Last call, p.11
Last Call, page 11
He went back to the legal pad. I went back to the lobby, gathered up my daughter, and set out, after reminding Darcy that she needed to get herself over to Audrey’s to pick up her dress after she made sure it fit.
* * *
“Any news?” I asked Rafe two minutes later. I had snapped Carrie’s seat into the back of the Volvo and turned on the engine, but I was still parked on the square in Sweetwater while I let the AC work its way through the car. “I’ve just spoken to Dix. He thinks he went to school with Scott Green and Glenn. He thinks Glenn’s last name is either Tifton or Cordele or Perry.”
“It’s Forsyth,” Rafe said. “And yeah, he did. Green and Forsyth were in his year, Ellison was in mine.”
“So you remember them?”
“Vaguely. We didn’t have much in common.”
“Reena said Mark had a juvenile record for joyriding and such. Didn’t you do some of that?”
“Not with that group,” Rafe said.
Ah. “Well, Dix also said you need to wear a blue suit for the wedding. Do you have a blue suit?”
“If I didn’t have a blue suit, don’t you think I woulda said something about it by now? I knew two months ago I was gonna have to stand up there with him.”
“There’s no need to be touchy about it,” I said. “I’m just trying to help out.”
“Sorry.” I pictured him pinching the bridge of his nose the way he does when he’s frustrated. “Sorry, darlin’. Yeah, I have a blue suit. It’s in the closet at home. It’s clean. You don’t have to worry about it.”
I told him I appreciated it, but my voice might have been a little stiff still, because he added, “Don’t mind me, darlin’. I’m just frustrated. We’re not getting anywhere. We’re out here beating the bushes, seeing what we can scare up, and there’s just nothing. No one’s seen Bob since he left Sweetwater on Saturday morning. Nobody’s seen Mark or Scotty or Glenn since they left Dusty’s on Friday night—or early Saturday morning, more like. They stayed till closing. If they were headed out to commit some kinda crime at that point, or they accidentally happened upon one, nobody knows what it was, and nobody’s reported anything. There’s no sign of Scotty’s truck, and none of their phones are pinging…”
“How are you spending your time?”
“At this point, we’re just randomly dropping in on places, asking if they’ve seen any of ‘em.” He sounded beyond frustrated. “The bar where Mark used to drink. Scotty’s old drug counselor. Glenn’s job.”
“He had a job?”
“They all had jobs,” Rafe said. “Glenn was a short order cook. Scotty worked for one of those quick-change oil places, and Mark cut lawns for a landscaping company. All legal and above-board.”
“No reason to think anything criminal was going on at either of their places of employment?”
“We’re looking at the landscaping company,” Rafe said, “just in case they’re a common denominator in a string of burglaries or something like that. No sign of it yet, but we gotta look. Glenn’s restaurant and Scotty’s oil-change place seem to be just that. A restaurant and an oil-change place.”
“I could go have lunch and then get an oil-change afterwards…?”
“No, darlin’. Go home and make sure my blue suit looks OK and I have a shirt and tie to go along with it.”
I promised him I would, but it wasn’t something I was going to rush home to do. “Anything else?”
“Nothing I can think of. I’m getting to the point where I’m thinking we just need to start checking places randomly. Dredge the river. Drive around looking for circling buzzards.”
“Ugh,” I said.
“I know, darlin’. But the more time passes, the less likely we’ll find any of ‘em alive. We’re past seventy-two hours for Bob now, and getting close to four days for the other three. The chances are dropping every hour. And there’s just effing nothing!”
Things must truly be bad if he was swearing like that. He usually refrains when he’s talking to me. “Go back to work. I’ll deal with your suit.”
He didn’t waste time telling me he appreciated it. “I’ll let you know if anything changes. Stay outta trouble.”
“You, too,” I said, and let him go.
Chapter Thirteen
So that was that. They had no clues, no lines to tug, and nothing to investigate. And I didn’t, either. And like Rafe, my frustration was mounting.
Although unlike Rafe, at least I had other things I could do. I had Rafe’s suit to worry about, and I had to make sure Dix and Grimaldi’s wedding went off without a hitch on Saturday. It was late morning on Tuesday by now. I might as well just make sure the arrangements were moving forward as planned. I’d just have to find something else to do tomorrow instead.
The caterer was located in Columbia, but there was no real need for me to go there. They wouldn’t have started cooking yet, after all, so there’d be nothing to see or taste. I stayed where I was, and placed a phone call, saying I needed to talk to someone about the Grimaldi-Martin wedding this weekend.
Only to be put on hold and then picked up again by the breathless owner of the company. “Miss Grimaldi?”
“Chief,” I said. “And no, this is Ms. Martin. Collier.”
“Excuse me?”
“It’s Chief Grimaldi. She’s the police chief in Columbia. Not Miss. But I’m not Tamara Grimaldi. I’m Savannah Martin Collier. Sister of the groom.”
Her voice went flat. “Are you calling to cancel?”
“No,” I said. “Do you want me to be?”
She stuttered. “We thought… That is… The Maury County sheriff is in the wedding party, isn’t he? And we heard about the disappearance.”
“So far,” I said, “the wedding is proceeding as planned. Do you have any information about the sheriff being missing?”
“Me?” She sounded taken aback. “No more than anyone else. Why would I?”
“No reason. So there are no problems on your end?”
She sniffed. Audibly. “Of course not. We pride ourselves on a seamless operation.”
“Good for you,” I said. “I’m the one you’ll be dealing with at the house on Friday and Saturday. I’m the one who lives there.”
“The house being what you call the Martin Mansion in Sweetwater?”
I nodded, although she couldn’t see me. “That’s the one. Big brick house with pillars on the road between Columbia and Sweetwater.”
“We have the address,” she told me. “We’ll start bringing in the food for the rehearsal dinner around four on Friday. Then we’ll clean up, and be back the following day at noon to set up for the wedding reception.”
I told her that sounded good. “You’re handling the silverware and flatware and all that? But you need someone else to bring the tables and chairs?”
“We recommended Luxe Events. I’d be happy to coordinate with them, if you’d like.”
“Feel free to do that,” I told her, “but my mother would kill me if I didn’t check in with them myself, too. And take down my number, please, so you can let me know anything that comes up between now and Friday at four. I’ll make sure I’m there Friday afternoon.”
We worked out the details, and then I called Luxe Events and did the same thing with them. We were on the schedule and they were on top of it, it sounded like. I made sure they’d be at the mansion and set up before four on Friday—didn’t want the caterers arriving and have nowhere to put the plates and silverware—and then I disconnected and put the car in gear. The flowers—table and chair decorations, bouquets, and rose petals—were coming from an outfit south of us, down by Pulaski, and that was somewhere I wanted to go in person. It was more than a florist shop, but not quite a nursery, and they did a lot of big events in the area, including the ones at Milky Way Farms and Rippevilla Plantation, both of which host a lot of weddings. It was a big place, always busy, and full of all sorts of lovely plants and flowers, and it smelled amazing. Something that smelled nice and looked pretty sounded like it would be just the ticket right now. I desperately needed a mood-enhancer.
At the last second, I decided to swing by Bob’s house, too, and see if Mother was there and wanted to come with me. The nice smells might make her feel a little bit better, as well.
Although, as I learned when I rang the bell, Mother had started self-medicating again.
Back in the fall, when she’d first learned about Audrey and Dad, and Darcy’s existence, even though it was something that had happened before Mother even met Dad, it had taken a horrible toll. She’d refused to talk to any of us about it, and I had literally been kicked out of my childhood home and banished to Nashville for daring to question the way Mother was handling the situation.
She and Audrey had worked it out in the end, but for a few weeks there, Mother had taken to adding alcohol to her tea to get through the day. When she opened the door to me with a steaming cup in her hand, on a day when the temperature was approaching ninety-five degrees, I feared the worst.
“You’re kidding?”
I took it out of her hand and sipped it. Yep, there was a liberal dose of something that wasn’t lemon juice in there.
I put it on the console table in the hallway and faced her. “You can’t do this again, Mother.”
I was afraid she’d get angry—she’d certainly told me what-for last fall, when I’d brought it up—but instead, her face crumpled. “I don’t know what to do, Savannah. He’s gone, and I don’t know where he is, and I don’t know if he’s coming back… It’s been three days, and no one’s heard from him. The only reason for that, has to be that he can’t call. That he’s dead.”
“He’s not dead,” I said firmly, even though I recognized the validity of everything she was saying. “You can’t start thinking that way. You have to keep believing that he’s all right and will be back.”
“Even if he’s not? Then it’s just going to be harder once I learn the truth.”
“The truth might be that he’s coming back.”
“You don’t believe that,” Mother said, her eyes filling with tears. “You know as well as I do—better—that after three days, he isn’t likely to be found alive.”
There wasn’t anything I could say to that, because—yes—I did know as well as she did that it was becoming less and less likely he’d be found alive at this point. But— “You can’t give up. I didn’t give up when Rafe went missing. You can’t give up now.”
“Rafael came back after a day,” Mother said, with a dry sob. “And he was young and strong. Bob is sixty-one. If anything happened to him, anything like what happened to Rafael, he would be less likely to survive it.”
Anybody would be less likely to survive it, honestly.
“Nothing like what happened to Rafe has happened to Bob. Hernandez was a psychopath. There aren’t any psychopaths after Bob.”
“You don’t know that,” Mother said.
“I do, though. Rafe knew that Hernandez was a psycho. He didn’t know the guy was on the loose when he was supposed to be in prison, but he did know that Hernandez was crazy. There aren’t any crazies after Bob. Rafe would have looked into that. Or Cletus would have. Or Grimaldi. Someone. If Bob arrested someone who was nuts, someone would know about it and they’d look into it. That kind of insanity is hard to hide.”
Mother looked unconvinced, and I added, “You can’t think like that. You have to believe that he’s going to be found and it’s going to be all right. Otherwise you’ll go crazy. You have to stay positive and hope for the best. And do nice things for yourself.”
Nice things that didn’t include numbing the pain and worry with spiked tea.
“And on that note, I’m headed down to Pulaski to the Flower Mart, to check on the flowers for the wedding. It always smells nice there. I thought you might like to come.”
“I’m hardly dressed to go out,” Mother said.
She did, in fact, look just fine. Maybe not by her own standards, but by mine she was perfectly presentable. True, she was wearing a pair of cotton capris with a short sleeved shirt. It wasn’t up to her usual standard of silk and linen. But she looked better than most people would under the circumstances. Her hair looked presentable, and she had on makeup.
“You look fine,” I said. “It’ll be good for you to get out. Grab your purse and let’s go. I’ll buy you lunch again.”
The Wayside Inn was on the way, and I knew Mother liked it there.
It seemed to have done the trick, or maybe she was just happy for an excuse to get out of the house and away from the tea, because she slipped her feet into sandals and grabbed her purse, and off we went to the Wayside Inn.
It is what it sounds like, an old inn on the road between Pulaski and Columbia, and the chef is German and quite good. It’s one of Mother and Bob’s regular places, and of course everyone knows her there. The hostess, and then the waitress, and then finally the owner showed up at our table to commiserate with Mother about Bob and whether there was any news. They greeted me too, and poked at Carrie, who was awake and in a mood to be admired, but they really wanted to talk about Bob.
“Any news? Do they know what happened? Are there any suspects?”
There wasn’t much we could tell them, but I think maybe Mother was made to feel a little better just by the fact that so many people seemed to be thinking about her and about Bob.
Mother had salad for lunch, of course, and because I still haven’t lost all the baby weight, and because I knew she’d have something to say about it if I had something else, I had a salad, too. With low-fat dressing and no croutons.
“You know, Mother,” I said, as I forked up the lettuce, “Rafe loves me the way I am.”
“Of course he does, darling.” She forked up a sliver of lettuce, too, and conveyed it to her mouth. “And you love him. So you want to be the best you can be for him.”
Hard to argue with that. I filled my mouth with rabbit food and changed the subject.
After the bill was paid and Carrie had been fed, we headed outside and into the car again. “Flowers next? Or is there anything else you want to do?”
“We can go smell the roses now,” Mother said, which was rather poetic, I thought. “Unless you have anything else you’d like to tackle first?”
I didn’t. I’d only suggested lunch as a means to get her to agree to come with me. If I’d been alone, I would have been in Pulaski and probably on my way back by now.
The road between Sweetwater and Pulaski runs past the Bog, which is where Rafe spent his formative years. It had been a trailer park back then, with some rundown mobile homes and a few site-built shacks. That was years ago, though. Two years ago or so, a local construction company had bought the land, with the idea that they’d develop it into a community of affordable homes. The sign—Welcome to Mallard Meadows, Homes from the $180s—still sat at the side of the road where the old mailboxes used to be. It was faded now, the letters harder to make out. Ronnie Burke and his associate Liz were both still in prison, as far as I knew. Not only had there been financial shenanigans going on, but they’d also been responsible for several deaths, including that of Rafe’s mother, his mother’s boyfriend, and Todd’s ex-wife.
“Ronnie Burke is still in prison,” I asked Mother as we zoomed past, “isn’t he?”
He was someone who had reason to dislike Bob, anyway. He’d had big plans for making lots of money from Mallard Meadows, and that had all gone by the wayside when he’d been arrested. And since it was Bob’s ex-daughter-in-law he’d killed, and Bob’s son he’d framed for it, it was understandable that Bob, perhaps, hadn’t been all that understanding.
“Didn’t he have a mother of some sort?”
“Everyone has a mother of some sort,” my own said. “But yes, Frances Burke is a force to be reckoned with.”
“She wasn’t arrested, was she?”
Mother shook her head. “She wasn’t involved. Or if she were, nothing came of it.”
Someone should definitely check on Frances Burke. It was more than a year ago now, that Ronnie and Liz had been arrested, and maybe Frances had reasoned that it was long enough to wait to take her revenge on Bob. “Would he have answered the phone for her? Would he have gone to see her four hours before his son was getting married?”
“I don’t see why not,” Mother said, a tiny wrinkle between her brows. “Surely you’re not suggesting that Frances Burke has kidnapped Bob?”
I wasn’t entirely sure what I was suggesting, but I did feel, strongly, that someone ought to look into Frances. “Call Rafe for me,” I told her, “would you? Ask him if anyone’s visited Frances Burke?”
Mother’s brows rose, but she took my phone, found Rafe’s number in the contacts, and dialed.
“Yeah?” my husband’s voice came on the line.
Mother blinked. “Rafael?”
There was a second’s pause while Rafe adjusted to the fact that he was talking to my mother and not to me. “Margaret Anne. Why are you calling me on Savannah’s phone? Is everything all right?”
“Fine,” I yelled in the direction of the phone. “I’m driving.”
“She’s driving,” Mother said, as if there was any chance at all that he hadn’t heard me. “We’re on our way to Pulaski to see about the flowers for the wedding.”
“How nice for you,” Rafe said politely.
“We just passed the old Mallard Meadows sign. You know…” She hesitated delicately.
“The Bog. Sure.” Rafe has no problem with saying it. Or any problem with the fact that he grew up there. As he’d told me once, a long time ago now, he was what he was, and if my mother or I didn’t like it, there wasn’t a whole lot he could do about it.
“And Savannah thought of Ronald Burke and his girlfriend,” Mother said. “Ronald is still incarcerated, is he not?”
“I haven’t checked,” Rafe said, “but he oughta be.”
“What about his mother?” I yelled.
“What about his mother?” Mother echoed.
I glanced at her. “I’m sure he heard me, Mother.”
“It’s not polite to screech, darling,” Mother informed me. “Rafael? Was Frances incarcerated, too?
