Lisa Djahed - Bee Stanis 01- The Foolish Stepmom (4 page)

“I’ll talk to her.”
Was his only response. I knew he’d do what needed to be done.

Later that night, after dinner (and only a few jabs from Jules about not eating such and such) Ben got back on the computer to check on Jesse’s status. They had been scheduled to have a hearing to determine where and how to hold him
.
He hadn’t technically violated his house arrest unless his pee test came back positive but they didn’t have anywhere to put him, seeing that he was under Drew’s supervision and currently Drew wasn’t supervising anything except the inside of a
coffin.

“OH MY GAWD!” is
alls heard and I rushed into the computer room to check.

“What?!?”

“They are charging Jesse with murder, first degree
.
” “What?!?”

“It is right here.”
As he pointed to the register of actions on the computer and flipped back towards the detailed charges.

D I  11/02              61  3

ARREST AFDVT:

Chg: 782.04 Murder. First
Degree Felony

“Oh my god, they think Jesse killed Drew. There is just no way. They must have come back with something from the autopsy. How do we find out?” I was thinking out loud while my heart was pounding. I just didn’t believe it. There was no way Jesse would hurt Drew. Maybe accidentally.

“I think it is time to call Officer
Krumpke.” Said my oh-so-smart husband.

Latest breaking news indeed.

Chapter Four

Turns
out, we didn’t have to wait for a call back from Officer Krumpke at all. Jesse and Drew’s manner of death were all over the news that next morning.

Troubled teen arrested and tried as Adult in Murder of Father

PALM BAY- An eighteen year old boy will be tried in adult court on charges including first-degree murder in the death of his father.
Jesse Ronald Jones faces two counts related to the October 29th poisoning death of his father. He’s accused of killing his father by feeding him Drano and sleeping pills in their home on Glencove Avenue off Emerson Drive. The cause of death was listed as homicide.

Jones who was previously arrested for drug charges has been held at Stark’s penitentiary since he was arrested
.

Court proceedings to this point have been sealed to the public and parties involved have been bound by a gag order.

The charges against Jones include one count of first
-
degree murder and one count of first-degree assault with a deadly weapon
.

It was on Channel 6 news which we turn on to watch for weather (balmly again today) and traffic updates.

“Honey, oh my
gawd, come see, Jesse’s on TV, ” yelled Ben. All three of us girls came running from various places in the house, each with a brush in hand.

“Aww
,” is what I said in response to seeing Jesse in an orange outfit being led somewhere shackled.

“OMG
,” as in OMG (Oh my god) is what Jules said, she often talked in letters these days.

“Aww
,” Yaz said imitating me. Bless her little head. We all four were stunned
.

“Drano?”
I was speaking in one word sentences now. Ben kept rewinding it and replaying the same small clip so we could digest the poisoned by Drano bit. How awful. Could they really think Jesse could do that? There was no way. It must have been a mistake. This whole
thing was starting to get too serious and too scary and it was starting to
hurt my head and my heart. How could I have such warm feelings towards someone charged with such a heinous crime? The whole thing was making me sick, making me doubt my own self. Had Jesse really resented hid dad that much? Drano? Who does that?

“Ok girls, time to get ready,
” Ben said as he looked at me. Dang that, having to be an adult. I wanted to take the day off, go see Jesse, demand he tell me what really happened. Find out more. Dang work, dang step-kids, dang being responsible. Did the world know what was important?

We all folded into our routine, me putting out breakfast, the girls not eating it, well, Jules not eating it, both Ben and I watched the girls get on the bus and as soon as they did a TV Van pulled up and we turned to each other and went inside and said at the same time:

“Drano?”

“Oh my god Ben, this is so bad.
Poor Jesse.”

“We
don’t know that Jesse didn’t do it, Bee, they must have a reason to charge him.”

“Ugh
.
It is just so awful.”

“Ben, I want to go see him. I want to hear it from him.”

“Bee, we can’t, it is not our weekend.” Meaning unless we made arrangement otherwise, the girls were supposed to be with us this weekend because god forbid we change it.

“Can’t we ask her to take them this weekend instead, we have the memorial service tomorrow and everything, just this once,
please?” Ben looked at me with a disgusted look. Both he and I knew what this meant, an actual conversation with Countess Von Stinker, or Jules and Yaz’s mom, as we called her. It was our sick little joke of a nickname. But if you met her, you’d understand.

Ben grunted a response that meant, ok, but you do it and don’t expect a good outcome.

After two emails, a Facebook request and one voice mail, and three fully designed posters later, I finally got a response from Countess Von Stinker, she would grant our request, just this once. Dealing with her was like pulling teeth. You would think that a mother would jump at the chance to get an extra weekend with her kids, but no, not if it meant being nice to us. God forbid she do us any favors. It was always
all about her. Apparently she was preparing her seminar, something about healing with sticks and would have to cut her preparations short to see her kids early. Lordy-loo on a stick. Countess Von Stinker was a new age healer. And not that there’s anything wrong with that, she’s just a bit of a tree-hugging, astrology following hippy. Turns out though, Countess Von Stinker is a bit of a gossip hound too. The only way I got her to agree was to give her some of the dish on the whole Jesse/Drew thing. She knew they lived next door and was all hyped up that we lived next to a murderer and more importantly that her BABIES lived next to one. It was all I could do to hold back the throw up that was inching up my throat. As much as I tried to assure her that her BABIES were safe and that Jesse was NOT indeed the murderer, the more crazy she became until finally I had to bag off the call claiming a work call was coming in. How Ben have ever married and fathered two children with her was a complete mystery. I
mean, for one thing, she’s a slob. Like a walking talking Pig-Pen from Charlie Brown with stuff just billowing off her, except her dirt and stink was all patchouli smelling. She walked around with a tea cup full of organic tea and brandy in a big skirt claiming that the entire world didn’t understand her and that only she held the key to the secret of the universe, because it was in the last astrological chart she made. I really think the reason she doesn’t have
custody is that she really doesn’t want the burden of raising her kids. There are so many women out there that love having babies but hate raising them, and she’s one of them. Let’s see, there was Countess Von Stinker, Mom-Hussy from next door, Taylor’s mom, and that was just in
my immediate circle.

Sure enough, like a moth to a flame, Countess Von Stinker made a scene at the drop-off that night. Eight times out of ten she did. There was the jumping on the hood of the car incident, the trying to run me over incident (yeah, that really happened, I stopped going to drop offs for a year after that) and then this:

“I’m not sure my babies should live in your neighborhood with all the crime and murders that happen there.” Like murder happens every other day on Palm Tree lined Glencove Avenue.

“Where the hell are they going to live then?
With you? You can’t even clean up your yard or clean up after your cats, never mind children. AND they get lice every single time they come here.” Ben jumped at her bait. I put my hand on his shoulder but he shrugged it off, and I knew then it was going to get ugly so I jumped to help the girls with their bags.

“You are such a woman-hater Ben
Danechka Stanislov, you know nothing about raising girls. I should have never let you take custody from me.” And here we were, at round eighteen thousand and ten.

“At least I know how to feed them and cloth them, like a normal parent does- not like you hippy freak.”

I threw both girls bags on the front entry way just in time to usher Ben into the car. (I had packed each of their bags with a treatment of RID —I got it in a big pack at Sam’s Club— urging them to wash everything they touched and do a treatment before they came home.) I ended up driving because I knew he’d be too upset and would
have rather stayed and fought it out. She screamed as we pulled rather hastily out of the drive. I hated that, their fighting, it meant they were still tied to each other, a tie I couldn’t touch. It is amazing to me how many threads of small bitterness I can taste in a single day.

We got to the prison ahead of schedule, with Ben finally calmed down after the encounter with Ms. Hippy Bitch - for someone so “centered” in the universe she was certainly off her kilter.

Ben sat at the table outside the little grey pre-fab trailer where the video hookups were for prisoner visitation and smoked. He always did that, chain smoked when something upset him. But I knew it wasn’t just Countess Von Stinker that was getting to him, he didn’t want to come here today. Not as much as I did. I needed to see Jesse and see his face and have him tell me he did not murder his dad. If I could see it and really believe it, then my heart would be settled. Not my head, because if not Jesse, then who, who could have fed Drano to a man and
burned him from the inside out while he laid sedated from pills. Uugh it was too awful to fathom.

We went in and signed in and were ushered to the waiting area while they fetched Jesse.
There we sat with our fellow visitors, a lot of moms with small kids hanging off them, some older weary looking moms probably visiting their got too drunk and drove middle aged kids, the hooker girlfriends. It was a sad, dreary place with an odd institutional feel.

Finally it was our turn.

“Jesse, honey, how are you holding up” I said into the phone/video hook up. I could see him and see right away how upset he was. He looked so small and scared.

“I didn’t do it, Bee, I swear didn’t do it,” and he cried, I mean sobbed into the phone. You could see the other inmates in his cell block area roaming around behind him and for him to be this vulnerable, in jail, just killed me.

“It’s okay, Jess, it is okay. I believe you.” And I did, I just couldn’t imagine him harming his dad that way. As tears came to my eyes, I was grateful Ben nudged me to take a turn on the phone.

“Jess, listen, you know this is recorded right, anything you say can be used at a future time, so be careful what you say, but we believe you didn’t do this. But we need to figure out who did. You need to focus with me kid, what happened that day, tell me everything.”

“I can’t, I can’t really remember that much. Taylor came over and we got drunk, we had VSOP and we finished it, we were watching Cops and drinking. My dad was there, but was in the back computer room for a while, Pam came over for a bit and then left and then he went to take a nap. The thing is, I don’t remember cause I was drunk. I tried telling that to the cops but they didn’t believe me and didn’t test
me for an hour after we got to the station. By that time I wasn’t lit at all. What am I going to do, Ben, Bee, what is going to happen?” And with
that he started tearing again and I started tearing.

Just then we heard the clerk yell out: “Visitor Two for Jones, Visitor One time up.”

I got back on the video phone: “Jess, we have to go, call us, we’ll figure this out, just take it one step at a time, remember to pray, God can help you now more than you know, lean on him, okay.”

As we were leaving we saw them, Taylor and her mom. Her mom looked like a squashed dirty version of the Pillsbury dough boy, with stringy long hair in a stylishly out of date sweat pant suit.
Must
have been her dress clothes, for the jail visit. They must be visiting Jess, they were the reason we had to go. As we passed them Taylor’s mom gave us a dagger look. Probably because Ben was giving her one right
back.

“I can’t believe they came
,” I said as soon as we were out of the building.

“Right?”
Ben said, but I could see he was pondering something else and not really clued in to any utterances from me.

“What did he say about that day?” I asked
, I could see and hear a little but the phone line keeps most stuff mumbled and thus private.

“He said Pam was there
, and Taylor. It must be one of them.” Pam, I thought no way. Taylor. Maybe.

“Pam
, no way, Taylor, maybe.” I nodded at him.

“Hmmm.”
Was all he said as he reverted into his own thinking
space

As we headed home we picked up some Chinese
, this was our
EOW routine, hang around in sweats watching tv and eating food from the carton and generally acting like slobs on our “night” off. It was hard maintaining a facade of always being the adult so when you got the chance not to, it was a real treat. We made quite a night of it, eating ourselves full, drinking beer, watching trash TV and finally making love in the living room. I could get used to this no kid on the weekend thing I thought guiltily.