Ada Unraveled (28 page)

In fact, now that I thought about it, he’d
never cracked a smile all morning. I wrote it off to my paranoid
tendencies.

Meanwhile, large Will melted away into the
atmosphere.

I smiled at my bit of humor and returned to
the important things in life--in the kitchen, planning dinner.
Steak or fish?

The living room television announced that a
third woman had disappeared from the Cleveland County bar scene. I
moved slowly toward the doorway so I could listen better. The woman
had been belatedly reported missing by her estranged family, after
they’d heard about the one found in the old Iguana graveyard—the
one out back of Ada Stowall’s house.

Her parents indicated that she had drug
problems and had disappeared before for weeks at a time. Last time
they heard from her was mid-summer.

Luke?

A picture of the now-missing Hispanic woman
appeared on the screen. The camera zoomed in on her face and what I
thought was a scar, or maybe running mascara, turned out to be a
small snake tattooed on her left cheek.

Luke and Eddie?

No! I wasn’t going there. The authorities
were on top of things. I turned the television off! I was taking a
day off! But my feet were thinking for themselves as they carried
me down the hall toward the quilt.

Snakes again.
What was it with Iguana
and snakes? Deep in thought I moved toward the back of the house
and into Ada’s Bedroom, the one so dubbed because it contained her
quilt and genealogy. Standing at the foot of the bed I reviewed
again the figures sewn in the large central medallion with nine
squares.

The top three, Ada and Mark happy, Mark and
Luke fighting, Ada and Luke unhappy.

The middle three squares…maybe Jake and
Victoria with snakes around their feet in the first square, maybe
some of their children in the second square, after all?

That second square was the central square of
the quilt. I needed to figure out who those four children were.

Maybe Ada had sewn this quilt over a long
period, so there were only four children in the middle square
because at the time Ada sewed it that was all there were in the
family? I ticked them off on my fingers: Jake, Victoria, Mark,
Luke…. No, that wouldn’t work. The four figures in the central
square were three girls and a boy. The birth order of Jake and
Victoria’s children was two boys, then four girls, and finally one
more boy.

And the sixth square? Did it hold runaway
Ada on an island, with her little son?

Guess work. Just guess work.

My eyes traveled slowly down toward the
bottom three embroidered pictures. Enigmas.

Strange squiggles and lines. Strange lines
and squiggles. And a doll of many colors.

Concentrate!

Okay. Square seven, bottom left,
clearly--was a random design of tangled swirls.

I peered at it harder. And made out a
possible cross dangling from the tangles—maybe it was a rosary.

But instead of a string of beads, the cross
was hanging from a thin rope of yarn that changed colors as it spun
from orange to purple to blue. I sighed. I really had no idea what
the pattern meant. Especially since, off a bit from the primary
mass of tangles, were two star-shaped jacks.

So was it a child’s game? I sighed
again.

Square eight, bottom center, had random
randomness with those star-shaped jacks everywhere, some of them
split in half, some whole, and pieces of yarn again haphazardly
tossed on the ivory background. At the center of this mess were a
red splotch and a much larger green splotch.

Incomprehensible is what it was.

Or, perhaps--my librarian brain kicked
in—
a scientific diagram?

Had Ada embroidered the chemical notation
for the disease that afflicted this family onto her quilt?

But I went no further with this thought,
because at that moment the light in the room shifted as the sun
moved over to the west side of the house. Now streaming though the
bedroom window, it brought the topstitching suddenly into
relief.

What had seemed random stitching on a par
with the random swirls in square seven and eight slowly took on
shape. Not a language, not anything meaningful…if you didn’t know
the pattern that was now emerging in Iguana. But since I did, I
realized quite stunningly it was…Snakes.

The distinct shape of a cobra’s cowl caught
my eye first, and at once my brain began looking for others. And I
saw them, dozens, large and small, sometimes overlaying each other,
sometimes just the head peeking out of a seam or a fold, sometimes
attached to complete bodies--their tails twisting and coiling away
toward infinity.

I muttered,
“Snake heads and
….”

A voice growled, “What?”

I jumped a mile off the ground and took a
full minute to settle back down—or so it seemed.

“Matt! How many times do I have to tell you
not to sneak up on me like that when I’m concentrating?”

“You’re always concentrating.” He tried on a
devilish grin. It didn’t fit.

He was feeling playful, which was a relief
given my earlier worries. My gaze returned to the quilt as if
pulled by a string while he said something I didn’t quite
catch.

“What?” I was trying to recapture my
thoughts about snakes and….

He said forcefully, “There was a guy at the
top of our driveway.”

Now he had my attention.

“He was just hanging around.”

“Mexican gardener? Student Mormon?
Extraterrestrial invader?” Working at controlling my frustrations.
Failing miserably.

“No. Just a guy.” He turned and walked away.
The gloom was back. “Be careful,” he added from somewhere else in
the house. Deadly serious.

“Where did he walk?” I practically
yelled.

Then my cell phone rang with an invitation
to another Stowall autopsy—Luke’s. He’d been found…dead!

Stupefied, I never heard the answer to my
question to Matt. And didn’t think to ask questions of the deputy
doing the inviting for Tom.

Matt attended this autopsy with me. I barely
had time to shower and dress before having to race out the door and
up the mountain again.

Thursday, October 9

It was Luke again. He had another woman with
him. Was this the third or fourth?

And where did he get them? Where did these
women come from? They were so like his mother. So weak.
So…needy.

Eddie glanced at the top of the bureau, at
the object right next to the picture of his mother. He looked back
at the ceiling. Listened in disgust.

He sat up and swung his legs to the floor.
Noticing how hard his stomach was becoming, he pushed himself up
off the bed.

Time to stop Luke. He’s sick of digging
holes in the mud. He’s sick of the beatings.

He climbed the stairs and opened the door to
his parents’ bedroom for the first time in almost three decades.
Luke’s naked sweating body was moving up and down violently on the
woman. But the woman wasn’t screaming anymore. She was dead.

It seemed the gun made almost no sound at
all. Luke spun to stare in astonishment at his tortured
progeny--one last communication that gave Eddie supreme
pleasure.

Then monster-man flopped over on top of the
woman. Two corpses humping.

Two humping corpses.

It took Eddie an hour to drag them both down
the stairs and out the back door of the kitchen, into the raining
night. He buried them out back in the cemetery—
next to the other
humping corpses

LIRI Log: Will Townsend:

10.11 / 12:00. Visited Red’s Rebel Bar and
Grill, spoke with Max Phoenix, regular bartender, says he hasn’t
seen the two missing women for a while. But there was a white guy
picked up the Mexican woman (#2)—thinks her name is Manuela, Ella
for short--just before Labor Day, maybe the 30th of August. White
guy was old, maybe in his sixties. Says he’d never seen him before.
Says the cops haven’t been to see him.

10.11 / 13:20. Visited Devine Dog Lounge,
spoke with owner Stan Klee, says he saw a gray-haired guy a couple
of nights ago hanging around Leticia, the third missing woman.
Leticia is a regular of Devine’s but owner doesn’t know where she
lives. Klee says he’s never seen the gray head before. Doesn’t know
his name. Also says cops haven’t been to see him.

I behave differently when I’m with Matt. A
little less freewheeling, a little more restrained. It’s the same
for him. God’s Adam and Eve design at play--two parts of the same
whole, one balancing and correcting the other.

But somehow this afternoon we were a little
bit off. Or maybe it was just me.

Detective Thomas Beardsley met us outside
the double doors of exam room six and in hushed tones filled us in.
The first thing we learned was that the “team of gravediggers”
they’d brought in to help with the search at Ada’s, unearthed two
more women and Luke in the course of the night. Beardsley said what
we’d been brought in for today was Luke’s postmortem. This, because
of our connection to Victoria Stowall.

Of course, the deputy who’d called us at
home had told us this was Luke’s autopsy. But that was all he’d
told us. I was eager for more details. I didn’t realize just how
eager I was until I said, “Why on earth wasn’t this on the
news?”

Tom just shrugged. He looked exhausted.

Then I remembered I’d taken the day off.
Which meant keeping the television off. So I really didn’t know if
the news about Luke had been on the news.

But I did know that police detectives Mosby
and Learner would want copies of the photographs I’d taken in my
walk around of the house and any notes I’d made. So I handed two
copies of the pictures to Tom, and then apologized for not having
any notes yet.

I hadn’t gotten to journaling yet. I said
I’d fax my notes in ASAP. Asked him to give the Pinto Springs folks
the second copy of the photos.

Matt gave me a look. I wasn’t sure why. I
was tired, cranky, and definitely not communicating well with him
about what was going on. I reasoned that he wasn’t sharing
everything he was doing with me, either.

But it was wrong-headed thinking, and on
some level I knew this. On some level I knew I wasn’t managing the
mental overload caused by having two apprentices under my wing—that
and being in the middle of a complicated murder case for the first
time.

Beardsley quickly stowed the pictures in his
briefcase.

Tom also told us that the word L U K E that
we’d found yesterday had been painted underneath three other types
of blood. They were checking with the Cleveland Hospital now to
confirm Ada’s blood type, assuming that the oldest blood was
hers.

Then Tom led us into the lab anteroom,
taking a sharp turn to the right where I was expecting us to go
straight. We climbed a narrow set of circular stairs and my blood
pressure lowered with each step up. To somewhere more
comfortable.

This exam room had an upper theater, which
is where we were being escorted. There would be no horrible smells
up high, looking down. And no close-ups of the dead. I was
relieved. Matt probably was too, though he never let on.

On the way up, Tom said, “The name of that
graveyard is the Stowall Family Cemetery. Records are showing that
Ada and Luke were the official keepers of it. Ironic, huh?”

Matt said, “And now Eddie?”

Tom said, “I guess.”

It finally hit me; Luke had been buried in
that graveyard—nearby the barflies. Who buried him? Who killed him
and buried him?

The only name that came to mind, of course,
was Eddie.

I couldn’t believe I hadn’t gone there yet.
Where was I--back in that quilt? Still searching for a day off from
the Stowalls?

I couldn’t explain my delayed reactions, and
it frankly worried me.

He pushed the next door open and we stepped
up and into the circular viewing theater. Subtle voices greeted us
from down below--transferred to us mechanically and emitted from
two speakers on the side walls. The speakers removed us one step
further from the very real experience of standing next to the
body.

Looking down now I was reminded of the last
autopsy, Jake’s, Eddie’s grandfather. And now here we were for
his…father’s or uncle’s. The question that followed these thoughts
was
where was Eddie now?

In my effort to remove myself from the
Stowall weirdness I’d lost track of him, too.

Through the dome-shaped, viewing window I
saw two steel tables. One held an exposed body.

Tom said, “That’s the second woman, just
being sewn up. The path-techs will stuff her into a body bag pretty
quickly. Then they’ll prep Luke. He’s on the table nearest us.
Still in the bag.”

My stomach did a little flip-flop despite
the distance. I was more anxious than I’d realized.

The young detective said in hushed tones,
“Marana has ruled that the first two of the women died of heart
failure, as a result of a prolonged episode of blunt-force trauma.
The third woman is still in route.”

In other words, they were beaten to death.
He continued.

“Most evidence to date points to Luke as the
culprit.”

Matt said, “Most?”

“The ME found a Negroid hair on the second
woman, the one that was just zipped up. Eddie is claiming he was
forced by his father—actually, he calls him Luke—to help him bury
the women. A solitary hair would support that claim. If they find
any more….” He let the thought speak for itself.

I said, “So Eddie’s resurfaced?”

Tom nodded. “This morning. They caught him
trying to reenter his home. They questioned him. Took him to his
Aunt Mary’s.”

I said, “I don’t think Luke was his father
either, but I don’t have any clear proof. I wonder if Eddie has
found any evidence other than the marriage dates on the genealogy.
I certainly would be wishing Luke wasn’t my father.”