Wrongful Termination: A Savannah Martin Novel (Savannah Martin Mystery Book 16) Read online

  “I don’t have a problem taking orders,” Rafe told the ceiling.

  I didn’t say anything, and after a second he glanced over at me, lips twitching. “Maybe that ain’t exactly true. I’ve been doing my own thing for a long time. Having somebody else tell me what to do could take some getting used to. But Tammy and I’ve worked together before. We get along.”

  They did. And I’d never sensed any kind of problem between them. At least not when they were on equal footing.

  “So if it isn’t that, what is it?”

  “Nothing,” Rafe said.

  I waited, and eventually he sighed. “We talked about this over Christmas. Who in Maury County’s gonna accept me as the law? They all know who I am.”

  “They knew who you were,” I corrected. “A long time ago. You’re not that person anymore.”

  “They don’t know that.”

  Perhaps not. But— “They’ll find out.”

  He was silent another minute. So long that I started thinking he might have fallen asleep. “I dunno about this, darlin’.”

  That was obvious. “Tell you what,” I said, as my own eyelids got heavier. “You don’t have to figure it out tonight. Maybe someone at the TBI will change their minds. Maybe they’ll keep you on after all.”

  He made a noise. This time it was definitely a grunt.

  “Or maybe not. We’ll be fine either way. If you can’t work for the TBI and you don’t want to work for Grimaldi, we’ll figure something else out. We live cheaply.”

  In Rafe’s grandmother’s house, that had no mortgage or rent. Or we could move to Sweetwater, to my mother’s house. The mansion had been built right around 1840, and had been in the Martin family since, so there was no mortgage or rent due there, either.

  Rafe still didn’t say anything, and I suppressed a yawn. “You could go to work for Yvonne at Beulah’s Meat’n Three. She’d hire you in a heartbeat, and you’d look cute in one of those little aprons. Or maybe we can renovate houses together. I can find them, you can renovate them, and then we can sell them again. You renovated this.”

  “Maybe,” Rafe said, his voice far away. “Go to sleep, darlin’.”

  “You, too,” I said, or maybe I didn’t. I’m not quite sure. I was asleep by then.

  * * *

  Rafe went to the TBI the next day, to sign paperwork and hand in his badge and gun. He also had a meeting with Doug Brennan, who was Wendell’s boss, and who was not happy about the situation, but who hadn’t anything even resembling a reasonable solution to the problem.

  “He said I could maybe work in the gym,” Rafe told me over dinner. “Said I was in good shape, and maybe I could teach the agents a thing or two.”

  “That’s pretty rude,” I said, as I twiddled pasta around my fork.

  Rafe didn’t answer, but I figure he thought so, too. “When I told him I hadn’t gone through everything I did to help the real agents with push-ups and chin-ups, he offered me a desk job.”

  “What kind of desk?”

  “I didn’t ask,” Rafe said, his tone deeply disgusted. “I figured he’d say security.”

  “Mr. Brennan sounds like he’s pretty clueless.”

  “He ain’t the sharpest tool in the shed,” Rafe agreed. “Although he’s less of a problem than the upper brass. Brennan would be happy to keep me working. It’s the folks above him that wanna see results before they’ll agree to give me anybody else to train. Hard to blame’em for that.”

  I guess. “It isn’t fair to just fire you without warning, though. And after all these years, too!”

  He shrugged.

  I hesitated. “So is it time to discuss Tamara Grimaldi’s job offer yet?”

  “Thought we did that yesterday,” Rafe said.

  And of course we had discussed it yesterday. Just without coming to any conclusions.

  “If we stay in Nashville, what do you plan to do for a living?”

  “Like you said,” my husband said, “we could renovate houses together.”

  We could do that. I might not be great at finding or keeping clients, but I could manage to find my husband a house to renovate. However— “How would we pay for it? If you’re out of work and I’m a stay-at-home mom with a real estate license and very little income?”

  “Home equity line on this house?” Rafe said.

  That would be a great idea, if not for one small fact. “Isn’t it your grandmother’s house? I don’t think anybody’s going to give you a home equity loan on a house you don’t own.”

  And while we could dust off his grandmother, who lives with her niece—Rafe’s second cousin twice removed or some such, who also happens to be my mother’s best friend—in Sweetwater, and bring her to Nashville, no banker worth his salt would give Mrs. Jenkins a loan. Not only does she not have a job either, but she’s very far from compos mentis. Half the time she doesn’t even know who Rafe is, and thinks he’s his father, her son, instead.

  “And anyway,” I said, “you tried this last year, remember? After you finished up being undercover before Christmas, and you had those couple of months with nothing to do.” Nothing but making love to me and finishing fixing up Mrs. Jenkins’s house, which he had started doing in the fall. “You went absolutely crazy with boredom.”

  He didn’t answer. We ate in silence for a few minutes.

  “I can tell you want me to take the job with Tammy,” Rafe said.

  I opened my mouth to deny it, and closed it again. And opened it again. “I don’t want you to take the job unless you want to. But you don’t have a job here anymore. And I’m going to miss Grimaldi now that she’s living down there. Same with your grandmother. And with Mother shacking up with the sheriff, the mansion will be sitting empty. Nobody else wants it.” My sister and brother and half-sister all having their own places to live. “You and I could just move right in. You know as well as I do that it would be safer for Carrie down there. Here, I can’t even take her out to play in the yard without worrying about driveby shootings.”

  OK, so this was a bit of an exaggeration. Not only was Carrie much too young to go outside and play, but we didn’t have a big problem with driveby shootings. Word had gotten around that Rafe worked for the TBI, with a gun and the power to arrest people, so most of the evildoers in the area gave our house a wide berth. So far, the only trouble we’d had, had been from people who were after us for personal reasons, and not just because they were committing crimes in the neighborhood in general.

  That would probably change now, too.

  Rafe made a face when I mentioned it, but he didn’t argue. He must have come to the same conclusion.

  “But it’s totally up to you,” I said. “I know you don’t have warm feelings about Sweetwater. If you can’t face going back there, I understand. Carrie and I just want to be where you are. And if that’s here, then we’ll stay here. Or we can go somewhere else. Somewhere that isn’t Sweetwater.”

  Like the little town where we’d spent our honeymoon six months ago. On the Florida gulf coast. Rafe had enjoyed it there. Maybe the chief of police would give him a job.

  On second thought, maybe not. She’d been extremely attractive, and I felt like a hag these days. At least if he went to work for Tamara Grimaldi, I didn’t have to worry about her batting her eyes at him, seeing as she’s more interested in my brother than in my husband. At least in that way.

  “It just seemed somewhat fortuitous,” I said. “That Grimaldi offered you a job, and a week later, you lost the job you had.”

  After a beat, I added, “You don’t think…?”

  He shook his head. “Wendell didn’t know till I told him. If he didn’t, I don’t see how Tammy coulda.”

  I didn’t, either. So it must just be fate.

  “It would be nice to have some help with the baby,” I said wishfully. “If we lived in Sweetwater, my sister would babysit sometimes. Or my mother. Or Darcy.” My half-sister. “Or Audrey and your grandmother. Lots of people who’d take Carrie and give us a
chance to spend a little time alone once in a while.”

  We weren’t at a point where that was an issue yet. Carrie was so young, and we were so new at parenting and so crazy about every little thing she did, that we didn’t mind spending every waking moment with her. But as she got a year or two old, I had a feeling that that would change. We’d welcome the chance to eat a meal like grownups again. And when we did, it would be nice to have people around who could provide a couple hours of babysitting.

  Not to mention that it would be nice to have people around who had gone through child rearing, and who I could ask questions of, when something came up. Just last week, I’d had to call my sister in a panic and tell her that Carrie was hiccupping and wouldn’t stop, and did I need to take her to the emergency room? (No. It was normal and would go away on its own. Which it did, an hour later. An hour I spent sitting next to the crib watching my baby to make sure she didn’t hiccup herself to death in her sleep.)

  And yes, it was nice that I had someone to call. But it would be even nicer to have Catherine close enough that I could actually take Carrie over to her house if I wanted to.

  Rafe made a noise. It was somewhat agreeable. Or at least not disagreeable.

  “You could drive down and talk to her,” I said, “maybe. Grimaldi, I mean. She offered you the job and you said you’d think about it, but you didn’t actually talk to her. Not that I know.”

  He shook his head.

  “It might help to get some kind of idea exactly what she has in mind. I mean… if she’s planning to put you in a uniform and send you out on patrol, I can see why you wouldn’t be interested in that. But if she wants you to do detective work, that’d be different.”

  He nodded.

  “We could run down tomorrow morning. You could see Grimaldi. I could too, for that matter. See how she feels about her new job after the first couple of days. And we could see Mother and the sheriff, and your grandmother and Audrey and everyone else.”

  And then we could either drive up again tomorrow afternoon or evening—it’s just over an hour, so no big deal—or we could spend the night in Sweetwater, and leave Friday morning, and still get home in plenty of time to set up for the party.

  “Would you like to do that?”

  “I suppose,” Rafe said. He still sounded dissatisfied, though.

  “At least if you talk to her, you’ll have more of an idea what she had in mind. And if you turn it down, you’ll know exactly what it is you’re turning down.”

  He nodded.

  “So do we have a plan?”

  “I suppose,” Rafe said.

  The lack of enthusiasm was annoying. But he’d agreed to do something, and that was more than he had when we’d sat down to dinner, so I counted it as a win, and devoted myself to my spaghetti. Talking about it more would only muddy the waters.

  Chapter Two

  We set out around nine the following morning. Rafe had no appointments at the TBI, and I had nothing to do, either. So we waited until Carrie had woken up, and spent the couple of hours she keeps awake looking at her and tickling her tummy, and when it came close to the time she’d go down for another nap, we piled her and all her paraphernalia into the Volvo, crawled in after her, and set off for Sweetwater.

  With a quick stop at the gas station on the corner of Dresden Street and Dickerson to put gas in the car before we hit the interstate.

  We’d only been driving for a few minutes, but Carrie was already getting drowsy. I stayed in my seat while Rafe got out to do the honors.

  As sometimes happens, the credit card machine was on the fritz, and Rafe ended up having to go inside to pay. And spent a couple of minutes talking to the kid behind the counter before he came back out. His name is Malcolm, and he lives up the street from Mrs. Jenkins’s house.

  “Did you tell him you lost your job?” I said when he was sitting beside me again, and had turned the key over in the ignition.

  He shook his head. “Don’t figure it’s any of his business.”

  Aside from which he might still be hoping that what’s-his-name—Brennan—would be able to pull some strings and change things. No need to give up hope quite yet.

  “I guess that’ll put a kibosh on Malcolm’s plans to join the TBI when he’s old enough, anyway.”

  Rafe shrugged. “He might could change his mind about that, anyway. Not like he’s doing much to make himself more likely to be hired.”

  No. He’d been working at the gas station since he left high school, and didn’t seem in any hurry to leave there to go to college. And the TBI, like every other employer in the state, seemed to prefer someone with a secondary education to someone without.

  If Rafe had had a college degree, he might still have a job.

  “He’ll figure it out,” Rafe said, and turned the car onto Dickerson Pike in the direction of the interstate. “And if he don’t, none of my business.”

  None at all. I settled into the seat and glanced over my shoulder at the baby. Her eyes were closed, with long eyelashes fanning against her cheeks the way her father’s did. Her little pink lips were pursed and making sucking motions. I reached over and rescued the pacifier that had fallen into her lap, and stuffed it back into her mouth before she could realize that it was gone and start crying.

  Rafe glanced over at me. “She OK?”

  I smiled. “Perfect.”

  “Sleeping?”

  I nodded.

  “You comfortable?”

  I was.

  “Why don’t you take a nap, too? I’ll wake you when we get there.”

  I squinted at him. “Are you sure?” I could use the nap, sure. I’d been up several times overnight. But— “You don’t want the company?”

  “You’ll still be here,” Rafe said. “Just not watching how fast I’m driving.”

  Ah. “Have at it. Just remember that if you get pulled over now, you won’t have a TBI badge to get you out of the speeding ticket.”

  “I won’t get pulled over,” Rafe said, cutting onto the interstate in front of an eighteen-wheeler carrying gas. We weren’t dangerously close, and in the second it took the driver to lay on the horn, we’d already traveled far enough that the deep, angry toot was far behind us.

  Rafe laughed. I smiled, and closed my eyes.

  When I opened them less than an hour later, we were just pulling up outside the police station in the town of Columbia in Maury County. I blinked at the clock. “Here already?”

  “I told you I was planning to go fast,” Rafe said.

  “Sure, but…” It wasn’t worth asking him if he’d flown—he had to have been, to have gotten here in the time we had—so I didn’t. Instead I glanced over at Carrie. She was still asleep, the pacifier making tiny in-and-out motions as she sucked on it in her sleep. “I’ll stay here with the baby.”

  “Bring her,” Rafe said, opening his car door. “I’m sure Tammy’ll wanna see her.”

  I wasn’t. Tamara Grimaldi isn’t exactly the warm and fuzzy type, and I couldn’t imagine she’d care one way or the other whether I brought the baby in to see her.

  Not that she minds children. She seems to get along with Dix’s daughters well enough. But she has a pretty pragmatic approach to them. She doesn’t gush or coo or tickle their feet. When they’re old enough to be talked to, she talks to them like small adults. Or so I’ve determined from seeing her interact with Abigail and Hannah.

  On the other hand, I wasn’t all that keen on being left in the car. This could take some time. It was cold. And I wanted to see Grimaldi, and ask how she was doing. So when Rafe told me to bring the baby, I brought the baby, car seat and all.

  He held the door for me, and let me walk into the lobby first. I made a beeline for the reception desk, where a young woman in uniform was taking up space. “We’d like to see Tamara Grimaldi if she’s available, please.”

  She looked from me to Rafe and back. A little slowly. Her gaze lingered on him a lot longer than it did on me. He usually has that effect on wo
men. “Who should I tell her is here?”

  “Savannah Martin,” I said, and added, a second later, “Collier. And Rafe. And Carrie.”

  She nodded and picked up the receiver. A red fingernail tapped buttons on an old-fashioned phone. After a second, she said, “Chief Grimaldi? Someone to see you.”

  A beat passed, then she rattled off our names. Rafe’s first. Then she put down the phone and told him, “She’ll be right out.”

  He nodded. I rolled my eyes. She didn’t notice, since she was still looking at him.

  “You can wait in the sitting area over there.” She waved a vague hand in the direction of the sofa and a couple of chairs on the other side of the lobby.

  “I don’t imagine it’ll be long,” Rafe told her, “but thanks.”

  She nodded, and watched him walk away. She even got halfway up from her chair to get a better look at his butt.

  I ought to be used to it by now.

  Correction: I am used to it by now. Women always look at Rafe. I look at him myself. He’s nice to look at. As I think so myself, it’s hard to blame other women for thinking the same. But when he was standing in front of her with a wife and small baby, the blatant appreciation was a bit too much.

  Nothing I could do about it, though, so I followed Rafe—and his excellent butt—over to the seating group. And no sooner had I put Carrie’s carrier on the low table, than the door to the inner sanctum opened, and Tamara Grimaldi strode through.

  * * *

  The first time I met Tamara Grimaldi was a couple of hours after Rafe and I had stumbled over my colleague, and Alexandra’s mother, Brenda Puckett’s butchered body in what was now the house we were living in on Potsdam Street. Brenda had essentially cheated Mrs. Jenkins, Rafe’s grandmother, out of it, and put it on the market for a lot of money—money she didn’t plan to share with Mrs. J. But she’d gotten herself murdered in the middle of the deal, and when Rafe and I showed up, we found her with her throat cut in front of the fireplace in the library.