Unfinished Business (31 page)

Since it was the best I was likely to get, I
settled for it.

Thirty minutes later I was in a hospital bed with a weird belt
strapped around my waist—or around my belly, rather, since my waist
was a thing of the past—and some sort of monitor perched just above
my belly button. The baby’s heartbeat thundered through the room,
as rapid as the pitter-patter of rain.

I wasn’t alone. In fact, I was anything but
alone. My room was filled with people. Mother was there, of course,
and she had called the sheriff to tell him what had happened, so
Bob Satterfield was there too, hovering over her as she perched on
a chair in the corner.

Dix had arrived with Catherine: I assumed
they’d dumped all five kids on Jonathan again. That poor man
deserved a medal, although knowing him, I’m sure he thought being
married to my sister was reward enough.

David was there, naturally. Ginny and Sam
hadn’t made it down here to pick him up yet. A nurse had taken a
quick look at him, and at Mother, and declared them both good to
go. Aside from abrasions around their wrists and ankles from the
ropes, and David’s bruises, both from rolling around on the floor
in Mother’s bedroom and bicycling all night, they were both
unharmed. I thought David might end up needing some kind of
counseling—it isn’t every twelve-year-old who can go through what
he had and not have some residual anxiety—but for now, he seemed
both happy and calm, nibbling on a pastry someone had
unearthed.

With the exception of Todd and the addition
of David, it was almost exactly the same crew who had shown up at
the hospital in Nashville after I’d had my miscarriage last
fall.

That didn’t seem to be a danger this time.
I’d jarred my back when I fell, and the doctor recommended a trip
to either a chiropractor or a masseuse if I didn’t start to feel
better in a day or two, but other than a bump on the back of my
head, there didn’t seem to be anything seriously wrong with me. The
baby’s heartbeat sounded fine to him—insanely fast in my ears, but
they all assured me it was normal—and I wasn’t in labor, and was in
no danger of losing the baby. The knife hadn’t gone deeply enough
to do any damage. I hadn’t even needed stitches. Just a thin stripe
of surgical glue and three butterfly bandages along the side of my
stomach.

So for the time being I was flat on my back
being monitored, and in a short while, once all the more seriously
injured had been taken care of, someone would be by to do an
ultrasound, just to make sure everything was as it should be inside
me.

Hernandez was still on the operating table.
Wendell had left the rookies in charge of keeping watch and had
stopped by to tell us that the knife had done some damage to
Hernandez’s internal organs, and that he’d lost a lot of blood. It
was still touch and go as to whether he’d survive.

At one point, even Grimaldi walked in and up
to the bed. “Can’t leave you alone for a minute,” she asked me,
“can I?”

I smiled. “Sorry, Detective. But I caught
him for you.”

She grimaced. “I can do without that kind of
help, thank you.”

I could have done without the experience
myself. Although I was glad Hernandez was in custody and off the
streets, where he couldn’t hurt anyone else. “You didn’t have to
come all this way to see me. I’m fine.”

“I didn’t,” Grimaldi said, and added, “Not
that I’m not happy to know you’re fine. But I have to stick around
to see what happens to Hernandez. Just in case he’d like to make a
deathbed confession about where he put the bodies.”

She looked around the room. “Where’s your
boyfriend?”

“They took him away to be re-stitched,” I
said. “He tore open the stitches in his arm, and a few in his chest
and stomach, too. They have to put him back together and rewrap
him.”

“When he comes back, tell him to come find
me. I want to show him the pictures of the girls you found and see
if he can identify anyone.”

“I’ll let him know,” I said.

“I have to go hover over Hernandez.” She
glanced sideways at the belt and monitor strapped around my
stomach. “You sure you’re OK?”

“I’m fine. The baby’s fine. Listen to the
heartbeat. Doesn’t it sound fine?”

She shrugged.

“They’re doing an ultrasound later. It may
be late enough by now that they can see whether it’s a boy or a
girl.”

“Do you care whether it’s a boy or a girl,
Savannah?” my sister wanted to know from over by the wall.

I shook my head. “As long as it’s healthy, I
don’t care. I probably don’t even care then. Although I hope it’s
healthy.”

Just between you and me, a girl might be
nice, though. Rafe already had a boy, and I’m not sure I’d know
what to do with one. With a girl you can buy pretty dresses and
little hair barrettes and shiny shoes with bows, but a boy is going
to get dirty a lot and bring worms and frogs into the house. Girls
sound like they’d be easier. And I’ve had more practice with girls.
Not only am I one, but I’ve spent more time with Dix’s daughters
than with Catherine and Jonathan’s sons. It isn’t that I don’t like
Cole and Robert—of course I do—but they feel sort of foreign to me.
I suspect they feel the same way about me.

“Do you have a name picked out?”

“We haven’t talked about it. And I guess we
didn’t want to get too invested until we knew for sure that
everything was all right.” Since I’d lost a baby last year, and
another three years ago.

Catherine nodded. “I have some good ideas,
if you have a hard time coming up with something.”

I didn’t think that was going to be a
problem, but I told her I’d keep it in mind. But between my family
and Rafe’s, there were plenty of options. We couldn’t use Robert,
after my father, since Catherine had already done that. But there
was Calvert, after Mother’s family. Dix’s middle name. We could
call him Cal for short. Cal Collier. Or name him after one of the
longer-ago relatives, like great-grandfather William. Or maybe
Tyrell, after Rafe’s father. I could only imagine Mother’s reaction
to that.

It might be worth doing, just for the
expression on her face.

Or maybe we should just call him Martin, my
maiden name. Martin Collier had a nice ring to it.

And if it was a girl, she could be Margaret
Jean, after my mother and Rafe’s. Or LaDonna Anne, ditto. Or
Tondalia, after his grandmother, although Mother wasn’t likely to
approve of that, either.

She could be Sheila, after Dix’s late
wife.

Then again, maybe none of us needed that
reminder every day.

Or maybe Lila, after my friend Lila Vaughn.
It was Lila’s murderer who had tied me to the bed in his McMansion
that time when Rafe came and rescued me. And while none of us
needed to live with the reminder that Sheila was gone, it might be
nice to remember Lila that way.

I had a few other ideas too, but the
conversation had started up again.

“I’m sorry I’m going to miss that,” Grimaldi
said politely, but with an expression that said clearly that she
was thrilled she didn’t have to sit through my ultrasound, “but I
should go find Hernandez and see how things are going. If he dies
on the table, we’ve lost our only chance to find those bodies.”

I nodded. “Go.” The missing women’s families
deserved closure, if we could give it to them. Maria’s family had
cared enough about her to file a missing person’s report. They’d
waited for more than four years for her to come back. I’d waited
less than twenty-four hours for Rafe, and they’d been the longest
twenty-four hours of my life. If he hadn’t come back when he did—if
he hadn’t come back at all—I don’t know how I could have stood it.
So while we couldn’t give Maria’s family their relative back, we
could give them the knowledge of what had happened to her, and the
assurance that her killer was behind bars—or dead, if things turned
out that way. Maybe we’d even be able to give them a body, or what
was left of one.

If Rafe hadn’t come back, I would have
wanted to know what happened to him. Even if he’d left me. Even if
he didn’t want to be with me—or with the baby. Even if he was dead.
I would want to know what happened.

And if there was a body, I would have wanted
it. Bodies bring closure. So if Grimaldi could get the location of
Maria’s remains out of Hernandez before he died, it would help
Maria’s parents. They’d still grieve, but they’d have their
daughter back.

What was left of her, after four years.

So Grimaldi left on her grisly errand, and
after a few seconds, so did Bob Satterfield. “Y’all don’t mind if I
go see what’s going on, do you? My county and all?”

None of us did, not that it would have
mattered if we had. He was right: it was his county and technically
speaking his job. If Mother had begged, he might have stayed with
her, but of course she didn’t. So he walked out of the room, and
the rest of us settled back down to our small-talk while we waited
for the ultrasound technician. For a couple of minutes, anyway,
until we heard rapid footsteps in the hallway outside.

Virginia Flannery burst through the door.
“David!”

She’s short and plump and blonde, with pale
blue eyes. A bustling sort of woman in her forties, no taller than
her son. David takes after his father. Both of them. Sam stopped in
the doorway a moment later, tall and skinny, bald and black.

“Mom!” David launched himself off the chair
and into Ginny’s arms. Sam wrapped them both in long arms, his nose
buried equally in Ginny’s blond curls and David’s short crop of
black.

It was a lovely family moment, broken only
when Ginny took David by the shoulders to shake him. “Don’t you
ever
do that again!”

“I just wanted to help,” David said.

“And you did,” I told him. He had. If he
hadn’t launched himself on top of Hernandez, we might all be dead.
I would certainly be. “But your mom’s right. We were all worried
sick about you. You can’t keep running away. If you do, we’ll all
have heart attacks, and then where will you be, with nobody left to
take care of you?”

“I can take care of myself,” David said,
even as he leaned into his father. Ginny turned to me, her eyes
wet.

“Thank you for finding him.”

“I didn’t,” I told her. “He found my mother,
all on his own.” I glanced at her, and she got up from the chair in
the corner and came to shake Ginny’s hand.

“Margaret Anne Martin.”

“Virginia Flannery,” Ginny said, and no
doubt shocked the daylights out of Mother by wrapping her in a hug.
“Thank you for helping my son!”

“He’s a lovely boy,” Mother said
uncomfortably, “and as Savannah said, he found me.”

“You still haven’t told me about that,” I
told David, just as much because I was curious as to give Mother a
hand. Ginny let her go, and turned to her son.

“I’d like to hear it, too.”

Sam nodded.

“I wanted to help,” David said. “So I waited
until everyone was asleep, and then I left. I was going to go to
the Bog, because I thought he might be there—” Again, no one
bothered to ask who ‘he’ was, “but when I got there, everything was
gone.”

I nodded. “A company called Cornerstone
bought the land last summer, to develop. It took them until this
spring to have all the trailers and shacks removed. But then the
owner got himself in trouble,” of his own making, although there
was no sense in mentioning that, “and now everything’s on hold
again. But the Bog’s just a patch of dirt right now.”

“I didn’t know what to do,” David said. “I’d
been cycling all night. I was tired. I wanted to sleep. But there
was nowhere to go.”

Not unless he wanted to curl up under a
tree. But maybe he’d had enough of that during the week he’d spent
at camp.

“But then I remembered that you grew up
here, too. I didn’t know where to find your brother—” His gaze
glanced off Dix, “—but my dad... my other dad... Rafe told me that
you’d grown up in this big mansion on the other side of town from
where he grew up. So I went that way. And when I saw it, I figured
that had to be it.” He shrugged. “He said it looked sort of like a
funeral home.”

I suppressed a smile. Dix didn’t bother,
since Mother wasn’t looking at him.

“But nobody was there,” David said, “so I
sat down to wait. And then I guess I fell asleep.”

And so he reduced the whole night, all his
effort and all our worrying, to just a few sentences.

“I found him curled up on the porch swing
when I came home from lunch,” Mother told Ginny and Sam. “I took
him inside and fed him.” Her face darkened. “And then that monster
showed up.”

“Monster?” Ginny said blankly. I guess Rafe
hadn’t bothered to go into that aspect of things on the phone.

And just as well. The less she knew, the
less she’d worry.

“An old acquaintance of Rafe’s,” I
explained, downplaying things as much as I could. “He was just
released from prison, and decided to come after Rafe, since Rafe
was the one who put him there.”

Sam nodded. I guess maybe he’d done some
research on Rafe before letting him spend time with David. I
wouldn’t blame him. If David were my child, I’d do the same.

“And when he lost Rafe,” I continued, “he
started going after the people in Rafe’s life. It was pure bad luck
that David was here. He was aiming for Mother.” And eventually me,
although he couldn’t have known, when he followed her and Dix home
this morning, that I’d be showing up in Sweetwater by late
afternoon.

“He tied us up,” David said, his voice
smaller now, less cocky and self-assured, “and marched us down to
the basement. It was dark, and it smelled bad. Savannah opened the
door once. I could hear her voice. But she didn’t come down the
stairs. And then we waited until she went outside before he took us
back upstairs. And he tied me to the chair and made Savannah’s
mother take all her clothes off, and he put her on the bed...”