Sugar and Spite (4 page)

“Not really. But there’s a city mentioned… right down here.” She scrolled to the bottom of the page. “There it is. Macon. That’s a town in Georgia, right? I wonder why they would give their town but not their name.”

Savannah felt her stomach flip into a tight roll like an overwound window blind as she stared at the word. Finally, she found her voice. “Macon is a town, all right. But in this case, it’s not a location. It’s a name.”

“A name? Don’t tell me you have another sibling named after a Georgia town! I thought I knew all nine of you.”

“He’s not my brother,” she said.

Tammy looked up at her expectantly, but she didn’t fill in the blank. That window blind had rolled all the way up her throat.

“Well, do you want me to respond? If it’s an old boyfriend, maybe he wants to wish you a happy Valentine’s Day and—”

“No.”

The answer was so quick and abrupt that Tammy raised I one eyebrow. “Ooo-kaay. Whatever you say.”

Savannah turned to walk out of the room. Tammy jumped up from the chair and followed: Nancy Drew on the prowl.

“Do you wanna talk about it?” she asked. “Because if you do, I—”

“No… thank you.” Savannah stopped in the middle of the floor and was nearly rear-ended. She turned and gave Tammy a kind but don’t-push-it look. “Why don’t you knock off a little early?” she said gently. “Not much going on around here, right?”

“Ah. Yeah, I guess right.”

Savannah watched, feeling a little guilty as her deflated assistant walked into the front hall and retrieved her own purse and keys from the piecrust table. Savannah’s grandmother’s table. The table where Macon had tossed his keys, a lifetime ago.

“Thanks for everything you do, Tarn,” she said. “I just want a hot bath and a well-balanced, nutritious, wholesome dinner.”

“A pint of Ben & Jerry’s Chunky Monkey?”

“You know me too well.”

Tammy shook her head. “Junk food is going to be the death of you.”

“I’ll die a happy woman… with chocolate on my breath and a smile on my lips.”

“Call me later, if you need me.”

Savannah smiled. Yes, Tammy was there for love, not money. “I will, sweetie. I will.”

* * *

But Tammy wasn’t the one Savannah called later that night when the decadent culinary treats and the sweetness of the romance novel wouldn’t take the bitter taste away. She called Granny Reid in Georgia. Even though it was late, she knew Gran would still be up, reading her Bible and her National
Enquirer
… both the absolute, gospel truth, according to her.

No one could beat Gran when it came to lending an ear and giving advice. In her eighty-five years, Gran had seen it all and lived most of it. Nothing even surprised her, let alone shocked her.

Savannah snuggled under the rose-spangled satin comforter on lace-trimmed sheets as she held the telephone receiver against her cheek and listened to the phone ring once, twice, three times. The sleeves of her white-cotton, Victorian-styled nightgown were also trimmed with lace, the bodice closed with a crisscrossing of tiny pink ribbons.

Around the house and out in the hard, cold world, Savannah was denim and linen, wool and corduroy. But in bed… in bed she was all woman.

Southern femininity—her heritage from the lady on the other end of the phone, whose voice was silkier than any satin spread.

“Hi, Gran. It’s me.”

“What’s the matter, sugar?”

Nothing got past Gran. She could smell a whiff of trouble across a phone line three thousand miles away.

“Macon’s looking for me.”

There was a long silence on the other end. She could tell her grandmother was choosing her words carefully. Southern belles were known for their tact, their diplomacy, their—

“What does that horse’s ass want with you?”

Well, maybe not.

“Don’t know. I haven’t talked to him. He left a message the Internet.”

“On the what?”

“Ah… the worldwide computer system.”

“Can’t imagine he’d be bright enough to operate something like that.”

“Maybe he had help.”

“Like an accomplice? Naw. That would mean he had a friend. Not likely.”

“I see your point.”

They both shared a companionable giggle; then Gran got serious. “How do you feel about that, sweetheart… him trying to get in touch with you after all these years?”

“Honestly?”

“That goes without saying. I don’t ask if I don’t want to know.”

“I wish he’d just leave me the hell alone. As far as I’m concerned, my business with him is over and done with, and that’s the way I like it.”

“Then send him a message on that Internet thing and tell him so.”

“Or just ignore him, drink lots of liquids, stay warm, and get plenty of rest, and like a bad case of the flu, maybe he’ll go away?”

“One can always hope.”

Savannah thought she could detect a note of sadness in her grandmother’s voice. Gran wasn’t the only one who could detect a problem long-distance. “I’m sorry if it hurts you to discuss him,” Savannah said. “I probably shouldn’t have called you, of all people.”

She heard Gran sniff a no-nonsense, but still ladylike, sniff on the other end. “Do you really think I don’t know what sort of person Macon is? Of all people, I should know my own son.”

Savannah toyed with the ribbon on the front of her gown, allowing it to slip between her fingers. Unshed tears began to burn her eyes. She blinked them away. Why should it still hurt after all this time?

She started to speak, but her throat closed up. As always, Gran filled in the blank. “It’s all right, honey. It’s okay to cry.”

Savannah cleared the knot out of her throat. “I’m not crying.” But it wasn’t a very convincing denial; even to her own ears, she sounded like a defiant, teary, five-year-old.

“I didn’t say you were boo-hooing up a storm,” Gran said. “But I could tell you were getting a little weepy on me. And that’s all right. I know my son wasn’t much of a father to you. And your mama… well, she was another story altogether. And things weren’t exactly a picnic for you, the oldest in a family with nine young’uns and no full-time parent to take charge.”

Savannah flashed back on the mountains of laundry that always needed to be washed, hung on the clothesline, folded, or ironed. The skinned knees, cut fingers, cat scratches, and beestings that had to be cleaned, medicated, and kissed. The endless assembly line of school lunches: stacks of sandwiches, sliced Spam when they could afford it, peanut butter when they couldn’t. Babies crying, kids fussing, the verbal quarrels and the knock-down-drag-outs that had to be refereed. A table with not one, but three extra leaves in it, burdened with plates of fried chicken—one piece per kid—and huge bowls piled high with mashed potatoes. If you truly are what you eat, those children’s bodies must have been ninety percent mashed potatoes.

But the memories weren’t all tiresome.

Granny Reid had always sat at the end of that table, saying grace at the beginning, and thanking the Good Lord above for every one of them sitting around it. She had cared for her shiftless son’s children without one word of complaint, making each of them feel as though they had a special, wonderfully warm spot in her heart.

“I didn’t suffer, Gran,” Savannah said, wishing she could, like the commercial said, reach out and actually touch the precious person on the other end of the phone. “Not one bit. I have no regrets about my childhood… thanks to you.”

“Me either, sugar. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. You children kept me young long past my youth. And now the grandbabies are doing the same. As long as there’s a youngster in the house, I’m a kid, too.”

Savannah took a deep breath and snuggled deeper under the satin comforter. “I wish I could be as young tomorrow as you were yesterday, Gran.”

“Well, of course you do, sugar,” her eighty-five-year-old grandmother replied with Mae West sauciness. “Or half as good-looking.”

* * *

Savannah had just dropped off to sleep when the telephone rang, exploding in her right ear and sending her pulse racing like a scared rabbit’s. She grabbed the receiver, dropped it on the floor, picked it up, and smacked herself on the teeth with the mouthpiece. She could swear she tasted blood.

“What?” she shouted, ready to kill whoever was calling her at—she squinted at the red, glowing numbers on the bedside clock—1:22
a.m.

“Van…”

Savannah didn’t need Gran’s extrasensitive radar to detect the distress in that one word. She sat straight up and flipped on the bedside lamp. “Yeah, Dirk, what’s going on?”

“It’s Polly.”

Savannah had a half a second to utter a quick, silent prayer, one that she instinctively knew was pointless.
God, let her be okay. They just had a fight, right? She’s alive, but they just argued and
—

“She’s dead.”

Let it be natural causes, or
… “A car accident?”

“Murdered.”

She could hear him, feel him shaking through the phone. Dirk got excited, but he wasn’t a shaker. His teeth were chattering, and he was having trouble breathing.

“Calm down, buddy,” she said as she jumped out of bed and reached for the jeans and sweatshirt she had tossed into the hamper upon retiring. “Where are you?”

“At home… in my trailer.”

She danced around on one foot, trying to get the jeans on with one hand and the nightgown off over her head. “And where is the bo—I mean, where is she?”

“In my trailer. Shot with my gun.”

“Oh, shit.”

“Yeah.”

“Don’t do anything. Don’t touch anything. Don’t say anything to anybody. Just sit down on the floor and put your head between your legs until I get there.”

There was silence on the other end, except for his shaky breathing.

“Do you hear me?”

“I hear you. Hurry.”

“Hang tight, buddy. I’m halfway there.”

Savannah made the ten-minute trip to Dirk’s place in less than six, but that was plenty of time for her to fantasize more than a dozen scenarios of what had happened in his trailer. And she didn’t like the way any of them played in her head.

They didn’t call it “
hom
-i-cide” for nothing. Most murders were committed in the home and by killers who were either family or friends of the victim.

But Dirk wouldn’t kill Polly. He wouldn’t. He wouldn’t. He just would not do it.

The words gave Savannah comfort, so she kept playing them over and over in her head. But each time she repeated the litany, it had a less convincing ring of truth to it. Savannah had learned several things in law enforcement. And one of them was: Anyone will do anything under the right/wrong circumstances.

Dirk wouldn’t kill Potty. All right, he might have if
…

As she whipped along the narrow, dark, eucalyptus-lined road leading to his trailer park, she tried to fill in the blank. What would it take to put a guy like Dirk over the edge? He had been through a lot with his former wife already, and he had never hit or harmed her in any way. At least, not that Savannah had ever heard. And usually, domestic-related killings were a culmination of abuse that had escalated over a period of time.

If Dirk had shot his ex-wife, Savannah could honestly say she hadn’t seen that one coming.

Her headlights shone silver on the leaves of the orange trees that stood in long, straight rows parallel to the road. The groves glimmered in the winter moonlight, and Savannah wished her spirit were even half as peaceful as those orchards looked.

What could have happened in that trailer?

She considered alternative scenarios—the ones where another party had pulled the trigger.

Of Dirk’s gun?

Yes
, she told the nasty, cynical cop voice inside her head.
It could happen. Well
… it
could
. The killer—not Dirk—could be lurking in the darkness of the groves right then, watching her approach the park.

If somebody else did it, he would have hightailed it out of there right away… unless Dirk got him, too. She hadn’t taken the time to ask before racing to his aid.

She wondered if he had called the cops yet. Knowing Dirk as she did, she figured he hadn’t. But someone must have. The trailers were pretty close together, and the nosy Biddles wouldn’t have missed an opportunity to report trouble and stir up a hornets’ nest if possible.