Saving Savannah (3 page)

“From what?”

“Don’t know, but I’ll find out. Guar-an-teed.”

“I gave her my bizness card, in case she’s in trouble.”

“You have a business card?”

“’Course, I do. I need it fer my traiteur bizness. It has the St. Jude prayer printed on the back.”

“That should help Savannah.”

He probably didn’t know that she could recognize sarcasm when it hit her in the face. What an idjet! “Yer darn tootin’ it will.”

Then she said a little prayer in her head.
We got us a mission, Jude
. At least, she thought she’d said it in her head.

But then, Tee-John said, “Jist don’t be draggin’ me inta any more of your acts of mercy. Last time I ended up bailin’ you out of the slammer.”

“I dint ask you ta help. In fact, I was havin’ fun. You meet all kinds of interestin’ folks in jail, y’know?”

John’s jaw dropped, as it often did when in the company of his wacky great-aunt.
I know! I’m a cop. I deal with those “interestin’” folks every day.

“The food ain’t so good, though. I tol’ the captain he needs ta find a cook what knows how to make a good roux. The gumbo was downright disgustin’.”

Rolling his eyes, John cautioned, “You need to slow down, auntie. Relax and enjoy yer golden years!”
Like that is ever gonna happen.
Even so, Tante Lulu was getting old, and he hated the idea of her overdoing and ending up in a hospital or worse. She was precious to him and all his family, despite her interfering, outrageous ways. Probably because of those interfering, outrageous ways.

“Pfff! There ain’t nuthin’ golden about creakin’ bones and farts what slip out without warnin’.”

He chuckled before he had a chance to catch himself.

“Besides, I like helpin’ people.”

“Even when they don’t want yer help?”

“Specially when they doan want my help. Those are the ones needin’ me most. Wait, wait, wait. Doan be in such a rush.”

What now?
He was steering her toward their parked car in hopes of getting out of Nawleans before noontime.

“I tol’ you I need ta go to the Voodoo Palace over on Dumaine Street.”

He’d been hoping she would forget. As he drove them over, he asked, “What herbs are you missing? I thought you had every weed and plant that ever grew.” The pantry off the kitchen of her bayou cottage was overflowing with hanging dried plants and shelves of all her different herbs in labeled bottles along with ancient ledgers spelling out her remedies. As a child, he’d loved standing in there, sniffing the various intriguing scents.

“A love potion.”

“Huh?” His mind must have been wandering. Did she really say .
 . . ? “Um, you have someone who’s looking for a love potion?”

“Heck, no! I’m wantin’ some fer myself. Have you seen that new butcher over at Boudreaux’s General Store?”

He had to think for a minute. Then, he exclaimed, “Tante Lulu! Thass Boudreaux’s great-grandfather, Gustave, helpin’ out over the summer. He’s almost bald and walks with a cane.”

“Yeah, but have you checked out Gus’s hiney?”

Un-be-liev-able
! “Can’t say that I have.”

“Watch yer sass, boy. Even us older ladies notice a man’s back side now and then. Ain’t nuthin’ wrong with that.”

“His hiney, huh? Does Gus have a fart problem, too?”

She smacked him on the arm. “If you weren’t so busy bein’ sarcastic, you would have noticed the man’s cute hind end.” She waved a Richard Simmons fan in front of her face to emphasize her point.

What could he say to that? “And you need a love potion because .
 . . ?”

“Because Gus pays me no nevermind. Even when I wear my ‘Wild Girl’ T-shirt, he doan even blink my way.”

“Why don’t you just get some of Sylvie’s hopped up jelly beans?”

Years ago, his half-brother Luc’s wife, Sylvie, who was a chemist, invented a love potion that she put in jelly beans. What a stink there was in the newspapers about that! The product never was sold to the public.

“First of all, Luc gave Sylvie strict orders not ta give me any. I cain’t imagine why.”

John could. Being an inveterate matchmaker, Tante Lulu would probably be feeding them indiscriminately to every couple she deemed worthy, whether they wanted them or not. Like the time she planned a secret wedding for his half-brother René and his nemesis, a court TV lawyer. The wedding had been a secret to everyone, including the bride and groom.

“Secondly, Sylvie claims they doan really work.”

“Seemed to work with Luc. He was head over heels in love with her after popping a few of the candies.”

“Thass what I said.”

“Has it ever occurred to you that Gus has cataracts? Boudreax tol’ me when I picked up that poke of okra fer you. His PawPaw is goin’ in fer surgery soon. His vision’s so bad that he gave Millie Pitot ham hocks when she asked fer chicken thighs last week.”

“So, it wasn’t me?” Tante Lulu smiled. “Well, I want some of those love potion herbs anyways. You never know when I might need ta do some emergency matchmakin’.”

Emergency matchmaking? He didn’t want to think what that might mean.

“Mebbe that Savannah gal needs a little help in the love department.”

Yeah, a homeless stripper living in a car with her five-year-old kid is thinking of a man. More like where her next meal is coming from. That’s what he thought, but what he said was, “Whatever you say, auntie.”

Georgia .
 . . and other things . . . on his mind . . .

CAPTAIN MATTHEW Carrington, U.S. Army Special Forces, sat down at a desk in the temporary office assigned to him at Fort Dix in New Jersey. He was so shocked, he felt gut-shot.

After five years of hell in an Al-Qaeda prison, after torture that would haunt him for life, after a badly tended leg wound that gave him a limp, and after six months of multiple surgeries and rehab in a D.C. hospital, he’d thought he couldn’t be hurt any more. He was wrong.

He examined the creased and stained envelope in his shaking hands. It had so many forwarding addresses, it was amazing that it had actually caught up with him. From Georgia to three different Army Post Offices to five other addresses, it had traveled, finally sitting in a dead mail box until some postal employee had given it one more shot.

He pulled the letter out and read it once again. It was dated more than five years ago.

Dear Matt:

You’ve been gone for a week now, and I haven’t heard from you. I know, I know, you hate letter writing, and you’re probably still in transit. You need to give me your new email address, BTW. Your old one isn’t working.

First of all, I love my ring. I’m looking at it now and getting tears in my eyes. I swear it is the most beautiful engagement ring a woman has ever received.

There’s something I need to tell you, honey. Pretend you hear a drum roll. I just can’t wait any longer.

I’m pregnant.

I know, I should have told you in person, but I didn’t want to ruin our time together. You said, repeatedly, that we’d set a wedding date when you came home, and we’d have kids sometime in the future. The future is now, sweetheart.

It happened, and there’s nothing I can do about it. Actually, I’m ecstatic. Our baby might be unplanned, but it will be more than welcome. By me, anyhow. Please, please, please tell me that you’re happy, too.

Gotta go now. I’m writing over my lunch break, and my one o’clock Creative Fiction class is waiting. I’ll write again tomorrow. I just wanted to get this in the mail ASAP.

Love you forever,

Savannah

He could kick himself for not setting up a new email account as soon as he hit Afghanistan, but he hadn’t had time. He’d been immediately engaged in briefings for an upcoming mission, which turned out to be his gateway to hell.

Ever since he’d come back to the States a month ago, he’d been trying to contact Savannah, but she seemed to have disappeared off the face of the earth. All his mail had been returned Forwarding Order Expired, including the dozens of letters he’d written from the hospital. He couldn’t find a phone number for her or a trace of her current whereabouts on the Internet. Finally, he’d given up, figuring she’d delivered to him the GI’s dreaded silent shaft. It wasn’t her style, but maybe she’d met someone else and didn’t have the nerve to tell him in person. Shit happened.

And now, just as he was about to go on leave, his commanding officer had handed him this letter. Straightening with determination, he picked up the phone and dialed a certain number.

“Mom?”

“Matt! Darlin’!” His mother’s deep Southern drawl was warm with welcome. “When will you be getting here? Your father’s at the club. He’ll be so disappointed to have missed your call.”

His parents had visited several times while he was at Walter Reed Medical Center, but this would be his first trip back home.

“I’ll still arrive about seven p.m., but, Mom, I have a question for you. When you came to the hospital, I asked if you knew where Savannah was, and you said no.”

There was an ominous silence before she said, “That is still true.” She laughed, a fake laugh, if he ever heard one. “I don’t know why you’re still interested in that girl. Good Lord, she didn’t even know her parents. She had no birth name. She was abandoned. An orphan! I shudder to think what might be in her genes. I always said you were too good for—”

“Enough! I didn’t like you talking Savannah down before, and I don’t like it now.” He shook his head with disgust. Something was fishy here.
Slow down and think
, he told himself.
Sometimes a soldier needs to regroup and try a different tactic.
“Mother, did Savannah ever contact you or Dad after I was deployed almost six years ago?”

The silence was telling.

“Did you know she was pregnant?”

Her gasp carried through the telephone line. He could just picture her with a hand held delicately to her heart. “Yes, but—”

He said a foul word that he’d never said in his mother’s presence before. “Did you see the baby?”

“Yes, but—”

“Boy or girl?”

“A girl. Her name is Katherine Mary Carrington. I told Savannah she had no right to give the baby our name, but she probably used it as a ploy to gain money from us.”

A little girl. Oh, God! I have a daughter. And she would be .
 . . five years old already. Oh, God!

“Did you give her money?”

“Of course not!”

“Did she ask for money?”

“Well, no, not exactly, but—”

For Savannah to go to his parents for anything, knowing how his mother felt about her, there must have been some emergency. “She was my fiancée. Why would you refuse to help her with anything?”

“She could have hocked that too-expensive engagement ring you bought her if she had that many troubles.”

“And did you tell her so?” he asked with brutal calm.

“I did, indeed. The hussy had the nerve to turn around and walk away. Good riddance to bad rubbish, if you ask me.”

Matt saw red. He literally understood for the first time in his life what people meant when they used that hackneyed expression. Through the haze of fire floating in front of his vision, he gritted his teeth, knowing he needed more information before he could end the call. “Are they still in Savannah?”

“No. At least I don’t think so.”

“Savannah must have given up her teaching job. I called the school, and all they would tell me was that she was no longer employed there and hadn’t been for years. She loved her teaching job. They wouldn’t have fired her for a pregnancy; that’s against the law. Do you know why she left?”

“Um .
 . . I have no idea. I mean, we offered
to .
 . . well, never mind.”

“You offered
what
?”

“We offered to bring up the girl, if you must know, once we were told of the birth by a friend of ours at the hospital. Doctor Morgan. You remember him, don’t you? His daughter Emily used to play tennis with you at the club.”

“About the baby?” he prodded.

“Oh. Well, all Savannah had to do was sign the papers, but she tore them up and threw them at us. Can you imagine?”

“You saw her then? The baby?”

“Briefly. She looked like you did as an infant, actually. And at that point, as far as we knew, you were probably dead. It would have been our last link with you. Our only child!” She barely stifled a sob.

Matt was not touched with sympathy for his mother. He knew from experience that she could sob at will when it suited her purposes. And he noticed that she’d referred to her granddaughter as “it.” Some life that child would have had under his mother’s care.

“You must admit, Matthew, we have much more to offer than a single mother,” his mother continued, apparently recovered from her brief bout of grief, “but Savannah wouldn’t listen. In fact, she had the gall to have a security officer escort us from the hospital.”

Good for her!
“Why didn’t you tell me as soon as you realized I was alive?”

“We didn’t want to worry you. Especially not in the beginning, when you were in the hospital recovering from physical injuries.”

“And later, when I asked where Savannah was?”

“We didn’t lie. We don’t know where she is. We even had a court date, several, in fact, and she never showed up.”

“A court date for what? No, don’t tell me. A custody hearing. No wonder she disappeared.”

He’d always known his parents were snobs of the highest order, but he’d mostly been amused by their exaggerated sense of self-importance. He’d never thought they could be so deliberately cruel.

“Did you threaten Savannah?”

“Of course not. We just offered to take it off her hands.”

“It? It? Are you referring to my daughter .
 . . to your grandchild . . . as an ‘it’? Thus far, I’ve heard you call her ‘the girl,’ ‘the baby,’ and ‘it.’ Don’t you have a friggin’ heart?” He was shouting now. He couldn’t help himself.

“Matthew David Carrington! Don’t you dare take that tone with—”

For the first time in his life, he hung up on his mother, and he pulled the plug on the land phone when it immediately started ringing.

Two hours later, he was on a flight to Georgia. In the past, when he was happily on his way home after a long mission, that Gladys Knight song “Midnight Train to Georgia” would play in his head. This time, he for damn sure wasn’t happy. He pulled his wallet out of his back pocket and looked, for about the thousandth time, at the photo of himself and Savannah taken two weeks before his deployment, on the night he’d asked her to marry him. They looked so happy.

Was she happy now?

Had she built a new life for herself without him?

Where the hell did she think he’d been all this time? He’d forgotten to ask his mother. Probably dead. Yep, he’d bet his stripes that his mother would have told her he was deceased, not MIA.

Another unwelcome thought came to him. What if she’d married and his little girl was calling another man daddy?

“Oh, Savannah, where are you?” he whispered, pressing the picture to his lips. Tears welled in his eyes, but then he raised his head with determination. “I’m on my way, sweetheart, wherever you are.”

Some puzzles just take time to solve .
 . .

“I JIST CAIN’T understand why she won’t accept my help. I’ve asked her ta come stay here with me,” Tante Lulu told Tee-John as they sat in rockers on her Bayou Black back porch. Tee-John’s five-year-old son Etienne was down at the bayou stream fishing. Or more accurately, scaring away every fish, bird, and small animal within fifty feet with his wild casting technique.

Tee-John took a draw on his long neck bottle of beer, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, even though there was a perfectly good St. Jude napkin sitting on the wicker table beside him.

“She’s afraid, Tante.”

“Of what?”

“I’m not sure.”

She gave him a narrow-eyed look, the one that had been working since he was a young’en causing mischief up and down the bayou. “How kin you not be sure?”