Unfinished Business (35 page)

“Isn’t it?”

He didn’t answer. Just turned to my mother.
“Yeah. I’ll marry your daughter here.”

Mother’s face relaxed. It was infinitesimal,
but I could see it. I guess she’d been afraid he’d refuse.

As for me, I was jumping up and down inside,
although I stayed as calm as I could on the outside. “Are you
sure?” I asked him. “I know this isn’t your favorite place in the
world.”

He shook his head. “I don’t care about any
of that. I just wanna marry you. I’ll marry you anywhere you want
to. You never asked if we could get married here.”

“I didn’t think you’d want to,” I said.
“It’s your wedding day, too. I want you to be comfortable.” And I’d
been certain Mother would have a hissy fit if I made the
suggestion, so I hadn’t even considered it. In fact, I was still
taken aback that she’d suggested it.

I turned to ask her if she, too, was sure,
but before I could, she spoke. “I’ll take care of all the details.
The ceremony will take place next Saturday at eleven.”

“This coming Saturday?”

Five days from now? That was a hell—excuse
me, heck—of a lot of details in a very short time.

“Haven’t you waited long enough?” Mother
wanted to know.

When I didn’t know what to say to
that—because yes, I had—she nodded briskly. “Just leave everything
to me. I’ll get started right now. Excuse me, please.” She walked
out of the kitchen, down the hall, and into the parlor with the
desk. After a moment, we could hear her voice on the phone.

I turned to Rafe, speechless.

“Go?” he asked.

I nodded. The sooner we got out of this
alternate reality and away from my very alarming mother, the better
I’d like it.

“That was weird.”

It was five minutes later, and we had
escaped the mansion and were in the car on our way to
Nashville.

Rafe grinned. “Amazing what a night of good
sex can do for a woman.”

My nose wrinkled. “Oh, eewww. Gross.”

He chuckled. “You know they were doing
it.”

“Yes, but she’s my mother. I’m not supposed
to think about that.”

“Just cause she’s your mother don’t mean she
can’t have sex,” Rafe said. “She ain’t old. She’s a good-looking
woman for her age. And your daddy’s dead. You should be glad she
ain’t alone, and that she’s happy.”

“I am glad she’s happy. I just don’t want to
think about her and the sheriff doing it.”

He shrugged. “Some people change when
something big happens to them. She prob’ly thought she was gonna
die yesterday. And that you and David were gonna die, too.”

Probably. I had thought we were going to
die. I had no doubt she’d thought the same. “She did offer to let
us get married in the mansion, didn’t she? I didn’t imagine
it?”

He shook his head. “She’s pulling it
together right now. Whaddaya wanna bet she’s gonna put me in a
monkey suit?”

A tuxedo? “I’m sure she will,” I said. “You
can’t have a proper wedding without the tuxedo.” And wouldn’t he
look absolutely gorgeous in one?

“That mean she’s gonna put you in a gown,
too?”

I hoped not. I was already voluminous. I
didn’t need a puffy gown making me look bigger. “I doubt it.
Wearing the white gown for a second wedding is tacky. Especially
when the bride is pregnant.” And my mother is never tacky.
“Besides, I doubt there’s time to have a gown made.” And I wouldn’t
fit into the one I’d worn last time. Not that Mother would suggest
it. Wearing the same dress to marry Rafe that I’d worn to marry
Bradley went beyond tacky and into supreme bad taste.

“You think we oughta worry about this?”

“I think she’s trying to make amends,” I
said. “Or maybe she’s just trying to make you forget you saw her
naked yesterday. If she’s nice to you, there’s less chance you’ll
make a big deal out of it.”

He rolled his eyes.

“You’re marrying her daughter,” I said. “And
you saw her at her most vulnerable. You’re lucky she’s talking to
you at all.”

“I’m not sure,” Rafe told me, “but I think
maybe I liked it better when she didn’t.”

I wasn’t sure either, but I thought maybe I
agreed. Having Mother suddenly arranging my wedding to Rafe—in the
mansion in Sweetwater—was disconcerting, to say the least.

“I remember this place,” I said two hours later.

We’d driven to the house on Potsdam and
changed clothes, and then we’d gone back out to meet Grimaldi,
Wendell, and the rookies at the address Rafe had provided
yesterday. And now that we were here, I knew why it had sounded
familiar.

Some five months ago, another old
acquaintance of Rafe’s had walked away from a work-release program
in Montgomery County, and had shown up in Nashville. Desmond
Johnson hadn’t been looking for Rafe; he’d been after his
girlfriend and child, a toddler named Justin whom I had mistakenly
believed to be Rafe’s. Justin and Tanya—AKA Lantana DuBois, exotic
dancer—had been living here, incognito, in a rental held in Rafe’s
name.

It was a brick duplex in a neighborhood
south of town, the kind of place where nobody cared overmuch what
anyone else did. The perfect kind of place for someone who wanted
to keep a low profile and go unnoticed, and for much of his career,
that had been exactly what Rafe had needed.

“I lived on one side,” he told me. “Huron
lived on the other.”

Grimaldi arched her brows. “Wouldn’t you
have noticed if he’d left bodies rotting under the
floorboards?”

We were all standing in the parking area in
the rear of the building: she, I, Rafe, Wendell, and the three
rookies.

Rafe sent her a look. “Depends,” he
said.

“On what? Once you’ve smelled a dead body,
it isn’t the kind of thing you forget.”

No, it isn’t. There was no way Rafe could
have lived here while bodies were rotting in the apartment next
door. Anyone with a nose would have noticed.

“I didn’t stick around long after Huron was
busted,” he said. “People got worried about what he was telling the
cops, and what kinds of deals he was trying to make to get himself
outta jail.”

An understandable concern when you were
involved in breaking the law.

“He didn’t get busted for anything we were
doing, but he knew everything that was going on. We had a big job
planned in about three weeks.”

He glanced at Wendell. “You were getting
ready to bust the whole thing open. And instead we pulled up stakes
and went somewhere else. Jackson, I think.”

“I remember that,” Wendell nodded. “More
than a year of preparation down the drain. And all because
Hernandez couldn’t keep his pants zipped.”

A little more than that, surely. But I saw
his point.

“Anyway,” Rafe added, “I was outta here
within a couple days. I kept up the rent on the place, but it
wasn’t till last summer that I came back. If there are bodies, they
wouldn’t smell no more by then.”

No, they wouldn’t.

“And it don’t need to be in the house.” He
turned to look at the backyard, and we all turned with him.
“There’s a couple acres of trees back there, before you get to
Murfreesboro Road. Plenty of room to dump a couple bodies. And
there ain’t no tracks or nothing, so nobody much goes in
there.”

“We have to search all of that?” José looked
dismayed.

“We’ll check the house first,” Grimaldi
said. “But if we don’t find anything inside, it might come to
that.”

The boys exchanged a glance. “Let’s go,”
Jamal said.

“I lived on the left,” Rafe told us. That
was the same unit where Tanya and Justin had stayed earlier in the
year. “Huron was on the right.”

“You have keys to them both?”

He shook his head. “But it’ll only take me a
second to open the door.”

A slight exaggeration, but not by much. It
took less than a minute, while Jamal, Clayton and José leaned over
him, admiring his handiwork.

“When you gonna teach us to do that?” Jamal
wanted to know.

Rafe glanced up at him. “I wasn’t gonna for
a while yet, but since there’s some other things we can’t do till I
heal up, maybe I’ll make it sooner. Tomorrow?”

“All right!” They exchanged high fives all
around. I made a mental note to ask him to teach me how to pick a
lock, too. You never know when a skill like that might come in
handy.

Although surely the TBI wasn’t expecting him
back to work in the morning? He’d been injured. Didn’t he get a
couple of days off, at least, to recuperate?

Rafe straightened and pushed the door open.
“Ladies first,” he told Grimaldi, who gave him a stony stare.

She went through the door first, though. The
rookies followed, after a glance at Wendell that gave them
permission. He followed them inside, and Rafe turned to me. “You
sure you wanna do this?”

“I doubt he has them stacked against the
walls,” I said. “I don’t think there’s anything to see in
there.”

He shook his head. “Prob’ly not. More likely
he took’em out there.” He glanced at the woods. “Or loaded’em in
the trunk of the car when I wasn’t looking, and took’em somewhere
else.”

“So no reason why I can’t go inside.”

“I guess not.” He gestured. I walked through
the door in front of him, into Hernandez’s share of the duplex.

It looked like rentals all over Nashville.
Not too different from the one I had occupied for a few years, if
in slightly worse shape. There were the ubiquitous off-white walls,
and the ever-present tan carpets everywhere except in the kitchen
and bathroom, where there was seen-better-days vinyl. The kitchen
cabinets were cheap particleboard, the counters fake butcher-block,
and the appliances at least fifteen years out of date.

I glanced at Rafe. “Does the other side look
like this, too?”

He nodded. “I know it ain’t much. But I’ve
lived in worse.”

Yes, he had. I had seen the inside of the
Colliers’ trailer in the Bog before it was removed, and it had
looked considerably worse than this. And then there were the two
years he’d spent in Riverbend Penitentiary. I was reminded, not for
the first time, how different our lives had been, and how lucky I
was to have had mine.

The apartment wasn’t very big: just the
living room and small kitchen, bedroom and bath. It didn’t take but
a minute to determine that it was empty. Of life, and of death.

“Nothing,” Jamal announced when he bounced
back into the living room after checking the other rooms. Everyone
else followed at a more leisurely pace. Meanwhile, Jamal looked
around. “This place have a basement?”

Rafe shook his head. “Crawlspace.”

“Outside?”

Rafe nodded.

“How about an attic?”

“Crawlspace,” Rafe said again. “The access
is in the closet on the other side. It’s prob’ly in the closet on
this side, too.”

It was. A square panel outlined with planks
in the ceiling of the closet, and pieces of wood nailed to the wall
to create a makeshift ladder.

Jamal looked at it and shook his head.
“Somebody else is gonna have to go up there. That ain’t made for
somebody my size.”

Clayton and José sized each other up.
Clayton was taller, but skinnier, while José was short but buff. I
personally didn’t think his shoulders would fit through the hole.
Before I had the chance to say so, Wendell had already decided.
“You,” he told Clayton.

Clayton nodded. The other two gave him a
boost, and he shimmied up the wall like a monkey. It took him a few
seconds to lever the piece of wood out of the opening, hanging onto
the wall by his other hand, but it was only a minute or so before
he could wiggle through the opening and into the upper
crawlspace.

It wasn’t a tall space. We could see that
from below. The underside of the roof was close to the floor of the
crawlspace, with the spiky ends of nails poking through every so
often, where the roofers had driven them through the shingles and
decking into the attic.

“Your tetanus shot up to date, boy?” Wendell
called up to Clayton. “We’ve spent enough time in the hospital this
week.”

“I’ll be careful, boss.”

Clayton crawled out of sight. We heard him
moving around, and occasionally a muttered, “Shit,” but nothing
that would indicate he’d found Hernandez’s graveyard.

After a couple of minutes he came back, his
head gray with cobwebs. “Nothin’.”

“C’mon down,” Wendell told him, and Clayton
swung back through the hole. His hands and the knees of his pants
were black with dirt, and he stopped off in the bathroom to wash
some of it off while the rest of us headed out to look for the
entrance to the underside of the house.

It was another wooden panel, barely bigger
than the one in the closet, inserted into the cinderblock
foundation. Jamal levered it off and crouched to peer inside the
dark hole. “Anybody got a flashlight?”

“Car,” Wendell said, and José set off at a
jog. He handed the flashlight to Jamal, who took it and squeezed
through the opening into the underside of the house.

His voice came back to us as he crawled
around, no doubt getting just as dirty as Clayton, who bounced out
of the house to join us in crowding around the crawlspace door.
“Got some trash here. Candy wrappers and soda cans. A beer bottle.
Half a PVC pipe.”

His voice faded as he moved farther away
from the opening. The crawlspace wasn’t likely to be divided as the
upstairs was; it would be just one long area under the entire
structure. Once Jamal reached the underside of Rafe’s half of the
duplex, we could no longer hear him.

It took a lot longer for him to come back
than it had Clayton, but eventually he slithered back through the
hole, in even worse shape than Clayton had been. “You gotta
plumbing leak,” he told Rafe when he’d shaken off the worst of the
dirt. “No bodies, though. The only bones I saw looked like they
mighta been a raccoon or something.”