She saw something. Or someone. And that someone didn’t want her around to talk about it.”

  So that someone had made sure she couldn’t.

  “Any idea where the blood came from?”

  “I looked,” Rafe said. “I didn’t see none. And there were no cops around. It didn’t look like anybody came to work this morning and found a mutilated body taking up space.”

  That was encouraging, anyway.

  “Course,” Rafe added pensively, “they might not have found it yet.”

  “If it was outside, you mean?”

  “Or if someone took it with them.”

  “Wouldn’t there still be blood?”

  “You’d think,” Rafe said, and got to his feet. “I’m gonna go do like my grandma, and take a nap in front of the TV. I didn’t get much sleep last night.”

  I nodded, and pushed myself upright, too. “You go ahead. I’m going to finish filling the dishwasher. I’ll be in later.”

  Rafe nodded and wandered off down the hallway. When I came into the parlor five minutes later, he was sprawled in one of the chairs with his eyes closed. I curled up in a corner of the sofa—the one Mrs. Jenkins wasn’t occupying—and watched TV.

  Four

  The day passed slowly. Seven o’clock came and went without a call from the nursing home. It might have been an oversight, I guess. Maybe the staff went home, and whoever took their place didn’t realize they were supposed to call Rafe. If this had been a real emergency—if Mrs. J had been missing without us knowing that she was safe—we would have been freaking out well before seven in the evening. The fact that nobody called to tell us anything was, frankly, pretty disturbing.

  “I thought this was a good place,” I told Rafe over dinner.

  He looked grim. “Me, too. If I don’t hear something tomorrow morning, I’m going down there and raising hell.”

  I glanced at Mrs. Jenkins, who was happily tucking into spaghetti and meatballs, and lowered my voice. I had no idea whether she knew or understood what we were talking about, but I didn’t want to worry her. “Can you do that? I mean, when you know that she isn’t actually missing?”

  “I can raise hell about them not getting back to me. And about them letting her walk out. Which they musta done, or she wouldn’t be here.”

  Indeed. “I don’t suppose you have any idea who would have let her out? I mean, someone must have, right? She couldn’t have gotten through the security on her own.”

  Rafe nodded. “I suppose she mighta slipped out. While somebody was busy hauling a body, say, and wasn’t paying attention. If they left the door open or something.”

  Possible. “So it might not have been deliberate.”

  He shook his head. “Coulda happened either way. She saw something and snuck out while the door was open, to see what was going on. Or she saw something, and somebody figured it wasn’t safe to leave her behind to talk.”

  “And when you say ‘something,’ you mean a murder.”

  “Most likely,” Rafe said. “It was a helluva lot of blood on her dress. Not her blood. So she musta been right there when somebody was bleeding.”

  “Might it have been an animal? If she got out somehow, and was wandering the road, and came upon a dog or a deer someone had hit?” My stomach clenched a little at the thought. Last month, Rafe and I had rescued a dog named Pearl from a crime scene. We’d intended to bring her home with us, but instead, of all people, Pearl had bonded with my mother, and Mother with her. So Pearl had stayed behind in Sweetwater, at the Martin Mansion. Mother took good care of her, I was certain. But the idea of Pearl—or someone else’s Pearl—getting out and getting hit by a car was disturbing.

  Of course, if Mrs. Jenkins had been wandering along the side of the road, she might have been hit by a car, too, and that was even more disturbing. The nursing home had really dropped the ball badly on this one.

  Rafe lifted a shoulder. “Mighta been, I guess. But I drove that road, and I didn’t see nothing like that.”

  “If someone picked up the dog or the deer, and the rain washed away the blood...?”

  He shook his head. “I dunno, darlin’. I suppose it’s possible. I’ll take the dress to the lab tomorrow and get the blood analyzed. If nothing else, it’ll tell us whether it’s human or animal.”

  That would be a step in the right direction. If nothing else, finding out that it was animal blood would allow us to stop worrying about what Mrs. Jenkins had seen—and maybe done—and whether there was a dead body somewhere that no one had discovered yet.

  “If it’s human,” I said; Rafe’s brows lowered, “it’s not like anyone would consider her sane. She wouldn’t end up in prison.”

  “She wouldn’t end up in prison anyway. Because she didn’t do nothing.”

  “Of course not. But that might be hard to prove, if she can’t remember what happened.”

  Rafe didn’t say anything to that.

  “Are you sure we shouldn’t contact Grimaldi? She knows Mrs. Jenkins. She’d help us figure out what’s going on.”

  “No,” Rafe said. “Bad enough that I’m gonna sneak around and lie. I ain’t asking her to do the same.”

  He added, “And anyway, the group home’s in Williamson County. If anything’s going on down there, it’d be Williamson County’s problem.”

  “All the more reason to ask Grimaldi for help. It wouldn’t be a conflict of interest for her.”

  “I don’t think it works that way,” Rafe said. “Don’t worry about it, darlin’. I’ll take care of it. You just take care of my grandma.”


  Fine. “I’ll take care of your grandma. But for the record, I’d like you to talk to somebody about what’s going on. If you don’t want to involve the police,” and if it wouldn’t be their case in any case, it probably didn’t make much sense to do so, “at least talk to Wendell.”

  Wendell Craig was Rafe’s handler during the years he was undercover. Now he’s Rafe’s boss, although they’re really more like partners.

  Rafe said he would. “Eat your food, darlin’. You gotta keep your strength up.”

  I assumed that meant we’d get busy later, after Mrs. Jenkins was asleep, and devoted myself to my spaghetti.

  * * *

  The next morning, he got up and out early. I was still in bed, with my eyes slitted against the sunlight pouring through the curtains, when he kissed me goodbye and grabbed the bag with Mrs. Jenkins’s soiled housedress and slipped out the door and down the stairs. I heard the front door lock, and a few seconds later, the roar of the Harley-Davidson starting up outside the window.

  At least the weather looked nicer today, what I could see of it. He wouldn’t get wet driving to work.

  I had nowhere to be today. There’s a staff meeting at work every Monday morning, but it wasn’t like I could bring Mrs. Jenkins with me, so I would have to skip it this week. Not like I had much to report anyway. Between you and me, I wasn’t sure why I bothered pretending. I wasn’t selling any real estate. I wasn’t really working toward selling any real estate, either. I liked the idea of selling real estate, but when it came to the reality of it, I was doing a—pardon my French—piss-poor job of actually finding clients.

  My license was up for renewal soon. Maybe I just wouldn’t bother renewing it for next year. We could save the money I spent on the fees and the continuing education I had to take every year to keep the license current. Rafe didn’t make a whole lot—people in law enforcement generally don’t; it’s a thankless job, and nobody pays you what you’re worth—but we were living cheaply, and we would survive. Maybe I could find something else I’d be good at, that could bring in some money.