It was possible that the couple had lived together without benefit of marriage, until the law was changed, and after that made their common-law marriage official. They could also have gone out of state to marry. But people of those early times didn’t usually treat mixed race couples with respect, let alone do business with them--which would have limited Gordon’s ability to accumulate wealth. Yet he seemed to have been quite comfortable financially.
Or there was another possible explanation. Maybe it wasn’t a mixed race marriage.
In fact, I did not yet know whether Gordon was Caucasian or another person of mixed race—like Jolene.
Matt and I had found several people of Asian descent—with last names such as Kim and Sun—on the genealogy, and an entire branch that consisted of the last name of Washington and Lincoln, as well as a bunch of first names that could easily have been used by early African-Americans. Names like Moses, Dolly, and Athena were all through that Washington and Lincoln branch of Stowalls. Ada’s maiden name on the Stowall genealogy was listed as Johnson. And Gordon’s tree connected very distantly to the primary branches of Stowalls, despite the fact that he carried the famous--or infamous, depending on your perspective--moniker.
The fact that Gordon and Jolene were wealthy and apparently respected members of Cleveland County society led me to believe Gordon was white.
And, although the picture of Ada, the one on top of Eddie’s first floor bureau, showed her clearly to be of African descent, a little pale-colored powder and Eurasian wigs could have made it difficult to tell. Her features were not heavily African. Her nose wasn’t much different from my own. And her lips had that luscious plumpness for which modern white actresses resorted to injections.
Hair…well that was a different matter.
Eddie might well have chosen this picture because it emphasized that African portion of her heritage. But I told myself that frankly none of this was germane to my investigation anyway. So I put the question of heritage aside and concentrated on finding clues that would help explain Ada and Eddie’s maltreatment more directly.
And so it was in Ada’s second book that I discovered that Gordon could be a reasonable man, Jolene could be a wise and caring mother.
Unfortunately for Ada, by her eleventh year too many damaging memories had been planted and the course of her life had been largely determined.
I should note that while the second volume was an on-going diary, Ada didn’t write in it every day. From what I was noticing now, in the first few pages it seemed she was only taking time to record significant events such as achievements at school, holidays and vacations.
So the death of Hazel had had a sobering effect on Gordon and Jolene’s marriage--at least for a while.
That I’d had no idea until early this morning that Ada’s mother Jolene was African-American galled me. It made me wonder what other significant information was being withheld.
As I lay in our second spare bedroom, where I retreat when I can’t sleep, I pondered my anger over this omission. Maybe my anger was the problem. Maybe my anger was more due to the content of these poison-filled, little books, and the frustrating secrecy of the Bee Women. With these thoughts I finally fell asleep.
The phone rang. I stumbled from my bed, reaching it on time to hear someone speak to me in dial-tone.
Not my language. I looked at the display. The number was unfamiliar. I jotted it down, left a note on Matt’s computer, fell back into bed, this time with my husband.
Chapter 31: Squares
Saturday, October 11
I needed a day off from the Stowall family weirdness, so I stayed home, did the mundane things that kept me feeling sane and rational. It was lovely. Until nine.
Will Townsend, our hulking apprentice came to visit.
One of the disadvantages of running your business out of your home was bumping into non-family types while retrieving a cup of coffee in your robe. Sans makeup. He and Matt were conferring in our front office, with the double glass doors. The one adjacent to the front door that we usually use for interviewing clients.
I scooted back down the hall toward our bedroom, only briefly wondering why they were sequestered. Probably planning some more snooping. It never ceased to amaze me how stealthy a guy Will’s size was capable of being. He had probably been svelte in his youth, but now he was…large.
I showered, dressed, and called my son Harry to plan our next visit. Due to leave for the Mideast wars next month, he was at the top of our list. His wife Tammy and their children would remain in North Carolina during his long overseas tour, a decision that would have worried me except her parents lived nearby.
After talking with Will—and sending him wherever he was going--Matt left to deal with a battling husband and wife from Oceanside. One of them had hired a lawyer to sue his spouse—but not for divorce. Some weirdness to do with her allegiance to a rival gang. Matt said it sounded like the lawyer was feeling threatened by them. Might need protection.
That was my Marine’s purpose in life. Protection.
I waved goodbye to Matt, noting my hubby seemed a little preoccupied this morning. Our kiss had been a perfunctory peck.
In fact, now that I thought about it, he’d never cracked a smile all morning. I wrote it off to my paranoid tendencies.
Meanwhile, large Will melted away into the atmosphere.
I smiled at my bit of humor and returned to the important things in life--in the kitchen, planning dinner. Steak or fish?
The living room television announced that a third woman had disappeared from the Cleveland County bar scene. I moved slowly toward the doorway so I could listen better. The woman had been belatedly reported missing by her estranged family, after they’d heard about the one found in the old Iguana graveyard—the one out back of Ada Stowall’s house.
Her parents indicated that she had drug problems and had disappeared before for weeks at a time. Last time they heard from her was mid-summer.
Luke?
A picture of the now-missing Hispanic woman appeared on the screen. The camera zoomed in on her face and what I thought was a scar, or maybe running mascara, turned out to be a small snake tattooed on her left cheek.
Luke and Eddie?
No! I wasn’t going there. The authorities were on top of things. I turned the television off! I was taking a day off! But my feet were thinking for themselves as they carried me down the hall toward the quilt.
Snakes again. What was it with Iguana and snakes? Deep in thought I moved toward the back of the house and into Ada’s Bedroom, the one so dubbed because it contained her quilt and genealogy. Standing at the foot of the bed I reviewed again the figures sewn in the large central medallion with nine squares.
The top three, Ada and Mark happy, Mark and Luke fighting, Ada and Luke unhappy.
The middle three squares…maybe Jake and Victoria with snakes around their feet in the first square, maybe some of their children in the second square, after all?
That second square was the central square of the quilt. I needed to figure out who those four children were.
Maybe Ada had sewn this quilt over a long period, so there were only four children in the middle square because at the time Ada sewed it that was all there were in the family? I ticked them off on my fingers: Jake, Victoria, Mark, Luke…. No, that wouldn’t work. The four figures in the central square were three girls and a boy. The birth order of Jake and Victoria’s children was two boys, then four girls, and finally one more boy.
And the sixth square? Did it hold runaway Ada on an island, with her little son?
Guess work. Just guess work.
My eyes traveled slowly down toward the bottom three embroidered pictures. Enigmas.
Strange squiggles and lines. Strange lines and squiggles. And a doll of many colors.
Concentrate!
Okay. Square seven, bottom left, clearly--was a random design of tangled swirls.
I peered at it harder. And made out a possible cross dangling fro
m the tangles—maybe it was a rosary.
But instead of a string of beads, the cross was hanging from a thin rope of yarn that changed colors as it spun from orange to purple to blue. I sighed. I really had no idea what the pattern meant. Especially since, off a bit from the primary mass of tangles, were two star-shaped jacks.
So was it a child’s game? I sighed again.
Square eight, bottom center, had random randomness with those star-shaped jacks everywhere, some of them split in half, some whole, and pieces of yarn again haphazardly tossed on the ivory background. At the center of this mess were a red splotch and a much larger green splotch.
Incomprehensible is what it was.
Or, perhaps--my librarian brain kicked in—a scientific diagram?
Had Ada embroidered the chemical notation for the disease that afflicted this family onto her quilt?
But I went no further with this thought, because at that moment the light in the room shifted as the sun moved over to the west side of the house. Now streaming though the bedroom window, it brought the topstitching suddenly into relief.
What had seemed random stitching on a par with the random swirls in square seven and eight slowly took on shape. Not a language, not anything meaningful…if you didn’t know the pattern that was now emerging in Iguana. But since I did, I realized quite stunningly it was…Snakes.
The distinct shape of a cobra’s cowl caught my eye first, and at once my brain began looking for others. And I saw them, dozens, large and small, sometimes overlaying each other, sometimes just the head peeking out of a seam or a fold, sometimes attached to complete bodies--their tails twisting and coiling away toward infinity.
I muttered, “Snake heads and….”
A voice growled, “What?”
I jumped a mile off the ground and took a full minute to settle back down—or so it seemed.
“Matt! How many times do I have to tell you not to sneak up on me like that when I’m concentrating?”
“You’re always concentrating.” He tried on a devilish grin. It didn’t fit.
He was feeling playful, which was a relief given my earlier worries. My gaze returned to the quilt as if pulled by a string while he said something I didn’t quite catch.
“What?” I was trying to recapture my thoughts about snakes and….
He said forcefully, “There was a guy at the top of our driveway.”
Now he had my attention.
“He was just hanging around.”
“Mexican gardener? Student Mormon? Extraterrestrial invader?” Working at controlling my frustrations. Failing miserably.
“No. Just a guy.” He turned and walked away. The gloom was back. “Be careful,” he added from somewhere else in the house. Deadly serious.
“Where did he walk?” I practically yelled.
Then my cell phone rang with an invitation to another Stowall autopsy—Luke’s. He’d been found…dead!
Stupefied, I never heard the answer to my question to Matt. And didn’t think to ask questions of the deputy doing the inviting for Tom.
Matt attended this autopsy with me. I barely had time to shower and dress before having to race out the door and up the mountain again.
Chapter 32: Eddie 8
Thursday, October 9
It was Luke again. He had another woman with him. Was this the third or fourth?
And where did he get them? Where did these women come from? They were so like his mother. So weak. So…needy.
Eddie glanced at the top of the bureau, at the object right next to the picture of his mother. He looked back at the ceiling. Listened in disgust.
He sat up and swung his legs to the floor. Noticing how hard his stomach was becoming, he pushed himself up off the bed.
Time to stop Luke. He’s sick of digging holes in the mud. He’s sick of the beatings.
He climbed the stairs and opened the door to his parents’ bedroom for the first time in almost three decades. Luke’s naked sweating body was moving up and down violently on the woman. But the woman wasn’t screaming anymore. She was dead.
It seemed the gun made almost no sound at all. Luke spun to stare in astonishment at his tortured progeny--one last communication that gave Eddie supreme pleasure.
Then monster-man flopped over on top of the woman. Two corpses humping.
Two humping corpses.
It took Eddie an hour to drag them both down the stairs and out the back door of the kitchen, into the raining night. He buried them out back in the cemetery—next to the other humping corpses
Chapter 33: Townsend Report 1
LIRI Log: Will Townsend:
10.11 / 12:00. Visited Red’s Rebel Bar and Grill, spoke with Max Phoenix, regular bartender, says he hasn’t seen the two missing women for a while. But there was a white guy picked up the Mexican woman (#2)—thinks her name is Manuela, Ella for short--just before Labor Day, maybe the 30th of August. White guy was old, maybe in his sixties. Says he’d never seen him before. Says the cops haven’t been to see him.
10.11 / 13:20. Visited Devine Dog Lounge, spoke with owner Stan Klee, says he saw a gray-haired guy a couple of nights ago hanging around Leticia, the third missing woman. Leticia is a regular of Devine’s but owner doesn’t know where she lives. Klee says he’s never seen the gray head before. Doesn’t know his name. Also says cops haven’t been to see him.
Chapter 34: Snake Dance
I behave differently when I’m with Matt. A little less freewheeling, a little more restrained. It’s the same for him. God’s Adam and Eve design at play--two parts of the same whole, one balancing and correcting the other.
But somehow this afternoon we were a little bit off. Or maybe it was just me.
Detective Thomas Beardsley met us outside the double doors of exam room six and in hushed tones filled us in. The first thing we learned was that the “team of gravediggers” they’d brought in to help with the search at Ada’s, unearthed two more women and Luke in the course of the night. Beardsley said what we’d been brought in for today was Luke’s postmortem. This, because of our connection to Victoria Stowall.
Of course, the deputy who’d called us at home had told us this was Luke’s autopsy. But that was all he’d told us. I was eager for more details. I didn’t realize just how eager I was until I said, “Why on earth wasn’t this on the news?”
Tom just shrugged. He looked exhausted.
Then I remembered I’d taken the day off. Which meant keeping the television off. So I really didn’t know if the news about Luke had been on the news.
But I did know that police detectives Mosby and Learner would want copies of the photographs I’d taken in my walk around of the house and any notes I’d made. So I handed two copies of the pictures to Tom, and then apologized for not having any notes yet.
I hadn’t gotten to journaling yet. I said I’d fax my notes in ASAP. Asked him to give the Pinto Springs folks the second copy of the photos.
Matt gave me a look. I wasn’t sure why. I was tired, cranky, and definitely not communicating well with him about what was going on. I reasoned that he wasn’t sharing everything he was doing with me, either.
But it was wrong-headed thinking, and on some level I knew this. On some level I knew I wasn’t managing the mental overload caused by having two apprentices under my wing—that and being in the middle of a complicated murder case for the first time.
Beardsley quickly stowed the pictures in his briefcase.
Tom also told us that the word L U K E that we’d found yesterday had been painted underneath three other types of blood. They were checking with the Cleveland Hospital now to confirm Ada’s blood type, assuming that the oldest blood was hers.
Then Tom led us into the lab anteroom, taking a sharp turn to the right where I was expecting us to go straight. We climbed a narrow set of circular stairs and my blood pressure lowered with each step up. To somewhere more comfortable.
This exam room had an upper theater, which is where we were being escorted.
There would be no horrible smells up high, looking down. And no close-ups of the dead. I was relieved. Matt probably was too, though he never let on.
On the way up, Tom said, “The name of that graveyard is the Stowall Family Cemetery. Records are showing that Ada and Luke were the official keepers of it. Ironic, huh?”
Matt said, “And now Eddie?”
Tom said, “I guess.”
It finally hit me; Luke had been buried in that graveyard—nearby the barflies. Who buried him? Who killed him and buried him?
The only name that came to mind, of course, was Eddie.
I couldn’t believe I hadn’t gone there yet. Where was I--back in that quilt? Still searching for a day off from the Stowalls?
I couldn’t explain my delayed reactions, and it frankly worried me.
He pushed the next door open and we stepped up and into the circular viewing theater. Subtle voices greeted us from down below--transferred to us mechanically and emitted from two speakers on the side walls. The speakers removed us one step further from the very real experience of standing next to the body.
Looking down now I was reminded of the last autopsy, Jake’s, Eddie’s grandfather. And now here we were for his…father’s or uncle’s. The question that followed these thoughts was where was Eddie now?
In my effort to remove myself from the Stowall weirdness I’d lost track of him, too.
Through the dome-shaped, viewing window I saw two steel tables. One held an exposed body.
Tom said, “That’s the second woman, just being sewn up. The path-techs will stuff her into a body bag pretty quickly. Then they’ll prep Luke. He’s on the table nearest us. Still in the bag.”
My stomach did a little flip-flop despite the distance. I was more anxious than I’d realized.
The young detective said in hushed tones, “Marana has ruled that the first two of the women died of heart failure, as a result of a prolonged episode of blunt-force trauma. The third woman is still in route.”
Ada Unraveled Page 21