Ada Unraveled (24 page)

We were in Ada’s quilting room.

The walls were lined with shelving. The
shelves held dozens of clear plastic containers filled with cuts of
fabrics, arranged by color. Scraps, materials by the yardage, and
fat quarters.

Fat quarters are pre-cut bits of fabric,
measuring twenty-two by eighteen inches, folded into neat squares
and tied with leftover ribbon. Small fabric shops had long sold the
remnant at the end of a bolt this way. And now even the giant
chains were doing this, selling scraps for a dollar or two in
stacks displayed below the fuller bolts of gaily colored print.

Fat quarters were to obsessive compulsive
quilters what fudge was to OC dieters.

I had plastic containers of my own, down in
my walk-out basement. But I could always use more.

I knew Ada’s fabrics would be unique. She
had accumulated them over a long lifetime, no matter how deranged
that lifetime had been. And the array of stored and cataloged
quilt-goods surrounding me now no doubt contained some valuable
examples of early twentieth century cloth.

I confess I wasn’t consciously hearing Tom
who had rejoined us and was now telling me he’d gotten both digital
and 35mm pictures throughout the house. That he’d told the boys
they
couldn’t smoke on the premises
. And he’d taken pictures
of the bottoms of their shoes. Which was when he made us take off
our booties and let him photograph the bottom of ours.

On some level I must have heard him, because
I can remember these comments, but at the time his voice was as
faded as Ada’s living room furniture.

Tubs of priceless fabric all neatly
sorted and labeled in a neat handwriting.
Might as well have
been gold. I knew, as I gazed drunkenly at this treasure that I
would never leave the Quilted Secrets. I had to be an heir to some
of this. Greed. Greed was enveloping my mind.

“
Rache?”

Maybe Ada had librarian blood in her veins.
I was in the quilting zone, and I can’t honestly tell you how long
I stayed there. It could have been seconds. It could have been
hours. It’s all a blur.

“
Are you all right, Rachel?”

Ada’s blue and green materials were
carefully folded and stacked on one wall, her reds and yellows on
another, and purples and oranges on the third. The fourth wall held
her sewing machine…sewing machine?!

She cheated? Ada used a sewing machine? Hand
quilters don’t use sewing machines. Ever! Absolutely not….

“Uh, Ms. Lyons? Are you okay?” It was
Detective Tom, detecting that I wasn’t all there.

“What? Oh, sure, go on Tom. And stop calling
me Ms. Lyons. It’s Rachel.”

“Yes ma’am.”

Oh yeah. He was at work.

Then I realized he’d closed the door behind
us so he could share secrets.

Okay I was back. I noticed Hannah seemed a
little distracted still. It was probably her extra brain power
making it harder for her to pull back from the fabulous array
of….

“I need to let you know what we found in our
early run-through. Forensics came up with a ton of hair and blood
samples, and from an initial examination the hair wasn’t all from
Luke, Eddie or Ada. ”

“Where?”

“Upstairs in the master bedroom. On the
stairs. In the living room and kitchen.”

Hannah said, “How do you know that? How do
you know the hair didn’t belong to the family members? It hasn’t
been tested yet, has it?”

“No, of course not. We know because Luke had
mostly gray hair. And Ada and Eddie, of course their hair is
different. They found hair from all of them, of course, various
places around the house. Some of it was bleached blond and some
dyed red.”

A knock on the door interrupted us, and Tom
hurried to open it.

“Captain wants you,” a tall blond uniform
snapped.

As he left, Tom turned and shrugged
apologetically, then mouthed ‘Broward’.

Bleached blond? Dyed red? Had other women
been upstairs in Ada and Luke’s bedroom? Or for that matter, even
their dirty living room. That wasn’t fitting my impression of them.
I was thinking they were mostly reclusive. And what did Tom mean
that Ada and Eddie’s hair was ‘different’?

Then I remembered the recent missing women
and my sleepless night worrying what I’d stepped in.

I said, “Okay ladies, we better get going.”
I had a sense of urgency.

Hannah said in a dreamy voice, “Who’s going
to get all this?”

Gerry answered, “Victoria would, or some
other close relative. Maybe she’ll share it among us.”

I walked out into the hall, noted the open
door to a bathroom, another to a laundry room, and only half-heard
Gerry say as she followed us, “You don’t know yet, do you?”

But I was already entering the kitchen where
I spotted a deputy leaning over a long row of paper lunch bags on a
back counter, like the ones kids used, only white. He opened the
one in front of him, and his face screwed up in disgust.
“Evidence,” he mumbled, and resealed it.

Good grief! They’d left some of the evidence
bags just laying around for anyone to breathe on and otherwise
contaminate?

Biting my tongue, I swerved into what turned
out to be a small den off the kitchen--the room located on the back
side of the living room.

A fragrance hit me. It smelled strongly
female. I glanced around as Hannah eased up behind me.

“Smells like makeup,” she said. “What is
this? A bedroom, a den?”

I said, “Or office. It’s got furniture for
both a bedroom and an office. I think this room is actually bigger
than the living room. Maybe longer. What do you think?”

“Maybe it was supposed to be a family
room.”

I said, “Back in the twenties, maybe it was
the original living room, while that room in the front was supposed
to be the parlor.”

The thought floated in the perfumed air. I
stepped around a full-sized bed that was shoved up close to a
couch, so close you couldn’t really sit down on it anymore. A small
desk and a man’s bureau were right by the entrance. To the back of
the room was a small bathroom.

Gerry joined us and she eased the door to
the kitchen nearly closed as I snapped pictures. I didn’t want the
handful of deputies and cops in the kitchen to hear our remarks
either. My eyes ran over odd items lying about, on the desk, on a
small bed table, on the bureau.

“I think this room is probably being used by
Eddie now,” Hannah said.

I nodded.

It had obviously been touched by a woman’s
hand, however. There was a cheeriness to it I didn’t think Eddie
would be capable of. The newly inserted bed was covered with a
colorful quilt I assumed was one of Ada’s. I studied it briefly. It
was an ordinary block pattern of reds and yellows.

I said, “He slowly moved himself upstairs as
he got more clearheaded and braver.”

Hannah wasn’t up to speed. “Upstairs?”

Gerry said, “He was caged, in the
basement.”

I heard Hannah gasp. We did a quick
review.

“Look at the darling little statue.” Gerry
was standing next to the man’s bureau.

She’d picked up a four-inch-tall, porcelain
statue of a black and white dog, with large floppy ears and
comically large eyes. It was a parody of a Dalmatian and it spoke
of innocence and playfulness, not the working dog that was a
fireman’s companion.

There was an old label still stuck to the
dog’s chest, proclaiming its maker, “CHINA”. Taking it from Gerry,
I examined it more closely. One floppy ear was chipped and there
was a crack around its middle. The China dog had been broken in
half and glued back together long ago. And his tail was
missing.

Keepsakes don’t last long in a drunk’s
house.

“Ada’s,” I said softly. The porcelain dog
was Ada.

Eddie must think it symbolized Ada, too.
Maybe it was Eddie who was decorating the room now.

We were all whispering now. Out of respect,
I supposed. I finally realized she still had her hand on top of the
bureau, pointedly?

I moved back toward her, returning my
attention to it and to the objects on its top--a small lamp, a
handful of paperbacks, some candy wrappers.

Finally I saw it, a lone framed photograph.
Mindful that we shouldn’t be touching anything, I picked it up, my
fingers barely able to feel it through the latex. The picture was
of a pretty black woman, light-skinned but definitely of African
heritage, wearing a yellow sundress. The sundress dated the photo,
sending it back in time to the 1950s or ‘60s.

“Who…” I began, but quickly realized. It was
Ada. The woman in the photo had a large bruise on her right
shoulder. And she had “different” hair, cut in a short Afro.

“Ada was African-American?” I asked.

“You didn’t know?” Hannah.

“Biracial, actually. Maybe even
multiracial,” Gerry said.

I mused how political correctness had
submerged that potentially telling piece of evidence. Or were we
three women just failing to systematically communicate with each
other. I put that job on my list.

Because, frankly, it was a little sweet that
Ada and Eddie’s color didn’t rise to the top as information I
needed.

“What color is Eddie?”

“About the same, maybe a little paler. Luke
is almost all Caucasian.”

Hannah said, “What do you mean almost?”

So Hannah had never met Luke either.

“There’s talk of Indian blood in the Stowall
clan.”

“Which Indian? Our Indian, or the real
Indian?” I said.

“Point taken.” She smiled. “Native American.
Speaking of points, I should have made a point of telling you about
her heritage. But I thought you could tell from the hospital
pictures.”

I thought back to Ada’s files. “They were
old grays and sepias. And they zeroed in on specific wounds. I
don’t remember ever seeing a full picture of her face.”

Hannah mumbled, “Why do black women suffer
so?”

Gerry said softly, “Same reason all women
suffer.”

But I was wondering if that was true, that
all women suffered for the same reasons black women did.

And then it came to me, the parallel that
had been running around inside my brain looking for a way out.

“Like slaves,” I said. “They lived like
slaves.” They nodded in agreement. I carefully placed the picture
down on the bureau.

I was curious about the smell in the room
when we’d first entered it. I headed for the bathroom and looked
for cosmetics of any sort. I finally spotted an old, cloth pouch on
a small table, filled with lipsticks and rouge. It had to have been
Ada’s.

I said, “Do you think this room was Ada’s
once?”

Hannah said, “I think Eddie is gathering
some of his mother’s belongings.”

“It may be an act of grieving,” Gerry
said.

But then I pointed out the sprinkles of face
powder still on the back of the basin.

Eddie was using his mother’s makeup. This
was disturbing on several levels. I made eye contact with Gerry.
The final outcome of this imprisoned and brutalized man’s treatment
could end up going a couple of ways; he could slip from pitiful to
increasingly deranged, and maybe even dangerous right before his
loving aunt’s eyes.

But I didn’t say that. I kept the thought to
myself.

We left the room, feeling the weight of our
inspection. Tom appeared in front of me. He motioned us to follow
and led us up the narrow staircase sandwiched between the living
room and Eddie’s room. The house had fallen silent behind us and I
realized that the kitchen was now empty. I wondered if the donut
eaters had taken a lunch break—probably gone out for more donuts. I
glanced at my watch. It was eleven.

On our way up I also thought that I needed
to find a way through the door I’d just noticed on the far side of
the kitchen, the one I thought might lead to the basement.

The stairs twisted at a landing and doubled
back on themselves to end on a short hall at the top. There were
only two rooms on this floor that I could see, both behind closed
doors, one to the right and the other to the left--which would
place the rooms at the front and the back of the house instead of
on the sides. A full bathroom was centrally located between them,
door open.

I turned to the right, the back of the
house, reasoning that would be the location of the master bedroom.
But Detective Tom, who had stationed himself in front of the
bathroom, thereby giving us no indication of which way to go,
pointed the other way. I switched directions and opened the door on
that end. A layer of gray dust came away with my latexed hand.
Fingerprinting powder. I wiped my gloved hand absently on a tissue
from my backpack.

First impressions are all-important and I
reminded myself to expand on the short notes I was jotting as soon
as possible after this visit. What I was seeing now was beyond
disturbing. We had stepped into a different dynamic.

The room was a fair size for such a small
house. One window faced toward the front of the house, or east, and
a smaller one looked south toward the side with a neighbor. Both
were cloudy with years of dirt. Between them was the bed, tucked
close to the south wall, but far enough away to allow a small side
table. A closet door, standing ajar, was on the other side of the
south facing window.

After making space for the others, I drew a
little map of the room on my pad and snapped more pictures, then
looked around.

I spotted an assortment of clothes in the
closet, some hung and some lying piled on the floor. A combination
of men’s and women’s. A mostly empty shoe bag hung crookedly on the
inside of the door. On the west wall, immediately right as you walk
in the door, was a lady’s dresser with an assortment of odds and
ends on top.

I gently nudged open a small jewelry box. It
contained a broken string of pearls and a handful of other metal
and stone bits and pieces, mostly earrings and rings. The
discoloration on the aged mirror, and stains and scars, drops of
nail polish--on the top and edges of the dresser attested to age as
well as a misbegotten life.