Turning the ignition, I made a U-turn in the middle of the street. I was heading toward the highway and back to Jubilant Falls.
Chapter 11 Kay
“This court finds that the defendant is not able to stand trial at this time. She shall be remanded to the custody of a mental health facility, until such time as she can be declared competent.”
With a swing of his gavel, Judge David McMullen, a man who had been a dear friend of my father’s and who had, with his wife and daughters, once spent a Christmas holiday in the Virgin Islands with us, brought the first nightmare to an end.
For mother, it was over. I made sure she had a private room. Even in her insanity, she would want only the best. Even if she recovered, Mother would never be tried for the stabbing death of her father.
I made some discreet inquiries and found that Marvin Gillespie’s death so many years ago had been ruled accidental. Conrad Gillespie was the last surviving brother and easier to find than I imagined. Jarred had succumbed to lung cancer in his fifties; a heart attack had claimed Otis a few years later. Conrad had moved just a few miles up the road from the little coal town Mother had grown up in, opened a construction business after the war, and raised a family of six children with his British war bride, Cora.
One Saturday, I left the children with Novella, who agreed to stay on, and met Conrad in the day room at the mental hospital where Mother would spend the remainder of her days.
She was sitting in a wicker chair by the window, staring vacantly out the ivy-bordered windows. Her fingernails, no longer perfectly painted, picked nervously at the hem of her blouse. She still looked marvelous; the white blouse was ironed crisply, her hair was combed and styled, and a small gold dove held a pink-flowered, silk scarf around her shoulders. The staff saw to it that her appearance would always be impeccable.
“Mother?” I touched her shoulder. The nervous fingerpicking stopped, and she looked at me. It was a few seconds, before she recognized me.
“Oh, hello, Kay,” her words were slow and soft, the results of the antipsychotics she was taking.
“Mother, I have someone here to see you.” I turned, and Conrad stepped forward, clutching his Gillespie Construction ball cap in his hand.
“Hello, Marian.”
Mother looked back and forth between Conrad, the brother she hadn’t seen in fifty years, and me, the daughter who now knew all her closely held confidences.
“Everybody knows now, don’t they?” she whispered, reaching for our hands. “It’s not a secret, anymore.”
Tears brimmed in Conrad’s eyes, as he knelt beside her chair. “No, sis. It ain’t a secret, anymore.”
“They came for me, Conrad, just like the voices said they would.”
Conrad laid his head on her arm, to regain his composure. Tentatively, she touched his thinning, gray hair with a wrinkled hand and looked at me.
“This is my brother, Kay. Have you met Conrad?” she asked, her eyes vacant from medication.
“Yes Mother. I have. I’ll let you two visit for a while.” I touched her shoulder. "I love you, mother."
She smiled back at me with vacant eyes, patting my hand.
I left them to catch up on the years and went to the cafeteria for a cup of coffee. After about an hour, Conrad found me.
“She’s bad off, ain’t she?” he asked, twirling his coffee cup in his large, calloused hands.
I nodded. “She’ll never see the outside world again. The scars of the abuse and then the effort to keep her father’s death a secret has just festered too long.”
“We all knew that she killed him and run off. She had to. She couldn’t have stayed there in that house, with Ma dead.”
“But what about the police?”
“There was a chicken casserole broken all over the floor, when we came home. We put that around Pa’s body, before we went for the police. My huntin’ knife was missin’, but it didn’t take any rocket scientist to figger out where they’d find it, if anybody could find Marian. There weren’t no fancy police investigators back then, and I’m sure that they were just as glad as everyone else to see Marvin Gillespie gone.”
“That’s harsh.”
“It was a harsh world we lived in then. The company that owned the mines owned everythin’ back then. They owned the company, owned the shack we lived in; they even ran the school and the store where we bought our food and clothes. They printed money we spent there. The scrip they made, that was our money. It was a hard world, Kay, a hard world. You know what a governor is?”
“If it’s anything other than the political one, no.”
“A governor is somethin’ you put on an engine to keep it from goin’ faster’n it needs to, a control. It reins in the power of an engine, like you rein in a horse.”
“Okay.”
“Our pa had no governor on his life. He’d go after the first thing that caught his interest and, like anythin’ that runs wild without some kind of restraint, his interest wasn’t very often pure, or very honest. He was like a lot of men back then in the coal camps. He’d spend his check, what the paymaster didn’t dock for the grocery bill at the company store, on hooch at Flagler’s Tavern, and when he couldn’t spend it on hooch, he go back in the hills and get him some ‘shine. And when he’d be damn near blind drunk like that, he was an animal. He’d get in fights with anybody who looked at him wrong. He’d come home, and on nights when Ma was workin’...” Conrad stopped and hung his head.
I reached across the table and laid my hand on his arm. “You couldn’t have stopped it, Conrad.”
“Pa only kept his job because Ma would go beg the boss to let him stay. He couldn’t work more than two or three days a week, when he was on a bender. Don’t think them miners were all like that. They were so beat down… their lives wasn’t nothin’ but workin’ hard for a few pennies. They were all lookin’ to make their lives, everybody’s lives in that camp, a little better. When somethin’ happened to make that world a little less hard, people looked on it as a blessin’.”
“But my mother never knew that.”
“No, she never did. We tried to find her. I don’t know if she changed her name or anythin’, but we looked for her for almost ten years before we give up. Maybe if we tried harder, if we looked longer, she wouldn’t be here today.”
“You don’t know that. For the most part, Mother had a good life.” I told him about Daddy, the practice, the huge house on the north end of Jubilant Falls, my marriage to Paul, the children – all three of them – and finally, Paul’s death.
“You ain’t had it easy either, have you?”
I shrugged. “Who among us does?” I asked.
“It’s the secrets we keep that’ll eat us alive. That’s the one thing I’ve learned in this life. Marian had her secrets. Your husband had his secrets, and look where it all ended us up.” He gestured at the cafeteria’s institutional décor.
“Yeah, Conrad.“
“That’s Uncle Conrad to you,” he smiled.
I smiled back. “We’re sitting here just finding out about family we didn’t know we had, and we’re taking steps to make sure there are no more secrets.”
“That’s right. No more secrets.”
* * *
Despite the relief of Judge McMullen’s order declaring mother unfit for trial, I still had more left to endure in the Aurora Development case, as the Journal-Gazette was calling it. Grant Matthews never saw a jury, at least as a defendant. When the felonious assault charges against him were upgraded to attempted murder, the man who scarred my face so many years ago curled up like a whipped dog and took the first deal he was offered: testify against Lovey McNair and we’ll give you a mere twenty years, rather than life.
Lovey McNair faced the worst of the charges, conspiracy to commit murder, solicitation to commit murder, fraud, and a total of twenty-three counts of failure to maintain a habitable abode.
The first witness to testify was Elizabeth Kingston. She stepped into the witness box and clearly, but softly, swore to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Lovey stared coldly at Elizabeth, during her testimony, but Elizabeth lifted her chin, and she set up the scene of her rat-infested apartment, of her efforts to keep it clean, and of how unresponsive the staff at Aurora Development was to her requests.
The next witness was Grant Matthews. Deputies led him into the courtroom, shackled at the wrists and ankles. Yeah, you’re a big man now, I thought, watching him shuffle across the courtroom as his manacles rattled. Hearing Grant Matthews talk about how Lovey had engineered the attempted hit on Marcus turned me cold.
“He was writing a story that was going to make her company look bad. She didn’t want everyone in town to know how badly she let some of the apartments get, how repairs were never made,” Grant told the court.
Up on that stand, the man who often left me cowering in a corner or screaming for help those many years ago suddenly didn’t look very frightening to me anymore.
"But the story ran the day before. It was already in print," the prosecutor asked. "If you were assigned to stop that story from running, you failed, didn't you?"
Grant shook his head. "Not completely. That was only part of the job. The other part was to get Mr. Henning."
Maybe it was the passage of time, maybe it was my own empowerment, I don’t know, but Grant Matthews looked like the slimy worm he truly was. I thought about that brick through my window all those months ago. My fear of that night changed from weakness into rage and from that rage to strength. He didn't scare me anymore; he couldn't. From my seat in the spectators’ gallery, I glared at him throughout his testimony.
“And didn’t the defendant have other reasons for wanting the reporter dead?” the prosecutor asked.
Grant paused. “She told me it was because this reporter was bothering her partner’s daughter,“ he began.
“And is it not true that woman was your ex-wife?” The prosecutor snapped.
“Yes, sir.” Grant hung his head. I felt the eyes of the courtroom spectators turn my way. I lowered my own eyes and slipped quietly out of the courtroom.
Marcus was coming down the marbled-tiled hall, apparently the next scheduled witness.
“Kay, I…” he started to say. The attorney beside him grabbed his arm and shook his head at Marcus.
Don’t speak. Don’t say anything.
I locked myself in the last stall in the ladies’ bathroom and sobbed. Everything was gone, everything that mattered; I lost my mother, my husband, and the man I loved, all within a year. It was a burden I didn’t think I could carry, but what choice did I have? My anguish bounced off the gray bathroom tiles, until I didn’t think I could cry anymore.
It only took the jury four hours to find Lovey McNair guilty of all charges. At her sentencing, Martin Rathke argued that at her advanced age and with no prior record, she would not be a threat to the community.
“It seems to me, counselor, that with this lengthy list of charges she has been a threat to the community, to members of staff of our local newspaper, and to the tenants of Aurora Development for some time,” Judge McMullen thundered.
In the end, she got ten years.
In one of her husband David McNair’s few acts of spine, he forced his wife to sell all her interest in Marlov Enterprises to me, then closed up the house and moved to Florida. I don’t know if he ever visited Lovey in the minimum-security wing of the women’s prison in Marysville. I know I never did.
I'm told Marcus gave an impressive speech to the media assembled on the courthouse steps after the verdict, grand and glorious in his old flamboyant style. This had been what he wanted after all, a chance to get his career back on track, a chance to practice what he called real journalism. He finally had gotten his big story, but the price had been too high, for both of us. Afterward, he went back to the newsroom, cleaned out his desk, and disappeared.
No one, not even the new editor, a woman named Addison McIntyre, knew where he went.
Jess gradually recovered, although it took him a slow six months at a rehab clinic in Cleveland. His pretty-boy good looks were destroyed in the attack. The left side of his face hangs a little now, and sometimes he drools a bit, but once he gets out of his wheelchair, he claims, he's going back to newspapering.
As guardian of Mother's estate, I made sure that all his bills were paid directly from her funds and established a college fund for his daughter, Rebecca. It went a long way in curing the animosity Jess had always felt about me. At my last visit, I couldn’t resist asking if they’d heard from Marcus.
"What do you hear from Marcus these days?" I stared into my coffee, to avoid the embarrassment of seeing his wife, Carol, wipe the saliva from her husband’s chin.
"Not a thing. No one knows where he's gone, or what he's doing." Jess's words were slow and measured, but his intelligence was still intact.
"I tried to call his parents in Chillicothe," said Carol. "But I didn't get anywhere. Either they wouldn't tell me, or they really didn't know."
"Elizabeth Kingston has heard from him a few times by letter," Jess said.
"Was there a return address? Is he okay?" I clutched my coffee cup harder, hoping I didn’t sound as desperate as I felt.
Jess shook his head. "She wouldn't say. I think it's best that everybody move on, Kay. He's gone for good."
So, I had lost him completely.
I resigned as director of the literacy center, although the board begged me to stay. In the end, I was made an at-large board member and had a hand in choosing my successor. But there were other, bigger issues to deal with in that run-down neighborhood.
As the new head of Aurora Development, I made sure that all the rental properties surrounding the center were repaired. Ironically, it took less than the bimonthly bill I now received for Mother's care to repair each house.
If Mother had only been strong enough to stand up to Lovey, I wouldn’t be here now.
I closed up that ghastly rental house of ours in the historic district and moved into Mother's newer house in the north end. There were too many memories of both Marcus and Paul, and no matter what I did I could never escape them. It was a strange sadness that I carried with me then, knowing that events beyond my control cost me both of the great loves in my life. I went through the lists of if only and I should haves, almost every day. I should have married Marcus the first time he asked. What if I forgiven Paul?