Bitter Blood (2 page)

Delores pulled the Volkswagen between her recently repaired green Oldsmobile Cutlass and Janie’s 1970 gold Chevrolet Nova. She got out carrying her beige purse, a yellow-bound Bible, the Sunday paper, the gas receipt, the white sweater she’d carried against the morning coolness, and her keys on two rings held together by a safety pin. She was about to insert one of those keys into the center garage door when a shot rang out, splattering the door with her blood. The shot was followed quickly by another, and a few seconds later by a third.

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When Delores Lynch moved into the big house on Covered Bridge Road late in 1970, she vowed that this was the last move she would make. She was fifty-four, her children were grown, and every time she had begun to establish roots, she had been yanked up and moved. She resented it. Needing order and stability, she felt haunted by change.

Not since her early childhood in Pittsburgh’s east end had she had security of place. Her father, John Rodgers, a machinist at Union Switch and Signal Company, had died in 1932 when Delores was fifteen, leaving his wife, Lilie, and two teenage children to fend for themselves in the depths of the Depression. Delores’s brother, Elmer, three years older, took upon himself the responsibility of seeing that the family had a roof over their heads and food on the table—and that his younger sister would be able to stay in Westinghouse High School and eventually achieve her dream of becoming a nurse. But work was scarce, pay short, and as the family’s situation steadily deteriorated, they were forced to move several times. The hardships of those years would have a lifelong effect on Delores, who decades later still proclaimed that nobody ever lived poorer than she. “I know the value of a dollar,” she enjoyed telling people. “I lived through the Depression.”

Delores didn’t get along with her mother and seldom talked about her childhood in later years. If anybody asked about it, even her children, she changed the subject. When her mother died in 1974, she mentioned it to none of her friends.

Near the Depression’s end, Delores’s brother became a Sealtest milk routeman, a job he would keep until his retirement, and he was able to help his sister complete her nursing training at Pittsburgh’s Mercy Hospital. Soon after she started to work as a nurse at the hospital, a friend invited her on a blind date, and she met the man she would marry.

Charles R. Lynch, Jr., grew up in the steel mill town of Vandergrift, thirty miles northeast of Pittsburgh. His father was a chemist in the mill laboratory. The second of seven children, Chuck, as he was to be called throughout his life, grew up loving sports. Although he was a wiry five-foot-three, his pugnacious nature allowed him to claim a spot as a starting guard on the basketball team at Vandergrift High and to become a bantamweight Golden Gloves boxer. But it was in academics that he really excelled, and he was rewarded with a scholarship at the University of Pittsburgh, where he became a business major.

After his graduation, Chuck went to work as an accountant at the General Electric plant in Pittsburgh, but the coming of World War II prompted quick decisions. He enlisted in the navy and asked Delores to marry him. The wedding took place on January 11, 1942, at his family’s Evangelical and Reformed Church in Vandergrift. Chuck spent most of the next three years at sea guarding Atlantic convoys and rising to the rank of chief petty officer, while Delores lived near his home port in New Jersey, working as a nurse until the birth of her first child, Jane Alda, on October 28, 1944. At the war’s end, Chuck returned to his new family and his old job at GE.

Before his son, Thomas John, was born on August 16, 1947, Chuck was already a young man on the rise at GE. After taking the company’s business training course, he was assigned to GE’s staff of traveling auditors at the huge plant in Schenectady, New York, where Thomas Edison had started the company in 1886. This was a plum assignment for promising would-be executives, and Chuck was proud to get it. The traveling auditors were dispatched to GE plants all over the world and often were away from home for months at a time. Delores resented being left alone with two small children and grew bitter about it.

After three years as an auditor, Chuck got a quick succession of assignments in New York and New Jersey. He moved his family four times in three years, living for the longest stretch—two years—in Livingston, New Jersey, before he got his first management job at a GE distribution center in Washington D.C. The family settled in Springfield, Maryland, for the next three years. The constant moving didn’t bother Chuck. It was a price he expected to pay for his ambition. He was the quintessential company man, willing to give whatever the company asked. “He lived for GE,” a friend said of him after his death. “GE was his life.”

Chuck’s dedication paid off with a promotion and a transfer to Chicago, where he was to become distribution manager for GE’s Hotpoint appliance division. The family settled into a comfortable, two-story older house with a lawn and trees on Hoyne Drive in south Chicago, and Chuck, a golfer, joined the nearby prestigious Midlothian Country Club. Janie and Tom had attended private schools in Washington, and in Chicago both were enrolled at Morgan Park Academy, only a few blocks from their home. Here the family was to achieve its longest period of stability, nearly six years.

Chuck’s work, as usual, was consuming. He was one of a handful of executives who made the Hotpoint division highly profitable, and he was handsomely rewarded with bonuses and stock options. With her husband devoted to his job, her daughter away at college and her son in high school, Delores decided to return to work. For three years she was a nurse at her son’s school. “When she was school nurse, all of the kids, the troubled kids, would go over and talk to her,” Tom later recalled, “and she was very much in tune with everything.”

Delores quit work after Tom’s graduation, and while he was going off to college in North Carolina, she and Chuck were moving into a new waterfront home they had built at 259 Lake Shore Drive in Barrington, an upper-crust bedroom community northwest of Chicago. But they hadn’t even finished the landscaping before GE merged its appliance divisions, and, much to Delores’s chagrin, Chuck was transferred once again, this time to Louisville and the world’s largest appliance factory.

GE’s sprawling Appliance Park covers one thousand acres in Buechel on Louisville’s southern edge and is Kentucky’s largest employer. It produces all of GE’s major appliances—washers, ranges, refrigerators, air conditioners—and at its peak in 1973, it employed 22,000 people, a figure that was to drop drastically in the early eighties. Chuck became one of the plant’s top executives. As manager of product distribution, he oversaw warehousing and shipping and was responsible for getting every appliance to its eventual destination. Several thousand employees answered to him.

The Lynches bought a two-story gray Cape Cod house near the tenth hole of the golf course at Hunting Creek, an exclusive country club in the green hills of the Ohio River bluff north of Louisville, off U.S. 42, but Delores could find no happiness in that plush and tranquil setting. She liked Chicago—with the exception of its blustery winters—had friends there, and didn’t want to leave. She was disgruntled with the very idea of being in Louisville. While Chuck was engrossed in his new job, Delores was fighting with her new neighbors. She resented intrusions onto her property and confronted golfers who came into her yard to retrieve stray balls. She had a dense line of pines planted across her back property line to shield the yard from the golf course.

Although she mothered some neighborhood children, she often bickered with others who wandered into her yard. She had a particular animosity for the six Dougherty children who lived across the street. She hated their Great Dane, Rebel, and threatened to shoot him if he came into her yard. She toted a BB rifle when she went to the streetside mailbox, claiming she needed it for protection from the dog. One day she shot Rebel at close range, sending him home yelping with a tiny hole in his haunch. After one of the Dougherty children confronted her about it, Delores called the child’s church school and reported her for impudence.

Carolyn Kraft, who lived next door to Delores, was friendly with her at first. Delores called her “good buddy” and frequently popped in or telephoned. But Carolyn found her strange and her problems with the neighbors self-created and unnecessary.

“Everything irritated her,” she recalled years later from her retirement home in Florida. “The world is full of people like that. They look for problems. One day I told her, ‘Delores, you should live on an island. You should live where no other people are around, because other people aren’t always going to do what you want.’ She said, ‘I would if I could find one.’”

By 1969, after a dispute with the Krafts about drainage from their swimming pool, during which Delores hid in bushes and snapped pictures of her neighbors, she had found her refuge—four and a half acres on Covered Bridge Road, about five miles from Hunting Creek. There, far back from the road, she started building the dream house in which she vowed to live out her days. The land wasn’t exactly an island, but it was isolated, set among the trees on the hillside, and the nearest neighbors, the Cables, were out of sight.

When Delores finally moved into her new house, her neighbors at Hunting Creek breathed a collective sigh of relief and remarked how happy they were that she and her strident paranoia were gone. Delores was just as happy to leave. The people at Hunting Creek, she told her friend Marjorie Chinnock—her only friend in Louisville at the time—were just a bunch of snobs.

Delores had no sense for decorating, and her new house was an incongruous mingling of elegance and gaudiness—expensive Persian carpets were offset by sturdy and plebian furniture that sometimes had been picked up at auction sales or on other bargain hunts; sterling silver serving sets clashed with art from cheap department stores. Delores admired the beautiful and tastefully decorated white-columned brick home of her neighbors, Howard and Katy Cable, and often remarked to Katy how much she wished her own house could look the same. Later she sometimes brought friends to see the Cables’ house.

Whatever talent Delores lacked in decorating was more than made up for by her obsession for cleanliness and order. She spent hours every day cleaning, dusting, polishing, spraying with deodorants and disinfectants. The house was immaculate, and Delores’s determination to keep it so often made visitors uncomfortable. She kept shoe racks by entrances and expected guests to deposit their footwear so they would not scuff her highly polished hardwood floors. Overnight guests would laughingly tell, with only slight exaggeration, of drying every drop of water from the shower stall after bathing, searching bed linens for lost hairs, and scouring lavatories for stray drops of toothpaste so they wouldn’t risk upsetting Delores.

She kept her yard as immaculate as her house, and during warm weather, neighbors frequently saw her wearing bib overalls and riding her big red lawn mower. Fallen tree limbs barely hit the ground before they were burning in a big barrel. Leaves were raked several times each fall. Every dropping left by her tiny dogs in the fenced backyard was picked up in tissue paper and disposed of properly.

After settling in her new house, Delores began building a new life for herself. Her children were again nearby. Janie had received a degree in education from Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois, and moved to Kentucky, where she first taught in Scott County schools, then in Fayette County schools, before enrolling as a graduate student in special education at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, only seventy-five miles away. Tom had been graduated from Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and newly married, had enrolled at the University of Kentucky School of Dentistry. Delores kept close contact with both.

By 1975, however, Janie had moved away to California, and Tom had finished dental school, joined the navy, and was beginning his practice repairing the teeth of Marine Corps recruits at Parris Island, South Carolina. Delores began looking for new interests—and a new church.

After leaving Grace Episcopal Church in 1969, Delores joined St. James Episcopal Church in the picturesque village of Pewee Valley, only about ten miles east of her home. St. James was a beautiful church, built of granite, set on a broad lawn shaded with spreading maples and festooned each spring with dogwood and azalea blossoms. Delores loved the priest there, Father R. C. Board, a traditionalist, and became very active in the church, even serving as a member of the vestry. She disdained the new priest who came after Father Board retired in 1975, led a faction of the congregation that sought to oust him, and eventually left the church in anger because of the bitterness that ensued. For several years, she had no church and often traveled many miles to attend services where Father Board was filling in for absent priests. After trying several churches, she finally returned to Grace.

Delores began spending a lot of time in Pewee Valley when she joined the church there. The town, once a thriving grape-growing area and early resort for wealthy people from Louisville, was the place where Annie Fellows Johnston, a local resident, wrote early in the century a series of popular books about a little girl who befriended an old plantation colonel. In 1934,
The Little Colonel
stories were made into a movie starring Shirley Temple, providing the later inspiration for an amateur theater group in Pewee Valley.

The Little Colonel Players, one of Kentucky’s oldest community theater groups, presented four plays each year, plus a special summer production featuring only high school and college students. The group had converted an old grocery store next to the town hall into the Little Colonel Playhouse, with a tiny stage and seating for ninety on folding metal chairs.