Ada Unraveled

a Quilted Mystery novel

Barbara Sullivan

Smashwords Edition
copyright 2015 Barbara Sullivan

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Part One

Part Two

Part Three

A Thank You

Additional Books by Barbara
Sullivan

Brief History

Connect With Barbara
Sullivan

Dedication &
Acknowledgement

“Fibers form and twist

Secrets dormant lie

In the fibrous myst

Distant mem’ries dye

Children ever cry.”

From the Latter-day Poems of Ruth
McMichaels, 1934-.

June

His mom brought him a friend. He was
astonished, frozen on his bed. He couldn’t even remember what his
tongue and lips were for. He watched his mom leave them alone,
sneaking upstairs with a smile on her old face. What was she
thinking? What was she doing? He couldn’t have guests. He was in a
prison,
a cage
. And he was half out of his mind with the
drugs they forced him to take.

For a moment he knew his fluttering heart
would stop—completely—gallop right to the end of his life. He
wasn’t healthy. He was a pile of flab lying on a…but she’d changed
the sheets, hadn’t she? She had made him put a nice shirt on. Even
ran a razor over his chin…as if he had man-hair.

His new friend was a pretty girl with funny
hair. She was smiling. She turned off the TV and spoke to him in a
youthful voice that turned his bed into a magic carpet. Doing all
the talking so he didn’t have to, she was almost giggly but not,
almost flirty but not. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d
heard a feminine voice, other than his mom’s. And then he did.

Vera. The last time had been with Vera, of
course.

This girl spoke in weather, talked about the
June gloom. Her eyes flitted about the room…cell…nervously. Her
smile faltered as she took in his living space. It was a freaky,
underground, oversized dog pen, for cripes sake.

Her darting eyes were like little blue
hummingbirds searching for nectar, but
there weren’t no nectar
down here, little darlin’.

After a while she left him with a promise to
return, like a gift he could open later, whenever he was lonely. He
let himself pretend that maybe this spectacular change in his
routine meant he would soon be free. He settled back on his cot,
letting his floating brain fantasize about freedom. He didn’t float
for long.

Noisome sounds of his parents fighting
wakened him in an urgent sweat. They were upstairs, probably on the
second floor--their bedroom. They wouldn’t involve him if he stayed
quiet.

He prayed to God for the sounds to stop, for
his mother to be all right, but He wasn’t listening. How else could
He have ignored the brutality that regularly befell his mother all
these years?

His mother’s familiar pleading voice grew
louder. Impotent tears trickled down the sides of his face. He
looked toward the little bookcase she’d set up for him many years
ago, remembering the beating she’d gotten when she had done
that.

The same books she’d brought him then were
sitting there now. He’d read them repeatedly, to the point of
memorizing some. He read the titles again now. It comforted him at
times like these. That had been back before they started him on the
second drug. The drug that took reading away from him.

The Odyssey.

Dante’s Inferno.

Beowulf.

Tale of Two Cities.

“
What could be the harm Luke? She’s…not
normal…right? She doesn’t want sex with him.”

He covered his head with his mother’s quilt,
shut his eyes tight. He couldn’t hear his father’s response, but
from two floors down he heard the rueful rhythm begin, embroidered
by his mother’s quiet cries of pain.

Stifled so her son wouldn’t hear.

But he heard. He always heard.

Pound, pound, pound.

Long after the ritual blows ceased her cries
had flown down the stairs to him, bouncing off the twists and
turns, finding him under his blanket. This time was different. This
time she had begged and called for him.

What was she thinking? He couldn’t help her.
He was locked up like a dumb animal.

The pleas became whimpers. The whimpers
stilled. And then he thought he heard her whisper,
I’m sorry
Eddie. But it will be over soon
.

He listened harder, his ears searching from
under his blanket, searching for the sound of her breathing. But
his heart was pounding so hard he couldn’t find her.

Eventually his racing heart quieted and the
house descended into a malevolent silence. His blanketed eyes
slowly shut. He dozed—slipping into his half in and half out sleep.
Half terrorized and half calm.

New sounds forced him back.

Thump, thump, thump.

This time not fists driven into flesh, this
time the bouncing sound of a thing being dragged down the upper
staircase.

A once living thing?

His heart raced ahead of the truth. He
opened his eyes under his covers, searching blindly for a different
meaning in the dark underside of the comforter. The kitchen door
squeaked open and shut hard.

Noises came to him from out by the shed.
Even the frogs and grasshoppers were holding their breaths. Then
chopping sounds of shoveling came to him, sounds of earth being dug
up and tossed aside.

His father was way back behind the house,
maybe as far away as the graveyard. The clouds were low tonight. He
knew sounds traveled farther bouncing off their soft
underbellies.

Finally his mind cleared enough to force him
from his bed and he went to his high cellar window to peer into the
foggy night. To see what he could see.

His father was standing right there, his
cruel face aglow in the light from the kitchen! He was gripping her
hair in both hands, pulling her away, her eyes and mouth open in
sightless, soundless witness to the wretchedness that had been her
life. He shrank away, moved backwards till he bumped into his
bed--not far, just a few feet.

There was not a shred of humanity on his
father’s face. He was dragging his dead mother to her grave, and
his face showed nothing but savage purpose.

He crawled back into his miserable bed. Now
he was alone with the monster.

September 20

I’m Rachel Lyons, early retiree from the
public library world, newly anointed private investigator, in
business with my husband Matthew Lyons for three years now. I was
out for a stroll in the woods with a conservation group I’d just
joined. Only, the stroll was more like a trudge. The group I was
trudging with was in search of signs of life after the firestorms
that had burned a tenth of Southern California last week.

I was in search of female companionship.

The wonderful thing about working in a
public library is working with a highly intelligent group of mostly
women. The thing about working out of your own home is it’s mostly
you and your partner, and occasionally a couple of apprentices. And
your computers.

A sickly breeze coaxed my attention to the
grim surrounds and the task at hand. The conversation among the
Conservators was typical, I suppose. Discussions of what native
grasses and plants to restore,
amsonia
and
coyote
melon
and
cucurbita palmate
. I had no real knowledge
here so I just nodded agreement at the suggestions as to what to
replant and what not.

Another slight breeze stirred the lurking
foulness into the smoke-stained air and I turned, suddenly
electrified.
I knew that smell
. My recent training had made
me very familiar with it. The group resumed its discussion without
me as I found myself following what was surely the scent of
death—human death--just a few steps away and down behind a family
of boulders on a gentle slope.

“Rachel! Where are you going? We shouldn’t
wander off alone…” someone called out after me. Probably President
Elise.

Wherever life takes me,
I thought
stubbornly.

I climbed down and stopped in my tracks. On
the ground about twenty feet away was a black mound, the obvious
source of the stench. The calling voices behind me faded away as my
mind began to shut down to a pinpoint of perception. I touched one
hand to the nearest boulder for anchorage, grappling with the idea
that the dark mound had once been human. Maybe I was holding the
rock so I wouldn’t sway. On its side with legs curling away and
head down in a classic fetal position the shape made a hideous
silhouette in 3-D.

A week was a long time for a body to lie
about—which was how long it had been since the Santa Ana wind
driven fires had flown through here and burned these mountain
woods.

From the elevation of its uppermost limbs I
knew it had passed through the seventy-two hour stage of rigor
mortis, into the swollen stage of internal decay and
self-digestion. Thus the lovely smell.

The others had caught up to me. “Treat this
like a crime scene folks.”

They stopped, respectful of the authority in
my voice. Rachel Lyons was no longer just a happy hiker. I was now
the private investigator from Lyons Investigations and Research,
Inc., or LIRI, and we were already well known and respected in
these parts.

The sun was shifting lower in the sky. Soon
its light would paint an orange stain on everything and the
photographs wouldn’t show true colors. I had to hurry.

“Can I assist you, Rachel, in preserving the
site?” I jumped at the sound of a voice inches from my head. The
lone African American in our conservation group, a woman in her
thirties or early forties, had joined me.

“I’m Dr. Karen Bridle,” she said, and
offered her hand. I have a PhD in zoology. Perhaps I can be of
assistance. I work regularly with the local ME and am schooled in
protecting evidence.” In the weeks to come I would learn she knew a
great deal about the local ME and his offices.

Violent sounds of gunfire woke me with a
start.

Peering blurrily at the giant television
screen in our living room, I watched two more bad guys get killed
until my heart settled down. Matt was still asleep. He could sleep
through anything. Most guys could. Once again another great rental
movie had put us under. Once again our new reclining chairs had
lulled us to sleep. A purchase we were both regretting.

Togetherness in your middle years.

About my name, Rachel Lyons, in case you
hadn’t noticed, it’s poetic. Rachel means lamb in some language,
probably Hebrew, definitely biblical, which makes my married name
rather strange. I actually stopped to think about the implications
of being
lamb lion
before marrying the macho Marine pilot
now snoring a few feet away. Something about the lamb lying down
with the lion kept running through my mind.

Maybe because he was a babe.

But I did, obviously, and for the next
thirty years, I crisscrossed the United States chasing duty
stations, while raising three boys and working my library career in
broken segments--as he came and went to Vietnam, to the Med (sea,
that is), and to Iraq One. And then we settled down in
Jacksonville, got the kids through high school and off to college,
and even saw them married off.

Somewhere in the middle, Matt retired and
eventually so did I. And then we made three big switches; from east
to west coast, from government employees to entrepreneurs, and from
country living to suburban dwellers in the midst of a cultural
chaos.

Luckily, we already owned a small home in
Escondido that we’d purchased on one of our many tours here, and
that was where I was sitting right now.

Well actually, in the reclining chair still.
They’re hard to get out of. I persevered and then headed back to
the kitchen to finish the after-dinner clean up.

Matt and I had a deal. He cooked and I
cleaned. It was a great deal for me, I hated cooking. Something
about my last customers and their constant complaints about beef
stroganoff being a secret Russian recipe for poison and shrimp
being bottom feeding insects of the sea had long ago burned out my
culinary gene.