It wasn’t particularly hot in the house, but it wasn’t actually cool either. Finley supposed if you sat nice and still you’d be quite comfortable.
“Sit anywhere you’d like,” Gladys directed. “Chester will be along with the tea.”
“Thank you.” Finley settled on a well-loved sofa adorned with a crocheted throw hanging across the back.
The lady of the house sat in one of the upholstered rockers that flanked a marble-topped table.
“They were young when they died.” Gladys set her rocker in motion. “Doug had just turned forty-two. Wanda had us over for cake. She was only forty. It was a terrible tragedy.”
“Both parents were murdered?” The details of the case were a bit sketchy. Home invasion. Parents shot and killed. Boy found hidden in the barn. There hadn’t been any real forensic work as far as Finley could determine. Few reports at all, in fact.
“Well,” Chester announced as he entered the room carrying a tray of glasses filled with iced tea, “that depends upon who you ask.” He placed the tray on the table between the rockers. Handed a glass to his wife and then another to Finley. He settled into his rocker and claimed the final glass.
“If you had asked Joe Keaton,” Gladys said, “the police officer who investigated the case—he passed away a while back—anyway, he would’ve told you it was a home invasion. Doug and Wanda had a little money and some nice things. There was no money found in the house. A few things were missing. A gold-coin collection and a pistol, along with the rifle used to kill them.”
“The murder weapon belonged to the victims?” Finley asked.
“Yep,” Chester said. “That part right there don’t add up to me.”
“Not one bit,” Gladys put in.
“Why was Detective Keaton convinced otherwise?” Surely there was some sort of evidence, though she’d found nothing in the meager contents of the case file. The missing items may have been sold prior to the incident. Or perhaps they were simply hidden, and no one had found them.
“Officer,” Chester corrected. “He wasn’t no detective. The closest detective then, and now, is in Winchester on the Tennessee side or Scottsboro on this side.”
“Officer Keaton was from Huntland,” Gladys explained. “Everyone always called him ’cause he was so close by.”
“Who called him?” Something else Finley hadn’t found in the file.
“I did,” Chester said.
“So you discovered the bodies?”
“Heard the gunshots. I didn’t think too much of the first one. Folks run off unwanted critters with a gunshot. Bobcats, coyotes, and such. Doug wasn’t one for hunting, so I figured he’d had to run off a critter. But when I heard the second shot, I knew something wasn’t right. I told Gladys to stay in the house, and I drove over there.”
“You didn’t see a fleeing intruder when you approached the house?”
He shook his head. “Wanda was on the sofa.” He grimaced. “Just sitting there with her eyes wide open and a big-ass hole in the center of her chest.”
“Language,” Gladys scolded.
“Anyway, her dress was soaked in blood. The sofa too,” he went on, ignoring his wife. “Doug was in his chair, blood all down the front of him. The bullet had torn through the underpart of his chin and throat and ripped through his brain. Don’t sound like no home invasion to me.”
“You believe he committed suicide after shooting his wife?” Though the trajectory of the bullet sounded feasible, the fact that the weapon used was missing basically ruled out that scenario.
“I sure do.”
“What about the weapon?” she countered. “If he shot himself, who took the weapon?”
Chester shrugged. “I don’t know, maybe the boy. All I know for sure was Doug hadn’t been happy for a while. He and Wanda were having some trouble.”
“I hate to speak ill of the dead,” Gladys interjected, “but the last time I talked to Wanda just a few days before, she said Doug was very upset with her. Things were pretty rocky.”
“Not happy about what?” Finley looked from one to the other. Chester seemed the most forthcoming.
“They always had trouble with that boy,” Chester tossed in. “There was something wrong with him.”
Something else the file on Charles Holmes hadn’t shown.
“Now, you don’t know that for sure,” Gladys chided. “He was a little odd, that’s true. But Wanda never told me anything about him being trouble.”