Lost Daughters Read Free Page B

was right to tell her, he found an excuse not to.
    Some days and nights the facts of the case were all he could think about. Maureen’s biological mother, Othella Mae Johnson, was dead. She had been Mama Ruby’s last victim. She had experienced Mama Ruby’s wrath when she’d tracked her down and attempted to reclaim Maureen when Maureen was twenty-five. Othella had a lot of relatives back in Louisiana, though. Virgil admitted to himself that it was not fair to Maureen to keep her cut off from that family.
    However, he knew how important it had been to Mama Ruby for Maureen not to know the truth about her background. Would he be betraying Mama Ruby if he told Maureen now—especially since she was no longer around to “chastise” him for doing so?
    â€œI don’t know what to do about this mess now,” Virgil said out loud to himself one evening while driving the two miles home to Goons from his job in Miami. He didn’t need to work. Injuries that he had sustained while a prisoner of war in Vietnam had made him eligible to collect disability payments from Uncle Sam for the rest of his life. He worked anyway because it made his life seem more balanced, and he enjoyed being the chauffer for one of Miami’s most powerful lawyers. “Besides, Maureen is happy now and I don’t want to mess up her mind,” he reasoned. “Let me shet my mouth,” he snickered, looking around. “Somebody was to see me talkin’ to myself they’ll swear I done lost my mind.” He stopped talking, but he couldn’t stop thinking about his sister.
    Maureen was happy in many ways. She had returned to her old job as a file clerk at a lobster factory in Miami, and she and Loretta lived in a nice little apartment about a mile away from Virgil. They visited each other several times a week and talked on the telephone almost every day.
    Maureen didn’t have much of a social life, even though she had resumed her relationships with her hard-partying old friends Catherine “Catty” Flatt and Emmogene “Fast Black” Harris. Every once in a while, Maureen accompanied them to the clubs and the neighborhood parties. She even went on an occasional date.
    Unfortunately, romance was still as elusive as it had always been for Maureen. She was thirty-two years old now and had never been married or even involved in a serious relationship. She was lonely, but she didn’t complain about it that often. As long as she had her daughter to keep her company, she was fairly happy.
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    Loretta had always been an attractive child, but by the time she was fourteen, she was so beautiful that people stared at her and complimented her on her looks everywhere she went. It was no wonder. She was five foot ten and had the body of a goddess, slim but curvy in all the right places. She had Maureen’s beautiful brown eyes, high cheekbones, full lips, and long thick black hair. She had long legs and fair skin that she had inherited from the father whose true identity she would never know—a father whose true identity nobody else would ever know either, Maureen had decided.
    Everybody, including Mama Ruby and Virgil, had believed Maureen’s lie when she told them that she’d been seduced by an albino drug addict called Snowball. He had conveniently died of a drug overdose right after Maureen realized she was pregnant. The truth of the matter was Loretta’s father was John French, the deceased son of Mama Ruby’s Caucasian landlord. As toddlers, Maureen and John had played in the sand together and frolicked naked in the Blue Lake, near Ruby’s house. They had ridden together on John’s old mule and played marbles and hide-and-go-seek. They had romped in the blackberry patch behind Ruby’s house. That was where John had overpowered Maureen one afternoon and raped her when they were seventeen. She didn’t see or hear from him again until a few weeks later.