Unfinished Business (32 page)

His eyes were full of tears and remembered
horror.

“Where is he now?” Sam wanted to know, his
voice grim.

“On his way to the morgue.” The answer came
from behind him, from the doorway. Rafe slipped back into the room,
the bandages around his arm and chest once again sparkling white,
even if his shirt still sported blood stains. This time, the
wounded arm was in a sling.

“He didn’t make it through surgery?” I
asked.

He shook his head. “Died on the table.”

“Did he tell Grimaldi where the bodies are
buried?”

That sounded sort of flippant, and I added,
“Of the women you think he killed four years ago, I mean. Did you
see her? Did she show you the pictures?”

He nodded. “She did, yeah. And no, he
didn’t.”

“Damn.” I shot a guilty look at Mother. “I
mean, darn.”

“We’ll find’em.” He extended a hand to Sam,
and they shook. “Good to see you, man.”

“You, too,” Sam told him, with a nod to
Rafe’s arm. “What happened there?”

“Spent some time with an old friend. Long
story.” And one he clearly didn’t want to talk about right now.
“I’ll tell you over a beer sometime. They stitched it back up. I’ve
just gotta take it easy for a couple days.”

Sam nodded. “I’m sorry the man died. I would
have liked to have seen him go back to prison.”

We all would. But that’s life. Sometimes you
win, and sometimes you lose.

He and Ginny left a couple of minutes later,
taking David with them. He was headed back to camp to finish out
his two weeks. I’m sure Ginny would have liked to have kept him at
home, where she could hug and squeeze him as much as she wanted,
and assure herself that he was whole and safe, but she sucked it up
and said yes when he asked if he was going back to camp.

“You made a commitment, son,” Sam added.
“You gotta see it through.”

David grinned. “Good. We’re watching
Young Frankenstein
on the big screen tomorrow, and I don’t
wanna miss it.”

So that was that. They walked out, and left
the rest of us—the family—alone together again.

There was a moment of silence, broken only
by the thump-thump-thump of the baby’s heartbeat from the monitors.
Rafe tilted his head to listen, and his lips curved.

“What a lovely family,” Mother murmured. I
glanced at her, startled, but of course she wasn’t talking about
us.

“Ginny and Sam? Yes, they’re great. David
got lucky when he ended up with them.” I turned to Rafe. “I’m
sorry, but...”

He chuckled and sat down on the edge of the
bed. “Don’t worry about hurting my feelings, darlin’. I woulda made
a lousy father back then. And Elspeth woulda made a lousy mother.
Besides, I was in prison.”

I nodded.

“I’ll do better now.” He put a hand on my
belly, next to the monitor, his skin dark against the fish-belly
whiteness of mine. A Southern Belle avoids the sun at all costs. It
promotes wrinkles and premature aging.

“You’ll do great,” I told him, breathlessly,
as the warmth of his palm seeped into my skin. The belly was cool,
exposed like this in the air conditioning. “You’re great with
David. He adores you. And you’ll be great with the baby, too.”

“Just gotta make sure I stay alive.”

“Yes,” I said, “I think it would be really
great if you could do that.”

As it turned out, it was a few weeks too soon to be able to
determine the baby’s gender. The ultrasound tech did her best, and
said it looked like it might be a girl, because she couldn’t see a
little wee-wee—her word—but she warned us that the absence of the
wee-wee at this point wasn’t conclusive, since it was still early
in the pregnancy.

“Another three to four weeks,” she said,
“and you should be able to get a better idea.”

“But everything’s normal?”

She smiled. “Everything’s fine. The
heartbeat is healthy and everything looks good. You’re seeing an
OB, aren’t you?”

I nodded. Growing up, my gynecologist had
been Dr. Seaver in Columbia, but she wasn’t practicing anymore, and
besides, I lived in Nashville now. I had found myself an
obstetrician closer to home, and was getting regular checkups. Not
frequent ones yet, but I had a monthly appointment in two weeks,
and we were supposed to talk about scheduling an ultrasound
then.

“Then I’m sure everything will be just
fine.” She gathered up her equipment and headed for the door.

“So I’m good to go?” I called after her. “I
don’t have to stay here any longer?”

She shook her head. “No reason that I can
see why you should.” She disappeared into the hallway. I turned to
the family.

“Sorry about that.”

“There’s nothing to be sorry about,” Mother
said firmly. “The baby is healthy. That’s all that matters.”

Very nice of her to say that. And a bit
surprising, since I’d been fairly certain that she was not excited
at the prospect of being a grandmother to Rafe’s child.

“When I had the three of you,” she added,
“we had to wait until after you were born to know whether you were
boy or girl.”

“The bad old days.”

“Surprises can be nice,” Mother said
primly.

“Much easier to pick a paint color if you
know what you’re having, though,” Catherine told her. I wasn’t
surprised. My sister has always been the pragmatic one of the three
of us. It comes from being the eldest, I assume.

She got to her feet. “If the excitement’s
over, I think I’ll go home to my own kids. They’ve probably turned
the house upside down by now. I hope Jonathan’s all right.”

“I’ll go with you,” Dix said, and got up,
too, “and get my two.”

“You’d better,” Catherine told him. “You
drove me here.”

“Right.” He turned to me. “You all right,
Savannah?”

“Fine,” I said. “I’ll just wait for someone
to come and take this monitor off my stomach, and then Rafe and
I’ll drive home.”

To our house in East Nashville where the
sheets were still bloody because Wendell and the rookies had been
busy here and hadn’t had the time or opportunity to get us a new
mattress.

“I think you should stay the night,” Mother
said, and we all turned to her. She ignored the variously shocked
and aghast expressions. “Not in the hospital. At the house.”

I opened my mouth, and closed it again
without speaking. I didn’t know what to say. I never thought I’d
see the day when my mother volunteered to have Rafe stay at her
house. And not just volunteered, but actively encouraged.

“You’re still in pain,” she told me, which
was certainly true, “and I’m sure Rafael could use a good night’s
sleep before driving back to Nashville.”

He probably could. As good a night’s sleep
as he could expect under my mother’s roof, with her disapproving
presence just down the hall.

“If you’re worried about privacy,” Mother
added, which was as close as she’d ever come to acknowledging that
Rafe and I were having sex, sometimes even under her roof, “I plan
to find Bob and spend the night with him.”

As close as she would probably ever come to
acknowledging that she was having sex with the sheriff, too.

Catherine and Dix sported matching
expressions of mingled shock and horrified fascination. Rafe looked
like he had a hard time keeping a straight face. I wasn’t sure what
to think, let alone what to say. “Thank you,” I managed eventually.
“That’s... um... good to know.”

Mother nodded. It was a very dignified nod,
even if she had flags of high color on each cheek. “I’ll see you
both tomorrow morning.” She sailed past Catherine and Dix and out
of the room with her head held high.

Hopefully the sheriff was still around,
conversing with Grimaldi or Wendell and the rookies. If not, she
might be coming back up here for a ride in a few minutes.

For a moment or two after she walked out, no
one spoke. We all just stared straight into the air, avoiding one
another’s eyes. Then—

“I didn’t see that coming,” Dix said.

Catherine shook her head. “I’m not sure
whether to applaud or go hide somewhere.”

Rafe chuckled. It was easy for him; he
didn’t have a mother to embarrass him.

Then again, he’d surely been embarrassed
plenty growing up.

“It’s the adrenaline,” he said. “Going
through a traumatic experience like your mother did, makes some
people wanna reaffirm life by banging like hammers.”

He gave me an exaggerated leer. My face
twisted. “Oh, eewww. If there’s one thing I don’t need, it’s a
mental picture of my mother and the sheriff banging like hammers.
Eewww.”

“And on that note,” Catherine said, shaking
her head as if to dislodge the image, “I think I’ve had all I can
stand. Ready to go?”

She looked at Dix. He nodded. “Let’s get out
of here before something else happens.” He turned to me. “Call me
if you need anything. If not, drive safe tomorrow.”

We promised we would, and Dix and Catherine
vanished through the door and into the hallway. I turned back to
Rafe. “You know, Mother isn’t the only one who went through a
traumatic experience today.”

The amusement dropped off his face. “You all
right, darlin’?”

“I’m fine,” I said. And then qualified it.
“Or maybe not exactly fine. I killed someone.”

He didn’t answer, just looked at me. But at
least he didn’t deny it, to try to make me feel better. And he
didn’t make light of it.

“I didn’t mean to kill him. It wasn’t even
that I thought, consciously, ‘if I turn this knife around, I can
stab him with it.’ We were just rolling around on the floor,
fighting—”

Rafe’s expression turned to stone.

“—and he was trying to stab me, and I was
trying to protect myself and the baby, and then I saw David
coming—he threw himself on top of Hernandez, chair and all—and I
knew the knife would go into me if I couldn’t turn it away, so I
did... but it wasn’t like I was trying to kill him.”

Rafe shook his head.

“It was him or me, you know?” I shook my
head. “I know that sounds like a cliché. It
is
a cliché. But
it’s the truth. He was trying to hurt me. And the knife was going
to go into somebody. I just made sure it wasn’t me.”

Rafe nodded.

“But I wasn’t trying to kill him. I didn’t
want to kill him. I just didn’t want him to kill me. Or Mother. Or
David.”

Rafe nodded.

“You’ve killed people. Does it ever get
easier?”

His mouth twisted. “Killing people?”

“Of course not.” Although if you did it
enough, surely even that became commonplace after a while. “Living
with it. The knowledge that you ended someone’s life. Does it ever
go away?”

He shook his head. “If you care that you
took their lives, you carry’em with you. I figure it’s better that
way than if you don’t care.”

I nodded. “Anyway, that’s actually not what
I was talking about.”

He glanced at me, and I added, “When I said
that Mother wasn’t the only one who’d gone through a traumatic
experience today. I didn’t mean that I was upset about Hernandez.
Although I am, a little. But I meant that Mother isn’t the only one
needing to reaffirm life.”

He arched a brow.

“I promised you sex after the hospital.” We
had been in a different hospital when I made that promise, with him
in the bed instead of me, but it came to the same thing, didn’t it?
“Want to go back to the mansion and bang like hammers?”

There was a scuffing sound over by the door.
I looked up, and Rafe turned around. A blushing junior nurse stood
there, looking mortified. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

She wouldn’t even look at either of us, and
her cheeks were as red as apples.

Rafe turned back to me. “Soon as we get
outta here,” he said, with a wink.

But of course it wasn’t that easy. The belt and monitor had to come
off, and after being hooked up to it for an hour or more, I had
gotten used to hearing the rapid pitter-patter of the baby’s
heartbeat. The silence once it was gone, was deafening.

Then before we could leave, we had to track
down Grimaldi, Wendell, and the rookies, and confer with them.

We found them in the lobby, discussing what
their next moves should be. Hernandez was dead, and couldn’t pay
for his crimes beyond what he’d already paid, but Grimaldi wanted
to find the women Rafe suspected he’d killed. And without
Hernandez’s input, that was going to be tricky. As far as anyone
knew, Hernandez was the only person who knew what he’d done with
the bodies. And that was if Rafe was right and there were bodies.
He could be wrong, and the women could be alive and maybe even well
somewhere.

Talk about finding a couple of needles in a
haystack.

“I might could help you with that,” Rafe
said, after we’d stood and listened for a minute.

Grimaldi turned to him. “How could you do
that?”

“I know where he lived back then. We could
start there.”

Grimaldi thought about it. “You think he
might have buried them under the floorboards?”

“No,” Rafe said. And qualified it by adding,
“Prob’ly not. But it’s worth checking.”

Grimaldi shrugged. “Sure.”

“Here’s the address.” He recited it. Wendell
nodded. Obviously he remembered the place. The address sounded
vaguely familiar to me too, although I don’t know how I would have
known where Eugenio Hernandez lived four years ago, so it must just
be my imagination.

“Savannah and I are gonna stay the night
down here,” Rafe added. “We could meet you in Nashville in the
morning.”

“Ten o’clock,” Grimaldi said. “If you think
you can drag yourselves out of bed by then. And let’s keep this
between the...” She counted heads, “seven of us for the time
being.”

Wendell nodded. “No sense in bringing out
the backhoe until we know something for sure. You boys up for some
digging?”

The rookies exchanged a glance. “Whatever
you need, boss-man,” Jamal said. Clayton and José nodded.