Ada Unraveled (31 page)

It was time for a visit to Carlsbad City
Library branch, the Georgina Cole Genealogy Library. I finished my
shower, and after putting on my makeup, selected my new slacks and
matching shirt. Then I began to plot my visit.

Sipping a glass of noonday tea, I stood
staring vaguely out at our yard. Wisdom was watering it. I was
achieving zen. Until some movement in the bushes and trees on my
neighbor’s side caught my eye. I glanced away, not wanting to be
peeping, and not wanting to be peeped at.

Then I remembered Matt’s comment about
someone hanging around and quickly looked back. But whatever it
was, man or horse—or next door neighbor--it was gone.

I pushed the worry away. Surely Wisdom would
have barked if it had been some intruder. But he was now faithfully
hugging my left leg, having come in through the dog door, in hopes
of a walk. “Sorry pal, not now. Maybe later,” I lied. The almost
constant rain was cutting into our quality time. A pang of guilt
twanged in my heart.

I went into Ada’s Bedroom, Wisdom followed
with lowered head. Her quilt was still on the bed, a spiral
notebook with my thoughts on the meaning of the quilt lay opened
upon it. I needed the reminder of where this investigation had
begun and what I knew and didn’t know.

After updating the notes with Andrea’s
revelations, I stood looking at the beautiful creation. It was hard
to believe it contained such evil.

Early yesterday morning I’d finally solved
the mystery of the top stitching—the random snakes.

I ticked off the known: a random pattern of
snakes sewed the three layers together—the top stitching; the top
row of the three-by-three block of central squares held the
earliest history of Mark, Luke and Ada, including Mark’s murder;
now I’d had it confirmed that the central row of three were about
Jake and Victoria, and their family. I still had questions here.
Why were only four of the Stowall children depicted in the fifth
square, the literal center of the quilt?

The bottom three squares remained
unexplained. Perhaps I could find information at the library about
the two squares containing squiggles that looked like chemical
notations.

The last of the nine squares held a solitary
human figure. It was intricately created from black, brown, white,
tan, yellow and red materials, minute pieces of which had been
painstakingly cut and sewn together. These were the colors of the
human race. However, to make the character even more enigmatic, it
appeared to have breasts of pale pink and a black phallus hanging
between its legs.

I thought again of the estrogen bottles
found in Eddie’s medicine cabinet, and wondered if this
multi-colored human was meant to be him. It certainly would
fit.

But before I could make my escape the house
phone rang, yet again. This time it was Gloria. I switched to my
Ukrainian translator ears.

“Hello, Gloria. Good of you to call back.”
Being my kind of gal she came straight to the point.

“I vant you to understand, Rachel, dat I had
no idea, none, dat Eddie vas alife. None of us did. He vas kept
hidden. And Ada alvays spoke of him in the past tense.”

“Have you seen him?”

“No. No I hefen’t. I don’t know vere he iss.
No von seems to know. But vat I need you to understand (at least
that’s what I think she said) is dat dere vas nothing I could do
for Ada. Nothing.” To make matters worse Gloria began to cry.

“I vas only a young nurse when I met her. I
had no power, I vas…and she couldn’t leaf him. She vas in her
forties by den. She had no….and couldn’t leaf him. He did things.
Even worse things dan you know. John, his condition, she didn’t
know if maybe Eddie vould maybe...be a…” The phone went dead.

Resolutely, I picked up my notes and packed
them in a briefcase. I added sharpened pencils, a fresh note pad
and my thin camera.

LIRI Log: Will Townsend:

10.12 / 12:22. Followed subject, Rachel
Lyons, on drive to Carlsbad Public Library. During drive, she
displayed distress attempting to use her cell phone.

10.12 / 13:13. Observed subject enter
library after several more phone calls. No evidence of her being
followed.

10.12 / 13:24. Confirmed subject’s
whereabouts in Genealogy Room. No one was observed watching
her.

10.12 / 14:38. Confirmed subject is still in
Genealogy Room.

10.12 / 16:39. Subject left library for home
after three hours and fifty-seven minutes.

The traffic was moving well as I approached
I-15 via I-78, on my way to the library. And of course my phone
rang. I checked it quickly, holding the phone down in my lap. Early
this morning my freshly repaired station wagon had been returned to
me and it was too old to have hands free phone devices.

It was a joy to drive in once again.

But the last thing I needed was a ticket. It
was Ruth McMichaels. Mind-reading-Ruth. The one I’d been trying to
reach for what seemed like eons.

Maybe she was calling to get me arrested.
Maybe she had no idea I was in a car. Surreptitiously, I cupped the
phone to my ear and said hello, after the fourth ring.

Silence. She’d probably given up.

Then, as if from some great distance, “It’s
not Eddie’s fault. He’s an innocent.” Her voice was reed thin.

Oh lord, how many times did I have to hear
that?

“Ruth! I thought I’d missed your call. Thank
you so much for getting back to me. Do you know where Eddie
is?”

“With the sisters.” She paused again. “I’ve
seen….”

She faded out. I prompted her.

“Seen what, Ruth?”

“They do things. You have to know, Rachel.
People want you stopped. They want you terminated, like the
girls—well, not all of them. No, like Hazel. I have to tell you...”
Again the voice disappeared into some netherworld. Again it
returned.

“It didn’t happen to all of them. Or there
wouldn’t have been Eddie….”

What wouldn’t have happened?

I thought I heard a man’s urgency behind
her. Then other voices.

“Ruth, is someone with you?”

“The boys were spared. Maybe….”

Ruth yelled something, but not into the
phone. Was she talking to her husband? She was still married,
right? What was his name? I started to support his needs, to tell
her I could talk with her at a better time—when I wasn’t breaking
the law--but then she was speaking again.

Now in a different time zone. Much
earlier.

“Gordon said she was a witch. But that was
just because she was pregnant.” She laughed faintly. “He was drunk.
She drowned, like a witch.”

Gordon?

I said, “Do you mean Gordon Stowall killed
Hazel?”

“It’s the bad blood. That blood was bad in
more ways than one.…”

I wasn’t getting much information I could
understand and again thought it might be best to push for a later
conversation. But she forged onward.

“In front of half the family. On Lake
Henshaw. They’re after me now.”

“Who’s after you? Do you mean the
sisters?”

“No, no. Well…I don’t know…
Paul!
Wait!”
Another long pause and then, “You have to know,
Rachel.…”

“Speak to me Ruth.”

She yelled something garbled and then seemed
to disappear again. I checked the phone, we were still
connected.

I dove in with my questions.

“Ruth, tell me about Ada. When did she
become pregnant with Eddie? The dates on the genealogy would
indicate it was when she was with Mark, but Eddie is Luke’s son,
right?”

Silence. “Ruth?”

She was back! But her voice had gone so deep
I thought it was a man speaking, at first.

“
Not unless by violence
. Mark married
her. Then Luke raped Ada. That’s why they fought, why he killed
Mark. Mark knew…couldn’t stop his own brother.”

I said, “What do you mean by bad blood,
Ruth?”

“Hasn’t anyone told you yet? Inbreeding. It
led to John Stowall…the last son of their family…it’s in his book.
It has a family tree. More complete. They can’t have children
because they were sterilized by that nutsy doctor.” And then she
was really gone.

Sterilized! There it was. The thought I’d
been dancing around all this time. That’s why the little x’s on the
fighting figure on Ada’s quilt—
and the same little x’s over the
children’s groins
.

But I didn’t want to think it.

And the nutsy doctor, the one Famine just
told them about, he had sterilized them! I definitely needed that
man’s name.

I heard a metallic chirp and looked over to
see a police car right next to me. My heart bumped. The traffic cop
signaled me to close my phone by closing his hand. I did. He sped
forward, where he stayed, just in front of me for a few miles.

Nice cop, giving us phone addicts a little
room to roam. I wanted to call Ruth back to be certain she was
okay, but pulling to the shoulder on the freeway seemed a daunting
task, so I continued on.

It was another fifteen minutes before I
reached the old library in Carlsbad. I redialed Ruth’s number, but
there was no answer.

I sat in my car calling everyone I could
think of. I even called my home phone number forgetting Matt was
away…
and it rang busy.

No one was home! Matt was still on the road,
would be all day, in fact I’d been given instructions not to call
him.

Maybe he’d returned early. Or maybe I’d
dialed the wrong number.

I called home again. It rang several times.
Good. So, I’d pressed a wrong button, not hard to do with these
fool, teensy phones.

I called Hannah again, willing a pickup.
Someone was always home at their house, or so she’d said. Still no
answer. I left a second message for her to call me, and added she
should contact her mother. That Ruth had called me very upset.

I called Tom Beardsley at work again. Busy.
I left a second message.

And now my phone was down to two bars. And
my station wagon didn’t have a phone cord in it. I glanced toward
the library.

The library had phones, of course. Ruth had
sounded genuinely terrified. Maybe I needed to call nine-one-one.
But what was I to say? Someone hung up on me? I heard loud noises?
They live somewhere on Cleveland mesa?

A plea like that would just slip to the
bottom of the bin of hundreds and maybe thousands of requests for
help that went out to the California Emergency Communication system
every day.

I finally realized that what had unnerved me
so utterly was the similarity between Ruth’s voice and words, and
the words my mother spoke, just before she’d slipped into
dementia.

I tried to settle myself further by
carefully reviewing what Ruth had told me.

The most stunning information I had just
received from Ruth was that the Stowall children had been
sterilized.

But Ada had had Eddie. So, either Mark or
Luke had not been sterilized. Maybe neither of them had. Ruth
really hadn’t told me which one was the father, but her obvious
dislike of Luke had led her to charge him with rape.

I kept going back to the four children with
Xs over their genitals at the center of Ada’s quilt. One male and
three females.

So maybe these were the only four that had
been sterilized. John and three of the four girls. That would make
sense. And maybe brain damaged Sarah was the one not sterilized
because she was brain damaged. They might have figured no one would
marry her anyway.

Realizing just how exhausted I was from
nights of dial-tone-phone-call interrupted sleep and the insomnia
that ensued, I opened my car door and willed myself towards the
library.

I stepped out of the truck and breathed in
the sea air. The Cole branch of the Carlsbad library commanded a
view of the Pacific Ocean that is the envy of most along the coast
of Southern California. Cool breezes year round, great view,
excellent collection of books and databases.

Before leaving the house, I’d called to see
if I could access John Stowall’s book online through the library.
Many electronic genealogical tools are available online, some
through local public libraries. However, I’d found that most family
biographies were not. They were too obscure.

And it turned out John Stowall’s family bio
wasn’t online either--as ubiquitous as the Stowall’s seemed to be.
The only public copy of the book appeared to be held in Carlsbad’s
closely guarded special collection room. I would have to read it
there.

My first goal was to explore this bad blood
thing. My second goal was to verify Eddie’s parentage. My third was
to find out more about Ada’s family and get a better picture of
Gordon, Jolene and Hazel.

The librarian brought me the biography after
taking my ID card. I was vaguely offended that she couldn’t see
that I was a librarian, too. Next time I’d wear my NCLA tee.

I was praying the book would have a detailed
index as I opened the red, leather book and flipped straight to the
back to find that indeed there was. The thin biography also had a
sizeable collection of family photographs. But I fought the urge to
start with them and flipped back to the first page.

It answered my first question immediately,
at least partially. The very first sentence began, “I, John
Franklin Stowall, was born with a rare blood disease, a medical
event that brought an end to this branch of the Stowall family and
misshaped the maturing years of my brothers and sisters.”

My breathing slowed, my blood stilled. There
it was;
rare blood disease
. Bad blood literally. But I
didn’t yet know what kind of disease.

There was no table of contents, so I flipped
back to the index and searched for a further explanation. I tried
“diseases”, and “blood diseases”, even looked under the keywords
“Stowall, John”. Nothing.