But they weren’t telling me the truth. I struggled to compose myself.
“Look, it’s okay Rache….”
“No. It isn’t. Tell me what’s happened to Ruth, Matt, or I’ll have to go on thinking she’s really dead and you just aren’t telling me.”
“Rache.” He sighed, and sat on the side of the bed and took my hand. “Ruth had a stroke. She’s still…recovering.”
A wave of guilt swept over me. “If only I’d called sooner. If only I hadn’t been lying around here stoned on pain killers, I could have been helping.”
“Stop it Rachel. You’re not a super hero. You were hurt, too. Someone tried to kill you.” His words made the seat belt welts and bruises across the front of my body ache.
“She thought she was in danger. She kept yelling, for someone to stop it, and…for Paul. It sounded like she was under attack. Or…maybe that was just me, thinking she was in danger. I heard voices in the background.”
His face reflected his confusion. It wouldn’t be until later that we’d figure out it was just Ruth’s television blaring in the next room.
“So, is she able to talk?” I was afraid of the answer.
“Not yet, Rache. She’s still under. They’re keeping her that way, in a chemically induced coma, so her brain can rest and heal.”
Tears began flowing again.
“It isn’t like your mom, Rache. She’ll come out of this and probably stabilize. Just, maybe with some disabilities.”
I almost shook my head, no. Remembered my neck, and muttered, “I’m really messed up, Matt. My emotions. I guess from the meds.”
The tears began flowing again.
“She’ll make it, Rache. It’s hard to die.”
“Not so easy to live, either,” I said.
Chapter 43: Ivy
Hours later I carefully lifted myself off our bed—Matt was finally asleep--and crept back to Ada’s Bedroom.
Ada’s quilt was still spread across the bed, beaming glorious colors up at the world. The genealogy was hanging casually on the far wall.
I had my iPod Shuffle. I’d stuck its little earbuds in my ears and turned Beethoven’s 9th up full blast. His Ode to Joy symphony.
Beethoven’s last symphony and the one he’d written after going deaf. It was his farewell to us, and I’d read both the original poem written by von Schiller and the lyrics of the 9th written by Beethoven. I wanted to understand the full meaning of his powerful creation.
I wanted to understand Beethoven’s farewell message to us—a man who listened to God in His own language, music.
And I wanted to understand the creator of this beautiful comforter. Somehow they went together.
One phrase had stuck with me from the Chorus: “Joy, beautiful spark of God. All men will become brothers under thy gentle wing.”
I prayed it was so as I gazed at the strange multi-racial, multi-sexed figure in the ninth square.
There were so many variations, so many different kinds of people on earth it was hard to imagine us ever coming together in peace.
A memory from that seemingly long ago visit to the Georgina Cole Library came to me as my attention turned to the genealogy—the one Matt had pinned to our wall only a week ago.
I remembered I’d had several photocopies made, including the larger version of the genealogy. Had those things been saved from the accident? I seemed to remember something about them being delivered to the house sometime this past week. I searched our office, found the sheets in a little bundle of stuff, and painstakingly taped it together, my neck screaming for me to lie down.
I told it to shut up.
At last, I laid it out over Ada’s quilt. It hung over both sides of the bed and ran several feet into the room. I pulled up a chair and began searching for Paul, Ruth’s late husband. I don’t know why, except, I just couldn’t seem to let go of Ruth’s screamed words, Paul, wait. As if he was moving away from her.
And maybe he was, as he accepted the fact that she wasn’t going to die after all. That he would have to wait a little longer for them to be reunited.
Me and my fool research. My fool single-mindedness. I should have dropped everything I was doing and run to her aid before entering that library. I would have saved us all. Memory wasn’t always a good thing. Maybe it was better not to….
Oh lord, I was getting tears on the genealogy. I carefully brushed them dry….
Ivy.
A name jumped up at me from under my tears.
I was thinking, look—there’s a Stowall Ivy. Like…. No! Not like. As! The same as. The same Ivy. My great-great-grandmother! What was her name doing…?
I followed the family line beneath her down to my mother. My God. Oh my dear God, I was a Stowall!
Chapter 44: Amber Alert
Saturday, October 18
What woke me was the incessant rain beating against our home. I rose from my bed in a darkness not even the sun could dispel and waited by a window—computer on my lap--for the morning light and for the coffee to brew. Wisdom waited too. Our vigil was finally rewarded and the day began in a dimness that seeped more than brightened, delivering the same dreary message it had for days.
Soon. Soon you will all be washed away.
I searched on my computer for a doctor Marcus Borman. I knew it was pointless. My guess was the doctor who had sterilized the Stowall daughters would have to be in his nineties, if indeed he was still alive.
I wasn’t sure why I was looking for him. The search just seemed to fit my mood—dark and getting darker.
I changed my criteria to just Marcus Borman California. Nothing. Tried again, this time using Marcus Borman anywhere. The name had an unusual spelling. Maybe…. And there it was. The bad doctor had a Twitter account.
Without knowing if I had found the correct Marcus B., I entered the domain of snips and scraps. One hundred and forty characters didn’t allow for much more than snips of info and scraps of news.
The icon this particular Marcus Borman used was an obscure cartoon character, in black and white. His profile summary said he was a loving dad with a beautiful wife.
Surely not the Marcus Borman I was seeking.
I read a few of his tweets. He liked a music group I’d never heard of. He read e-books and played a lot of e-games. I skimmed down, looking for familiar names. Finally I read, “Party for grandpa’s 90th. He says the music’s too loud. #Olddoctorsneverdietheyjustlosetheirpatience”. So there was a grandpa who had been a doctor!
I scrolled down, my excitement urging me on, through pages and pages of tweets—sports scores, celebrity retweets, Instagrams of his cute kids and the occasional Four Square check-in that seemed to indicate that he either lived in Arizona, or visited frequently.
Finally I ran across a tweet that electrified me: “#thatawkwardmoment when your gramps comes home with a snake tattoo and a new bud named Luke straight out of Deliverance.”
The tweet was date stamped to six months ago, late spring of this year. Could Luke Stowall have tracked down Dr. Borman in May or June, and if so, why? I scrolled through another six months of tweets, without finding any more references to Grandpa Borman or Luke, and decided to get on with my day.
But an answer to my question had begun to germinate and eventually would bloom to the thought that maybe Luke and Ada had been arguing over releasing Eddie to the point that Luke was thinking of asking the old surgeon to snip his son’s future progeny.
Thus Ada’s desperate attempt to alert the rest of the world to her son’s existence, by inviting Andrea over for tea. And then Ada was murdered.
But this thought wouldn’t clarify for another week.
I stumbled through an early breakfast with Matt. He had work to do, this time with Will; they needed to earn our keep ferreting out another company villain. The admin offices of a prominent San Diego corporation had been burglarized in the wee hours. The owner and his senior officers had some leads they wanted our private investigations firm to quietly and discretely investi
gate.
We were thinking it was one of the “senior officers”—someone who knew their way around the security equipment already installed--but we weren’t privy to that information. So Matt and Will would begin random observations.
Matt suspected that the culprit might well have gotten all the information he or she wanted in the wee hours and wouldn’t be back for more. He wasn’t up for this assignment, but money was money.
Holding my second cup of coffee, I watched him grab his tackle box from the office closet, the one now used for fishing of a different kind. It held what I carried in my backpack, and more. It held his gun. I shivered, which sent a stab of pain to the back of my brain--where a seed was planted for later in the day, when I would choose to carry my own gun.
I turned on the television, not looking at the screen but listening as I continued to gaze at the dismal weather. I thought about Luke and Eddie and the prescription drugs and wondered yet again whether Eddie had done something that merited being locked away, or was he just a victim, as every one of the hand quilters had been telling me?
I still knew so little about Eddie. Was he a pervert? And what particular perversion was he supposedly guilty of? Or was he just a victim as every one of the hand quilters had been telling me?
Suddenly the television had my full attention. There was another Amber Alert, the U.S. warning system covering child abductions. A little girl was missing.
Stepping in front of the television to listen better, I saw a map on the screen.
“…in Iguana California, up on Cleveland plateau…near Applepine Ridge.”
Near Victoria Stowall and her clan! Near Eddie Stowall and his horrible, little cellar prison!
My mind started racing. I wondered if I should call Hannah, or maybe Gerry, my two quasi-assistants. No. This was my job. I’d been hired to find out the truth about Ada and by extension, Eddie. I needed to find him. I needed to know exactly what he was up to. I was beginning to suspect the worst. Of him. Of the entire Stowall clan. A clan that now included me.
It occurred to me that my thinking was muddled by pain and perhaps I should just tip Tom Beardsley off and let the cops do their job. Of course, they’d already proven how many ways they could mishandle a Stowall investigation. Muddled thinking won out.
I dressed as quickly as my complaining neck allowed, drove up our long driveway, found the back road to the mile-high plateau, and began the climb.
On some level I wasn’t really conscious of, I’d been suspecting that the real reason Eddie Stowall might have been caged in his basement for the past twenty-plus years had more to do with Depo-Provera than two insane parents and their dirty little family secret.
And Depo-Provera was a drug used to chemically castrate child molesters. And now there was a missing child nearby his home.
Chapter 45: Guns
I parked half a block away from Ada Stowall’s stained and faded little house in our current rental SUV and attempted to pull my jumbled thoughts together. The pains in my neck were muted because I’d loaded up on Ibuprofen before heading out. A little walking around and knocking on doors would no doubt take care of that.
Organize, I counseled myself. I’d been here before, of course. But now I needed to see the entire neighborhood.
My eyes prompted my brain in a review of what I knew. Ada’s house of secrets just ahead. A vacant lot on this side. A killer’s cemetery behind the house where three women and the killer himself had been illegally interred. And arrayed on either side of the snaking street were little wooden houses much like Ada’s.
And probably standing in his home, Eddie Stowall. Alone now. Freed from his restraining medications. Maybe looking back out at me, unseen, behind the masking glass of a dirty window.
A trill of shivers ran down my spine ahead of a note of pain.
Wrapped from tree to tree, and pasted on the gloomy structure in several places were strips of gay yellow police tape, as if the police had come by and TPed the place.
The police line had been disturbed. Someone had entered Ada’s front door.
I looked down at my lap, where my cell phone rested in my hands. I’d called Matt earlier but his phone was going straight to voicemail. So I left him a message in the hopes he’d hear it soon and come rescue me from my mad plan. I put the phone in my left raincoat pocket.
Then I fingered my silver Rossi 38 while watching the drizzle make lazy lace across my windshield. My stomach was churning with anxiety, telling my brain to go home. I reviewed the reasons not to carry the gun with me on my trip around the shabby neighborhood.
A gun is for killing. Period. Nothing more, nothing less. Target practice is just getting good at it.
A gun kills animals for food--which is okay as long as you eat the animal.
A gun kills people, in defense of self, or accidentally as with children finding taboo toys. Or in the commission of a crime.
A gun protects.
A gun destroys.
A gun protects by destroying.
A gun will protect me if I come up against the son of a gun who tried to ram me to death.
Whoever wrote the bit in the bible about lions lying down with lambs was probably thinking of a modern day zoo—which only worked as long as they were both in separate cages. Preferably with the lamb’s cage located a few blocks away from the lion’s so she could get some sleep.
I stifled a tension yawn, checked the safety, and slipped my revolver into my trench coat pocket. It barely fit, even with a stubby four inch barrel. I opened the door and began my search for Eddie. I’d found Ada. Now I needed to find her spawn. Eddie needed to be saved, or put back in a cage.
Chapter 46: Seeking
My umbrella was black. Gerry would be appalled. My shoes were work shoes intended for nurses and librarians who have to stand a lot. Also black. My neck brace was mostly hospital white. And I wore an old, gumshoe-style raincoat that I’d found at the back of my closet. It was tan and the sleeves were fraying, but it had large front pockets.
The umbrella was all but useless as the rain was as much a low-flying cloud as downward moving water. My blond hair flattened to my head under a watery hairnet. I was frightened. Unnaturally so. I told myself it was just the departing drugs.
Scanning the street, I wondered if they were running a contest to see whose landscaping would die first. It was the kind of street where door-to-door salesmen might come to harm.
But, I reasoned, the neighbors should be home on Saturday and witnesses were never good if you were of a criminal mind. I should be safe. I decided to start with the people who could best see the front of her house. That is, if they were looking out after years of looking the away. But the first door I knocked on, the one directly across from Ada’s, stayed shut and silent despite a pale light hidden deep within. I knocked a second time and a third, and then moved on to the next house.
The next house featured two stripped-down, rusted cars on one side. The lawn was a muddy field, across which a crooked path of partially submerged cinderblocks more misled than led visitors to the front door. I carefully picked my way up this perilous walkway. Climbed two steps to the door.
I had a plan. Ask the neighbors if they’d seen anyone other than the police enter Ada’s house recently. If the answer was yes, I would have legal justification on two issues to enter and search the deceased Ada’s abode.
One reason I could enter was as an agent for Victoria Stowall, the legal owner of the house. I could enter to inspect the house for damage.
The second reason had to do with search and seizure laws, which stated that this activity was within the purview of private investigation if the act was to prevent a wanted felon from escaping—assuming the authorities didn’t order me to wait.
That second reason had to do with Eddie.
Eddie was wanted now—for questioning, at least, according to Gerry. He was not only a witness in the murders of three women, but the district attorney would have to review the circumstances of Luke’s dea
th and determine whether Eddie should stand trial for shooting an unarmed man in the back, or be exonerated for trying to protect a woman being attacked.
I stopped short of my goal—the next front door--suddenly awash with angry feelings. I wondered what had triggered them and glanced around. But nothing about this house explained my reaction. Probably more leftover Oxycontin.
It might also be residual guilt over Ruth’s stroke injuries. Because I hadn’t used the public phone at the library to continue my attempts to reach folks on the mountain. So they would have gotten to her sooner. Saved more brain cells.
Guilt that now evolved into a misplaced righteous fury. I took a deep breath. Found some sort of calm.
I knocked on the unpainted front door a bit too firmly. A curtain lifted and a woman peered out then withdrew. I assumed she would open the door, now that she knew it was another woman waiting. But nothing happened.
I knocked again with more civility.
The rain teased my anger and gloom. I knocked again. Something told me she was standing just the other side of the door, so I spoke through it.
“I just want to ask you if you’ve seen Eddie Stowall.”
Nothing.
“I just want to ask you if you’ve seen anyone moving about inside of Ada’s home, or entering her home, other than the police.” Again, nothing.
I knocked again and announced firmly that I wasn’t going away. I told the woman I wasn’t the police. Some time elapsed before the door finally opened, with the chain in place.
“Who are you?” She was a small Hispanic woman speaking in heavily accented English. Probably thought I was from INS.
I handed her my card and smiled encouragingly. She pulled back. I pressed on. “Ada Stowall’s family has hired me to investigate her death. I’ve been here before, but now I’m looking for her son Eddie. I believe he’s in danger.”
What made me say that?
She lifted her eyes from my calling card and stared at me soulfully. “I see some womans,” she said. “Sometime they come in the day. I no see no Eddie.”
Ada Unraveled Page 26
