Betrayal In Blood. Michael Benson

      CHAPTER 16

      The Mini-Breakdown

      For Cyril, however, things weren’t that great at home. He and Patty were having problems. It had always been tough for Cyril to relax, but now he was having more trouble than ever.

      The death of his baby brother did nothing to help Cyril’s already fragile state of mind. During 2002, Cyril Winebrenner struggled with his emotional and mental stability. Eventually that mental health collapsed.

      Samantha remembered: “He had a nervous breakdown. He was in Indiana at the time, I think. He was in the hospital and he couldn’t remember anybody or anything. So Patty and Cleo and little Cleo went out there, because they were living in Iowa at the time, and he didn’t know them. One of Cleo’s brothers was up there, so they stayed with him. He called Tabby one time and asked if he could come stay with them until he got things sorted out.”

      Ginny remembered it this way: “Cyril and Patty were having problems. Patty left and moved back up here with her mom. Actually, we went down and we moved her up here, because she couldn’t afford to move on her own. Cyril was . . . I’m not sure. He said that [he and Patty were breaking up because] he was working a lot and he asked us to come down. I said you’ll have to put Patty on the phone. Patty’ll have to tell me that this is what she wants or we’re not doing it. I always try my best to stay out of my kids’ problems. I wanted to be there if they needed me, but I didn’t want to get in the middle of it. So I talked to Patty and Patty said yes. She had already had ‘Little One.’ So we went down and picked her up. We rented a trailer and dragged it back up here to her mom’s.

      “Cyril worked down there for another month and then he moved to Indiana. He had brothers there; well, they were Cleo’s sons from a previous marriage. He moved out there with them, and then he stayed with Cleo’s sister and her son Brian for a while.

      “In October, I got a call, around midnight. It was a collect call, and when I asked from who, I heard Cyril’s voice say, ‘I don’t know.’ He had completely lost his memory. He didn’t know where he was. He was terrified. After talking to him for a little while, I got him to hand the phone to someone else. He had wandered into a hospital. He had seen a big cross. It was a hospital in Crown Point, Indiana (which is just south of Gary, only about twenty miles from Chicago) .

      “Cyril put me on the phone with a hospital attendant and I asked her to go get a doctor, get somebody to come get him and take him to the emergency room. She went and got a security guard, who came on the phone and said he would take him to emergency; then he gave me the numbers I needed to make sure he got there okay.

      “We were in Minnesota and we drove there with his wife. Because he was married, she was the only one who could do anything. They were still married at the time. The doctors said that Cyril had had what they called a ‘mini-breakdown.’ They said that his memory would eventually all come back, but that it would take time.

      “Cyril was eventually put in a mental-health facility. They kept him for a couple of days. He wasn’t violent. He wasn’t suicidal. He just didn’t know who he was, and he was scared. After two days my husband went there and picked him up. He brought him back. We were staying at my brother-in-law Danny’s until we could get things back on track.

      “Cyril didn’t remember me. He didn’t remember Patty. He didn’t remember his son. He didn’t recognize any of us. He got on his cell phone and he just started going through the numbers. He just started calling people and talking to people, trying to figure out who he was.

      “He came across Tabby’s number, because he and Tabby used to talk quite a bit. He talked to her and she asked to talk to me, so he put me on the phone and Tabby said, ‘Okay, Mom. What’s going on?’

      “So I explained it all to her, and she said, ‘Okay, now he makes sense.’ I gave her back to Cyril and they must have talked for an hour. When they got done, I asked him if that helped any. ‘No,’ he said, ‘but she seems to like me.’

      “I said, ‘Well, she should, she’s your sister.’

      “And he said, ‘She said I could come up and stay with her. She told me to think about it. Next time I talk to her, what should I tell her?’

      “I said, ‘That’s your choice. You can either come back to Minnesota with me, you can go back to Iowa, or you can go back to Minnesota with Patty. Or, you can go to Tabby’s. You can do whatever you want. The choice is yours. You have to make that decision.’

      “He said, ‘But I don’t know where I belong.’

      “I said, ‘I know that—but you have to have a place to start. You decide where you are most comfortable.’

      “So he called Tabby back and Tabby called me. We didn’t have the extra money to get him there. Chicago to New York is quite a ways. So (in September 2002), Tabby sent us a hundred dollars so we could get to New York and get back. So we took him to New York and we spent a couple of days there, getting him settled in. Then we went back to Minnesota. We never did see him after that—until after Tabby was gone.”

      This wasn’t the first time Tabby had invited a troubled sibling to come and live with her family in the house on Pennicott Circle. A few years before, Samantha had been having problems and had stayed for a spell with the Bryants.

      So, Cyril, once again remembering who he was, was the latest in a series of houseguests of Kevin Bryant. From living in mobile homes all of his life, he found himself in the large, two-story suburban home on Pennicott Circle.

      He was the houseguest of his sister, a “lawyer’s wife,” and her much older husband. The guy was as old as Cyril’s dad. At least.