Past Due Read online

  Savannah Martin has always been a good girl, doing what was expected and fully expecting life to fall into place in its turn. But when her perfect husband turns out to be a lying, cheating slimeball—and bad in bed to boot—Savannah kicks the jerk to the curb and embarks on life on her own terms. With a new apartment, a new career, and a brand new outlook on life, she’s all set to take the world by storm. If only the world would stop throwing her curveballs...

  The sins of the past are coming due, and someone has to pay...

  Savannah Martin’s high school reunion is supposed to be a fun weekend of catching up with old friends and parading her boyfriend—Sweetwater bad boy Rafael Collier—in front of everyone who used to sneer at him back in the day. Not even the daily battle she’s waging with morning sickness can douse Savannah’s anticipation.

  But when Rafe won’t come to Sweetwater, Savannah has to face her old schoolmates without his support. And her best friend Charlotte isn’t as happy for Savannah’s new relationship as Savannah had hoped. And when a dead body turns up in the Colliers’ old mobile home in the Bog, Savannah is thankful to be on her own. The sheriff is always looking for a reason to shove Rafe back behind bars, and a fresh homicide is just the excuse he needs.

  But when another murder takes place at the reunion, even the threat of jail can’t keep Rafe away. Soon old classmates are dropping like bowling pins, and Rafe and Savannah are scrambling to catch up with a killer hell bent on making sure old enemies pay for old sins... all while trying to stay one step ahead of Sheriff Satterfield and the Columbia PD.

  Past Due

  Savannah Martin Mystery #8

  by

  Jenna Bennett

  Chapter One

  If someone had told me that at my ten year high school reunion I’d be married, divorced, and pregnant out of wedlock while I lived in sin with my mother’s worst nightmare, I would have laughed.

  Politely.

  It just goes to show how wrong you can be.

  My name is Savannah Martin, and ten years ago, I attended Columbia High School in Maury County, Tennessee, an hour or so south of Nashville.

  At eighteen, I had my whole life planned out. After high school, I’d be attending finishing school in Charleston before my debut at the Christmas Cotillion in Savannah, my mother’s home town. (Since I was named for it, I was profoundly grateful she wasn’t born in Hephzibah or Hortense.) Once that was accomplished, I’d go on to study law at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, and eventually join the family law firm, Martin & McCall, on the town square in Sweetwater.

  I didn’t plan to drop out a year before graduation to marry Bradley Ferguson, although Bradley—or someone like him—was part of the plan, too. He was healthy, wealthy, and white, a Southern gentleman from Natchez, Mississippi, who could trace his antecedents back to the War for Southern Independence and beyond. He was everything my mother wanted for me, and everything I’d been brought up to believe I should want for myself.

  Pardon me while I laugh. Not so politely.

  By the time my ten year reunion rolled around, Bradley was history. Ancient and unlamented history. I had divorced him three years before. He was kicking his heels in prison, as a matter of fact, waiting to go on trial for conspiracy to commit murder, while his current wife, the one he’d dumped me for after not quite two years of marriage, was dealing with a newborn.

  I considered myself lucky to have escaped.

  I considered myself beyond lucky to be pregnant and living in sin with the boy my mother, along with every other mother in Sweetwater, had warned their daughters about.

  Yes, Rafe was from Sweetwater, too. But I had made the trek home for the reunion by myself. He’s three years older than me, so his own reunion had come and gone a few years ago, something he’d made sure to point out to me. Several times. Something he hadn’t pointed out, but which I already knew, was that he never goes back to Sweetwater unless he has to. Given the bad memories he has of the place, I don’t see any need to push him, either.

  So I was alone when I walked into the Wayside Inn the evening before the big day, to have dinner with my best friend Charlotte, in from North Carolina for the occasion.

  Charlotte and I had been inseparable through school. For a while, she’d even dated my brother Dix. But by now it was a few years since I’d seen her. She’d been there for my wedding, but not my divorce, and she didn’t know about Rafe. With Charlotte happily married with a couple of kids, and me a marital failure, we hadn’t had all that much in common over the past couple of years, and besides, Rafe’s and my relationship wasn’t something I had wanted to share by email.

  The Wayside Inn is the most upscale restaurant in Sweetwater, and was, once upon a time, an actual roadside inn on the way from Columbia to Pulaski. It’s old and dark and full of atmosphere, and the chef was trained in France, so the food is excellent.

  So is the service. When I walked in, the maitre d’ recognized me immediately. “Good evening, Miss Martin.”

  So did someone else. A woman sitting on a chair inside the door looked up. “Savannah?”

  It wasn’t Charlotte. In fact, it took me a moment or two to recognize her. The face was vaguely familiar, but hard to place under the heavy makeup, and the jet-black hair was new. She was beyond thin, bordering on anorexic, her long legs twisted into a pretzel shape around the legs of the chair.

  There’s an old saying—originally uttered by Wallis Simpson, I believe—that a woman can’t be too thin or too rich. Wallis had obviously never met Christina Foster.

  “Tina?” I ventured. “Tina Foster?”

  She nodded. I waited for her to tell me it was something else now—a married name—but she didn’t, so I guess she was still Christina Foster.

  I moved a couple of steps in her direction, leaving the maitre d’ to hover politely by the door to the dining room. “What are you doing here?”

  “Waiting for Mary Kelly,” Tina said.

  Of course. Tina and Mary Kelly had been inseparable growing up, just like Charlotte and I. We had gone to school together from kindergarten through 12th grade, so I guess it could be said that I knew Tina well. At the moment, however, I couldn’t come up with anything to say to her. I felt very far removed from the girl I had been the last time I saw her, and besides, she looked so different from what I remembered that it threw me a little.

  “I’m meeting Charlotte,” I said eventually.

  “She’s here already,” Tina answered.

  I glanced over my shoulder at the dining room. The maitre d’ nodded.

  I turned back to Tina. “Would you like to join us?”

  She hesitated. “I don’t want to intrude...”

  “You wouldn’t be. I’m sure Charlotte would like to see you.” And having Tina there meant I could put off telling Charlotte about Rafe for a bit longer.

  Not that I didn’t want my best friend to share my happiness. I just wasn’t sure how happy she’d be. Or how long it would take me to convince her I hadn’t lost my mind.

  “I don’t know...” Tina said.

  “At least until Mary Kelly gets here. There’s no sense in you sitting here alone when you can sit with us.”

  Tina allowed herself to be convinced, and unfolded her long limbs from the chair.

  She’d always been tall. I’m five eight, and she had me beat by an inch or maybe even two. Add in the heels and platform soles, and she towered over me. And the extreme skinniness of her body only added to the illusion. It was like walking next to a giraffe.

  “Do you model?” I asked as we followed the maitre d’ toward the table in the back where Charlotte was waiting.

  Tina shook her head.

  “You look like you could.”

  From the neck down, anyway. The face was a different matte
r. It was difficult to tell under the exaggerated makeup, but she looked older than twenty-eight, haggard and drawn, like the last ten years had been hard. And the posture wasn’t all it could have been, either. She had the height, but she stooped, like she were ashamed of it.

  And then the maitre d’ stopped beside our table, and I forgot all about Tina as Charlotte got to her feet with a squeal. “Savannah!”

  I squealed back, and gave her a real hug, not the lean-in-and-kiss-air that’s popular among Southern Belles.

  My old friend looked the same, plus a few years and a few pounds. None of us keep our girlish figure forever, especially after a couple of kids. She had the same soft, brown hair, the same oval face, the same bow-shaped mouth and turned-up nose. With a bit more fullness in the chest, perhaps. I wasn’t sure whether to accredit that to nursing two kids, or to having married a cosmetic surgeon.

  The smile was genuine, anyway, when she stepped back to look at me. “You look great!”

  Oh, sure. I certainly didn’t look eighteen anymore. And I was battling morning sickness these days. Although I hoped to God I looked better than Tina.

  And that reminded me. “Look who I ran into in the lobby. You remember Tina Foster.”

  “Of course,” Charlotte said. She looked like she was contemplating hugging Tina, too, but Tina’s body language must have dissuaded her. She put her hands behind her back instead. “Nice to see you.”

  “Likewise,” Tina murmured.

  “She’s waiting for Mary Kelly,” I explained. “I thought they might want to join us for dinner.”

  Tina didn’t say anything. Charlotte didn’t, either, and I added, into the slightly awkward silence, “Or at least that Tina could sit with us until Mary Kelly shows up.”

  “Of course,” Charlotte nodded. “There’s plenty of room.”

  There was. She had snagged us a four-top table, so there were two empty chairs. Charlotte had already claimed hers. I took the one opposite, and left Tina to fit her long legs into the corner.

  “So where did you come in from?” Charlotte asked when Tina was seated. “You don’t live here anymore, do you?”

  Tina shook her head. “Atlanta.”

  “What do you do there?”

  “Makeup,” Tina said.

  There was a pause, while Charlotte and I both tried to decide exactly what that might mean. Research and development? Community theatre? Avon?

  “I sold makeup for a while,” I said. “At the Green Hills Mall. After my divorce, and before I got my real estate license.”

  “I work for Turner,” Tina said. It took me a second to place the reference, but then I did. Turner Television, based in Atlanta. She must be doing the makeup for some show or other. “So you sell real estate now?”

  I nodded. “Since last summer.”

  “How’s it going?”

  I shrugged. Not as well as I’d like. If Rafe hadn’t moved in and started paying some—or most—of the bills, I’d be flat broke. “It’s harder than I thought. Lots of competition, and the economy isn’t great right now, either.”

  “What about you?” Tina turned to Charlotte.

  “I’m a stay-at-home mom,” Charlotte said. There was a trace of challenge in her voice, or maybe defensiveness, as if she expected Tina to sneer.

  Tina didn’t. “How many kids do you have?”

  Charlotte has two. One boy, one girl. The boy’s four or so, the girl about a year and a half. I hadn’t met either of them, but I got annual Christmas cards with pictures.

  “What about you?” Charlotte asked, and a shadow crossed Tina’s face.

  “I’m not married.” She glanced around, almost as if she were looking for a way out, and added, “There’s Mary Kelly.”

  Indeed she was, the same cool platinum blonde I remembered from high school. If Tina had changed almost beyond recognition in the past ten years, Mary Kelly had hardly changed at all. She kept her hair in the same sleek pageboy, her face hadn’t aged, and I swear she could probably fit into the old cheerleading uniform. She didn’t look like she’d gained or lost a pound.

  “There you are,” she said to Tina, who wasted no time in explaining.

  “I saw Savannah in the lobby. She invited me to sit with her and Charlotte until you got here.”

  “You’re welcome to join us,” I told Mary Kelly.

  She hesitated. Glanced at Tina for a second, and then away again. “I guess. If you don’t mind.”

  “Why would we mind?” Charlotte asked.

  “We’re just catching up before the big day tomorrow,” I added.

  And this way, I could put off the moment of reckoning a bit longer.

  So Mary Kelly sat down next to Charlotte, opposite from Tina, and we got busy perusing menus and ordering drinks. Mary Kelly asked for a martini and Tina for gin and tonic. Charlotte already had a glass of Chardonnay. That’s my go-to drink when I’m out somewhere, as well, and for a moment I was tempted to follow suit. Then I remembered why I couldn’t.

  “Sweet tea, please.” I smoothed the blouse over my still flat lap and smiled at the waiter.

  “Are you sure you don’t want a proper drink, Savannah?” Mary Kelly asked as he walked away.

  I shook my head. “Not tonight, thanks. The tea is fine.”

  “You planning to make up for it tomorrow?” Tina grinned.

  I smiled back. “Something like that.”

  The class reunion was tomorrow night. The planning committee had rented the biggest event venue in Columbia, complete with catered buffet, a DJ, and an open bar. A lot of drinking was expected.

  I wouldn’t be doing any of it, but I also wasn’t quite ready to share the news that I was expecting. First, because it would involve explaining Rafe, and secondly, because I’d been through two miscarriages in the past, one with my ex-husband a couple of years ago, and the other just six or seven months back. Rafe’s baby. And I wasn’t out of the woods with this pregnancy yet. Most miscarriages happen in the first trimester, and I still had a few weeks to go. I figured by the time I got to four months, if I was still pregnant, I’d tell everyone then.

  But that was a month away. I hadn’t told my mother, or my brother or sister, or anyone else.

  And it wasn’t just the people in Sweetwater I’d kept in the dark. Everyone I knew in Nashville were equally clueless. At this point, the only three people in the world who knew that I was expecting was me, my boyfriend, and the gynecologist.

  But since I couldn’t say any of that, I focused on the menu. “I guess I’d better decide on something to eat before the waiter comes back.”

  It had been a while since I’d been to the Wayside Inn. Not since last October sometime, when I’d had dinner with Todd and he’d proposed marriage. I had told him I needed to think about it, and then I’d driven back to Nashville and shown up on Rafe’s doorstep in the middle of the night.

  Right now, I couldn’t remember what I’d eaten that night. The salmon sounded good, though. I closed the menu. “So I live in Nashville. Charlotte lives in Charlotte, and Tina in Atlanta. What about you, Mary Kelly?”

  “I’ve stayed in Sweetwater,” Mary Kelly said, closing her own menu.

  “What do you do?”

  “Real estate and development,” Mary Kelly said.

  “Really? I’m a real estate agent, too.”

  She turned her nose up. Not physically, but I could tell she thought what she was doing far outshone what I did. “I work for Stonegate Development. We’re developing the Bog.”

  Oh, really?

  I had heard about that, as long ago as last summer. In fact, when Rafe’s mother LaDonna died—in the single wide trailer where Rafe grew up—it was a representative for Stonegate Development who discovered the body. Sheriff Satterfield had spent considerable time trying to prove that Rafe had had something to do with it, but since my now-boyfriend hadn’t even been in the Middle Tennessee area then, the sheriff had had to concede defeat. Especially since there was no proof that LaDonna hadn’t j
ust died of an overdose of her drug of choice.

  However, that was last July. I’d been to the Bog several times since then, and the Colliers’ trailer was still there. So were all the others. There wasn’t a mini-McMansion in sight.

  “What happened with that?” I asked. “The last time I was in the Bog, everything looked like it always did.”

  Charlotte giggled. “When have you ever been to the Bog, Savannah?”

  As you may have gathered, the Bog is Sweetwater’s trailer park, a dank and dismal tract of land on the south side of town, filled with decrepit mobile homes and little clapboard shacks, overhung by the scent of despair. Growing up, I’d never set foot there. Charlotte hadn’t, either. But it had been Rafe’s home. His upbringing was one I wouldn’t wish on my own worst enemy.

  Anyway, I’d been there last August, snooping around. Rafe had caught me. And I’d been there in early October, when Marquita Johnson died, and then again a week or so later, when a hitman was targeting Rafe. And I’d been there in November, when Rafe’s son David figured out he was adopted and went looking for his origins and we had to track him down.

  But since admitting to any of that meant bringing up Rafe—and I wasn’t ready to do that—I just shrugged. “I heard about the development last fall. I went to check it out. But nothing was going on then.”

  Actually, rather a lot had been going on. But none of it had had anything to do with Stonegate Development.

  “We’re just getting ready to start,” Mary Kelly said smugly. “The bulldozers come in on Monday. By the end of next week, all the houses and trailers will be gone. And in a month, you won’t recognize the place.”

  “That’s good.” It wasn’t a happy place. Not for Rafe, and not even for me.

  “Why are you so interested in the Bog, Savannah?” Charlotte wanted to know.

  Mary Kelly smirked. “She has a new boyfriend. Hasn’t she told you?”

  Charlotte turned to me, just as the waiter materialized next to the table and began to distribute the dinner dishes.