What? Damn. He was escaping! Behind me I was aware that Tom Beardsley was shuffling through the photos I’d just given him.
Dr. Bridle saved the day. “Dr. Marana, I’m sorry our presence has upset you. We merely thought we could bring some additional insight, should you need it, by relaying our initial observations and presenting you these photographs…and other evidence. And answering any questions you might have about the condition in which we found the body. But indeed you have conducted a most thorough examination of Jake Stowall.” Bridle’s smooth talk halted Marana in his departure, and he turned back. She remained calm and sweet under the weight of what I took to be his furious gaze. I envied her ability to do so. I wanted to slap the haute off his face.
I needed to reassess Dr. Bridle. She knew full well he was smitten, and she was using it. Well, why not? He was a fool.
The fool collected himself and returned to the table.
“Perhaps once you have had a chance to examine the contents of what I’ve brought you, especially vials number three and four and the two sealed slides I’ve included, you will see why we feel there is something sinister about Jake Stowall’s snakebite wound. You have a completed copy of my lab report as well, and a copy has been sent to the state Herpetology labs, just in case we have discovered a new and even more deadly form of rattlesnake--one with the capacity to kill large mammals in a single bite and wreak great havoc in the process.”
Now, that was clever sarcasm.
Marana’s perfect complexion shaded red, and he shifted his weight from one foot to the other, then back again. His eyes softened a bit. Yes, he was definitely smitten and definitely still hopeful.
I looked down at the floor to conceal an irrepressible grin and remembered I was wearing a mask.
“What’s this?” Tom Beardsley asked from behind me. I turned toward him.
“There, hidden in the leaves away from the body, that shiny silver object. Isn’t that some sort of hypodermic needle?”
“Good eyes, sheriff,” I said after peering more closely. He was holding one of the pictures taken at some distance from the body itself. I frankly hadn’t noticed the bright object on my review.
The skinny horseman snarled, “I’ll need a copy of those pictures. Why don’t I take them and we’ll get them back to you after we’ve reproduced them.”
I said, “No need, Detective Mosby. I contacted the Pinto Springs PD recently and let them know pictures and a transcript of my observations were on the way. I’m sure you’ll find our office has already forwarded them to your agency at their request.”
Beardsley quickly stashed his set and moved away.
Mosby’s anger was palpable as he spat, “Why don’t you send your men back to the ‘scene of the crime’ Detective Beardsley? Do the work the way you should have done it originally, three weeks ago. I’m sure you’ll find nothing has been disturbed in that brief time of neglect.” But of course it hadn’t been Beardsley’s investigation originally and Mosby knew that.
The Cleveland County junior detective was unfazed, responding pleasantly, “Good idea, Detective. We’ll do that right away.” I smiled under my mask. Maybe he did have a future with the sheriff’s department.
Dr. Marana turned and flew out of Exam Room #3. I made eye contact with Dr. Bridle for the first time since the procedure had begun. She winked and smiled.
At least the results of the exam were “open and ongoing.” A small victory. Gerry must have heard it all, because she was beaming as she joined us in our departure. Her brother had just been handed the reins. We chatted our way back up to the surface and went our separate ways.
Chapter 16: Family
Tuesday, October 7
Matt hollered to me from somewhere in the house, “Hey, you keeping your log up to date on all these trips and luncheons?”
He was right. I needed to do some serious paperwork. At least I’d been keeping thorough notes of activities and times.
A thought popped into my mind. I needed to start a timeline of what I knew. Something I could carry with me. I began searching for the spare pocket-calendar that I’d stashed away. Found it. Began noting what I knew.
Using color coding and the Dewey Decimal System, of course. A PI’s version.
But Matt was talking about my financial records.
“Tonight.” I called back, hoping to appease. I’d work on that side of the business another time.
“I need your help on this Douglas v. Douglas case. Are you almost done with your quilt project?”
The neighbors would begin to complain, not to mention know more of our business than they should, and somehow I knew it would be me who would get up and join him even though I was in our office. A guy thing.
I headed down the hall toward the kitchen where I thought Matt was finishing cleanup after another feast. Constant Wisdom was by my side. He was hoping for more scraps from dinner. “We’ve done that, Pal. Scraps are gone,” I muttered to him as we walked side by side. He was not deterred. Hope springs eternal. Maybe we should have named him Hope. But that was a girl’s name.
“What?” Matt hollered again, and I realized he was located behind me. I did an about face and headed back down the hall toward the spare bedroom to the sound of Wisdom’s moan. What was Matt doing in there?
“You know I think there’s something strange about this genealogy. Come take a look at this.”
He’d pinned it to the wall next to the bed. Good guy. I took my place next to him, ignoring the magnificent quilt that called like a siren from a sea of colors for me to look at it. Just one little look, it won’t take long…to get lost for a day or a week or the rest of your life in my designs and colors and intricate stitching.
“You okay?” He was staring down at me, frowning.
“Of course. What did you want me to see?”
“Some serious inbreeding in this family tree. Lots of cousins marrying cousins.” The phone rang in our office. “Check it out,” he tossed back at me as he left to catch the call.
“Inbreeding?” I muttered to Wisdom. “What’s he mean?”
Matt had pinned the genealogy at eye level on the west facing wall—his eye level. So I was craning my neck. It spread eight landscape sheets across—about seven feet--but only two sheets high. It covered about ten generations of Stowalls vertically, but numerous families horizontally. I scanned the names on the huge chart.
I found Geraldine Patrone on this genealogy. Her maiden name, Beardsley, was tied somehow with the Stowalls. “I wonder if this means my one hope for impartiality at the morning’s postmortem had a conflict of interest”, I wondered aloud.
I had no idea if Matt was hearing me, but it helped to verbalize my thoughts. I often used Wisdom as a sounding board because the results were about the same as with Matt.
“That was lawyer Henson. He wants us to serve papers on some guy in Del Mar. Another deadbeat father. Can you handle that one? I’ve got the continuation of the Fletcher court case tomorrow a.m.”
I’d jumped. He loved sneaking up on me when I was deep in thought. He assumed a position behind me and I smiled and leaned back. It helped with my neck.
We worked with several area lawyers, Henson was one of them.
“I guess I can.” I really didn’t like serving people. It could be dangerous. “I think I need to make a duplicate of this so I can mark it up with highlighters. Did you hear that Gerry Patrone is a member of this Stowall family. Amazing.”
“I already copied it, just haven’t taped it together. The sheets are in your inbox. Did you notice the number of times your gal Ada is listed on this?”
“Where...”
“Third generation up. Here, and here, and here.” He pointed to her name with a purple highlighter. I took it from him and underlined the three entries.
“She married a Mark Stowall. Then the next year, Mark’s brother, Luke. Two of Victoria’s sons. Wow. Curiouser and curiouser,” I muttered.
“Yeah. Mark dies December 1965, then his
brother Luke marries sister-in-law Ada. January 1966. A month later. Sound suspicious? Remind you of Hamlet? Here, have fun coloring. I have to pay some bills. There goes the phone again, probably for you.”
Hamlet? He shoved a fist full of highlighters at me and disappeared again. I dusted off my knowledge of Shakespeare. Oh yes, Hamlet’s father and uncle…and his mother. Queen Gertrude, the “adulterate beast”.
But not an adulteress. My English Lit instructor had stressed that difference. Adulterate means to be changed to a worse state by mixing. By mixing Uncle Claudius’ seed with Hamlet’s father’s seed—in Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude.
So was Ada childlike? She was very young when all this happened, but...after years of complicit acts? Concealing Eddie. Did Ada die from her innocence?
And was Matt suggesting that Luke killed Mark? Hmmm. Luke, the second born, maybe jealous of his older brother? It’s certainly a classic motive. But…so is love.
“Might not be so unusual, brothers loving the same woman, I mean,” I muttered to Wisdom. “They were all so young. Look, Mark Stowall died when he was twenty. And Ada was widowed about the same age. And Luke was just eighteen. I wonder what Mark died from.” Wisdom had no answers. I absentmindedly rubbed the top of his head and behind his ears where the softest fur was.
I briefly looked down and noted that he was staring at the white wall before him. At nothing. He could do that quite comfortably. Nothing was a good thing to stare at when you were a dog being stroked. Or a PI contemplating. I was no longer seeing the names on the chart.
Matt returned. “I was wrong. It was for me. The County Water Department wants me to consult on some vandalism in the morning. I pushed it to afternoon. Have you looked at the quilt yet?”
I turned away from my blind inspection of the genealogy and stood next to him by the bed, inhaling deeply to reengage my brain.
Pointing, he began. “Remember we thought square one was a reference to Adam and Eve?”
“Sure, a male and female figure standing either side of an apple tree. Make’s sense,” I mumbled, still stroking the dog’s ears, who had closely mirrored my movements so we could stay connected. “The male figure is made of blue materials. The female figure of pink. They’re both smiling. Obviously in Paradise.”
“Then, square two must be Cain and Abel. Right? Two guy’s fighting on the ground?”
I stared. Two guys fighting. I leaned closer, stopped stroking the dog. One of the fighters had a small x over his one visible eye. “One of them has stopped fighting. He’s dead.” My head snapped back toward the genealogy—and thoughts of Hamlet.
Matt said, “Bingo. Mark. The dead guy could be Mark and the one on top, the winner of the battle, could be Luke.”
“So…we think Luke may have killed his older brother, maybe over Ada. So there would be a police record somewhere. At least an investigation of the event.” What was that date again? I checked. “December sixty-five.”
“Noted.”
“I’ll check the Cleveland County Times. Should have an article, ‘Local Boys Fight to the Death’, something like that.”
“Agreed.”
I said, “And now…I can see that in square number three the male figure looks different, taller and bigger, with blond hair instead of brown. So square number one is Ada and Mark in Paradise, square number two is Luke killing Mark in a fight, and square number three is Luke and Ada around the apple tree. Only this time there’s a snake dangling from a branch. And Ada isn’t smiling. I bet the snake is Luke’s sin. Their one way ticket out of Paradise.”
“Possibly. But check out the female figure in squares one and three. Do you see anything different in them?” The phone rang in our office again, and Matt rushed off to answer it. He was using Marine words as he went.
I peered at the two Ada figures. Her stomach. It was slightly bigger. So was she pregnant by the second marriage? Or was this variation merely a consequence of the difficulties of creating with fabric, as in the art of appliquéing?
And the next question was, when was Eddie born? But I didn’t have to look at the genealogy to know that Eddie wasn’t listed on it. I’d already noted this, while blindly staring at it.
“I’m going to call Gloria, Wisdom. Maybe nurse Gloria can help me with Ada’s medical history. Abigail did say her mother worked at the Cleveland Hospital. I better practice her last name.” And I began saying Pustovoytenko over and over in my head. I should have practiced it aloud.
I would make several phone calls.
Things got complicated on the first, when I called the Cleveland County Times to discover the newspaper had a two month wide hole in its archival records. From December 1964 through January 1965.
So no info on the death of Mark. And no wedding announcements of either marriage.
My next call was to Gloria and I totally flubbed her last name, twice.
Gloria Pustovoytenko agreed to meet with me during her lunch time tomorrow. She was reluctant, but finally agreed to let me view Ada’s medical records. I was frankly surprised. She would definitely be bending the medical ethics rules. So I assumed she wanted to find out what happened to Ada as much as the quilters did. And her daughter Abigail was one of them.
Then I called Gerry Patrone and Hannah Lilly and invited them along. I had some special plans for these two women that I was hoping field experiences might help move forward.
Chapter 17: Ada’s Suffering
Wednesday, October 8.
I finished serving deadbeat dad in Del Mar by one--an onerous chore made more so by the necessity of chicanery and deceit, and the sense of personal danger which was always a part of the activity.
In California, and probably other states as well, the documents must be visible to the person being served, in other words, not in an envelope. If the individual refuses to accept service, flees, or closes the door, etc., and this individual has been positively identified as the person to be served, the documents may be “drop” served, and it’s considered a valid service.
I was lucky. The guy slammed the door in my face after answering that I had his name right, so I dropped the papers where I stood, rang the bell once more and walked away.
No confrontation. No threats. Nice and easy.
Then I drove up into Cleveland County to meet Hannah and Gerry at the Hospital on Charles Street North. There was also a small Cleveland Community Clinic on Tio Pico Road in the southern part of the county, but that one didn’t have an Intensive Care Unit and Gloria Pustovoytenko was in charge of the hospital ICU.
My latent fear of the white truck with the rammer attached had receded to the point that I didn’t think of it until I crossed the southern border of Cleveland County on I-13. Then my heart began a low, steady thumping and I found myself searching every intersection along the route. Relieved, I finally spotted the hospital and quickly pulled into the three story attached parking structure.
The ICU was on the third floor, so I parked on that level and walked toward the clearly marked entrance. The old parking structure was gray and damp and made me feel melancholy. Not a good entrance into a world where life was on the line for so many, I mused. But hospitals were expensive to build and just as expensive to maintain. So given our current economy, old it would no doubt stay. At least it wasn’t rainy today. Just threatening.
Gerry and Hannah were waiting just inside, Gerry in another semi-formal outfit with matching purse, this time all in blues and sans the opera cape, and Hannah in a casual outfit similar to my own, a subdued gray and white pantsuit. My pantsuit was black on gray, with a string of onyx beads.
After solemn hellos the three of us traversed several long corridors then turned right toward a final branch that ran directly in front of the intensive care units.
The left side of this hallway held small groupings of chairs. No one was sitting in them, but a couple of gatherings of people stood staring at what appeared to be the right wall, about thirty and sixty feet away. They were worried looking, caught between
hope and grief. As we neared the first group I realized these people were peering through large viewing windows, looking directly into the ICU’s. Now I understood the guard and nurse’s station at the beginning of this corridor. This was where families could gather to gaze upon their loved ones and send them their prayers if they prayed.
On some levels it seemed a strange practice, perhaps unwise, perhaps intrusive. But I thought the viewing windows allowed loved ones the illusion of closely guarding the patients currently under care without interrupting the activities of their nurses and occasional doctors.
My heart began objecting to what I might see through the windows as we approached. But thankfully there were no great puddles of blood forming under patients’ beds, or broken bones sticking out of twisted limbs, or multicolored bruises on display. There were, however a lot of tubes and wires running from comatose-looking old people hooking them to eerily lively monitors blinking red and green and blue-lighted numbers and squiggly lines—like science fiction screen savers.
Someone needed to tell the IT guys this wasn’t a party. I wondered if Ada had ever been kept in one of these rooms for the world to ogle. Abigail’s mom emerged from a small office facing the patients in ICU One and she quickly joined us.
In a stern librarian’s voice head nurse Pustovoytenko said, “Ve must to go to Records. Dis way.”
Her Ukrainian accent was so strong I had trouble understanding what she’d said, but when she turned to walk away Gerry and Hannah followed, so I did, too. We walked back the way we’d come, and took an elevator down four stories. My gut began objecting again—it has a mind of its own—not the morgue, don’t take me to the morgue again.
But of course, yesterday’s morgue was miles away.
And this first subterranean level was a different kind of morgue, an archive—a kind of morgue but of records, not people. The three of us followed a silent Gloria down more twisty corridors. I wondered if I should drop bread crumbs. I also wondered why we couldn’t have met Gloria somewhere on the first floor. Save us a lot of time and walking. But I had to admit her time was more valuable than mine, and I remembered this was her lunch hour we were using.
Ada Unraveled Page 11
