Island Getaway, An Art Crime Team Mystery (27 page)

It took me four minutes longer than the
fifteen I had promised before I could pull my pale-blue Volvo — the
safest car on the road — to a stop behind the sleek, black
Harley-Davidson waiting in the circular driveway. The man
straddling the seat matched the motorcycle: dark, muscular, and
more than a little dangerous. The T-shirt might as well have been
painted on for all that it left to the imagination, and the tattoo
peeking from under the left sleeve looked like the tail end of a
viper curled around his bicep.

 I hesitated before I opened the car
door. Real estate can be a scary business on occasion. Those of us
who are involved in it advertise our faces and phone numbers all
over town, then agree to meet total strangers who call, claiming to
want to see an empty house somewhere. Often in an area that isn’t
the best, like the one I found myself in now. Sometimes — rarely,
but it happens — one of us gets attacked. And there was something
about this man that suggested that I ought to step carefully. So I
did, both because it seemed prudent and because the gravel was
difficult to navigate on three inch heels. “Sorry I’m late. I’m
Savannah Martin...”

And then I stopped — dead, if you’ll pardon
the pun — when he removed the mirrored sunglasses and I met his
eyes.

They were as dark as those on a Jersey cow,
and surrounded by long, thick, curving eyelashes. There’s nothing
wrong with
my
lashes — nothing a liberal application of
make-up can’t correct, at any rate — but I would have sold my soul
to possess his. He could hawk mascara for Maybelline with those
lashes. Not that
that
was the reason I was staring.

“Struck speechless by my good looks,
darlin’?” His voice was amused.

“Sorry,” I managed, fighting back a blush.
How mortifying, to be caught staring! “For a second there you
looked familiar, but...”

“You ain’t never forgotten me?” He grinned.
White teeth flashed against golden skin, and a ghostly memory
stirred, like an alligator in a swamp, but it subsided without
breaking the surface.

“Um...” I said, distracted. The grin widened
wickedly.

When a few seconds passed while I didn’t say
anything else, he added, “Been back to Sweetwater lately?”

So he was from back home. Well, it made
sense. The drawl, slow as molasses, was pure South, and he wasn’t
someone I had met recently, or I would have remembered.

“A few weeks ago,” I said slowly, running
mental mug shots past my inner eye. “You?”

“That’d be telling.” Another grin curved his
lips and the alligator stirred again. I concentrated, and almost
had it, but just as I was about to reach out and grasp it, it
slipped through my fingers once more.

“You couldn’t give me a hint, could
you?”

I smiled hopefully. He contemplated me in
silence for a few seconds before he said accommodatingly, “Sure.
Columbia High.”

I nodded. Of course. He was someone I had
gone to high school with. That explained it. Long enough ago that I
wouldn’t necessarily remember him right off; not so long ago that I
had forgotten entirely. But there had been hundreds of students in
my high school, from all over Maury County and beyond. How in the
world did he expect me to recognize him after all this time...?

And then the brick dropped, or the alligator
reared, or whatever. I jumped back. “Oh, my God! Rafael Collier.
You’re...”

“Guilty as charged.” He made a little
mocking half-bow. His voice was pleasant, but his eyes were
anything but. They had turned as black as the motorcycle he’d been
riding, and approximately twice as hard. I swallowed and opened my
mouth. And put my foot in it.

“I thought you went to prison.”

He lifted an eyebrow. Just one; the other
didn’t move so much as a fraction of an inch. “That was twelve
years ago, darlin’. I got out.”

Obviously. I swallowed again and took
another step back.

Rafe Collier had been a senior in high
school when I was a freshman, so our paths hadn’t crossed often. I
knew who he was, of course — everyone did — but we’d never had much
to do with each other. I don’t think we exchanged three words in
the year we both attended Columbia High. Or maybe three — “Looking
good, sugar!” followed by a wink — but no more. He graduated the
next spring, by some miracle of God, or maybe because some of the
teachers passed him so they wouldn’t have to deal with him for
another year.

It wasn’t surprising. Rafe was the
quintessential small-town bad boy, updated for the new millennium.
Gone were the days of tight jeans and leather jackets; Rafe had
worn his jeans baggy and enough gold around his neck to post bail
for murder one. I knew he’d gotten arrested the summer after he
graduated, and seeing as he was the kind of kid whose
yearbook-entry had identified him as ‘most likely to spend the rest
of his life behind bars’, I had assumed he would be shuffled from
one correctional facility to the next until he dropped dead and
saved society the expense of keeping him. I certainly hadn’t
expected to come across him now.

“What are you doing here?” I asked, with
more curiosity than tact.

“Looking at this house.” He nodded toward
it. I glanced at it, too.

“You must have done pretty well for yourself
if you have a half a million dollars to spend on a ramshackle
hundred-and-fifty-year-old house in a bad... um... I mean,
transitional
neighborhood.”

Narrow escape there. Brenda Puckett would
have had my head on a platter if she had heard me refer to the
property as being located in a ‘bad’ area. She’s the queen of
puffing, which is RealtorSpeak for making something sound better
than it is without actually lying about it. Lying outright is
called intentional misrepresentation and is illegal, but puffing is
considered a necessary evil.

Rafe didn’t take the bait about his
finances. “Nice save,” he said instead, mildly. I grimaced. He
added, with a look around, “What’s so bad about this? Looks
better’n where I grew up.”

I glanced around, too. “It doesn’t look like
any part of Sweetwater I’ve ever seen.”

“You prob’ly didn’t come down my way a lot,”
Rafe said dryly. “You grew up in that big mausoleum on the hill,
right?”

I wasn’t sure I’d classify my ancestral
home, the Martin Mansion, as a mausoleum, but it was big and square
with white pillars and sat on a little knoll just outside
Sweetwater proper, so I assumed we were talking about the same
thing. “I guess.”

“You prob’ly still had slave quarters out
back and brought in darkies to do the housework.”

His voice was flat. I shrugged. I wouldn’t
have put it exactly like that, but yes, my mother sometimes
employed some of the young women in the area — black and white both
— to clean house or help with the cooking or serving for one of the
many parties she held. Rafe’s own mother had been among them, if I
remembered correctly, though it didn’t seem diplomatic to bring it
up at the moment.

“Thought so,” Rafe said.

There wasn’t much either one of us could say
after that, so the silence lengthened. A black youth in a shiny,
green car with chrome wheel wells and a sound system that
threatened to shake the fillings from my teeth drove slowly by,
staring at us from a half-reclining position in the front seat. It
looked like the same car I had seen on my way here. Rafe followed
it with his eyes until it was gone before he turned to me. “So when
you say the neighborhood’s bad, you mean it’s full of black
folks?”

I hesitated. Every real estate agent learns
about testers: people who are hired by the real estate commission
to make sure agents aren’t violating the fair housing laws. You
know the ones I’m talking about: laws that preclude discrimination
based on race, religion, gender, national or ethnic origin,
familial status and a few other protected classes. I didn’t really
believe that Rafe Collier was an undercover agent for the
commission, but I couldn’t afford to be careless. “I’m not actually
allowed to comment on the racial make-up of a neighborhood.”

“Afraid I might take it personal?” He
smirked. I decided not to dignify this comment with an answer, just
continued as if I hadn’t heard it.

“But if you’d care to take a drive around
the area, you’ll see what kind of people live here. And if you’re
concerned about crime, you can always contact the police department
and ask about their statistics.”

Rafe snorted. “Yeah, that’s gonna
happen.”

I shrugged. Rafe didn’t seem to have
anything else to say, and before the silence could lengthen once
more, I nodded toward the front door. “You still want to go
in?”

“If it ain’t too much to ask.”

His tone was dry. I reverted to
realtor-mode, polite and distant. “Of course not. It’ll just be a
second while I get the door open.” I headed up the stairs to the
porch with him behind. Far enough behind that I worried that my
skirt was too tight and made my derriere look big. When I reached
the heavy front door I stopped, frowning. The little black lockbox
hanging from the handle was open, and empty. “Where’s the key?”

“If I knew that,” Rafe said from behind me,
“you think I woulda called you?”

“It was more of a rhetorical question.” The
key wasn’t in the lock, but when I reached out and tried the
doorknob, it turned in my hand. “You didn’t try the door, I
suppose?”

“If I had,” Rafe repeated, “you think I
woulda called you?”

I hesitated. Some people might have been too
cautious or too law-abiding to enter an empty house alone,
especially when it said
No Trespassing
in letters two inches
high on the door, but Rafe Collier...? “Probably not. You would
have just walked in.”

“Like I’m gonna do now.” He reached out and
gave the door a push. It opened with a protesting shriek. It must
have been decades since anyone oiled the hinges.

I hesitated for a second on the doorstep.
The house was cool and dark, with all the draperies closed against
the sun, and there was a certain safety in being outside, in the
open. Inside the thick walls, nobody could hear me if I screamed.
Not that I had any reason to think I’d be doing any screaming, but
I’m a woman, and not stupid, so the possibility is usually at the
back of my mind.

“After you,” Rafe said. I looked back at
him. He quirked an eyebrow. I couldn’t very well refuse to go in,
considering how I’d practically begged for the chance to come here.
So I forced a professional smile, took a deep breath, and stepped
over the threshold. Rafe came in behind me and pushed the door
shut. I moved a little further into the hall, out of his reach,
before I looked around.

We were standing in a huge entry, giving way
to a long hall running the depth of the house, with doors leading
off it to the left and right. It didn’t look as if anyone had
lifted a finger in here for at least twenty years. There were
cobwebs draping the 15-foot ceiling like canopies, and mouse
droppings scattered across the scuffed wood floor. There was
peeling wallpaper, sagging doors, and posts missing from the
banister, and everything was overlaid by a thick layer of dust. A
faint metallic scent that I knew I’d smelled before, but which I
couldn’t place, hung in the air, along with the odors of dankness,
mold, dirt, and dust.

“Know anything about the owner?” Rafe asked,
looking around. His nostrils were quivering too, I noticed.

I shook my head. “Not other than that he or
she hasn’t been taking care of the place. But when I see Brenda on
Monday, I’ll ask her.” He didn’t answer, and I added, “There should
be five rooms down here and five more upstairs, plus the third
floor and basement. Where would you like to begin?”

“May as well go up.” He stepped onto the
staircase, just to our left.

 The second floor looked much like the
first. Rafe wandered down the hall and opened one of the doors. A
room with peeling paint and a sagging ceiling met our eyes. It was
empty except for dust and debris and a soiled mattress in the
corner. The mattress squeaked and rustled, and I squeaked too, and
backed up hastily. Rafe shot me a look over his shoulder.

“I don’t like mice,” I said defensively. He
smirked.

“Those ain’t mice, darlin’. Those’re
rats.”

I took another step back, feeling the color
draining from my face. Rafe grinned and closed the door.

 The rest of the second floor looked
pretty much like the first room, with shredded wallpaper and
cracking plaster, scuffed and gouged wood floors, and chunks
missing from the ceilings where water had gotten in. As Rafe walked
from room to room taking it all in, his face impassive, I snuck
glances at him, wondering what he was doing here.

All right, so I know that just because a guy
was a bit of a hellion in high school, doesn’t mean that he
couldn’t have straightened himself out by 30 or so. People do it
all the time. He might have a good job and a stock portfolio and be
able to qualify for a quarter-million dollar loan without any
problem. Anything was possible. Unlikely, but possible.

“You know,” I said casually, “I didn’t ask
what you do.”

He glanced at me, in the act of opening
another door. “Do?”

“For a living.”

“Oh.” He shrugged. “This’n that.”

He turned back to the door. I nodded
gravely. This and that? What did
that
mean?

Eventually we ended up in the third floor
ballroom, where I stood at the top of the stairs admiring the dust
motes dancing in the streaks of sunlight while Rafe prowled and
peered into closets and dark corners.

“Are you looking for something in
particular?” I asked finally. He shot me a look over his
shoulder.

“Why?”

“I thought maybe I could help. If you’re
checking for dry-rot or something.”