Chapter Three: Part One

CHAPTER THREE

Oregon City, OR

October 5, 11:45 PM

           

Nick Benson was seething.  He couldn’t believe that some schlemiel detective from Seaside, Oregon had the balls to call him and act like he’d done something wrong.  Nick had never been forced to answer for anything to anybody.  His mother and school teachers had generally treated him like a sacred artifact – something to be handled with fear and awe.  His younger brother had tried to get him in trouble with the police in the past, but it hadn’t worked.  “What a worthless little germ he is,” thought Nick.  “How dare anyone attempt to treat a Benson like such a commoner?” he asked himself angrily.

Nick’s grandfather, DeWayne Benson made a fortune in illegal liquor and gambling clubs during Prohibition.  When World War II started, he began investing in various steel and munitions factories, further increasing his fortune.  He didn’t have time to marry until 1941, when he was fifty years old.  At that time, he married a woman of great beauty and questionable character. 

DeWayne’s wife, Ruby, it was rumored, had worked in a brothel in Astoria, OR.  It wasn’t what the young woman had set out to do, but life had other plans.  Her father was a fisherman who left for work one day and never returned.  It was widely assumed that he’d met his maker at sea.  A few years later, a piece of his fishing vessel washed up on shore down on the Clatsop Flats, and put all doubts to rest. 

Ruby worked hard alongside her mother trying to help raise her brothers and sisters.  She was a beautiful girl, and had hopes that someone would marry her and help support her family.  Things didn’t work out that way.  Some of her younger siblings died of ailments which could have been cured had there been enough money for medical care.  This is what caused Ruby to do what no one would’ve ever asked of her.  She began selling herself for money. 

Men paid a handsome price to bed the beautiful prostitute.  She made enough money to help her mother pay the rent and feed the remaining children. She clung to that purpose in order to save her sense of self-worth.  Ruby refused to let her situation in life destroy the pride that she had in who she really was.  No man, no person would ever take that away from her.

At 19 years of age, Ruby needed something remarkable to happen in order to change her direction in life. When a wealthy man named DeWayne Benson began seeking out her company, Ruby had hopes that her luck had changed.    The man came back several times in the next few weeks.    He was older than most men who frequented the brothel and he didn’t talk much, but he was gentler with Ruby than many of her other customers.  He also seemed to recognize that Ruby was not a typical prostitute, if ever there was such a thing.  Ruby believed that her dreams had come true when Mr. Benson finally asked her to marry him.  She thought she’d be able to live in a decent home in Oregon City and send some money home to her mother who was getting on in years.  Fate again had other plans.

Ruby’s marriage to DeWayne was a rocky one.  He travelled a great deal.  By trade, he was an attorney, but never discussed who his clients were.  Ruby felt certain that they weren’t the most reputable people.  If they had been, DeWayne would have introduced them to the upper crust of his Oregon City community.

Ruby was lonely, an emotion with which she was unfamiliar.  Growing up in a large family, and then working in a brothel, she’d spent very little time alone prior to this.  She fully expected to become pregnant quickly after getting married, and hoped to spend her time raising several children.  She wanted to have a large, happy family.

Ruby finally gave birth in 1947, after six years and several unsuccessful pregnancies, to a baby boy.  She named him Daniel.  Her plan was to raise him to be a fine, upstanding member of society.  Unfortunately, when Daniel was just a few months old, Ruby died.  Some believed that DeWayne had gotten the heir that he wanted, and no longer needed a wife.  His story was that Ruby had put the baby down to sleep in the nursery early in the evening.  The maid, who also slept in the nursery, claimed to have heard nothing unusual that night.

DeWayne said that his wife hadn’t been herself since the birth of their baby, and believed that she was in the midst of having a nervous breakdown.  Anyone who had known Ruby as she grew into a young adult, helping to care for her family through whatever means she had at her disposal, would have known this to be untrue.  DeWayne explained to anyone who cared to listen that she must have died from an overdose of the medicine the doctor had given her “for her nerves.”  Or perhaps she had suffered from a seizure due to the medication, and died from it.  DeWayne wasn’t sure. “Figures,” sneered DeWayne when he opened the door to allow the coroner into his home.  “You’d think she was the only woman who ever had a baby.  She sniveled about how horrible her life was.  How she needed to get away.  She had everything she needed right here, and it wasn’t enough.  I guess taking care of one baby was too much for her!”  The coroner didn’t offer an opinion one way or the other. 

The only certainty was that when she was found in the morning, she lay posed in her bed, as though the angels had swooped down and gently lifted her soul from her body.  Her hair was perfectly coifed.  Her nails were perfectly manicured.  The bedcover was perfectly draped across her body.  And she was stone cold dead.

Ruby Benson was buried behind the family home on a hillside overlooking the Willamette River.  There was no minister present at the burial.

With DeWayne as his guide, Daniel grew to be even more cold and calculating than his father.  The only female in his life was the same maid who slept in his nursery on the night his mother died.  The poor woman had nothing of her own.  DeWayne considered her to be his slave and treated her as such.  Her grandfather had run up a large debt at one of DeWayne’s gambling clubs, and had covered the debt by offering his granddaughter as a caretaker for the Benson home when she was ten years old. 

Ruby Benson didn’t marry DeWayne until the girl was sixteen.  Up until that time, the girl was expected to take care of all of the master’s needs – all of them.  When Ruby moved in, she became a mother, a friend and a guardian angel to the young woman who was only five years younger than Ruby.  When little Daniel was born, the maid thought her life couldn’t get any better.  And she was right.

When Ruby died, the young maid cried for days, being beaten and sexually abused frequently.  She was expected to clean the huge home, do the cooking, take care of the baby and do other unnamed things for Mr. Benson once again.  As Daniel got older, the maid thought about running away, but where would she go?  She didn’t know anyone.  Visitors were never invited to the house.  She didn’t know where her original family was.  She didn’t think that anyone even knew she lived there.  And she was right.  Almost.

As Daniel got older, he treated the maid poorly, as his father had taught him.  If she asked him to do something that he didn’t want to do, the boy simply told his father that the maid was mean to him.  DeWayne thought nothing of striking the woman severely to dissuade her from being too hard on his son.  Daniel had even seen his father choke her once until Daniel feared she might die.  Not wanting to be left alone with his father, though, Daniel cried and asked his father to stop.  Which DeWayne did.  That time.

A few years later, the maid was not so fortunate.  DeWayne told Daniel one morning that their maid had died from pneumonia the night before.  Daniel knew it was a lie because she hadn’t even had a cold.  He was old enough now, though, so that it meant little to him.  Together, DeWayne and Daniel disposed of her body.  She was thrown unceremoniously into the same grave as Ruby Benson, and covered with five feet of dirt.  At least Ruby had been put in a coffin – not that it mattered.