Edith paused, searching for the proper word. “… to accommodate his needs any longer, he came to Carol looking for … sexual gratification!
For several seconds, while Edith Mossman struggled to regain her composure, Joanna had to battle her own sense of outrage. A terrible revulsion assaulted her-a sickness that had nothing to do with current physical reality.
How could someone do that to his own child? a shaken Joanna wondered. How could he?
“Carol told me Eddie came to her bed late one night a few months after Cynthia became ill,” Edith Mossman continued at last. “With Cynthia confined to her sickbed in the room next door, he woke Carol up and forced himself on her. He told her that since Cynthia could no longer perform her wifely duties, they were now Carol’s responsibility.
He said that her mother needed Carol to take her place. He claimed that was what Cynthia wanted!”
Edith paused again while her eyes brimmed with tears. “So, of course Carol complied.
What choice did she have?”
In her years as sheriff, Joanna Brady had encountered more than her share of ugly situations. A year earlier she had struggled to come to terms with the murder of a pregnant and unwed teenager. Dora Matthews had been a sexually precocious classmate of Jenny’s, and it had been tough on Joanna to realize that children Jenny’s age were already sexually active. But the tale Edith Mossman had just related was far more appalling.
When Joanna tried to speak, the question she was asking stalled in her throat. “How old was Carol at the time?” she managed finally.
“She’d just turned ten,” Edith answered.
Months earlier, when thirteen-year-old Jennifer Ann Brady 262
had crossed the critical line of demarcation that separates girlhood from womanhood, Joanna had responded to the situation by taking her daughter out to dinner alone so they could have a private woman-to-woman discussion of the intricacies of human sexuality. To Joanna’s dismay, Jenny had wasted no time in derailing her mother’s best intentions.
“Come on, Mom,” Jenny had told her with a dismissive shrug. “I already know all that stuff. They teach us about it at school.”
Being told about the birds and the bees by your mother or by a respected teacher at school was one thing. To be routinely raped by your own father from age ten on was something else.
“How long did the incest continue?” Joanna asked.
“Until Carol was fourteen,” Edith answered. ‘As soon as she had her first period, she got pregnant. When it came time to deliver, she was too small and the baby was too big. The doctor did a cesarean, but it was too late to save the baby. He died.
Later on the doctor told Carol that her female organs had been damaged and that she’d never be able to have children.”
Joanna thought about what George Winfield had told her about his autopsy findings.
“They’d been damaged all right,” Joanna put in. “Dr. Winfield, the medical examiner, told me that he thought a complete hysterectomy was performed on Carol right along with the cesarean.”
‘A hysterectomy?” Edith Mossman gasped. “Carol never mentioned that.”
“Maybe she didn’t know,” Joanna suggested.
“They did that to her at age fourteen? That’s criminal.”
“Yes,” Joanna said quietly. “I couldn’t agree more, but go on. What happened then?”
“Carol said Eddie left her alone after that. She always 262
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thought it was because the scar made her too ugly-because the other girls were prettier than she was. I think it’s because my son is a pervert, Sheriff Brady. Fifteen was too old for him. He went right on down the line-from Carol to Andrea, and from Andrea to Stella.”
‘And Kelly?”
“I suppose he abused her, too. I don’t know for sure because I’ve never talked to her about it.”
‘And she’s still there,” Joanna said. “In Mexico.”
Edith nodded. “I believe Eddie married her off to one of his middle-aged Brethren buddies. She couldn’t have been more than twelve or thirteen at the time.”
“I know you told me the other day, but I don’t remember. How old was Carol when she finally ran away?”
“Twenty.”
“Do you have any idea why?”
“You mean, after ten years of living in hell, what finally provoked her to leave?”
Joanna nodded. “Something like that.”
“She heard her father making arrangements to marry her off. To someone up in northern Arizona.”
“In one of the bigamist communities on the Arizona Strip?”
It was Edith Mossman’s turn to nod. “Somewhere up there,” she agreed. “I don’t know exactly, but that’s the
