Everything She Ever Wanted (91 page)

said, 'What is she doing back here?"

" It got worse.

Shortly before Thanksgiving, Susan noticed that Adam had a

big bald spot on the back of his head.
 
She pulled him over to

her and examined it more closely.
 
It looked as if someone had

deliberately taken scissors to his mop of curly hair and cut out a

chunk of it.
 
She showed Boppo, who peered at Adam's hair and said,

with a straight face, "I don't see anything, Susan.
 
It looks perfectly

fine to me.
 
Cliff, look here-do you see anything wrong with Adam's

hair?"
 
Papa didn't see the big bald spot either.
 
If Susan hadn't been

so depressed, she might have laughed.

On Thanksgiving, as everyone was trying to make the best of a difficult

holiday, Pat brought up the subject of hair.
 
They had just finished

their meal when she stomped off and returned carrying two of her

dolls.

She insisted that Susan had deliberately butchered their hair in the

back.
 
There were, indeed, sections of the dolls' wigs missing - The

backs of their heads looked just like Adam's.
 
k there delib "Susan did

it," Pat said icily.
 
"Susan's been bac erately mutilating my dolls."

to shake her head.
 
And Susan stared at her mother and began then, with

a horrible clarity, she realized what was happening.

The dolls were not Pat's best dolls; they were the cheapest ones.
 
ir

to She knew that her mother had deliberately cut off their ha'

incriminate her.
 
She knew too that her mother had cut Adam's hair just

as deliberately, the sharp points of her scissors against his tender

neck.

"I didn't know why Mom hated me so much," Susan said.
 
"But I knew she

wanted us out of the house, and I saw what lengths she would go to.

Adam wasn't hurt.
 
But the thought of her doing that to his hair to get

at me gave me chills.", It was the last day the Alfords would spend in

that house.

Boppo and Papa turned as one to Bill and Susan, and Susan recognized

the look.
 
She had seen it before when they had ordered Kent out of

their home-because he was upsetting his sister.
 
Now, she was the

expendable one.

Bill and Susan grabbed Courtney and Adam and left Boppo and Papa's

house.
 
They couldn't move far-the only house they could get into

immediately was around the corner and on the main street of

McDonough.

They had saved just enough for the rent.
 
The house was old, but it had

a big backyard and a nice landlord.

And it would be their own, with doors to shut and lock.

"I wasn't well yet," Susan acknowledged, "but I know I was starting to

get well, from that time on.
 
I just didn't know what I was going to

have to face.
 
Our family had had arguments before, but things always

worked out.
 
This time was different."

Susan was still too close for Pat's comfort.
 
"It began when my mother

would pull into our driveway and just sit there," Susan said.
 
"She

didn't get out of the car, and she didn't come to the door.
 
She would

park there for a while staring at our windows, and then she would back

her car out and drive away."

By the Christmas season, a month later, Debbie was divorced and

remarried-to Mike Alexander, who had finally divorced his wife.
 
Ronnie

was married to Kathy and collecting state industrial insurance from an

injury suffered on a construction job.
 
He had suffered a number of

such injuries on the job, which, fortunately, had always been covered

by state industrial insurance.
 
Susan and Bill were fighting simply to

stay afloat.

In December, Susan got a bizarre phone call from her sister.

It took her a minute to figure out what Debbie was talking about.

Debbie and Pat hadn't worked for the Crist family since June of 1988,

but two and a half years later, Debbie was calling Susan to blame her

for their dismissal.
 
"You ruined it for us," Debbie said angrily.
 
"We

know that you called Mrs. Crist and told her lies about us.
 
You made

us lose our jobs.
 
And I'll never forgive you."

Susan was baffled.
 
As far as she knew, her mother and sister had been

let go because the Crists' medical insurance ran out.

That was what her mother had said.
 
Why on earth would she have called

the Crists?
 
She didn't know them.
 
And she and Bill at the

time.
 
weren't even living in the Atlanta area.
 
The more Susan thought about

Debbie's phone call, the more she felt an ominous sense that a

Pandora's box had been opened and she didn't want to know what was

inside.
 
When she told Bill, he stared back at her, puzzled.
 
Susan

wanted to forget it, but she knew that if Bill were pushed, he wouldn't

look away.

He would find out what the hell was going on.
 
One thing they Iled the

Cristsboth knew.
 
Neither of them had ever ca Iled Dawn Slinkard, On

December 26, all unaware, Bill ca Debbie's daughter, to ask that an

antique crib that the Alfords had lent her be returned.
 
Debbie

answered the phone, and she s was still furiou with her sister.
 
She

told Bill never to call again.

"You and Susan have ruined my life.
 
Susan made the Crists fire my

I'fe."
 
us.
 
Susan has always ruined ists' listing and punched Bill

looked in the directory for the Cr in the number.

Elizabeth Crist answered the phone.
 
Bill didn't know that the date was

special to her; if her husband had lived, it would have been his

ninetieth birthday.

"Mrs. Crist," Bill began, "have you ever received a phone ca from my

wife, Susan Alford?"

"I've never heard the name.17

"Well, let me explain.
 
My wife's mother and sister worked for you a

few years ago.
 
What I really wanted to ask was whether my wife ever

called you iabout her mother, Pat Taylor Allanson.

You may know her as Pat Taylor?"

There was a long silence at the end of the line, and then Betty Crist

began to tell Bill Alford "things I didn't want to hear."

When Bill told Susan what Mrs. Crist had said, she was sick at

heart.
 
Despite the way her mother had treated her, she still hoped the

"trouble" was all over.

sometimes," she recalled, "

But "there had been things said over the past few years my grandmother

would jokes

that Sean made, or some question ask-and in spite of myself, I would

wonder if my mother was still dangerous.
 
I'd wanted so much for her to

be normal that I overlooked a lot of things.
 
But I had told myself-and

my mother and my grandmother-that if I ever felt my mother was hurting

someone else, maybe even trying to kill someone else, I would have to

go to the authorities.
 
I swore that before she killed somebody, I

would stop it-even if I was disowned from the P A R T family, with

nobody wanting anything to do with me.
 
I guess I always knew that it

would blow the family completely apart."

Susan placed a call to the Fulton County District Attorney's Office.

I G H T Don Stoop got all the oddball cases in Fulton County.
 
He was

the only investigator in the D.A."s office eager to dig into cases that

seemed, at the outset, to be fairly routine, but m' lit take ig

interesting detours.
 
He was remarkably adept at exposing what lay

under the surface.

Stoop was a walking paradox.
 
Nobody ever ew exactly what he was

thinking at any given moment.
 
He was a wiseass with a sentimental

streak.
 
Most of the time, he appeared to be the ultimate macho cop-and

yet, he knew exactly when to stop pushing and the precise moment to

listen attentively.
 
An irrepressible tease, he knew when to quit.

Stoop was anathema to crooked cops on the take; he had cleaned out a

half-dozen corrupt police departments around Atlanta.
 
His office was

upstairs over a restaurant, kitty-corner from the Fulton County

Courthouse; nobody could find it without a map and an invitation.
 
It

was just large enough to hold a desk and a bookcase, but he was never

there, so it didn't matter.
 
A connoisseur of beer, he also kept a

candy dish on his desk for his sweet tooth, but he jogged calorie for

calorie and never had a spare inch around his middle.
 
He sported a

mustache that would be the envy of any member of a barbershop quartet

and his ties were hardly inconspicuous.

Don Stoop was born in 1952.
 
He was an army brat and he never really

grew up in one place.
 
The closest thing he had to a hometown was the

area around Red Bank, New Jersey.
 
As a towheaded youngster, Donnie

Stoop spent vacations there with his favorite uncle, "Fritz"

Fitzpatrick, a detective for the Freehold Police Department.
 
Fritz was

patient and encouraging, a good cop who could recognize the seeds

sprouting in the kid.
 
If there is such a thing as a born detective-and

there is-Don Stoop was destined to become an investigator.
 
He

questioned everything; he wanted to know all the whys and hows, all the

details of the cases his uncle Fritz worked on.
 
Why did people do bad

things, and how did his uncle know they were guilty?
 
He could not

imagine that there could be a better job than to be a policeman.

When his uncle Fritz died, he left his badge to Don.

Stoop had a half-dozen years in the service behind him, a B.A. in

police science, and two two-year degrees in criminal justice and

philosophy.
 
From the first moment he put on a police uniform in Cedar