Rafe spent an hour or so on the sofa with his grandmother, watching Bitsy and Bob muddle their way through their lake house renovation. Eventually, the house was ready, with big, gorgeous, floor-to-ceiling windows letting in the lake view, and Rafe got to his feet. “I’m gonna go.”
I nodded. “Good luck.”
“I’ll take the Harley, in case you wanna go somewhere.”
I glanced out the window. It was chilly outside, and looked like rain. Not very pleasant for a leisurely ride. Especially a leisurely fifteen-mile ride on a bike. “You can take the car. The weather looks questionable.”
He shook his head. “I’ll be fine on the bike. If you go into labor and you have to go to the hospital, the two of you need the car.”
He had a point. I tried to imagine maneuvering the heavy bike to the hospital, with Mrs. Jenkins hanging onto the back. The mind boggled.
“I don’t expect to go into labor today,” I said. “Not with three weeks to go. But leave the car, by all means. Better safe than sorry.”
“That’s my girl.” He bent his head and brushed my lips with his. “Take care of yourself. And our baby. And my grandma.”
I promised him I’d take care of everyone, and watched him shrug on his leather jacket and head out into the chilly November day. It wasn’t raining, not precisely, but the air was wet, even if nothing was specifically falling from the sky.
He took off down the driveway. I watched until he was gone, and then I went inside to Mrs. Jenkins. A new show had started, and another couple had replaced Bitsy and Bob. They wanted to buy a tiny home and live in it with their three children. All under the age of five.
Mrs. J was enthralled. I went looking for my phone.
I wasn’t going to give anything away to Detective Grimaldi. Rafe was worried about his grandmother, and I could understand that. I was worried, too. I didn’t think she could have killed anyone—certainly not without incurring some sort of injuries to herself—but I knew what it looked like. Somebody doesn’t get that much blood on them from a nosebleed.
At the same time, I needed information. About what, I wasn’t sure. But if anyone was dead, Grimaldi might know. And might tell me, if I probed carefully and without giving away why I wanted to know.
For all I knew, she might be off work this weekend, and knew nothing at all about anything. And in that case, it would just be a cordial check-in with a woman I considered a friend and who considered my brother—maybe—something more.
So I dialed. And waited for Tamara Grimaldi to pick up. On the TV, Saffron and Gus and their three kids were looking at a school bus turned into living quarters and marveling at how spacious it was.
“Just wait until the kids grow past three feet each,” I wanted to tell them, but of course I couldn’t. And the real estate agent didn’t, just watched them with a beaming smile while almost-visible dollar signs floated around her head.
I’m a real estate agent. I like dollar signs. But I wouldn’t be beaming while a family of five were talking about moving into a school bus. I’d be trying to talk them out of it.
The phone was picked up on the other end. “Savannah.”
Grimaldi has finally wrapped her brain around my first name, after calling me Ms. Martin for the first year we knew each other.
“Detective.” On the other hand, I’ve never wrapped my brain around calling her Tamara. And while Rafe calls her Tammy, no one else does. Not even her own family.
I’ve never asked my brother Dix what he calls her. They’ve been very circumspect about their relationship. To such a degree that I’m not even a hundred percent sure they have one.
“What’s going on?” Grimaldi wanted to know.
“Nothing,” I said.
Grimaldi didn’t answer. She has the interrogation technique down pat. Don’t say anything, and let the suspect squirm. I squirmed, until the silence got to be too much for me. “I’m just saying hello. It’s been a couple of days since we talked.”
“Is someone dead?” Grimaldi wanted to know.
That’s what I wanted to know. “I’m sure a lot of people are dead. But you’d know that better than I would. Are you working on anything interesting?”
“No,” Grimaldi said. “And it wouldn’t be any of your business if I were.”
“Just making conversation,” I said. Sort of airily.
“Uh-huh. Your husband around?”
I told her he wasn’t. “He’s on his way to Brentwood to see his grandmother.”
Mrs. Jenkins gave me a startled look over the back of the sofa. I smiled apologetically and wandered toward they foyer while I lowered my voice. She was already confused enough, poor thing. Hearing me lie about things wouldn’t make her any less so. “Speaking of...”
“Yes?” Grimaldi said.
“I heard that someone fell down the stairs at the nursing home and died. A Mrs. or Ms. Bristol. Can you shed any light on that?”
“None at all,” Grimaldi told me. “I had nothing to do with it. I don’t know that anyone else did. First of all, depending on where in Brentwood this place is, it could be Williamson County’s jurisdiction, and then the sheriff there would likely be in charge, if there were suspicious circumstances. If not, the attending physician might just have signed the death certificate and sent the body to the funeral home for cremation or burial.”
“Without an autopsy?”
“There’s not always an autopsy,” Grimaldi said. “People die in nursing homes all the time. It’s expected. Most of them expire quietly. The family can ask for an autopsy if they feel they have cause for concern, but with most elderly people, it’s bag and tag.”
It took me a second to wrap my brain around ‘bag and tag.’ When I had, I said, “What about a fall down the stairs? Would someone order an autopsy for that?”
“Maybe, maybe not,” Grimaldi said. “It would depend. If someone saw her, and could testify that she just lost her footing and fell, then no. If it happened while no one was looking—an unattended death—then maybe. It would depend on the doctor. How suspicious he was that it wasn’t an accident. How eager he’d be to try to make something of it. And how likely it was that she didn’t just fall.”
So basically, there was no way to know. Not a particularly comforting thought, that someone could push you down the stairs in a nursing home, and just because you were old, nobody would bother to investigate.
“Did your grandmother-in-law say anything to make you think it was suspicious?” Grimaldi wanted to know.
She hadn’t. But then again— “You know how she is.”
Grimaldi agreed that she did. “I hope everything is all right?”
“As far as I know,” I said. “If it isn’t, I’m sure Rafe will figure it out when he gets there.”
Grimaldi said she was sure he would, too.
“So are you working today?” I asked.
Grimaldi said she was off, but on call in case anything needed her attention.
“You didn’t drive to Sweetwater to see Dix?”
“No,” Grimaldi said.
“Is everything all right?”
“Everything’s fine,” Grimaldi said.
OK, then. I could tell from her tone of voice that she didn’t want to talk about it, which made me want to talk about it more, but I respected her boundaries. Sort of. Instead, I came at the matter from a different angle. “Are you coming to Sweetwater for Thanksgiving?”
“No,” Grimaldi said.
“Didn’t Dix invite you?”
He had.
“Do you have to work?”
“It’s a family occasion,” Grimaldi said. “I’m not family.”
She wasn’t. But Bob Satterfield would be there—Mother’s beau—and he was just as much family as Grimaldi was. Emotionally attached to one of the Martins.
“I’m sure you’d be welcome. Things are going to be awkward this year anyway, what with Darcy and all.”
Darcy had been my brother’s receptionist for the past couple of years. That was before we realized that she was also our half-sister, through a youthful fling of my father’s. Before he met Mother, naturally. But even so, Mother was a little leery around Darcy, and still royally pissed off at Audrey, Darcy’s biological mother, who had known for thirty-four years that she’d given birth to my father’s child, and had never mentioned it to anyone.
Every Thanksgiving for thirty-three years, Audrey had been there as part of the family. She’s been my mother’s best friend since Mother came to Sweetwater as a young bride.
This year, she probably wasn’t invited. Darcy probably was—Mother was doing her best to be polite—but it wasn’t like Darcy would enjoy it when she knew her biological mother was sitting at home alone, gnawing on a turkey-leg by her lonesome. So either way you sliced it, it would be an awkward evening.
“That’s all right,” Grimaldi said, as if I’d offered her a wonderful opportunity. “I usually work on holidays. That way, the detectives who have families can be home with them.”
That made sense. And was very nice of her. I said so. She grunted.
“Well, we should grab lunch sometime soon,” I said brightly, and then wished I hadn’t. She had the day off today—unless she got called in on a case—but I couldn’t have lunch with her. If she suggested it, I’d have to decline. And I couldn’t tell her it was because I had to babysit Mrs. Jenkins, since she wasn’t supposed to know that Mrs. Jenkins was here.
Luckily, she didn’t take the bait. “That sounds nice,” she said instead, politely. “I’ll see what I can find out about your Ms. or Mrs. Bristol, and get back to you.”
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.