She wasn’t in the foyer. I had assumed, when she heard my mother go downstairs, she’d follow, the way I had done. But she hadn’t. Maybe she’d fallen asleep.
I headed back up the stairs, with Pearl keeping pace. She looked worried. Maybe I wasn’t moving fast enough for her. My back still hurt, and climbing stairs was getting more and more difficult every day.
“Mrs. Jenkins?”
I entered the second floor stairwell and headed toward the back of the house. Past my open door to Mrs. Jenkins’s—formerly Catherine’s—room.
The door was open there, too. It only took a second to see that the room was empty. The overnight bag was still on the bed where I’d left it. And it didn’t look like Mrs. Jenkins had laid down for a rest the way I had.
“Mrs. J?”
I turned toward the bathroom. The door stood open there, too. Not much chance anyone was inside, but I peered in anyway.
It was empty. The shower curtain was pulled to the side, and no one was hiding in the tub.
“Mrs. J?”
Dix’s old room is on the same side of the hallway as the bathroom. I stuck my head inside. Empty, of course.
She must have waited until my mother left, and then gone into the master suite. I headed that way.
“Mrs. Jenkins?”
There was no answer.
If you’ve ever watched HGTV—and I had watched a lot of it this week—you’ll have noticed that one recurring phenomenon is potential homebuyers walking into the master suite, doing a half turn, and then saying, “I don’t think it’s big enough,” or words to that effect. “I’m not sure our furniture is going to fit in here.” Usually, the master bedroom in new construction is huge. In old houses, like this one, not so much. Back in 1840, people didn’t think of a master bedroom as a retreat the way we do today. It was just somewhere you went to crash after a long day of hard work.
Mother’s room was a little bit bigger than mine, but it wasn’t huge. The attached bath—not 1840s vintage—wasn’t, either. It took me less than twenty seconds to look through it all and determine that once again, Mrs. Jenkins wasn’t here.
I put my hands on my hips and did that HGTV half-turn. So where the hell—excuse me, heck—was she?
I’d been awake the whole time we’d been upstairs. I would have heard her if she went past my door and down to the first floor. I’d heard Mother. I’d followed Mother. Mrs. Jenkins hadn’t been between us, and hadn’t come down while we’d been standing in the foyer.
“Mrs. J?”
There was no answer. I headed for the back of the house and the narrow staircase down to the kitchen.
And that’s where I found her. In the kitchen. With three burners going on the stove—gas, of course; Mother wouldn’t consider cooking with anything but gas—and the island afloat with food stuffs. When I walked into the room, she was mincing something green, super fast, with a knife as long as her arm. Knowing my mother, I’m sure the knife was lethally sharp. And she was humming.
“There you are,” I said, too relived to have found her to yell at her for scaring me. “What are you cooking?”
“Fried chicken,” Mrs. Jenkins said, “mac’n cheese, and collard greens. And biscuits.”
Lovely. Sounded like we were in for a feast. My stomach rejoiced, even as my arteries whimpered.
Another very nice thing, was that she sounded completely lucid. A lot of the time, she sounds a little vague, like she’s not entirely sure where she is, who you are, and maybe even who she is.
Not so now. She was cooking from scratch, humming as she dredged chicken pieces in flour and some sort of crunchy mixture. Bread crumbs, or Corn Flakes, or maybe potato chips.
“Need any help?”
I know how to cook, sort of. Soul food isn’t a strength, though, so I was relieved when she told me, “No, baby. You just sit down and watch.”
I sat down and watched. Kept my eye on the sharp knives and the gas flames on the oven, to make sure she didn’t hurt herself. And on Pearl, whom I had to tell to go lie down in the corner, since her position, on the floor between the island and the stove, might cause Mrs. Jenkins to stumble over her and fall. Pearl grumbled, but went.
An hour later, we had fried chicken and macaroni and cheese—from scratch—and biscuits—ditto—and collard greens. I didn’t like the greens that much. They were wilted and sort of greasy. But everything else tasted like heaven. When we were finished, it was all I could do to stagger into the parlor and collapse in front of the television. “HGTV?”
Mrs. Jenkins nodded. She didn’t look as full as I felt. And she’d eaten as much as I had.
Of course, she didn’t have an almost-full-term baby pushing on all her internal organs, either.
I fell asleep over Property Brothers. Mrs. Jenkins patted me and told me she’d stay with me. I grunted something and fell asleep again, and didn’t wake up until Mother came home. By then it was after ten o’clock and time to go to bed. And I was alone.
“Damn. I mean...” I pushed upright and looked around, frantically. “Where is Mrs. Jenkins?”
“She went up to bed,” Mother said calmly, unbuttoning her coat. “Where you should be, too.”
I should. But before I could, I had to call Rafe. I had told him I would, and if I didn’t, he’d worry. So after dragging myself upstairs and brushing my teeth, I forced my gluey eyelids to stay open long enough to call my husband.
He sounded disgustingly alert. Although, considering that it was only about ten-thirty, maybe it wasn’t surprising. “Evening, darlin’.”
“Ugh,” I said.
His voice turned sympathetic. “Rough night?”
“Rough day. Right from the beginning.” I took a breath, carefully, and added. “The evening was actually pretty peaceful. Mother went out with Bob Satterfield, and we just stayed here. Your grandmother cooked. I ate too much. And fell asleep in front of the TV.”
“Sorry, darlin’.” I could hear amusement lacing through his voice.
“I feel like a beached whale.”
“I know.” The sympathy was back, along with the amusement. “It’ll be over soon.”
It would. And then I’d probably wish I could stuff the screaming, inconsolable, small poop-machine back inside for a while so I wouldn’t have to deal with it. “We’re going sightseeing tomorrow,” I said. “I’m showing your grandmother around. And tomorrow afternoon, we’ll probably help Mother prepare for Thanksgiving. You’re still planning to come, right?”
“Course.”
“Mother asked. She’s looking forward to seeing you.”
“I’m looking forward to seeing her, too,” Rafe said, which had to be a lie. Or maybe not. “So no problems getting there?”
“None at all. Nobody followed us that I could see. Is there anything new where you are?”
He grunted. Annoyed. “We did the door-to-door. Nobody saw nobody at the house. Nobody saw nobody using the payphone. Nobody noticed any strange cars. Nobody noticed a BMW. It was all sedans and trucks and the usual stuff.”
“So we can’t put Fesmire at the house.”
“No,” Rafe said. “And we can’t put him nowhere else, neither. I told José and Clayton to go home at ten.”
“They haven’t seen Fesmire all day?”
Apparently they hadn’t. “He didn’t show up at home or at work so far.”
“So where is he?”
“God knows,” Rafe said. “For all we know, he ran off to Vegas with his mistress.”
“Does he have one?” Had her name been Julia Poole? “Is he married?”
He was.
“He probably doesn’t have a girlfriend, then,” I said.
“You never know,” Rafe answered. “Wealthy doctor like that might look good to some gold-digger twenty-year-old.”
Maybe so. “But you don’t know where he is. Or where she is, if she exists.” Maybe it was Fesmire’s girlfriend who had called and gotten me out of the house earlier.
“No,” Rafe said. “If he ain’t home or at work by tomorrow morning, Tammy’ll put out a BOLO and see if anybody’s seen him. Until then we wait.”
“You’ll wait carefully, right? Just in case he decides to come back in the middle of the night?”
“I’m sleeping on the sofa,” Rafe said. “With a gun on the coffee table.”
Good. “I’ll let you get to it. And I’ll call you tomorrow morning. Do your best to stay alive so you can answer the phone.”
My husband assured me he would. “Sleep well, darlin’.”
“You, too,” I told him. “I miss you.”
“Miss you, too. But I’m glad you ain’t here.”
I was, too, if it came to that. This afternoon had been scary. I was perfectly happy to stay out of the way until they caught the bad guy, be it Alton Fesmire or someone else. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
“Love you.” He hung up, and saved me the trouble of doing so. I plugged the phone in to charge next to my bed, and crawled underneath the covers.
When I woke up again, it was morning. Bright sunlight slanted through the curtains, and I could smell coffee and hear voices from downstairs. Mother must be up, and she either had company, or was talking to Mrs. Jenkins.
A quick look at the phone showed me that it was close to nine. I swung my legs over the edge of the bed, and groaned. My back still hurt. Too much activity followed by too much sitting around yesterday, probably, and then falling asleep on Great-Aunt Ida’s uncomfortable loveseat.
Rafe hadn’t called, and that was a little worrisome, since he should certainly be up by now. But when I called him, he answered immediately. “Morning, darlin’.”
“Good morning. Did anything happen overnight?”
I imagined him shaking his head. “Nothing. I slept like a baby.”
Funny. According to Catherine, babies don’t sleep well at all. At least not for the first eight months or so.
“Any news?”
“Nothing so far. Everything’s quiet. José and Clayton have gone south.” To Brentwood and Franklin, I assumed; both of which are south of Nashville. “We’re just keeping on keeping on.”
“You do that,” I said. “I’m going to grab some breakfast and then show your grandmother around. Call me if there’s anything I need to know. Otherwise, I’ll talk to you again tonight.”
Rafe said he would. We made kissy noises at each other, and then I hung up and headed downstairs.
Mrs. Jenkins’s door stood open, and I found her in the kitchen with Mother. They seemed to be getting along all right. I have to admit I’d been a little worried about Mother doing the Lady of the Manor act with poor Mrs. J. My mother, not to put too fine a point on it, was brought up with some old Southern mores she hasn’t been entirely successful in eradicating.
I’m not sure she’s ever felt it necessary to eradicate them, to be honest. At least not until I brought Rafe into our midst, and she came face-to-face with her prejudices. She’s doing a lot better than she was, but I know I can’t expect miracles, so I’d made my way down the stairs concerned that the atmosphere in the kitchen was tense.
It wasn’t. They were sitting at the island having coffee together. Mother was doing most of the talking, but that wasn’t unusual. Mrs. Jenkins never had a whole lot to say, and as she’s gotten more confused over the past year, she’s said less and less. But she looked clean and comfortable, in one of her housedresses—not the same one she’d been wearing yesterday—and a pair of clean, white socks.
“We should get you a new dress for tomorrow,” I said, as I headed for the fridge and the bottle of milk. The coffee smelled good, but I couldn’t have any. “For Thanksgiving dinner.”
Mother nodded.
“Would you like to come with us?” I offered. “Later, I mean? I need something to eat first. But we were going to do the grand tour of Sweetwater. I was going to show Mrs. Jenkins the Bog, and the cemetery where LaDonna’s buried, and I thought we might have some lunch at the café, maybe.”
“That’s all right,” Mother said pleasantly. “I have things to do here.”
I looked at her. “You and Audrey still aren’t talking?”
“She slept with my husband,” Mother said.
“Before he was your husband. Before he even knew you. And he broke it off with her as soon as the two of you met.”
Mother looked stubborn.
“We’ve been over this before,” I told her, as I dipped a spoon into a cup of yogurt I’d found in the fridge. “There’s no point in rehashing it again.”
And then I proceeded to rehash it anyway. “She’s been your best friend since before Catherine was born. There are good reasons why she didn’t tell you she had Dad’s baby and gave it up for adoption. You’re being silly.”
Mother looked mulish.
“Fine,” I said. “Don’t come with us. But you’re going to have to deal with this sooner or later. Darcy is my sister. And Audrey’s her mother. Neither of them is going away. Dix and Catherine and I want a relationship with Darcy. And we love Audrey. I understand that you’re hurt—anyone would understand why you’re hurt—but holding on to your feelings doesn’t help anybody. All it does, is leave you without your best friend. When you need her most.”
Mother’s mouth opened, probably to tell me it would be a cold day in hell when she needed Audrey for anything. I continued. “Audrey’s all right. She has her daughter back. I’m sure she misses you, but she gained something from this. All you gained, was a step-daughter you didn’t want.”
I waited a second. She didn’t deny it.
“But nobody did any of this to hurt you. And the person you’re punishing the most, is yourself.”
Mother didn’t have a response to that.
“I’m going to go upstairs and get ready,” I said, as much to my mother as to Mrs. Jenkins. “I need to wash and put on real clothes.” Since I’d come down in my bathrobe. “I’ll be back in a few minutes. And then we can go.”
Neither of them said anything. I padded down the hallway and upstairs.
When I came down twenty minutes later, Mrs. Jenkins was sitting on the bottom step of the staircase talking to Pearl. My mother was nowhere to be seen. I assumed she was sulking, so I didn’t push it. “Ready?” I asked Mrs. Jenkins instead.
She nodded.
“You’ll need your coat. Is it upstairs?”
She nodded.
“I’ll get it.” I was pregnant, but she was old. And moving might be good for me. I still had that niggling lower backache.
I found Mrs. J’s coat tossed over a chair in her—or Catherine’s—room, and brought it back down. I helped her into it, and we headed out. Since I didn’t know where Mother was—inside or out—I made sure I locked the door behind us. And while I wasn’t unmoved by Pearl’s forlorn expression and sad puppy eyes, we couldn’t take her with us. “I’m sorry, baby,” I told her. “But we’re going to Audrey’s, and she wouldn’t appreciate you in her store. The folks at the Café on the Square wouldn’t be happy to see you, either. And I don’t want to leave you in the car. You’ll be better off here. I promise. I’m sure Mother’s around somewhere...”
Pearl dropped her tail and her ears, but she didn’t try to follow us out. I felt horribly guilty, though.
Once in the car, I was able to shake it off. The dog wasn’t being abandoned, after all. She had food and water and was well taken care of. She had doggie beds and furniture to lie on, and we were only going to be gone a few hours. Maybe I could take her for a walk when we got home. A walk might help my back, as well.
“Where would you like to start?” I asked Mrs. Jenkins.
But of course she didn’t know, since she hadn’t been here before. I decided to head toward the Bog. It was the farthest away, on the south side of town. We could make our way back from there.
While we drove, I gave her a little history.
“When I was growing up, the Bog was a trailer park. Rafe lived there with his mother and grandfather. I didn’t know him, though. Not until I started high school. Although I’d heard of him...”
We’d all heard of him. LaDonna Collier’s good-for-nothing colored boy, who was always getting in trouble.
I didn’t realize at the time that some of that trouble wasn’t of his own making. Plenty was. But whenever something—anything—went wrong in Sweetwater, Rafe was the usual suspect. And he wasn’t always guilty.
“Old Jim died when Rafe was twelve. The sheriff always thought Rafe and LaDonna had something to do with it, but Rafe says no. That his grandfather was drunk and fell into the river one night, and that they didn’t find him until later. That they were just happy he wasn’t inside the trailer giving them a hard time, and they weren’t about to put themselves out to go look for him.”
Mrs. Jenkins didn’t answer. When I gave her a sideways look, her expression was peaceful. Could have been a couple of different reasons for that. She might not be listening to me. She might not have any idea who Rafe and Old Jim were. Sometimes she didn’t. Or—seeing as Old Jim shot her son Tyrell in retaliation for Tyrell’s knocking up LaDonna—she might be just fine with the idea of Old Jim staggering out of the trailer, dead drunk, and falling headfirst into the Duck River. Nobody else had mourned for him, so it seemed fitting.
“Rafe and I met in high school. That was the first time I went to the Bog.”
After a second, I added, honestly, “Not that I went to see him, or anything. We weren’t on those terms. But we found him in Columbia once. I was there with my brother and some friends to see a movie, and Rafe had been beaten up. He was sitting on the curb just down from the movie theatre. We loaded him in the car and drove him home.”
Much against Todd’s wishes. It was his car, and it was brand new. He didn’t appreciate Rafe bleeding on the leather upholstery. And it totally destroyed Dix’s plans of necking with Charlotte in the backseat on the way home. Instead of having the backseat to themselves, they had to share it with me, squeezed in like sardines in the small sports car, while Todd kept shooting hostile glances at Rafe.
Mrs. Jenkins smiled.
“After that, I didn’t see him again for twelve years. Until he called the real estate office and asked me to meet him outside your house last year. He knew who I was as soon as he heard my name on the phone.” He’d double-checked, I remembered. “I didn’t recognize him at first. I knew there was something familiar about him, but twelve years is a long time. He didn’t look the same.”
And when I did realize who he was, I’d been scared. I remembered taking a step back. “I thought you went to prison.”
And that purring answer, “That was twelve years ago, darlin’. I got out.”
Now it seemed crazy that I could ever have been afraid of him. Not that he can’t be plenty scary. And plenty dangerous. But not to me.
Never to me.
“I think I fell for him almost from the second I set eyes on him. Even though it took me a long time to admit it.” Especially to myself. Other people had known long before I had.
He’d probably known long before I had. Although I think he’d been a bit afraid I’d never admit it. And that I’d marry Todd instead, because my mother wanted me to, and because it was what a properly brought-up Southern Belle was supposed to do. Not shack up with the bad boy from the trailer park on the wrong side of town, and get pregnant out of wedlock.
“Here’s the turnoff.” I took a right, and the Volvo bumped and scraped down the rutted path toward what had been the Bog up until a year and a half ago. “The first time I came here was last fall. A couple of days after I met Rafe again. I wanted to see where he’d grown up.”
Of course, I’d told my mother and myself something different. LaDonna Collier had died a few weeks ago, and Brenda Puckett had died a few days ago, both of them with a connection to Rafe. I had put forth the theory that he’d had something to do with both deaths. I’d been sleuthing, basically. But I’d also wanted to see where he’d grown up. Even if I hadn’t been willing to admit it.
“There were a couple of clapboard shacks down here, then. And a couple of abandoned mobile homes. Ronnie Burke had already bought the land, and most of the people who lived here had moved out. LaDonna was the last holdout.” Until she died. “It was the most depressing place I’d ever seen.”
And while I’d been sneaking around, peering through windows—trying to identify the Colliers’ trailer—Rafe had snuck up behind me and damn near scared a couple of years off my life.
It looked different now. All the houses had been leveled and the debris hauled away, and the mobile homes had been towed off, too. The singlewide trailer where Rafe had spent his formative years was on a scrap heap somewhere, no doubt. It hadn’t been good for anything else.
Ronnie had started staking out building plots before he went to prison. Most of what he’d done was gone by now, six months later, but here and there, a piece of plastic flapped forlornly at the end of a wooden stake driven into the ground. And he hadn’t been able to do much more before the whole business venture had blown up in his face.
It was still one of the most depressing places I’d seen.
“Let’s get out of here.” I put the car in reverse and made my way up the track. When we were on the road and headed back to town, I added, “So that’s the Bog. What did you think?”
Mrs. Jenkins shrugged.
Yeah, not a whole lot to say about it, really.
“How did Tyrell come to know LaDonna, anyway?” I asked. An African-American eighteen-year-old from the urban core of Nashville would have had no reason to come to Sweetwater. And while LaDonna might conceivably have gone to the city for something, I couldn’t imagine what. The Colliers hadn’t been big on culture, and we had doctors in Maury County. A school trip, maybe? To see the State Capitol or something like that?
“Dunno,” Mrs. Jenkins said.
“He never told you?”
She shook her head.
Could be true, or could be one of those many misplaced details. It’s tough, trying to get information out of someone who can’t remember who you are from day to day, and not much of anything else, either.
We drove to the Oak Street Cemetery next. It’s on the outskirts of town, about halfway between the square and the mansion, and for the past hundred years or more, all the Martins have been interred there. Before the public cemetery was established, we had our own, in the woods behind the mansion. It’s still there, but we’re not allowed to bury anyone there anymore. Mrs. Jenkins might be interested in seeing it, though. Or maybe not. It wasn’t a very pleasant time of year to go stomping through the woods.
Everyone else in town is also buried at Oak Street, so naturally LaDonna was there. So, I assumed, were Old Jim and Wanda, his wife, and maybe Bubba, LaDonna’s brother, but I’d never looked for their graves. I did know where LaDonna’s was, though, so I guided Mrs. Jenkins there.
Rafe had arranged for the stone. From Memphis, the sheriff had told me. Rafe had been in Nashville at that time, actually, as far as I knew. But the stone was his doing. It had an arched top with an engraving of a cross. LaDonna Jean Collier. In loving memory.
We stood for a moment and looked at it. Mrs. Jenkins didn’t say anything. I didn’t, either. I wondered what she was thinking. Would she have liked to have met LaDonna? Or didn’t she really care?
She loved Rafe, so she might have liked to have known him growing up. And I’m sure she’d have given anything to have had Tyrell be alive and well, instead of dead.