Everything She Ever Wanted (7 page)

didn't know it was unloaded, he gingerly removed the gun from her grip

and she handed the phone to him.
 
"Please talk to my son and reassure

him that you're here with me."

After.
 
Riggins spoke to Ronnie and hung up the phone, he was assaulted

with a torrent of words as Pat told him how horrified she had been to

see her own father-in-law standing there in the hedgerow waving his

private parts at her.
 
"I've been ill," she told Sheriff Riggins.
 
"I

have a lot of trouble with blood clotting, and what have you, and I

have to have oxygen.
 
I have high blood pressure and all from an

accident I was in-I just got out of the hospital.
 
This was the first

day I felt well enough to mow.

"My son said for me to ask you to load the gun for me, so I'll have

something to protect myself after you leave-at least until my husband

gets home."

"Where are the shells for this .22?"
 
Riggins asked.

"I don't know."

Tom called back just then and told Riggins where the keys to the gun

cabinet were.
 
The deputy chambered the rounds and showed Pat how to

shoot the gun.
 
She wasn't unkno*ledgeable about guns.
 
She could load

and shoot a .22 rifle, and she had used a much more powerful gun when

she went deer hunting with Tom the previous fall.
 
But she was

apparently too frightened to think straight, and her hands shook.

Riggins noted that she also seemed terribly embarrassed, and, hell,

what woman wouldn't be?
 
It was a humiliating thing to have to turn in

your own kin for showing off his privates.
 
It wasn't natural.

"Can you describe the man you saw?"
 
he asked.

"Yes," she began slowly.
 
"Of course-I mean I knew it was his father.

. .

. There he stood wearing that same kind of hat that he wears, that kind

of floppy hat, and his shirtsleeves rolled up like he does, and just

dropping his pants.
 
Yet at the same time I was thinking, How could it

be his father?
 
You know?
 
But I know it was him."

The Pike County deputy managed to calm Pat down and suggested that she

talk with her husband about whether they 99 wanted to bring charges

against his father.
 
Pat seemed composed enough when he had to leave on

another call.

This was, in fact, Riggins's second visit to Kentwood Morgan Farm.
 
In

early April, Tom Allanson had called him to report that somebody had

shot one of his cars full of .22 bullet holes.
 
The car was parked out

in back of the barn, and it looked as if somebody had used it for

target practice.
 
Riggins had never been able to pin the shooting on a

suspect, and Tom had had no suggestions.
 
There were a lot of visitors

coming and going at Kentwood, and then there was fifteen-year-old

Ronnie Taylor living there with his mother and stepfather, and from

time to time his teenage friends.
 
But this time a suspect had been

positively identified.

When Tom got home a few minutes after Riggins left, he listened in icy

shock to Pat's accusations against his father.
 
His father was a mean

SOB on occasion, but Tom couldn't even imagine Walter Allanson as an

exposer.
 
His father was much too controlled to do such a thing, or had

always seemed so to Tom.

Still, his dad had done about everything else he could to make their

lives miserable.

Tom called his father's law offices and no one answered.
 
His life

seemed to be spinning out of control.
 
It was one thing to have his

father angry with him.
 
Lord knew he was used to it.
 
But every day

brought some new shock.

Margureitte had told him his father didn't care if he lived or died and

wouldn't even spit on his grave if he did.
 
His father had accused him

of putting poison in his own baby's milk and of stealing guns from

him.

And Pat believed his father had ruined him in the job market, and would

actually kill him if he got the chance.
 
That was exactly what he had

told Mrs.
 
Radcliffe.

Even Nona and Paw had warned Tom that he might be in danger.

But this.
 
His father had done the unforgivable.
 
Walter Allanson, an

attorney at law, candidate for judge, had exposed himself to his

wife.

Tom was enraged.
 
Poor Pat was so sick she could barely move, her

collarbone hurt her all the time, and still she had been out there

trying to help by mowing the lawn.
 
How dare his father frighten and

shock her that way?

It made Tom realize that Pat had been right; he couldn't let his father

get away with it.
 
Neither of them could stand for such shabby

treatment.
 
As much as he dreaded the prospect, Tom knew that he would

have to confront his father.

Walter O'Neal Allanson and his wife, Milford-but called Carolynwere

both fifty-one in late June of 1974.
 
They had been married for

thirty-two years, more than half of their lives.
 
They lived in East

Point, a gracious suburb adjacent to Atlanta's southwest border.

Theirs was by all accounts a comfortable marriage, although some said

that Walter had strayed a bit in his forties.

If he had, Carolyn had let it go.
 
The woman involved was long dead.

In his fifties, Walter Allanson had grown almost puritan in his

opinions about the sanctity of marriage, as virtuous as a reformed

hooker.
 
If there were children involved, he was inflexibly against

divorce-a sometimes difficult stance for an attorney whose practice was

general law.

Walter was a handsome man with iron gray hair and clear bluegray eyes,

a compactly trim man-save for a slight falling away of his chin line as

he moved through middle age.
 
"Big Carolyn" was a plain woman who

rarely wore makeup.
 
Her hair was brown and combed back from her face

into nondescript waves.
 
She was neither slender nor fat; rather, her

figure was full breasted and solid.

The months ahead promised to be as challenging and exciting as any in

the Allansons' lives, ever since Walter had announced his candidacy for

a civil judgeship.
 
He had a good reputation, and there was every

reason to think he would win in the fall elections.
 
Carolyn truly

enjoyed her job as a nurse in a local doctor's office, but both she and

Walter came home for lunch every day.
 
They were always together.
 
If

the early fire had gone out of their relationship, they were

companionable.

Walter came from simple people, uneducated but with native

intelligence.
 
His childhood had been hardscrabble, and.
 
it was

important to him to have money against tomorrow's uncertainties.

He was shrewd when it came to real estate.
 
He had bought the house at

1458 Norman Berry Drive in East Point for a good price.

The neighborhood was prime then, with Norriian Berry Drive a pleasant

boulevard divided by a green strip of young trees and shrubbery in its

center island.
 
Russell High School, Walter's alma mater, was almost

directly across Norman Berry.

The house was built in the.
 
forties of dun-colored brick and white

siding with peaked dormers.
 
It was a solid house, set on a plateau so

high above Norman Berry Drive that a man could get winded just walking

up the driveway.
 
Oaks, pines, laurel hedges, and rhododendrons grew

thick, shutting out the noise of the street below and separating the

Allanson house from neighboring properties.

Carolyn's mother-"Mae Mama" Lawrence-owned the property to the west of

them, but you could hardly see her house through the foliage between

them.
 
Walter planted a grape arbor out back, and it thrived.
 
He laid

down a strip of concrete smac dab in the middle of the backyard so he

could turn around and not have to back up the 194 feet to the street.

It didn't add much aesthetically to the yard but it was practical.
 
And

Walter Allanson, if anything, was a most practical man.

His pragmatic view of life had cost him any relationship with his

sister jean, even though she and her husband lived only a few blocks

away.
 
And now his rigid moral views had shut his son out too.
 
Walter

detested Pat, and he would far rather lose Tom than bend even a little

toward his new wife.
 
Walter didn't need anyone in his life who

questioned his authority.
 
Tom had known that since he was a little

boy.

A number of people had reason to resent a man like Walter Allanson.

Lawyers make enemies, often unaware.
 
Over the :E years, he had

represented the usual assortment of clients who felt they hadn't been

given proper attention.
 
But Walter didn't run scared.
 
He had always

considered himself fully capable of defending himself.
 
Still, his

partner, Al Roberts, his law clerk, and his secretary had noticed that

he was jumpy and tense in the last weeks of June 1974-not at all like

himself.

On Saturday, June 29, 1974, Carolyn and Walter Allanson left the house

on Norman Berry Drive a little after nine, driving their 1963 white

Ford station wagon.
 
Walter wanted to check on one of his real estate

purchases.
 
It was a beautiful morning, with only the edges of the day

betraying the heat to come, and they headed northeast of Atlanta toward

Lake Lanier in Forsyth County, where Walter had picked up a piece of

waterfront property.
 
There were no buildings on it yet, but the land s

and earround homes.
 
He and Tommy had built a good boat dock up

there.