Ada Unraveled

by Barbara Sullivan

  But the womans were the aunts. And why would they come if Eddie wasn’t inside? Still, I needed confirmation of my assumptions.

  “Have you heard any recent noises over there? Seen curtains move? Could you say there may be someone inside right now?”

  She shook her head no and pulled back from the door further. “Lo siento. Yo veo nada,señora,” she muttered and closed the door, leaving a whiff of savory beans and rice behind. I realized I was hungry.

  The third house was using an overturned grocery cart and faded orange hazard cones for lawn art. As I approached—using another cinderblock path--I contemplated what level of the social rung this neighborhood was teetering off of. I got an answer on the first knock, but the first thing the guy in this house wanted to talk about was my medical condition.

  “So, what happened to your neck? Boyfriend get too rough?”

  My eyes flashed on his tattooed neck and arms; body art to match his lawn art. Maybe he frequented the same tattoo parlor Luke did.

  Maybe he had a tattoo of a grocery cart hidden under his soiled Stanley Kowalski t-shirt. The style they call the wife-beater. I reached forward with my left hand holding out a calling card and simultaneously stepped back. My right hand was in my pocket. He grinned, showing me his grimy teeth--they matched the color of his shirt. He glanced at the card.

  “So, you got a boyfriend, Private Lady? Huh? You’re kind a cute.”

  At least he could read. I stepped back a little more, out of reach, and his grin spread even further. His eyes fell down my torso and landed on the lump in my right pocket. Mr. Sexy rested his potbellied body against the door sill, not a position one normally strikes from.

  I relaxed my shoulders but didn’t let go of my gun.

  “I’m investigating the death of Ada Stowall, looking for…”

  “What’s to investigate? The punk she lived with in that freak’s funhouse beat her to death. Took the poor bastard thirty years, but he finally got the hang of it. Now, me…I wanted to kill my old lady as bad as he did, I’d of figured out how a lot sooner.”

  His slouch against the doorsill changed meaning. This slob was through attempting seduction. I kept my face immobile, serious.

  Do not laugh! Definitely not cool to laugh.

  “We’re also looking for information on her son Eddie. Have you seen him?” He noticed the “we”. His hand rose from behind him, holding a beer bottle. Halfway through the move my heart skipped a beat.

  He took a swig and added thoughtfully, “Now, what I hear is he’s a real creep. Nah, I haven’t seen hide nor hair of the cellar-dude. But the lady next to the Stowall funhouse took in a boarder a couple of months ago. To give the neighborhood a little more class. I’m sure he and Eddie are hitting it off real well. The boarder’s a heart attack. Nice engaging you in conversation Lady PI, but now we’re done.”

  Beergut Man burped, turned and closed the door firmly. At least he didn’t fart.

  I walked steadily--as steadily as his crazy quilt cement blocks and my rabbitty heart allowed—back toward the sidewalk.

  Adrenaline was playing ping-pong with my brain. I knew I wouldn’t travel much further. My knees would never hold up through another scare like that. And my neck was awake and sending me now-familiar bolts of pain. So when the next house also greeted my knocks with silence, I crossed to Eddie’s side of the street and slowly started back.

  Two houses later after essentially the same results--no one saw or heard anything helpful--I knew there was no point in continuing. I was walking in a war zone under temporary ceasefire. These people were afraid of their shadows, hiding from the law and from each other.

  So I skipped the last house—the one with the heart attack boarder--and moved on to Ada’s. It was time to confront Eddie, son of Luke, or maybe Mark--but grandson of Victoria one way or the other.

  I could avoid my visit to the house of blood and pain no longer.

  It wasn’t easy walking up the Stowall family sidewalk toward the door. I must have tensed badly on the short trip because when I lifted my right arm to push the doorbell another stab of pain raced up my neck into my brain.

  But this one also descended back down as an equal and opposite stab of fear that filled my chest.

  I lightly rapped on the door, so lightly I knew no one could hear me on the other side, and turned to walk back to my car.

  I tried lying to myself, that I needed to think this move through, but the truth was, I’d just lost my nerve. Eddie Stowall scared me. This whole neighborhood scared me.

  I climbed into the SUV and stared up at a house that now seemed to be radiating evil directly at me. I pulled my phone out of my pocket and stared at it, willing it to ring. If only Matt were here. I would feel so much braver.

  Chapter 47: Eddie 9

  Eddie turned the music down on his iPod, thinking he’d heard a car door slam. Maybe it was Aunt Mary. But he needed to be sure. He went to the window and pulled the curtain back. A big black vehicle was parked a ways away, someone was in it. He couldn’t see who, but it wasn’t his aunt. Her car was small. He returned to his search for a belt in Luke’s dresser.

  Little Aunt Mary had given him the iPod the day she visited with big Aunt Martha. It was a great gift, though the music today was strange. That was the day big Aunt Martha went on and on about the new quilting witch. They don’t like her. They say she’s trouble, even mild Mary.

  They took him away that day, made him hide. But now he was back and no sign of the quilting witch.

  He knew what she looked like. He’d seen her the day she walked through his side yard and stood banging on the back door. Her and the two pretty younger ones.

  He’d asked his aunts if they’d left him the gun he used to kill Luke. None of them had owned up to it. But big Martha had looked away a bit too quickly. Come to think of it, she never said one way or the other if she’d left him the gun.

  So, it was probably her.

  Dumb cops were so busy digging up the back yard they let him slip away with the gun hidden under his shirt. Then he hid it where they’d never think to look—his grandma’s old snake shed.

  No belt in the dresser. He turned to the closet with the pile of dirty clothes on the floor and began looking there, maybe on one of the old man’s pair of pants. His step into the closet produced a creaking sound and the world tilted slightly. He retreated and pulled the dirty clothes away. The carpet wasn’t any cleaner. Eddie pressed down on it and could feel something shift. He reached for the corner of the closet and peeled the carpet corner out from under the baseboard. Underneath was a rough pine board subfloor, and one of the boards looked slightly out of place. He lifted it.

  Inside he found a strange looking weapon. It had some kind of attachment, like a hypodermic needle. And glass cylinders lay nearby. He wasn’t stupid, he knew what they were. This was the weapon Luke used to kill his grandpa—the night of the fires.

  He held one of the glass vials up to the light, some cloudy liquid lay in the bottom of it.

  These containers looked like the ones his mother wrote about in her third diary, the ones they filled with venom. The reason she forgave the man, after he confessed his love for her.

  Because he’d been forced to milk snakes all his childhood. He and Mark. They’d been bitten many times by the terrifying things. So Jake could make a living. So Grandpa Jake could avoid getting a real job.

  According to his mother, the act of milking those terrifying snakes had changed the oldest boys.

  Eddie didn’t agree.

  Mark wasn’t twisted. Mark had been sane and rational, and he’d been the oldest. The one you’d think would be the worst affected. Birth order had consequences.

  No, Luke was born twisted. He was genetically twisted. And I am not Luke’s son.

  He tossed the tranquilizer gun and the vials on the bed and returned to his search. He finally found a belt and looped it into his new hip-hop pants, the ones he’d bought when Mary took him shopping. Couldn’t keep the fo
ol things up now that his hips were melting away. Now that he was growing man’s hips.

  And the gun was scary in his skivvies. He didn’t like the Luke-killer gun so close to his privates. It made him nervous.

  Wasn’t about to lose his balls again.

  He’d bought a whole bunch of stuff that day with Mary. She’d looked at him funny at first, with some of his choices. But then she shrugged her little shoulders and paid the man at the counter.

  He heard another noise outside and went back to the window. The woman—it was a woman, he could see her shape--had climb out of her car to stand and stare at the front of his house. No sign of Mary. Maybe a welfare lady was waiting for his aunt under the big black umbrella. Maybe Mary called someone to come get the child.

  He couldn’t see her face.

  He needed to get back downstairs. The little one shouldn’t be alone down there. He’d grown tired of looking at his new clothes anyway. Oversized shirts big enough for an elephant. Gangsta shirt. He grinned.

  You could easily hide a gun underneath them.

  The middle aunt, Anne, who cleaned his house for him, won’t enter his parents’ bedroom, won’t come upstairs at all. She says it smells upstairs. She says it’s full of evil.

  She says, “The house should be burned to the ground.”

  Truth? He doesn’t come upstairs much either.

  More truth? He found if he spent too much time up here in his parents’ bedroom he started thinking bad thoughts. And he got headaches.

  But what he really didn’t like was going outside. Outside was…too open. Too big.

  He glanced around him. Maybe Aunt Anne was right—it should burn. He was especially bothered by the dark stains on the walls.

  KNOCK, KNOCK.

  Guess it was time. He tightened the belt another notch. He really liked his new riding boots, they were the best thing about his new outfit, he thought as he rounded the landing on the stairs.

  KNOCK, KNOCK.

  Okay, okay. He went into the kitchen. Eddie opened the package he’d received in the mail just yesterday. He put the stuff on. Put on the hat. Maybe the belt wouldn’t be needed after all.

  He grabbed the little one’s hand. She’d been eating a jelly sandwich; it was all over her face. He smiled. Poor little thing had been living next door, in a place that was as bad as his cellar.

  Chapter 48: From Inside the Storm

  …a mid-day dusk

  Knowing that the authorities wouldn’t respond until it was too late was what drove me back out of my car. Eddie might slip away again.

  Eddie might have the little girl in there.

  I glanced up at the front of the Ada’s dark house as I approached. The apparition I’d spotted a few moments ago had moved away from the upper bedroom window just before my eyes arrived, leaving the curtains waving slightly. Someone was definitely in the house, but now the curtains were still.

  My breathing grew even more rapid. Stop! Control it. It’s just fear. At least I was doing something. But how could I deal with this man alone? I’d barely handled Beer-gut Man.

  Willing my brain to shut up, I walked steadily toward the door.

  Someone once called me the Border Lady. Perhaps she saw me standing at some border of good and all the rest, like this, waiting to cross.

  I could do this!

  The world grew darker as I waited on the threshold of Ada’s door. Colors were fading in the cloud-made dusk, changing reality into an old black and white film noir--starring Edmond O’Brien, perhaps.

  I’d called Gerry after spotting movement in the house and after I’d heard the news repeated on the radio—about the missing child. I’d asked her to contact her brother Tom, to tell him I’d seen Eddie in the upper window. She was yelling for me to wait, to stay in my car as I closed my phone. Turned it off. Put it on silent mode.

  As if the dusky fog had moved into my mind I opened the outer, screen door and knocked twice. It was an act of blind courage. Of desperate need to bring this all to an end.

  I didn’t doubt that Eddie had killed Luke in self-defense. No one did. But he was still wanted for questioning. He needed to be brought in, so a judge or the district attorney for Cleveland County, or some other legal body could rule on his innocence.

  I was voting innocent. Except…a little girl was missing.

  I knocked again.

  What did years of Depo-Provera do to a man?

  Gerry would contact the appropriate folks through her brother. They’d come quickly.

  I thought I heard him moving about inside.

  I knocked again.

  I was justified under the law. It was my duty.

  I knocked a fourth time, harder, and the door began to move inward of its own volition.

  My breathing slowed. My neck reminded me with another stab that I should still be in bed.

  The door slid….

  Maybe grandmothers shouldn’t be doing this line of work.

  The door slid….

  “Eddie? Are you in there? I just want to talk to you.”

  My breathing sped back through normal and went straight into hyper-drive. I shoved my right hand into my trench coat pocket and gripped the gun.

  He was holding a small child by the hand. There was blood on her face. So it was true! He was a pedophile.

  She was all I could really see, maybe because she was down low enough for the meager light from the door to illuminate her.

  Above, and next to her, was a figure, a…creature I couldn’t quite make out, concealed in the shadows. More a silhouette than a man.

  I squinted but still couldn’t make him out, so I stepped inside and waited for my eyes to adjust.

  Cloaked not only in shadows but in the playfulness of childhood and the anonymity of middle age stood Eddie.

  “Eddie? I’m Rachel Lyons. I just want to help you, Eddie,” I repeated. I was surprised at how strong my voice sounded.

  He didn’t respond. I took another step into the house while simultaneously asking if I could come in.

  His arms hung loosely at his side. His stance was wide. He was wearing a cowboy hat. Finally the silhouette focused into varying shades of gray that I could almost discern. I pulled in air and held it a beat, forcing my breathing to calm again.

  Eddie looked old, older than his time, a lumpy, overweight man. I thought his hair might be gray, but then he was still in the shadows. I couldn’t tell his expression, or for certain the color of his complexion. But the fact that he was wearing hip-hop clothing—although belted at his waist--made me see a light-skinned African.

  Even with the baggy shirt I could tell he had breasts. His shoes looked brand new and expensive, like the shirt and jeans. He began to emerge from the shadows, moving toward me, two limping steps. He was injured?

  The little girl was clearly in shock, but she moved with him. Unseeing. Unknowing. She was wearing a huge pair of shorts, pinned around her waist, obviously not hers.

  But she didn’t seem afraid of him.

  My thoughts veered crazily to his limp again. Had he been crippled by his father’s beatings? He took another halt-step forward, the shadows receded even more and my heart froze.

  He was wearing a hip holster to match his cowboy hat. One large hand rested on a gun still seated in the holster. He wasn’t smiling.

  It all took nanoseconds.

  He pulled the gun out and pointed it straight at me.

  It isn’t true you have time for a thousand thoughts at moments like this. You know, like you’re life passing before your eyes? No. I had time for just one thought: get the gun out.

  Get the gun out….

  Get the gun out of my pocket!

  Something banged in my head. It whizzed through my hair—actually pulled at my hair—and took the top of my ear off. I could feel it. I could feel a gusher of blood bathing the side of my head.

  And pain once again signaled I was alive.

  My gun was still tangled up in my coat pocket.

  Eddi
e was preparing to shoot again. Aiming with both hands.

  The little girl was screaming.

  My shoulders tensed in terror, a pain born of tortured muscles and ripped ligaments tore straight into my brain.

  But my mind had time to do just one flashback, to the bee and the story I’d told.

  Suddenly a young voice shouted at me from long ago, Robert’s young voice, once again urging his sister Erika to hit her…only, “Shoot him! Shoot him! Shoot him!”

  So I did. Right through my coat.

  Chapter 49: Justified

  Hannah’s deep, honey-laced voice was soothing me, flowing over my vinegar-ed mind through the phone, making a sweet and sour mixture in my brain.

  “You did the right thing, Rachel. You had to defend yourself.”

  I was choking down the sobs. Her soothing voice was flavored by days of her own crying over her mom.

  “He’s fine. Eddie’s fine. He’s being cared for right now, right next door to my mom. I see him through the doorway. He’s still half-under from the surgery. He’s going to be fine.”

  Matt was staring at me from our bedroom doorway like he had no idea who I was--like he’d never seen me before in his life.

  “Rachel, don’t blame yourself,” she said. “The doctors even did some other repairs on his hip while they were at it, releasing cartilage and removing old scar tissue that was causing him to limp. He’ll be up and about in a couple of days. Really, he’s fine. The bullet just caused a flesh wound.”

  “I shot him,” I said, as if I was just discovering that fact all over again.

  Matt slipped away from the doorsill and returned with another house phone pressed to his ear, so he could listen in.

  She paused and sighed. “They’re working with the kidnapped girl now. She’s only a baby, poor thing. She hasn’t said a word yet, that I know of, but they’ll get through to her. When I went by to look in on her, her mom and dad were holding her, comforting her. The red on her face, it was only…well it doesn’t matter.”

  “Tell me,” I blubbered, then blew my nose.