The Unborn

Chater 24

“So that’s the juice eh?” Mike asked, nodding his head towards the file beneath her hands.

“Boy, you don’t mess around with pleasantries do you?”

“Pleasantries are for pleasant people Paula, and I am not one of them.” He sat back deeper in his chair and allowed the waitress to place his coffee on the table. He looked up at her and asked, “How’s the feed going? Will it be much longer or are ya still chasin’ the pig around the kitchen?”

The waitress eyed him, her sense of hu-mour almost as free as Mike’s. “I’m sure it won’t be too much longer, Sir. I believe they were still harvesting the wheat to make your toast.” With that, she spun on her heel and marched away.

“She got you there, Mikey…” Paula broke into another fit of laughter.

Mike smiled to himself and picked up his coffee. “So what did ya find for me?” He ignored Paula’s comment. “Anything worth writing home about or just a few nit-picky, tid-bits?”

“You got a real work of art here, my friend. I don’t know what this woman has done to make you check her out but I am guessing she wouldn’t want too many people knowing about this stuff.” She flipped open the file and pulled the first sheet of paper out and handed it to Mike.

He snatched it anxiously and scanned it line by line.

“She’s had a pretty rough trot growing up, by the look of this.”

Paula enlightened him. “Her mother, Carol Mavis Stockton (Nee Beetson) left her and her father when she was just three. I guess most kids could learn to cope with that, but not when your father is an abusive alcoholic.”

“Abusive?” Mike asked. “How so?”

“Physically and sexually. I’d be only guessing here, but I’d say there was some psychological abuse in there too. Usually is in those sort of circumstances. Started around age seven, from what I can gather.”

“How do you know that?”

“Her emergency room reports. Every time she went to the hospital for treatment, the Doctor’s were meant to phone welfare. Normal procedure when they think a child has been abused. But somehow, they always managed to forget to make the call.”

Mike remained silent. His face sullen.

“At least three times she was admitted with vaginal bleeding and in 1967 she had a broken arm. That’s only the beginning, she was also seen over the years for numerous cracked ribs, a dislocated jaw and other general bruising and abrasions, countless urine infections and in 1973 she was admitted again with severe abdominal pain and internal bleeding. It turned out she had an ectopic pregnancy and had to undergo surgery.”

“Jesus!” whispered Mike. His heart sank. Ben had told him about her abusive childhood and ectopic pregnancy, but he never imagined the hell she must have gone through at the hands of her drunken father. All those fractures and cases of vaginal bleeding, he couldn’t believe that she was being abused and the hospital did nothing to report it. This was definitely a case of another one slipping through the cracks. Although Mike was no doctor, he knew that when a seven-year-old child has broken bones and vaginal bleeding, the cause can’t be natural.

“Where did her mother go?” He finally asked.

“Seems she couldn’t handle the father or his abuse so she left the daughter with him and skipped out to her parents place in Harten. Apparently she was emotionally and mentally unstable.”

“You’d have to be, to leave a kid with a menace like that, wouldn’t ya?” Mike replied in more of a statement than a question.

“Well the father, Arthur, was a labourer and was prone to violent tempers and outbursts. I suppose Carol just couldn’t take it anymore.”