We got to Catherine and Jonathan’s house in plenty of time for the festivities.
They live in a subdivision on the outskirts of town, in one of the new McMansions that have cropped up like mushrooms over the past ten years. And they’re very nice, don’t get me wrong. All open and airy, with plumbing that works and floors that don’t slope and windows that don’t let in drafts strong enough to make the curtains move.
I grew up in an old house, of course. Sloping floors and drafts and faulty plumbing is part of the charm. The mansion was finished right around 1840. Rafe’s grandmother’s house is a Victorian from the 1880s. Between those two, I spent two years in Bradley’s townhouse in Green Hills, and two more in a small one-bedroom apartment in East Nashville. That’s where I lived when I met Rafe again.
If we moved to Sweetwater, would we have to live in a McMansion? Something new, without the personality of the houses I preferred?
I looked around the foyer and tried to imagine myself living there.
“Something wrong?” Catherine asked. She’d come to the door to relieve us of our coats. “You’re wrinkling your nose. Does something smell bad?”
Not at all. The house was redolent of roasting meat and baked goods, and things like pine trees and oranges.
I shook my head. “Just thinking.”
Rafe hadn’t let me know that he wanted the job offer from Grimaldi to be a secret, so I added, “Tamara Grimaldi offered Rafe a job working for the Columbia PD.”
Catherine’s brows rose. She turned to him. He shrugged. “I’ll take the baby in.” He picked up the car seat.
“Everyone’s in the family room,” Catherine told him. “Straight through the dining room to the back. Except the kids. They’re upstairs.”
Carrie was too small to join them, so a non-issue for us. Until next year, when she’d be moving under her own steam. Crawling, if not walking. I pictured her pitching headfirst over the edge of the staircase and rolling to the bottom, and winced.
Rafe passed out of the foyer with the baby carrier, and Catherine turned to me. “You OK?”
“I’m fine,” I said.
She glanced at the doorway where Rafe had disappeared. “Is he OK?”
“He’s fine, too. Thinking about it.”
She tucked her arm through mine. “It would be nice to have you back home.”
It would be nice to be back home. I’d gotten over my need to be independent. Or to prove I was independent. I was ready to have family around me again. These last couple of weeks in Nashville, with a newborn and with Rafe at work all day, had reminded me how nice it is to be surrounded by people who love you, and who pitch in to help when you need it.
“Anything I can do to nudge him in the right direction?” Catherine asked as we headed for the family room.
“You mean in the direction of Sweetwater?” I shook my head. “It has to be his decision. I don’t want him to do it because he thinks I want him to. I mean, I realize that that’ll play into it...”
“And should,” Catherine nodded. “You’re his wife. What you want matters, too.”
“But not more than what he wants. I think he’s tempted. Since we had Carrie, we’ve both realized that where we live in Nashville, maybe isn’t the best place to be. And with his grandmother down here now, and with Grimaldi moving, and the boys he’s been training for the TBI finishing training and going on to do actual work… it might be a good time to make a change.”
Catherine nodded. “I’ll be happy to give him my opinion if you want.”
“If he asks,” I said. “Otherwise, just keep it to yourself.”
She made a face but didn’t say anything else as we passed through the beautifully decorated dining room and into the family room.
The whole gang was there, or so it seemed. It wasn’t until I’d looked around the room, at all the familiar faces, that I realized that no, we were still missing some people.
I turned back to Catherine. “Where’s Mother?”
“Not here yet,” Catherine said.
“Have you spoken to her?”
She shook her head. “Why?”
“She spent the night with Bob. I haven’t seen her since she left after the party last night.”
“I’m sure she’s fine,” Catherine said. “We would have heard if she wasn’t.”
Nice that they were all so certain about that. “Did you hear that Todd got engaged?”
“To Marley?”
I nodded.
“Good for him,” Catherine said. “How do you know?”
I explained that Rafe had spoken to the sheriff earlier. “He told Rafe, and Rafe told me.”
“Why are you worried about Mother, if your husband has spoken to Bob? Didn’t Bob tell him that Mother’s all right?”
He had.
“Do you think he’s lying?” Catherine wanted to know. “What do you think he did? Strangled her and hid her in the freezer and now he just isn’t telling us?”
“Of course not.” Bob Satterfield wasn’t the kind of person who’d do something like that.
“You’ve gotten involved in too many murders,” Catherine told me. “Mother’s fine. I’m sure she’ll be here soon.”
And if she wasn’t, we’d mount a search party and go looking for her. I wandered over to an empty spot between Darcy and Dix, and proceeded to sit. “Where’s Grimaldi?”
“She had to work,” Dix said.
“In Nashville?”
He nodded. “She’s still there until the thirty-first.”
Of course she was. Because God forbid that she quit a week early and spent the holidays with us.
Of course, she had a habit of working holidays so her colleagues with families didn’t have to, which I suppose is nice of her. But I’d expected her to be here. If nothing else, so she could ask Rafe what his answer to her offer was. I’d kind of like to know, too.
“I don’t think she expected an answer today,” Dix told me.
“Sounds like you know what I’m talking about, anyway.”
“She talked to me about it.” He glanced at me. “She wanted to know whether I thought you’d want to move back home. And whether he would.”
The second glance was for Rafe, perched on the arm of the sofa where his grandmother was sitting. He had given Carrie to her, and they were both beaming down at the baby. I could tell from the way Rafe was poised, that he was ready to make a grab for Carrie if she slipped out of Mrs. Jenkins’s hands.
“What did you tell her?” I asked.
Dix shrugged. “That I had no idea. I figure you might be open to it. I’m less sure about him.”
I nodded. I was less sure about him, too. “Between you and me…”
Dix nodded.
“How do you think the population of Columbia would take to Rafe policing them?”
“If they have any sense,” Dix said, “they’ll take a look at his reputation and consider themselves lucky.”
Awww.
“And if that doesn’t work, all he has to do is flash his badge and his gun, and that look he gets in his eyes when people don’t do what he wants, and that ought to take care of it.”
Hard to argue with that. The look Rafe gets in his eyes sometimes is enough to make grown men wet themselves. It was nice of Dix to notice.
“I love you,” I said.
He grinned. “I love you too, Sis.”
“It’ll be nice for you to have Grimaldi here.”
“Nice for all of us,” Dix said.
It was hard to argue with that, too.
The search party turned out to be unnecessary. They cut it close, so close that we were almost ready to move into the dining room for Christmas dinner by the time the doorbell rang again, but a minute later Bob ushered Mother into the family room.
“Sorry we’re late.” They stopped just inside the door, him with his hand on her back.
“Yes,” Mother chirped, and reached up to sweep a lock of champagne-colored hair from her temple, “sorry we’re late.”
The hand lingered, and the lights from the tree caught on something shiny, glimmering on her finger. I squinted as a beam of reflected light hit me squarely in the face. “What’s… is that what I think it is?”
Mother giggled. Actually giggled, like a school girl. And pulled it off, in spite of being fifty-nine and several months old.
“Ohmigod!” Audrey squealed and jumped to her feet. Her heels clacked on the floor as she hurried toward Mother, her wedge of black hair swinging. “Ohmigod! You’re engaged. You’re engaged!”
She’s a year older than Mother, but managed to pull off the middle school squeal, too. They fell on each other, jumping up and down, while Bob edged out of the way. Audrey was crying, and so was Mother.
Dix was the first to congratulate Bob. He slapped him on the shoulder with one hand and extended the other. “Welcome to the family. Congratulations!”
After that, the whole thing pretty much descended into pandemonium. We all hugged Mother and sniffled along with her, and we all either hugged Bob or shook his hand, and congratulated them both. She kept shedding happy tears, and he was beaming, like the happiest man in the world.
By the time we made it to the dinner table, Catherine was apologizing for the roast and how the rolls were a little too brown on the bottom. Nobody had heard the oven bell ding in the excitement, so we were eating slightly-burnt rolls and a roast that was, perhaps, just a touch dry. The sauce helped, though, and I don’t think anyone really minded.
“So when’s the wedding?” Jonathan wanted to know. He’s my brother-in-law, Catherine’s husband, and more than ten years in the South—first at Vanderbilt University’s law school, and then here in Sweetwater—hasn’t managed to wear the sharp edges off his Boston accent.
Mother and Bob exchanged a look. “We were thinking of eloping,” Mother said demurely.
Really? I would have thought she’d want the big reception and the adoration of the populace for her nuptials.
Then again, I don’t know why she would. I mean, she had the big wedding and the white gown when she married my father. She got to experience it again six months ago, when Rafe and I got married on the grounds of the mansion. If she just wanted to run off somewhere now, and tie the knot in a private little ceremony with no fanfare, maybe it wasn’t so surprising.
I tried to imagine my mother and the sheriff being lawfully wedded by an Elvis impersonator in Las Vegas. The mind balked.
“Maybe somewhere tropical,” Mother added.
“Wedding and honeymoon in one? What a good idea.”
Mother smiled at me. “We thought so.”
“Todd called me to share the good news about Marley,” Dix said. Since Todd Satterfield is his best friend, and has been since kindergarten, I guess it made sense that he would have. “Hard to believe you’re both tying the knot.”
He grinned at the sheriff, who grinned back and took Mother’s hand. “I’m a lucky man. I gain a wife and a daughter-in-law, all at the same time.”
“I guess Todd’s moving in with Marley, so you’ll finally get your house back.”
Todd had been living with his father for the past year-and-a-half or so, since he came back from Atlanta to take the position as assistant DA for Maury County. I hadn’t heard Bob complain, and I imagined they’d probably gotten along reasonably well. And it wasn’t like they’d been stumbling over each other. Bob’s house isn’t quite as enormous as the mansion, but it’s one of the big four-squares in the middle of town, so there was plenty of room for the two of them.
But of course Marley had a house, too, where she and her son Oliver lived. And it made sense that Todd would move in there.
“He’s been staying with Marley on and off for a while,” Bob confirmed. “Half the time lately, he didn’t even come home at night.”
Well, good for him. “Are they having Christmas dinner together?”
“They went away for Christmas,” Bob said. “Todd rented a cabin in Gatlinburg. Oliver’s enjoying the snow.”
No doubt. And Todd and Marley were surely enjoying the ambience after Oliver went to bed. All snuggled up in front of a fire with the mountains outside. And a ring box in Todd’s pocket.
“So where will you two be living?” Catherine wanted to know. “A night here and a night there? Separate residences? Or?”
Mother looked discomfited. She didn’t really look at any of us when she said, “We wanted to talk to you about that.”
Uh-oh.
Mother squared her shoulders under the green silk. “I want to move in with Bob.”
And…?
“Sure,” Catherine said, with a glance at me and Dix. “You can move in with Bob. Why would we mind?”
“We’re adults,” I added. “We realize that… you know.”
Mother flushed. So did I. Rafe turned his head to hide a smile.
Dix cleared his throat. “What’s the problem?”
Mother focused on him. She looked relieved to be dealing with him instead of me or Catherine. “It isn’t a problem, really. Just… what to do with the house.”
There was a moment of silence. I blinked. “When you say the house, you mean the mansion? The Martin Mansion?”
Mother nodded. “If I won’t be living there anymore…”
Since in her world, I guess, a wife moves in with her husband. The way Mother had done when she married Dad. The way she proposed to do now, after marrying Bob.
Then again, that was exactly what I’d done, too, in shacking up with Rafe, so I had very little room to talk.
“I hope you’re not suggesting that we should sell it,” Dix said, with another glance at the rest of us. He included Darcy this time, since she was also one of Dad’s children. “The Martins have owned the place for a hundred and eighty years. Longer.”
“Of course not,” Mother said with a sniff. “But you’re the Martins. Not me. I’ll be Margaret Anne Satterfield.”
So she would.
Catherine looked at Dix. “I already have a house.”
He nodded. “So do I. And the girls like it. I don’t want to take them away from where they lived with Sheila.”
They both turned to look at Darcy. She shook her head. “No offense, but I don’t really want it. I have a house, too. So does Patrick.” Her boyfriend, an officer with the Columbia PD. One of Grimaldi’s underlings come New Year, I guess. He was sitting next to her, but not saying much. He nodded, though.
“You guys fight it out,” Darcy added, sharing a glance between the three of us. “I appreciate that you’re including me, but you’re the ones who grew up there. I wasn’t a Martin until a couple of months ago. I still don’t feel like one. To me it’s just a house. A really big one.”
OK, then.
There was a beat of silence, and then everyone turned to me.
And to Rafe.