“I don’t think that’d be a problem today,” Bob said. “We’re all pretty busy right now.”
No doubt. “What’ll happen to Richard?”
“We’ll get him patched up,” Bob said, “and then we’ll talk to him. But before that I’ll call Todd, and give the DA’s office a heads up. He’ll get out on bail, of course. He has plenty of money.” Unlike Steve Morris. And unlike his wife. “But eventually we’ll convict him and put him in prison. And then Charlotte won’t have to worry about him again.”
He sent a fatherly glance her way.
“Feel free to head out,” I told him. “I’ll get her either back behind the wheel of her own car, or into mine. You’ll want to talk to her, right?”
He nodded. “But it can wait an hour or two. Let her get the kids back home and settled first. Tell her I’ll stop by the house later.”
I said I would, and then I watched him walk to his car and drive away. By then, little Michaela and JR had calmed down enough that Charlotte was coming back up for air again, too.
“The sheriff said we could leave,” I told her. “You can drive home if you want to, or we can all pile into my car and I’ll drive. Bob said nobody would give us a ticket for not having all the kids strapped into booster seats today. Your choice.”
Charlotte glanced at the blood spatter on the inside of her car windows and shuddered. “We’ll go with you, if you don’t mind.”
I didn’t mind at all, and told her so. “Carrie’s in the car, so we’ll have to squeeze both the kids in next to her. If we take JR’s car seat out of the minivan, we can probably wedge Michaela in the middle without a seat. Or you can keep her on your lap.”
“I don’t care,” Charlotte said. “I just want to get away from here.”
Then that’s what we’d do. I helped her unhook Michaela from the booster seat, and then stood and held Michaela’s hand while Charlotte crawled into the minivan and released JR. She hauled the car seat out and shut the minivan door while I walked the kids around the corner and down to the Volvo. We got them both situated in the back—waking Carrie up in the process; although the upshot was that Michaela was fascinated by the baby, which went a long way toward taking her mind off what had happened earlier. I put her in charge of making sure that Carrie didn’t lose her pacifier, and she sat there patiently while I drove us back toward Sweetwater, sticking the pacifier back into Carrie’s mouth every time the baby spat it out. And because Michaela was calmer, JR quieted down, too.
“You holding up all right?” I asked Charlotte under my breath as we rolled past Beulah’s in the opposite direction.
She blew out a breath and shoved her hand through her hair. “Not sure. I had no idea he’d…”
She trailed off.
No, I’d had no idea my first husband would break the law, either. It hadn’t been to get me back—he had Shelby and a baby on the way by then, and didn’t want me—but I’d totally underestimated who he was and what he was willing to do to hang on to what he wanted.
“Thank God I got worried and got to your house in time to see him leave with you.” A couple minutes later, and they’d be gone. “Otherwise, he could have kept going, and until your father came home and found your mother, nobody would have known what had happened.”
“Oh, God!” Charlotte said. “My mother!”
“She’s fine.” Or mostly fine. “The sheriff sent a car over there. The paramedics were going to stay with her until your father could make it home. She was shaken up and afraid, but I’m sure, once Bob called and let her know that you and the kids are safe, it went a long way toward calming her down.”
Charlotte’s eyes filled with tears. “I can’t believe I bought that down on my parents. I had no idea Richard was capable of something like that.”
I’d had no idea, either, or I would have been concerned as soon as she didn’t show up on Fulton Street this morning. “You never told me he was abusive,” I said.
“He wasn’t!”
After a second she changed it to, “I mean… not like that. He didn’t get physical. He just liked things a certain way, you know? And if they weren’t that way, then he wouldn’t talk to me until I changed them. For days, sometimes. One time, he didn’t talk to me for two weeks after I cut my hair shorter than he liked.”
“What would you call that,” I wanted to know, as we passed the driveway to the mansion and kept going, “if not abuse?”
I didn’t wait for her answer. “That’s controlling behavior, at the very least. Emotional abuse. Probably verbal abuse. The man’s a menace!”
Charlotte shushed me, with a glance into the back seat. Poor little JR had fallen asleep, probably from crying so hard, but Michaela was still poking at Carrie. Neither of them were paying attention to us. Nonetheless, I lowered my voice. “You should have said something.”
“What could you have done?” Charlotte wanted to know. “I was ten hours away.”
Back then? Not a lot. But since she came home… “It would have helped to know this might be coming.”
“I had no idea this was coming!” Charlotte exclaimed, and then shot another guilty glance into the back seat.
We rode in silence a few seconds.
“I know you told me these antics with the money—canceling your credit cards, shutting you out of the accounts—were a way to try to force you to come back to him.” A statement I obviously hadn’t taken to its logical conclusion back then. “But did you realize he wanted you back this badly?”
Charlotte shook her head, and shoved another shaking hand through her hair. That alone would have told me how upset she was. We Southern Belles never, ever touch our hair after it’s styled in the morning. “God, no. I thought, with this new woman and a baby on the way, he’d be focused on them, and maybe wouldn’t care that we left and didn’t come back. I mean… I didn’t think he’d seriously expect me to stay married to him while he had a baby with someone else on the side.”
“But he did?”
She shrugged. “He must have. He was taking us back at gunpoint. Because—” Her tone changed to mimic his, “nobody leaves him until he says they can.”
Outside the window, the Oak Street Cemetery rolled by.
“The earring…” I said, and didn’t need to say any more.
Charlotte sighed. “Richard called. I didn’t want to scream at him in front of my parents and the kids, so I went for a drive. But after a while it got hard to drive and scream, so I stopped at the house so I could scream without worrying about keeping the car on the road.”
Perfectly understandable.
“He said…” She swallowed, and her voice got stronger. “He said a lot of really unforgivable things. And touched on the jewelry he’d given me. He said he wanted his engagement ring back. I assumed so he could give it to the floozy.”
That would have been my assumption, too.
“I stopped wearing that, and my wedding band, after I left him. But I had the earrings on. And I took one out and threw it. As hard as I could. At the wall.”
She grimaced. “And then I realized that I was throwing away money. Money I could use to feed my kids. So I looked for it. But it was late, and I was tired, and it’s a big room...”
“You couldn’t find it.”
She shook her head. “Morris wasn’t there. I swear. It was just me. I gave up, and drove home, and figured I’d just look again in the morning, when the sun was out and I could see better.”
I nodded. “But by morning…”
“I overslept. Because I’d lain awake half the night, fuming and fretting. And when I got there…”
Morris was dead on the floor. On top of her earring.
“Thanks for telling me,” I said, since the story about the earring had bothered me a little. “Do you want me to call Catherine? I’m not sure where the two of you are in the divorce proceedings, whether he’s been served or not—”
“Yesterday,” Charlotte said with a grimace.
So that was what had
set this off. Her taking actual steps to separate herself from him was what had set Richard off on this path.
“Well, she probably needs to know what’s going on. Do you want me to call her so she can meet us at your house, or would you rather do it yourself later?”
“Later,” Charlotte said. “I want to see my mom first.”
That made sense. However— “I wouldn’t wait too long, if I were you.”
We reached Green Street, and I made the left turn. And drove down a block and half and parked in the same spot I’d been parked earlier, behind Richard’s rental. “Someone will have to drive that back to Nashville, I guess. Or maybe the company can send someone out to pick it up.” After the sheriff had gone through it for anything Richard might have left. There probably wasn’t anything there—he had abandoned the rental in favor of the minivan, and probably didn’t plan to come back to it—but someone had to take a look.
Charlotte nodded, but her attention was across the street, on the house. An ambulance was still parked at the curb, and now her father’s truck had joined her mother’s little compact in the driveway.
“Go,” I told her. “I’ll get the kids.”
She gave me an agonized look, but then she nodded. And opened the door and sprinted across the street. Good thing it’s a quiet area without many cars.
“Mommy!” Michaela shrieked, terror in her voice. JR jerked upright and, after a stunned second, began screaming, too.
Definitely time to go. I opened my own door, and then JR’s. “Come on.” I leaned in and unhooked the straps holding him to the seat, and wrestled him out. This would be what I’d be doing with Carrie in a couple of years, I realized, so it was probably good practice. Hopefully she wouldn’t be screaming in my ear when I lifted her, though. Although sometimes, I’m sure she would.
Michaela scrambled across the car seat and out, no doubt terrified to be left behind. I put JR down and looked back and forth, left and right, up and down the street. There were no cars in sight. “Go.”
They took off across the street together. JR slowed down in time to carefully negotiate the step-up to the sidewalk, and then they were both running through the gate and up the walkway to the house. I shut the door and walked around to the other side of the car to grab Carrie and the car seat.
By the time I got inside, both the kids had flung themselves at Mrs. Albertson, who was sitting on the sofa with Charlotte’s father clutching her hand. Charlotte was on the other side of her, streaming tears, while the two paramedics were hovering, seemingly unsure what to do. When I came through the door, as the only person in sight who wasn’t visibly crying, they turned to me with what looked like relief.
“Everything good here?” I asked.
They nodded. “Yes, ma’am,” one of them said. “We’ve checked out Mrs. Albertson. Her daughter says she and the kids weren’t hurt.”
Not physically. Mentally was another story, but unless we wanted to dope them all to the gills, there wasn’t much the paramedics could do about that. The kids might need therapy, and Charlotte might too, but we could worry about that later.
“You can probably go,” I told them. There might be other people needing the ambulance today, after all. “Everyone’s OK. The bad guy’s in jail, and the sheriff’s coming to take statements and update everyone. I don’t think we need you anymore.”
They both nodded—a man and a woman, around my age. “If anything changes, just let us know.”
I promised I would, and saw them out. By the time I got back into the living room, the kids had stopped screaming and Charlotte was wiping her face. “You all right?” I asked Mrs. Albertson, who was pale and looked shell-shocked, but otherwise didn’t seem to have anything wrong with her.
She nodded. And cleared her throat. “Charlotte tells me I have you to thank for calling the police.”
“I was worried when Charlotte didn’t show up this morning,” I said, “and nobody answered the phone. So I drove over here. I was parked across the street when I saw them all come out and get into the minivan. I called Rafe. He called the sheriff. And then we all converged on the car up at the intersection of the Columbia Highway and the Damascus Road.” Before they’d made it to the interstate, thankfully. If they had, it would have been much harder to catch up, and much more dangerous to pull them over. Charlotte wouldn’t have had a choice but to speed up once they were on the interstate.
“Well, thank your husband for us,” Mrs. Albertson said. A little stiffly, but she said it. Which was nice, since I’d gotten the impression that she wasn’t entirely reconciled to my marriage.
Not that it matters to me what Charlotte’s mother thinks of my husband. Not really. But I want all of Sweetwater to realize that he isn’t the hoodlum they all saw growing up—or isn’t just that kid—so I’ll take any little victory I can get.
The doorbell rang at that moment, and I got to my feet. “I’ll get it.” It was probably Sheriff Satterfield, coming to update them all and take official statements. Maybe he’d brought Mother. She and Mrs. Albertson were friendly.
I pulled the door open with a smile on my face. “Hello, Sh… Oh.”
It wasn’t the sheriff. Nor my mother. Instead, it was Detective Paul Jarvis staring at me over the fuzzy head of Chester the Shih-Tzu.
Twenty
I blinked. He blinked back.
Jarvis, not the dog. The dog was panting.
“Detective,” I said eventually.
“Mrs. Collier.” He nodded. And looked a little uncomfortable.
I lowered my voice. “You aren’t here to arrest anyone, are you?”
With the dog riding on his arm, that was perhaps a little unlikely, but I thought it was safer to ask.
Jarvis shook his head. “I heard about what happened. I wanted to make sure everything was all right.”
Nice. If a little inexplicable.
I nodded to the Shih-Tzu. “What’s with Chester?”
Jarvis glanced down at him, and if I hadn’t known better, I would have said his cheeks got a little pink. “I took him home with me last night. Didn’t want to bother the folks at the shelter. Thought he could use the company.”
My eyebrows went up, all on their own. “That was nice of you.” Surprisingly so.
“I’m nice,” Jarvis said. And added, “Sometimes.”
When I didn’t say anything, he continued, “I thought he might take the kids’ minds off things. And he’d enjoy the attention.”
He probably would. I took a step back. “Come on in.”
Jarvis stepped across the threshold, and I closed the door behind him. “Can I take your trench coat, Detective?”
He gave me a look, as if suspecting that I was being snarky. “I won’t stay long.”
Fine. “This way.” I gestured him through the foyer and into the living room. And raised my voice. “Detective Jarvis stopped by.”
Charlotte’s eyes widened. So did her mother’s. They both looked frightened.
“He took Chester home with him yesterday,” I continued, brightly, as the kids eyes zoomed in on the dog like homing beacons. “He thought Chester might like some company.”
“OK if I put him down?” Jarvis inquired gruffly. He waited for Mrs. Albertson’s nod before lowering Chester carefully to the floor. Michaela gazed at him with wonder, while JR looked a little apprehensive. Chester began to sniff the rug and the leg of the coffee table.
“I hope you emptied him out before you brought him in here,” I told Jarvis out of the corner of my mouth.
He gave me a look and turned to Charlotte. “I heard about what happened. Everyone OK?”
She nodded. And got her voice to cooperate. “Thank you, Detective.”
“My pleasure,” Jarvis said, and sounded like he meant it.
Mrs. Albertson also found speech, finally. “Won’t you have a seat, Detective Jarvis?”
Jarvis perched on the edge of one of the wingback chairs across from the sofa. I took the other one, and leaned back, cross
ing one leg over the other. Jarvis leaned forward, hands between his knees. “I won’t stay long. I just wanted to make sure that everything was OK.”
“Making sure you’ll still be able to arrest me later?” Charlotte asked tartly, and then looked horrified at her own forwardness. Her mother gave her a shocked look.
“Charlotte!”
Jarvis’s lips twitched, but he didn’t say anything. Not about that. “When we spoke this weekend,” he said instead, directed at Charlotte, “you didn’t tell me that your husband was a threat.”
“I didn’t know!” She glanced at her mother and father, and then back. “I knew he was upset that I left and took the kids. I explained about the money…”
Jarvis nodded.
“But I didn’t think he’d come here. I thought, now that he has a new girlfriend and a baby on the way, he’d focus on them and let us go. Eventually.”
Michaela’s hand stilled on Chester’s fur, and she looked up and over at her mother. Maybe Charlotte hadn’t told the kids about Richard’s mistress and the baby yet.
“The gun…?” Jarvis said.
Charlotte sighed. “He kept it in the bedside table drawer.”
“Did he ever threaten you with it?”
“No.” Charlotte shook her head. “At least…”
I rolled my eyes. “Goodness, Charlotte.” If he’d threatened to shoot her, why hadn’t she gotten the hell—heck—out of there before now? And why didn’t she have a restraining order in place against him?
She turned to me. Or on me, more accurately. “You don’t know what it’s like, Savannah!”
Well, no. I didn’t. Bradley had been a jerk, but he hadn’t been violent. Not until I had the evidence to put him in prison for conspiracy to murder, and by then we’d been divorced for years. And while Rafe keeps a gun in the house, I don’t have to worry about him threatening me with it. There are no circumstances whatsoever where I’d ever have to worry about Rafe hurting me, or threatening to hurt me, in any way.
Right of Redemption Page 23
