Broken Doll Read Online Free Page A

double-wide trailer. Then he built what he called a bunkhouse fifty yards away from the main mobile home. It had electricity, but no heat. That’s where Richard and I lived. We were only allowed in the house for meals.
    â€œTo keep us kids out of the house,” he explained, “Bob would make us go out into the yard and pick up rocks and stack them up into piles. Once we finished that, he had us move the piles around the yard.”
    According to George Clark II, Bob Smith’s treatment of Richard was not only physically painful, but also emotionally humiliating. “There was one event that I’ll never forget as long as I live.”
    Richard and Jennet, young and mischievous, got up in the middle of the night and ate up all of sister Leslie’s Camp Fire Girls cookies. “There were dozens of them,” said George, “and they ate them all. My mom and Bob were responsible for the money. Bob went down to some store and bought this big cigar, very big around. That night we had roast beef, mashed potatoes, a great big dinner. And Richard had to stand next to the kitchen table with a glass of water, had to eat that cigar while we ate our dinner.”
    The sight of his younger brother gagging on the cigar diminished George’s appetite. “I couldn’t eat my dinner, and I don’t think any of us kids could. Richard was shaking like a leaf, and Bob was telling him that if he didn’t eat it, he was going to get the hell beat out of him.”
    When asked why Kathleen allowed Bob to beat her children, George gave the question serious consideration. “I figure Mom must have really loved Bob Smith a lot to let him do that to us. That’s all I can figure. Mom must have really loved him.”
    Richard Clark was fourteen years old when his loving yet terminally inebriated mother died in an auto accident on September 19, 1982. “She was full of drugs and alcohol when she died,” said Carol. “She hit a bridge on Highway 9.”
    â€œThe next morning,” recalled George, “Leslie took the girls, Jennet and Crystal, out in one corner of the yard, and I took Richard out to the other corner of the yard and told him of our mom’s death. I don’t know how he was affected by it—I was in shock; Bob was in Alaska. He and our mother were not on good terms at that time.”
    George Clark telephoned Bob Smith, the man who beat him with a fireplace poker, and told him of Kathleen’s death. “When Bob got home, all the kids scattered—left, kind of went our own ways.”
    After the funeral, Richard Clark went to live with his aunt Carol. “When he came to live with me, he was very upset over his mother’s death, but refused to openly grieve,” said Carol. “He wouldn’t talk about her death. He kept everything inside. I couldn’t even get him to cry. Then, one night, he was at the home, and he was outside and he was all upset and he was crying. He said, ‘I just want to die.’ And that was the time when I told him that I couldn’t be his mother. I had to be my son’s mother, and that upset him.”
    Desperate, disoriented, and self-destructive, Richard Mathew Clark attempted suicide three times within twelve months. “He slit his wrists,” noted Carol sadly. “He still has the scars.”
    Richard Clark, still seeking a surrogate mother, moved in with his mother’s ex-husband and his new wife, Toni. “I married George Clark, Richard’s father, on November 2, 1974,” said Toni Clark. “After Kathleen died, Richard came to live with us for a couple weeks, but it didn’t work out because we lived in a two-bedroom house, and we crammed all the kids into one bedroom. It was just so crowded,” she said, “that they didn’t have sneezing room. Richard had to walk to school, and he didn’t like that school too much anyway. So he went to live with his grandma