Unfinished Business (6 page)

“This is a nightmare,” I said.

“Tell me about it,” Catherine answered. “You
live
here
?”

I looked around. Last August, when I’d
driven over to this part of town from the real estate office, to
let Rafe into the house that turned out to be Mrs. J’s, I’d been
worried about venturing into what was generally considered to be a
sketchy neighborhood. And the sight of Rafe, astride his big, black
Harley-Davidson, with muscles bulging and eyes hidden behind a pair
of dark sunglasses, hadn’t been reassuring. Sure, he’d taken my
breath away. It had been instant, if unwilling, attraction. But
he’d looked like someone I should stay far, far away from, no
matter how gorgeous he was. And then, of course, I’d realized who
he was, and how much more I needed to stay away from him. And then
there’d been the bloody corpse inside the house...

However, since then I’d become inured to the
area. Sure, there were still drug deals going down on the corners,
and most of the residents came from a lower socio-economic bracket
than the one I’d grown up in. The crime rates were a bit higher
than across the parkway, in the ‘nicer’ parts of East Nashville.
But things were looking better all the time. Our house had been
renovated. A couple of others had followed suit. A few brave
pioneers had moved in. And a real estate developer had bought some
of the empty lots and a few small crackerbox houses, and had
knocked down the houses and built new, bigger homes on the land. We
were halfway to gentrified. Or at least a few steps along the
way.

But to Catherine, who hadn’t been here
before, and who was used to her safe subdivision and charming,
quaint old town, I could well imagine it looked like something out
of a scary movie.

“It’s not as bad as it used to be,” I told
her, while I wondered what was going on in the other car. Dix had
been to the house before, and hadn’t seemed concerned, but Mother
was surely aghast at the depths to which her youngest daughter had
descended. This was likely to make her even more determined to talk
me into coming back to Sweetwater with her.

Although with Dix in the house, she might
concede that I’d be safe.

Unless Dix was planning to scurry off to
Tamara Grimaldi’s house as soon as Mother’s back was turned...

“Wow,” Catherine said. She was peering out
the front window. “That’s quite a house!”

“Which?”

“That one.” She pointed. “The brick
Victorian, with the round tower on the corner.”

“That’s my house,” I said, and turned into
the circular driveway. Crunching across the gravel with someone who
had never been here before, brought back memories of the first time
I’d driven up to the house, on the first Saturday in August last
year.

It had been hot then, too. I’d been nervous
about venturing into the ‘bad’ part of town. And Rafe had been in
the driveway, scaring me and attracting me in about equal measure.
And that was before I realized who he was: my hometown bad-boy, the
one whose mother had been held up as an example of what not to
do.

The house itself had looked considerably
worse than it did now. The bones had been there—a three-story brick
Victorian, 1880s, with a round tower on one of the corners—but it
had been rundown and derelict, like no one had done any work to it
in thirty years.

Which was about the time that had passed
since Tyrell was shot, so probably a fairly accurate estimate.

The brick had been crumbling and there’d
been ivy climbing the walls. Several of the windows had been broken
and they’d all been dirty. The porch had been missing some of the
ornate gingerbread trim, while the floorboards had looked as if
they were thinking of breaking at any moment, and dumping whoever
stepped on them into the no-man’s-land underneath. There were
missing roof tiles, and waist high weeds all over the backyard.

I could go on, but I won’t. Rafe had done a
heroic job after he took over, in making the house look better. And
on a limited budget, since undercover work for the TBI doesn’t
exactly fill the coffers with a whole lot of gold. But the grass
was cut and the ivy gone. The brick had been tuck-pointed and the
broken windows replaced. I cleaned them regularly, at least on the
inside. The roof had been replaced, and so had the rotten
floorboards. And inside, there were refinished wood floors,
gleaming woodwork, and fresh paint.

It was a beautiful, one-of-a-kind house. The
neighborhood might still leave something to be desired, but the
house itself shouldn’t scare anyone off.

I stopped the Volvo at the foot of the
stairs and cut the engine. Catherine and I got out. Meanwhile, Dix
pulled to a stop behind us, and he and Mother did the same.

The driveway was empty other than our two
cars. Rafe’s motorcycle hadn’t magically reappeared while I was
gone. I hadn’t really expected it to, but it was still
disappointing.

I waited a second for Mother to make a
comment about the neighborhood or the property. When she
didn’t—reserving judgment until she’d seen the interior, no doubt—I
headed up the stairs to the porch. “Come on.”

Down on the street, a souped-up brown Buick
rolled by, blasting rap music loud enough to shake our eardrums.
The same thing had happened back in August—with a green Dodge, and
a sullen-faced young black man who had scowled at us through the
window. It had made me nervous. Now I just lifted a hand to greet
the kid who lived in the house two doors up. He was nineteen,
answered to Malcolm, and worked at the gas station on the corner of
Dickerson and Dresden.

He gave me a toot of the horn in return, and
rolled off down the street. Going to work, no doubt.

Mother watched the byplay with a tiny
wrinkle between her brows, but she didn’t say anything. Just waited
on the porch until I’d opened the three locks on the front
door—Rafe agreed to let me live with him, but he’d insisted on
taking precautions, especially after I got pregnant—and disarmed
the shrieking alarm system.

“Come on in.”

I waited until they’d filed past me into the
foyer, and then I closed and locked the door behind them. I was no
longer uncomfortable being here by myself, but it never hurts to be
careful.

“So you live here,” Mother said after a
moment.

I nodded, resisting the temptation to ask
whether she really thought I’d take her—take all of them—into
someone else’s house.

Of course, I could have. Quite easily. I
still had my real estate license, and with it, access to every
house for sale in Davidson County. But that would have been
dishonest. And anyway, I liked my house.

Rafe’s house.

Mrs. Jenkins’s house.

Whatever.

“It’s gorgeous,” Catherine said, looking
around. “The woodwork... it’s original, isn’t it?”

I nodded. “1880s. Never been painted.
Everything here is original. Except the kitchen. And the bathrooms.
We... Rafe kept the original clawfoot tubs, but everything is
updated.”

Catherine nodded. “I love an old house.”

I do, too.

“Although it’s nice when everything works
the way it should.” She smiled.

I smiled back. “Old houses sometimes have
quirks. For instance, it takes a minute to get the hot water
upstairs, through all the pipes. But it’s worth it.”

Catherine nodded. And looked around,
enviously. Like Dix, she lives in a new subdivision home in
Sweetwater. And while it’s very pretty, and spacious, and
well-insulated, and has a garden tub and a walk-in closet and a
media room above the front-loading garage, it does lack some of the
charm of a genuinely old house.

Of course, it does make up for it in
convenience. But I wouldn’t want to trade.

“Will you give us the tour?”

“Sure.” I put my bag down on the bench in
the foyer. “Down this way are the formal rooms and the
kitchen.”

We made our way down the same hall I had
walked barefoot this morning, our heels clicking on the hardwood
floors. “Library, parlor, dining room, kitchen.”

“Nice,” Catherine said, looking around with
approval.

“Thank you.” I took another look around
myself, just in case I had missed a note from Rafe the first time.
Or just in case one had appeared in the time since.

It hadn’t.

“The library is where your colleague was
murdered,” Mother asked, “isn’t it?”

I nodded. “She doesn’t haunt the place,
though. And the bloodstains came out of the floor. Unlike in the
ghost stories Dix used to tell me.”

Dix grinned. Mother shuddered
delicately.

“The second floor is all bedrooms and
baths.” We went back down the hall and up the staircase to the
second floor. “Our room.” I opened the door to the room I shared
with Rafe. The bed was still unmade, since I hadn’t taken the time
to fuss with it before I left.

“Mrs. J’s room.” Pale lavender, across the
hall. When I first saw the house last August, there’d been an old,
soiled mattress in this room, that housed a family of mice.

Rafe had told me they were rats, but I
prefer to think he was just yanking my chain. We didn’t know each
other very well then. Anyway, the mattress and rodents were long
gone.

“This one used to be Marquita Johnson’s
room.” I pushed open the door to the third bedroom. Yellow, with a
brass bed. “Now it’s just another guestroom, I guess.”

“The nurse,” Mother said.

I nodded. “Her husband—ex-husband—works with
Bob Satterfield.” Bob is Mother’s gentleman friend, and also the
Sweetwater sheriff. “Rafe hired her to take care of Mrs. Jenkins.
We took a casserole to Cletus’s house after she died,
remember?”

Mother nodded. She hadn’t wanted to go, but
I had made her. Both because I felt guilty—I hadn’t liked Marquita,
and she hadn’t liked me—and because I thought there was a chance
Cletus, her ex-husband, might have killed her. Another long
story.

“This one,” I pushed open the last bedroom
door, “will become the nursery.”

Or at least that had been the plan before
today. Before my boyfriend, the father of my baby, and the person
whose house I lived in, had vanished without a trace.

There was a moment’s pause. Then—

“Would you like for us to help you look
around?” Catherine said. “We don’t have anything else to do until
Jonathan gets here.”

Dix rolled his eyes at her. “He isn’t hiding
in a closet, Cat.”

“I know that,” Catherine said. “But maybe
there’s a clue here to where he’s gone or what happened.” She
turned to me. “Did you check?”

I shook my head.

“Did you at least look in his closet to see
whether he packed a bag?”

“No,” I admitted. “All I thought to look
for, was a note. And his suit. The one he was getting married in.
It’s still here. I was wondering whether to take it with me to the
courthouse or leave it, in case he came back.”

“Let’s look now.” Catherine set out,
briskly, for the master bedroom, and pushed open the closet doors.
“Can you tell if anything’s missing?”

I peered in. “Not that I can see. But most
of Rafe’s clothes are in the bureau. He doesn’t wear suits and ties
very often.”

“Then look there,” Catherine ordered.

“Yes, ma’am.” I crossed to the bureau and
pulled out one of Rafe’s drawers. (I have three, he has two.)

The scent of him rose and smacked me across
the face, spicy and masculine, and I sucked in a breath.

Catherine was next to me immediately, with
an arm around my waist. “What is it? What happened?”

“Nothing.” I bit my lip against the tears
crowding my eyes. “It just... the clothes smell like him.”

Catherine didn’t have anything to say to
that. Or if she did, she didn’t bother. Instead, she just wrapped
the other arm around me, and let me cry on her shoulder while Dix
awkwardly patted my back.

Catherine left thirty minutes later. Jonathan pulled up in the
driveway and honked the horn. “Sorry, Savannah,” he said when I
opened the door, “but if I let the kids out of the car, I’ll never
get them back in.”

I nodded. “Thanks for coming.”

“It’s no problem,” Jonathan said, nodding to
Dix, who had followed me out on the porch to see his girls. “We’ll
take care of them until you come home.”

“I’ll be back tomorrow,” Dix told him,
moving down the stairs. “And I’ll keep you up to date by
phone.”

“I appreciate it.” Jonathan’s attention
moved past us to the door. “Are they coming?”

“Probably just visiting the powder room
before getting in the car. I’ll check.” I left the two men outside
with the kids, and went back through the door to see what was
keeping Mother and Catherine.

I didn’t have to look far. They were in the
kitchen, arguing, their voices carrying down the hallway to the
foyer. Their very polite voices, since we’d all been taught that
yelling is unladylike.

“I’m not sure that’s a good idea,” Catherine
was saying as I headed down the hallway.

“She can’t deal with this alone,” Mother
answered.

“She won’t be alone. Dix is staying, and she
has friends here. Including the police detective.”

“That’s not the same as family,” Mother
said.

“Dix is family,” Catherine told her.

“Dixon is a man,” Mother answered, and of
course there was nothing Catherine could say to that. And at any
rate, I had reached the kitchen by then, and stopped in the doorway
to look from one to the other of them.

“Jonathan’s outside, waiting. With all the
kids. And they’re getting impatient. What’s the problem?”

“Mother won’t leave,” Catherine said.

I turned to Mother, who said, “You can’t
deal with this alone.”

“I’m not alone,” I said. “Dix will be here.
And Grimaldi will call. And Wendell. And I have friends at work.”
Sort of. “And neighbors.”

“That’s not the same as having family
around,” Mother said.