I stayed where I was. I was still a little weak in the knees, and anyway, I didn’t particularly relish coming face to face with either of my sisters, my brother, or my brother-in-law.
It didn’t last, of course. Half a minute later, Darcy walked through the door with my daughter’s baby carrier over her arm like a shopping basket. “What on earth happened?”
“Long story,” I said, and was about to launch into it when Dix sidled around the door jamb. He must have heard Darcy moving around, and decided to join us.
“What the hell, Sis…!”
“Don’t look at me,” I protested. “He’s doing his job. Take it up with the sheriff. Or Tamara Grimaldi. If you’re still on speaking terms.”
Darcy put the baby seat on the conference table and pulled out the chair Rafe had been sitting in. Getting comfortable, she folded one long leg over the other. “Did he really accuse Catherine of murder?”
“Not in so many words.” But yes, he pretty much had.
“That’s crazy,” Dix said. “What the hell…!”
“He knows that.” At least I hoped he did. I hoped he wasn’t so busy following the clues that he forgot that this was my sister he was looking for evidence against.
“I was probably in the car with her that morning, you know,” Dix said. “She’d drive both of us to school.”
She would, now that I thought about it. However— “Sixteen years later, there’s no way that you can remember specifically whether you were there or not that morning. You could have overslept. You could have been sick. Or had a dentist appointment. You might have gotten a ride with someone else.”
“Yes,” Dix said, “sure, but…”
I arched my brows and he ground to a frustrated halt. “Fine. You’re right. I can’t recall that morning specifically. Whose side are you on?”
That was a good question. If my husband was serious about looking at my sister for murder, where did my loyalties lie? I loved my husband… but he’d only been my husband for seven or eight months. Catherine had been my sister for twenty-eight years.
If she’d been guilty, that would be a different matter, of course. If she’d actually committed murder, I would be able to justify siding with my husband against her. But of course she hadn’t.
“It’s not about sides,” I said finally. “He has a job to do. He has to look at the evidence. He doesn’t actually think that Catherine did anything to Katie. But what would it look like if he ignored her? Like he was doing favors for his wife’s family, right?”
Dix had to admit that it would look exactly like that. “But that doesn’t mean I like it!”
No. And I didn’t like it, either. Even if I understood it. Or at least I understood it when I put aside my own feelings of loyalty to Catherine and the rest of the family and looked at the situation as unemotionally as I could. “I’m sure he’ll find some kind of evidence soon that points to someone else. He’d have to, since Catherine didn’t do it.”
“It’s not that easy to prove you didn’t do something,” Dix said. “It’s a lot easier to prove that you did.” After a second he added, “If you did.”
“So he’ll find the evidence to prove someone else did it, and not Catherine.”
Dix looked unconvinced, but before he could say anything else, Jonathan and Catherine also appeared in the doorway.
“What the hell, Savannah—!” my brother-in-law said. He had his arm around his wife. Her eyes were red, as if she’d been crying. From that, and the arm around her shoulders, I assumed that not only was Jonathan now up to speed with what had been going on in the conference room while the door had been closed, but Catherine had confessed to him about Darrell and the panty raid and everything else.
“I know,” I said. “I know. He doesn’t really think Catherine did anything wrong. He just has to look at the evidence and follow the clues that are there.”
“To my wife?!”
“The fact that she’s your wife, or my sister, or his own sister-in-law, doesn’t really matter.”
“The hell it doesn’t!” Jonathan said.
I shifted my attention to Catherine. “If you’d only left that stupid box of underwear alone, this wouldn’t be a problem, you know. He’d have found them when he and Nolan and Vasquez looked through Darrell’s trailer—”
Darcy shifted in her seat when she heard Nolan’s name, so maybe she hadn’t realized he’d been involved in that.
“—but you wouldn’t have looked so damn guilty. If he’d connected the dots and asked you about it—” Which he probably would have done, given that her name was written on nine of those pairs of panties, “you could have made it out to be no big deal. ‘Sure, I spent a week or two sleeping with Darrell Skinner in high school. It was no big deal and ended amicably.’”
“It did end amicably!” Catherine said. When I kept looking at her, she added, “OK, so maybe it wasn’t exactly amicable. But it wasn’t like I’d commit murder over it. I didn’t like him that much!”
“I’m surprised you liked him at all, to be honest. I wouldn’t have thought he’d be your type.”
“He wasn’t,” Catherine said. “That’s what I liked about him.”
Ah. Yes, I could relate to that. The same thing I liked about Rafe in the beginning, pretty much. That he wasn’t the type I was supposed to get involved with.
“Didn’t it bother you that he slept around?”
“Yes,” Catherine said. “But when I was sneaking up there, afraid that somebody’d see me and report me to Mother and Dad, it wasn’t like I could make a big deal out of it.”
No, I guessed not. “What about Katie?”
“I have no idea what happened to Katie.” She shook her head. “For God’s sake, Savannah, don’t you know me better than that?”
“I didn’t mean that,” I said. “Of course I know you wouldn’t have hurt Katie. I told Rafe as much. I wondered whether you knew that Darrell started seeing her.”
“No,” Catherine said tartly, “and furthermore, I have no way of knowing whether he did or not. Nor does your husband. Just because her underwear was in that box once, doesn’t mean Darrell had anything to do with her again.”
I guess that was true. We might all be postulating a relationship that just hadn’t existed. Katie must have survived the encounter, anyway, and gone on to live longer, because if the date on the pair of panties had been the same date she’d died, Rafe would have had all the evidence he’d needed right there.
“You’ve done this type of thing before, Savannah,” Jonathan said.
When I turned to look at him—what type of thing?—he added, “Can’t you look into this and figure out what happened?”
“Get in my husband’s way while he investigates? I don’t think he’d appreciate that, do you?”
“We’d appreciate it,” Jonathan said.
Well, yes. I’m sure they would. But that wouldn’t help my homelife if Rafe got it into his head to be annoyed with me.
On the other hand, there had to be something I could do to help him reach the right conclusion, but hopefully without getting in his way. Sometimes it actually is easier to be a civilian when you’re trying to solve a crime. People will talk to you when maybe they won’t talk to someone who’s officially in charge. Some people have a problem talking to the police.
And besides, with his past and reputation in Maury County, Rafe might not have the easiest time getting people to open up to him anyway.
“There’s going to be a memorial service tomorrow morning,” Darcy said. “For Katie. At the funeral home on Broad Street in Columbia.”
We all turned to her. “How do you know that?”
“Patrick told me. He and Lupe are working crowd control.”
“I guess Grimaldi expects there to be a big turnout.” If she wanted officers there to direct traffic.
Darcy nodded. So did Dix, so maybe he’d spoken to Grimaldi in the past twenty-four hours, and heard the same thing. He hadn’t mentioned that earlier. I gave him a narrow stare, but then Jonathan spoke to me again, and I had to stop scowling at Dix.
“Maybe the real killer will be there.”
“That only happens in mystery novels,” I said, although between you and me, for at least a couple of the funerals I had attended, the killer had shown up, too.
Then again, most homicide victims are killed by people they know, so not a big surprise, maybe.
“I’m not sure I’d recognize the killer if he did show up. I haven’t lived here for a long time, and I didn’t know Katie. I have no idea who she associated with.”
They all deflated.
“But I’d be happy to go to the memorial if someone can keep the baby for me.” Since I assumed Rafe would also want to go to the memorial.
Catherine raised her hand. “Under the circumstances I probably shouldn’t be going anyway.”
Maybe not. “I’ll come with you,” Darcy told me, “if you don’t want to go alone.”
I didn’t mind going alone, but if she wanted a chance to see Nolan, I wasn’t going to deprive her of it. Besides, the company would be nice.
“I think if Jonathan or I showed up,” Dix said, “we’d be accused of being ambulance chasers, so we’ll just stay away.”
That would probably be best. “If you don’t have any connection to Katie’s family, there’s no reason for you to be there. Although I’m sure there’ll be a whole lot of curious people who just don’t want to miss the event of the season,” like Darcy and me, “so in that sense, you could feel free to go.”
“I have kids at home, too,” Dix said, “and no need to burden my sister with them. We’ll stay home.”
Burden? “Excuse me,” I said coldly, “but I’m not burdening my sister with my daughter.” She’d volunteered, and besides, they were the ones burdening me with this trip to Katie’s memorial service.
Not that I wouldn’t have been tempted to go on my own if no one had brought it up. In fact, if I’d known that it was happening, I probably would have gone on my own, even with the baby. I had started to feel a bit invested in Katie’s fate even before Catherine had become a (not very serious) suspect.
“When does it start?” I asked Darcy.
“Patrick has to be there by nine, so maybe ten?”
More like eleven, probably, but I wouldn’t mind getting there by ten. It would give me time to talk to people, if anyone seemed inclined to talk to me.
“How about I pick you up at a quarter of?”
“Make it half,” Darcy said, “just in case we have to hunt for parking.”
Good point. If as many people turned up as I expected they would, we could be walking a while after parking the car. Maybe I should just park at Darcy’s little rental house outside Columbia and walk from there.
“We’ll figure it out tomorrow,” she told me. “I’ll call Patrick and see what the parking situation looks like after he gets there.”
It sounded like a plan. “I should let the rest of you get back to work.”
“Not so fast,” Jonathan told me. I had never noticed this bossy, somewhat menacing streak before, but then his wife had never been on the hot seat in a homicide investigation, either.
I sank back down in my chair. “Why?”
“What can the rest of us do to help?”
How was I supposed to know? “You realize this isn’t my job, right? I don’t usually work homicide cases. I’ve stumbled over a few dead bodies in my time, but it’s Rafe’s job to work the case.”
“If he hauls my wife off to prison,” Jonathan growled, “it won’t be because I didn’t try hard enough to stop it.”
“He won’t.” For God’s sake. “Nobody really thinks Catherine had anything to do with this. He just has to look at the evidence.”
“And the evidence apparently puts her right in the crosshairs.” Jonathan gave her a look, one that spoke volumes. She had her head bent and didn’t see it, but I did. “I won’t have it. There has to be something we can do.”
“Honestly,” I took a breath, “the best thing you can do is stay out of this. If Catherine hadn’t gone up to Darrell’s to look for those pairs of panties, you—or she—probably wouldn’t be in it at all. She made herself look twice as suspicious. So just stay out of it. Let Rafe and the sheriff do their jobs. Obviously, if you think of anything that might help, let them know. Or let me know, and I’ll pass it on. But otherwise, just pretend like it doesn’t concern you. Because it won’t, in the end.”
“Easy for you to say,” Jonathan muttered, but he didn’t say anything else. Instead, he glanced from Darcy to Dix and back. “I think we’re just gonna go home. Neither of us can focus on work right now.”
My brother and other sister both nodded.
“Do you want me to forward any calls,” Darcy asked, “or take messages?”
Since they were busy talking, I decided to leave again, and made it all the way to my feet this time. “I’ll see you in the morning,” I told Darcy as I grabbed the handle of the baby seat.
She nodded, and went right on talking to Jonathan and Catherine about their schedules. Dix hesitated a second before he got up, too, and followed me toward the front of the building.
He waited until we were in sight of the front door before he opened his mouth, and he kept his voice low so it wouldn’t carry back to the conference room. “How much of that was true?”
I stopped to look at him. “How much of what? What I told Jonathan and Catherine?”
He nodded.
“Most of it. Getting involved will only make things worse.”
“That your husband doesn’t consider our sister a viable suspect,” Dix said.
I hesitated, since I honestly wasn’t sure how to answer that question. “Let me put it this way. He knows Catherine. He’s probably less inclined to believe her guilty than someone he doesn’t know. And the evidence is all circumstantial and mostly theoretical.”
Dix nodded.
“But Catherine made it worse for herself by breaking into Darrell’s trailer and removing his property. That didn’t improve the way she looked at all.”
Dix nodded.
“He has to investigate. I don’t think he ultimately thinks Catherine is guilty, but he can’t not look into it.”
Dix lowered his voice another notch or two, to just above a whisper. “What if he doesn’t come up with any evidence against anyone else?”
“Then I don’t know what he’ll do,” I admitted. “But the absence of evidence against someone else isn’t evidence against Catherine. And I don’t think any of them—Rafe or Grimaldi or the sheriff—is going to take Catherine to trial on circumstantial evidence. Someone else, maybe. But not Catherine.”
Dix nodded. “And if she went to trial, it would be the DA’s office who’d prosecute. And I could probably talk Todd out of it.”
“You probably could.” Two years ago, I could have, too. But that was before I married Rafe, and jilted Todd in the process. Still, he might do it for Dix.
“This sucks,” Dix said.
It did. “Maybe I’ll discover something at the memorial tomorrow.”
“When’s the last time you saw a murderer confess at the memorial?” Dix wanted to know, and when I didn’t say anything, he nodded. “Yeah, me either.”
He walked back toward the conference room. I let myself and Caroline out the front door into what was now the chill of the early afternoon, and walked back to the Volvo.
I spent the rest of the afternoon at home, doing essentially nothing. I changed and fed Carrie, I fed myself, she spent time on the floor, she napped. While she did that, I pulled up a blank document on my computer screen, typed BEDDED BY THE BEDOUIN at the top, followed by Chapter 1, and then I sat there and waited for the next sentence to present itself.
It didn’t, of course. I couldn’t focus on the imaginary adventures of some woman I hadn’t even named yet, and the sex appeal of some imaginary guy in a headdress—no matter how much he looked like Rafe—when I had Katie’s murder and my sister’s potential arrest swirling around in my brain.
So I turned the computer back off and climbed up to the attic. On my way past, I checked in on Carrie, who was sleeping sweetly in her crib, her cheeks rosy and her breath even. She wasn’t likely to wake up for another hour, at least, so I’d have plenty of time to root around up there.
The mansion, as I’ve mentioned before, was built in the 1839 to 1841 timeframe, and is a two story, red brick building with big, white pillars across the front. Your typical antebellum plantation house, in other words. It has around 5,000 square feet, and an attic across the top floor that’s bigger than my apartment used to be, before I moved in with Rafe.
And there’s stuff up there from when the mansion was built. There’s antique furniture throughout the downstairs, too, but a lot of pieces ended up in the attic. So did a lot of clothing, as it went out of style.
The old household ledgers and such, from back when the Martin Plantation was a working plantation, in the years before the War Between the States, have been donated to the local historical commission for display. At least one ledger lives in the old slave cabin, so the school children who come to see it can also see how the money was spent—or wasn’t—back in the day.
But I wasn’t up here for any of that. I had no idea what I was looking for, or where it would be, if it was even here to begin with, but it was much more recent stuff. It wasn’t likely to be in the far recesses of the attic, where the really old things were. Unless Catherine had deliberately tried to hide something—and if she had something she desperately needed people not to see, it would have been easier to get rid of it—anything pertaining to her high school years would be close to the staircase.
So I started there, opening boxes and checking the pockets of clothes. Since Mother occasionally rented out the mansion for special occasions, anything personal had been removed from the bedrooms downstairs. Whatever Catherine hadn’t wanted—like the pretty dresses Mother had bought for her to wear as a teenager, which Catherine had eschewed in favor of more socially acceptable jeans and shirts—ended up here.
There was nothing of interest in any of the pockets. A dried-out Chapstick, a piece of very old chewing gum, a quarter and a penny. An—I arched my brows—old condom, still in the wrapper. Size large, lubricated. If I wanted to take something away from that, I could surmise that someone—maybe Greg, maybe Darrell—had been reasonably well endowed, but maybe not too good at foreplay.
If Darrell had a reputation for making the earth move regularly, the condom might have been intended for Greg.
There was no way to know now, anyway, and no reason I needed to know. I left the small package where it was and kept digging.
Catherine’s books, including high school yearbooks, were all packed into a couple of cartons, and I set them aside for later. The yearbooks, not the other books. There was nothing among Catherine’s offerings that could rival Apache Amour or Pirate’s Booty, so I wasn’t interested in reading any of it.
One smaller box within a bigger box contained cards and notes and a few photographs. Letters from our mother’s mother in Georgia—immediately identifiable by not just the spidery elegant handwriting, but the return address on the envelopes—and cards from Catherine’s best friend Angela, whenever they were separated over the summer. Angela’s ancestry was Greek, if I remembered correctly, and some of the cards showed pictures of pretty, white buildings against a blue sky, and the ruins of what I assumed was the Acropolis. We have a life-size replica of the Parthenon in Centennial Park in Nashville, that I’ve looked at many times—it’s the closest I’ve come to the real thing—but since the replica is of the Parthenon the way it would have looked before time and the Germans destroyed it, and the card showed the temple the way it looked now, it wasn’t easy to make the match. But I was pretty sure I was looking at a picture of the Acropolis.
By this point, my fingertips were starting to get numb. The attic wasn’t heated, and I’d probably spent twenty or thirty minutes up here. If I wanted time to look at what I’d found before Carrie woke up, I might just want to drag my finds downstairs and go through them in the heated comfort of the parlor.
So that’s what I did. Balanced the box of correspondence on top of the stack of yearbooks, and staggered down the stairs with them, shutting the door behind me. For now, those two areas seemed like they’d have the best potential for finding anything interesting, and if there wasn’t anything there, I could always come back upstairs later, or tomorrow, and look for something else.
Downstairs, I dumped my hoard on the table in the parlor, before curling up on the peach velvet loveseat that had been sitting there for a hundred years, at least. The central heat seeping into my bones from the register by the window felt lovely as I sorted envelopes and postcards from the box, and while Pearl snuffled a little on the pillow in the corner.
Let me just mention here that I did feel a little guilty. These were Catherine’s personal possessions, and I had no business reading her correspondence with her friends and family. She’d probably feel violated if she knew.
On the other hand, she had left these things here at the mansion instead of taking them with her to her own house, so maybe they weren’t that important to her.
In the end, it didn’t turn out to matter. The box gave me no further info toward proving that Catherine had, or hadn’t, had anything to do with Katie Graves’s disappearance and death. And if I’d thought about it, I probably would have realized it. These were letters and postcards Catherine had received from friends and family. There wouldn’t be anything in any of them pertaining to this. If Catherine had written anything down concerning either Darrell or Katie, it would have been in correspondence she had sent to someone else—probably Angela—and not on postcards Angela sent Catherine.
The handful of photographs showed Catherine and Angela, Catherine, Dix, and me, Catherine and Greg, and a couple of shots of a group of kids around a campfire somewhere in the woods. There was no way to know one way or the other—one hackberry tree looks very much like another—but I did wonder whether it had been taken on the Skinners’ property. Yvonne had mentioned something about campfires, hadn’t she?
I peeled my eyes, but didn’t see Darrell Skinner anywhere among the faces. On the other hand, I didn’t see Greg, either.
And as I peered from tiny face to tiny face, I realized that I didn’t really know what Katie Graves had looked like. I had the photograph of Greg and Catherine in front of me, and it was just a few months since I’d seen a picture of Darrell with Yvonne. An older Darrell, but I was pretty sure I’d have recognized him, had he been in the photos. Maybe he’d been the one taking them.
Or maybe Greg had.
But I didn’t have a clear idea of what Katie had looked like. I remembered the headlines in the local papers back when she died, and pictures of a girl with long, dark hair, but beyond that, I couldn’t bring her features to mind. At least half the girls in the picture had long, dark hair, and sixteen years had blunted my recollection of Katie’s face.
The yearbook took care of that. I grabbed the book for Catherine’s sophomore year, and turned over the pages until I got to the Gs. Katie’s name turned out to be Kathryn, not Katherine—same sound, different spelling—and she did indeed spell it with a K, so the ring we’d found near the dumpsite hadn’t belonged to her. And if it had belonged to Darrell, he hadn’t worn it to commemorate his relationship with Katie.
She looked up from the page with solemn, dark eyes. As Rafe had said once, when I asked, she’d been pretty enough, with long, straight hair parted in the middle, and steady eyes under straight brows. Not striking or even particularly noticeable, but with even features and a bland, somewhat unformed face.
Unlike some of the girls, she wasn’t wearing a lot of makeup or fake eyelashes, and she also didn’t have any of the nose- or eyebrow rings or colored hair some of them sported. She just looked like an average girl, the kind you can find millions of in high schools all across the country.
With her face in mind, I took another look at the pictures from the woods, and thought maybe she was there, in the background, half hidden behind another girl with blond curls and a big grin. It was hard to be sure, though. But I put the photos aside so I could ask Catherine about them later.
Other than Katie’s face, the yearbooks didn’t reveal much of interest. Catherine showed up a few times, with and without Greg and/or Angela. I knew both of their faces from seeing them around the house growing up, and from the photographs in Catherine’s box. And Katie showed up once or twice, surrounded by people who weren’t my sister, or anyone else I knew. So at least Catherine hadn’t lied about that. Other than that one outing in the woods, where they were both depicted, Catherine really didn’t seem to have had much to do with Katie in high school.
In one of the photos—the school newspaper staff—Katie was sitting next to a curly-haired blonde with lots of teeth, whom I recognized from the picture in the woods. Her name turned out to be Lynn Jeffries, and I made a mental note to find out whether she was still around, and whether the cops had spoken to her, then or now. If she and Katie had been friends—and they might have been, since I’d seen pictures of them together both during school activities and off-time—Lynn might have some idea whether Katie was, or would have been, involved with Darrell Skinner.
At that point, Carrie started making noises, so I packed everything up neatly and stowed it all away on a bottom shelf in the bookcase, where Rafe might not notice it.
Not hidden, not precisely—because hiding it would make me feel like I was keeping things from my husband—but not anywhere where he was likely to notice it, either, unless I drew his attention to it. And then I went to get my daughter and to start cooking dinner.