Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Vol. 29, No. 4, September 1971

“Take her and good riddance. That damned brat tried to poison me one day. She put roach powder in my soup!”

Barbara denied it. She did tell Joe Wood that Mrs. Kennedy made her wash the dishes, sweep the floors, mop them, and do other chores on the promise that if she did them well she would allow her to go out and play.

“She never let me out of the house,” Barbara told Wood. “When I finished doing what she wanted she told me it wasn’t done good and to do it over, and then because I had to do it over she said I had to be punished and so couldn’t go out and play. She beat me too.”

“I ought to kill her,” Joe Wood said.

“That’s right, Daddy. You ought to kill her.”

It was the first time that Barbara had ever heard the word “kill” in reference to a human being, and it may also have been true that she did put roach powder into Mrs. Kennedy’s soup. If that is so then she indicated at that tender age that she had in her makeup a leaning toward planned violence.

Joe Wood took Barbara home, and home was a shack. Hortense, a half-brother and half-sister by Joe Wood lived there with their crippled grandfather, a kindly old gentleman who never understood his daughter and feared her temper. It was during the depression and there was little food in the house. The children were always hungry and cried a great deal. Hortense yelled and swore at them and nothing grandpa could say or do would shut her up. When Barbara was seven, Joe Wood died suddenly. Things really got worse then.

Hortense, still young and attractive, went out every night with different men. She forced Barbara to clean the shack, do all the chores she did while she was living with Mrs. Kennedy. One day she ran away, was found on a street and returned home. She ran away again, and again was brought back home.

Hortense yanked her out of the shack and took her to an orphanage, St. Mary’s of the Palms in San Jose. The sisters were kind and treated her with a great deal of sympathy and understanding. The few months she spent in the orphanage were the only happy memories she had of her childhood.

For some unexplained reason, Hortense took her out of the orphanage and placed Barbara in the Home of the Good Shepherd, a school for incorrigible girls. Barbara stayed there until she was caught sneaking over the wall that kept the girls fenced in. She had wanted to pinch some oranges in a nearby grove.

Instead of reprimanding her in a way a child should have been, they kicked her out of the home, a home that was supposed to straighten kids out who ran away from home.

Back in the shack with grandpa she found a measure of happiness in his kindness and in her school work. Like another young woman whose life ended in violence, Bonnie Parker, Barbara had a leaning for poetry and English literature. She read Oscar Wilde, Walt Whitman, Robert Bums, Shakespeare, and Robert Bridges. She was fourteen and like most girls that age began to take an interest in boys. She was well developed and mature for her age.

Hortense’s mother instinct or a sudden desire to inflict her brand of discipline came to the fore and she refused to allow Barbara to date during all the time she was in high school. No dances, football games, or any other activity.

Fed up with Hortense’s strict discipline, Barbara ran away. She went to San Francisco, where she met a man in his mid-thirties in a bar where she was trying to get a job as a waitress. He made a big pitch for her until he found out she was jail bait.

“Come on,” he said, “I’ll take you home to mother.”

Barbara was certain there was no mother and that she would wind up having her first sex experience. She was broke and hungry and decided that if this was the way it had to be then there was no use fighting it.

To her surprise, there was a mother. The man was an ex-con with a heart. They were good to her, mother and son. But it didn’t last long. Hortense tracked her down with the help of the juvenile authorities. However, she rebelled. She stayed home but she also sneaked out regularly for dates with boys.

The boys made the usual advances and for a while she resisted going all the way. One boy, however, far more mature than the others, a senior in high school with money to spend, bought her gifts because he realized she came from a very poor family and had little or nothing of the things young girls desire and value. He bought her stockings, handkerchiefs, gloves, bits of costume jewelry, and all the time he treated her with the greatest respect, made no advances.

The psychology worked for him. On this night, parked in his car on a hill overlooking the city, he took her in his arms and kissed her tenderly, stroked her hair and told her how lovely she was. His tenderness and carresses thrilled her. Here was someone who liked her, loved her even, wanted her. She gave no resistance to anything he did, and he had his way with her.