Carla Larson even joined her mother on a couple of visits to the Schmitz home on Spyglass Hill. The outside was beautiful, she thought, but the inside of the residence was cold. She saw how it matched her mother's description of John Schmitz's wife.
“It lacked any personality, charm. It lacked familyness. It was formal, cold. Wintry, icy. Mary was a cold woman.”
Going there was extremely uncomfortable for Carla Larson.
“I didn't want to betray my mother, and I liked John, but it didn't feel right. I wasn't comfortable being around Mary, because I knew.”
Years later, when reporters would once again search the archives for tidbits about John Schmitz and his affair with Carla Stuckle, the daughter she left behind when she was just a little girl would consider once more if it had been a love affair or a convenience.
At least on her mother's side, Carla Larson concluded, it hadn't been about love.
“She admired him, respected him, was drawn to his power. I don't think my mother's capable of truly loving anyone. It is not in her nature. She's too selfish a person.”
* * *
It was the oldest trick in the book. Carla Stuckle became pregnant to hang on to her man. She gave birth to a son in June 1981. One afternoon at her home in Drayton Way, Carla Stuckle sucked on a More menthol and flatly stated to her daughter she had become pregnant on purpose.
“To replace Philip,” she said.
Getting pregnant and having a son was something that Carla Stuckle wanted to do for John Schmitz. She told her daughter of how she had been visiting at the Schmitzes' home in Corona del Mar when she passed out.
“In the exact spot where Philip fell into the pool,” she said.
Carla Larson found her mother's story suspect. As she understood it, Mary Schmitz was inside and Mary Kay and an older brother were in the water playing. No one had seen where the little one had gone in. Carla Stuckle told her daughter that if Mary Schmitz had been more mindful of her children, the little boy would never have drowned.
John Schmitz's mistress also confided that she had had an amniocentesis performed during her pregnancy. She had done so not because she was concerned that giving birth in her forties would have jeopardized her chances for a healthy baby. She did it because if it had been a girl she would have aborted the baby.
“It has to be a perfect boy,” she said.
She was giving him the son he lost.
She chose the name—John George Bostrom—to irritate Mary Schmitz, if she ever found out.
“John was not real thrilled that I put his name on the birth certificate, but I'm not going to lie,” she told her daughter.
“Birth certificates are public record, Mother.”
The older woman smoked and sighed. “Oh, well.”
Chapter 7
BY THE SUMMER of 1982, things had changed dramatically for both Carlas, mother and daughter. At age forty-three, Carla Stuckle had given birth to her second child by John Schmitz, a baby girl she named Eugenie or Genie. She told no one at El Toro who the father was, nor did she reveal it to the women she worked with at the Santa Ana answering service where she took messages on the weekend.
Carla Stuckle's daughter, Carla Larson, had a child of her own by then, a son, the same age as John George Bostrom. For a time, the twenty-three-year-old cared for her half brother and half sister in her base housing, but it became too much and she told her mother she needed to make child-care arrangements. Her mother was angry at first, complaining bitterly that baby-sitter's fees would send her to the poorhouse. She was already late on her mortgage and other bills were piling up.
One afternoon in late July, Carla Larson got a phone call from her mother, who was crying and saying something about her son's penis being injured.
“What? How in the hell did that happen?” the younger woman asked. She was in shock. “Did it get caught in something?”
Carla Stuckle didn't have any answers. She sobbed some words into the phone and told her daughter that the baby was in microsurgery to repair the damage.
“Mother, tell me what happened,” the younger woman asked once more, this time using more soothing tones in an attempt to calm her mother.
“I took him to the doctor,” Carla Stuckle said. “He said the baby has a hair wrapped around his penis and it had been there for some time.”
“Oh, my God. Don't you ever bathe him? How could this have happened?”
Carla didn't have an answer. She muttered a quiet, “I don't know.”
Carla Larson hung up the phone and made quick plans to go see her baby brother at Children's Hospital. When she arrived she found the boy asleep in a little crib, unaware of the problem that had brought him there. He was bandaged. Carla Larson couldn't get a look at him to see what in the world her mother was talking about. The nurses said nothing.