I reached her by phone. When I explained who I was and why I was calling, she hung up without comment. I did no better on my second try, but that only spurred me on. Owensboro-Daviess Regional Airport was closed for the duration, so I grabbed a Delta to Nashville and drove a rental three hours and 134 miles to Owensboro. A light rain plagued me for most of the trip and was still falling when I got to the Center and tracked Barbara Jefferson to the main auditorium, where a touring national company of The Sound of Music was rehearsing.
She was sitting by herself in the back of the house, humming along to the music while scribbling in the three-ring binder on her lap.
I waited until some fellow at the sound console removed his headphones and called a break before I settled in the seat next to her and announced myself.
She wasn’t thrilled to see me, about as pleased as Colonel Custer at the Little Big Horn, and started to rise. I cuffed her wrist with my hand, promised I only wanted five minutes of her time.
Five minutes, she said, grudgingly, and sat down.
Her voice reminded me of my old high-school history teacher, firm in a no-nonsense sort of way, but at twenty-four, she was younger than Mrs. Streeter by a couple hundred years. She was casually dressed in form-fitting jeans and a tight sweater advertising her oversized breasts, her hair piled under a University of Kentucky Wildcats ocean-blue cap that matched the color of her wide-set eyes; gorgeous enough to pass for a beauty-pageant contestant in spite of distracting worry wrinkles and creases that covered her face and hinted at the dark family secret she’d kept to herself all this time.
I told her almost matter-of-factly that her father needed her and what I had in mind for what I perceived as a heart-tugging father-daughter reunion played out on the public stage. She eased back like she was dodging a bumblebee circling for an attack, drew her lips tight in a show of distaste, and sounded a sour grunt.
I remember her words almost exactly:
“My father never needed me before, so why now, after all this time?” she said.
“He needed you as much then as he does now, more,” I said, without hesitation. “But then you were only a child, eight years old. Your father chose being found guilty and sent to prison over exposing his precious baby girl to questioning by a single-minded D.A. bent on using any means available to him to wring a guilty verdict out of the jury. Your father was protecting you. Can’t you see that yet, now that you’re older? He was protecting you, Ms. Jefferson.”
“You mean I was protecting him,” she said. “By not testifying, not swearing to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, there was no possibility I’d spill the beans, reveal that I saw my daddy murder my mommy.”
What?
What did she say?
What was she telling me?
She caught my incredulous look and said: “You heard me correctly, Mr. Allen. Daddy was always saying I was sound asleep when the murder happened, but I was not. Their arguing woke me up, so I slipped out of bed and tiptoed over to their bedroom. The door was open a crack and I saw what Daddy was doing to Mommy, and I—”
She stopped speaking. Her eyes had grown wide, moist, relating the ugly memory she’d carried with her since childhood, but—
Was it the truth?
I was hearing nothing I didn’t know from the research I’d rushed through after I was hustled into Dr. Edwards’s orbit by G. Jerry Jones.
Why then, when she grew older, hadn’t Barbie come forward, gone to the authorities and told them what she knew?
I put the question to her.
She sucked the air out of the room and let it stream from her mouth in small doses, then again, and a third time, all the while shaking her head hard enough to spring it loose from her neck, before telling me:
“Daddy saw me standing in the doorway. He charged over and said for me to get back to my room and stay there. I asked him what he did to Mommy. He said he didn’t do anything and that I saw nothing. He repeated that — I saw or heard nothing, because I was asleep — and said to make sure I always said that or what happened to Mommy might happen to me, and we wouldn’t want that to happen — either one of us — would we?”
I had no choice but to challenge her.
“How do you explain the blood evidence that wasn’t your father’s and supported his claim that he fought with a stranger who had broken into your home and was probably guilty of killing your mother?” I said. “It was enough for the jury in his third trial to find your father not guilty and allow him to walk out of the courthouse a free man.”
“I don’t have to explain anything, sir,” she said, using sir like it was a dirty word. “I know what I saw, and no amount of circumstantial evidence will ever change that, no matter how hard you or anyone attempt to convince me otherwise, not in a million years.”
With that, there was nothing left for me to say.
Her memory of that night, however false, was too ingrained to be ousted by the truth.
I hated the idea of returning to L.A. with the news I’d failed in my mission and my idea for a father-daughter reunion was out the window. Hopefully I’d have a different idea, maybe a better idea, by the time my plane hit ground at LAX.
I pushed myself up from my seat, thanked Barbara Jefferson for her time, and started to leave the auditorium. I’d reached the aisle when she whistled for my attention and followed with a colossal smile before breaking out the kind of laughter I always associated with kids and circus clowns.
She motioned for me to come back and sit down, saying: “I sure sold you a bill of goods, Mr. Allen. Best performance since I was Martha in Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? right up there on that stage with the Owensboro Players. Got the rave notices in my scrapbook, you ever want to see them.”
I barely kept my temper under control at having been played for a fool, asking: “What exactly is your game, Ms. Jefferson?”
She said: “No game, Mr. Allen, just testing your grit. Everything you believed about my father and me is as true as the colors of a rainbow. A day has never passed where I doubted my father was looking after what was best for me, no matter what personal cost to himself. Yes, of course I’ll do what you ask. It’s been a long time, much too long, since I saw Daddy in the flesh. Embraced him. Kissed him. Felt the warmth of his love.”
I arranged Barbara’s arrival for four days prior to her father’s appearance in front of the Board of Medical Examiners. This allowed time for substantial media coverage that would keep the story of their loving reunion fresh in the public eye and mind and, most importantly, in front of board members who would be deciding the doctor’s future.
Max was waiting for her at the arrival door inside the airport terminal, holding a dozen long-stem red roses and shifting nervously from foot to foot, his expression tight with pent-up emotion, as the door swung open and the Delta passengers streamed out, many to greetings by their own relatives and friends.
Newspaper reporters and photographers along with TV crews filled the area, poised to capture the magical moment of a long-overdue father-daughter reunion that my press releases had predicted would produce enough tears to rival Niagara Falls.
That’s how I had coached them to react, and to keep the crocodile tears flowing while I guided them arm-in-arm to the Delta VIP lounge for a brief press conference, afterward to a limo that would whisk them away to an unspecified destination for deserved moments of togetherness away from prying eyes.
The arriving passengers dwindled down to a few, then none.
I broke out in a sweat, fearing Barbara had changed her mind at the last minute and wasn’t on board. The press was growing impatient and began grumbling, growing noisier as the flight crew strode into the terminal, followed by the flight attendants. I expected the arrival door to be closed at any moment. My mind raced through the possible excuses I could offer, sickened by the thought I was contributing to the end of the doctor’s career, not its resurrection, no matter what I said.