Chapter 19: The Reckoning
The next morning, the papers were filled with news of the daring FBI raid and conjecture about the "inside man" whose sabotage had made the gang and their customers so vulnerable to capture by the time the FBI arrived in force.
Sadly, the FBI wanted to confiscate the Duesenberg, but they chartered a bus to take Mary and all her fellow abductees back to River Heights, where her father promised to put them up safely in the Jones residence until they were required to testify back in Chicago. After that, they could return to their former lives, or in the cases where there was no life to return to, Mary and her father promised the FBI that they would find new and wonderful living arrangements for them all.
But what of the girls who had been shipped away for years before the raid shut the gang down? The FBI got busy sweating information out of the gang members so that they could recover as many girls as possible. Mary offered her assistance, and the man in charge, Special Agent Bertrand Dorff, said he would keep her in mind. Could this be Mary's opportunity to work in the FBI? She hoped, and intended to lobby hard for the role. They would need somebody who could go undercover. Who better than her?
As a side benefit of her involvement in the case, she was able to learn from an FBI physician that the Grafenberg Ring that had been put into her was in fact a birth control device developed in Germany only the year before. It was in her uterus. The FBI physician was very sorry, but nobody in the United States knew how to remove one, and she would not be able to have any children until it had been removed. She told him not to worry about it; she liked not getting pregnant.
After parking the bus at the Jones residence and introducing her father and Margaret to all her fellow abductees, Mary got an update on more local events from her father. The Rush will had been found where she hid it behind the headboard. The Rush farm was safe. Mary jumped into her Packard convertible and drove to the Rush place immediately to reunite with George after her ordeal. When she got there, Eustace, George's mother, let her in, but looked a little unsettled. Mary ran past her upstairs to George's room. She opened the door to find her dearest George with a very thin, very pale, blonde girl clinging tightly to him and eyeing her with whimpering suspicion.
"George Rush, what is the meaning of this?" said Mary firmly but, she felt, gently. There might be a perfectly logical explanation to this. "Explain yourself."
George bashfully related his story. After they had separated, he had found this feral girl, the very one clinging to him, in a locked room deep underground. She had apparently been kept there for several years, starved, and abused in terrible ways they couldn't entirely know because she was apparently mute and Mr. Mitchell, who was in jail for his many offenses, wasn't talking. The sheriff believed her to be Bonnie Lambert, daughter of the family Mitchell had evidently stolen the farm from six years earlier.
Once George had freed her, Bonnie had not been able to tolerate being separated from George for even an instant without producing loud keening wails, so everybody had thought it best for her to let her just continue to cling to him until she started feeling a little more comfortable with her new life as a free young woman. By the records, if she was Bonnie, she had just turned 18. Everybody was pretty sure she was Bonnie.
Mary had questions. "How do you sleep at night?"
"First, I dress her in her bedclothes, and then I dress in my bedclothes, and we sleep."
"You mean you've stripped her naked and seen her... assets and everything?"
"Mary, it's not like that," George responded red-faced. "You know I'm an honorable man. I would never take advantage of Bonnie and her terrible psychological affliction. This is necessary in order for her to have any semblance of comfort."
Mary sighed. "I understand, George. This is difficult. I trust you, of course. It's just that after my harrowing ordeal of being peddled like a piece of meat by white slavers, I was hoping to get back to my normal life with you and, you know, spoon a little." She looked down and smiled shyly.
"Oh I couldn't wish for anything more adamantly, Mary! With Bonnie clinging constantly to me like this since I found her, I haven't been able to, um, settle myself down in weeks! I confess I've started to have impure thoughts about Bonnie. I'm merely a man. As you well know, men have needs."
"Have you acted on them?" asked Mary, "You could tell me the truth. We've been through an awful lot together."