Seven Sisters (34 page)

“No one suspected? None of the other servants? The judge?”

“Not that anyone said. To me, anyway.”

“So, what about the other babies . . .”

“She got pregnant shortly after that. I stayed till past her delivering time. When she had another set of twins, I couldn’t help but wonder what God was thinking, giving her those babies. They named them Bethany and Beulah. I struggled with what I should do, even went to the judge once, trying to tell him he needed to watch out for those babies, but I got too afraid, and my words got all jumbled.

“ ‘Eva,’ he’d finally said in that gruff voice of his. ‘I know working for Mrs. Brown’s not the easiest thing in the world. I’ll triple your pay if you’ll stay. I know you need the money, what with your son and father. I’ll see that Father Xavier at San Miguel gives him a little extra work, add to his pay. They’ll be taken good care of, Eva. Trust me on this. I value your discretion.’ ”

She fingered the torn arm of her easy chair. “That’s all he said. He valued my discretion. I had to look the word up to see what it meant. I knew then he was telling me to keep quiet. What could I do? If I lost my job with the Browns, there was no place to go. I was a good nanny, but by then it was hard times, and there was no work anywhere. With my job and Father’s tending the mission gardens, me and Father and Johnnie had it good. All I had to do was forget what I’d seen.” She sighed deeply, causing Heidi to lift her head and whine. Mrs. Knoll patted the dog’s head reassuringly.

“Things went okay for three months after the second twins were born. I’d even convinced myself that maybe I’d been seeing things. Then Beulah started having the breathing spells, and time after time Mrs. Brown would call for the doctor. I took to following after her, especially when she was around the babies. But she’d say, ‘Now, Eva, let me care for my babies. Take the girls for a walk. They’re looking a little peaked these days.’

“I’d take Cappy and Willow and little Etta for a stroll around the garden, and then, sure enough, the doctor would come driving up in his fancy car, spewing dust in his haste to get there. Finally Beulah died, and then Bethany. I was beside myself, not knowing what to do.”

“Didn’t anyone, Judge Brown, her doctor,
anyone,
suspect what was happening?” That seemed unbelievable to me, that all these babies kept dying and no one questioned it.

She shook her head slowly. “Lots of babies died back then. You go look at any graveyard and you can see that. If anyone else suspected she was killing her own babies, they never said anything. Like me, I reckon they just wouldn’t,
couldn’t
believe such a thing about anyone.”

“Did you go to Judge Brown after the others?” I asked.

“I tried, but after Bethany, the last twin, passed on, he wasn’t living at the house but one or two days a month. I think he knew something was going on. Maybe he just wanted to stay away from all that sadness. Maybe he didn’t want to make any more babies for her to kill. I don’t know. The one time I tried to say something, he stopped me and told me they wouldn’t be needing me at the big house anymore. He gave me a year’s pay and said he’d pay me a pension until I died. Got a check at the first of the month like clockwork. When my boy got sick, the bills were paid, and he paid for the funeral, too. Did the same when my father died. Then one day, after Father had been gone a while, the deed to this little house came in the mail. I moved out here around ’42 and never saw any of the Browns again.”

“And you never told anyone,” I said.

Her glassy eyes seemed to clear slightly when they stared straight into mine. “Not until now. I figure there’s no reason to hide it anymore. Those babies never got their justice, and I shoulder the burden for that. I should have told someone. I should have tried.”

OUTSIDE, DETECTIVE HUDSON leaned against his truck, staring out at the bright, level horizon.

“Thought you’d never get through,” he said, spitting a wad of gum out on the dirt. “So, what’s the story?”

“She’s ninety-seven. I’ll be glad if I can even talk at that age.” I looked back at the tiny desert house, bleached bone-white by the sun. A mental shiver rattled my brain. “Let’s get on the road. I’ll tell you on the way back.”

We were halfway to San Celina by the time I finished my story.

“That’s unbelievable,” the detective said, his expression as incredulous as I still felt.

“I know. And somehow it’s got to do with Giles’s murder. I’m assuming he found out about this and was going to let it out. I bet you anything now that
Giles
was the anonymous caller to the newspaper the night of the party. He was going to make sure this went public immediately if Cappy and the sisters didn’t cooperate.”

“And the great child-loving philanthropist, Rose Brown, would be exposed for what she really is—a baby killer.”

I stared out the window. “The question is, what do we do now?”

He was quiet for a moment, then said, “I’m going to confront Capitola. Throw down the gauntlet and see what happens.”

I twisted around to look at him. “I don’t think that’s a good idea. We don’t know enough yet to confront her. We need to run this by someone who knows the legal stuff involved. You could blow it if you jump in too fast.”

He thought for a moment. “Okay, I’ll go talk to someone at the DA’s office, then.”

“That’s still jumping the gun. I don’t trust them to keep it quiet. I’m telling you, Detective, this is a very, very prominent family in San Celina. One whiff of this scandal, and the media will be all over you, me, the Browns, and Eva. If we found her without much trouble, so will they. I don’t want . . . no, I
won’t
let that happen. It might kill her.”

Annoyed, he asked, “So what do you propose we do?”

“I know someone we can trust who’ll be able to advise us without fear of leaks. Let me just run it by my friend before you set things in motion.”

His face set hard and stubborn.

“Please,” I said, ready to beg if necessary.

He hesitated, then said, “An hour. That’s what I’ll give this person. Then it’s out of your hands, and I’m going to my superiors and the DA.”

“Deal,” I said.

15

AS BEFITTING A good attorney, Amanda’s expression didn’t change while I told her Eva Knoll’s story. For once Detective Hudson sat quietly and kept his thoughts to himself. When I finished, she waited a moment before speaking.

“I’ll be flour-breaded and deep-fried,” she finally said. “I know some research doctors back east who’d give their left nuts to hear this. There’s always been speculation it happened before the seventies when it was given a name, but most doctors always considered it a modern-day disorder. I guess there is nothing new under the sun.”

“A disorder?” I said. “What do you mean?”

“If what this Mrs. Knoll told you is true,” she said, leaning back in her executive office chair, “then it appears that Rose Brown had a syndrome called Munchausen by Proxy.”

“Don’t give me any psychological crap,” Detective Hudson burst out. “She killed those babies. That’s homicide in my book.”

Amanda’s normally mobile and smiling mouth turned grim. “I agree wholeheartedly, Detective, but it’s not quite as simple as that, at least in the law.”

He started to protest, and Amanda held up a hand. “Let me see if I can explain. I prosecuted a Munchausen by Proxy case when I was working for the DA’s office in San Francisco. Young mother regularly fed her two-year-old daughter syrup of ipecac to make her throw up whatever she ate. The child inhaled her own vomit, causing pneumonia a couple of times. She was literally starving to death, but it took doctors eight months to figure out what was causing it. Since the pneumonia qualified as great bodily harm, we eventually prosecuted the mother under torture charges, simply because we couldn’t figure out what else to call it and get a decent sentence.” She picked up a small Beanie Baby panda from the top of a pile of Beanie animals and absentmindedly stroked its back with her polished fingernails.

“How about plain old child abuse? Assault? Attempted homicide?” Detective Hudson said bitterly.

Amanda nodded, still stroking the furry toy. “It’s certainly a form of child abuse, but the problem is it doesn’t fit neatly into what we call child abuse under the law or any of those other things. Once we had all these tidy organized categories: You had physical abuse, you had molest, you had neglect. Now all of a sudden we have this insidious type of child endangerment whose physical manifestations are hard to distinguish from the behaviors of good mothers who are simply caring for very sick children. You have to understand, the mothers of these children often appear to be extremely loving and deeply concerned. It’s dangerous for doctors, nurses, or social workers to accuse someone of Munchausen by Proxy, because they might be accusing a mother who is innocent. There have been cases where a slow-growing brain tumor caused vomiting or other symptoms that only the mother observed, and it took the doctors some time to find the tumor. If those mothers had been accused of this disorder, it would have been tragic for them and their children. As a society we are hesitant to believe that a mother would harm her own child. It’s only the worst of these Munchausen cases that even make it to court. Most are so borderline that the prosecutor doesn’t have a chance convincing a jury that a mother deliberately tried to harm her sick child, that indeed she was the one making the child sick.”

She set the toy panda down and picked up a turtle. She took a pair of scissors, cut the tiny tag off the ear and threw it away. “I give these to the deputy DA in charge of the child abuse unit. Helps the kids to have something to hold when they testify. They’re the perfect size for little hands.” She put down the turtle and picked up a pale pink pig. “I cut the tags off so crazy adult collectors won’t steal them.”

“So you’re telling us that lots of mothers get away with killing their babies with this Munchausen thing?” Detective Hudson broke in.

She tossed the pig in the detagged pile and picked up a bright red lobster. “Look, child abuse cases, even ones with real evidence of physical injury, are hard for juries to watch and rule on. Like I just said, something deep inside all of us does not want to believe or face the fact that some mothers hurt their children. And when there’s not always overt evidence of harm and the mother appears loving... well, what can I say? More often than not, they get away with it. That’s if they’re ever discovered, which in most of these cases they aren’t.” Her mouth turned down with sadness as she clipped the tag off the lobster’s claw.

“But why would anyone do that to their own child?” I said.

“The question of the year,” she said, leaning forward and resting her elbows on the desk. “I’ll give you the fifty-cent lecture. It has to do with power. Not having it and wanting it. Oh, there’s lots of deeper issues, but it really comes down to that. Surprisingly, most of the mothers who do this have not come from overtly abusive homes. But they often come from homes where the father is emotionally unattached. Somewhere in the psyche of this young girl—and by the way, the majority of people who have this disorder are women—she develops what we call a ‘character perversion.’ In a nutshell, to get positive attention from her doctor, who is an authority figure substitute, she uses her baby and its imagined or manufactured illness. Their babies aren’t even people to them, but more like objects used to gain them what they want, which is attention and praise. Some researchers have even gone so far as to compare the babies to fetish objects.”

“But she killed her babies,” Detective Hudson said. “If they were what she needed for attention, why would she kill them?”

“Very good, Detective,” Amanda said, nodding. “You’re right, most deaths in Munchausen by Proxy cases are accidental. Those mothers don’t
intend
for their babies to die. But if they do, God help the next baby that comes along. They become the new fixed object.”

I felt my stomach churn. Amanda was right; it was a hard thing to comprehend. The mother/child relationship was one we all idealized, even when we knew better.

“So, you’re telling me,” Detective Hudson said, “that she managed to kill four babies and no one had a clue? And why wouldn’t she try harming the older girls?”

Amanda picked up a small moose with orange antlers, studying it critically. “He’s pretty cute. I may have to buy one for myself.” She looked back up at us. “First, it sounds like the first twin died naturally. Maybe the attention she received when the baby was sick set it off. As for why she didn’t harm her older girls, who’s to say she didn’t and they survived whatever she did? We’ll probably never know. The harm she did to them psychologically isn’t as obvious. I’m telling you, Detective, I did extensive research on this subject, and there is very little information out there. As for people suspecting, there was one case file back in the fifties where seven children in the same family died from what they diagnosed as crib death before anyone started asking why.”

Detective Hudson stood up and started pacing her small office in frustration.

“What do you think we should do?” I asked.

Amanda shook her head, bemused. “Accusing someone of this with so little proof, especially someone as prominent as Rose Brown, would only gain you a libel suit. Not to mention that it happened so long ago. I’m not clear as to why you found out this information.”

I told her how we thought it was the reason Giles was murdered, that somehow he’d found out and was blackmailing the family.

“Then you’ve got a real sticky situation on your hands,” she said. “It could be any of the family who killed him or none of them. And this could possibly have nothing to do with Giles’s murder. It’s intriguing, but I’d say it’s information that, though troubling, is best filed under the good Lord’s final judgment.”

Detective Hudson let out a scoffing grunt. “I think I should confront Cappy Brown.”

I looked to Amanda, questioning.

“That could be problematic,” she said, watching him walk back and forth, finally saying, “Sit down, Detective, darlin’. You’re makin’ me dizzy.”