The story hit the media early that afternoon. A press conference had been hastily arranged and District Attorney Michael Lytell, accompanied by Her Honor, Mayor Regina Goodnow, informed the attendant reporters that the Henry Carson murder had been solved.
He identified the high school principal, Julia Peterson, but not the three girls, due to their tender ages.
I was singled out for the part I played in bringing the murderers to justice. I was besieged for interviews by local TV and newspapers, the national media, and the cable outlets. I declined them all, preferring instead to surrender the headlines to Lytell and my stepmother.
Regina greatly relished the spotlight, but out of excitement, she was prone to making errors. She did so that morning, when she referred to the three underage victims as willing participants in Henry Carson’s play parties. This earned her a rebuke from the District Attorney.
As my father once commented about Regina, “Often wrong but never uncertain.”
I sneaked out a back door in order to avoid the media morass, jumped into my Wrangler, and slipped away. I knew I was headed for the Carson house, but I needed to make certain no one was following me. So I took a leisurely swing around Freedom and in the doing, felt confident I was alone.
I wasn’t quite certain why I wanted to see her. Maybe now that she was no longer a suspect, we might approach each other unencumbered. I had purposely not shown any interest in her, but our meetings always contained an emotional subtext that, while unmentioned, was nonetheless there.
She was a desirable woman, and now out from under the shadow of suspicion, approachable. I was keen to see what might develop between us.
The For Sale sign in front of the house offered the first hint she was gone. Once the story broke, she was free to go wherever she chose, and from the looks of it, she couldn’t get out of Freedom fast enough. I suppose I wasn’t really surprised, but her leaving without so much as a fare-thee-well depressed me.
Clearly, she owed me nothing, but the empty house saddened me. I can’t pinpoint why. I’m a cynic by nature, capable of fending off emotional investment in professional circumstances.
But dealing with my father’s illness has made me more emotionally naked than usual, and Kimber Carson’s sudden disappearance exacerbated that nakedness and contributed to my incipient despair.
I asked myself the same question I had posed to Robaire Noel: “Where do you see yourself in ten years?”
And like Robaire, I hadn’t a clue.