Ada Unraveled (21 page)

“I love our warriors, Gerry. Like a mother.
Like a sister. Like a wife.”

And then she gave me Tom’s private
number.

“Listen, Gerry, I’ve got to get some sleep.
We’ll talk more tomorrow.”

“Okay. And, Rachel?”

“Yes.”

“I’m really glad you’re on the case. I think
Eddie needs your help.”

Okay, was that a compliment or an implant in
my brain?

I returned to our bedroom. Matt was sleeping
soundly but my mind was still whirring, just beneath the
exhaustion. I took Ada’s diary with me into the spare bedroom to
read another entry. It was easy to slip under Ada’s quilt. Seemed
the perfect place to read her earliest messages.

This entry described Ada’s experience of
running away to her grandma’s with sister Hazel.

The young Ada thought that the event she was
remembering had occurred sometime around her eighth year.
Especially poignant was her description of a bus ride in the middle
of the night to their grandma’s. It was in this entry that I could
see how gifted eleven-year-old Ada truly was. Her description of
the darkened towns and long stretches of countryside sliding by the
bus windows evoked her loneliness. She wrote with sensitivity of
the strangers riding with them, a couple of older Hispanic men
slumped over in sleep, a heavy black woman clinging nervously to
her cloth bag, and two white men sitting together at the back who
kept glancing at the young girls with “dirty eyes.” These finely
drawn characters evoked Ada’s fear, and her child’s awareness of
the potential for evil everywhere.

I fell asleep riding that bus down a highway
of anguish.

Thursday, October 9

I was early for the luncheon with Hannah and
Ruth, so I parked in the restaurant lot with the motor running,
keeping the chill out.

I was stewing. Some repugnant combination of
corruption and politics was holding up the investigation of the
stink hole in Ada’s back yard. No investigation had been done as of
this morning. No action at all. I complained to Matt, hoping he
could stir the pot somehow. And now I was here, waiting to meet
with Ruth, to ferret out more information about Ada.

I reached into my briefcase lying on the
backseat and pulled out Ada’s diary. It was time to open this
little book again.

“
Dear Hazel,

Another time, I remember seeing our father
push her down the cellar stairs. He stayed home from work to feed
her and care for her this time, but he never stopped drinking. We
came home from school and they were fighting in the kitchen. Then
he pushed her down the stairs. I heard her bouncing.

I can’t remember if I thanked you for
feeding me when our parents were drunk. We were always so hungry.
Like the night we were alone waiting in my bedroom with the bureau
pushed up against the door to keep him out. They had just come home
from the bar and he was throwing her against the walls, she was
screaming at him, calling him her favorite dirty name. Then they
went into their bedroom and we tried not to listen, hiding under
the covers.

Later you went downstairs, even walked past
their door, and got me some bread and cheese. Thank you Hazel. I’ll
miss you forever. I’m crying again. I have to stop. Goodbye for
now.

Your loving sister, Ada

PS: They haven’t had anything to drink since
you died. Maybe they will stop.”

Hannah and Ruth pulled into the parking spot
next to me. I closed the diary and quickly put it back in my
briefcase, feeling duplicitous. I was completely caught up in this
child’s life of fear. Ada was a smart little girl at eleven. I felt
I’d been there on that snowy night.

I hustled after them through the chilly rain
into the restaurant. We settled in a booth and ordered. Made polite
noises, talked about the weather, and then fell silent. The cheery
warmth and happy voices inside the Mexican restaurant pulled me out
of my diary-funk.

I noticed Hannah glancing at me and realized
she expected me to open the conversation, so I did--with my usual
directness. I related the little tale I’d just read in Ada’s diary.
Ruth didn’t respond. She looked at me with a mix of anger and
pleading in her eyes. It made me feel bad. I let it go, looked down
at my paper placemat. I’d been curling up the scalloped edges,
every other one.

My hands were restless, as usual. I looked
out the rain-streaked window next to our booth. I had a feeling
everything I needed to know was sitting out in Matt’s truck, in a
little brown diary. Why make this old woman miserable?

Then she began.

“I was her aunt...by marriage. I can share
childhood memories of Ada’s, too. Maybe because I wasn’t really a
relative, she felt she could tell me things…sometimes to the point
that I wished she would stop. I was like her psychiatrist, only
not.”

Ruth paused to take a turn at counting the
raindrops on our window while the waitress delivered our meals.

“She never took my advice. I was just a
wailing wall, a listening wall. Most of her life. I know there is a
truth that must be told about Ada and her suffering—the
psychological abuse she endured as a young child, as a wife. But I
don’t know what it is. Or she would have left the pain, somewhere
along the way.” Ruth’s scratchy voice trailed off as her eyes
refocused on something distant and deep inside.

I worried at Ruth’s pain. She wasn’t young.
I noted that my enchilada-tamale lunch began congealing the minute
it was laid before me.

I wasn’t hungry anyway.
Autopsies. A
diary of dreadful secrets. Interrogations of the elderly.
I
nudged my plate away and sipped the iced tea.

“Mom, why don’t you tell us about her
parents?” Hannah gently urged.

“Yes, well you know about Gordon and
Jolene…”

Yes, I did. It was all in the diary.

“…that he was a, well, a wife beater. They
were both alcoholics, she, mostly because he was, or so I wanted to
believe….”

Her ancient voice droned on. I half
listened.

“Many wouldn’t believe ill of him anyway.
They saw a different Gordon, a Gordon who was a successful
businessman, who owned a large boat, belonged to the San Diego
Yacht Club, was even Commodore one year. They called them GoJo
because they were inseparable and they seemed to live the perfect
life. Gordon was movie star handsome, you know, Jolene was too,
when they first met. But he changed all that.

“How they could not have seen the bruises is
beyond me…both the men and the women laid blame on the victim. She
missed so many bees over the years…”

Who was she talking about? Jolene? Ada?
Hannah read my mind.

“Who, mom?”

“Oh. Jolene. Well, and Ada. Like mother like
daughter, I guess. It gets blurry now. Sorting out who suffered
what. Growing up in a house of pain shattered Ada’s courage. Taught
her to accept life’s lot. She was crippled by her childhood.”

Ruth stopped again, her face a mask of
dejection behind which I could only guess at the emotions.

“That story you just read, about them
looking for Christmas trees? She ended up in the hospital after
that time. When she got home, a cast on another arm, heavy makeup
to cover the scratches and bruises on her face, they celebrated
Christmas like nothing had happened. I remember. That Christmas
Gordon gave her a huge bottle of Chanel No. 5 and a mink cape. And
they were sober when we came calling. It was grotesque to see her
don the cape like a little girl, so proud, pulling it over her
broken wing. She was trapped in many ways by Gordon, his violence,
his charm, his growing wealth. By the time Gordon’s business hit
the skids it was too late for her to leave him. Hazel and Ada
watched it all. Hazel, well she took a different road, somewhere
around her twelfth birthday. She veered off…then she was dead. They
were only a year apart, you know.”

“How did she die?” I asked.

“Accident,” Ruth said, but her rheumy eyes
blazed with anger. “Another Gordon accident.”

She meant that Gordon had something to do
with Hazel’s death.

My eyes slid to those of a man, sitting
almost directly behind Ruth. He was staring intently at us. At
Ruth, specifically.

I wouldn’t have noticed except he looked
like a street person, his clothes, his unshaven face and wild eyes.
He was sipping a beer. Finally he realized I was looking at him,
and he grinned. An evil, salacious grin.

I tore my eyes away and looked down at my
rigor mortising lunch.

“Ruth, did Luke kill Ada? We need to know
what you and the rest of the family know, because bad things are
still happening. Jake’s death. Luke’s gone missing.”

“Mark killed her,” Ruth said,
mysteriously.

Hannah said, “But Mark died years
before.”

I followed Ruth’s line of thinking, saying,
“How did Mark kill her?”

“Because he loved her. Because he gave her a
love-child.”

Hannah said, “Eddie? Mark is Eddie’s
father?”

But Ruth had doubled over, clutching at her
stomach.

“I’m not a part of that clan! Don’t include
me with them. Those Stowalls are…well, just you remember that,
Hannah. We’re not a part of them.” She was growing agitated.

Hannah said, “Victoria’s your sister.”

“Sister!” Ruth spat out angrily. Heads
turned at the next table. “Not her son or daughter. You remember
that, Hannah. We’re not those Stowalls. We’re McMichaels.”

Ruth suddenly grabbed at her stomach with
both arms and began rocking.

“Mom…?”

“Oh no, it’s my IBS. What the blazes did I
just eat? I gotta go. Take me home, Hannah. Now!” And in a flurry
of need the two were gone.

The redhead came to see him one more time.
She was angry about the bruises on his body. Luke was in and out
even during the day now, drunk and raging.

The girl amazed him again, saying he needed
to go shopping. She gave him money. He didn’t want to make her feel
bad but he couldn’t go outside.

He told her this, but she just shook her
pretty red hair and said, “You’ll be fine, Eddie. No one will even
notice you.”

But he wouldn’t be fine. He didn’t
understand out there.

And he looked too strange not to be
noticed.

She insisted, saying next time one of the
aunts would drive him to the store. Assured him it wasn’t far. And
finally she’d left. Eddie began missing her the moment the door
closed, the moment she left him standing forlornly in the stained
kitchen. Waiting for trouble to arrive in the form of his drunken
beast of a father.

Luke, he’s not a father.

No father would behave the way he does.

The redhead was leaving him to his own
defenses. He was thinking he should ask her to return the diary he
knows she took.

A new thought came to him. What if his mom
had kept other diaries? Luke’s out at some bar, should be gone for
a while longer.

Resolutely, Eddie climbed the stairs to the
upper rooms of the house.

He slipped inside the room where he once
slept, and his eyes opened in wide astonishment.

The room had been…it was papered with
quilts.

Even the ceiling. She’d hung her quilts all
around his room and even fastened them to the ceiling. The curtains
on the small window that looked out on the cemetery were even
constructed of her quilts.

It was like a quilted mausoleum. And his bed
was covered with the most beautiful quilt he’d ever seen. It looked
like it was made of white silks, like, wedding dress materials, all
beaded and sequined and embroidered. Maybe one of the dresses had
been her own. The nightstand next to the bed held a picture of him.
He picked it up. Stared at his young self. Grieved.

Moved on.

There was a drawer in the nightstand. He
pulled it open. And there it was…
a second diary.

He picked it up, pushed the drawer shut and
retreated back down to the main floor bedroom.

Eddie placed the little leather book next to
his new bed.

He went into the bathroom, opened the
medicine cabinet and pulled out his mother’s makeup case, a small
zippered pouch many years old and filthy with cosmetic oils and
dyes. And her fingerprints. And her DNA. And her smells. Eddie had
retrieved this from the upstairs bathroom yesterday.

He opened the pouch and pulled out her face
powder.

Watching himself in the mirror as he worked,
he applied a light layer of ‘paleness’, as his mother once called
it, to lighten her complexion. To cover the bruises. Now he was
doing the same. The smells of the makeup calmed him.

When I got home from the awful lunch, I
found a phone message from Matt that they’d put Jake Stowall back
in the ground this morning.

I grabbed a snack from the fridge, jotted
some notes down from the luncheon, jogged three miles with Wisdom,
and faxed Hannah and Gerry copies of the contracts Matt and I had
written up. Then I cleaned house.

Until the phone rang, that is.

It was an angry Detective Junior Grade Tom
Beardsley. I was thinking he wanted to discuss the fact that his
sister had been with me in Ada’s backyard, but that wasn’t it. I
was surprised, until I slowly caught on to what was happening.

“You had no business going to Ada’s house,
Ms. Lyons. You had no business snooping around in the back yard.
You were on private property, now officially a crime scene.”

His breathing was rapid, his voice elevated.
He was lying and uncomfortable. Someone was listening to him. Maybe
monitoring what he was saying. He was speaking to them, not to
me.

Really? What on earth was going on?

I said, “What did you find in the
back…?”

He cut me off.