Ada Unraveled (34 page)

Great.

“Any other witnesses? Maybe they could
help.”

“Yes, one woman said it was a teen-aged boy
with pimples. And a guy said he was certain it was his
ex-wife.”

I sighed. And then something snapped into
place.

“I remember something, Matt.”

“Okay.”

“Ruth. Ruth called me.”

“What?”

“Ruth McMichaels, she called me while I was
driving to the library. She sounded worried. No! She sounded
terrified.” Fresh tears rolled down the side of my face. I’d moved
too quickly trying to sit up. My face clenched; my teeth ground
against each other.

I contained the pain with all my will.

“The phone, give me the phone, please.”

Matt cautiously moved away from the safety
of the doorway and handed me his cell phone.

“Did Hannah call? Do I remember that she
called?” I was punching numbers into his cell as I asked.

“Rachel, you need to rest…”

“I need to speak to Hannah…Hannah it’s me,
Rachel.”

The chocolate voice said, “Oh, hi hon. How
are you?”

“Your mom called me last Saturday. While I
was driving to the library.”

There was a pause. Then she said, “We found
her, Rachel. Thanks to your messages, we found her on time.”

Hannah’s voice was flat, emotionless. I
almost spoke over the meaning in the deadened sound.

“Found her? You mean….”

“She’s alive Rachel, resting. You need to do
the same. Don’t worry about my mom.”

Something bad was wrong. Something she
wasn’t telling me.

“Oh. Hannah? I just remembered something
else. I had this weird dream. About the biblical Ruth and biblical
Paul….”

“Who? Paul, my dad? He’s dead, Rachel. Died
a few years back.”

“Ruth said…he needed her. In my dream. No
even before. She called to him while we were talking on the
phone.”

I started crying and Matt reached for the
phone, but I resisted. Until I saw his face.

I let it go. Holding my head in my hands,
trying to stop the wracking sobs because they hurt my neck so
badly, I closed my eyes against the tears and the pain.

I heard Matt laugh gently, and say, “No, I
won’t. Don’t worry, Hannah. She’ll be better soon.”

But they weren’t telling me the truth. I
struggled to compose myself.

“Look, it’s okay Rache….”

“No. It isn’t. Tell me what’s happened to
Ruth, Matt, or I’ll have to go on thinking she’s really dead and
you just aren’t telling me.”

“Rache.” He sighed, and sat on the side of
the bed and took my hand. “Ruth had a stroke. She’s
still…recovering.”

A wave of guilt swept over me. “If only I’d
called sooner. If only I hadn’t been lying around here stoned on
pain killers, I could have been helping.”

“Stop it Rachel. You’re not a super hero.
You were hurt, too. Someone tried to kill you.” His words made the
seat belt welts and bruises across the front of my body ache.

“She thought she was in danger. She kept
yelling, for someone to stop it, and…for Paul. It sounded like she
was under attack. Or…maybe that was just me, thinking she was in
danger. I heard voices in the background.”

His face reflected his confusion. It
wouldn’t be until later that we’d figure out it was just Ruth’s
television blaring in the next room.

“So, is she able to talk?” I was afraid of
the answer.

“Not yet, Rache. She’s still under. They’re
keeping her that way, in a chemically induced coma, so her brain
can rest and heal.”

Tears began flowing again.

“It isn’t like your mom, Rache. She’ll come
out of this and probably stabilize. Just, maybe with some
disabilities.”

I almost shook my head, no. Remembered my
neck, and muttered, “I’m really messed up, Matt. My emotions. I
guess from the meds.”

The tears began flowing again.

“She’ll make it, Rache. It’s hard to
die.”

“Not so easy to live, either,” I said.

Hours later I carefully lifted myself off
our bed—Matt was finally asleep--and crept back to Ada’s
Bedroom.

Ada’s quilt was still spread across the bed,
beaming glorious colors up at the world. The genealogy was hanging
casually on the far wall.

I had my iPod Shuffle. I’d stuck its little
earbuds in my ears and turned Beethoven’s 9th up full blast. His
Ode to Joy symphony.

Beethoven’s last symphony and the one he’d
written after going deaf. It was his farewell to us, and I’d read
both the original poem written by von Schiller and the lyrics of
the 9th written by Beethoven. I wanted to understand the full
meaning of his powerful creation.

I wanted to understand Beethoven’s farewell
message to us—a man who listened to God in His own language,
music.

And I wanted to understand the creator of
this beautiful comforter. Somehow they went together.

One phrase had stuck with me from the
Chorus: “Joy, beautiful spark of God. All men will become brothers
under thy gentle wing.”

I prayed it was so as I gazed at the strange
multi-racial, multi-sexed figure in the ninth square.

There were so many variations, so many
different kinds of people on earth it was hard to imagine us ever
coming together in peace.

A memory from that seemingly long ago visit
to the Georgina Cole Library came to me as my attention turned to
the genealogy—the one Matt had pinned to our wall only a week
ago.

I remembered I’d had several photocopies
made, including the larger version of the genealogy. Had those
things been saved from the accident? I seemed to remember something
about them being delivered to the house sometime this past week. I
searched our office, found the sheets in a little bundle of stuff,
and painstakingly taped it together, my neck screaming for me to
lie down.

I told it to shut up.

At last, I laid it out over Ada’s quilt. It
hung over both sides of the bed and ran several feet into the room.
I pulled up a chair and began searching for Paul, Ruth’s late
husband. I don’t know why, except, I just couldn’t seem to let go
of Ruth’s screamed words, Paul, wait. As if he was moving away from
her.

And maybe he was, as he accepted the fact
that she wasn’t going to die after all. That he would have to wait
a little longer for them to be reunited.

Me and my fool research. My fool
single-mindedness. I should have dropped everything I was doing and
run to her aid before entering that library. I would have saved us
all. Memory wasn’t always a good thing. Maybe it was better not
to….

Oh lord, I was getting tears on the
genealogy. I carefully brushed them dry….

Ivy.

A name jumped up at me from under my
tears.

I was thinking, look—there’s a Stowall Ivy.
Like…. No! Not like.
As!
The same as. The same Ivy. My
great-great-grandmother! What was her name doing…?

I followed the family line beneath her down
to my mother. My God. Oh my dear God, I was a Stowall!

Saturday, October 18

What woke me was the incessant rain beating
against our home. I rose from my bed in a darkness not even the sun
could dispel and waited by a window—computer on my lap--for the
morning light and for the coffee to brew. Wisdom waited too. Our
vigil was finally rewarded and the day began in a dimness that
seeped more than brightened, delivering the same dreary message it
had for days.

Soon. Soon you will all be washed away.

I searched on my computer for a doctor
Marcus Borman. I knew it was pointless. My guess was the doctor who
had sterilized the Stowall daughters would have to be in his
nineties, if indeed he was still alive.

I wasn’t sure why I was looking for him. The
search just seemed to fit my mood—dark and getting darker.

I changed my criteria to just Marcus Borman
California. Nothing. Tried again, this time using Marcus Borman
anywhere. The name had an unusual spelling. Maybe…. And there it
was. The bad doctor had a Twitter account.

Without knowing if I had found the correct
Marcus B., I entered the domain of snips and scraps. One hundred
and forty characters didn’t allow for much more than snips of info
and scraps of news.

The icon this particular Marcus Borman used
was an obscure cartoon character, in black and white. His profile
summary said he was a loving dad with a beautiful wife.

Surely not the Marcus Borman I was
seeking.

I read a few of his tweets. He liked a music
group I’d never heard of. He read e-books and played a lot of
e-games. I skimmed down, looking for familiar names. Finally I
read, “Party for grandpa’s 90th. He says the music’s too loud.
#Olddoctorsneverdietheyjustlosetheirpatience”. So there was a
grandpa who had been a doctor!

I scrolled down, my excitement urging me on,
through pages and pages of tweets—sports scores, celebrity
retweets, Instagrams of his cute kids and the occasional Four
Square check-in that seemed to indicate that he either lived in
Arizona, or visited frequently.

Finally I ran across a tweet that
electrified me: “#thatawkwardmoment when your gramps comes home
with a snake tattoo and a new bud named Luke straight out of
Deliverance.”

The tweet was date stamped to six months
ago, late spring of this year. Could Luke Stowall have tracked down
Dr. Borman in May or June, and if so, why? I scrolled through
another six months of tweets, without finding any more references
to Grandpa Borman or Luke, and decided to get on with my day.

But an answer to my question had begun to
germinate and eventually would bloom to the thought that maybe Luke
and Ada had been arguing over releasing Eddie to the point that
Luke was thinking of asking the old surgeon to snip his son’s
future progeny.

Thus Ada’s desperate attempt to alert the
rest of the world to her son’s existence, by inviting Andrea over
for tea. And then Ada was murdered.

But this thought wouldn’t clarify for
another week.

I stumbled through an early breakfast with
Matt. He had work to do, this time with Will; they needed to earn
our keep ferreting out another company villain. The admin offices
of a prominent San Diego corporation had been burglarized in the
wee hours. The owner and his senior officers had some leads they
wanted our private investigations firm to quietly and discretely
investigate.

We were thinking it was one of the “senior
officers”—someone who knew their way around the security equipment
already installed--but we weren’t privy to that information. So
Matt and Will would begin random observations.

Matt suspected that the culprit might well
have gotten all the information he or she wanted in the wee hours
and wouldn’t be back for more. He wasn’t up for this assignment,
but money was money.

Holding my second cup of coffee, I watched
him grab his tackle box from the office closet, the one now used
for fishing of a different kind. It held what I carried in my
backpack, and more. It held his gun. I shivered, which sent a stab
of pain to the back of my brain--where a seed was planted for later
in the day, when I would choose to carry my own gun.

I turned on the television, not looking at
the screen but listening as I continued to gaze at the dismal
weather. I thought about Luke and Eddie and the prescription drugs
and wondered yet again whether Eddie had done something that
merited being locked away, or was he just a victim, as every one of
the hand quilters had been telling me?

I still knew so little about Eddie. Was he a
pervert? And what particular perversion was he supposedly guilty
of? Or was he just a victim as every one of the hand quilters had
been telling me?

Suddenly the television had my full
attention. There was another Amber Alert, the U.S. warning system
covering child abductions. A little girl was missing.

Stepping in front of the television to
listen better, I saw a map on the screen.

“…in Iguana California, up on Cleveland
plateau…near Applepine Ridge.”

Near Victoria Stowall and her clan!
Near
Eddie Stowall and his horrible, little cellar prison!

My mind started racing. I wondered if I
should call Hannah, or maybe Gerry, my two quasi-assistants. No.
This was my job. I’d been hired to find out the truth about Ada and
by extension, Eddie. I needed to find him. I needed to know exactly
what he was up to. I was beginning to suspect the worst. Of him. Of
the entire Stowall clan.
A clan that now included me.

It occurred to me that my thinking was
muddled by pain and perhaps I should just tip Tom Beardsley off and
let the cops do their job. Of course, they’d already proven how
many ways they could mishandle a Stowall investigation. Muddled
thinking won out.

I dressed as quickly as my complaining neck
allowed, drove up our long driveway, found the back road to the
mile-high plateau, and began the climb.

On some level I wasn’t really conscious of,
I’d been suspecting that the real reason Eddie Stowall might have
been caged in his basement for the past twenty-plus years had more
to do with Depo-Provera than two insane parents and their dirty
little family secret.

And Depo-Provera was a drug used to
chemically castrate child molesters. And now there was a missing
child nearby his home.

I parked half a block away from Ada
Stowall’s stained and faded little house in our current rental SUV
and attempted to pull my jumbled thoughts together. The pains in my
neck were muted because I’d loaded up on Ibuprofen before heading
out. A little walking around and knocking on doors would no doubt
take care of that.

Organize,
I counseled myself. I’d
been here before, of course. But now I needed to see the entire
neighborhood.

My eyes prompted my brain in a review of
what I knew. Ada’s house of secrets just ahead. A vacant lot on
this side. A killer’s cemetery behind the house where three women
and the killer himself had been illegally interred. And arrayed on
either side of the snaking street were little wooden houses much
like Ada’s.