Right of Redemption Read online

  Certainly not at noon on a Sunday, when the place was likely to be filled with church goers chowing down after the morning service. “It’s a perfectly respectable diner. Run by a woman we both went to school with. No worries. C’mon.”

  Charlotte didn’t say anything, but I could see her brace herself when I grabbed the handle and pulled the door open.

  * * *

  The inside of Beulah’s looks like you might expect. It’s a long, low room with an old-fashioned lunch counter along one side and with a row of booths along the other, looking out over the parking lot. The stools and benches are red vinyl, the table tops speckled Formica with steel edges. It’s all very traditional and, in its way, comforting. There’s nothing fancy about it at all.

  Yvonne was manning the hostess station, and beamed a welcome when she saw me. “Afternoon, princess.” And then she looked past me. “Where’s your husband?”

  “Home with the baby,” I said. Or on his way to Dix’s house by now, most likely. Kickoff, or whatever it was called, was probably at noon. Truth be told, I wasn’t even sure what kind of game they’d be watching. What kind of sport do people play in February?

  “Sorry,” I added. “I’ll bring him next time.”

  “See that you do.” She grinned at me before turning to Charlotte. A second passed. “I know you,” Yvonne said.

  Charlotte looked pretty deeply uncomfortable. I smiled. “Of course you do. You went to school together. Charlotte was my best friend growing up.”

  Yvonne nodded. “You dated her brother.” She flicked a glance at me.

  I nodded. So did Charlotte.

  “She’s back in town,” I told Yvonne, since Charlotte wasn’t stepping up and doing her own talking. “Her husband cheated.”

  Charlotte flinched, but I wasn’t sure whether it was because of the cheating or because I’d said it out loud where other people could hear.

  I didn’t think she had to worry. Nobody looked like they cared much what we were talking about, and I didn’t know many of them, so Charlotte probably wouldn’t, either. Most of them were a lot older than us. Cletus Johnson, one of Bob Satterfield’s deputies, was an exception. He was Yvonne’s age, a couple years older than Charlotte and me, and was sharing a booth in the rear with his mother and his two kids. I hadn’t seen them—the kids—for more than a year, and they’d gotten much bigger. Cletus’s mama looked about the same, at least from what I remembered and what I could see of the back of her head.

  Darcy had gotten here before us, and was sitting by the window. I gave her a raised finger—index, not middle—and she nodded. In the booth next to her, a young guy with light brown hair flopping over heavy eyebrows looked from me to her and back, and said something to his companion. I didn’t think I’d ever seen either of them before, but I gave them a polite nod anyway before turning my attention back to my own companions.

  “Oh, honey,” Yvonne said, in response to my remark about Charlotte’s marriage, “all men are bastards.” She patted Charlotte’s arm in commiseration.

  Charlotte forced a smile. “Thank you.”

  “Yvonne’s had her own experiences with cheaters,” I said. “Remember Darrell Skinner?”

  “Wasn’t he one of that family who…?” She trailed off without finishing the thought, but I knew what she hadn’t said. Wasn’t he one of that family who was murdered last fall?

  I nodded. “The youngest son. Several years older than us, though. But Yvonne dated him for a long time.”

  “A decade,” Yvonne said. “More. And he just couldn’t keep his pants zipped.”

  After a second she added a reflexive, “Bless his heart.”

  Charlotte and I both observed a moment of silence for the dead. “Anyway,” I said, “Charlotte’s living here now. Doctor Dick’s still in North Carolina.”

  “Nice to have you back home,” Yvonne said politely, as the door opened behind us and a couple of septuagenarians walked in. “I guess you’re meeting your sister?”

  I nodded. “I see her. We’ll talk to you later.”

  “I’ll be by,” Yvonne said and turned toward the new arrivals. “Welcome to Beulah’s. How many for lunch?”

  We left her there, and made our way toward Darcy’s booth. The two young guys in the next booth watched as we came closer, and I did my best to ignore them, even if it wasn’t easy. It was also a little weird, since they were at least four or five years younger than Charlotte and me, if not more, and probably a decade younger than Darcy. I get attention from men sometimes, and I’m sure Charlotte does, too, but they’re not usually college kids.

  As soon as we slid into the booth across from Darcy, I forgot all about them, though. “Did you get called back in to the police station again, too?” I unwound my scarf from around my neck.

  Darcy shook her head. “Did you?”

  “Both of us.” I glanced at Charlotte. “Not together. Charlotte was there first, I think. Or at least it sounded like Jarvis had already talked to her when he talked to me.”

  “Any news?” Darcy wanted to know.

  And how! “I found out why Morris couldn’t keep up with the taxes and lost the house to foreclosure.”

  “Why?” Charlotte and Darcy said in unison.

  I lowered my voice, since we were in a public place and there was no point in broadcasting this to everyone in Beulah’s. “He was in jail!”

  There was silence. From the table behind me, too. The two young guys were probably listening to every word we said. I reached for the menus and gave one to Charlotte and one to Darcy. “We should decide what to eat before the waitress gets here.”

  Charlotte accepted hers obediently, but Darcy said, “What for?”

  “Jail? Rape and murder.”

  Charlotte gasped, and I added, “A rape and murder he said he didn’t commit. And a jury agreed with him, because they acquitted him a couple of days ago, and he was let go.”

  “So he didn’t do it?”

  I didn’t actually know whether he’d done it or not. “He was acquitted. Farther than that, I’m not sure. I’ll get the court transcripts on Monday. Rafe said court records are public in Tennessee, and if I go to the courthouse and pay a fee, they’ll give them to me. But it may not be that he didn’t do it. It may be that he was let off on some kind of technicality. It happens. We won’t know until we do a little investigating.”

  Charlotte shuddered and tried to hide it. “I can’t believe he came to the door and you talked to him! And all along he might have been a rapist. And a murderer!”

  “I only talked to him for two minutes,” I said. “And I wasn’t in any danger.”

  And he wasn’t the first rapist or murderer I’d talked to. Although Charlotte might not know that, and I didn’t want to make her look at me the way she looked at the memory of Steve Morris. Besides, my experiences with the dregs of society weren’t anything everyone in Beulah’s needed to hear, either.

  “I should have salad,” I said, perusing the menu. “I need to get serious about losing the rest of the baby weight.”

  “You look great,” Darcy said, and added, “for having had a baby three months ago.”

  I hid a grimace. She probably hadn’t meant it the way it sounded. “I don’t look as good as you.” She was tall and slender. I was less tall, and had been less slender even before I got pregnant.

  “Yoga,” Darcy said. “And I didn’t have a baby recently.”

  “Speaking of that…”

  She eyed me across the top of the menu. “I’m not pregnant.”

  “I didn’t think you were. But are you and Nolan at least talking about it?” Because she wasn’t getting any younger. Although it would be rude to point it out.

  That hadn’t stopped me once before, actually, but I was determined not to do it again.

  “Yes,” Darcy said, with long-suffering patience. “The topic has come up. But we’ve only been dating six months. It’s too soon to have babies.”

  She turned back to the menu. “If n
ot salad, what are you going to have?”

  “Probably salad.” I sighed. “The cobbler sounds good, though. It’s a good day for cobbler.”

  “Any day’s a good day for cobbler,” Darcy said. “If you have salad, maybe you can reward yourself with a cobbler for dessert. I’ll help you eat it, so it’ll only be half a cobbler.”

  She moved her attention to Charlotte. “What about you? Want to help us eat a piece of cobbler?”

  Behind us, the two young guys struck up another conversation. I guess they’d gotten tired of listening to us talk about food.

  “I guess.” Charlotte sounded like she didn’t care about cobbler one way or the other, which was practically sacrilege. “I should have salad, too. It’s more than two years since JR was born, and I’ve still got baby weight to lose, too.”

  “JR is your son?”

  Charlotte nodded. “Richard Junior. JR for short.”

  “Cute,” Darcy said. “So salads all around, and cobbler for dessert.” She sounded happy about it. It was probably the cobbler, although I wouldn’t put it past her to be excited about salad.

  The waitress materialized beside the table, snapping gum. “Getcha?” The name tag pinned to her ample bosom said Mo, but I remembered her from the competency hearing last year, and knew that her full name was Maureen Boyd.

  “How are you, Miss Boyd?” I said politely. “I’d like a sweet tea with lemon and a chef salad, please.”

  She gave me a look under bushy brows. After a second her eyes cleared. “You’re the youngest Martin girl, ain’t ya?”

  I nodded. I was indeed the youngest Martin girl. “Although I’m a Collier now.”

  “That’s right.” She grinned. “You married LaDonna Collier’s boy last summer, didn’t ya?”

  I had. And I appreciated her leaving out the ‘good-for-nothing, colored’ part between LaDonna’s name and ‘boy.’ And since she had, I grinned back. “It was the event of the season. At least according to my Aunt Regina.” Who writes the society column for the Sweetwater Reporter.

  Maureen put her head back and hooted. “Don’t tell the boss I said so, but she has a crush on him.”

  Oh, I was well aware of that. “Yvonne has a crush on everyone. She likes my brother Dix, too. Speaking of which, this is my sister Darcy. And if you remember me, you probably remember Charlotte Albertson, too.”

  Maureen nodded. “Ain’t seen you in a while.”

  “I’ve been living in North Carolina,” Charlotte said softly.

  When she didn’t say anything else, Maureen turned her attention to Darcy. And looked from her to me and back for a second. “Sisters?”

  “Same dad,” I said. “Different mothers.”

  Maureen nodded. “I’ve seen you around. Been here a while now, ain’t ya?”

  “Three years. A bit more.”

  “Well, we’re happy to have ya,” Maureen said. “What’ll it be?”

  Darcy ordered a salad, and so did Charlotte. “And we’re going to split a cobbler for dessert,” I told Maureen.

  She grinned. “Good choice. Grady’s been baking up a storm back there.”

  I remembered Grady, too, from the hearing. He had also spoken up in Yvonne’s favor, and against the Otis Odoms. I should have asked Jarvis, when I had the chance, what—if anything—was going on with that case.

  Maureen withdrew to fetch our drinks and put in our orders, and we returned to our conversation. On a totally different topic now. “I never knew Savannah had another sister,” Charlotte said to Darcy.

  Darcy glanced at me and back at Charlotte. “We didn’t know it, either, until last fall. I asked Savannah to help me figure out who my birth parents were. I’ve always known I was adopted, but I didn’t do anything about it as long as my parents were alive. But after they died, and I moved here and started working for the law firm, I thought I’d look into it. I didn’t have any other family, and my ex-husband had married someone else, so I was all alone. I thought it might be nice to see whether I was related to anyone else in the world.”

  “Rafe was busy in Nashville,” I added—this had been during the dreadlocks and gold tooth debacle that Charlotte knew nothing about, so no sense in mentioning it, “and he wanted me to stay down here with Mother, and out of the way of what he was doing, so I thought I’d help Darcy. And we ended up finding out that we were related.”

  “That’s amazing,” Charlotte said.

  Oh, it was. I grinned at Darcy across the table. She grinned back.

  “You don’t look much alike,” Charlotte added.

  No, we didn’t. “It’s a maternal thing. Darcy takes after Audrey’s family. I take after the Georgia Calverts. Same as Dix.”

  “I remember your dad,” Charlotte said, still looking at Darcy. “I guess there’s some resemblance…”

  “The mouth and jaw, mostly. But she’s related to Rafe, too, through Audrey’s mother. It’s all very tangled.”

  And this wasn’t the time or place to go into the details, especially since Oneida, Audrey’s mother, had spent her whole marriage passing for white, and I had no need or desire to broadcast that to everyone at Beulah’s. Given that Audrey had opened her home to her Aunt Tondalia—Oneida’s sister and Rafe’s grandmother—who was as brown and wrinkled as a raisin, I’m sure Sweetwater was catching on, but that was no reason to sit here and announce anything.

  “So you used to be married?” Charlotte asked.

  Darcy nodded. “In Birmingham. He cheated.”

  “So did my husband,” Charlotte said darkly.

  So had mine. “All first husbands are scum.”

  “Feel free to drink to that,” Maureen said, as she stopped beside the table with our glasses. “The food’ll be out shortly.” She wandered off again.

  I lifted my tea. “To better luck next time.”

  “Better luck next time,” Darcy said.

  We both looked at Charlotte. She sighed, and raised her glass. “Better luck next time.”

  We drank.

  Twelve

  The salads had arrived by the time the Johnson family—Cletus, his mother, and two kids—were ready to take their leave. The kids came bouncing down the aisle first—cute little tykes, a girl with beads in her hair, and a boy in an oversized sports jersey with a number twenty-three on the back—and when the adults came even with us, they slowed down.

  “Deputy,” I greeted Cletus. “Afternoon off?”

  He nodded. “Your husband working?”

  There’s no love lost between him and Rafe, but I guess they get along better now than they have at any time in the past. There’s professional courtesy, if nothing else.

  I shook my head. “He has the day off, too. He’s over at Dix’s house watching the game.”

  Cletus nodded and shifted his attention across the table. “Darcy. Good to see you.”

  “You, too,” my sister said brightly. Once upon a time, she’d gone on a date with Cletus Johnson. Hopefully he wasn’t still harboring hopes in that direction, since Darcy was getting pretty serious about Nolan, at least as far as I know.

  Cletus turned his attention to Charlotte, while behind my back, I heard one of the young guys in the next booth say something in a low voice. It was the tone more than anything that caught my attention, because he spoke too softly for me to hear the words. But when I glanced over my shoulder, I saw Cletus’s little girl take two steps back from the table, her eyes wide.

  At the same time, Cletus drew in a big breath, big enough that the buttons on his shirt strained.

  He’s a muscular guy. Not quite as tall as Rafe, but stockier, and with a chest and a set of shoulders that are quite impressive. And when he inhales and breathes out through his nose, he looks something like the Incredible Hulk powering up. Brown, not green, but you get the point.

  “What did you say to my little girl?” he wanted to know, his voice a deep bass rumble laced with menace.

  The young man turned, a cocky smirk on his face. A smirk that faded when he go
t a load of Cletus towering over him. I could see his throat move when he swallowed. “Nuthin.”

  “That’s not what I heard,” Cletus said.

  It wasn’t what I’d heard, either. Or rather, I hadn’t heard exactly what was said, but I’d definitely heard something. And from the little girl’s expression, it hadn’t been nice. I glanced over at the hostess station, but it was empty. Yvonne must be somewhere else.

  Not that Cletus wasn’t perfectly able to handle this on his own.

  He leaned in, bracing both hands on the table. Muscles bunched under the thin Sunday-shirt, stretching the fabric tight. Just one of his arms was bigger around than the younger man’s thigh, and while the kid—because he wasn’t much more—wanted to act brave, he shrank back a little before he caught himself.

  Cletus’s voice was dangerously even. “Did I just hear you call my little girl a jiggaboo?”

  A couple of people at the nearby tables gasped audibly, and started whispering to each other. The young man shook his head. “No, sir.”

  He couldn’t quite wipe the smirk off his face, though. Nervous he may have been, but not so nervous that he didn’t think it was funny to hear Cletus repeat the ugly word.

  The little girl tugged the back of Cletus’s pants, and when he turned around, she whispered something to him. He nodded. “I know, precious. You go on outside with your nana now. Daddy’ll be there in a minute.”

  He waited for Mrs. Johnson to nudge both the kids ahead of her toward the door. The look she turned over her shoulder as she walked away was scared, but it was hard to say whether it was the two young men she was afraid of, or whether she was just worried about what her son might do.

  By now, Yvonne had come out of the kitchen and noticed what was going on, too. She said something to Mrs. Johnson as the older woman shepherded the little boy and girl past the hostess stand. Mrs. Johnson responded, and Yvonne took off toward us, the soles of her shoes squeaking on the floor. “What’s going on?”

  “This… gentleman,” Cletus said, “just called my daughter a jiggaboo.”

  Yvonne inhaled, and her bosom—always impressive—expanded. The eyes of the guy on the other side of the table, another scrawny youth with lank, brown hair and a scraggly goatee, glazed over.