Home Stretch

by Jenna Bennett

His eyebrows drew down. “She all right?”

  “She’s fine. We just had a bowl of oatmeal each. When we’re done here, I’m going to take her shopping. For a pair of shoes and some clothes that fit better than mine.”

  He lowered his voice. “Has she said anything?”

  This wasn’t about Mrs. Jenkins. We’ve been together long enough for me to follow the way his mind works.

  I shook my head. “She said she wanted to wait until you got here. So she wouldn’t have to explain twice.”

  “Then let’s hear it.”

  He put a hand on my back and nudged me into the parlor ahead of him.

  “So what’s going on?” I asked brightly when he’d deposited me on the sofa next to Mrs. Jenkins, and was in the process of taking the chair across the table from Grimaldi.

  She looked from me to Mrs. Jenkins to him. “How long has your grandmother been here?”

  “Since Saturday night,” Rafe said.

  Grimaldi glanced at me, in time to catch my wince. “Is that true?”

  I nodded. “Technically it was early Sunday, I guess. Around three in the morning. We were still asleep.” Or had been, until I woke up to use the bathroom.

  “How did she get here?”

  “We’re not sure,” I said. “I know she walked part of the way, because her slippers were worn through on the bottoms. But I don’t think she could have walked the whole way from Brentwood.”

  “Did you ask?”

  I nodded. “She says she got a ride. But she can’t tell me from who. Whom.”

  “Why?” Rafe asked.

  Grimaldi looked at him. “Savannah said you went to Brentwood to see your grandmother yesterday.”

  I looked guilty. Rafe gave me an arched brow, but didn’t say anything. Not about that. “I went to Brentwood, but not to see my grandma. Nobody called to let us know she was gone, so I wanted to see what they’d say when I showed up.”

  “And what did they say?”

  “Nothing,” Rafe said. “They acted like they didn’t know she was gone. The doc in charge promised they’d do a top-to-bottom search, and let me know when they found her.”

  “But they haven’t?”

  He shook his head. “Not so far.”

  I glanced at the clock. It was after ten. Plenty of time for the nursing home staff to get their act together and notify next of kin that they’d misplaced a resident. The fact that they hadn’t seemed significant. Of something, even if I had no idea what.

  “Who told you she was here?” Rafe wanted to know, and I wondered guiltily whether I had. I hadn’t admitted anything, but Grimaldi might have read between the lines.

  Then again, why would she care? It wasn’t a crime for Mrs. Jenkins to be here. It was her house, still in her name. Rafe had power of attorney, but Mrs. J had every right to visit. And she wasn’t a prisoner at the nursing home, either. She shouldn’t have been able to walk out the way she did—mostly for her own safety—but she wasn’t in prison. If she’d seemed like she was unhappy, we’d have gotten her out of there long before this. She wouldn’t have had to make a break for it to escape.

  Grimaldi said that nobody had told her. “I didn’t know she was here until I saw her. I wanted to talk to Savannah about something else.”

  “What’s that?”

  Rafe and I said it at the same time. I glanced at him, and he winked at me. At least he seemed less upset now.

  “Ms. Bristol,” Grimaldi said. When I didn’t immediately answer, because it took me a second to remember who Ms. Bristol was, or had been, she added, “You asked me about her yesterday, remember?”

  I remembered. The friend of Mrs. Jenkins who had fallen down the stairs and died. “You looked into it?”

  “There wasn’t anything to look into,” Grimaldi said. “Her name was Beverly Bristol. She was eighty-two. She died a week ago Saturday. The doctor in charge at the nursing home signed the death certificate. There was no autopsy, since the cause of death was obvious. She fell and broke her neck.”

  “Did someone see it happen?”

  “I have no idea,” Grimaldi said. “I pulled the death certificate—it’s public property—and saw the cause of death written on it. There was no investigation, so to know more, I’d have to ask the doctor.”

  “Name?” Rafe asked.

  She told him. “Is that the same guy you spoke to?”

  Rafe nodded. “Fesmire. Doctor Alton Fesmire.”

  “Did you not like Alton Fesmire?” It was a logical guess, judging from his tone of voice.

  “I didn’t like that he didn’t call me back when he said he would,” Rafe said. “Any reason to think Beverly Bristol didn’t die from a fall down the stairs?”

  Grimaldi shook her head. “None at all. Or at least not until I investigate further. Any reason I should?”

  “Not that I know of,” Rafe told her. “So why are you here? We didn’t know Beverly Bristol. You could have told us this over the phone. And you didn’t need me.”

  “That’s not really why I’m here,” Grimaldi said, and glanced at Mrs. Jenkins.

  Uh-oh, I thought.

  Mrs. J was paying no attention to the conversation. There was home renovation going on on TV, and she was engrossed in watching muscular men wielding sledgehammers. Under other circumstances, I might have been engrossed myself.

  I could feel Rafe tense, although nothing was visible on the outside, and his voice was just as calm as usual. “What’s going on?”

  “I caught a case last night,” Grimaldi said. “A dead woman in a car in the Cumberland River.”

  “How sad.” But what did it have to do with us?

  “Her name was Julia Poole,” Grimaldi said. “She was the night nurse at the facility where Mrs. Jenkins lives.”

  That explained what she had to do with us. Sort of. “What happened?”

  “A boater found her,” Grimaldi said, “when he was pulling his boat ashore after two days on the river. Down off one of the public boat ramps in Shelby Park.”

  That wasn’t the info I was looking for, but it was interesting. Shelby Park is in the neighborhood. A couple of miles away, but in the same part of town that we live.

  And quite a trek from Brentwood.

  “Did she live around here? Julia Poole?”

  Grimaldi shook her head. “Bellevue. It looks like someone drove the car to the ramp, put it in neutral, and let it roll into the river. I guess he—or she—hoped it would roll all the way in and then maybe get dragged by the current, but instead it got stuck on a rock, and didn’t submerge all the way.”

  Lucky for Julia. Not that I figured she’d care, being dead. But it was good it had happened that way, and that she’d been found quickly instead of being lost, maybe forever.

  “She’d been there approximately twenty-four hours,” Grimaldi said, “according to the ME. The cold water did a good job preserving the body.”

  “How’d she die?”

  Grimaldi turned to Rafe. “Her throat was cut.”

  My vision got narrow, and I closed my eyes and focused on breathing deeply.

  I had, once upon a time, seen a dead body with its throat cut. In the room next to the one we were sitting in, as a matter of fact. If I’d been Catholic, I would have crossed myself, and offered up a prayer for Julia Poole’s soul, as well as for Brenda Puckett’s. Since I wasn’t, I didn’t. Instead, I just focused on not passing out. While my thoughts spun, wildly out of control, to places I didn’t necessarily want them to go.

  A cut throat would explain the amount of blood on Mrs. Jenkins’s housecoat.

  The Cumberland River would explain why she was soaked to the skin. I’d attributed it to the rain, but it hadn’t been raining that hard, and the Cumberland River made for a better explanation.

  It also explained how she’d made it home. Shelby Park was a lot closer to the house than Brentwood. Two miles rather than fifteen. And a more familiar area. One made up of small roads that were easier to navigate than the interstate.<
br />
  The problem was going to be explaining what Mrs. J was doing in the car with Julia Poole and her throat in the first place.

  For a hideous moment I wondered whether there was a correlation between Brenda Puckett having her throat cut in Mrs. Jenkins’s library last year, and Julia Poole having her throat cut now.

  I knew Mrs. Jenkins hadn’t killed Brenda. The person responsible was in prison, and likely to stay there. He’d had nothing to do with Julia Poole’s death. But was it possible, somewhere in Mrs. J’s confused mind, that she’d gotten the two of them mixed up and thought she needed to kill Julia Poole because she thought Julia was Brenda Puckett?

  I didn’t know whether that made any sense whatsoever. A psychiatrist might be able to shed light on it. But the thought crossed my mind. And stayed there.

  “Breathe,” Rafe told me, his voice much closer than it ought to have been. A hand on the back of my neck pushed my head down, as close as I could get to between my knees. The stomach got in the way, but I did my best to comply with the pressure of his hand. “You all right?” he asked the back of my head.

  I managed a grunt, as my stomach was squeezed into my thighs. “Careful.”

  The pressure let up a little. “I’ll get you some water.”

  He was up and away before I could say anything. I heard his steps moving toward the door and down the hall. I concentrated on breathing, and by the time I heard his steps come back, I was ready to sit up. Between you and me, it’s a lot harder to breathe bent over these days. It’s hard to breathe, period. The baby’s pushing on everything, including my lungs.

  A glass of water appeared in front of me. “Sip. Careful.”

  I sipped. Carefully.

  “OK?” Grimaldi asked. She was watching me closely.

  I nodded. “Thank you. I just remembered Brenda Puckett. You know?”

  “You don’t see cut throats every day,” Grimaldi agreed, calmly. “Most people, when they kill someone with a knife, they stab them. Or shoot them, if they have a gun. Or bash them over the head with a rock, if it’s spur of the moment. Cutting someone’s throat takes a little more forethought.”

  “Unless it happened in the kitchen,” I said. “While she was cooking.”

  Grimaldi shook her head. “It didn’t. I don’t think it happened in her house at all.”

  I didn’t say anything, just took another sip of water. Rafe arched a brow. He was perched on the arm of the sofa, next to me. Just in case I turned pale again, I guess, and looked like I would faint. “No blood?”

  Grimaldi shook her head. “And if the ME’s right about the time she went into the water, it would have happened when she was at work. Or was supposed to be at work.”

  My hand shook. The ice cubes rattled together. Rafe took the glass out of my hand and put it on the table. If he was nervous, I couldn’t tell. His hand was warm and hard and perfectly steady. “I walked around yesterday. I didn’t see any pools of blood or evidence that anybody’d cleaned up.”

  My eyes went, unwillingly, to the part of the sofa between me and Mrs. Jenkins. She’d sat there just over twenty-four hours ago, dripping river water and blood. And Rafe had cleaned it up.

  There was nothing to see now. But I still felt guilty.

  “You probably didn’t see everything,” Grimaldi told him. “And if there was a pool of blood somewhere, they’d make sure you didn’t see that.”

  Rafe nodded. “D’you have any evidence she was at work Saturday night?”

  “I haven’t been down there yet,” Grimaldi said. “I wanted to talk to you first. Get your take on the place.”

  Rafe glanced at me. “We’ve always been happy with it. My grandma’s seemed happy, and they seemed to take good care of her.”

  I nodded. That had been my impression, too. Until two nights ago. “Is it possible that someone killed Julia Poole before she went to work, so there wasn’t a night nurse on duty Saturday night, and that’s how Mrs. Jenkins was able to get out?”

  That might be the explanation for what had happened to Beverly Bristol, too, a week ago. Maybe Julia Poole had a habit of not showing up for work. If she’d decided to stay home, and Beverly Bristol had needed help in the middle of the night, she might have left her room and fallen down the stairs to her death. And no one was around to help her.

  It was Grimaldi’s turn to shrug. “Who knows? I’ll find out when I get there. So you haven’t had any interactions with her?”

  Rafe and I both shook our heads. “We’re there in the afternoon,” I explained, “when we go to visit. I’ve never been there at night. If she only worked nights, I wouldn’t have seen her.”

  Rafe added, “If you gotta picture, I can take a look.”

  Grimaldi contemplated him for a second before she put her hand in her pocket and pulled out her cell phone. She scrolled through a few photos, and handed it to him.

  I craned my neck. “Gah!”

  I should have expected it. It was Grimaldi’s snapshot taken at the crime scene. I’m sure she’d had a professional crime scene photographer out to take all the official crime scene photos, but she must have snapped a few of her own, just to have handy.

  Rafe tilted the phone out of my way, but not before I’d seen more than I wanted to. A woman’s face, deathly pale—no pun intended, since she’d literally been drained of blood—and staring at nothing. Long, wet hair stuck to her head and lay in strands across her cheek. The hair was dark, but whether it was black, brown, or some shade of dark red, I couldn’t tell.

  She didn’t look familiar.

  Rafe handed the phone back. “Never seen her.”

  “Me, either,” I said.

  Grimaldi took the phone back and hesitated. She glanced at Mrs. Jenkins.

  “Go ahead,” Rafe said. His voice was calm, but I could hear the tension in it. “Warn her first.”

  Grimaldi nodded, and leaned forward to get Mrs. J’s attention. “Mrs. Jenkins?”

  Tondalia Jenkins looked away from the bulging muscles on the TV screen and smiled toothlessly. “Yes, baby?”

  “Do you remember me?”

  Mrs. J shook her head. “Sorry, baby.”

  She calls everybody baby. Me, Rafe, David. Detective Grimaldi.

  “That’s fine,” Grimaldi said. “I’m Tamara Grimaldi. I work for the Nashville Police Department. We met last year.”

  Mrs. J nodded, but her attention was already straying back to the screen. Grimaldi hurried up.

  “I’d like you to look at something. A picture. Can you tell me if you know who this is?”

  She handed the phone to Mrs. Jenkins, who looked at it for a second before a tear rolled down her wrinkled cheek.

  “You recognize her?” Grimaldi took her phone back.

  Mrs. Jenkins nodded.

  “Can you tell me what happened to her?”

  “She got hurt,” Mrs. J said.

  Obviously. But did she know that because she’d seen Julia Saturday night, or did she say it based on the photograph?

  “Do you know who hurt her?”

  “Julia’s hurt,” Mrs. J said. “We gotta get help for Julia.”

  “Did you see her Saturday night?”

  Mrs. Jenkins looked blank. Grimaldi looked frustrated—and understandably so—but she reined it in. “I’m headed down to Brentwood from here. I thought you might want to come with me.”

  She was talking to Rafe, not me. I wanted to come along, too, but of course I couldn’t. Aside from the fact that I hadn’t been invited, and wasn’t likely to be, I had to take Mrs. Jenkins shopping for shoes and a new housedress.

  Rafe hesitated. “Yeah,” he said after a second. “I still wanna know why they didn’t call and tell me they’d lost my grandma.”

  I wanted to know that, too. And how it was, or might be, related to Julia’s murder and Beverly Bristol’s accident.

  “I’ll hold down the fort,” I told them. “When the show is over,” and the muscular men with the sledgehammers had finished throwing their we
ight around on screen, “we’ll go shopping and get some lunch.”

  Rafe nodded. “Thanks, darlin’.”

  “No problem,” I told him.

  We both knew he’d delivered the old housedress with what was surely Julia Poole’s blood all over it to the TBI lab this morning. That housedress implicated Mrs. Jenkins in the murder. Or if not quite that, it proved that Mrs. J had been in Julia’s vicinity very shortly after her throat was cut. Someone with a cut throat doesn’t take forever to bleed out. It’s over in a very short time.

  Rafe didn’t want Grimaldi to put those pieces together. I didn’t think he had anything to worry about—I didn’t believe Mrs. Jenkins had hurt Julia Poole, and I figured Grimaldi would know that—but I understood that he had more reasons to be distrustful of the police than me, even now, when he was in law enforcement himself. He’d spent a lot of time under suspicion for this, that, or the other, just by being poor, or being black, or having a criminal record.

  I wouldn’t go against him on this. If Grimaldi asked me outright whether Mrs. Jenkins had had anything to do with Julia Poole’s death... I’d deal with the problem of whether to lie or tell her the truth then.

  Six

  The two of them took off in Grimaldi’s sedan, after Rafe called Wendell to tell him what was going on. As expected, Wendell had no problem loaning Rafe to the MNPD for the duration. Under the circumstances, it wasn’t surprising, although it was usually the case, no matter why the MNPD asked. The TBI is there as a resource for local law enforcement. And anyway, I wasn’t sure what Wendell knew about the circumstances—or how much Rafe had told him—and with Grimaldi standing right there, it wasn’t like I could ask.

  Grimaldi got behind the wheel, which never makes Rafe happy. He made a face, but gave me a kiss before he fit himself into the passenger seat.

  “For now,” I told him before he closed the door, “maybe it’s best if the two of you don’t mention that we have Mrs. Jenkins here. It’s not like we can send her back there, with what’s going on, and when they let her walk out once already. I’d still like to know how that happened.”

  He nodded. “I ain’t telling nobody nothing. Not until I know what’s going on.”