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leg.
It's the prison's fault; they didn't give her her medicine for days.
We're going to sue them."
She blamed Susan for everything. The decline of the family had begun,
of course, with her treachery.
Debbie and Mike Alexander agreed with the Radcliffes. "Susan needs
professional help," Debbie said succinctly. "She cut the hair off
Mom's dolls, and one night, when I was all alone in my apartment, Susan
came over and cut off all the power and lights to my unit. I looked
out the window and saw a dark truck, and I knew it was Susan."
Not likely. Susan was working as much overtime as she could as a store
security officer to make enough money to leave McDonough and the
constant surveillance of her outraged family. "Besides," she said with
a laugh, "if I wanted to shut off Debbie's lights, I wouldn't have the
first idea how to find the thing -the fuse box or whatever-to do it."
Pat's latest conviction appeared to have started a slow winding down of
The Family; its gracious facade cracked, and bit by bit chunks fell
off, giving a glimpse of what lay beneath. Aunt Lizzie and Margureitte
were barely speaking. Aunt Thelma had a stroke and had to be put into
a hospital over in Augusta. For a time, Margureitte and Cliff visited
her regularly, but she didn't get any better. Thelma's surviving
sisters got her power of attorney and sold her house and car. Thelma
was placed in a nursing home in Elizabethtown, North Carolina.
Ashlynne still lived with Boppo and Papa; Debbie and her new husband,
Mike Alexander, in financial straits, moved in with them in 1992; and
Ronnie, disabled by a back injury on a construction job, kept his
trailer in their side yard. Boppo and Papa bragged proudly that Sean
Alford came every week to play golf with Papa. They did not, of
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course, encourage him to reconcile with his parents, but urged him to
visit his "Grandma Pat" in prison, which he often did.
Letters sent by outsiders to Pat Taylor in prison were not
acknowledged.
Margureitte reported that Pat was far too . ill to be interviewed, and
her speech was so compromised that it was hard to understand her. It
was ironic; her condition sounded remarkably like that of Nona Allanson
sixteen years earlier, when Pat had poisoned her with arsenic. Pat was
apparently still able to continue her hobbies, however. In the summer
of 1992, her picture appeared in a Milledgeville paper as she proudly
showed off a quilt she had made for the prison craft show.
Boppo could scarcely believe Pat was back in prison. "I didn't want
her to accept the plea-neither did Mr. Roberts-but they were going to
charge Debbie with the 1976 arsenic case, or maybe charge Pat with
false imprisonment of her aunt Elizabeth Porter in Warsaw, North
Carolina. I can tell you that Bobby, her son, told me that Pat took
very, very good care of his mother.
"Pat is hurt so deeply that she can't even be angry," Margureitte
said.
"She had to sell over eight thousand dollars' worth of her dolls and
doll clothing in one day-all heirloom sewing-to pay for an attorney."
Margureitte was still stunned by Susan's treachery. "Susan said her
mother was a very good mother. She sang in the choir. She was a
Brownie mother. The colonel and I bought groceries for Susan and Bill
when they were having a hard time, and the colonel invited them to live
with us. They left on Thanksgiving. Susan cut her mother's dolls'hair
in back, and she called Colonel Radcliffe a bastard!"
Her voice trailed off to a whisper with the shock of it all.
"My own prognosis is not good," Margureitte confided, inhaling smoke.
"I have lung cancer, you know. The doctor told me 'two years' last
year, and Colonel Radcliffe asked him about that in my last checkup,
and he just said, 'I haven t changed my original estimate." . . .
It's terrible to think that I may not have my daughter here to take
care of me when I reach my last days."
Margureitte was a woman of a remarkable will and a strong
constitution.
Although she arrived at the 1992 Siler family reunion at White Lake in
a wheelchair, her sisters commented that they had never seen her look
better.
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