Chapter 16 Roseate Spoonbill #3
triumphant rehearsal, another choir member said that she had prayed on it and felt she must confide in Ruth about Faith, with
a capital F, Roman’s new beloved.
Now she was fully disgraced. Despair was right there waiting.
Ruth looked at me then, her eyes all pupils, the way her sister remembered from the night she told Roman Wild that she would
pour boiling water on him and kill him. Again, I experienced that chill. Something bad was about to happen.
“You’re saying you did this. How could you, Ruth?”
“Not me! It was just good luck for me that somebody else did it.”
“Ruth, you know better.”
Ruth began shrugging and nodding as if having an internal conversation with the two sides of her nature.
She looked so crazy. She was so crazy.
“Did you kill them, Ruth?”
She said softly, “What does it even matter?”
“Oh, Ruth.”
“For Felicity,” she said then. “It isn’t that hard. You can’t taste it. The old man, Emil, he used to have tea with her every
time he came over. He wanted some tea, with just a little sugar, when I told him Felicity was running late. He didn’t know
I was her mother. So I gave him some tea. It was like he asked for it. Felicity didn’t know until it was over.”
“Oh, Ruth. The regret . . .”
“Not really,” she said. “I had no choice.”
“And the other guy?”
“He threatened her after they moved the body. I heard him. If she didn’t stay with him, he would tell the police. He would
tell them she did it. He said he was going to his apartment and then up to see his kids and he would come back the next day
and she’d better make the right decision. Jack would have found out about the baby. The old man was going to die anyway.”
“Ruth, we’re all going to die anyway,” I said.
I felt like a crone and sounded like a teenager.
“He was sick, sicker than I am. I had to help Felicity get away from Jack. We would have been on a beach somewhere. She might even get the money from the life insurance.”
“Felicity went to prison.”
“She thought I was too sick to stay alive in prison. She was sure she could not be convicted. She said it looked bad but there
wasn’t enough evidence to convict her. There was no other way,” Ruth said, and took a long, quavering breath. “When it was
all over, she thought maybe it was better, that this way nobody would find Sparrow. If Jack saw that Felicity was going to
prison for murder, no way was he going to come within ten feet of her anyhow. Felicity said don’t write, don’t call. She said
she would figure something out. She would find a way, a loophole, or something.”
“Ruth, Felicity is innocent. We have to help her. And you need help . . .”
“You can’t tell anyone.”
“I have to, Ruth.”
“No, Reenie. Please.”
“Felicity can work something out with Jack. People mislead other people all the time. But later, they can be reasonable.”
“I don’t think so,” said Ruth. She might have been right. No one will ever know.
“How old is she?” I asked. Ruth ignored my question. Sparrow was small and slight, but had to be nearly ten. “Where was she?”
“My parents had a nanny to take care of her. My sisters never knew. Sparrow was never there when they visited. I would go
and stay with my parents all the time when she was a baby.”
So much for those innocent old people we wanted to protect from finding out that their lost daughter was still alive. Did
they know what else that daughter did? Were there no limits to deceit . . . or to love?
“Then they got older. She was an active little kid. It was time for her to go to school, so I came here. But there are lots of places I can take her. You’ll never find her. Or me.”
I played for time. “Ruth, calm down. There’s no hurry. So Hal and Alice knew all the time? All of it?”
“Not about those men. The rest, yes. I’m sorry, Reenie. None of this should ever have happened.”
I said, “Well,” and I started to get up. At that moment Ruth spun around and punched me solidly on the jaw. I stumbled. This
little woman, maybe just over a hundred pounds . . . she kicked me in the shins and pushed me against the refrigerator so
hard that the next morning, I would have a bump on the back of my head the size of a Ping-Pong ball.
She grabbed Sparrow’s arm. “Don’t you dare follow me,” she said. “I’ll wreck the car if you do.”
She ran for the door but stopped when there was a sharp knock.
“You little bitch,” she said to me.
I half walked, half crawled to the door. Claire and Fay had brought the police.
They took my phone because I’d recorded everything Ruth said. I hated myself for it. But as she said, there was no other way.
A child protection officer was summoned. Sparrow would have to spend at least the night in emergency foster care. That is,
until Sam showed up, calm, competent, reassuring, armed with Felicity’s fax naming him Sparrow’s legal guardian. After she’d
been examined by a pediatrician, the little girl was released into Sam’s care. The day after tomorrow, he would travel to
Wisconsin to secure Felicity’s release from Manoomin Correctional Facility for Women.
I was not then nor am I now the kind of woman who weeps on her husband’s shoulder. But that night, I did. I couldn’t stop
crying. My chin had swelled and purpled. Nelia kept pointing to it and saying, “Oh, poor ouchie!”
Nell went to the Brevard County Sheriff’s Office to meet with Ruth.
Sam offered to go with her, but Nell, although literally shaking, insisted on going on her own.
She was Eleanor Bigelow for the defense, although she would not handle this case alone.
We debated the question of Sparrow traveling to Wisconsin with Sam.
She was so little. But Felicity had waited so long and had given up everything to keep her little girl safe—including that little girl.
“I want to come,” I said.
“It’s not a good idea. The children,” said Sam. “I might be there for several days.”
Later that night, Sam admitted he could not imagine going without me; he couldn’t face the emotional back draft, although
he didn’t expect a media blitz. There were factors upon factors, some unknown, and he couldn’t be sure even of the factors
he knew about.
What if Miranda came along too, as the utility grandmother-in-law on-site? My father volunteered to look after the kids (“And
if this doesn’t prove the existence of God . . .” my mother said). He’d have the able help of Nell and Harper, my assistant
with the parakeet-green hair and the pierced lip and nostrils. She had deferred her medical school entrance for a year; her
appearance belied her bullet-train mind and gentle spirit. In the tradition of journalism and nepotism, the managing editor,
one Gus Damiano, said, “Harper’s bizarre.”
Miranda introduced herself to Sparrow. “So I am happy to meet you. What is your name?”
“My name is Sparrow,” she said. “I like Nelia. I’m ten, almost a teenager. But I like little kids still, even though I’m a
big kid.”
She was not, in fact, big; she was speck sized. That night, as I brushed tangles out of her wispy brown hair and put it into
a braid, she began to cry.
“Sweetheart,” I told her, “I know you must be so sad.”
She said, “I really do want my Granny.” I lay beside her and rubbed her small back, my mind unable to encompass how confused she must certainly feel, a little girl whose very circumspect world comprised of one older woman had burst into a cacophony of raucous kids and solicitous strangers.
I told her, “I know you are scared. For a long time, you were with Granny, but now you get to be with someone who’s really
nice too, maybe even nicer, who is your mommy but you didn’t see her for a long time. Her name is Felicity.”
“I know Felicity,” said Sparrow. “I have her picture at my room.”
“We will go on the airplane to see her. Did you ever go on an airplane?”
“When I was a baby. Of course, I don’t remember. You don’t have memories from when you were a baby.”
“They’ll give you nice food and maybe some candy.”
“Oh dear,” she said, and I had to stop myself from laughing. “I’m not allowed to have candy. They say it’s very bad for you.”
“Just once in a while it’s okay. I’m a mom. I know.”
“Will you come too?” said Sparrow. “Do you know Felicity?”
“Yes,” I said. “She is . . . she is my best friend. I was her friend all my life, since we were little, like you.”
“I am not little though. I told you that.”
“When we were younger, like you. I’m sort of your aunt. Not really, but sort of.” She seemed to think about that for a while.
She certainly remembered it. She has called me “Auntie Mommy Reenie” most of the time, even as an adult.
That night, the next thing she asked was, “When can I see my Granny?”
“I don’t know,” I told her.
“Is my Granny bad?”
What could I tell her? “She did some very bad things, but she thought they were the right thing. She might have something
wrong in her brain.”
Ruth was under guard at Grace Hospital with significant chest pains.
She would be transferred to Wisconsin for sentencing when she improved.
Nell and Sam planned to plead Ruth not guilty by reason of a mental disease; all they could hope was that she would serve her time at Dawn Hill Hospital for Women operated by the Wisconsin Department of Corrections.
At the police station, Ruth was chillingly nonchalant when she described such things as Emil Gardener’s death throes and simply closing the bathroom door on Cary Church’s final seizure.
Ruth “didn’t see any point” in describing how she got the man into the bathtub in the first place, beyond explaining that he was “initially reluctant,” so Nell suspected there had been a knife, or even a gun.
Ruth refused to talk about that. Her attitude was the very definition of “in cold blood.”
Sparrow slept most of the way to Wisconsin. When we got into the airport, which now looked so small, she said, “I didn’t get
any candy at all. I feel sort of bad about that. I think I should go on another airplane.” Sam and I bought her a big box