C
HAPTER
35
A fine mist of warm blood sprayed on my face and arms. When I opened my eyes, Dixie was on the ground clutching her bloody right shoulder and moaning. The quilt lay next to her. The blue and yellow patches were turning scarlet, soaked through by Dixie’s blood.
The knife clattered to the ground beside her. I stuck out my foot and vigorously kicked it under the bed, beyond her reach. Then I bent down and snatched off her glasses and put them in my pocket.
She moved her head from side to side, moaning, “Help me.”
Still holding the gun in one hand, I bent down and shoved the quilt against her shoulder with my free hand. I hated to do that to my grandmother’s lovely quilt, but it was already ruined. Even if I could repair the slashes from the knife, there wasn’t enough spit in the world to dissolve all the blood that had stained it. “Don’t move.” I tried to staunch her bleeding. “I’m calling for help.”
I stepped around her and ran to the back door to let the dog inside. My hand left bloody smears on the doorknob. Arthur looked at me as if I were a total idiot and hurried around me to the bedroom where he stood over Dixie. One thing Beavers hadn’t included in the instruction manual for Arthur was the command for “Don’t let her get up.” I needn’t have worried. Every time Dixie moved, Arthur growled and bared his fangs.
“Good boy.” I wiped my bloody hands on my shirt. I ran back to the kitchen, put the gun on the counter, and grabbed the phone. My hands were shaking so badly I had to punch in Beavers’s number twice before I got it right.
“I just shot the killer.”
“You
what
? Where are you?”
“I’m home. She needs an ambulance. Arthur is guarding her right now.”
“Her?”
“Dixie Barcelona. From the Blind Children’s Association. She told me she killed Claire and then she chased me with a knife. She’s crazy. I was forced to shoot her or she would have killed me, too.”
“You
shot
her? With what?”
“Ray’s gun.”
“I thought I—”
“So sue me!” I was yelling now. “I need help!”
“Have you called nine-one-one?”
“
You
are nine-one-one!”
“Okay, okay. I’ll take care of it. Stay put. I’m on my way.”
“Please hurry.”
Three minutes later I heard the blaring sirens coming closer and closer. A red EMT truck from the LAFD and two squad cars screeched to a halt in front of my house. I opened my door and the medics put down their gear when they saw the blood on me.
“You need to sit down, ma’am. Where have you been hurt?”
“Not me.” I pointed them toward the bedroom. “Down there.”
Two officers with their guns drawn looked down the hall and saw Arthur. “Call off your dog, ma’am.”
“He’s a trained police dog. He won’t hurt you. Come here, Arthur. Everything’s okay now.” To my surprise he got up and trotted toward me.
“Be careful. I kicked her knife under the bed.”
The policemen came back from the bedroom holstering their guns. “All clear.” Then they motioned for the paramedics to go to Dixie.
Another cop sat me down in the kitchen, took out a metal clipboard, and inserted a blank report. “What happened here?”
I pointed to the Browning on the counter next to the phone. “I shot her with that.”
“Start from the beginning.”
After about ten minutes, the medics wheeled Dixie out on a collapsible gurney. They’d cut away her clothing and draped a white sheet to cover her breasts. Her shoulder wound was wrapped with a thick pad of gauze that was already turning bright red. An oxygen mask covered her face and an IV line hung on a short pole above her head.
I stood and walked toward the medics. “Wait a minute.” I pulled Dixie’s glasses out of my pocket. “She’ll need these.”
Beavers walked in the front door as Dixie was wheeled outside. He took one look at me and his face turned ashen. “Are you hurt?”
At first I was confused, then I remembered the blood on my face, shirt, and hands. “No, no. I’m fine.”
“Let’s get you cleaned up.” He took my elbow and gently guided me over to the kitchen sink. He grabbed the dish towel hanging there and turned on the hot water.
I took off my glasses and pressed the steaming wet towel to my face, welcoming the warmth. Then I dissolved into tears.
Without a word, Beavers wrapped his arms around me and held me while I leaned into him and sobbed. “It’s all over.” He stroked my head. “But this is your last crime scene, Martha Rose. From now on, you’re grounded.”
In spite of myself, I started laughing hysterically.
C
HAPTER
36
I waited until the next morning to call Quincy because I wanted to be sure I was calm and confident when I told her about Claire’s story and shooting Dixie. She wanted to fly back to LA, but I was able to convince her I was just fine. Then I drove over the hill to visit Uncle Isaac.
I arrived at our old house in the Pico-Robertson area of West Los Angeles around ten. Built before World War II, the unassuming little stucco bungalow with a red tile roof sat up from the sidewalk on a modest grassy knoll. I walked up the narrow cement walk and let myself in the front door. My uncle was in the kitchen making a pot of freshly ground coffee to go with a cinnamon
babka
he pulled straight from the oven—my bubbie’s recipe. He stood about five feet six and kept his white curly hair cut short. When he saw me, his smile folded his face into delighted wrinkles, and his hazel eyes crinkled. He grabbed my face in his hands and kissed my forehead. “The little bird has flown back to the nest.”
I sat down at the familiar kitchen table with a gray Formica top and chrome legs. This was where, as a little girl, I’d eaten my Rice Krispies, cut out paper dolls, and painted with a child’s watercolor paint box purchased at Ralph’s Five and Ten Cent Store.
Across the room, toward the back door, the pantry doors stood open. The shelves still sagged under the weight of the old Lodge cast iron pans. Time stood still in my bubbie’s kitchen. Uncle Isaac cut a generous piece of babka hot from the pan. It filled the house with the aroma of yeast, cinnamon, butter, and caramelized sugar. I was silent for the first few bites, just enjoying the way the pastry filled my mouth with such good and powerful memories. When I was finally able to speak, I sipped at the steaming coffee and described to him the drama that occurred over the past couple of weeks.
Every once in a while he gasped, “Oy! What were you thinking?”
“I’m all right, Uncle. I want to be sure you know that. I wasn’t hurt except for my pride when I spent a night in that nasty jail.”
He bumped his forehead with the palm of his hand. ‘This is what I sent you to college for? This is how you use that brain of yours? Tracking down killers and thieves? Traipsing around like a
meshuggenah
, getting thrown in jail and almost getting killed, God forbid?”
“I started out just wanting to help an old woman whose daughter died. I had no clue things would get so complicated and dangerous. I guess it’s like playing poker. I got dealt some pretty interesting cards and wanted to stay in the game to see where those cards took me. The longer I stayed in, the more chips were at stake. In the end it was too late to pull out.”
Uncle Isaac got out of his chair and kissed the top of my head. “Thank God you’re all right. And, by the way, you’d make a terrible poker player.”
I shifted in my seat and took a deep breath. “There was something else I came to discuss.”
“What?”
I was hoping this conversation wouldn’t end like all the others before it when I’d been lied to or manipulated into dropping the subject. I took another deep breath. “I want to have a serious conversation about my parents.”
Uncle Isaac walked over to the kitchen sink, picked up a sponge, and wiped the counter in slow, tight circles. “What’s to discuss?”
Here we go again
. “Uncle, I’m not a child. I know you’ve been lying to me all these years. I don’t think my parents were ever married, and I’m pretty certain the story of my father dying in a train wreck before I was born is a lie.”
He pressed down harder on the sponge. “How did you decide that?”
“For one thing, I’ve never seen a marriage certificate.”
“I told you a hundred times, it got lost when we moved to California.”
“So why do I have the same last name as you, Bubbie, and everyone else? Why wasn’t I given my father’s last name?”
He refused to look at me. “You know why. Without your dead father to take care of you, it was easier to give you our family name.”
“I know what you’ve told me, and I’ve always chosen to keep my doubts to myself. Not anymore. Now I want to know the truth.”
“What’s changed? What’s the big deal after all these years?”
“During the last couple of weeks, while I was involved in solving the mystery of the quilts, I met a young man who inspired me to find out the truth about my parents—no matter how painful it might turn out to be.”
The sponge stopped moving. He raised his head to look at me, and red crept up his cheeks. “I never wanted you to get hurt.”
“And I never wanted to hurt you by calling you a liar, but it’s time to be honest with each other. You can stop protecting me. I’m not leaving today until I have some answers.”
He slowly turned from the sink to face me, shoulders drooping in resignation. “Believe me, there’s not much to tell. You have to understand that because of her condition, we always sheltered your mama.”
“What condition?”
“You know how she was, may she rest in peace. Her head was always in the clouds. I don’t know how else to describe it. From the time she was a little girl, she lived in another world. She was . . . childish.”
I remembered all the times I tried and failed to get my mother’s attention and her love. “So you’re saying she’d always been remote? I thought she just didn’t like
me
.”
“No, No! God forbid! You had nothing to do with it. Your poor mama was born that way.”
I wasn’t sure that made me feel any better.
“Anyway, when she was young, about seventeen, she met a man. From what we were able to piece together later, he took her to his hotel room several times.”
“If she was so sheltered, how could that happen? Didn’t you ever notice she was gone?”
“Ours was a small town. We never thought anyone would harm her, so we didn’t feel we had to watch her every minute. She was, after all, not retarded. Just naive.”
I tried to imagine what life must have been like in the mid 1950s in a small midwestern town. Shady streets? Clean air? Lilac-scented breezes in the spring? Friendly neighbors looking out for one another?
“It wasn’t unusual for your mama to go on long walks by herself, or sit for hours reading in the library. We just thought she was doing something like that. Anyway, the worst happened and she got pregnant. She was too innocent to understand what was happening to her. It was your bubbie who suspected something was wrong and took her to a doctor.
“Anyway, when your mama broke the news to him, the louse told her he was going out of town to visit his sick mother. He promised her they’d be together as soon as he returned.”
My head spun. What kind of man would take advantage of someone like her? Although I knew the answer, I asked anyway. “Did he come back?”
“What do you think? She never saw him again. When your bubbie and I found out she was pregnant, we tried to track him down. Your mama called him Quinn, and the hotel registration confirmed his name was J. Quinn. He listed his permanent address as a post office box in Omaha. The box number turned out to be phony.”
“Phony in what way? That there was no such number?”
“No. All the post office told us was that the box wasn’t registered to any Quinn and they refused to tell us who it was really registered to.”
I wracked my brain thinking of other ways he could be found. “Do you know what he did for a living? Did my mother?”
“The hotel owner didn’t really know. The man was a transient. Your mama said he painted pictures. That’s all the information we had to go on, your bubbie and me. Unfortunately, it wasn’t enough to find him.”
You could have done better than that!
“Did you think of hiring a detective agency to track him down?”
Uncle Isaac looked at me with great tenderness and sadness. “No, faigela. Your bubbie and I decided to bring your mother to California to make a fresh start. Two months after we arrived, you were born.” He smiled and gestured toward me. “A real native Californian. We made up the story about the train wreck to protect your mama’s reputation and to spare you the stigma of being . . .”
I spat bitterly, “A mamser? An illegitimate bastard of a child?”
“Don’t say that! We never thought of you that way. You were our whole life.”
By now, tears coursed down my cheeks. I covered my face with my hands and cried softly, emptying the tears bottled up inside me for so many years.
Uncle Isaac patted my shoulder. “No, no, faigela. Don’t cry. Don’t cry.”
When I could speak, I wiped my eyes with the back of my wrists. Uncle Isaac handed me a paper napkin for my nose. “Did my mother ever describe him, ever talk about him?”
“We told her not to. We were afraid she’d let the truth slip out. She didn’t have the
sechel
to judge what was safe to say and what wasn’t, so we just told her not to talk about it anymore.”
Well, in at least one respect, I was my mother’s daughter. I’d done a lot of loose talking recently that almost got me killed.
The missing pieces of the story began to come together like the patches in a quilt. I now knew more about my parents and about how I came to be, but there was so much more to know. I cried some more for my poor mother, for the pain of Quinn’s betrayal, and for the lie she was forced to live her whole life. I wept for my uncle and Bubbie, who devoted their lives to care for my mother and me. And I wept for myself. Born because of one lie and raised on another. Not likely to ever find out the full truth of who my father was or what happened to him.
My uncle patted my shoulder again. “This is why we never told you, faigela. We wanted to spare you. We just wanted you to have a normal life, to be happy. There was nothing we wouldn’t do for you or for your mama.”
“I know,” I choked. So that was that. As far as anyone knew, my father could still be alive. A good detective agency might even be able to find him, but did I really want to go there? Maybe Uncle Isaac was right. Maybe it was wiser to just not talk about it and move on.
I got up and hugged my uncle in a long embrace. His bony old shoulders protruded through the blue sweater he wore. “Thank you for the truth. I hope you know you’ll always be my real father, Uncle Isaac, and I hope you know how much I love you and appreciate what you did for me and my mother.”
Those old shoulders shook as he hung on to me and wept.