Tiger cate, p.25
Tiger Cate, page 25
“Cate … again … I’m so sorry — ”
“Yes, I got that.” Then, somewhat softer, “All this cloak - and - dagger stuff is nerve - wracking, Bronnie. Miguel said if I came today you would fill in some details.”
“Details, yes … Details.”
For the first time since they’d met, only two weeks ago, Bronnie looked haggard. Whatever secrets she’d been holding in were visibly tearing her apart. Cate was almost afraid to find out what had caused this change in Bronnie.
They sat looking at each other for several minutes. Finally, the older woman roused herself and began to talk.
PART IV – The Truth
The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple. — Oscar Wilde
And the truth shall make you free. — John 8:32
Chapter 54
March 12, 1980 Albuquerque, New Mexico
Bronnie
The old Woodie station wagon sat with its motor running in the No Parking zone outside the Christian Children’s Home in northwest Albuquerque. Inside, two young girls stood with their mother, Ruby Taylor Brown, in the cramped little office. Their older sister, Bronnie, had positioned herself at the window to keep an eye on the man who sat waiting in the family station wagon.
All the talking was done. Ruby had wept openly as she’d signed a sheaf of papers releasing custody of her two younger daughters, Margaret and Stella. Bronnie had wanted to dry her mother’s eyes and murmur encouragement the way she was used to doing at home these days. It would be over soon, and Ruby knew it was for the best. The girls couldn’t stay in the house with that man, the one waiting in the car. Not since they’d told Bronnie and Ruby everything that had been going on.
The man only had one functioning eye now, the other swathed in a bandage. Two days earlier, the younger girl, Stella, had seen to that. She babbled on proudly about it every chance she got. It was an eye for an eye, she said. He was lucky he wasn’t dead, blah blah.
The girl had lunged at him with a kitchen knife, and the tip had caught him in the eye socket. Sliced the eyeball in two while slashing the lower lid and upper cheek. Hard to put a thing like that back together.
Bronnie had held a towel over the bleeding mess until the paramedics arrived. Having graduated high school mid-term to start her certified nurse’s assistant training, she was secretly thrilled to be putting it to use already. Another part of her was thrilled that her stepfather — the bastard — had gotten it in the eye. She would have aimed much lower.
Despite her husband’s serious injury, Ruby couldn’t be talked into going with him to the hospital. She was still reeling from what the middle girl, Margaret, had told her — that he had been molesting and sexually assaulting them. Touching them, making them touch him, and so much more. A ten - year - old and an eight - year - old … and it had been going on for years.
“At first, he did it alone with just me,” Margaret had said in a strangely calm voice. “Then he wanted Stella to do it, too. He made me go get her. Then he made us both … kiss it.” She spent the next ten minutes saying everything else he’d made them do.
“They cannot stay here,” Bronnie had told her mother with newfound authority. “I’ll be moving into the dorms at the college soon, and those two need to be in a safe place until you figure out how to get rid of that monster. If you don’t want me to go to the police, you better come up with a plan, Mother.”
Ruby had looked at her meekly, a cavernous sorrow etched into her once - beautiful face. Over the last few years, their relationship had gradually shifted. Now the daughter was the voice of strength and reason for a mother overwhelmed by life.
“I miss Dad,” Bronnie had said as she rinsed off the breakfast dishes that morning. There was no doubt that the specter of Chet Taylor — an Army officer who had lost his life in the final years of the Vietnam War — loomed in their minds at that moment.
Ruby sat at the kitchen table, weeping again, her face in her hands. At only thirty - six, her mother seemed frail and broken from the loss of her one true love and the cost of some terrible choices in romantic partners since then. A string of hard - luck boyfriends had come and gone, lured by her military widow’s pension, and, ultimately, put off by her neediness. Then came Bob Brown — a one-night stand whom she’d married on a lark. Supposedly, he had fathered Stella, but what parent could do to his own child what he had done? By rights, he should be in prison.
Ruby had taken a martyr’s breath and shaken out her shoulders. “I’ve decided that if he tells the police anything, I will say I pulled the knife. Those two have been through enough.”
“Something tells me he won’t be talking to the police about this,” Bronnie had replied dryly. “Here’s the number for the children’s foster home. Call now, so we can take them there before he gets back.”
But before they’d finished packing the car, Bob Brown had arrived home in a cab. In a rare fit of remorse, he had insisted on driving them, perhaps afraid they were all trying to flee. Bronnie had sat in the back seat with her sisters, feeling protective and fierce. She kept her eye on Stella, who was laughing maniacally at her father and kicking the back of his seat. Just her funny ways, their mother would often say, just her funny ways.
When the admission work was completed, their mother stood fussing with the girls’ outfits like they were about to take a Christmas picture.
“I am coming back here in a month to fetch you,” Ruby murmured as she gave each an impassioned kiss on the head. “Three months, tops.”
Ten months later, she still hadn’t returned.
But Bronnie had gone weekly to see her siblings. Stella, a born extrovert, settled into group foster care nicely and held court with a half-dozen little girls her age. Margaret, who had always been a loner, seemed perpetually buried in a book during Bronnie’s visits.
“What are you reading?”
“Black Beauty.”
“Again?”
“I like it. It’s a good story,” the girl would reply stonily.
Over that first year, Margaret had checked out from the library and read a stack of the most famous horse stories written. The Black Stallion, My Friend Flicka, Misty of Chincoteague, King of the Wind, and National Velvet, among others. No doubt it kept her mind off her current situation and fed what Bronnie imagined was an ongoing fantasy of being adopted by a horse trainer from the Ruidoso Downs racetrack.
Bronnie had chuckled and ruffled her sister’s hair, ignoring the sullen glance she got in exchange. While Stella was adapting well and showing no obvious signs of damage from her past ordeal, Margaret was escaping further into a fantasy life of books. But she was doing what she needed in order to survive in the orphanage. They were all tightening their emotional belts.
Not until the first week of 1981 did Bronnie realize the extent of her mother’s fragility. Two days after the child-molesting, pension-stealing, wife - abusing Bob Brown moved out — leaving her bank account empty and the rent in arrears — Ruby took the remainder of her sleeping pills, downed a half - quart of vodka, and eased herself into a steaming bubble bath. Bronnie found her submerged body the next morning. Such a serene look on her face, as if to say, “Sure, I’ve been a screw-up, but I got this one right.”
Chapter 55
February 25, 1982
Bronnie parked her rental across the street, grabbed the colorfully wrapped package, and darted through traffic to the curb in front of the austere youth facility. Had Albuquerque always been this busy? Having recently returned from the Indonesian island where the Peace Corps had stationed her for the past year, the crowds, frigid weather, and traffic sounds of her southwestern hometown seemed unfamiliar and jarring.
A lot had happened to her sisters in the year she’d been in the Corps. Stella had gone into an adoptive home and why not? She was a gregarious, outgoing girl who had her father’s talent for singing and merriment, not to mention his con-artist charm.
Her adoptive family had two other children — an older boy named Fred, and Tina, a girl Stella’s age. They’d been trying for a third child for years but had lost hope. So, they settled for adding the adorable little orphan girl they’d met at the children’s home, thinking she would be a grateful and happy addition to make their family complete. Never thinking she might have darkness that followed her everywhere she went.
Six months ago, Stella had clubbed her adoptive sister Tina over the head with Fred’s baseball bat, apparently as a joke. Apparently thinking the girl would get right up, shake it off, and chase Stella around, after which they’d all have a great laugh. Only after emergency surgery to relieve pressure on her brain and a tense week of waiting did Tina regain consciousness. Her parents claimed she still wasn’t right.
Given the circumstances, the adoption was reversed. Stella was sent to a psychiatric hospital for “evaluation,” then to a different children’s facility, one with locked doors. She would be there until she was eighteen.
Bronnie had avoided visiting her until now, but today would be her last chance on this year’s leave. She had planned to arrive late morning, knowing lunch would be at noon and she could beat it out of there while Stella was distracted by food. She needn’t have worried. This wasn’t the kind of institution that encouraged close or extended contact between inmates and their visitors, for everyone’s sake.
A suddenly preadolescent Stella was waiting for her in the visiting room. She looked thin and bad - tempered, her legs crammed under a table that seemed built for toddlers. Still, the girl smiled at Bronnie and exclaimed in surprise at the belated Christmas/early birthday present. The gift had been costly, but Bronnie was grappling with her guilt over the plans she’d made. After her Peace Corps stint ended next year, she was planning to finish her nursing studies at a subsidized college on the East Coast, where some friends from the Corps lived. She wasn’t planning on returning to the Southwest for a long while.
“Oh, how precious — what is it?” Bronnie noticed how quickly Stella could shift from stormy to that charming smile, the one that worked magic on adults.
“It’s a portable cassette player you can carry with you and listen to with headphones. I checked and they’ll let you have it at least in the lunchroom.” She glanced around the room at the handful of guards leaning against walls, ready to step in if a family visit got ugly.
“I love this — thanks, sis!” She blew a kiss over the table, then smiled at the burly guard who had shifted his position to get a better view of their conversation. At almost eleven, Stella was all long limbs and lean torso. Bronnie was a little shocked to see her breasts budding already. Her sly, roaming eyes were now framed by prescription glasses. A brainy Lolita on stilts.
“You are welcome, my darling,” Bronnie answered gaily, mimicking how their mother used to croon to the baby of the family. Had all that fawning and pampering led to Stella’s dangerous state of mind? No, it had been the sexual abuse plus a certain gene pool, all courtesy of Bob Brown. The court-appointed lawyer had told Bronnie there was hope among the doctors that her sister would grow out of her antisocial behavior. She had murmured agreement, all the while thinking, Uh huh, when pigs grow wings.
“Um, Stella, I want to ask you something.”
“Yeah?” Stella responded. She was fiddling with the Walkman, trying to figure out where the accompanying batteries went. She looked at that moment like any normal preteen, and Bronnie dreaded asking her question.
“Why?”
Stella looked up and straightened her black-framed glasses.
“Why what?” As if she had no idea what Bronnie might be curious about.
“Did you do that to the little girl?”
An amused smile crept onto her face. Oh, that why. No doubt she’d been asked more than a few times.
“First of all, not a little girl. My age, right? And fat. Just rolls of it.”
That could not have been why she attacked the girl with a baseball bat, it just couldn’t. Bronnie stared back, waiting. Stella lifted her glasses and rubbed the bridge of her nose where the heavy frame had left a dent. Without the glasses, Stella’s gunmetal eyes were calm and undisturbed, just shy of amused.
“Well, she was going to tell, wasn’t she? What me and Fred were up to. He’d told me no one was home, and so we were doing it, you know, and she just walks in without knocking.”
“Doing what exactly?” But her fingers were tingling. That could not have happened. No.
“We were just having fun, you know? Feeling each other up. Course, our clothes were piled on the bed. That probably set her off.”
Bronnie opened her mouth to say something, then shut it again.
“Oh, wipe that look off your face. It wasn’t — ” Stella mimicked the loud voice of a street hustler, “it wa’nt no big deal, man. Shee-it!” A guard came to attention and stepped in toward her, and she dropped back to her own voice. “I told her I would make her sorry. I warned her what would happen.”
“Stella, you nearly killed her,” Bronnie whispered, aware of the guard still hovering.
“So I hear,” the girl said, puffing out her cheeks and shrugging her shoulders. “I tried to talk to her, but she ran. Kinda ticked me off, her running away like that.”
An image of a lion bringing down a gazelle flashed before Bronnie’s eyes and she shuddered. As she passed back through the security check at the front entrance, Bronnie wondered whether society might not be safer with Stella permanently housed in such a place.
The half-hour drive to Christian Children’s Home was hardly enough time to recover. Another jolt awaited as her usually shy sister Margaret swung wide the front door. On the cusp of adolescence, the girl had already bloomed into a young woman. Now taller than Bronnie, Margaret was more rounded, her chestnut hair falling well past her shoulders. The girl glowed with good humor and something else Bronnie couldn’t quite define. She looked nurtured.
Bronnie found herself hugged and dragged through the front door, all while Margaret filled her in on the last year. Before she knew it, they were stepping into a large room set up for Sunday brunch. Margaret led Bronnie by the arm to a couple who had been looking out the window, plastic cups of punch in their hands. The man was older, well into his fifties, with the tanned face of someone who’d spent his life outdoors. Next to him was a striking if not beautiful woman in her forties, with alabaster skin, bright auburn hair, and aquamarine eyes.
“Bronnie, this is Doc and Fiona Finley. They … they’ve taught me so much about horses and riding and horse care, and — ” Margaret was choking up, and Bronnie stared at her in amazement. Her stoic little sister was undone.
“We’ve learned a lot from her, too,” Fiona murmured in a slight Irish lilt. “She is a delight.”
“Hi. Daniel Finley,” the man said in a deep baritone, reaching out to shake her hand. His steel gray eyes twinkled with amusement. “I’ve been mentoring the 4 - H group in this area for years,” Doc said. “When Margaret showed up, she was remarkably good with the horses. She said she’d had no previous riding or horse experience. True?”
Bronnie nodded. “Only in her dreams.” They all laughed, and then they filled Bronnie in on her sister’s meteoric rise in the horse show scene, from novice to champion in her age group.
Later, Margaret showed Bronnie the trophies in her tiny room, which lined most of her designated shelves.
“Next show season, I go into the older age category—fourteen to seventeen. I’m trying to prepare now.” She closed the door to the hallway and turned to Bronnie in a conspiratorial whisper. “Hey, I need to tell you something.”
Bronnie felt her stomach lurch as Margaret self-consciously leaned against the wall in the cramped space. She had a hunch what she would hear and had been trying to prepare herself.
“Doc and Fiona, they’re moving to Arizona later this year. They’ve asked me if I want to go with them. We would live on a ranch that’s been in Doc’s family for almost a hundred years.” Margaret turned her faded denim eyes on Bronnie as tears spilled onto her cheeks. “I guess they want to adopt me, I mean legally. Is that, I mean, would that be okay?”
Suddenly, Bronnie was tired of being the older, knowing sister. Stella’s adoption had been a disaster, so who knew? She smiled back half - heartedly and answered, “You tell me, Margaret. Will it be okay?” Then she reached out to embrace her younger sister, regretting having introduced any doubt into such joyous news.
“You deserve to have a happy life, Margie,” Bronnie whispered into her hair. “On a ranch with horses to ride? Oh, Lord, yes — the jackpot! Mommy and Daddy would be so happy for you.”
She held her damaged little sister for what seemed like a long time. For years afterward, she’d regret not having held her longer that day.
Chapter 56
April 13, 1984 Phoenix
Margaret’s voice had sounded small and fearful on the phone. It wasn’t a voice she’d heard her sister use before, not even when their abusing stepfather had lived with them. Margaret the stoic, she’d been. Margaret the steady one. Hearing that hysteria in her voice had made Bronnie agree to fly out West. She couldn’t spare any time away from her nursing studies in Boston right now, not with finals looming. Yet here she was, all the way across the country, on Daniel Finley’s dime.
She’d departed a blustery New England seven hours earlier, dreading her arrival back in the Southwest. But Phoenix’s sleek, sunny airport with its ultra - modern architecture had stretched its arms out to welcome her like a fashion-savvy girlfriend. So much for her notion of old cowpokes shuffling down dusty Arizona streets.
