“What do you want me to say?” Charles said. “We were together eighteen years. Not everything is going to be perfect all the time. Things were great in the beginning but as time went on, yeah, we fought a lot. Sometimes once a week. Maxine wanted a divorce since Haven was little. She used to bring it up all the time. I told her it wasn’t going to happen.”
“Why not?” asked Josie.
He looked at her like she was stupid. “Because I didn’t want one, that’s why.”
“She didn’t need your permission to divorce you,” Turner said. “Did you threaten her?”
“I didn’t need to threaten her. She knew she’d be ass out if she left me. She never made as much as I do, even when she got promoted to office manager.”
“She’d be entitled to child support,” Josie pointed out. “Perhaps even alimony.”
“No kidding,” he said. Had he wanted to wait until Haven turned eighteen to agree to a divorce so he wouldn’t have to pay child support?
“You were separated, though,” said Josie. “What changed your mind about getting divorced?”
“Honestly? It just got to the point where nothing I did satisfied Maxine. She wasn’t the same girl I married, okay? She changed.”
Josie was willing to bet that Maxine had matured and figured out that she deserved more out of life than a relationship where her husband refused to consider what she wanted, but Josie didn’t share that thought.
“Plus,” Charles said, lifting his head, “coming home from work or from business trips was like walking into a stranger’s house. I didn’t feel welcome in my own damn home anymore. The older Haven got, the less she liked me and the more she wanted to spend time with Maxine. Then it was just those two and I wasn’t part of the club.”
“Did you want to be part of the club?” asked Josie.
“It would have been nice, considering I was bankrolling their lives. Jesus, my own daughter pretty much hated me, thanks to Maxine.” Tears filled his eyes. The irritation he clearly had toward his wife and daughter drained away, softening his posture. Or maybe he was reaching the point where he couldn’t hold off the reality that his family was dead and the accompanying grief. Propping his elbows on his knees, he exhaled hard and dropped his face into his hands, sniffling.
Turner watched him with a stony expression. Josie waited to see if he would break down completely or pull himself together. After the big hand on the clock above Charles’s head advanced twice and he showed no signs of falling apart, she resumed the interview.
“What did the medical examiner from Fauset County tell you when he came to give you the death notifications?” Josie asked.
His words were muffled. “That they were murdered.”
Josie and Turner exchanged a curious look. There they were, developing an unspoken language, like they’d been doing this together forever. It was mildly alarming. While it benefited them both professionally to be able to communicate without words, Josie wasn’t sure she wanted to forge that kind of intimacy with someone who pissed her off as consistently as Turner.
Shaking off the thoughts, she asked Charles, “You were told that your wife and daughter were murdered and your first instinct was to get into their tent?”
“My first instinct?” he said, lifting his head and using the backs of his hands to wipe away tears. “No. My first instinct was to punch a hole in the wall. Haven might not have liked me very much, but she was still my daughter.”
“That’s fair,” Josie said. “Tell us why you needed to get into the tent.”
Charles looked away from them as more tears slid down his cheeks. This time, he used the sleeve of his shirt to sop them up. “I didn’t know what to do after they told me, you know? I was in shock. The next thing I know, I’m sitting in the driveway of the house. Our house. Guess I just wanted to be around all their things or something. Be in the house where we used to be a family. But Maxine changed the locks as soon as I moved out. I needed the key and figured it would be with their stuff in the tent.”
“You didn’t want to get a divorce initially,” Josie said. “But then you were the one who moved out?”
Charles didn’t answer.
Turner made a sound of disgust. “I see. What’s her name?”
He sniffled again. “What? Who?”
“The woman you’re seeing. ’Cause after everything you just told us, there’s no way you would willingly leave that house and let Maxine have it.”
“There’s no woman,” he insisted.
“We’ll let her know you said that when we interview her,” Josie said flatly.
“Jesus, you’re a pain in the ass. Fine. There was someone when I first moved out, okay?” He rattled off a name which Turner plugged into the notes app on his phone. “It only lasted a month. But Maxine and I were separated.”
“You were separated,” Turner said. “But you continued to harass your wife.”
