Luke was keeping people in as well as out.
I snapped a picture of the line of sight, which ran from the front door to the back door, passing through the living room and the kitchen on the way.
On the immediate left, as you entered the house, was an interior wall, upper half wallpapered and lower half beadboard paneled and with a thin chair rail divider. These were not recent interior design additions. These were decorating efforts of a much earlier time, maybe before Eisenhower. The entranceway wall turned left into another hall leading to other rooms.
I knew from our walk-around of the yard Wednesday that there were probably four downstairs rooms: on the right, the living room in the front and maybe a den at the back; and on the left, maybe an office or bedroom in front—behind the pre-Eisenhower wall--and a sizable kitchen beginning straight ahead and flowing to the left in the back. Somewhere off to the left off of the invisible left-right hallway would no doubt be a bathroom and laundry room.
The stairway up to the second level wasn’t visible from the front of the house, so I wasn’t sure what side of this small house it would be situated on.
I also wasn’t sure if there were two or three rooms on the second floor, but the sloped roof made me think it was a much smaller space than the main floor.
And then there was the basement. I was determined to visit that space as well, before we left this house of pain.
Hannah would trail behind me as we explored, asking occasional questions and using fairly sophisticated crime scene terminology, reminding me she was probably brilliant. She’d obviously prepared for this exploration overnight.
The living room was about twelve by fifteen and occupied by a scattering of dilapidated cloth furniture, most of which faced toward the rear wall at a small, analog television.
Soiled doilies covered the filthy arms of the couch and one chair. Next to the chair was a listing table lamp. I guessed the couch had once been aquamarine, and the styling and color loosely dated it to sometime in the 1950s or ‘60s.
This front room was cheerless, frozen in time. It spoke to the Luke Stowall lifestyle. Uninviting. Not expecting company. Raised high enough off the ground to prevent snooping. Never washing your windows provided extra privacy.
Through the dingy side window glass I could see the vacant lot we’d traipsed across. The fall field mirrored the sorry interior. A couple of miserable Cleveland County deputies peered soddenly in at me through the front window.
I read their minds. They hated that I was inside, working their crime scene, warm and dry.
Hannah told me she’d done a quick online check before arriving and had learned the house was built in 1928, long before Luke and Ada. She added that the home had first been Jake and Victoria’s.
That explained the choice of entryway wallpaper, faded peach-colored Oriental birds on bamboo in a swirling aquamarine background. Chinoiserie.
I had trouble wrapping my mind around the possibility that everything inside the house was at least fifty years old.
I muttered, “Where’s Eddie? Did he let them in?”
Hannah turned to face me so others might not hear. “I know they tried to get Victoria to agree to a warrantless search, but she wouldn’t. Anne called me about this. Your cover story about representing Victoria was almost blown, until Anne convinced her mother to allow the search.”
Anne, one of the Stowall daughters.
“Victoria still owns the house, then?”
“Yes. I guess Luke and Ada never could scrape the money together to buy it. Anyway, CCSD had already moved forward to get the warrant approved by a judge. The grounds for the request came from the neighbors across the street. They called to complain about some “snooping” going on around the house. That would be us, of course. When the man was questioned further he started blabbing about hearing all sorts of violence for years. The judge signed the search warrant late yesterday. Victoria’s agreement to allow the search came a few minutes later. Anne says she’s sorry.”
I said, “So the daughters are okay with the investigation of their family?”
“Well, Anne is.” Hannah glanced around nervously.
I stepped back to take one more picture of the living room, this one from the kitchen doorway. In the process I backed into Gerry.
“Follow me,” she whispered cryptically. We did, down the short hallway toward the left side of the house and the other front room. We stepped quickly into the small room, the one that lay behind the beadboard wall. Inside we found Ada Stowall’s quilts and sewing supplies.
We were in Ada’s quilting room.
The walls were lined with shelving. The shelves held dozens of clear plastic containers filled with cuts of fabrics, arranged by color. Scraps, materials by the yardage, and fat quarters.
Fat quarters are pre-cut bits of fabric, measuring twenty-two by eighteen inches, folded into neat squares and tied with leftover ribbon. Small fabric shops had long sold the remnant at the end of a bolt this way. And now even the giant chains were doing this, selling scraps for a dollar or two in stacks displayed below the fuller bolts of gaily colored print.
Fat quarters were to obsessive compulsive quilters what fudge was to OC dieters.
I had plastic containers of my own, down in my walk-out basement. But I could always use more.
I knew Ada’s fabrics would be unique. She had accumulated them over a long lifetime, no matter how deranged that lifetime had been. And the array of stored and cataloged quilt-goods surrounding me now no doubt contained some valuable examples of early twentieth century cloth.
I confess I wasn’t consciously hearing Tom who had rejoined us and was now telling me he’d gotten both digital and 35mm pictures throughout the house. That he’d told the boys they couldn’t smoke on the premises. And he’d taken pictures of the bottoms of their shoes. Which was when he made us take off our booties and let him photograph the bottom of ours.
On some level I must have heard him, because I can remember these comments, but at the time his voice was as faded as Ada’s living room furniture.
Tubs of priceless fabric all neatly sorted and labeled in a neat handwriting. Might as well have been gold. I knew, as I gazed drunkenly at this treasure that I would never leave the Quilted Secrets. I had to be an heir to some of this. Greed. Greed was enveloping my mind.
“Rache?”
Maybe Ada had librarian blood in her veins. I was in the quilting zone, and I can’t honestly tell you how long I stayed there. It could have been seconds. It could have been hours. It’s all a blur.
“Are you all right, Rachel?”
Ada’s blue and green materials were carefully folded and stacked on one wall, her reds and yellows on another, and purples and oranges on the third. The fourth wall held her sewing machine…sewing machine?!
She cheated? Ada used a sewing machine? Hand quilters don’t use sewing machines. Ever! Absolutely not….
“Uh, Ms. Lyons? Are you okay?” It was Detective Tom, detecting that I wasn’t all there.
“What? Oh, sure, go on Tom. And stop calling me Ms. Lyons. It’s Rachel.”
“Yes ma’am.”
Oh yeah. He was at work.
Then I realized he’d closed the door behind us so he could share secrets.
Okay I was back. I noticed Hannah seemed a little distracted still. It was probably her extra brain power making it harder for her to pull back from the fabulous array of….
“I need to let you know what we found in our early run-through. Forensics came up with a ton of hair and blood samples, and from an initial examination the hair wasn’t all from Luke, Eddie or Ada. ”
“Where?”
“Upstairs in the master bedroom. On the stairs. In the living room and kitchen.”
Hannah said, “How do you know that? How do you know the hair didn’t belong to the family members? It hasn’t been tested yet, has it?”
“No, of course not. We know because Luke had mostly gray hair. And Ada and Eddie, of course the
ir hair is different. They found hair from all of them, of course, various places around the house. Some of it was bleached blond and some dyed red.”
A knock on the door interrupted us, and Tom hurried to open it.
“Captain wants you,” a tall blond uniform snapped.
As he left, Tom turned and shrugged apologetically, then mouthed ‘Broward’.
Bleached blond? Dyed red? Had other women been upstairs in Ada and Luke’s bedroom? Or for that matter, even their dirty living room. That wasn’t fitting my impression of them. I was thinking they were mostly reclusive. And what did Tom mean that Ada and Eddie’s hair was ‘different’?
Then I remembered the recent missing women and my sleepless night worrying what I’d stepped in.
I said, “Okay ladies, we better get going.” I had a sense of urgency.
Hannah said in a dreamy voice, “Who’s going to get all this?”
Gerry answered, “Victoria would, or some other close relative. Maybe she’ll share it among us.”
I walked out into the hall, noted the open door to a bathroom, another to a laundry room, and only half-heard Gerry say as she followed us, “You don’t know yet, do you?”
But I was already entering the kitchen where I spotted a deputy leaning over a long row of paper lunch bags on a back counter, like the ones kids used, only white. He opened the one in front of him, and his face screwed up in disgust. “Evidence,” he mumbled, and resealed it.
Good grief! They’d left some of the evidence bags just laying around for anyone to breathe on and otherwise contaminate?
Biting my tongue, I swerved into what turned out to be a small den off the kitchen--the room located on the back side of the living room.
A fragrance hit me. It smelled strongly female. I glanced around as Hannah eased up behind me.
“Smells like makeup,” she said. “What is this? A bedroom, a den?”
I said, “Or office. It’s got furniture for both a bedroom and an office. I think this room is actually bigger than the living room. Maybe longer. What do you think?”
“Maybe it was supposed to be a family room.”
I said, “Back in the twenties, maybe it was the original living room, while that room in the front was supposed to be the parlor.”
The thought floated in the perfumed air. I stepped around a full-sized bed that was shoved up close to a couch, so close you couldn’t really sit down on it anymore. A small desk and a man’s bureau were right by the entrance. To the back of the room was a small bathroom.
Gerry joined us and she eased the door to the kitchen nearly closed as I snapped pictures. I didn’t want the handful of deputies and cops in the kitchen to hear our remarks either. My eyes ran over odd items lying about, on the desk, on a small bed table, on the bureau.
“I think this room is probably being used by Eddie now,” Hannah said.
I nodded.
It had obviously been touched by a woman’s hand, however. There was a cheeriness to it I didn’t think Eddie would be capable of. The newly inserted bed was covered with a colorful quilt I assumed was one of Ada’s. I studied it briefly. It was an ordinary block pattern of reds and yellows.
I said, “He slowly moved himself upstairs as he got more clearheaded and braver.”
Hannah wasn’t up to speed. “Upstairs?”
Gerry said, “He was caged, in the basement.”
I heard Hannah gasp. We did a quick review.
“Look at the darling little statue.” Gerry was standing next to the man’s bureau.
She’d picked up a four-inch-tall, porcelain statue of a black and white dog, with large floppy ears and comically large eyes. It was a parody of a Dalmatian and it spoke of innocence and playfulness, not the working dog that was a fireman’s companion.
There was an old label still stuck to the dog’s chest, proclaiming its maker, “CHINA”. Taking it from Gerry, I examined it more closely. One floppy ear was chipped and there was a crack around its middle. The China dog had been broken in half and glued back together long ago. And his tail was missing.
Keepsakes don’t last long in a drunk’s house.
“Ada’s,” I said softly. The porcelain dog was Ada.
Eddie must think it symbolized Ada, too. Maybe it was Eddie who was decorating the room now.
We were all whispering now. Out of respect, I supposed. I finally realized she still had her hand on top of the bureau, pointedly?
I moved back toward her, returning my attention to it and to the objects on its top--a small lamp, a handful of paperbacks, some candy wrappers.
Finally I saw it, a lone framed photograph. Mindful that we shouldn’t be touching anything, I picked it up, my fingers barely able to feel it through the latex. The picture was of a pretty black woman, light-skinned but definitely of African heritage, wearing a yellow sundress. The sundress dated the photo, sending it back in time to the 1950s or ‘60s.
“Who…” I began, but quickly realized. It was Ada. The woman in the photo had a large bruise on her right shoulder. And she had “different” hair, cut in a short Afro.
“Ada was African-American?” I asked.
“You didn’t know?” Hannah.
“Biracial, actually. Maybe even multiracial,” Gerry said.
I mused how political correctness had submerged that potentially telling piece of evidence. Or were we three women just failing to systematically communicate with each other. I put that job on my list.
Because, frankly, it was a little sweet that Ada and Eddie’s color didn’t rise to the top as information I needed.
“What color is Eddie?”
“About the same, maybe a little paler. Luke is almost all Caucasian.”
Hannah said, “What do you mean almost?”
So Hannah had never met Luke either.
“There’s talk of Indian blood in the Stowall clan.”
“Which Indian? Our Indian, or the real Indian?” I said.
“Point taken.” She smiled. “Native American. Speaking of points, I should have made a point of telling you about her heritage. But I thought you could tell from the hospital pictures.”
I thought back to Ada’s files. “They were old grays and sepias. And they zeroed in on specific wounds. I don’t remember ever seeing a full picture of her face.”
Hannah mumbled, “Why do black women suffer so?”
Gerry said softly, “Same reason all women suffer.”
But I was wondering if that was true, that all women suffered for the same reasons black women did.
And then it came to me, the parallel that had been running around inside my brain looking for a way out.
“Like slaves,” I said. “They lived like slaves.” They nodded in agreement. I carefully placed the picture down on the bureau.
I was curious about the smell in the room when we’d first entered it. I headed for the bathroom and looked for cosmetics of any sort. I finally spotted an old, cloth pouch on a small table, filled with lipsticks and rouge. It had to have been Ada’s.
I said, “Do you think this room was Ada’s once?”
Hannah said, “I think Eddie is gathering some of his mother’s belongings.”
“It may be an act of grieving,” Gerry said.
But then I pointed out the sprinkles of face powder still on the back of the basin.
Eddie was using his mother’s makeup. This was disturbing on several levels. I made eye contact with Gerry. The final outcome of this imprisoned and brutalized man’s treatment could end up going a couple of ways; he could slip from pitiful to increasingly deranged, and maybe even dangerous right before his loving aunt’s eyes.
But I didn’t say that. I kept the thought to myself.
We left the room, feeling the weight of our inspection. Tom appeared in front of me. He motioned us to follow and led us up the narrow staircase sandwiched between the living room and Eddie’s room. The house had fallen silent behind us and I realized that the kitchen was now empty. I wondered if the
donut eaters had taken a lunch break—probably gone out for more donuts. I glanced at my watch. It was eleven.
On our way up I also thought that I needed to find a way through the door I’d just noticed on the far side of the kitchen, the one I thought might lead to the basement.
Chapter 28: Blue Room
The stairs twisted at a landing and doubled back on themselves to end on a short hall at the top. There were only two rooms on this floor that I could see, both behind closed doors, one to the right and the other to the left--which would place the rooms at the front and the back of the house instead of on the sides. A full bathroom was centrally located between them, door open.
I turned to the right, the back of the house, reasoning that would be the location of the master bedroom. But Detective Tom, who had stationed himself in front of the bathroom, thereby giving us no indication of which way to go, pointed the other way. I switched directions and opened the door on that end. A layer of gray dust came away with my latexed hand. Fingerprinting powder. I wiped my gloved hand absently on a tissue from my backpack.
First impressions are all-important and I reminded myself to expand on the short notes I was jotting as soon as possible after this visit. What I was seeing now was beyond disturbing. We had stepped into a different dynamic.
The room was a fair size for such a small house. One window faced toward the front of the house, or east, and a smaller one looked south toward the side with a neighbor. Both were cloudy with years of dirt. Between them was the bed, tucked close to the south wall, but far enough away to allow a small side table. A closet door, standing ajar, was on the other side of the south facing window.
After making space for the others, I drew a little map of the room on my pad and snapped more pictures, then looked around.
I spotted an assortment of clothes in the closet, some hung and some lying piled on the floor. A combination of men’s and women’s. A mostly empty shoe bag hung crookedly on the inside of the door. On the west wall, immediately right as you walk in the door, was a lady’s dresser with an assortment of odds and ends on top.
Ada Unraveled Page 18