Valencia Street

This is a true story.  

We had literally just stepped in the doorway from our week-long vacation at Panama City, and I was already bored. My life was that of a typical teenager, where nothing riveting or sensational ever happened.  After I put down my bags, my mom asked me to go pick up the mail from our next-door neighbor, Edie. She is a nice enough old lady, I thought, though I honestly did not know too much about her other than she was married (though her husband was rarely seen) and their adult son Abel, lived with them, who was severely mentally challenged. Come to think of it, I didn’t even know her husband’s first name.  

I delicately knocked on the door of the house that was diagonally across from my backyard. For some unknown reason, I felt nervous, and had the briefest desire to turn around and go home to ask my mother to come get the mail. The lady was my mom’s friend after all. I just as quickly chastised myself for my inexplicable case of nerves, and waited for the door to be answered. It was answered seconds later by Edie’s forty-four-year-old son Abel, who though old enough to be my father, had the mental capacity of a five-year old child. He answered the door with a lop-sided smile, and moved aside so I could enter. That feeling returned, the feeling that I wanted to turn around and run, but couldn’t explain why. The old lady (her name is Edie) was sitting calmly at the kitchen table, with what appeared to be a plate of peanut butter cookies in front of her, wrapped in Saran Wrap, awaiting, I was quite sure, my mother’s sweet tooth. Edie was always bringing over treats for my mother, Paulagene, who weighed ninety pounds dripping wet, but had a raging sugar addiction. To break the tension that she I could feel swirling around me, a kind of nerve-induced gloom, I remembered my manners, and greeted Edie with a hardy “Good Afternoon, Mrs. Whitiker, my mother wanted to say thank you for holding our mail and watching over the house while we were gone.”  

The older woman just looked at me for a beat, her expression still the same, one of sadness and resolution, like she had decided her life was miserable and would remain so for the rest of the time she spent on this earth. Frankly, I couldn’t see the appeal for the two women to be friends. Paulagene, my mother, was a dervish of energy and life, always running from one activity to the next, leaving a ray of sunshine in her wake.  

I stood awkwardly in front of the silent woman. What felt like a full minute later, Edie turned to pick up a small pile of mail and the plate of cookies and handed them both to me. “These are for your mother,” she said simply. “Thank you,” Taylor politely responded. Her mother had taught her nothing if not exquisite manners. “My mother will be delighted,” she said truthfully. Only a bulldozer could keep Paulagene Marsh away from a plate of homemade cookies. “Well, thank you again,” I stammered, feeling the now gaze of Edie and Abel, who had come to sit next to his mother, smiling expectantly at both of them. “I better get home.”  She slowly backstepped, and turned toward the front door, only a few feet away but for some reason I felt like I was walking The Green Mile. I turned at the door and gave a hasty half-wave, and tried not to sprint out the door to what felt like the sanctuary of my yard. I had just made it through the back door when the phone rang, seeming to almost vibrating the device right off the wall, like the phone itself understood the caller’s urgency. My mother hurried to grab it, and when she heard who it was, responded with a happy hello. Her facial expression changed within seconds. She grew immediately somber and stoic. Before my brain could register any alarm, I had ended the call, replacing the receiver with a determination that was climatic. Before I could ask what was wrong, my mother turned to me and said in a distinctly calm and rational voice, “Edie just called. She chopped up her husband and buried him in the backyard while we were gone. She’s coming over and I’m calling the police for her.”  

I was absolutely sure she had heard her mother incorrectly. The only sign that this was really happening was partially due to the look on her mother’s face, which was solemn and pinched, not a look Paulagene was ever seen wearing. “What...” I was able to sputter out, before the back door opened, and Edie and Abel walked in like it was any typical Sunday. I watched in frozen suspension as the two casually walked toward my living room and took a seat on the couch. Paulagene hovered anxiously in the entryway that separated the living room from the kitchen, I assumed, to be near the phone if it rang. Within a minute or two she was back to her usual self, playing hostess and asking if anyone needed a drink. I shot my mother what I hoped was a withering look, after all, we were waiting for the police and Edie had just confessed to Paulagene that she had killed her husband. Not just killed him, as in could have been mistaken for an accident, but managed to chop him up into pieces and then processed to bury him in the backyard. Therefore, I thought that the famous Mrs. Post would forgive them if her mother didn’t offer her “guests” drinks. 

The police arrived and the somber atmosphere became grave. My father and I stood in the corner of the room, trying to stay out of the way but both leery of leaving my mother alone in the room with Edie and Abel even though the police were present. That’s when things went to a whole new-level of weird.  

Fully expecting Edie to give a full confession, my family was aghast when Edie proceeded to blame the whole tragedy on her poor son Abel. The man, who was politely if vacantly smiling at his mother and holding her hand through the whole conversation, obviously had no idea what was being discussed concerning him.  My mother and I were equally appalled, our faces dropping in shock. My father, a little late to the party as far as details were concerned, shared an equal look of uncertain confusion. Edie was lying. To the police. About her disabled son. I kept thinking I would wake up soon, to discover this had all been a nightmare brought on by too many Doritos and ice cream the night before. But unfortunately, this was really happening, and my family was smack-dab in the middle of it.  

The police began to question Abel, and quickly realized that that was a dead end. There was simply no way Abel could have been capable of showing the hatred and brutality that had such a death would have required. This was 1990, and there were no such things as cell phones. Therefore, when my friend Chad told me the following week that he had seen blood stains in the garage when he went to mow the Morinos’ lawn, and had simply dismissed it as paint, the foreshadowing of the heinous phone call wasn’t allowed any forethought.  

The police rapidly dropped their line of questioning for Abel, and though Edie had already implicated him in the murder, they shifted their attention back to her. She immediately rose on the defensive, in fact, if we had been in town at the time of the murder, I wouldn’t have been surprised if Edie would have laid the blame at my mother’s feet for that matter. Edie had worked herself into a corner and she knew it. There was only one way to escape this debacle, and that was to plead insanity. After the room had heard the grisly details of the murder, it would be even harder to swallow such a plea.  

Two days before, Edie had opened the garage door where, unbeknownst to the entire neighborhood, she had forced her husband (his name was Franklin) to reside. Being in what the my family learned was in actuality a common-law marriage, Edie couldn’t technically divorce her husband, and she had been trying to send him to live with other family members several times, even going so far as to buy him a bus ticket from central Florida where we lived, to Nevada. Franklin had always returned, determined to work out the issues of the relationship, much to Edie’s dismay. She told the police she had simply had enough of him, and did not know how to get rid of him. Then, the day of the murder, she had walked into the garage and seen him masturbating. She had flown into such a rage that she had picked up the nearby hatchet (ok, in a suburban neighborhood in central Florida who needs a handy hatchet in their garage, I thought) and proceeded to chop up Franklin into pieces. Then she made the decision to bury him in the backyard, which to me revealed that she was apparently in her right mind enough to contemplate and administer the burial of the body.  

The police wrapped up their questioning, and proceeded to read Edie her rights and take her into custody, all from my living room couch. This was mind-blowing. I was pretty sure my parents were never going to take a vacation again.  

Within two weeks of the catastrophe, Edie was back home as if nothing had happened. Apparently, she had hired a famous attorney, the one who did the Burning Bed case in 1984 and received a release under the clause of temporary insanity. The neighborhood went into an uproar. This was, or had been, a very quiet suburb of upper middle-class families, with a church directly across the street from the our home and no previous activity of a criminal nature at all.  Not surprisingly, we moved further into town within a month of Edie’s return. Her son was sent to a state home to be cared for, and as far as I know, Edie stayed in her home until she passed away, several years later. Sometimes the truth really is stranger than fiction, but I was only sixteen, and I realized that day that the world was weirder than any story I could ever conceive.