“That’s when the fights—who-who--between my mother and father began.
She stopped.
I said what she was having difficulty saying. “He’d suggested sterilization. But Mark? Luke? They weren’t…” I began.
“No. This had always been a burning question of mine, Rachel. So recently when I asked her again, Martha told me she overheard why the two oldest boys weren’t done, during one of those screaming fights between them. Martha thinks our mother might have even been pregnant again, with Sarah.
“The first one Jake wanted to sterilize was Mark. Because…Mark was beautiful. No. That wasn’t it…who-who. Because….”
She stopped. Then restarted.
“It’s hard, Rachel. It’s hard to share this. But…Mark was only our half-brother. Martha says she heard in that terrible fight sometime around Sarah that mom had loved another boy, in high school. It was…she got pregnant, and that beautiful boy refused to marry her. But my dad did. My dad Jake had loved her like a puppy all through their childhoods. And…she accepted his offer of marriage…to save herself from the shame.
“He was a lot of weak and terrible things, but he loved us—in his own way.”
She had made her peace with her family. I found myself turning my face away from Matt, feeling that if I made contact with his lovely blue eyes I’d start crying.
Anne continued.
“So, even though it was natural that my dad decided Mark should be sterilized first—he was the oldest, almost fifteen at the time—my mother knew dad’s real reason…that Mark wasn’t his son. Mark belonged to another man.
“Anyway, with the boys being so close in age, dad probably resented that his son wasn’t the first born. Being the first born has great significance, Rachel, even today.
“Finally my mother agreed, as long as Luke was sterilized at the same time. That slowed him down. Stopped the whole discussion, for a while.
“But, you see, my dad…he wasn’t very smart, Rachel. And he believed in that awful doctor…like he was a god. He couldn’t say no to him. It’s strange. Even now I can’t understand why he couldn’t see how evil this medical man was. He was all about destruction, not healing. But my dad…like the worshipers of Hitler…he was a believer.
“But the threat against his own son, Luke, tipped the scales in my mom’s favor for a while, especially after she told dad that if he went ahead with the surgery he would have to tell the other members of the family—the cousins and more distant relatives—what he’d done. Who-who--that he’d had the boys sterilized.
“When dad told the doctor no, their friendship seemed to chill. Dad didn’t invite him to every birthday party any more. Or over the holidays.”
“Martha can’t remember how long it was before the fights started again. Sarah was born, a girl, and of course there was no way to know if she was afflicted with this terrible illness. Females don’t bleed. The males do. The females just carry it, silently.
“When their sons are born is when it becomes obvious that they are carriers.
“Martha says Jake, our father, returned to the subject with a new plan just before her twelfth birthday. Since Mark and Luke hadn’t shown any signs of…hemo…who-who…philia there was no need to sterilize them. That was the reasoning he offered.
“But girls could carry it without any signs. Our mother never heard that implied threat. She thought it was done.
“So, one night…after giving us all sleeping pills in our dinner and after we all went to bed--who-who--he carried Martha out to the shed where the doctor was waiting. That’s where it happened. He used ether, and some surgical knives, Martha said. She was sleepy, but she saw—who-who.
“No hospital would have allowed the procedure. So dad and…I can’t say his name. I hate the sight of him, won’t look at his pictures….”
She stopped again. I filled in the missing pieces. And after Martha, Jake carried Anne outside to the shed. And after Anne, Jake carried Mary.
I’d heard enough. I’d found the truth of what had happened to these poor women. I thought the others would feel that way, too.
“Thank you Anne. I know this was hard. I hope you’ll find sharing these painful memories a healing thing for you.”
Anne said, “But there’s one more thing, the thing with Sarah, her slowness, that wasn’t hereditary either.
“My mother’s reaction to what the doctor and my dad had done all during that long and terrible night made her practically insane. She took the three of us older girls, baby Sarah and Mark away. Who-who--Martha says they stayed in a cabin, up on the peak, for more than a month, as she nursed her girls back to health. She swore she’d never return to him. That she loathed him.
“Luke had refused to join us up in that cabin. This made her very sad. Then fall came. The food she’d brought up to the cabin was running out. Her parents were dead and she had nowhere else to turn.
“Martha says that our dad went down on bended knees to beg forgiveness from her. Promised he’d never touch Sarah. Swore he’d never see the doctor again. But it was all lies.
“When Sarah was ten, many years after the three of us had been sterilized, on—who-who--a cold night in winter, Jake carried her out to that shed. Just like he’d done with us. Only this time mom was away, at a cousin’s wedding. So this time no one was given sleeping pills.
“And Sarah fought, with loud screaming that woke the rest of us. When we raced outside to help her, Sarah came running out of the shed—bleeding from a head wound, crying--who-who--hysterically. Sarah’s burst of courage somehow infused the rest of us, and we scooped her up and hid her in the attic until our mother returned the next day.
“We refused to tell my father or the doctor where she was, no matter what they said. No matter what the threats.
“And we were scared, Rachel. Very scared of that man. We didn’t realize—who-who—that head injuries could turn into mental retardation. We all feel so guilty for not getting help for Sarah sooner. A blood clot.”
She stopped again, to catch her breath. I dared to look at Matt, but he was watching the phone as if it was a coiled snake.
“After all that had happened--who-who—by now my mom was afraid of all doctors. Even though there were more of them in Cleveland County by then, and a good hospital. So, in the following days, when Sarah said she had headaches, and her speech began to slur….”
Victoria didn’t take Sarah to the hospital.
Anne continued. “Martha says when Sarah started having problems at school, not being able to learn, mom fell apart. She lost her spark for life. The only thing that made her happy was quilting.”
“Our dad finally came to see the doctor for what he was. He was a…Mengele. The Auschwitz concentration camp doctor. A torturer. Who didn’t see us as human beings.
“Sometime later, outside in the cold winds, Martha picked up an iron rake and brought it down hard on his back. I have that one vivid memory of him, howling with pain and rage. Then turning his rage on my father. Telling him what a stupid pig he was. Shouting that we were all stupid pigs—who should be sterilized so we didn’t stink up the human race!”
I heard a muffled sound, maybe coughing, maybe crying. I decided it was time to end it.
I said, “I think this is enough, Anne. You’ve been very brave telling me all this. I hope we’ll talk again sometime. But you should rest now.”
“One more thing,” Anne choked out. “Don’t call Martha about this. She was the oldest of us girls. She was the strongest. And now she’s the most damaged. Her hatreds can’t be numbered. It was hard enough on her to share with me. Please, don’t force her to relive this horror further.”
This I could promise.
“I won’t Anne.”
Anne mumbled something into the phone I couldn’t quite catch, and then the line went dead, leaving my pounding heart and me alone.
Until I dared to turn and look at Matt again. He stood, his eyes shining, and I met him in the middle for a long hug. May
be now he understood my obsession with this case.
In the hours after this emotional phone conversation I thought of another question I wanted to ask—what did Eddie look like when he was young? Before the drugs and abuse. Thinking that what he looked like might further support my belief that Mark was Eddie’s father.
And therefore was not Jake’s grandson.
Chapter 52: Ruth’s Message
Hours later, the phone rang again. I checked. It was Geraldine Patrone, the billionaire’s wife. She waded her way into our conversation slowly, as usual, carefully testing the water with first a small toe and then a larger one.
Gerry was careful. Thoughtful.
Finally she came to her purpose. “After you told me about how Eddie looked, at his home, just before your shoot-out, I asked my dad if he had pictures of a younger Eddie.”
Shootout? Was that what they were calling it?
It was more like a comedy of near-fatal errors.
“And?”
“And he said he wasn’t sure. Said there were boxes of photos, and even some that had been put into albums over the years.
“But my mom remembers. She said Eddie was beautiful, just like Mark, only made of many different races, thanks to his mother. She said it made him almost magical looking.”
I hadn’t been able to see any of that in the strange creature standing in the shadows of Ada Stowall’s home.
When I stepped back into the living room, Matt had fallen asleep again in his recliner chair. The channel changed and I jumped. Looked. Sure enough, he was holding the controls. Eyes shut, he was changing the channels with his thumb.
Smiling, I walked out onto the deck to stand with Wisdom by my side, listening for wild sounds from the animal park.
Just a few blocks away, a couple of hills, maybe a small valley.
But the birds were being too noisy. A huge moon was rising out to the east and the birds were rejoicing at the day’s second sun—even as the first sun slipped away in the west. The moon looked as if it were rising out of Texas, big, luminous and full of promise.
Wisdom and me. Listening for the wild things. I stroked the soft fur behind his ears; he pressed against me. We were both seeking comfort.
I turned my mind back to Eddie. Matt had received another call. This one from PSPD Detective Mosby—aka Famine. The skinny black horse.
The house next door to Eddie’s had held two dead bodies: one female cadaver with a broken hyoid (probably the home owner) and a male identified as her boarder.
The woman’s body had been days old; the man’s corpse had been only hours old. That one had had a bullet in it. And a gun lay on the floor nearby.
The gun showed one set of prints, not Eddie’s. So Eddie’s actions against this man could be said to be self-defense. That is, if it didn’t turn out to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Child molesters don’t fare well in prison. He may have decided to take the easier way out.
A small pile of the child’s clothing--socks, shoes, underwear and a Dora the Explorer shirt--was found in the same bedroom with the boarder.
A pediatrician’s examination of the little girl, whose name I will not reveal, showed no evidence of sexual assault, no real physical damage, save some bruises on her upper arms. But, psychological damage aplenty, no doubt.
A child psychologist would assist the parents. She would help them keep the horror of what the little girl had experienced from burying itself deep inside her psyche, like a splinter, where it would surely fester.
Mosby had added, near the end of his call to Matt, that a couple of old-fart deputies had been “early-retired” without the usual gold watch, in retaliation for their stonewalling and corruption. Sounded like the Sheriff was holding his own with the Stowall clan.
And then he’d dropped the bombshell.
In the past hour, Eddie Stowall had disappeared with Mary Stowall. The cop assigned to keep an eye on him had been talking with Martha and Anne in a hospital visitor’s room when Eddie made his escape. Don’t ask me how a man fresh out of hip-surgery gets up and walks out.
There’s not a lot of love lost between cops and child molesters, either. Maybe Eddie was becoming some sort of hero in their minds.
I stroked Wisdom’s soft fur and sighed. He listened.
Mostly I thought of Eddie as a victim. When I honestly reviewed my memory of the Saturday afternoon shootout, I now saw two children in the picture before me, holding hands in the shadows. One child was clearly in shock, the other shockingly scary. I needed to believe I would never have shot him if he hadn’t shot me first.
A call from Harry relieved us of our family worries. His unit wasn’t going into a war zone after all. Instead, he would be coming our way sometime in November for a retraining exercise on California’s Camp Pendleton. We were gleefully dreaming of having his whole family over for Thanksgiving for the first time in several years.
I was pretty sure Ruth would never sew again. Her eyes remained closed to the world even when they were open. Hannah was currently planning to bring her home from the hospital, to the Lilly farm.
Matt swears he’ll get the guy or gal who rammed me on the freeway. But tomorrow is on the way and we’ve got full plates in store, although my meals would be served at home for a few more days.
An hour ago, standing looking down at Ada’s quilt, Wisdom always at my side, I’d become certain; the quilted figure of many colors in the ninth square was Eddie.
Matt has no forgiveness for him. He thinks Eddie should be put away permanently, that he’s too damaged to be trusted.
He’s probably right. If a woman’s soul can be severely damaged by watching her mother be beaten and brutalized—as in the case with Ada--wouldn’t the same thing happen to a man’s soul after watching his father beat and brutalize his mother?
But does having a damaged soul make you evil? Dangerous? Because if it does, then I fear for most of us.
Matt seemed satisfied that we were done with the Stowall mysteries. I wondered how Eddie’s saga would end, or rather begin. Would the Stowall’s bad blood continue to leave stains? Who would Eddie become, out in the big wide world?
A second mystery niggled at me as well. I still wanted to know if Ruth McMichaels ever really had magical powers. I still wondered about the dream I’d had while in a drugged state, recovering from my injured neck, where she mentioned Paul to me for a second time. Had she been communing with her long dead husband, on her hospital bed, and somehow her coma-dreams had slipped into my drug-dreams?
A light breeze lifted my hair. I thought I heard the braying of a zebra and turned my head to better catch the wildness of it.
But it was Ruth.
Love them anyway.
My heart stilled; my hand on Wisdom’s soft coat stayed.
“Love who?”
All of them.
It was the first clear message, the first of many that I would receive from her.
Ruth’s latter-day messages to me had begun. And then the moon rose in all its glory.
###
A Thank You
Thank you for reading my book. If you enjoyed it, won’t you please take a moment to leave me a review at your favorite retailer?
Keep loving reading, Barbara Sullivan.
Additional Books by Barbara Sullivan
Ripping Abigail
Embroidering Andrea.
Brief History
I was raised in the New England area and thus steeped in the local lore which included headless horsemen and witch-dunking. Add those images to my already dark childhood memories due to my parents’ long struggle with alcoholism and perhaps you can see the roots of my writing.
I began writing stories very early. My first book, a mystery, was three and a half pages long, written when I was eight. My mother saved it for me. I found it within the boxes and drawers of memories she kept. Only after her death would I hear from my other relatives that she was thought of as the family historian. I wish I’d found that little mystery befor
e. It would have saved me from years of experimenting in other genres.
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Dedication & Acknowledgement
Grateful acknowledgement is extended to my daughters, sisters and nieces for their patience and support. Without their encouragement I might have given up on the effort.
I also wish to thank the many friends who unstintingly accepted my need to write. Some of you even found a way to help me make my writing better. A special thanks to you.
None of this would have been possible if I hadn’t been rescued decades ago by my brave Marine.
This book is dedicated to Rosalie.
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