On the Road [again]

by Sheila Horgan

  Anna nodded. “Good point. When we know better, we do better.”

  Adeline smiled. “Exactly.”

  “You girls are right. I’m sorry. I sometimes get lost in my own confusion. I’ll do better. Anna, talk to me about Pickles.”

  The girls laughed.

  Anna tapped a few keys, and the picture of the beautiful young woman was displayed on the large screen with several other pictures. Each was of the same young woman. She seemed to be in very different surroundings in each picture. In each image she seemed completely different. With one exception. Her smile.

  “I think this is Pickles. In every picture.”

  “She is lovely. Anna, please explain how you found her, and if there is some reason — one I can’t begin to imagine — why such a lovely young woman would be called Pickles.”

  Anna laughed. “I may be more proud of finding that out than I have been of anything I’ve done in a long time. Are you ready for this? Pickles is called Pickles because she is originally from Connecticut. It’s that simple and complex. Ta da!”

  Carolyn pulled a face. “I think I’m going to need more words.”

  Anna laughed. “Turns out there is an old law on the books in Connecticut that a pickle is not officially a pickle unless it can bounce.”

  “I’m lost.” Adeline had leaned in with a smile on her face.

  “This young woman is named Gwendolyn Rachael Battsworthy. She was born in Broton Point. She is the oldest daughter of her still happily married parents, with a younger brother and a younger sister.”

  “That all sounds normal. Why is her name Pickles?”

  “In high school she was a flyer.”

  Adeline was confused. “A what?”

  “A cheerleader that gets thrown up in the air. Either the guys didn’t catch well, or she somehow altered her trajectory, but it was not uncommon for Gwendolyn to end up on her ass. You can get seriously hurt that way, but Gwendolyn would bounce right up and do the next routine.”

  Adeline was shaking her head. “Anna, I know you to be a profoundly honest woman, so I have no doubt that what you say is true, but I do not begin to understand what a cheerleader named Pickles has to do with Barry, and I can’t begin to imagine where you came across all of this information, and further, if you were able to come across it, why it is such a mystery that Barry is willing to sit incarcerated for an interminable amount of time to protect himself from the secret. And, do we need to contact Pickles and tell her of our twisted theories? Should we be concerned for her well-being? I pray we haven’t put a price on her head somehow.”

  “Stay with me just a moment longer. I have no idea why a young woman named Gwendolyn would prefer to be called Pickles, but she herself seemed to enjoy the name. She uses it as a moniker on social media. Perhaps to make herself known to her friends and not as noticeable to undesirables. I don’t know. Why do any nicknames stick?”

  Adeline laughed. “We will talk about that some time. In a million years you would not believe what I was called at one point in my life.”

  “Please, Adeline, do not create a challenge for me.” Anna wiggled her eyebrows.

  “Back to Pickles, please.” Carolyn was so intense that it was obvious she was still concerned about the deal Barry had made with the authorities. When she’d visited the jail and mentioned Pickles and his mother, Barry had buckled. Although the words worked as planned, the girls still weren’t sure what they meant, and Carolyn simply couldn’t leave the welfare of her granddaughter and great-grandchild to chance. She had said repeatedly that she wanted to know everything they could find to have backup ammunition in case Barry changed his mind. She couldn’t depend on words parroted to Barry when he was most vulnerable, no matter how powerful they seemed and how lucky she had been to take a man named Molly seriously, which is difficult when he presents himself in spandex and high heels.

  “Have you heard of the Deep Web?”

  Carolyn shook her head. “I’m sorry. I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Some people claim it exists, some people have their doubts, but there is supposedly a subculture of people that rely on the Internet to ply their trade in more dubious areas. Contract killers. Drug dealers. Persons of that nature.”

  Carolyn panicked more than a little bit, and it showed in both her body language and her tone. “Barry is associated with hit men? Where does that leave my Suze?”

  Adeline put her hand on Carolyn’s arm. “Let us see where this leads before we become overly concerned.”

  Anna was shaking her head. “I haven’t found anything that would indicate that Barry or any of his associates are hit men.”

  “Oh, thank God.”

  “But the news isn’t all good, either. I was reading an article about the Deep Web, and I thought to myself, if there is an outlet for things like that, there has to be an outlet for everything, right? And then we have Molly. He supplies some pretty alternative services via text. And Barry has been awfully good since we said the two magic words, your momma and Pickles, so just how serious must those threats be?”

  The girls responded simultaneously. “Agreed.”

  “I think I have the momma threat figured out. I had Kimberly help me run a few checks. Turns out Barry kept the secret of his mother’s death from just about everybody. There were people in his own family who thought she was alive, if not well, living in a facility somewhere under Barry’s watchful eye.”

  Carolyn was alarmed. “You didn’t tell them otherwise, did you? We only have suspicions. We don’t have any proof of anything.”

  “Well, we have a little bit of proof, thanks to some after-hours help from Kimberly.”

  “Remind me to send the child a nice little gift. I appreciate her doing extra work for me and my Suze.”

  “Will do. She’s been very helpful. I’m not sure if she has been assigned by Roland to help me or to keep an eye on me, but either way, she has been a godsend.”

  Adeline repositioned herself. “Please continue, Anna. I’m so curious I could burst.”

  Anna laughed. “Okay, this is what I know. I know that as Carolyn remembers it, she was under the mistaken impression that Barry’s mother was dead before the wedding. We now have the information that Suzi thought she was alive. That bothered me. For some reason that really isn’t clear, Carolyn assumed that the woman was dead. Based on life experience alone, I’ve decided that human beings have a great sense for these things and that I should go ahead and research people’s feelings as much as the facts as we know them. Remember that at the time of her marriage to Barry, Suzi was told that Barry’s mother was still alive. She was told that the mother was living in a facility close to them.”

  Carolyn interjected, “I still don’t understand how Suze could be so completely clueless. Did she never visit her mother-in-law? Did she never ask, not once, why she hadn’t been introduced?”

  Anna pulled her back into the current conversation. She knew that Carolyn’s questions were more than valid, but there were a million questions that needed answering, and stopping to discuss them all would simply throw them so far from the topic that they would never return. “Turns out that Carolyn was actually right, and Barry lost his mother on his sixteenth birthday. He lied about that. To everyone. Told Suzi that he had moved her to a new facility right near here not long after they married. I think I have that figured out too, but we’ll talk about that later. One thing at a time.”

  “Okay, I think I knew all that. Not then, but now. Or recently. What does that tell us?” Carolyn rubbed the back of her neck trying to release some of the stress.

  “It tells us a couple of things. Remember when we got that email, the one that had the mother’s death notice and all that? Remember that they had run it in the local paper and everything?”

  “Yes.”

  “So I got to thinking. If the whole world knew that Barry’s mother had been dead since he was a child, why didn’t your Suzi know?”

  Adeline reacted first. “G
ood question.”

  Carolyn reacted defensively. “She didn’t have any involvement with his family, that’s for sure.”

  Adeline tried to be supportive; knowing how hard all of this was for her friend, she spoke gently. “True, but he did have members of his family at the wedding, so he must not have been overly concerned that it would be mentioned. That begs the question: How? Why? If Anna is correct and the family didn’t know that his mother had passed, why would he take such a chance? Why poke the bear? Why not simply leave well enough alone and exclude them from the wedding?”

  Anna offered, “It was a story he’d been living with since he was sixteen. He was probably quite confident he could get away with it. It reassures me that some of the assumptions I’ve made about him are true. One of those assumptions is that he thrived on the excitement of ‘getting away with it.’ He wanted the challenge of having both sides of the family in the same place at the same time. You know how magnets are. Turn them one way, and they push away from each other. Turn them the other way, and they smash into each other. That was probably about what Barry’s world must have felt like at that reception, and it probably energized him.”

  Carolyn took a breath. “It was quick. The wedding and reception. We just had drinks and the cake. No food or dancing. At the time it seemed so strange to me, but Suze told me that she didn’t want to make too big of a deal of the wedding itself. She insisted that she wanted to focus on the marriage, not the wedding ceremony. It seemed plausible. Even smart. And then there was the fact that we’d lost my husband so recently. I was selfish. I didn’t really think about all of it. I was just grateful I didn’t have to get involved in too much planning and too big of a party. Suze said she just didn’t want anything crazy. She said she missed her grandfather too much to do all of the traditions.” Carolyn shook her head. “That’s what she told me at the time.”

  Anna tried to be reassuring. “I’m sure that was the case, Carolyn. She loved her grandpa, and she would want him there, plus from everything you have said about her parents, a short and sweet reception would keep them under control.”

  Carolyn’s eyes clouded. “She mentioned that, yes. I’m ashamed to say that my grandchildren make many of their decisions based on how to neutralize their parents as much as possible.”

  Anna tried to bring the conversation back to Pickles. “So, I was thinking, how in the world would Barry, even if he has the balls of a baboon… ”

  Carolyn interrupted the thought. “Do they have large ones? I always thought they had large rear ends. The other never entered my mind.”

  Anna couldn’t hide her annoyance. “I have no idea. Would you like me to pick another animal? Is there a reason I can’t get this information out?”

  Carolyn tried desperately to keep her tone level and, more importantly, not to cry. “Yes, because the thought of knowing what it is that is so monstrous a young man would willingly spend years and years in prison so the world doesn’t find out scares me. And the thought of that young man being married to my granddaughter scares me more. And the thought of him being the father of my great-grandchild scares me even more than that.”

  Anna deflated. “I’m sorry. I should be more aware of that. You said you wanted to know, so I wanted to tell you. I should be more sensitive.”

  “I should be more brave.”

  Adeline sat up stick straight. “Brave?”

  “Brave is the wrong word. I should be thicker skinned. Let’s go with that.”

  Anna asked, “Do you want all the details, or shall I just give you the big picture?”

  “I want all the details. Every one. Avoidance of ugly got us where we are.”

  “Okay. Let me start over. We know there is a young woman named Gwendolyn. She has a nickname of Pickles. She identifies herself as Pickles on several social media sites. The normal ones that you see all the time. Even that stupid one where anyone can ask you any question and you are supposed to answer it honestly. Strangers delving into your most personal thoughts and actions, and you are supposed to be stupid enough to answer the question. People actually do that. On purpose. By choice.”

  “Is that how you found her?”

  “That’s how I found out about the whole Deep Web thing. I’ll get there.”

  Carolyn blushed slightly. “I’m sorry. First I try to slow you down. Then I try to hurry you up.”

  Adeline smiled. “I had a husband like that once.”

  The girls laughed.

  Anna continued. “I figured I needed to find Pickles and to figure out how and why everybody thought Barry’s mother was alive, especially family, since notification had been made in the newspaper. You would think if your daughter, or sister, or aunt, had died, you would know about it.”

  “Does Barry have any siblings?”

  “Not that I could find. I’ve looked everywhere that I could think of, as did Kimberly. I should say that Barry was raised in a small rural area and that it is altogether possible his mother had a child outside of the hospital, but I find it unlikely he would go this long without acknowledging a brother or sister.”

  Carolyn challenged Anna’s assumption. “I find it unlikely that he could fake having his dead mother in a facility for years and Suzi didn’t know about it, but then I guess she spent a whole lot of time trying not to rock the boat. I think that she didn’t really know anything about him. Nothing of importance anyway. Nothing about his life, his history, what he was really like. I’m beginning to think that everything was a lie. Everything that he told her. Everything that she believed to be true. She fell in love with a façade. Not a real person. What does that say about her? What does that say about him? And how in the world can you live with a person all day, every day, and really know nothing about them? That is what is driving me crazy. It kind of shakes your hold on your own reality, know what I mean?”

  “Well, I did a bit of research on that too.”

  Adeline smiled. “In your free time?”

  “I’ve had trouble sleeping lately.”

  “Oh, Anna, is there anything wrong?”

  “No, just old lady syndrome. I guess I have more energy than I use in a day.”

  Adeline shook her head. “I find that hard to believe. You are always on the go.”

  Anna shook her head. “Momma used to say that when you get older, you eat and sleep less. I didn’t believe her at the time, but I must say she was right. About that and a whole lot of other things. Back to the topic at hand. Do you want to know more about Pickles, or switch over to my theory on his mother?”

  Carolyn threw her hands up in the air. “What the hell. I can’t seem to let you talk about Pickles, so why don’t you go ahead and tell us about his mother?”

  Anna laughed good-naturedly. “Well, I think I know why he kept her death a secret, if not how she died.”

  Adeline volunteered. “Money.”

  “How did you know?”

  “It’s always money. Isn’t that the thing they say on all those detective shows you like to watch? Follow the money. We needn’t go into the motivations of my own children to see such depravity, although I’m as aware of that tragedy as any. Money is often at the root of family issues.”

  Anna took a deep breath. “Well, yes. I guess that is what gave me the idea. Television. I won’t think about that. It makes me a little queasy that so many of my moments of brilliance are based on the boob tube. Anyway, turns out that Barry’s mother inherited a rather sizable amount of money from a family member. She was the country mouse to the family’s city mouse, if you know what I mean.”

  Adeline nodded. “They were of a different breed.”

  “That’s one way of putting it.”

  Carolyn was quiet. “How sad.”

  “I agree.”

  “Anyway, the family had a big trust fund for Barry’s mother. A stipend was sent from it every month. A direct deposit type thing. It’s not like a family member sat and wrote the check. It was some accountant somewhere that simply processed a pay
ment without thought.”

  “How convenient.”

  “Yes, then those funds were taken in cash, as they had been for years. Once a week, a fourth of the money minus a small amount that went into a savings account.”

  “And how did you find all this out?”

  “Barry is a control freak. I do mean freak. He has kept records of all of it since he took over the functions from his mother when he was twelve. She accompanied him to the bank, talked to the vice president of something or other, and made arrangements for young Barry to ride his bike to the bank and conduct her business for her.”

  Adeline’s brows knit. “How odd.”

  “Not really. I did that sort of thing for my mother. Times were different way back then, but I can remember my mother sending me off to the store and signing on the bottom line. No one gave it a thought.”

  Adeline smiled. “You are absolutely right. Now that I give it thought, I used to send my daughter to the store to pick up little things for me. I had a metal credit card back then. In a little pouch. It was so much smaller than they are now. I remember telling her exactly how much she could spend. It never dawned on me that she would take advantage of the situation. I’m sure their arrangement was very much the same. It was a common practice back then.”

  “I do that even now. My Suze knows the PIN number for my bankcard. If your child or grandchild has never given you reason to be concerned, you trust them with such things.”

  “I agree.” Adeline sighed. “There was a time I fully trusted each of the members of my family. My older children were spoiled and had the attitude of a python late to the dinner table, but it never dawned on me that they would actively obstruct… ” Adeline stopped herself. “I’m sorry. That is a discussion for another time”