“Kings Bay?” Colin assumes Gabe Mullery is affiliated with the Atlantic Fleet’s home port for Trident II submarines armed with nuclear weapons, less than a hundred miles from here.
“A diving medical officer in the reserves,” he says. “But my day job is here at Regional Hospital. Emergency medicine.”
Another doctor in the house, I think, and I hope he’s happier than Clarence Jordan must have been, trying to control his wife and do so discreetly, possibly relying on his publicized friendship with the chairman of the news service that owned a number of newspapers and television and radio stations back then, someone Dr. Jordan served with on committees and charitable foundations and who had the ability to manipulate what might end up in the press.
The media didn’t report a word about Mrs. Jordan’s recurrence of bad behavior, the series of sad and humiliating events beginning in January of 2001 when she was arrested for shoplifting after hiding an expensive dress under her clothes and neglecting to remove the security tag. A cry for attention, for help, but possibly more treacherous than that, it went through my mind, as I was going through Lucy’s e-mail.
Mrs. Jordan was striking out in a way that might actually punish a husband who neglected her and had rigid expectations about his wife’s role and behavior, and she retaliated by targeting his pride, his image, his impossibly high standards. Not even two months after her shoplifting incident at Oglethorpe Mall, she ran her car into a tree and was charged with DUI, and four months after that in July, she called the police, intoxicated and belligerent, claiming the house had been burglarized. Detectives responded, and in her statement she claimed the housekeeper had stolen gold coins worth at least two hundred thousand dollars that were kept hidden under insulation in the attic. The housekeeper was never charged, the accusation dismissed after Dr. Jordan informed police he’d recently relocated the gold, an investment he’d had for years. It was safely inside the house, and nothing was missing.
But what became of the gold between July and January 6? Dr. Jordan could have sold it, I suppose, although the price was at an all-time low throughout 2001, averaging less than three hundred dollars an ounce, Lucy pointed out, and it seems odd to think he wouldn’t have waited for the value to go up, especially if he’d had the gold for a while. There’s no evidence he needed money. His 2001 tax return showed earnings and dividends on investments totaling more than a million dollars. Whatever became of the gold, it seems a fact it was gone after the murders. There’s no reference to stolen property, and investigative reports indicate that jewelry and the family silver didn’t appear to have been touched.
Certainly Gloria Jordan didn’t end up with a small fortune in gold, since it likely was she who relocated it the last time, likely the afternoon before her murder, and although I don’t think anyone will ever know exactly what happened, I do have a theory based on the facts as I now know them. I think she staged a burglary to explain the disappearance of what she herself intended to steal, and then decided she wouldn’t have to share the loot with a coconspirator, or more than one, if she pretended she couldn’t find it. Her husband must have hidden the gold yet again, and she was dreadfully sorry but it wasn’t her fault.
I can only imagine what she might have said when her accomplice, or most likely two of them, showed up, but I believe Mrs. Jordan was up against a force of evil far more brilliant and cruel than she could conjure up in her worst dreams. I suspect that on the early Sunday morning of January 6, she was forced to reveal the gold’s hiding place and perhaps while she was in the garden near the old root cellar she received her first cut. Possibly as a warning. Or maybe the beginning of the attack, and she fled back into the house, where she was killed, her body carried upstairs to be lewdly displayed in bed next to her slain husband.
“So we’re looking around and it’s a great place, and I’m impressed, I admit,” Gabe Mullery is saying to us. “And an amazingly good price, and then the Realtor went into detail about what had happened here in 2002, and no wonder it was a deal. I wasn’t thrilled about the association or the karma or whatever you might want to call it, but I’m not a superstitious person. I don’t believe in ghosts. What I have come to believe in is tourists, in idiots that have the sense and manners of pigeons, and I don’t want a carnival atmosphere now that her execution’s back on.”
There will be no execution. I will make sure of it.
“Damn shame it didn’t go down as planned, that the judge delayed it. We want it over with so it will settle to the bottom, out of sight, and be forgotten. Hopefully someday people will stop asking for the nickel tour.”
I’ll do whatever it takes to make sure Lola Daggette never sees the death chamber, and maybe the day will come when she’ll have nothing to fear. Not Tara Grimm, not corrections officers at the GPFW, not
“Tell me what you want to look at,” Gabe Mullery says to me. “I don’t know if I can help you or not. Another owner lived here before we bought the place, and I really don’t know the details of what it was like when those people were killed.”
The kitchen is unrecognizable, completely renovated, with new cabinets and modern stainless-steel appliances and a black granite tile floor. The door leading outside is solid with no panes of glass, just as Jaime said, and I wonder how she knew, but I have a guess. She wouldn’t have hesitated to walk here and insert herself, possibly feigning she was a tourist wandering around, or she might have boldly said who she was and why she was interested. I notice the laptop computer on an area of the counter where there is no place to sit and work. There is a wireless keypad on top of a table and contacts in every window I see, an upgraded security system that might include cameras.
“Well, you’re smart to have a good security system,” I remark to Gabe Mullery. “Considering the curiosity people have about this place.”
“Yeah, it’s called a Browning nine-mil. That’s my security system.” He grins. “My wife’s into all the gadgets, glass breaks, motion sensors, video cameras, the nerdy one. Always worrying people will think we got drugs in here.”
“Two urban myths,” Colin says. “Doctors keep drugs in the house and make a lot of money.”
“Well, I am gone all the time, and she does sell drugs for a living.” He opens the kitchen door. “Another urban myth that pharmacists keep a stash at home,” he says, as we go down stone steps to a hyphen of flagstones and grass, and I hear music on the sunporch, which is set up as a gym and probably where Gabe Mullery was when we showed up. Before that, he probably was cutting the grass.
I recognize the red terra-cotta tile floor behind glass where there’s a bench and racks of free weights, and leaning against the back of the house are two bicycles with small wheels and hinged aluminum frames, one red, with the seat and handlebar raised high, the other one silver and for someone shorter. Next to them are a lawnmower, a rake, and bags of clippings.
“I guess the best thing is to let you wander around,” Mullery says, and I can tell by his demeanor he’s not the least bit wary of us and has no idea that maybe he should be. “Gardening’s not my thing. This is Robbi’s domain,” he says, as if he’s not particularly interested in it, and nothing that once was there is left.
The tea olives and original shrubbery, the statuary, the rockery, the crumbling walls, have been replaced by a limestone terrace built directly over what I suspect was once a root cellar, and behind the terrace is a small outbuilding painted pale yellow with a shingled mansard roof and a vent rising from it that looks industrial, and under the eaves are bullet cameras. So far I’ve counted three, and tucked behind boxwoods are an HVAC and a small backup generator, and storm shutters cover the windows as if Gabe Mullery’s wife is expecting a hurricane and a power outage and is worried about trespassing and spying. The building is blocked on three sides by privacy screens, white-painted lattices climbing with crimson glory vine and firethorn.
“What sort of work does Robbi do in her office back here?” I ask her husband what would be a normal question under normal circumstances.
