Past Due Page 4

  Charlotte looked envious as she poked at her rabbit food. I wanted to rub it in—See, my boyfriend lets me eat!—but I took another bite of the roll and refrained.

  Chapter Four

  “How about we take a drive?” I suggested when the food was gone and the check had been paid. Mary Kelly and Tina were still hunched over their table in the back, and we had a couple of hours to kill before we had to go home and start getting ready for tonight’s shindig.

  “Do you have your car?” Charlotte asked.

  I nodded. “I guess you don’t?”

  She shook her head. “I rented a car at the airport, but I left it in the driveway. It’s just a couple blocks to walk, and the weather is nice.”

  It was. Not as uncomfortably hot as it sometimes is at the beginning of May. High seventies, with clear skies and a little breeze. Charlotte’s childhood home is two blocks off the square, so it made sense that she’d walked to the café. The mansion, meanwhile, is a mile outside town, and I wouldn’t expect Mother to walk the distance in her high heeled pumps.

  “Where did you want to go?” Charlotte asked once we were in the Volvo.

  “How about a trip to the Bog?”

  She wrinkled her nose. “The Bog?”

  “It’s safe,” I said. “Nobody’s there. LaDonna Collier was the last person to live there, and she died ten months ago. The place is deserted. We don’t even have to get out of the car. I just want another look at it before the bulldozers come in on Monday.”

  “Fine.” Although it didn’t sound fine. “If you insist.”

  “We won’t stay long.” I put the car in gear and pulled out of the parking space and onto the street. “Just a quick stop to see whether anything’s happening. It’s a nice day for a drive.”

  Charlotte folded her arms and didn’t say anything, although her expression conveyed displeasure. I decided to drive and give her time to simmer down.

  It isn’t a long drive, just a few minutes in the car, and we had only gone halfway by the time she opened her mouth again. “You’ve changed.”

  “That’s what my mother said, too.” And in that same faintly accusatory tone.

  “The Savannah I know wouldn’t take up with someone like Rafe Collier.”

  “The Savannah you know hadn’t been cheated on, divorced, and threatened with rape and murder.” I flipped on the signal for the turn onto the Pulaski Highway.

  Her eyes widened. “Your husband did that?”

  “Of course not. The cheating and the divorce, yes. The rape and murder was someone else.” I pushed down on the gas pedal and the car picked up speed. “Rafe killed him.”

  “Urk,” Charlotte said, or something like it.

  I glanced at her. “Sorry. You’re right. I have changed. For the better, I think, although Mother probably disagrees.”

  Charlotte didn’t say anything, so maybe she disagreed, too. I continued, “Bradley’s in prison. Accessory to murder. His wife has a newborn she’s having to raise on her own.”

  Charlotte just stared at me, eyes wide. I put on the turn signal for the Bog, coming up on the right, and decided to be honest. “I haven’t changed as much as you think. I just don’t pretend as much anymore.”

  “Pretend?”

  “That I’m perfect. That I don’t have normal needs or normal feelings.”

  She looked confused, and I threw caution to the wind. “With Todd and Bradley—and Mother—I always have to watch what I say and how I behave. Act like a lady, eat like a bird. You don’t want your potential husband to think you don’t care. Don’t draw attention to yourself. Don’t ask personal questions. A gentleman wants a wife who’s a lady.”

  All things I’d grown up hearing, and Charlotte surely had, too.

  “But Rafe doesn’t care about any of that. I don’t have to pretend with him. I can tell him anything, and ask him anything, and do anything, and he won’t be surprised or shocked, because he’s heard and seen a lot worse. My absolute worst behavior won’t even come close to what he’s already experienced. And you have no idea how nice it is not to have to pretend I’m something I’m not.”

  The turn to the Bog appeared on the right, and I slowed down and maneuvered the Volvo onto the rutted track that led down through the trees. Charlotte didn’t answer, either because she was too shocked at my words, or too overwhelmed by her first glimpse of the Bog.

  As a girl, I’d never been here. Not ‘our kind of people,’ as Mother would say. I had no business here, among the white trash and poor blacks who couldn’t afford better than the rundown trailers and clapboard shacks that made up the community for the lowest of the low. Even deserted, a heavy sense of despair and hopelessness lingered in the air, and a tiny tributary of the Duck River wound through it all, muddy brown and sluggish.

  Old Jim Collier had drowned right there in the river, the year Rafe was twelve. The sheriff suspected that Rafe had had a hand in it—old Jim had been a brutal, nasty SOB who liked nothing better than to knock his nearest and dearest into next week—although my boyfriend had assured me that he and his mother had been inside the trailer when it happened. He admitted that they should, perhaps, have gone looking for the old man before the next morning, but they’d been happy to be left alone, and hadn’t been inclined to question their good fortune.

  That story truly would shock Charlotte, though, so I didn’t say anything about it.

  Instead, I pulled the car into the open space next to the Colliers’ old trailer, and cut the engine. Silence descended. Charlotte looked around, with mingled disgust and horror on her face. I didn’t blame her. I had been here before, of course, but even so, the sight of the place made me feel ill. I wouldn’t wish growing up here on my worst enemy. The fact that Rafe had, and had not only survived but come out as relatively sane as he is, never fails to amaze me.

  “Looks the same as last time I was here,” I said. “The only difference is that sign up by the road.”

  We had passed it on the way in. Big and white, with large letters. Future Home of Mallard Meadows, Homes from the $180s, with the Stonegate Development logo on the bottom.

  “Want to walk around?” I reached for my door handle.

  “No!” Charlotte said.

  “It’ll be good for you.” To see how the other half lives. “I’ll show you where Rafe grew up.”

  “I don’t want to see where your boyfriend grew up,” Charlotte said, but she opened the door and swung her legs out, even though she seemed afraid to actually touch the ground.

  We minced across the pockmarked ground to the Colliers’ trailer, skirting shards of glass and trampled beer cans.

  “The entrance is back here.” I turned the corner of the trailer to the rusty carport on the back side. “This is where Marquita Johnson was found dead. Her car was parked here.”

  I headed for the kitchen door, and reached for the handle.

  “Won’t it be locked?” Charlotte asked, glancing around like she expected Marquita’s ghost to come floating across the dry ground.

  “There’s nothing to lock up. Rafe cleaned the place out after LaDonna died. It’s empty.”

  I pulled the door open and climbed the couple of rickety metal steps into the kitchen.

  It’s classic 1970s mobile home vintage, with pressed wood cabinets and shiny brass handles, a green laminate counter and a chipped vinyl floor. No one had cleaned since last year, and the dead cockroaches with their legs in the air had quadrupled over the winter.

  Charlotte made a choked sound, and I glanced at her over my shoulder. “Nice place, huh?”

  “No!”

  “Makes you appreciate what you have, doesn’t it?”

  She didn’t answer, just stuck her nose in the air. The nostrils flared. “What’s that smell?”

  “Smell?” I flared my own and scented deeply. “Not sure.”

  I could smell something too, though. Something tangy and sort of metallic.

  And then a chill ran down my spine in spite of the warm weathe
r and the enclosed, dusty feel of the trailer, as I realized that I knew that smell. Had smelled it before, more times than I cared to remember. “Damn. I mean—”

  I caught myself. No, actually. Damn was exactly what I meant.

  “What?” Charlotte said.

  “Stay here.” I crossed the threshold into the long, skinny hallway that ran down the middle of the trailer, my heels sinking into the pile of the ratty shag carpet.

  Charlotte hesitated, but ended up following me. I guess she’d rather do that than be alone.

  Rafe’s room was down on the other end of the long structure. It was a low-ceilinged, dingy space with thick, green shag rugs on the floor, dirty and spotted, and with a hole in the wall from when someone, sometime, had put a fist or something else through the thin material. A Playboy centerfold decorated one wall: a busty blonde in virginal white with pink lips and a French manicure.

  Charlotte looked at it with big eyes, and I could remember my own first encounter with what I assume had been the teenage Rafe’s dream woman. White, like me. Blonde, like me. Sweetly innocent, for a pinup girl.

  Until then, I’d always considered Rafe to be black. Everyone in Sweetwater talked about ‘LaDonna Collier’s colored boy.’ It wasn’t until I visited the Bog and saw the picture, that I realized that maybe Rafe didn’t consider himself black. Or at least that he didn’t see skin color the same way I did, his own or anyone else’s.

  Yes, I really had changed.

  The room was empty, and we crossed the hall to what would have been LaDonna’s room back in the day.

  There were only the two bedrooms. I have no idea what they’d done while Old Jim was alive. Maybe Rafe had been sleeping on the living room couch. Or maybe LaDonna had. Knowing Old Jim—not that I had—it was a toss-up whether he’d consider his mixed-race grandson or his daughter to be lower on the food chain.

  The master bedroom, to use a laughable phrase, was bigger than Rafe’s room and had its own attached bath. I could see a corner of the brass and glass shower stall through the open door. The walls were covered in thin paneling, and the floors in the same dirty green shag as across the hall. Indentations showed where furniture had once stood. At some point, someone—I assume LaDonna—had tried to cheer the place up by pasting a wallpaper border with magnolia flowers and leaves under the ceiling. It only made everything look sadder.

  Those things registered in a matter of one or two seconds; just one quick glance around the room. After that, all my attention was focused on the body, slumped against the far wall.

  “Oh my God!” Charlotte stumbled down the hall, hand over her mouth. After a few seconds, I heard the back door slam into the frame.

  I stayed where I was. There was no part of me that wanted to move closer—in fact, I was feeling slightly dizzy and nauseous, too—but I gathered what information I could from where I was standing.

  Male, white, late middle age. Late fifties, maybe a few years above or below. Depended on how hard he’d lived. On the surface, I’d guess he’d lived pretty hard. The nose was florid—probably from drinking—and looked like it had been broken once or twice. Sandy hair, going thin on top, and eyes that were open and staring, surprised: a washed out, chlorinated blue.

  He might have been good-looking once upon a time. He wasn’t anymore.

  He’d been shot, or maybe stabbed, in the chest. The stain blossoming on his no-longer-white T-shirt was bright red, glistening wetly.

  As the room took a slow turn, I debated on what my next move should be. I wanted to call Rafe. I wanted to hear his voice and have him tell me what to do. But he was more than an hour away and there was nothing he could do to help, and besides, the farther he stayed away from a murder victim in his old trailer, the better. Even if he hadn’t been anywhere near Sweetwater today, and had no idea who the dead guy was, getting him involved would only complicate matters.

  I’d better call the sheriff instead. I could call Rafe later, after the matter was handled.

  The phone was in my bag, on the floor of the car. I followed Charlotte outside, steadying myself on the wall as I went down the hallway. Now that I was moving, I couldn’t get outside fast enough.

  Charlotte was leaning against one of the aluminum supports holding the carport up. She was pale, her eyes huge in her white face, but she didn’t look like she had lost her lunch. It was still touch and go whether she would, I thought.

  “I need to call the police,” I told her on my way past.

  She nodded and stayed where she was. I went to the car, dug my phone out of the bag, and dialed.

  The sheriff came rattling down the drive less than ten minutes later. By then, I had detached Charlotte from the carport and put her back into the car with the air conditioning running. She was leaning back in the seat, eyes closed, and looked like a Victorian lady having the vapors.

  Then again, I didn’t have much room to talk. I was doing OK now, but back when I’d come face to face with my first dead body—Brenda Puckett’s, in Mrs. Jenkins’s house last August—Rafe had had to catch me before I fainted. And when he caught me, I’d fainted anyway. So far, Charlotte was doing better than I’d been.

  Although I’d seen violence since, I hadn’t discovered any more corpses. I was pretty amazed at how well I was doing, to be honest. It helped that this guy was someone I didn’t know, versus Brenda, whom I’d known fairly well.

  When the sheriff pulled up beside the Volvo, I opened the door and got out. “Afternoon, Sheriff.”

  He nodded. “Savannah. What’s going on?”

  “We found a dead guy. Inside the Colliers’ trailer.”

  He took off his uniform hat and scratched his head. “That Charlotte Albertson with you?”

  I nodded. “She’s Charlotte Whitaker now.”

  “You two in town for the reunion?”

  I told him we were.

  “Your boyfriend around?” He glanced left and right.

  “No,” I said firmly. “Rafe’s still in Nashville.”

  “He don’t like coming home much, does he?”

  Can you blame him?

  I didn’t say it out loud. “Not much, no. And Mother doesn’t much like having him at the mansion, either, so that works out well. Besides, it’s my reunion, not his.”

  “Spouses and significant others are welcome,” the sheriff said mildly.

  “He wanted to stay home. And neither one of us particularly wanted the hassle of showing up together.”

  OK, in all fairness, I must admit that it was mostly Rafe who didn’t want the hassle. I would have been happy to walk into my high school reunion on his arm. Now that I’d gotten over my own hangups about dating him, and I no longer fretted over what people would say, I wanted to parade my newfound maturity in everyone’s face. So him being here would have been fine with me. More than fine. No, Rafe was the one who had put his foot down. Flattered as he was to be my trophy boyfriend—he’d said—he didn’t want to go to Sweetwater if he didn’t have to. And since I knew he’d prefer to be let off the hook, I let him off.

  “So tell me about this,” the sheriff said, indicating the trailer.

  I dragged my thoughts back to the corpse. “Dead guy. Looks like he was shot through the chest, although I didn’t go close to him. You can find him in the last bedroom on the left.”

  “You don’t know who it is?”

  I shook my head. To the best of my knowledge, I’d never seen the man before. “Maybe a vagrant? Someone looking for a dry place to sleep? He looked a little rough around the edges.”

  “And someone showed up and shot him?”

  I shrugged. “Maybe he was here with a friend. A drug deal gone bad or something.”

  “Maybe.” The sheriff glanced toward the trailer and back at me. “Stay here until I come back out. I might need to talk to you again.”

  Sure. I climbed back into the Volvo next to Charlotte and closed the door.

  It seemed like forever before he came out, but I don’t think it was more than j
ust a few minutes. We spent the time in silence. Charlotte didn’t say anything, but seemed content to sit quietly and breathe, and I didn’t attempt to draw her out. There wasn’t much to say. I could have asked her how she was, I suppose, and been told she was OK, but it didn’t seem worth the trouble. I had already asked her whether she’d recognized the dead guy—she didn’t—and beyond that, I didn’t think she’d have anything of interest to contribute.

  When the sheriff appeared around the corner of the trailer, I opened the door and went to meet him. After a few seconds, Charlotte did the same.

  Bob Satterfield nodded to her. “Feeling better, darling?”

  “Yes, thank you.” Her voice was weak but steady.

  “Tell me what happened.”

  I opened my mouth, but he was looking at Charlotte, not me, so I closed it again.

  “We had lunch,” Charlotte said. “At the Café on the Square. Savannah had her car and wanted to come here to see if anything had happened, so we drove down.”

  He glanced at me. “What did you think had happened?”

  “Nothing. I mean, nothing like this. But we had dinner with Mary Kelly last night. She mentioned that she works for the company doing the development here. Stonegate. I wanted to see whether anything had changed since the last time I was here.” And—ridiculously—I wanted one last look at the place before the bulldozers started tearing it up on Monday.

  The sheriff nodded. “Didya see anyone on the way here?”

  Charlotte shook her head.

  “We passed a couple of cars up on the road,” I added, “but no one down here.”

  “So you drove here from the Café on the Square. Then what?”

  “Savannah wanted to go inside,” Charlotte said.

  “We walked through the kitchen and down the hallway. By then we’d noticed the smell.”

  “Smell?”

  “Blood.” A whole lot of blood. Mixed with some other bodily fluids that people lose when life leaves them. The less said about that, the better.

  “We peeked into Rafe’s old room first. The one where the naked girl is pinned to the wall.”