Ada Unraveled (32 page)

It was as if he wanted to apologize, but was
too horrified by his own affliction to discuss it further. For
crying out loud! What blood disease?

Without a doubt the entire family shared in
at least one disease, the disease of terminal secrecy!

Something made me look up as I felt someone
watching me. I saw a figure quickly disappear around a line of
bookcases. A chill ran up my spine. I waited, expecting the person
to peer around at me again.

It was nothing of course, just my
imagination, my nerves, after all the hangup calls. I sat gazing
into space thinking about her for a few moments. Finally, I sighed
and returned to my frustrating search.

John Stowall went on to dedicate the book to
his siblings, and actually plead for their forgiveness for taking
their right to bear children away. “It’s because of my disorder
that my dear siblings suffered so. It pains me to know that I can’t
even be an uncle. It pains me to know my existence has damaged
their happiness in this way.”

So the mysterious blood disease was indeed
genetic. I returned to the index. It was only three pages long. So
I began working my way down, until I finally found it.

Not a blood disease, a blood
disorder.
He called it Hemostatism. A disorder that
interferes with the proper function of blood clotting. A bleeder’s
disease. I had never heard of this disorder, but that didn’t
surprise me. Medicine was not my field.

I turned to the section indicated. It was
only six pages long and I read it knowing I would need to research
further before the afternoon was out.

I would discover that John Stowall’s short
book was first an apologia, second a family history--which was as
much an attempt to identify the source of the ‘inherited
disorder’--and finally this brief discussion of ‘Hemostatism.’

I skimmed faster. Time was fleeting. I
needed to know more. I needed to know current medical knowledge,
and what was known in the middle of the Twentieth Century. John
Stowall’s discussion was sounding more and more fantastic, as in
not real. Mythical, not factual.

As I couldn’t leave the sequestered area for
archived materials, I asked the librarian for reference tools on
the topic. While I waited, I studied the photographs John had
included.

The photos were old, mostly of the family
when it was very young and still happy--all but one, before John’s
birth. The one photo of John was him as a three-month-old, in the
arms of his unsmiling mother.

So even then she knew. Her last son was a
bleeder.

She had to have been in her forties by then.
But Victoria still looked pretty.

Most of the pictures showed a happy family.
It was sad, knowing how these people would change. The dates of the
photos ranged from the ‘50s into the ‘70s.

Suddenly I found a passage that really
confused me. John wrote, “Thank God that since entering the holy
order my spontaneous bleeding has ceased altogether.”

Or, those around him who needed him to
seem to be a bleeder were no longer able to stick him with pins in
the middle of the night,
I mused. Munchausen’s came to
mind.

I continued my examination of the book and
discovered a notation on the end page advising that there was a
pamphlet which accompanied the book. As the librarian brought me
the medical books, I asked her for that as well. It turned out to
be the other genealogy of the Jake Stowall clan, the one Ruth had
just mentioned. I opened it, gingerly spreading it out over several
nearby tables with the librarian’s help.

I took a moment to study it, quickly
searching for some sort of confirmation of Ruth’s words that Eddie
wasn’t Luke’s son. Spotted Jake and Victoria Stowall. Ran my finger
down to the eldest child, Mark, and the second oldest Luke.

Ada Stowall was listed next to both of them
as wife on this version of the genealogy. Ada’s marriage to Mark
was dated December 8, 1964. Ada’s marriage to Luke was almost two
months later, on January 26, 1965.

But Eddie was only shown under her first
marriage, to Mark.

A straight vertical line down to his name
and the date of his birth, Thursday, June 6, 1965. He’d been born
eight months after Ada’s marriage to Mark and six months after her
marriage to Luke.

It was more and more apparent that Mark was
Eddie’s father. My heart lifted at the thought.

I leaned closer to the entries.
The
surface of the document had been repaired.
A faint printing of
Eddie’s name could be seen under Luke’s name, as well. And a
different birth date. But it had been removed. With a thin layer of
liquid paper.

I studied the entry of Eddie’s name in the
pamphlet under Mark’s name. It appeared to have been part of the
original document. Same font. I brushed my finger tip over the
words. There was no noticeable raise or depression.

A voice whispered in my ear. “Someone tried
to change the entry, way back when the book was first entered in
the collection. We had to do a repair on the pamphlet when it was
returned. That’s why it’s no longer allowed to circulate.”

The librarian had returned, to see what I
was doing, peering so closely.

I wished I’d carried my ALA card with
me.

But then she smiled. “You’re the PI, aren’t
you? The one trying to figure out that old Stowall mystery. I heard
you were a librarian.”

What?

“Don’t you know they have your picture on
television? When you were coming out of that old house? The one the
police had cordoned off? You and those other two women.”

Oh, no.
Gerry.

“Everyone’s trying to figure out who those
other women are.”

I said, “Janet Nelson and Helen Johnston. I
partner with them sometimes.”

Those were the names of a couple of
librarians I’d worked with back in North Carolina. I figured they’d
love the publicity.

The librarian scurried off with a greedy
smile. Probably jumped right on facebook. Or twitter, or linkedin,
or…whatever.

I sighed. I’d had my fifteen minutes of fame
and hadn’t even noticed.

The genealogy was much bigger than the one I
had pinned to my wall. And there might well be other changes on it
I needed to know. I asked if it was possible for a copy to be made
of a document this size. It was, but done in sections I would have
to tape together myself, and they would be scaled down.

In several places in his small tome, the
author referred to himself as ‘Brother John’.

I assumed John meant “Brother” with a
capitol B as in a Catholic religious. I knew that a lot of Brothers
were active in Catholic schools, and that teaching was an extra vow
some took, along with poverty, chastity and obedience.

I turned my attention to a couple of the
books the librarian had brought me that discussed hemophilia, the
Merck Manual and the volume of the Gales Encyclopedia of Medicine
that contained hemophilia, thinking that this was what John’s
family thought he had. But a brief review reminded me that this was
only partly a genetic illness.

But it could also occur in the womb during
development of the fetus, through a mechanism called chromosomal
mutation.

And it could be acquired.

This latter type occurred when antibodies
were formed against the “elements in the blood which are
instrumental to its healthy functioning”.

Way too simply put, hemophilia was a
condition where the blood failed to coagulate properly when blood
vessels broke. But since there was no obvious alternative, I
continued reading.

I understood very little of the medical
descriptions, but something in the roman numerals and chemical
script made me think of Ada’s quilt--specifically squares seven and
eight. I forged on.

Only men were actually stricken by the
disability--by bleeding--while women were the silent carriers,
passing the scary illness to their offspring. Clearly Eddie did not
have hemophilia. There was no evidence in his home or anywhere else
that I could find, that he exhibited this disorder. So why was he
locked up? Luke’s ignorance? Ada’s ignorance? The whole fool
family’s ignorance?

Or was Luke just a nasty, rotten man who
hated Eddie because he was Mark’s child—and that was the only
reason he kept him imprisoned?

It all came down to Jake. Jake was the one
who kept this fantasy alive, because he needed to justify what he’d
done to his daughters.

Yet, Ada never had another child. I wondered
if she’d been sterilized, too. After delivering Eddie. Of course,
if she didn’t love Luke she might very well have avoided pregnancy
in one of the numerous ways available to women since the nineteen
sixties.

I wondered if John had been sterilized, even
though males did not pass the disorder on.

None of these very personal questions were
being answered by John’s little book. Maybe these questions didn’t
really matter. Crimes had been committed before, and beyond
identifying the evil doer, no rhyme or reason had been found for
many of them either.

I tried to console myself with this fact.
But I wasn’t happy with the lack of understanding. This was the
twenty-first century.

I returned my focus to the volume I was
reading.

It seemed to me at this stage of my reading
that if John had hemophilia there was simple proof that it wasn’t
genetically endowed. The first two males hadn’t been bleeders.

But my whole brain was glazing over—not just
my eyes.

Along about three-thirty I discovered a
reference in the index to snakes on page thirty-two of John’s
little biography.

I hurriedly turned to this page and found a
small picture of a Western Rattlesnake. But it was the caption
underneath that grabbed my attention. It confirmed the worst of the
crazy things I’d heard about this man.

“Jake Stowall believed snake venom had
properties that would lead to the development of a cure for this
disease.”

So it was true. Jake Stowall thought he
could cure his youngest son’s bleeding problems using snake venom.
So did he use the venom directly on John?

Time was slipping by much too quickly, so I
flipped the pages until I saw a small illustration, this one
captioned, “PDB rendering of Coagulation Factor VIII.” It leapt off
the page at me.

My suspicions had been correct. Before me
was Ada’s “rosary”, complete with dangling cross and two jacks,
embroidered in the seventh square. And I felt convinced that when I
returned home with my notes and photocopies I’d find the strange
notations in the eighth square as well.

It was all coming together. But I had one
more task I wanted to complete.

I returned to the section with the
photographs. I needed to take more time looking at them, reading
the captions.

Andrea had said Luke looked ‘like a
knock-off of Jake.’ But I’d yet to spot a photograph that clearly
showed this.

And then I found one. Jake was standing with
his second son, side by side, out front of the backyard shed. Jake
in his fifties, Luke in his late twenties. They did look very much
alike. Same beady eyes with dark circles. Same stringy brown hair
hanging Hitler-like from a side part. Lean. Browned by the sun.
About the same height. Their faces were feature-for-feature
identical.

I moved through the pictures with an
increasing sense of urgency. Time had fled. I would get stuck in
the rush-hour traffic for sure. I turned another page, and again
something caught my eye.

A familiar photo –
had I seen this
before
, in Victoria’s twisting hallway, Jake, Victoria and some
of their children, with Jake holding a long, gnarled stick? Not
quite, because that hallway photo had included only the oldest
three sisters and two brothers, with Jake and Victoria flanking
them.

This picture was much clearer, and I could
see that the stick wasn’t a stick at all. It was a dead snake. And
I could see Mark and Luke better. Mark was startlingly beautiful,
with black curly hair wild about his head and piercing eyes. He was
tall and stately. And he was a stark contrast to Luke--still
looking very young in this picture. A gawky teen.

Not only was this version of the photo
clearer, it was uncropped. And it showed two more people in the
posed portrait on “Anne Stowall’s 1st Communion Day.”

I read the full caption underneath. The two
new people included were a very young John holding his older sister
Sarah’s hand. The damaged sister.

But, in this picture, I didn’t think Sarah
was damaged yet. She was maybe seven or eight, and her face was
full of happy mischief. Again, in contrast, the two- or
three-year-old John was thin and sickly looking.

In very small print beneath the primary
caption, were the words, “Photo by Dr. Marcus Borman, physician to
and friend of the Jake Stowall family. I am pictured here at the
age of two.”

I checked the index, looking for Borman.
There were two entries for him. I went back and quickly scanned
them.

Marcus Borman was described as a local,
general practitioner who “assisted Jake Stowall with John’s
hemophilia, working tirelessly on finding remedies for John
Stowalls’ ‘difficulties.’

A thought popped into my head so suddenly it
forced me back in my chair.

Was this physician the man who would later
sterilize the Stowall daughters? And, was he still a fugitive,
wanted for questioning?

Another glance at my watch lit a match under
my meandering mind. Four-thirty, time to run, or settle in for a
couple more hours of work. Rush hour was upon me, like midnight
upon Cinderella.

As I hurriedly returned John Stowall’s book
and raced out the front door for the parking lot, I wondered afresh
at the author-brother-
Brother’s
opening apology to his
siblings. He definitely believed his genetic blood “disease” had
prevented them all from procreating. I felt sorry for him and
wondered where he was today.