Vengeance Road

“Bernice had a hard life,” one friend told him.

Bernice never knew her real parents. She’d been told she had some Native American blood, maybe Seneca, and had been raised, for a time, on a reservation. Maybe Allegany, or Cattaraugus. She wasn’t sure. Bernice had never been sure about much in her short life, her friends told him.

Some sent him photos.

She stood stiff and shy in obvious embarrassment; a heavyset girl with low self-esteem who’d been abused by her foster father, who also beat her foster mother.

At first she’d overcome it all. Bernice did well in school, going on to study nursing at Buffalo State, nearly graduating before she was drugged and raped at a party.

“After that happened she was so brokenhearted. It was like she just gave up. She began missing classes,” one friend said.

Bernice had grown addicted to crack. Few people knew that she’d slipped into prostitution as she descended down a path that ended in a makeshift grave under a thicket of twisted maple near Ellicott Creek.

Gannon wanted to talk to Bernice’s family, but no one knew who her foster mom was, or where she lived. So he made a lot of calls over the next few days until he got a lead.

“You didn’t get this from me, but her name is Catherine Field,” a source at the city’s Social Services and Housing Department told him.

Catherine Field was a widowed fifty-nine-year-old diabetic who lived alone on welfare in an older section of the city west of Main. Gannon had gone to the address several times but in vain.

No one was home.

But he refused to give up trying to find her.

Maybe today would be different, he thought as once again he rolled by the home where Catherine had raised Bernice. It was a small two-story frame house built with the optimism that had blossomed when the Second World War ended. Now, with its blistering paint, missing shingles and sagging front porch, it looked more like a tomb for hope.

It sat among the boarded-up houses near a vacant lot where several old men leaned against an eviscerated Pinto and passed around a bottle wrapped in a paper bag.

Memories of his sister rushed at him before he turned his attention back to the story and the house, eyeing it intensely as he drove by. His hopes lifted when he saw a woman in the backyard.

This time he parked out of sight down the block and approached the house from a different street, coming to the back first, where he saw a woman in her fifties, tending a flower garden near the rickety back porch.

“Catherine Field?”

She turned to him, the toll of a hard life evident in the lines that had woven despair on her face. Her red-rimmed eyes stared helplessly at him.

“You are Catherine Field, Bernice Hogan’s foster mom?”

“Who are you?”

“Sorry,” Gannon fished for his photo ID. “Jack Gannon, a reporter for the Buffalo Sentinel.”

As if cued, breezes curled pages of the News and the Sentinel that were on a small table between two chairs. Also on the table: a glass and a bottle of whiskey that was half-empty.

“I’ve been trying to reach you,” he said.

“I was burying my daughter.”

“I’m sorry. My condolences. There was no notice of the arrangements.”

“We wanted to keep it private. My brother had a plot, a small cemetery on a hill overlooking an apple orchard.”

“Where is it?”

“I don’t want to say.”

“I understand. May I talk to you about Bernice?”

“You can try, I’m not in good shape.”

She invited him to sit on the porch. Gannon declined a drink. Catherine poured one for herself, looked at her small garden and spoke softly. She told him that Bernice’s mother was a child, fourteen years old, when she gave her up for adoption.

But Bernice was never adopted. Instead, she was bounced through the system. Catherine and her husband, Raife, a carpenter, became Bernice’s foster parents when Bernice was eleven. By then Bernice was aware that she’d been given up for adoption.

“I loved her and always felt like her mom, but she chose to call me Catherine, never Mom. I think it was her way of emotionally protecting herself because she’d had so many ‘moms.’ No one could ever really be her mother.”

Not long after they got Bernice, Raife started gambling, and drinking. He became violent and abused Bernice and Catherine before she left him.

“I’ll spend my life regretting that I didn’t do more to protect her.”

Catherine considered her glass then sipped from it.

“She was such a bright girl. Always reading. I was so pleased when she left home to get her own apartment and start college. So proud. She was on her way. She volunteered at a hospice in Niagara Falls. I just knew she was going to make it. Then the bad thing happened.”

“Her friends told me about the party.”

“They think someone slipped something in her drink. She never overcame it. She turned to drugs to deal with it. She wouldn’t talk to me or anyone, but I heard that when she ran up drug debts, she turned to the street.”

Tears rolled down Catherine’s face.

“When was the last time you saw, or talked, to her?”

Catherine wiped her tears and sipped from her glass.

“She called me about a month ago and said she was going to try to get clean, try to get off the street. Some friends were trying to help her.”

“Did she say who those friends were?”

Catherine shook her head.

“You can’t print anything I’ve just told you.”

“But I’m researching your daughter’s death for a news story. I have to.”

“No. You can’t print anything.”

“Catherine, I identified myself as a reporter. I’ve been taking notes. This tragedy is already public. Now, did Bernice say anything about anyone possibly harming her?”

“I’m not supposed to say anything. They told me not to talk to the press.”