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

  While she lived on her own in Nashville, she’d wander off occasionally, and get lost. Rafe hired a nurse for a while, but when she got killed—long story—Mrs. Jenkins ended up in a home. For her own safety, pretty much, since Rafe wasn’t around to make sure nothing happened to her, and he and I weren’t together yet. And once we were, Mrs. Jenkins was happy where she was, so we left her there.

  But that situation came to a head before the holidays, and since then Mrs. J has been living in Sweetwater with Audrey, the daughter of her long-lost sister Oneida.

  Another long story.

  “She seems like she’s doing all right,” Rafe said. “I told Audrey to call me if there was a problem, and she hasn’t.”

  “So you have no idea whether your grandmother would be at the store with Audrey or home by herself?”

  He shook his head.

  “Why don’t we just stop and check? If she’s at home, we can visit with her for a while, and then go knock on the Albertsons’ door. If she isn’t there, we’ll go see Charlotte and then see both Audrey and Mrs. J at the store.” And after that, stick our heads through the doors at Martin & McCall to say hi to Darcy, Dix, and Jonathan. And maybe Catherine.

  “Works for me,” Rafe said. “This way?”

  I nodded, and watched the old houses go by as he drove slowly down the picket-fence-lined street toward Audrey’s little Victorian.

  There was no answer there, though, so Mrs. Jenkins must be at the boutique with Audrey. At least I hoped she was, and not wandering around somewhere on her own. We drove the couple of blocks to Charlotte’s parents’ house instead.

  It’s another Victorian, but big and white with two stories. Like a lot of the houses in the area, it was surrounded by a picket fence. Mr. Albertson, Charlotte’s father, mustn’t have had the time to take the Christmas decorations down yet, because there were still wreaths on the downstairs windows and a swag of greenery draping the porch railing.

  Two small children in puffy winter coats—one pink, one navy—were running in circles on the dry grass, shrieking, while a figure in a brown fur coat sat huddled on the porch steps.

  At first I thought it was Charlotte. They were her children, or so I assumed. She had two, a boy and a girl, and these looked like they were in the right age range.

  But once the car stopped and I got out, I saw that it wasn’t Charlotte at all, it was her mother. Mrs. Albertson looked exhausted, and not at all happy to see me. For a second it looked like she thought about disappearing up the steps and inside the house without greeting me, but if she did, she must have thought better of it. When I approached the gate, she got up and came to meet me. “Savannah.” Her gaze moved past me to the Volvo, but there was nothing to see there—not yet, anyway—so she turned her attention back to me.

  “Hi, Mrs. Albertson,” I said politely. “Happy New Year.”

  “Likewise,” Mrs. Albertson said, without making any effort to sound like she meant it.

  I didn’t get the impression she was trying to be rude, in case you wondered. It was more like she was too tired to care.

  “My mother told me Charlotte’s here. I wanted to stop by and say hi.”

  She’d started nodding when I mentioned Charlotte’s name, and kept doing it after I stopped talking.

  I looked past her at the house. “Is she inside?”

  “She went to lunch,” Mrs. Albertson said.

  “Oh.” And left her kids with her mother? “Who with?”

  Mrs. Albertson shrugged. “I’ll tell her you were here,” she said, before her attention strayed beyond my shoulder again. Her eyes turned stony. From the reaction, and the noises behind me, I deduced that Rafe had opened his door and gotten out.

  “Please do,” I said lightly, since the last thing I wanted was any kind of unpleasantness. “We’re only here until tomorrow morning. And we have dinner plans. But I could meet her for breakfast, maybe. If she wanted.”

  Mrs. Albertson nodded. “I’ll tell her.”

  She glanced across my shoulder again. I thought about telling her she was safe, that he wasn’t about to come around the car and attack—as if he’s some kind of dangerous beast—but I figured she wouldn’t get the joke. So I just thanked her and turned back to the car. Rafe gave her a polite nod—one she didn’t acknowledge with anything but a long stare—and got back into the car. I took the couple of steps to the curb and did the same.

  “That was weird,” I said when we were moving again, away from Mrs. Albertson and her house and her shrieking grandchildren.

  He shrugged. “Looked pretty normal to me.”

  “I don’t mean the way she treated you.” But yes, that was pretty normal, sadly. He’d seen a lot of that kind of thing growing up. And will see more of it if he comes back here to live, a little voice in the back of my head reminded me. I ignored it. For now. “She said Charlotte had gone out to lunch. And she looked exhausted.”

  “Maybe something’s wrong,” Rafe said, turning the Volvo around the next corner and making his way back to Oak Street and the town square.

  “She looked like she was so tired she had no idea what she was doing. She started nodding and didn’t seem like she was able to stop again. I hope Mr. Albertson isn’t ill, and that’s why Charlotte’s home.”

  “Wouldn’t your mama know if somebody’s ill?”

  I would have thought so—there isn’t much that goes on in Sweetwater that my mother misses—but… “She didn’t mention it earlier,” I said. “Maybe Charlotte will call me and I can ask.”

  Rafe nodded, as we pulled onto the square and started looking for a parking space.

  Chapter Five

  The Sweetwater town square looks just like the town square in a hundred other little Southern towns. There’s a statue in the middle, of some long-forgotten Civil War hero—a conflict usually referred to as The War Against Northern Aggression in these parts—and then cobblestones and four walls of small, one-story, turn-of-the-last-century commercial buildings lining the square on four sides, with parking in front. We found an empty slot a few spaces down from Audrey’s boutique, and Rafe pulled the Volvo in there, between a pickup truck and what I recognized as my sister Darcy’s Honda.

  “I’ll get the baby,” I said, since she was on my side of the car. That way, when I’m driving, I’m able to look sideways into the back, and see her.

  Rafe nodded. “Audrey’s first?”

  Fine by me. I hauled the car seat—and Carrie—out of the back of the Volvo and headed for the entrance to the boutique.

  A little bell tinkled above the door when we walked in, and a few seconds later, Audrey came loping toward us.

  She’s been my mother’s best friend since Mother came to Sweetwater as a young bride thirty-some years ago. And very nice of Audrey, too, seeing as Mother had married the love of Audrey’s life. Despite that, Audrey befriended Mother and they’ve been inseparable ever since.

  Except for the month or two this fall, when all this came out and Mother needed some time to process it all. But they’re back to being friends now, and Audrey looked delighted to see us.

  “Savannah! And Rafe!” She zeroed in on the car seat. “And you brought the baby!”

  “I know we were just here,” I said, since we had in fact been in Sweetwater just over a week ago, for Mother’s usual Christmas Eve shindig and dinner the following day. “Rafe came down to talk to Tamara Grimaldi.”

  Audrey was busy peering into the car seat. “She’s precious! And she’s getting so big!”

  Not that much bigger than she’d been a week ago, surely?

  “We stopped by the house,” I said, while Audrey reached out a long finger tipped with red, to tickle Carrie’s cheek. “Your house, I mean. We thought Mrs. Jenkins might be there.”

  Audrey shook her head and straightened. “She’s in the back. Working on a coloring book.”

  She gestured us to follow.

  She and my mother look totally different. Mother’s a little shorter than me, soft
and pretty, with blue eyes and blond hair that she keeps blond by regular visits to the spa. She dresses in soft silk blouses and expensive-looking skirts and slacks.

  Audrey, meanwhile, is close to six feet tall in her heels, and there’s nothing soft about her. Or not about the way she looks, at any rate. She has black hair in a sharp wedge to her chin, and cheekbones for days, and today she was dressed in severe black and white, with a pair of fire engine red, patent leather shoes with platform soles on her feet. The four inch heels did nothing to slow her down as she legged it toward the back of the store.

  Mrs. Jenkins was indeed sitting at a desk in the small back room, with a box of colored pencils and a coloring book in front of her. When Audrey came in, she looked up, and then she caught sight of us, and her mouth split in a wide, toothless smile. “Baby!”

  She was talking to Rafe, not Carrie. He smiled back, and brushed past me to walk over and go down on one knee next to her chair, where she could put her wrinkled hand on his cheek and head and reassure herself that he was real, and here.

  “Have you been to see your mother?” Audrey asked me, while Rafe and his grandmother were getting reacquainted. It was too soon to tell whether she knew who he was, or whether she thought he was Tyrell, but she was happy to see him, anyway, so that was something. One of these days, she might not realize she knows him at all, but that day wasn’t today.

  I nodded. “We drove down this morning, and stopped in Columbia so Rafe could talk to Tamara Grimaldi. Then we drove to the mansion and had lunch with Mother. Now we’re here.” I glanced at her. “Why do you ask? Is something going on?”

  If anything was, I hadn’t noticed it. Mother had behaved just as she always does.

  But Audrey shook her head. “Just making sure. If you’d come here first, her feelings would have been hurt.”

  “It’s nice of you to worry about that.” Especially since Mother’s actions after the big reveal about Dad and Audrey this fall hadn’t been tender of Audrey’s feelings at all.

  “She’s my best friend,” Audrey said simply, as if none of that had ever happened. “And she’s so happy about little Caroline.”

  She directed another look into the carrier, where Carrie had noticed a brightly colored stuffed elephant hanging from the handle of her car seat and was trying to reach it. Her hand-eye coordination wasn’t all that yet, so it took effort, but eventually she managed to hit it and make it swing.

  “She’s smiling!” Audrey said.

  She did look like she was smiling. But so many times I’d thought she was smiling, and been told it was just gas, that I was afraid to believe it. “You think?”

  “Clear as day,” Audrey proclaimed. “She’s gorgeous, Savannah.” She glanced at Rafe, still kneeling next to his grandmother’s chair, and added, “The two of you make beautiful babies.”

  She’d hear no argument from me.

  Rafe turned to wave at me, and I brought myself and the baby carrier closer, so Mrs. J could see Carrie. She greeted me too with a toothless smile and a, “Hi, baby!” before she devoted her attention to the real baby.

  I stepped away and turned back to Audrey, lowering my voice. “How is she doing?”

  “Well enough,” Audrey said. “I take her with me when I go to work in the morning. I’m afraid, if I leave her at the house alone, she’ll get confused and wander off. She hasn’t yet, but I haven’t given her much opportunity to, either.”

  I nodded.

  “But we’re doing well. We’re talking a lot about my mother, and what it was like when they were growing up. Things Mom never wanted to talk about.”

  No wonder, seeing as Audrey’s mother had spent her entire adult life passing as white. Audrey knew she wasn’t, of course. And Audrey’s father. But no one else. And I imagined, to make the deception work, Oneida probably thought about, and talked about, her past as little as possible, even to the people closest to her.

  “Mother told me Charlotte’s in Sweetwater,” I said, changing the subject. “Do you have any idea what’s going on? Mother said she thought it wasn’t a visit, but that Charlotte’s here to stay. With both her kids.”

  “Have you spoken to her?”

  I shook my head. “We drove by on our way from your house to here, and Mrs. Albertson was out in the yard with both the kids. But Charlotte wasn’t there. Her mother said she’d gone to lunch. So I have no idea. Did she leave her husband?”

  Audrey shrugged. “People are saying that she did. That that’s why she’s back here without him. But unless she’s told someone that, I don’t know how they can know.”

  I didn’t, either. “I left a message with her mother to have Charlotte call me. If she does, I guess I’ll find out.”

  “How long are you staying?”

  I told her just until tomorrow morning. “We’re meeting Grimaldi for dinner at Beulah’s Meat’n Three. Then we’ll spend the night with Mother and drive up tomorrow morning.” I lowered my voice. “Rafe lost his job.”

  Audrey looked shocked.

  “It didn’t have anything to do with the job offer from Grimaldi. She said that if she’d known the TBI was thinking of letting him go, she’d have told him. Wendell didn’t know, either. He resigned, too, when he found out.”

  “Good for him,” Audrey said robustly.

  I nodded. I think it was rather nice of Wendell, to be honest. He’d had a career at the TBI before Rafe come along, so neither of us would have blamed him for staying. “We came down to talk to Grimaldi about the job offer. Rafe wasn’t really interested for as long as he had a job, but now that he doesn’t, we should at least investigate it.” Even if he wasn’t really that interested now either.

  “Is it something he can imagine doing?” Audrey wanted to know, with a glance at him. He had taken Carrie out of the car seat and given her to Mrs. Jenkins, who was holding on to her and beaming. “He didn’t have an easy time growing up here. It’s hard to imagine that he’ll want to come back.”

  “He doesn’t. Not really. Although he’s willing to.” I hesitated a second before I added, “I think it’s a little different now, maybe. His grandmother’s here, and you’re here, and Darcy. He has family he didn’t know he had. And then there’s my family. Even Mother has finally accepted him. There are ties here. Not all bad ones. And Todd’s getting married, so Rafe doesn’t have to worry about him hanging around and trying to change my mind anymore…”

  Audrey nodded. “For what it’s worth, I’d love to have you both back in Sweetwater. And I know Aunt Tondalia would, too.”

  “We’ll have to see what he decides,” I said, and then turned my head as the bell above the door tinkled. “Sounds like you have a customer.”

  Audrey nodded. “Excuse me.”

  She legged it out of the back room and into the shop. I heard her voice, all solicitous charm. “Hello. Can I—?” And then it changed. “Oh. Charlotte.”

  I glanced at the threesome over by the desk. Mrs. J was holding the baby, and Carrie seemed just fine, blinking up at her great-grandmother. Rafe was right next to them both, making sure nothing went wrong. I could duck out for a minute.

  I left an, “I’ll be back,” hanging in the air behind me as I pushed through the curtain into the boutique behind Audrey.

  She and Charlotte were standing near the front door, and at first Charlotte didn’t notice me. “I was wondering whether, perhaps, you needed some help…” she was saying, and then she stopped when she saw me coming. A flush crept up in her cheeks. “Savannah. I didn’t realize you were here.”

  And if she had realized it, she wouldn’t have stopped by. Or at least that was the very distinct impression I got.

  “I’m just down for the day,” I said, advancing. “I didn’t expect to see you, either. Although Mother said you were in town. We stopped by your house on our way here.”

  “We?” Charlotte glanced over my shoulder toward the back of the store.

  “Rafe’s in the back with Caroline and Mrs. Jenkins. Visiting.”


  Charlotte nodded. “I heard she had moved to town. And that you’re related.” She glanced at Audrey, and quickly away.

  “My aunt,” Audrey said. “On my Mother’s side.”

  There was an awkward few seconds while nobody spoke. “So how are you?” I asked brightly. “I haven’t seen you in a while.” Since the wedding, more specifically. June. “I don’t think you were here yet when we came down for Mother’s shindig on Christmas Eve.”

  Charlotte shook her head. “We didn’t leave North Carolina until the day after Christmas.”

  And by then Rafe and I were heading back to Nashville.

  “Is everything OK?” I asked.

  Charlotte gave a sort of jerky shrug. “Nothing I haven’t suspected for a while.”

  Ah. It had a familiar ring to it. But since Richard’s infidelity—or whatever, but probably infidelity—wasn’t something I felt like we needed to discuss in front of Audrey, I just said, “We’re only here for the day. We’re driving back to Nashville tomorrow morning. And we have plans for dinner. But if you wanted to grab some breakfast before we head out in the morning, we could talk.”

  “That’s OK,” Charlotte said, in a tone of voice that added, “Not on your life.” “I don’t want to keep you. I’m sure Rafe has to get back to work.”

  He didn’t. But since I didn’t feel like getting into that again—and since I was OK with giving her the easy out—I said, “Give me a call sometime, then. I’m only an hour away. And we may be spending more time in Sweetwater in the future, anyway.”

  Charlotte nodded. She gave a longing glace over her shoulder at the door to the outside. “I should go.”

  She hadn’t finished asking Audrey whatever it was she’d come here to ask—for a job, it sounded like—but I didn’t point it out. “Good to see you.”

  “You, too,” Charlotte said, without meeting my eyes.

  I didn’t think it was personal. And for once, I wasn’t inclined to see it as a rejection of Rafe, either. Charlotte had worked through that, or so I thought. No, this time I’m pretty sure it was just embarrassment and not wanting to talk to me about what was going wrong in her own marriage. Something had to be, if she was here and Richard was still in North Carolina.