Shades of Eva (54 page)

I could see why Brad would be so fearful. We
were all going to be held to account, even if what we did try to do
was the noble thing. I had to respect Brad’s decision to claim the
child, even if the claim was a lie. It was an act of generosity
that I was not capable of back then. But Ramsey had a point. Brad’s
supposed noble gesture was a gesture that made his future wife look
delusional.

I had to wonder where in the hell, or when
in hell, this person or persons had acquired my DNA, though—if it
was indeed my DNA and not some arbitrary hoax. If it was Mitchell,
he certainly hadn’t asked me for it.

I inquired of the detective as to how they’d
likely attained it. Ramsey just laughed and said, “There’s a
hundred ways to get someone’s DNA: Styrofoam cups, feminine
napkins, Q-tips. Name the orifice and I’ll give you ten disgusting
methods.”

At one point in the conversation, Ramsey
congratulated me on my status. He called Brad and I winners, as if
we had won something by virtue of being eliminated as the
biological father to the Elmer sample, as if my brother—or whoever
the father turned out to be—was the so-called loser.

I thought about that, thought about Ramsey’s
term winner. Becoming a father—in any capacity—is a gift, and a
wonderful one, or it can be. A winner wasn’t the right term for me.
I felt like everything but a winner that day.

I had waited for more phone calls
that night—and they came. Bells were ringing in my house like it
was a turn-of-the-hour clock shop in hell. These were the late
night calls from sympathetic colleagues and friends offering their
condolences for the embarrassment that had just veiled my life. It
was embarrassment that I was enduring, and a good bit of grief.
After all, my brother was missing, and being reminded of that
missingness—for lack of a better word—had rekindled a lot of sad
memories.

 In truth, to say that I was
embarrassed was an understatement. The fiasco prompted me to take
the clock shop offline and unplug the telephone, but Allie, who was
awake now, quickly brought me to my senses. “Your client might call
you again, Lev—or police might call again. You need the line
open.”

I had been asked to come down to the
precinct at River Bluff PD to give a written statement and a hair
follicle. These were welcome requests given the bells in the clock
shop, so at 12:30 in the morning, April 25th, 1995, I hung the
phone up and gathered my things and tried to give Allie one last
kiss goodbye.

She wasn’t receptive. She turned her cheek
to me and went back to sleep.

Her gesture was a vivid reminder of the
confession I had just offered her, and the resultant pain a
forty-year omission like that can bring.

It was almost 1:00 a.m. by the time
I
reached the precinct. Detective Ramsey was waiting for me. We
walked inside and into an interrogation room that put me
immediately ill-at-ease. We made casual conversation for a minute
or two, and that’s when he told me, to my surprise, that he had
been intimately familiar with Eva and her cases—cases plural—for
many years. These were her rape case, her baby’s infant abduction
case—two cases I had been somewhat familiar with way back when, and
one more—the case of the toolshed shooting when Mitchell was just
five-years-old shortly before Eva died.

Suddenly, I could understand why this matter
got dropped in Ramsey’s lap.

Here was a man, I was thinking, who might be
able to answer some questions that I had. Ramsey was a rookie
officer in 1970 when he was dispatched to the shooting call on
Maple Street near 17th in River Bluff. “It was a quiet night,”
Ramsey recalled, “quiet until I got that call. Eva said she shot
her neighbor, who was laying in her toolshed splayed open like a
gutted deer carcass. I grilled them both pretty good because there
was something inconsistent in Eva’s story. She said she was the
only one who did any shooting, but Mitchell had powder residue all
over himself.”

“Eva didn’t have any gunshot residue on
her?”

Ramsey was smiling. “That’s just it! They
both did—they both shot that guy, but that’s not what Eva was
saying, and the little squirt wasn’t talking. The neighbor’s name
was Elms by the way.”

This was all shades of Mitchell’s epiphany.
He’d remembered exactly what Ramsey seemed so eager to prove back
then. I had to point out, without giving away any confidential
patient information, that it would be easy for a child to forget
something like that.

Ramsey agreed. He offered me some coffee at
that point and I was more than happy to accept a cup. Then he
asked, “Any of this ever come up in therapy? The shooting that
is?”

Yes would have been an understatement. The
toolshed shooting was the primary subject of our conversations. And
as I said, that was protected information. “You’ll need a subpoena
if you want an answer to that,” I told the detective, smiling as I
sipped my coffee.

He smiled in return. “Yeah, little boy was
as silent as an alligator with his mouth taped up,” Ramsey said.
“Well someone was lying!”

“Sounds like his mother was protecting him
by taking responsibility for the killing,” I said. “That’s what
mothers do—they protect their kids.”

Ramsey nodded. “That must be the
psychologist in you.” Again he smiled. Ramsey then lit up a
cigarette. He was staring at me as if it were my turn to
conjecture.

I remained silent.

“How many times did you counsel this guy?”
Ramsey blew some smoke over his head and watched it dissipate in
the air above us.

I thought that a safe question to answer.
“Twice,” I said.

“Well,” Ramsey replied, blowing more smoke
in the air, “can’t learn too much about a guy in two sessions, I
suppose.”

He was staring at me then, as if he knew
that wasn’t true. It wasn’t. You could learn a lot about a man in
two hours.

Ramsey took my written statement
and
the two of us sat there continuing to discuss things over coffee as
the night wore on. At some point, Ramsey sat a high school yearbook
picture of who appeared to be Mitchell on the table. “Got this from
Mitchell’s father,” Ramsey said. “Is this your client?”

I looked at the picture. It appeared to be
Mitchell, at least a younger version of him.

“I’d say it is.”

Ramsey smiled and took up the picture. I had
been purposefully vague with respect to Mitchell’s counseling. As I
said, I was trying to obey the law. But at some point, the
confidentiality slut in me must have appeared and I suggested I
wasn’t exactly sure whom I was counseling at times.

It was intended to be a tongue-in-cheek
remark, but Ramsey jumped on it. “It almost sounds like you think
this was an imposter you were counseling,” he said, challenging my
remark.

“That’s how it felt at times,” I replied,
and tried to change the subject. “What’s Mitchell being charged
with?”

“Battery on his uncle. Conspiracy. False
imprisonment. Fraud. Extortion. Impersonation of a peace officer.
About the same things this Abigail is charged with, save the murder
charge.” He was referring to Abigail’s supposed execution of
Jackson Greer.

Bold as he was, Ramsey then asked about any
mental tests I’d given Mitchell.

Since I wasn’t sure of Mitchell’s motives,
his diagnosis, or his true identity, discussing or otherwise using
the results of the Dissociative Experiences Scale I’d given him
would be ridiculous, if not unduly incriminating. Because of those
factors, I was not going to turn over any test results, either,
unless I had a subpoena in hand.

I told Ramsey there was a limit to my
infidelity.

He looked me in the eye and smiled, nodded
again, and took another long drag of his smoke.

Ramsey had a pretty thick file
he’d
compiled on Eva. He was leafing through what appeared to be her
autopsy report.

“This is an interesting piece of paper,”
Ramsey said, referring to the medical examiner’s work. He turned a
page over. “I’m not the only one who’s requested this little piece
of literature recently. Seems an Emily Bond was interested in this
paper, and a few other pieces of information about Eva’s family:
death certificates, estate papers, birth certificates. We have a
records clerk at Owen County, along with Thelma Lomax, the
landowner of a cute little Victorian house over by the Institution
ready to make a positive ID on this little lady. You ever seen
her?”

Ramsey tossed a picture of Abigail Angstrom
on the table next to Mitchell’s high school photo. “Only on the
news,” I offered.

I had to admit, I didn’t quite care about
any Emily Bond or Abigail Angstrom at that moment. I couldn’t take
my eyes off the autopsy report Ramsey had just set aside. It was as
if until Ramsey had brought that document out, Eva was somehow
alive. Her death became at once salient. It hit me with a force I
wasn’t prepared for, as if someone had just sucker-punched me in
the stomach.

I’d discussed that death—theoretically
so—with Allie and with detectives, and even with Mitchell, but
there was something about discussing it with that autopsy report
laying there that made Eva’s death official, that brought things
home in a very final way.

“What was the cause of death?” I asked the
detective.

“Undetermined,” Ramsey said, taking in
another long puff of smoke with an irritating bit of indifference.
“Stress related arrhythmia the document says, but essentially
that’s like saying she died due to a failing heart. Everyone’s
heart fails when they die. There isn’t anything in here of any
substance to me.”

That piece of information was also
consistent with what my client had told me. He said they never knew
why his mother died; only that she had, and that didn’t seem enough
to him. He also implied she’d been killed by her psychiatrist.
Suddenly, Ully’s warning to the Asylum came back to me, and I
half-wanted to tell Ramsey to put the fire department on standby,
but I digressed.

At the time, my impulse had been to tell
Mitchell that the question as to why his mother died had to be
enough—that there was probably no answer as to why her heart
stopped beating. It was the realism of the therapist and the empty
pocket of disappointed expectations! But sitting there pondering
that question through an old pair of eyes—through the eyes of Eva’s
childhood sweetheart—and now, through the eyes of her son—the
question wasn’t enough for me, either. I wanted an answer.

Ramsey also had a copy of Eva’s marriage
certificate to Brad Rennix. Brad and Eva were married in 1957 just
a few years after I’d left for Notre Dame. Incidentally, Ramsey
also had Virgil’s death certificate in hand. Her father had died in
1957, just weeks before Eva’s wedding. Virgil was
eighty-four-years-old when he passed. 1957 must have been a
bittersweet year for Eva. Seven years committed and as freshly
released as she was engaged, just in time to attend her father’s
funeral.

Ramsey then showed me some of the records
regarding the infant abduction case. A detective Spurrier from
River Bluff had been assigned to the matter. I vaguely remember the
name, and the face. Spurrier had visited my family on several
occasions that year. Elmer’s abduction is what spurred Eva to
finally point a finger at my brother. Spurrier seemed to be
pointing his finger at Fred, as well. Fred had been home on leave
from the front for a few days when Elmer was taken, and his alibi,
according to what my parents told police, was that he was out
joyriding with Ully McGinnis.

It was hardly an alibi that could exclude
him from the investigation.

My brother never got to speak with Spurrier.
He had taken an early flight back to Korea the same day Spurrier
came calling.

Spurrier left notice that we were to notify
him as soon as Fred called, but my brother never did. Spurrier
contacted the Military Police at Fred’s base, and learned that my
brother had never arrived back. Flight attendants recalled seeing
Fred on the flight over. They were the last people known to have
seen him.

The Army, and authorities back home,
conducted a search for my brother. The Army, given the
circumstances, declared him AWOL after two days, and issued him a
dishonorable discharge in absentia within two months. The police in
Michigan declared him a missing person. With more evidence, they
might have declared him a fugitive.  

The whole matter broke my mother’s heart,
and infuriated my father. He wasn’t as much mad at Fred as he was
at Eva, though. He blamed her for this, and defended his son’s
decision to leave as a desperate attempt to protect his
freedom.

There was never any other suspect besides
Fred in the infant abduction case. No one else was ever accused.
The baby was never found and the case went cold. I never knew what
became of Eva after that until recently.

Detective Ramsey had the file of the
shooting case on his desk, but he had yet to open it. I remember
looking at the cover of it, at Eva’s name, and at the Fred Elms
name. I took note of the date and of the address of Eva’s home.
She’d married into a little house on Maple Street on the poorer
side of town.

I finished my coffee as Ramsey finished his
smoke. We both stood.

“As if you haven’t given enough,” Ramsey
said, “how about that hair follicle?”

***

Ben Levantle

I stepped out into the night air of River
Bluff. I wasn’t sure what to do next, but I did have an idea.
Anything was better than returning to the clock shop. I wanted to
see Mitchell’s house on Maple Street, the house where Eva died,
where, in a way, Mitchell died, too. I wanted to say my goodbyes to
them. I knew I wouldn’t see Eva again, and I didn’t think I’d ever
see Mitchell again. A goodbye seemed appropriate.