Chapter 13

Instead of returning to Los Angeles for the start of the second term, Vangie and Ed asked Bobbie to join them in Chicago before going back to school. First, they wanted her to meet her brother and sister — the Chicago Bears were, as usual, still in the playoff hunt so Ken couldn't get out to Maui — and second, to take care of a couple of details involving her adoption.

The nonstop flight from Honolulu to Chicago was a delight for Bobbie, as well. It was the first time in her life she had ever flown first class for such a distance. On the flight out to Maui with Kris — her first ever in first class — she had been so excited getting acquainted with her new sister, she had been oblivious to the flight itself.

This time she savored the food, the attention, and the overall level of comfort and service. The best feature, though, was after the luxurious meal service, when the cabin was darkened for the movie and she prepared to sleep, her new father ordered her to sleep with him.

After reclining his seat so that it was almost horizontal, Bobbie stretched out on top of him and then Vangie covered them both with a blanket. To her delight, the first thing her father did was to strip off her top. She fell asleep in his arms feeling his hands roam gently all over her upper body. As she drifted off to sleep she could never remember feeling so warm and snugly and loved as she did just then.

At O'Hare, the family was picked up by the Bradley's chauffeur with their dark green Rolls-Royce limousine. Once seated and with the car moving so smoothly and quietly, her father opened a briefcase and said, "Darling, here are a few clippings you might be interested in. Why don't you take a couple of minutes and read them."

She looked at the first clipping which included a large picture and a number of smaller ones. The large one looked odd: it showed a number of young people, all with completely shaved heads and in handcuffs, being loaded into a sheriff's van. When she looked at the smaller ones, she almost fainted: the pictures were her classmates who she now believed were responsible for her rape!

Then she read the accompanying story which told how the seven — four men and three women — had surrendered on rape charges. There were fourteen specific events charged but Bobbie's was not listed. At the end of the story there was an unexplained comment that one of the girls and all of the men had mutilated themselves. When she looked up at Ed and asked about it, it became immediately apparent that he knew far more about it than was in the story.

Pointing to a picture of one of the girls he said, "This is the one who took your virginity. Since she did it with the middle finger of her right hand, she wanted to cut it off at the second joint and did. The boys for some reason were quite insistent on amputating the ends of their penises. I gather that, when they recover, a full erection will only be an inch or two long."

"What happened, Dad?" Bobbie asked with her eyes boring into his. "Why is it I sense the hand of Edgar Warren Bradley in all of this? What did you do? Or more accurately, since you've been with me on Maui while all of this has been going on, what have your people been doing? How did they get these people to mutilate themselves?"

"The girl was told that her choice was to cut off the end of her finger or lose her whole hand. There is a strange little machine — sort of like an electric guillotine — that she used. She put her finger in the hole, pressed a button with her left hand, and then put the stump in a pot of boiling pitch to cauterize it. The boys used the same machine to cut off the ends of their penises. Of course, first they had to insert plastic straws up them. When the ends were cut off, the plastic straws were sealed closed and then they cauterized the stumps, as well. When they heal, they will remove the straw and have penises that will be usable for urination, anyway."

"What was their choice?" Bobbie asked with her eyes wide with horror.

"Having their penises and scrotums amputated. Of course they would have been provided with nice slits to use for urination ... Very much like yours and your mother's, in fact."

Then with his eyes as hard as diamonds he said, "Pumpkin, don't even think about it for an instant! The paper lists fourteen counts. We know of over thirty ... besides yours! It seems that they decided you were a lot of fun, so they've been doing it ever since, with increasing frequency. They are sadists and savages!"

"What is going to happen now?" Bobbie asked quietly.

"They will be serving at least twenty years apiece in the state prison. The guys will be going down to Joliet; I don't know offhand where the girls go. Right now there are huge dildos stuck up their rectums. The women are wearing wide leather collars — you might have noticed them in the picture. There is a ring on them where their leashes will be clipped. These women will spend the next years as puppy dogs on their hands and knees, and kept leashed. It is also why they are totally hairless.

"They will be the playthings of some pretty tough bull dikes who really run the women's prison. Similarly, the guys will be entertaining the toughest cons in Joliet for many years."

"But ... but what about the trial?" she asked. Bobbie was now pale in spite of her tropical tan.

"They will all plead guilty and ask — beg, in fact — for the maximum sentences. You see, they have been told that if they set foot out of jail or prison except while in custody, at any time for any reason in less than twenty years, they will be immediately dead! I guess they believe it now, although they didn't at first.

"It was necessary to go backwards, day by day and hour by hour with each of them. When they realized that everything they had said and done — including the most recent rape — was on video tape, they decided that the safest place they could be would be in prison. For that reason they will not ask for bail nor post it if it should be offered."

Turning to her he said, "Dearest Bobbie, I want you to know that Ken Carlson, Mike Morris, and Bill Cartwright all know what happened. Although they still feel a little cheated — they really did want to take care of it themselves — they believe that some semblance of justice is being done. Do you understand? They really feel as strongly about this as they told you they did."

Then after taking her hand and gently kissing it, he said, "Honey, that's one thing out of the way. This evening we're going to meet Cathy and Ken with their kids and have dinner. Tomorrow we'll take care of the rest of it."

Bobbie was overwhelmed by the reception she received from Ken, Cathy and their children. After nearly passing out with the power of the kisses she received from her new brother and sister, they stepped aside. Then the cutest little four-year old boy came forward to greet her.

He was like a smaller Ken Clifford but with gray eyes and brown hair. Diffidently, he extended his little hand and said, "Good evening, Aunt Barbara. I am your nephew, Kenneth, junior."

Bobbie took his hand, shook it gravely, then swept the little boy up in her arms and just hugged him tightly. Then she howled with laughter when the little boy looked over his shoulder towards his mother and said, "Mommy, Aunt Barbara is messing up my clothes and I know how hard you worked to make me look handsome. You won't be mad at me, will you?"

"My darling son," Cathy replied with the warmest smile Bobbie had ever seen, "I dressed you up so she would see how handsome you are. Since she's now seen you all dressed up and looking so handsome, now I wouldn't care if she ripped all the clothes off you to see you the way you would rather be, anyway: naked!"

Then the most beautiful little girl about two years old toddled over. "My name is Krista Bradley, Aunt Barbara," the little girl said. "Would you give me a kiss, too?"

The evening with her new brother and sister was utterly marvelous. Only when they were getting ready to go to bed did Bobbie learn that Cathy was in the ninth month of her third pregnancy. Since it did not show at all, Bobbie said, "Golly, sis, it must be awful being pregnant and looking like a walking house. How do you do it?"

Cathy just grinned and stuck out the tip of her tongue.

The next day was Saturday and the limousine came around at ten. Vangie and Ed had not mentioned where they were to go and Bobbie had not asked. As it moved from one expressway to another, she realized finally they were on the Tollway headed north. It was the road to, among other places, Deerfield. The driver got off at one of the Deerfield exits and proceeded directly to Barbara's old neighborhood, finally stopping in front of her former home.

Ed looked at her with love in his eyes and said, "Bobbie, I know this is going to hurt, but I really think it is something that should be done." Bobbie was so choked up she couldn't even speak. She just nodded once quickly and he opened the door.

After Vangie rang the doorbell and they waited for a few moments, the door was opened by Bobbie's mother, Amy Dawson. In a fleeting glance Bobbie saw that Ed Bradley's eyes were as cold as ice. When her mother realized who was there, she screamed for her husband, Charles, who came running.

Realizing it was the daughter they had disowned, his reaction was to try to slam the door in their faces but Ed had already placed his foot in the jam and said, "Mr. Dawson, that wouldn't be the smartest thing you have ever done. My name is Edgar Bradley. This is my wife, Vangie, and our new daughter, Barbara. We have come to take care of a few matters."

With ill grace, Charles Dawson invited them into the living room. Once seated, Ed explained that they were adopting Barbara as their daughter. Since she had been disowned by them two years earlier and was now a legal adult, it really only took her consent, but to keep everything neat and tidy it would be a little neater if they signed off, too.

The two elder Dawsons quickly scrawled their names on the appropriate lines of a legal form Ed produced. Then he gave them a check which was for the total amount of money they had sent Barbara and USC for her college education. It amounted, with interest added, to nearly $40,000.

With the business matters out of the way Ed Bradley just shook his head and said, "Mr. and Mrs. Dawson, I do not understand you. I cannot understand you! You gave birth to the finest, sweetest, most loving girl God has ever put on this earth ... Yet you threw her out of the house! Why?"

"We would not have a slut living under our roof!" Dawson exclaimed self-righteously. "She is a slut!"

Vangie reached out to hold Ed's arm and calm him down. She could tell that he was about to explode. With an effort of will he relaxed and then took a deep breath. "Mr. Dawson, your daughter was drugged and raped! Not once, but repeatedly. Do you recognize these people?" he asked, passing over the clipping Bobbie had seen the day before.

Dawson looked at it casually and then his eyes widened in recognition. "My Lord!" he exclaimed. "These are the girls who told us what Bobbie had been doing."

"And those are the girls who did it to her!" Ed exclaimed. Indicating the girl who had lost part of her finger he said, "This is the girl who took Bobbie's virginity ... with her fingernail! She jammed her finger up Bobbie's vagina while she was drugged and used her fingernail to break her hymen."

Then he shook his head and asked, "But why, in Heaven's name, did you believe them? Do you know anything about your daughter?" he almost screamed.

"Do you know that she was the valedictorian of her class? You may not because you were not at her graduation. You didn't hear the speech she gave that day which was widely reprinted. Why was it reprinted? Because almost the whole audience was moved to tears, is why. What was her topic? How the graduates owe everything to their parents! That was a day when she could scarcely sit down. Why? Because you had beaten her so badly — after she had just been raped for the third or fourth time!"

He shook his head and said, "Bobbie has some wonderful friends now, I'm happy to say. One of them has some remarkable powers. She can probe a person's brain and learn things that the person consciously has suppressed. For example, she learned that the day Bobbie was first raped and left unconscious on the porch, you beat her so severely she was left bleeding and unconscious on the living room floor!

"Was that all? Oh, no! You had told her how bad a beating you were going to give her. As soon as she could get up, she came to you and asked for the rest of her punishment. And yet this girl gave the most moving speech about love for parents anyone at that graduation had ever heard.

"Why didn't you know she was incapable of doing what those girls said? Do you know how highly she is regarded by every single person who knows her? Do you know that the pastor of your church considers her to be a living saint? Do you know that for six years — going back to when she was a Girl Scout — she spent all her free time at an old people's home?" Again Vangie reached over and put her hand lightly on Ed's arm. He could feel her hand and at the same time feel a calming sensation flow through him.