While we were here, Tom's step sister wanted to spend a week end with us. Tom said it was OK. It was a bad decision. They slept in one of the upstairs bedrooms where I had stored boxes of stuff in the closet. I had no idea what would happen.
About a week after they left, Terry came over and asked me how come I gave my dime ring to one of them. I was in shock. I hadn't given them anything. Tom was really angry. We went over to their house and he told Chuck and Doris. They told us the girls told them we gave them the stuff. They had a lot of my special things like the birthstone ring my mom gave me and some of opals I still had at the time. They made them give it all back at least what they thought was ours. I'll never know for sure.
Upstairs I opened the closet door to find all my neatly stacked boxes dumped in a heap on the floor. Some things were just destroyed. This was no, "Lets see what she's got." and "Do we want it?" It was more like they were trying to destroy my stuff. Papers were torn and marked on. They had taken down boxed games and ripped the cards up, stolen the dice and broken the game boards in half.
These were not little babies. They were teenagers.
They never stayed with us again, except for Kelly who would come in the daytime and be gone home before night. I made another trust mistake with Kelly. I thought she was mature enough to take Tommy in his stroller and push him up and down the street till he fell asleep. I told her not to go too far.
Apparently that did not sink in to her brain. After a half hour I went out to look. Neither of them was in site, no stroller no baby and no teenage girl. I gave it fifteen minutes and then I went into panic mode. I went up one street and then the one in the opposite direction. Nothing. I was really desperate now. I thought someone had kidnapped them.
I was crying hysterically and praying for the safe return of my dear little baby. I'd seen TV shows where stuff like that happened. I called the cops. They sent someone out to the house. I gave them all the information I had which wasn't much. They sent out cops and neighbors to search the street.
They got Tom out of work. He was as scared as I was but I could see he was trying to hold it together. He was real angry with Kelly. He figured and he was right that she had done something stupid.
It took two hours to find them. The cops dragged them both in the house. Well, they carried Tommy who by now was screaming his head off for MOM.
It seems that Kelly had decided to visit one of her brothers who lived clear on the other side of town. She told us that she thought we would know he was with her and safe. I was still horrified that she had no sense at all. The cops had given her a stern talking to about it.
They'd also notified her parents, Chuck and Doris who also worked where Tom did. They arrived shortly after the cops did and they got pretty upset with her too. I think with them they were more upset about the cops getting involved than her part in all this.
After that I was real careful of who I trusted him with. I think I only left him with Janice, Barb or Sue when she came to visit. I just couldn't trust anyone else.
I might as well finish the Kelly story while I have her photos here. A few months went by after we had moved to Mill Street when she ran away from home. It wasn't till later when I discovered why.
She had hitched a ride with a trucker and was riding around with him supposedly while her parents had no idea where she was. After a few months she came back and she was already married to him. She had to have been about 16 at the time.
She had a baby by him. I don't remember much about the kid. The marriage broke up a few months, maybe even a year later when she discovered him him bed with her younger sister. Her younger sister was thirteen or fourteen at the time.
She got so angry she went out in the yard, grabbed up a sledge hammer and pounded the crap out of his windshield. I personally think she pounded the crap of the wrong thing, but that's just me. So they got a divorce and the younger sister stayed with the pervert.
This would be the end of this story except one day she visited me. It was a bit after the sledge hammer incident. She had a downright chilling story to tell. It seems that not only had her husband been in her sisters pants but so had her step father Chuck. It was the reason she left home in the beginning she told me. She said he raped her and then wouldn't leave her alone. Of course with that family, you never knew who or what to believe. Stealing wasn't all they did.
After we moved to Mill Street we never visited Chuck and Doris that I can remember and they never visited us except after about the eight or ninth year we were there, Chuck and Doris gave Tommy the first present they had ever given him and the only one. It was a check for ten dollars.