Peggy Holloway - Judith McCain 02 - Portrait on Wicker (11 page)

I lo
oked at Mark, “They must have run the plates on the car that almost hit me. I guess we’re the only ones with no news, Mark.”

“We don’t have any news,” said Rosa
, as she and Trudy came into the kitchen carrying Jennifer.

“Can I hold her now, Aunt Rosa?”

I looked at her with a questioning look and she laughed. “She wants to call us Aunt Rosa, Uncle John, Aunt Judith, and Uncle Mark.”

Trudy lowered her head and raised it slightly to peek at us.
We all agreed it was a good idea. “And you have a cousin Brad and a Mimi,” Mark said.

CHAPTER 28

To see us digging into our dinner, laughing and talking, you would never have guessed we had so much on our minds. Judge Meadows had brought Trudy’s clothes back to her and had changed into her own outfit when she got to John and Rosa’s. Tonight she was wearing a pair of cut-off jeans and a long sleeved hot pink t-shirt.

John had bought Trud
y a CD player and some CDs. After supper, she excused herself to go to her room and listen to music. Rosa took the baby upstairs to change her diaper, bathe her, and get them both ready for bed.

The rest of us settled on the floor
, in the living room again. We had started a notebook and the judge had explained to me that it was similar to a murder book. In a murder book, you keep anything to do with a murder in one notebook. It would have a section of crime scene photos, the autopsy report, and witness reports and so on.

Our notebook was a little different.
The first section was a biography of Mr. Lessiter. We didn’t have much in this section yet but we wanted to start back as far as possible. I remembered he had told me, when I lived at their house, that he was a retired lawyer.

John volunteered to use his computer and get any information about Calvin Lessiter
, including finding out when and where he had met Judge Renfroe and Judge Gadsby, what kind of relationship they all had, and how long they had known each other.

He said he wanted to find out what kind of family he grew up in.
How and where he met his wife and so forth.

We had a section for each of the girls who had lived in his house and we were going to star
t filling that part in tonight.

I tried to arrange the sections in order
, according to when they were with the Lessiter’s. Some of the girls had written the year on their notebooks and there were even some yearbooks. Some had notebooks with icons, like rock singers, from the period they were living at the Lessiters, so we could at least narrow it down some. As far as we could tell, I was the third girl. I was twenty seven, so the girls before me were probably in their thirties now.

The last part of the book was going to be a time line and other miscellaneous items.
At the top of the page, for this last section, I put the license number for the tag of the car that tried to run me down.

Bill began, “I can’t believe this son-of-a-bitch is so stupid as to let someone use his car as the hit-and-run.
How can you be that stupid and become a judge?”

“Watch it…” began the judge.

We all started talking at once, “Who is it…” “Which judge…,” “Don’t keep us in suspense.”

“Okay,
listen up. Sh…be quiet. It’s judge Gadsby’s car.”

I looked at Mark.
We had almost gone to him. If Mackey hadn’t been murdered, we wouldn’t have met up with Bill and Sandy, and we would have probably signed our own death warrant
.

When I looked at judge Meadows, she was staring at the floor lost in thought.
She noticed we were all staring at her and she looked at each of us like she was studying us.

“I’m going to tell you all something that can’t go beyond this room
,” she said and waited for each of us to promise not to tell anyone else.

“Bill may remember this,” she continued.
“A few years back there was a thirteen year old girl who died of starvation and exposure to below freezing temperatures. It had been a particular cold winter that year.

“This girl had been a runaway from Indiana, I believe
, and had ended up being placed in foster care with an old widower by the name of Jenkins. Before his wife died the year before, they had been taking in foster kids for a few years.

“Mr. Jenkins was to have her;
Beth was her name, for about a week, until her parents came down for her. They were farmers and needed to get some kind of crops harvested first.

“Beth had ended up in fron
t of Judge Gadsby, after trying to shoplift a coat from Dillard’s. He placed her with Mr. Jenkins temporarily until her parents could come get her.

“About three days after she had be
en with Mr. Jenkins, he reported her missing.”

“Oh
, yeah, I remember that case. He came in and Sandy interviewed him. Remember him Sandy?”

“I do.
I remember thinking at the time that I didn’t trust him. It wasn’t anything I could put my finger on, he seemed very upset, but it was just something about him. But then after they found her body, and she had basically frozen to death, I had moved on to the zillion other cases we’re always trying to deal with.”

“Was there an autopsy done on her, and if so can someone get the report, on the sly of course?”

“I’ll look into that,” volunteered Bill.

“Okay,
let’s move on. John did you make any headway about any of the victims?”

John had notes he r
eferred to. “I only got to the first victim. I had to change some diapers today, and do some daddies stuff,” he said proudly.

Sandy and I said, “Aw, how sweet.”

He cleared his throat and continued, “Her name is Patricia Hunter or Trisha Hunter. She had run away from another foster home up near Baton Rouge.”

He again referred to his notes.
“This was in 1970. She was sixteen. She was picked up only hours after getting off the bus, for soliciting a man at the bus station, who was so outraged he called the cops.

“
He was a businessman from Detroit, who was passing by the bus station, on his way to pick up his car from a parking garage on Tulane. She saw him passing by and went out and stopped him.

“She appeared before Judge Renfroe
, after spending the night in Juvy Hall. After calling her foster parents, who said they didn’t want anything more to do with her, because she had been nothing but trouble, Judge Renfroe placed her with Calvin Lessiter.

“There was never any follow-up on her and I couldn’t find out who the case worker was.
I was afraid to dig around anymore.”

“You did well
, John,” said the judge. “Now let’s move on to Bill and Sandy. What did you find in the house today?”

“Here’s what we found
, in the night stand, by the bed, in the master bedroom,” Bill said, and began laying out some objects on the coffee table.

Just then Trudy walked in and went
over and picked up one of the items. I couldn’t tell what it was.

“Where did you get this?” she said and she sounded mad.
She began to shake and cry at the same time. Sandy and I rose and tried to hold her but she shook us off. But when John came over and put his arms around her, she cried on his shoulder.

I went over to the coffee table and noticed there was a whole box of these. They were IUDs.
I had one when Bill and I were sexually active. I had it taken out because it was making me bleed.

I was confused.
“Why would someone have these? They can’t be inserted except by a doctor.”

“There was a doctor,” Trudy said.

Everyone turned to stare at her and she said, “I should have told you about her. She came to the house one night, just before he started coming into my room. She and Mr. Lessiter came into my room in the middle of the night and she inserted it into me. It hurt like hell.

“After bleeding for a few days
, even though I wasn’t on my period, she came back and removed it and gave me some pills in a compact looking thing. She told me to take one every day.

“When I asked her what they were for
, she told me they were to give me energy. I saw Mr. Lessiter hand her an envelope, and saw her start to count what looked like a great deal of money.

“They didn’t know I was looking through the keyhole.
When she started to count it, I heard him whisper, ‘Not here you stupid bitch!’”

John said, “Think carefully, Trudy.
Did he ever call her by name? What did she look like?”

“I thought I heard him call her Fro.
But it might have been Flo. I’m not sure. She was tall and very thin. She had the blackest eyes I’ve ever seen. She wore her hair pulled really tight into a knot on top of her head. I remember thinking; she must have a lot of headaches. She carried a black bag, just like in the movies when doctors still made house calls.

“I only saw her twice
and both times she wore a black, much tailored, pants suit and a man’s shirt. I remember wondering if she was a lesbian.”

Again everyone got quiet and was looking at the judge.
She was staring off into space. Finally she spoke, “I’ve often wondered that about her myself.”

“Who?”
We all asked at once.

“
Judge Renfroe’s wife is a doctor. She’s sometimes called Fro.”

“That’s not the worst thing we found,” Bill spoke up.
“You wouldn’t believe what was under the house.”

He opened up an ice chest and everyone fell silent as we stared in horror.

“We didn’t dig any farther when we found this.”

What was in that Ice chest was worse than anything I could imagine.
I looked at John whose wife had just had a baby. He was openly crying.

“We can’t let Rosa see or ev
en know about this,” he said, his voice trembling.

“This must be why he decided to use the IUDs.
I’m wondering how many of these baby skeletons are under there,” Bill said as he looked from one of us to the other.

CHAPTER 29

I was so shaken after I saw the bones; I left the rest of the group and walked out front. I called Ben from my cell phone. Ben, the man I had left dangling for so many years; Ben, the man who had been there for me when I was a scared and confused sixteen year old runaway.

Ben was my best friend.
I could always count on him. But I knew I had also sometimes taken him for granted. He had been trying to get me to marry him for years.

First, I had been too young.
Then I had been in college and needed to devote my time and energy to getting my PhD. He understood all of that, but thought I would marry him when I got my private practice going.

And still I had put him off.
At one point I had told him I wanted to be friends and he said he understood. Everyone kept telling me he wasn’t going to wait forever; for me to make up my mind.

I really took him for granted.
I hadn’t even called him since I got to town and I almost hung up before he answered.

As soon as he answered the phone I said, “Ben, please, I need you.”

“Judith? What’s wrong honey? Where are you?”

“I’m at John and Rosa’s.
There’s some really bad shit going on.”

“Is it Rosa?
Is the baby all right? Did she have it yet?”

“T
he baby and Rosa are both fine. Can you just come over here so I can talk to you?” As I asked this I looked at my watch and saw that it was 12:03 a.m.

Ben still lived with his grandmother when he was on shore.
He worked on an oil rig. But he was soon going to have to put her in a home. He worried about her when he was offshore.

His grandmother’s house was just a few b
locks from John and Rosa’s. They saw each other often. I waited in the driveway for him. It only took a few minutes.

When he pulled into the driveway and parked I was there to open his door
, and fall into his arms.

“Oh, Ben, it’s so horrible.
It’s even worse than I thought. That man is a monster. I’m so sorry I have been so cold toward you. I’m sorry Ben.”

He held me close without saying anything and then drie
d my tears. “What’s happened, Judith? What’s wrong?”

I led him to the front porch and we sat down on the swing.
I told him everything, about getting the strange letter from Julia, about finding the other letter in the spaghetti, and the blacked out painting in her studio.

I told him about finding and rescuing Julia
, about taking her back to Houston, about putting her in another psychiatric hospital, and about someone trying to kill me with his car. I told him about the secret meetings we had been having with Judge Meadows, because we didn’t know who we could trust.