Charlotte was on her hands and knees on the road, retching, so I took it upon myself to open the back door of the minivan and look in on the kids. They were both screaming, with tears coursing down their cheeks. The little girl was sobbing so hard she was hiccupping. “Mommy! Daddy!”
“Shhh,” I told her. “It’s OK.” It wasn’t, but what else could I say? “Your mom’s coming.”
She wasn’t listening to me. “Daddy!” she screamed. “Daddy!”
I glanced over the back of the seat, into the front of the car and out the door. “Daddy’s OK, too.”
He was, actually. Or if not OK, at least he was alive and kicking. He was down on the side of the road, bellowing in rage, loud enough that whatever gunshot wound he’d contracted couldn’t have been that big a deal. I’ve been shot once, and it does tend to take all your attention when it happens. Richard wasn’t unduly put out by his, it seemed. His voice worked just fine, and so did his lungs. He was cursing and weeping—tears of rage, no doubt—and fighting as Rafe and Cletus together wrestled him to the ground and fastened handcuffs around his wrists. It took both of them to do it, which should tell you something about just how angry he was. They’re both bigger and considerably more muscular than Richard, and it still took their combined effort to get the job done.
“Richard Whitaker,” the sheriff intoned, “you’re under arrest for kidnapping—”
I squatted next to Charlotte as the guys hauled Richard to his feet and began moving him toward one of the sheriff’s vehicles. He was kicking and bucking, trying to throw them off, and I didn’t doubt for a second that if he could have gotten free, he would have taken off down the road. When he saw Charlotte on her knees on the pavement, he spat at her, and then let loose with a string of invective. “You ungrateful bitch, I should have…”
Charlotte raised her head to look at him, her cheeks pale and tear-stained and her lips quivering.
Rafe and Cletus paid him no mind, just kept wrestling him toward the squad car, where the sheriff was holding the door open. They maneuvered him inside, still cursing and bellowing—Cletus put his hand on Richard’s head and shoved it down—and then the door shut behind him, and it was blessedly silent. Or more silent. He was still carrying on inside the car, but distantly, muted, like a bumblebee in a jar. Hopefully, once he realized that nobody out here could hear him, he’d stop doing that, too, although I didn’t envy whoever would have to drive him back to the sheriff’s office for lockup.
He kept kicking and throwing himself around, too, like a five-year-old having a temper tantrum, making the whole car bounce and jerk.
“Better get him outta here,” the sheriff told Cletus. “I’ll follow you in a couple minutes.”
Cletus grimaced, but nodded. He and Rafe exchanged a wary sort of nod, like two tomcats circling one another in an alley, and then Cletus skirted the back of the squad car and headed for the front seat. Richard’s curses got louder for the few seconds it took Cletus to get himself seated behind the wheel, and then they were cut off again when Cletus shut the door. We watched as he made a U-turn across all the lanes of traffic—all the other cars moved out of the way of the flashing blue lights—and then he took the turn back down the Columbia Highway—or Pulaski Highway—toward Sweetwater.
Charlotte watched the car until it disappeared, her eyes wide, before she blinked and seemed to come back to herself. She looked around, from Sheriff Satterfield to Rafe to me.
Her brows lowered. “What are you doing here?”
Her voice was hoarse, either from the crying or the throwing up.
“I followed you,” I said, “after Richard loaded you into the minivan. You saw me, parked across the street.”
Or so I assumed, seeing as she’d taken Richard’s attention off me when it looked like he might be inclined to investigate my car.
“Oh.” She ran the tip of her tongue over her lips. “Right.”
Maybe she’d forgotten I was there, in the terror. It wouldn’t be surprising.
“I called Rafe from the car,” I said. “He called the sheriff. And then we all caught up to you here.”
She nodded, sort of vaguely. And looked around. And finally seemed to realize that her children were in the back seat of the minivan, screaming their heads off. “Oh, my God!” She scrambled to her feet. “Michaela! JR!”
Rafe put an arm around me and pulled me out of the way so I wouldn’t get mowed down. As Charlotte flew, head-first, into the back of the van to console her kids, I turned to Bob Satterfield. “Hi, Sheriff. Any news on Charlotte’s mother?”
The sheriff nodded a greeting and filled me—us—in. “Shook up, but all right. Whitaker gagged her and tied her to a chair so she couldn’t call for help when he took his family and left. She’s not a young woman, so the shock and rough handling didn’t do her any good, but the paramedics are staying with her until her husband gets there, and knowing that Charlotte and the kids are all right will go a long way toward making everything right again.”
A beat passed, and then he added, “Let me go do that.”
He headed for the remaining squad car. Rafe tightened his arm around me and leaned down to drop a kiss on my cheek. I turned my head at the last second so it landed on my mouth instead.
“You OK?” I asked against his lips.
They curved up. “Yeah. A couple bruises, but nothing worse.”
“What about Richard? He got shot, obviously.” I’d seen the blood spray on the inside of the window. “But he was in good enough condition to put up a fight.”
“Just a scratch,” Rafe said. His just-a-scratches tend to be a bit worse than… well, scratches, but I believed him when he added, “He’ll need a couple stitches and some padding. But he’ll survive to stand trial. And live for a long time afterwards.”
Good to know.
“I should get back,” he added, with a glance over his shoulder. “I got work of my own to do.”
I nodded. “I’m sorry to take you away from it.”
“I’m not.” He dropped another kiss, this time right on my mouth, and lingered. “But now that everything’s in hand here,” he added once he’d raised his head, “I should get back to it.”
“I’m going to stay for a few minutes, and then follow Charlotte home. Make sure she and the kids get there OK. Check on Carrie on your way past the car, would you? She’s probably still asleep—”
It had only been a few minutes since I stumbled out of the Volvo, but they’d been a couple of minutes that had gone on for what had seemed like a long time. “If not, I’ll take her out of the car while I wait.”
He nodded. “I’ll see you at home later.”
Count on it. I unclenched my hands from his sleeves and watched him saunter away, along the side of the road, down to the corner, and from there, over to the Volvo. He peered through the back window for a second, and turned to give me a thumbs up. I lifted a hand in acknowledgement, and then I watched him get into the Chevy and drive away, merging with traffic headed toward the center of Columbia.
“He going back to work?” the sheriff asked. I hadn’t even noticed him come back out of the car and toward me, but now he was standing next to me watching the Chevy disappear up the road.
I nodded. “He’s following Kyle Scoggins and Rodney Clark around. Rodney was the other guy from Beulah’s the other day. I saw him on Fulton Street earlier, and recognized him. And Rafe said he showed up at Kyle Scoggins’s place of employment just before this whole—” I waved my hand at Charlotte, at the minivan, and at the two screaming kids, “—mess happened.”
“Things are coming together,” Bob said, sounding pleased. I guess he was talking about the Laurel Hill case, and not this… mess. Although with Richard being caught red-handed the way he’d been, this was pretty open and shut too, if you asked me.
I cleared my throat. “What are the chances, in your opinion, that Rodney and/or Kyle killed Natalie Allen because she knew they were Nazi sympathizers and she was threatening to rat them out?”
“Rat them out to who?”
Whom. “I don’t know,” I said. “Somebody.”
He shook his head. “Here’s the thing, darlin’. There’s no law against being a Nazi. It makes people look at you sideways, especially when you go in a clump to a place like Laurel Hill for target practice. But we can’t arrest somebody for that. It’s no crime to think a certain way. It’s only a crime if you act on it.”
I nodded. “What if they were planning to do more? And what if Natalie knew about it?”
“More than three years ago?” The sheriff made a skeptical face. “Don’t you think they woulda done it by now? Especially if they killed somebody so nobody’d figure out what they planned to do?”
Maybe. I mean… that did make sense. “So not Kyle or Rodney.”
“It mighta been Kyle or Rodney,” the sheriff said. “I don’t recall the case. It wasn’t one of mine. But if it was Kyle or Rodney, it probably wasn’t for that reason.”
No. “I appreciate it.”
He nodded. And turned back to the minivan and Charlotte. “Think she’s gonna be all right driving home?”
“I think she’ll have to be,” I said. “Although I suppose I could pile them all into my car and drive them back if she can’t manage. You wouldn’t pull us over and give us a ticket if she held one of the kids on her lap on the way home, would you? I’ve got Carrie in the back seat, so there’s only room for one more car seat.”
“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.