The Pain of Adolescence and Sparky: Chapter Sixteen

This is a poult, a young turkey, photographed in Beacon Hill Park in Victoria earlier this summer. 

Suddenly, a little acne doesn't seem so bad.

Sparky's Funtime Summertime Murder Mystery
Chapter Sixteen 

Sparky here. This is Chapter Sixteen of my story about how Gerry Ringbold met his untimely end. The story starts here.

Carol's story about how Pea set about to discard Stuart's bastard child seemed incredible to me.

"How does anyone order the fate of another person like that?" I asked.

"Things were different back then," Carol said. "Even these days, rich people get to do pretty much what they want."

But, Pea did not entirely get her way. The two cousins did not exactly follow instructions. Instead they grew fond of the groundskeeper's daughter and conspired with her to frustrate Pea's intentions. 

When the baby - a boy - was born, they sent a message to Pea that the child had been stillborn. They then demanded their consideration anyway, as a guarantee that the story of the child would stay with them. Pea sent a small amount of money - too small thought the cousins and that planted the seeds of a simmering resentment they nurtured and elaborated over the years.

The groundskeeper's daughter and her son stayed with Pea's cousins until the son was eighteen years old and the groundskeeper's daughter thirty-four. Then, after a tearful and heart wrenching farewell, the groundskeeper's daughter took her son back with her to her childhood home. 

In his new town, the son quickly met and married a young woman. Just as quickly they had their only child, a son, the little boy who would grow up to be Gerry Ringbold. 

Bob Harrison's account of Gerry's life goes only as far back as his birth. Had Harrison tried a little harder at his job, he might have found out about Gerry's lineage, his connection to Pea's second cousins in upstate New York and about the anger that had built over the years around how Pea had thrown away Stuart's child. Harrison might also have found out that the upstate New York cousins bankrolled Gerry's legal education, their intention from the beginning being to use Gerry as their avenging angel.

As for the groundskeeper's daughter, with her son grown and her best years still ahead of her, Gerry's grandmother set about to rebuild her life. 

By now it is the mid-seventies. Without even a high school education and no social network but her family, the groundskeeper's daughter found herself back where she began, in Pea's house, asking for a job. 

Stuart had been dead for almost five years. Pea was prepared to show some magnanimity, especially because she was not aware that Stuart's child was alive, living in the same city, and raising Stuart's grandson. So she brought the groundskeeper's daughter back on staff to cook, clean and do laundry.

Settled as well as she ever might be, the groundskeeper's daughter married one of the other members of the staff. They had two children, both girls, one born in 1978 and one in 1980. The groundskeeper's daughter named her second girl Carol, after one of Pea's cousins. If Pea noticed the coincidence, she never said anything about it. 

"And that," said Carol, "is how someone born five years before me can be my grand-nephew. My mother and Gerry's grandmother were the same person."

You can read Chapter Seventeen here.