Ada Unraveled (36 page)

He held one of the glass vials up to the
light, some cloudy liquid lay in the bottom of it.

These containers looked like the ones his
mother wrote about in her third diary, the ones they filled with
venom. The reason she forgave the man, after he confessed his love
for her.

Because he’d been forced to milk snakes all
his childhood. He and Mark. They’d been bitten many times by the
terrifying things. So Jake could make a living. So Grandpa Jake
could avoid getting a real job.

According to his mother, the act of milking
those terrifying snakes had changed the oldest boys.

Eddie didn’t agree.

Mark wasn’t twisted. Mark had been sane and
rational, and he’d been the oldest. The one you’d think would be
the worst affected. Birth order had consequences.

No, Luke was born twisted. He was
genetically twisted.
And I am not Luke’s son.

He tossed the tranquilizer gun and the vials
on the bed and returned to his search. He finally found a belt and
looped it into his new hip-hop pants, the ones he’d bought when
Mary took him shopping. Couldn’t keep the fool things up now that
his hips were melting away. Now that he was growing man’s hips.

And the gun was scary in his skivvies. He
didn’t like the
Luke-killer
gun so close to his privates. It
made him nervous.

Wasn’t about to lose his balls again.

He’d bought a whole bunch of stuff that day
with Mary. She’d looked at him funny at first, with some of his
choices. But then she shrugged her little shoulders and paid the
man at the counter.

He heard another noise outside and went back
to the window. The woman—
it was a woman, he could see her
shape
--had climb out of her car to stand and stare at the front
of his house. No sign of Mary. Maybe a welfare lady was waiting for
his aunt under the big black umbrella. Maybe Mary called someone to
come get the child.

He couldn’t see her face.

He needed to get back downstairs. The little
one shouldn’t be alone down there. He’d grown tired of looking at
his new clothes anyway. Oversized shirts big enough for an
elephant. Gangsta shirt. He grinned.

You could easily hide a gun underneath
them.

The middle aunt, Anne, who cleaned his house
for him, won’t enter his parents’ bedroom, won’t come upstairs at
all. She says it smells upstairs. She says it’s full of evil.

She says, “The house should be burned to the
ground.”

Truth? He doesn’t come upstairs much
either.

More truth? He found if he spent too much
time up here in his parents’ bedroom he started thinking bad
thoughts. And he got headaches.

But what he really didn’t like was going
outside. Outside was…too open. Too big.

He glanced around him. Maybe Aunt Anne was
right—
it should burn.
He was especially bothered by the dark
stains on the walls.

KNOCK, KNOCK.

Guess it was time. He tightened the belt
another notch. He really liked his new riding boots, they were the
best thing about his new outfit, he thought as he rounded the
landing on the stairs.

KNOCK, KNOCK.

Okay, okay
. He went into the kitchen.
Eddie opened the package he’d received in the mail just yesterday.
He put the stuff on. Put on the hat. Maybe the belt wouldn’t be
needed after all.

He grabbed the little one’s hand. She’d been
eating a jelly sandwich; it was all over her face. He smiled. Poor
little thing had been living next door, in a place that was as bad
as his cellar.

…
a mid-day dusk

Knowing that the authorities wouldn’t
respond until it was too late was what drove me back out of my car.
Eddie might slip away again.

Eddie might have the little girl in
there.

I glanced up at the front of the Ada’s dark
house as I approached. The apparition I’d spotted a few moments ago
had moved away from the upper bedroom window just before my eyes
arrived, leaving the curtains waving slightly. Someone was
definitely in the house, but now the curtains were still.

My breathing grew even more rapid. Stop!
Control it. It’s just fear. At least I was doing something. But how
could I deal with this man alone? I’d barely handled Beer-gut
Man.

Willing my brain to shut up, I walked
steadily toward the door.

Someone once called me the Border Lady.
Perhaps she saw me standing at some border of good and all the
rest, like this, waiting to cross.

I could do this!

The world grew darker as I waited on the
threshold of Ada’s door. Colors were fading in the cloud-made dusk,
changing reality into an old black and white
film
noir
--starring Edmond O’Brien, perhaps.

I’d called Gerry after spotting movement in
the house and after I’d heard the news repeated on the radio—about
the missing child. I’d asked her to contact her brother Tom, to
tell him I’d seen Eddie in the upper window. She was yelling for me
to wait, to stay in my car as I closed my phone. Turned it off. Put
it on silent mode.

As if the dusky fog had moved into my mind I
opened the outer, screen door and knocked twice. It was an act of
blind courage. Of desperate need to bring this all to an end.

I didn’t doubt that Eddie had killed Luke in
self-defense. No one did. But he was still wanted for questioning.
He needed to be brought in, so a judge or the district attorney for
Cleveland County, or some other legal body could rule on his
innocence.

I was voting innocent. Except…
a little
girl was missing.

I knocked again.

What did years of Depo-Provera do to a
man?

Gerry would contact the appropriate folks
through her brother. They’d come quickly.

I thought I heard him moving about
inside.

I knocked again.

I was justified under the law. It was my
duty.

I knocked a fourth time, harder, and the
door began to move inward of its own volition.

My breathing slowed. My neck reminded me
with another stab that I should still be in bed.

The door slid….

Maybe grandmothers shouldn’t be doing this
line of work.

The door slid….

“Eddie? Are you in there? I just want to
talk to you.”

My breathing sped back through normal and
went straight into hyper-drive. I shoved my right hand into my
trench coat pocket and gripped the gun.

He was holding a small child by the hand.
There was blood on her face. So it was true! He was a
pedophile.

She was all I could really see, maybe
because she was down low enough for the meager light from the door
to illuminate her.

Above, and next to her, was a figure,
a…creature I couldn’t quite make out, concealed in the shadows.
More a silhouette than a man.

I squinted but still couldn’t make him out,
so I stepped inside and waited for my eyes to adjust.

Cloaked not only in shadows but in the
playfulness of childhood and the anonymity of middle age stood
Eddie.

“Eddie? I’m Rachel Lyons. I just want to
help you, Eddie,” I repeated. I was surprised at how strong my
voice sounded.

He didn’t respond. I took another step into
the house while simultaneously asking if I could come in.

His arms hung loosely at his side. His
stance was wide.
He was wearing a cowboy hat.
Finally the
silhouette focused into varying shades of gray that I could almost
discern. I pulled in air and held it a beat, forcing my breathing
to calm again.

Eddie looked old, older than his time, a
lumpy, overweight man. I thought his hair might be gray, but then
he was still in the shadows. I couldn’t tell his expression, or for
certain the color of his complexion. But the fact that he was
wearing hip-hop clothing—although belted at his waist--made me see
a light-skinned African.

Even with the baggy shirt I could tell he
had breasts. His shoes looked brand new and expensive, like the
shirt and jeans. He began to emerge from the shadows, moving toward
me, two limping steps. He was injured?

The little girl was clearly in shock, but
she moved with him. Unseeing. Unknowing. She was wearing a huge
pair of shorts, pinned around her waist, obviously not hers.

But she didn’t seem afraid of him.

My thoughts veered crazily to his limp
again. Had he been crippled by his father’s beatings? He took
another halt-step forward, the shadows receded even more and my
heart froze.

He was wearing a hip holster to match his
cowboy hat.
One large hand rested on a gun still seated in the
holster. He wasn’t smiling.

It all took nanoseconds.

He pulled the gun out and pointed it
straight at me.

It isn’t true you have time for a thousand
thoughts at moments like this. You know, like you’re life passing
before your eyes? No. I had time for just one thought: get the gun
out.

Get the gun out….

Get the gun out of my pocket!

Something banged in my head. It whizzed
through my hair—actually pulled at my hair—and took the top of my
ear off. I could feel it. I could feel a gusher of blood bathing
the side of my head.

And pain once again signaled I was
alive.

My gun was still tangled up in my coat
pocket.

Eddie was preparing to shoot again.
Aiming with both hands
.

The little girl was screaming.

My shoulders tensed in terror, a pain born
of tortured muscles and ripped ligaments tore straight into my
brain.

But my mind had time to do just one
flashback, to the bee and the story I’d told.

Suddenly a young voice shouted at me from
long ago, Robert’s young voice, once again urging his sister Erika
to
hit her
…only, “Shoot him! Shoot him! Shoot him!”

So I did. Right through my coat.

Hannah’s deep, honey-laced voice was
soothing me, flowing over my
vinegar-ed
mind through the
phone, making a sweet and sour mixture in my brain.

“You did the right thing, Rachel. You had to
defend yourself.”

I was choking down the sobs. Her soothing
voice was flavored by days of her own crying over her mom.

“He’s fine. Eddie’s fine. He’s being cared
for right now, right next door to my mom. I see him through the
doorway. He’s still half-under from the surgery. He’s going to be
fine.”

Matt was staring at me from our bedroom
doorway like he had no idea who I was--like he’d never seen me
before in his life.

“Rachel, don’t blame yourself,” she said.
“The doctors even did some other repairs on his hip while they were
at it, releasing cartilage and removing old scar tissue that was
causing him to limp. He’ll be up and about in a couple of days.
Really, he’s fine. The bullet just caused a flesh wound.”

“I shot him,” I said, as if I was just
discovering that fact all over again.

Matt slipped away from the doorsill and
returned with another house phone pressed to his ear, so he could
listen in.

She paused and sighed. “They’re working with
the kidnapped girl now. She’s only a baby, poor thing. She hasn’t
said a word yet, that I know of, but they’ll get through to her.
When I went by to look in on her, her mom and dad were holding her,
comforting her. The red on her face, it was only…well it doesn’t
matter.”

“Tell me,” I blubbered, then blew my
nose.

“Jam. He’d given her a sandwich while
waiting for the aunts to arrive. Mary told us.”

I searched for courage deep inside, found an
excuse.

“He shot me.” It sounded like another
delayed memory, exposing my fear.

“We know, hon. No one blames you for
shooting back.”

But she didn’t know what I’d been thinking
about him while I was prowling around his neighborhood. That maybe
he was a child molester. She didn’t know that that was one of the
reasons I’d driven up the mountain to meddle again.

Hannah continued trying to calm me.

“Anyway, what Eddie told Mary when he called
her was that he was afraid to call the police because they’d been
mean to him when they were searching his home for clues to his
mother’s death. So he wanted Mary and the other aunts to come get
the child, and for them to take her to the police.”

“No, wait, start from the beginning. How did
he end up with her?”

“Right. Okay. Eddie called early in the
morning and told Mary that he was hearing bad noises next door.
Mary said that was a little after four in the morning. She knew
this because the sisters take turns with the early morning work at
the bakery, and although it wasn’t her day to get things started,
she’d still woken up early, and it had annoyed her.

“So, the first time Eddie contacted her was
just after four, to report he was hearing bad noises,” I said.

“Right, Mary said she didn’t know anything
about an Amber Alert at that time. She remembers thinking she
couldn’t call her oldest sister Martha about Eddie’s concerns
because she’d already left her apartment for the bakery. So she
called Anne—that was around four-fifteen—to ask her to help her out
if she had to go over and see Eddie. Anne didn’t know there was an
Amber Alert out then, either.”

Matt shifted his listening position.

Hannah continued, “My guess is that the
parents hadn’t even found out that their child was missing from her
bedroom yet, because the first public announcement about the Amber
Alert wasn’t until around nine, if you recall.”

I did recall. I recalled it had electrified
me and sent me up the mountain in search of the weird man, Eddie
Stowall.

I said, “What exactly did Eddie say he heard
happening next door?”

“Well, that first time Eddie called Mary,
she told him maybe it was just a television blaring and he hung up,
saying he would check and see.