Right of Redemption

  Right of Redemption

  Savannah Martin Mystery #18

  Jenna Bennett

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  About the Author

  One

  “We should go into business together,” Charlotte said.

  I lifted my attention from the salad I was picking at—I would have preferred something with more substance, but it was almost three months since Carrie had been born, so it was time to get serious about shedding the rest of the baby weight—and stared at her across the table. “What?”

  “I need a job if I’m going to stay in Sweetwater.”

  She didn’t add that so did I, but it was implied. Or if it wasn’t, I knew it. I couldn’t loaf forever.

  She continued, “I could get my real estate license and we could work together. As a team. That’s a thing, right?”

  I nodded. It was a thing. Not everyone is good at everything, and not everyone is good at the same things, so a real estate agent who likes to take listings might work with a real estate agent who likes to work with buyers, and split the money they make between them. That way they both get to do what they like, and they both make money.

  I had no idea what I liked. I’d had my real estate license for going on two years, but I hadn’t managed to sell more than a handful of properties in that time. I just didn’t seem to be very good at it, and I was constantly distracted by other things. My husband, my baby, murder…

  As a result, I was usually thrilled when I landed any client, and couldn’t care less whether it was a buyer or a seller. The idea of having to share the commission I made with someone else was frightening, when I made so little as it was.

  And aside from that, what if Charlotte turned out to be a better realtor than me? Then I’d feel even worse about myself and my career choice than I did now.

  But of course I couldn’t tell her that. She had enough to deal with, between her impending divorce and custody battle, her kids, and her parents. She didn’t need to hear that I didn’t want to work too closely with her.

  So— “It isn’t as easy as it looks,” I said instead. “You know how, when you watch House Hunters on HGTV, the buyers always pick one of the three houses at the end of the show?”

  Charlotte nodded.

  “That doesn’t happen in real life. Sometimes you show them dozens of houses, and at the end of it, they don’t like any of them, and they decide they’re just going to rent for a while. And then six months turn into a year, and by the time their lease is up and they’re ready to buy something, they’ve met another realtor in line for coffee, and they don’t call you back. He gets their business. And you did all that work for nothing.”

  Charlotte stared at me.

  “And it takes time to get a real estate license. At least three or four months of classes. If you started now, you wouldn’t be licensed until the summer.”

  “That won’t work,” Charlotte said. “I need to make money now.”

  I tilted my head to look at her. “Problem?” She had moved herself and the kids in with her parents, in her childhood home, and it wasn’t likely that they were charging her rent. In fact, they were probably thrilled to have her back home, after almost a decade in North Carolina. And I’m sure they were delighted to spend more time with their grandchildren.

  “Richard is refusing to give me any money,” Charlotte said, her voice tight. “He put a freeze on our accounts, and he shut down my credit card.”

  Richard is the soon-to-be-ex, and father of the children. That’s probably obvious.

  “Can he do that? They’re his children, too. Isn’t he responsible for them?”

  “He’s waiting for the judge to rule on the alimony,” Charlotte said.

  “And until then he expects you to live on air?”

  “I’m sure he’s not expecting it.” Her voice was dry. “He just doesn’t care.”

  “But they’re his children!”

  “He has a new mistress,” Charlotte said, “and a new baby on the way. And she’s a big deal in Charlotte.”

  Yes, Charlotte had spent the past ten years in Charlotte. That’s called irony. Or something.

  “Well, you’re a big deal here,” I told her. “And the fact that his floozy is a big deal in Charlotte doesn’t mean that Doctor Dick doesn’t have to provide for the children he already has!”

  “Tell that to his lawyer,” Charlotte said.

  “Have you talked to Catherine about it?”

  Catherine McCall is Charlotte’s lawyer, and also my sister. When Charlotte first arrived back in Sweetwater, she wanted to hire my brother Dix—her high school boyfriend—to represent her. (My entire family, present company excepted, is lawyers.) But Dix, like most men, is squeamish when it comes to nailing another man’s scrotum to the wall for child support. Catherine has no such qualms. She would have had my own ex-husband, Bradley Ferguson, singing soprano if I’d allowed it back when he’d dumped me for his paralegal. (At the time, trying to keep my dignity seemed like a good idea. I’ve since learned that you can’t eat dignity, and besides, he didn’t deserve any consideration from me. And while that’s all water under the bridge now, the knowledge still stings.) However, I had every confidence that Catherine could do to Doctor Dick what I hadn’t allowed her to do to Bradley. And I was looking forward to watching.

  “We have to wait for the hearing,” Catherine said.

  “When’s that?”

  “Next month,” Charlotte said. “The 18th.”

  “That’s almost four weeks away!”

  She nodded. “I know.”

  “What are you supposed to eat in the meantime?”

  “We’re not starving,” Charlotte said. “My parents are taking care of us.”

  “Well, of course they are.” It had been more of a rhetorical question. How did Doctor Dick expect his wife and children to survive until the divorce was final and the settlement decided, if he wouldn’t give them any money? Charlotte had never had a job. She’d married Doctor Dick straight out of college and started popping out babies.

  “But that’s why I need to make some money,” Charlotte said. “I can’t let my parents continue to pay for everything. They have their own retirement to think about. But I’ve looked for work everywhere I could think of…”

  I nodded. She had asked Dix and Catherine for a job in the law firm. She had asked my mother’s best friend Audrey for a job at the boutique. She had probably visited every medium-to-high class establishment in Sweetwater looking for employment. I’m sure she wasn’t looking forward to starting on the low-end places. Waitressing and cleaning and working the register at the local Walmart…

  “We could flip a house,” someone said. It took me a second to realize the voice was mine. And maybe it had sounded strange to Charlotte, too, because she stared at me.

  “What?”

  I took the thought out and looked at it. “We could flip a house. Buy it, renovate it, and sell it. We could easily do that in the time it would take you to get your real estate license. Less.”

  It would give me something to do, too. I could bring the baby. And I’d have a house to sell once the renovating was
done.

  “Like Fixer-Upper?” Charlotte said doubtfully.

  “Sort of.” I mean, Chip Gaines actually knows what he’s doing. Neither of us had a clue. “More like Joanna Gaines without Chip.”

  “Decorating?”

  “A little more than decorating. But we could look for a house that doesn’t need a lot of heavy-duty renovating. Just cosmetics, you know? New paint, new tile, new light fixtures. And we’d hire people for all the difficult stuff. Like…” I thought about what would go into renovating a house, even one that didn’t need much heavy-duty reno, “we could order a new kitchen from Home Depot or Lowes, and they’d install it for us. That way we wouldn’t have to worry about installing cabinetry or countertops. Or plumbing. Or electrical work. We’d get a plumber or an electrician for that. We’d just have to worry about tiling the backsplash and painting the walls.”

  “Wouldn’t that cost more?”

  Yes, of course it would. “But we wouldn’t electrocute ourselves. Or accidentally nail-gun our fingers to the wall. We’d only have to do the easy stuff. Like painting.” It’s hard to kill yourself with a paintbrush. Practically impossible, probably.

  “I could paint,” Charlotte said.

  I could, too. I mean, how hard could it be? And laying tile, while it looked tedious, didn’t seem like it would be all that difficult to handle, either.

  “We just have to find the right house. Something not too expensive—since we’d have to buy it—in a good location, and in pretty good condition. We wouldn’t want to take on too much our first time.”

  Charlotte shook her head. “Would we be able to get a loan to buy a house? Neither one of us has a job.”

  “This is Sweetwater,” I said, “and I’m a Martin. I’m sure I could find a bank who’d give me a loan.”

  There have been Martins in Sweetwater for more than two hundred years. It’s not like we aren’t a good risk.

  “You’d probably have to put the mansion up as collateral,” Charlotte said.

  I stared at her, aghast. “Have you lost your mind? I couldn’t do that!”

  Physically couldn’t, I mean. All I did was live in it; I didn’t own it. It wasn’t mine to collateral with. And I’m sure Mother—who did own it, but didn’t live in it—wouldn’t hear of me taking out a home equity line on the ancestral home.

  “You’re not a Martin anymore, either,” Charlotte pointed out, and I sucked in an offended breath.

  “I’ll always be a Martin!”

  “You know what I mean,” Charlotte said, and of course I did, even if I didn’t want to admit it.

  “You have a point. Everyone in town knows I married Rafe. I’m probably persona non grata now. At least with the bank.”

  While Rafe and I live in the Martin mansion, my husband grew up in the trailer park on the other side of town. And in addition to that, he had a… let’s call it a checkered past, including a stint in prison and ten years undercover for the TBI, rubbing elbows—and other things—with the criminal underclass. None of that is a secret. And he was working for the police department now, which probably wasn’t a point in our favor, either. Everyone knows that law enforcement doesn’t pay much. So no, maybe I wouldn’t be able to waltz into the nearest bank and get a loan just on the strength of my maiden name.

  We sat in silence for a moment or two. Next to me, baby Carrie sucked on her pacifier and looked around with long-lashed blue eyes. She has my eyes but her daddy’s coloring, and the bright blue was startling against her dusky skin and black curls.

  “I don’t have any money,” Charlotte said.

  I shook my head. That’s what had started this part of the conversation. “I don’t, either. I should have had Catherine squeeze Bradley for more, but I didn’t. Although it’s moot now, anyway. He’s making license plates in Riverbend Penitentiary.” And had no money to spare.

  We sat in silence another minute.

  “Dix has money,” I said. “And Catherine. And Mother. Maybe one of them would give us a loan.”

  Charlotte looked dubious. “Dix and Catherine have children of their own to raise. I’m not sure they have any extra money for something like this.”

  Maybe not. And like Charlotte’s parents, Mother had retirement to worry about. Not that she’d ever been anything but retired. But she still needed money to live.

  “I could ask Darcy,” I said. “She inherited a little money from her parents.”

  Money I’d borrowed and given back once before. It was hard to say whether this situation would be more or less risky than that one. But at least no one would try to kill either of us at the end of it.

  “How much would it take?” Charlotte wanted to know, a wrinkle between her brows.

  I turned it over in my head. “It would depend on the house. As long as we could get a loan for the mortgage, we’d only need twenty percent for a down payment. We might even be able to get a construction loan, where the renovation costs are built into the loan on top of the value of the house the way it is when we buy it. Then we’d only need the down payment for that one loan, and no renovation costs, since they’d be part of the loan.”

  “Plus enough money to keep up with the monthly payments,” Charlotte said.

  I nodded. “But we could probably use the loan for that, too.”

  “Use the loan to pay for the loan?” She wrinkled her nose.

  “It would only be for a couple of months. If we hurried, we could get the house on the market by the end of the spring season. Three months from now, maybe. May? As long as we found a house that didn’t need a whole lot of fix-up—mainly cosmetics—and we worked fast.”

  I was starting to get into this idea. It sounded like it would be fun. I could see myself doing the Joanna Gaines thing—making decorating decisions and looking fabulous—while the house turned gorgeous around me.

  “Do you have a house in mind?” Charlotte asked.

  I didn’t. I’d seen a lovely little Victorian cottage recently, that needed renovating, but it wasn’t for sale, and was also a bit stigmatized by having had the bodies of two women in the basement for more than fifteen years.

  “I’ll have to see what’s available. Maybe we can go look at houses tomorrow.”

  “Shouldn’t we make sure we’d be able to buy one first?” Charlotte asked.

  I supposed we probably should. “I’ll talk to Darcy. And if that doesn’t work, I’ll talk to Dix and Catherine and Mother. And call you when I know something.”

  Charlotte nodded. “I should get back home. My mother’s been babysitting long enough.”

  “I should get back, too.” I lifted my napkin from my lap and dropped it next to my plate. “I’ll let you know what I find out.”

  * * *

  We walked out together, me hauling the car seat with the baby in it, and parted ways on the sidewalk outside the restaurant, which happened to be the Café on the Square in downtown Sweetwater. When Charlotte walked to her car, I walked next door, opened the door into Martin and McCall Law Offices, and greeted my sister. “How would you like to invest in my latest business venture?”

  Darcy looked up from the computer. “You have a business venture?”

  “I just came from having lunch with Charlotte,” I said, and put the baby carrier down on the floor. “Doctor Dick has frozen her accounts and canceled her credit cards, and he isn’t giving her any money. Charlotte says he’s waiting for the judge’s decision on what he’s supposed to pay. And meanwhile, Charlotte doesn’t have an income, or any way to feed her kids.”

  Darcy nodded. “That’s too bad for Charlotte, but giving your friend money isn’t what I’d consider a business venture.”

  “I wouldn’t ask you to do that.” I shrugged out of my coat and draped it over the back of a chair. “We want to renovate a house. Find one that doesn’t need a lot of fixing up, polish it, and put it back on the market. And make a profit. I’d have a house to sell, and we’d both make some money. And you too, if you wanted to go in with us.”


  Darcy contemplated me, her head tilted.

  She’s my father’s daughter, my half-sister, but she looks nothing like me. Dix and I take after Mother’s family, the Georgia Calverts. Darcy doesn’t honestly look a lot like Catherine, either, although Catherine takes after the Martins. Darcy looks like Audrey, tall and coltish, with hints of Dad in the mouth and jawline, but mostly she just looks like herself. Or Rafe. She’s related to him, too, through her mother. And looks more like his sister than mine, although what they are, is some sort of second cousin a few times removed. Rafe’s grandmother, Mrs. Jenkins, and Audrey’s mother Oneida, were sisters.

  “Do you know anything about renovating?” Darcy asked.

  “I know about real estate.”

  She nodded.

  “And Rafe renovated Mrs. Jenkins’s house in Nashville.”

  “But he won’t be renovating this one.”

  No, he wouldn’t. But I could ask him questions. “We’ll hire people to do the difficult stuff,” I said. “I’m not going to attempt plumbing or electrical work. I’m going to be looking for something that needs mostly cosmetic updating to be pretty. Surely we’ll be able to sand floors and paint and hang wallpaper.”

  Darcy nodded. “It sounds like fun, but I already have a job.”

  “I’m mostly interested in your money,” I confessed, and watched her eyebrows arch. “I thought I would just be able to go to the bank and get a loan, on the strength of being Savannah Martin, but Charlotte pointed out that I’m Savannah Collier now, and the Collier name doesn’t have that kind of cachet in Sweetwater.”

  Darcy’s lips twitched.

  “We’d pay you back, of course. With interest. Or a percentage of the profits, or whatever you wanted.”