Everything She Ever Wanted (44 page)

Dallas and they had a wonderful time, but she came home no closer to a

commitment from him than before.
 
Some@timesfar too often for Pat-Hap

couldn't be with her.
 
For all her skill at manipulation and seduction,

she was either naive or blind to the bleak realities of stolen passion

with a married man.
 
Pat would sit forlornly on the wide veranda her

ex-husband had built for her and stare through the dark woods toward

Tell Road as if she could make the sound of Hap's car materialize by

sheer force of will.

But all she heard was the rain in winter or the cicadas in summer or

Fanny Kate Cash calling to her cats.

Pat clung desperately to Hap through Christmas of 1972 and into the

long spring and summer of 1973.
 
When he was with her she was happy,

but when he left, she agonized that he would never come back.

She implored him to ask his wife for a divorce.

He hedged and gave her reasons why he had to delay such a

confrontation.

Miserable, Pat felt her life closing in on her again.
 
She didn't even

have the horse-show circuit any longer.
 
Debbie couldn't be expected to

jump horses with a steel rod in her spine.

Pat had always been able to coerce Susan to ride no matter what.
 
"She

even convinced me to ride when I was five months pregnant with Sean,"

Susan said.
 
"It was a costume show and Mom had to let out the waist of

her long velvet dress and then pin me into it.
 
I was so wobbly and

nauseated I thought I was going to pitch forward on my head.
 
Mom was

the one who loved costumes, not us.

But by 1973 Pat's daughters were both married and mothers and they had

no time for horse shows.
 
Pat herself wore the costume that had once

almost tripped Susan up.
 
She had designed it in burnt orange velvet

and it had a lace 'abot and cuffs.
 
With it, she wore a black felt

derby with a two-foot-long ostrich plume ' She saved and treasured a

photograph from that period of herself and Governor Jimmy Carter in a

fringe-topped surrey on the Georgia Capitol grounds.
 
Pat was in her

glory, smiling graciously as she sat beside the governor while a

liveried driver k held the reins of a Morgan horse.
 
It was undoubtedly

a "photo opportunity" picture of some sort, but for Pat it was proof

that she was meant to move in the highest circles of society.

Hap Brown was her entree to those circles and she wanted him more than

she had ever wanted anything.
 
She beseeched, argued, implored, nagged,

even subtly threatened.
 
If Hap Brown didn't divorce Cordella, she

didn't know what she might do.
 
Together, she and Hap could have the

perfect life.
 
Why was he too blind to see that?

Pat was hardly a typical grandmother; she was far too involved in her

affair with Hap.
 
Boppo was the grandmotherly type, and she lavished

attention on Dawn and Sean.
 
Debbie and Gary Cole lived with her

grandparents sporadically, but their marriage was full of dissension

and recrimination.
 
Pat allegedly devised a way to keep her daughter's

husband in line.

Nineteen-year-old Gary Cole was severely shaken when his wife's best

friend confided that he should "watch his backside."
 
The young woman

whispered that Pat had put out a hit contract on him and was bragging

that she had ordered him killed.

Gary walked scared and alert for months, but nothing ever happened.
 
He

reconciled with Debbie and they continued their uneasy alliance.
 
He

told himself the rumors were only the product of a family that thrived

on high drama and flamboyant gestures.

Ronnie tended to get lost in the shuffle.
 
He wasn't allowed to be with

his father, and his mother, whom he adored, had no time for him.
 
He

began to get into trouble at school and minor scrapes with the law.

Ronnie had never shone in the family.
 
His sisters were the stars as

they rode the Morgan horses.
 
They were both extremely beautiful girls,

and he was only an averagelooking boy.

Spring came again to Georgia, and the woods were full of the pink and

white of dogwood and azaleas.
 
Tired of waiting, Pat decided to force

Hap Brown's hand.
 
Backed to the wall, he made a choice, a choice that

sounded the death knell for Pat's plans.
 
She never told anyone what he

said to her, but his answer had clearly been no.

Night after night, Pat huddled tearfully on the veranda, her lace

handkerchief a sodden lump in her hand.
 
She neither ate nor slept.

"Hap's never coming for me," she cried to Susan.
 
"He's not going to

come for me."

Susan tied up the horse she had been exercising in their show ring and

looked at her mother.
 
She couldn't understand how such a young and

beautiful woman could be so distraught over an old man.
 
"You have your

whole life in front of you," she argued.
 
"Hap's an old man.
 
You can

have anyone."

But Pat seemed not to hear.
 
"Hap's not coming for me, she sobbed.

"Never, never, ever again."

Indeed, he did not.
 
Whatever he had told Pat, it seemed final.
 
Pat

took to her bed, and then was hospitalized.
 
Boppo and Papa hovered

near, afraid that she would die of a pulmonary embolism if she didn't

stop grieving so.

Pat had gentleman callers flocking to her sickroom.
 
A man from Social

Circle, Georgia, came to see her every day, carrying with him a single

red rose.
 
A man she described only as "a millionaire who wants to take

me to California in his J'et plane" often appeared at her bedside.

It was no use.
 
They weren't Hap.

Risen at last from her sickbed, Pat arranged to send Hap one P A R T

final message through his secretary.
 
"You go tell him that if he

doesn't change his mind and leave Cordella and his children and his

farm and come for me, I'll be married to Tom Allanson in two weeks.

You just tell him that."
 
Hap did not respond.
 
When Pat devised a

harassment campaign with phone calls to his office and his home, she

met with only silence.

She had threatened to marry Tom Allanson.
 
Who, Debbie and Susan

wondered, was Tom Allanson?
 
They knew him as their feed man and the

blacksmith who came to shoe horses from time to time.
 
But that was

all.
 
They hadn't even realized their mother knew his last name.
 
Why

on earth would she pick Tom Allanson as a threat to hold over Hap's

head?
 
She couldn't be serious.

But she was.
 
Pat had decided there could be no better way to get Hap

Brown off the dime than to be seen with Tom.
 
Hap was aging and fat and

Tom was a magnificent specimen.
 
Pat suspected she could have Tom if

she only crooked her finger.
 
She didn't really want him-not in the

beginning.
 
She used him to make Hap jealous.
 
Tom was only a means to

an end, a hugely virile male symbol, full of youth and energy.
 
But

later, when Pat finally accepted that Hap was never coming for her, she

looked more closely at Tom and rethought her options.

F 0 U R Within the space of less than two years, Pat had soared to

romantic peaks few women ever dream of, only to plunge downward into

deeper abysses of despair.
 
With Hap, she had come so close to having

everything she ever wanted and she cried bitter tears when she finally

accepted that he was gone.
 
But then she had found Tom and she knew he

would never leave her.
 
He gave her Kentwood Farm and passion and true

love, and suddenly all that, too, was disappearing, like smoke in a

darkening sky.

It seemed to Pat that fate stalked her, deliberately snatching away

every shred of happiness she found.
 
It wasn't fair.
 
Boppo had always

told her she was special and a special person deserved to be happy.

And yet when she got those things she yearned for, her pleasure lasted

no longer than a mouthful of cotton candy.
 
Someone always ruined it

for Pat.
 
Something always made her cry.
 
And she didn't know why.

After his conviction and sentencing, Tom went with "the chain"-all the

prisoners from the Fulton County 'all handcuffed and chained together

on a bus-bound for the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Center at

Jackson Prison.

He wasn't there long.
 
On October 25, 1974, Ed Garland filed a motion

for a new trial.
 
He cited twenty-nine errors by the court to

substantiate his request.
 
It was a standard ploy, something any good

criminal defense attorney would do, but Tom pinned all his hopes on the

thought of a second trial.
 
The motion for a new trial meant he could

be summoned back from prison to the Fulton County jail, and Pat

insisted that that be done at once, even though facilities in Jackson

were considerably more modern and comfortable than the crowded county

jail; she wanted him close by.
 
Fulton County Sheriff LeeRoy N.

Stynchcombe was given official orders to travel to Jackson and return

with Tom Allanson.

Once he got over the shock of his conviction, Tom held on to an

impossible dream that he might be released on bond by Christmas, 1974,

pending his appeal.
 
He had been locked up in the Fulton County jail

for 103 days.
 
The approaching holiday season made things, if possible,

worse.
 
His request for release on bond was refused.

Pat had great difficulty accepting the fact that Tom had been found

guilty.
 
The shock she showed the night the jury came back with their