Patricia Cornwell - Red Mist

I suspect that on the night of January 5 she may have spiked her husband’s drink with clonazepam, ensuring he would settle into a hard sleep. At around eleven, she went downstairs and disarmed the alarm, leaving the mansion and her family vulnerable to a break-in that she couldn’t have anticipated would end the way it did. What she probably had in mind was wrong, and most of all it was foolish, not so different from a lot of schemes devised by unhappy people who want out of their marriages and are seduced into believing they’re entitled to take what they think they deserve.

Mrs. Jordan probably never meant for her children to be harmed, and certainly not herself, and possibly not even her husband, whom I suspect she’d come to resent deeply, if not hate. She may have been determined to get away from him, but probably what she wanted was a secret source of cash, something of her own, and not necessarily for him to be dead. A simple plot, a simple burglary on a January night after a day of intermittent thunderstorms and chilly blustery winds, Lucy let me know the weather back then. One doesn’t decide to clean up the garden in such conditions, not that there’s any evidence Mrs. Jordan actually pruned so much as a branch stub or a watersprout the afternoon before her death.

What was she doing by the crumbled walls and depressed earth, what looked to me in photographs like the ruins of a root cellar from an earlier century? Maybe attempting to outsmart her accomplice or accomplices, and the grim irony is she wouldn’t have survived even if she’d been honorable. She didn’t recognize the devil she’d befriended and come to trust, and must have assumed all would be forgiven if a fortune in gold I suspect she’d promised to share was nowhere to be found because she’d decided to keep all of it for herself and had hidden it.

“Look, I wouldn’t blame you for not wanting to be bothered about this,” Colin is saying on the hot front porch, with its stately white columns and view of a cemetery that dates from the American Revolution. Puffs of hot wind carry the scent of cut grass.

“Not that damn case,” Gabe Mullery says. “You and reporters, and the worst are the tourists. People ringing the bell and wanting a tour.”

“We’re not tourists, and we don’t want that kind of tour.” Colin introduces me, adding that I’m returning to Boston in the next day or two and want to take a look at the garden in back.

“I don’t mean to be rude, but what the hell for?” Mullery says, and past him, through the open doorway, is the fir wood staircase, and the landing near the foyer where Brenda Jordan’s body was found.

“You have every right to be rude about it,” I reply, “and you’re not obligated to let me look.”

“It’s my wife’s thing, and she completely redid it. Her office is out there. So whatever you think you’re going to see probably doesn’t exist anymore. I don’t understand the point.”

“If it’s all right, I’d like a quick look anyway,” I reply. “I’ve been reviewing some information….”

“About that case.” He exhales loudly in exasperation. “I knew it was a mistake to get this place, and now with her execution coming up of all times on fucking Halloween. Like we can be in town for that. Close up the fucking place and call in the National Guard, would if I could, and wait it out in Hawaii, you got that straight. All right.”

He steps aside to let us in.

“Ridiculous having this conversation at all,” he continues irritably, “but not outside in this heat for all the world to see. Buying this damn place. Jesus Christ. I shouldn’t have listened to my wife. I told her we’d be on the tour route and it wasn’t a good idea, but she’s the one here most of the time. I travel pretty much constantly. She should live where she wants, it’s only fair. You know, I’m sorry people died in here, but dead is dead, and what I hate is people violating our privacy.”

“I can understand that,” Colin says.

We walk into the grand foyer of a house that looks so familiar it’s as if I’ve been in it before, and I imagine Gloria Jordan on the stairs, barefoot and in her blue floral-printed flannel gown, padding toward the kitchen, where she waited for company and a conspiracy to unfold. Or perhaps she was in some other area of the house when the door’s glass shattered and a hand reached in to unlock the dead-bolt with the key that shouldn’t have been there. I don’t know where she was when her husband was murdered but not in bed. That’s not where she was when she was stabbed twenty-seven times and her throat was slashed, overkill, what I associate with lust and rage. Most likely that attack took place in the area of the foyer where she stepped barefoot in her own blood and in the blood of her slain daughter.

“You probably can tell I’m not from here,” Mullery is saying, and at first I thought he might be English, but his accent sounds more Australian. “Sydney, London, then to North Carolina to specialize in hyperbaric medicine at Duke. I ended up here in Savannah long after the murders, so stories about this place didn’t mean much to me or I sure as hell never would have gone to see it when it went on the market a few years ago. We looked, and it was love at first sight for Robbi.”

Not the marriage made in heaven it was painted to be, Lucy e-mailed me, and attached information from records she searched that paint a portrait of a miserable woman with a self-destructive past who married Clarence Jordan in 1997 and immediately had twins, a boy and a girl named Josh and Brenda. A Cinderella story, it must have seemed to those around her when at the age of twenty she was hired by Dr. Jordan’s practice as a receptionist, and apparently this is how they met. Maybe he thought he could save her, and for a while she must have stabilized, her earlier years ones of chaos and trouble, pursued by collection agencies as she cashed bad checks and got drunk in public, moving from one low-rent apartment to the next every six or twelve months.

“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.