Over Troubled Water: A Hunter Jones Mystery (25 page)

Taneesha came through the door a minute later.

“Mr. Carson,” she said formally, “You are under arrest for the murders of China Carson, Jim Jordan and Annie Chapman, for shooting Ricky Richards and Rondelle Carson, and for arson in the case of the GetFit Gym. You have a right to remain silent…”

“Whatever you say,” he interrupted, “as long as y’all know I didn’t ever mean to kill China, no matter what, not even if Ricky Richards got her pregnant. I didn’t know that was China I shot. I thought it was Richards’ wife. She’s skinny like China got to be. I thought it was her. I didn’t know…”

Taneesha had a dozen questions she wanted to ask, but she didn’t want to do anything that might be a problem in the trial later, so she said, quite clearly for the recording, “Mr. Carson, your sister says she is going to arrange for your legal representation.”

“Is Rondelle alive?” he asked.

“Very much so,” Taneesha said. “You just got her in the shoulder.”

“I shouldn’t have done that,” he said, “I just went a little crazy when I heard Ricky Richards on the radio, talking to Will Roy like everything was just wonderful. Here my China’s dead because of him, and he’s back on his feet like nothin’ happened at all. I thought I’d run him outta business by settin’ that fire in the gym, and then somebody comes right along to help him get the whole thing started again.”

Shellie Carstairs was about to leave work and take some flowers to Hunter at the hospital, when she remembered to check her e-mail one more time.

And there it was: the message and picture Hunter had wanted to be sent from the Ocoochee County Sheriff’s Office.

She opened it to forward it to Hunter’s e-mail, and decided to see if she recognized the girl who had sent Jim Jordan her picture in an unsigned Valentine.

She did.

It was China Carson.

The next morning, with full cooperation from the Ocoochee County Sheriff’s office and the GBI, Jim Jordan’s laptop computer and a box of his personal papers, including a Valentine drawn by China Carson, was on its way to Merchantsville.

On Wednesday, just as The Magnolia County Messenger was about to go to press with a banner headline of ‘Carson charged in Foxtail Creek shooting,’ Hunter was waking up from a much-needed nap on the sofa.

“Ty’s still sleeping,” Sam told her, “Four hours. I think that’s his record so far. Mom’s here and Miss Rose is in the kitchen making chicken salad sandwiches. I need to go interview Russell Carson now that he’s got a lawyer.”

“Who’s representing him?” Hunter asked, struggling to sit up. “Did Rondelle find him a hotshot lawyer from Atlanta?”

Sam laughed and sat down beside her.

“I’m afraid not,” he said, “He made a mistake when he shot Rondelle. Once she got her head clear she decided to look after her own interests and got some legal advice. She’s already gotten him to sign his half of the house and the business over to her. Taneesha was a witness. Rondelle told Russell that Ricky Richards might sue over his business losses, and Russell’s still fixated on Ricky.

“Nobody’s told him it wasn’t Ricky?” Hunter asked.

“Nope, and Rondelle doesn’t know either,” Sam said. “Taneesha’s told Molly Bloomfield, though.”

“Molly’s representing him?”

“For now, anyway,” Sam said. “He’s indigent now that he’s signed everything over to Rondelle.”

Ty Bailey, who was in his downstairs cradle, opened his eyes and focused for a moment on a ray of sunlight and the voices from the next room. Then he began to let the world know that he was hungry again.

Flannery rushed to check on him and trotted back to look anxiously at Hunter and Sam.

“I’ll change him first,” Mary Bailey said from the door. “Hunter, you slept right through breakfast. Better come have some lunch.”

The interview with Russell Carson took place in the hospital’s medical library. He arrived in a wheelchair with one wrist cuffed to the armrest.

District Attorney Sanders Beale was there, along with T.J. Jackson. They were both looking exasperated.

Molly Bloomfield was looking pleased.

Russell Carson, it turned out, wanted to plead guilty and be done with it.

“I don’t want some big trial on television,” he said. “I’m not gonna have China’s name dragged through the mud. She did what she did, and I already forgave her, and I hope if she’s in heaven like the preacher said, she’s forgiven me. She just got tempted and led astray because she wanted a baby so much.”

“Before we talk about your late wife,” Sam said, “I want to talk about these letters.”

He placed the first one on the table.

“Did you write this and mail it?” he ask.

Russell glanced at it and nodded.

“Can you tell us why?” Sam asked.

“I guess it was stupid,” Russell said, “but when I decided I was gonna shoot Ricky Richards, I didn’t want China to think it was me. I thought it would come out in the paper and everybody would believe it was some crazy person who just wanted to shoot a bunch of people.”

“And this one?” Sam asked, putting the one about the burning of the gym beside the first one.

“Same way,” Russell said. “I was cleaning a lady’s rug and she was on the phone tellin’ some other lady about how they were all going to pitch in and help keep the gym open, and I thought, well, we’ll see about that, but by then I knew they weren’t gonna put it in the paper or on radio, so I just wanted to be sure you thought it was the same crazy person who did the shooting.”

“Where’d you get the name Abomination?” T.J. asked, leaning across the table, almost smiling at Russell. “That’s quite a name.”

“Yeah,” Russell said, not returning the smile. “I got it off this computer game that I bought. I only played for a while. It was a real hard war game.”

“Brutal Battalion?” T.J. asked.

“Right,” Russell said. “There was this one player who was always ahead of everybody and that was his avatar. He would write these messages full of big words. I was trying to come up with a name that would sound scary, and I thought of that.”

The District Attorney sighed.

“Let’s get serious here,” he said. “Mr. Carson, what made you think your wife was having an affair with Ricky Richards?”

“I didn’t want to think it,” Russell said slowly, almost to himself. “She changed so much. I mean she even looked different, and she wasn’t acting the same, but it was the Valentine that worried me first.”

Silence filled the room.

“See, we knew each other from high school, and back then she made me these Valentines. She could draw really cute things, and she’d put a lot of work into them, but she hadn’t done that after we were married. I mean she still drew, but she didn’t draw things for me in particular.

“So then right before Valentine’s Day I went by her mother’s house. India had just spent the night there, and she called me and asked me if I could go by there and take a look at the washing machine because there was water on the laundry room floor, so I went by. Miss Martha Mae was there, and she shut the cats up in India’s room so they wouldn’t bother me, and then she went back to see about Miz Jackson…”

“And…” the D.A. said impatiently.

“And I looked into the room China used and saw that she had all her art equipment out on a little table, so I went and looked, and she was making this Valentine, kinda like the ones she made when we were in high school, but better, because you know she had gotten to be a really good artist.

“So, I thought she was making it for me, and I got to thinking that I hadn’t sent her any Valentines flowers for a while, so on Valentines Day, I had a dozen red roses sent to her office.”

The D.A. nodded.

“But she never gave me the Valentine,” Russell said, “and I thought well, maybe she had messed it up or something, but I guess it did get me suspecting something , because I started noticing things – like a couple of times after that I’d come in and she’d be on her cell phone, and she’d just say “Bye” real quick. And then I started going by her mother’s house at night, and one time the GetFit van was right out front at nine p.m. Then I was talking to one of my customers while I was setting up to clean her septic tank, and she said she heard China had lost a lot of weight, and I said something about her going to the gym, and she told me that I must be more trusting than her husband because, and then she laughed about Ricky Richards fooling around.”

He stopped.

“That’s it?” T.J. asked. “You mean you didn’t actually know she was having an affair.”

“I knew something was going on,” Russell said. “You married?”

T.J. nodded.

“Well, then you know if your wife’s not acting the same,” he said. “And I was right, too, because I might as well tell y’all right now if my sister hadn’t already, that I can’t – you know – get a woman pregnant. I mean I would have raised that baby like my own, but it wasn’t mine.”

“Did she even tell you about it?” Taneesha asked.

“No,” Russell said. “I don’t even know if she knew.”

“I guess we’ll never know that,” Sanders Beale grumbled.

Taneesha suddenly spoke up.

“You killed two people besides your wife on the bridge that morning,” she said. “Did you know them?”

“I knew Mrs. Chapman, sort of. I went to school with her son, Andy. I never had met that Jordan guy. I’m sorry about them, because I didn’t get Ricky Richards anyway, and I never woulda shot China if I’d known that was her. I wish I hadn’t ever thought of it.”

His voice broke, “I swear I didn’t even know she was going to be on that ride. I didn’t know I had shot her until you came and told me. It was foggy, and I had left the gun there the day before. I had it in two plastic bags with duct tape around them, stuck up behind that tree, and I heard them coming, and was having trouble getting the bags off. One of them stuck to the gun and it was flapping around in the breeze, and my glasses fogged up, and they were coming so fast.”

He began to sob.

“I think this is enough for now,” Molly Bloomfield said.

“I just have one more question,” Taneesha asked.

She took a hand-drawn card out of a folder on her desk. Everyone looked at it as she held it up.

It was in surprising contrast to the harsh realities that had been under discussion.

It was a Valentine, decorated by hand with ink and water colors. There were two bears hugging in the center of a perfectly drawn heart. The heart was surrounded by a border of tiny flowers.

Inside, the words “I love you” were carefully printed.

There was no signature.

“Is this the Valentine you saw in your wife’s art case?” Taneesha asked.

He grabbed for it as she pulled it back. “Where did you get that?”

“China gave it to Jim Jordan,” Taneesha said. “His mother found it last week. There’s a whole e-mail correspondence between them, too. It was on his laptop computer.”

“Jim Jordan?” Russell asked, blinking. It was almost as if he had never heard the name before. “What are you talking about?”

“It wasn’t Ricky Richards your wife was having a romance with,” Taneesha said. “It was Jim Jordan.”

“And you don’t need to respond to that at all,” Molly told him.

He wasn’t responding. He went pale, and then very still.

Finally, he spoke in a whisper.

“Then I did kill the right one,” he said.

That night Taneesha had a serious talk with Jeremy.

“Are you sure?” he asked.

“I’m sure I don’t want to be a lawyer,” she said.

“You’d be such a good one,” he said.

“I’m a good law enforcement officer,” she said. “That’s what I want to do.”

“I thought you wanted to prosecute criminals,” he said.

“No, I’ll leave that to Sanders Beale,” she said, “By the time they’re arrested and charged, I’m sick of them. I don’t want to think about Russell Carson one more minute.”

“What about being a defense attorney?” Jeremy asked.

She laughed out loud.

“Can you even imagine me trying to talk a jury into thinking somebody like that wasn’t guilty?”

EPILOGUE

Six months later

It was a beautiful late October afternoon – a perfect time for a housewarming.

Hunter had almost covered the new kitchen counters with trays of appetizers while Sam made sure the charcoal was perfect for steaks, hamburgers, hot dogs and shrimp.

Mallory and Nikki had decorated the backyard with balloons and were both taking pictures of everyone who arrived.

Ty Bailey was sitting on a pile of fall leaves, falling sideways with laughter from time to time, as Flannery pounced around him catching the ball that Bethie tossed in the air. Fair-haired, blue-eyed and sturdy, he was the uncrowned ruler of the big Queen Anne house on Clearview Circle.

Tyler Bankston watched his namesake with a smile. He had already started a trust fund for little Ty’s college education.

For Bethie, moving to the new house meant having the wonderful attic room, safe and secure, but still with a bit of independence. Katie Calico, who was getting older and liked some peace and quiet, shared it with her. Sometimes she watched the squirrels run across the magnolia branches, and sometimes she just napped.