Assuming Names: a con artist's masquerade (Criminal Mischief Book 1) (2 page)

I hadn’t gained much by going to Wolf Meadows. I’d not seen chain marks in the trees or heard any wolf children howling, but I learned that a lack of cars did not guarantee solitude. I also came away with a rather horrific-looking, three-inch gash that started at my wrist and sliced down my forearm. It was an unfortunate addition to my image when I had plans to present myself in Dallas as cultured and sophisticated, like the women I had seen in a documentary on Neiman Marcus. It was the world’s ultimate luxury store where the clients sat on velvet couches while the fashions were paraded before them in private shows. I was certain none of those ladies would have been caught running through the backwoods, nor had they ever grappled themselves bloody on a chain link fence.

They were far too refined for such nonsense, and I coveted not only their manners but their fur coats and private jets. I had no sense whatsoever of how many necks had been snapped to obtain the one, or any idea of how to afford the other, but I thought a royal title would surely go a long way in securing both. Nothing too immodest though, I merely desired something ambiguous, like countess. Surely no one was keeping up with the world’s many countesses. There must be thousands of them, and if one more showed up, no one would notice.

To assume the title and the riches found in Neiman Marcus, I needed to escape Tennessee, dress the part, and sound foreign.

And I’d been faking a British accent for years, so that was hardly a problem. I would change my intonation to entertain myself, often publicly teasing grown men into a fevered passion before retreating behind my father with a face of uncomprehending innocence. And when the opportunity presented itself, I would play proper English to fool adults into selling me alcohol or tickets to R-rated movies.

But that wasn’t enough anymore. I’d just turned fifteen and the world was passing me by. I knew it was; I read the national papers and news magazines. So many wonderful things were happening while I sat bored and unchallenged in small town Shelbyville. I loved my family and they loved me, but there was no more time to wait. I had to go.

And they had no idea. I had always presented myself with impassive restraint, so my parents had no reason to suspect my brain was being ripped apart by restless turmoil. They couldn’t have guessed I was wandering the highway after midnight. I didn’t show my discontent and I was careful to hide the games I played when they weren’t looking.

They made their living selling ceramics at arts and crafts shows and had been selling my creations right beside their own since I was eleven. It was seldom I made less than five-hundred dollars in a month, and I spent most of it on clothes and cosmetics. It was 1985, but I didn’t dress like Madonna or any other teenager. At twelve, I had decided the only dignified color was black, but I wasn’t Goth either. I attained my sense of fashion from older movies; my goal was to look classic.

It was the night after visiting Wolf Meadows, and I was on the highway again. It was past midnight and I was dressed in a black cocktail dress with a full-length fur coat I had purchased the week before. I had just broken into my parents’ safe, so in my purse was a thousand dollars.

I had very little plan except to go to Dallas and declare myself a countess. But first I needed to hitchhike to the Nashville Airport, and it wasn’t going well. The night was exceptionally black, and, because of my dark clothes, I was uncertain if any of the five cars that had passed had seen me. I had been walking for thirty minutes when it occurred to me I needed to be more aggressive, so I stood half in the lane of the oncoming headlights.

Blue and red lights swirled across the top and the siren squawked a quick warning.

“Curses,” I thought, but then, “I can handle it. I’ve handled worse.” I raced for the driver’s door, effusing in my English accent, “Oh, thank god. I am so glad to see you. I thought I was going to be left in this wilderness to die.”

The sheriff’s deputy asked, “Ma’am, what are you doing out here?”

Still gushing, I carried on breathlessly, “I had the most horrible tiff with my husband and demanded he let me out of the car. I didn’t think he actually would and he hasn’t returned.”

“Well, let’s get you back to the station and see what we can do.”

I rode in the backseat of the cruiser thinking I’d be known as the thirty-minute runaway rather than the Counterfeit Countess.

At the sheriff’s department, I threw my fur coat over the arm of a chair and sank down beside it, crossing my legs, letting the split in the dress expose my thigh and reveal a thin line of stocking lace. “I cannot thank you enough for rescuing me,” I was still pouring out gratitude. “If you would just call me a cab, I will stop being such a nuisance.”

“Whoa, hold on there, ma’am, I don’t even know your name.”

“Oh … of course … forgive me,” I was drawing out the apology because I didn’t know what name I planned to use either. I reached for one of the many I’d used before, “I’m Amanda Forster.”

“And what were you doing out on the highway at this hour?”

Ducking my head, I forced a blush. “It is terribly embarrassing, but my husband and I had an awful row. I didn’t think he would actually stop the car when I told him to.” It occurred to me I was not wearing a wedding band, and before he asked, he needed to know I had no identification. I clasped my empty ring fingers, saying, “I was so mad, I threw all my jewelry at him, then I threw my passport and driver’s license. I just threw it all at his face and told him to go. Wasn’t that silly?”

Yes, ma’am, that was a little …” he couldn’t bring himself to say it. Then something else occurred to him. “How were you going to pay for a cab?”

“Well, I’m not foolish,” I smiled to pull him in. “I didn’t throw my
cash
at him,” and we laughed together.

“Where are you from?”

“Tanzania.”

He furrowed his brows. “Transylvania?”

“Oh, deputy,” I giggled, “you are so funny.”

He seemed pleased, then confused, and he asked again, “Where are you from?”

“Tanzania.”

“Really?”

I could see he’d never heard of it. “It’s right next to Mozambique.”

But that didn’t seem to clarify much either. He asked, “What language do they speak … there?”

“Swahili.”

One eye opened a little wider. “Say something for me in … that language. What is it again?”

“Swahili,” I smiled. Then holding his eyes, I purred out the words, “Orrysay orfay omorrowtay.”

“Isn’t that something?” He shook his head with wonder, then picked up the phone. I listened as he woke up the owner of a nearby cab company, explaining there was a woman in great need. The cab owner wouldn’t drive to Shelbyville but if the deputy would bring me the thirty miles to his business, he’d get me to the Nashville airport.

I implored, “Oh, please do.”

And the deputy smiled, “I can tell you haven’t been in the South very long. We are known for our hospitality.” Then as he was leading me out of the station to his car, he requested, “Say something in Swahili again for the boys.”

And I called over my shoulder to the other deputies, “It’say eenbay unfay!”

~~~~~~

My night with the police had not ended there. The cab broke down on the way to the airport, and I was transported to the Smyrna police station to play the same game a second time. But no one was too concerned with what had happened in Smyrna. The report listing me as a runaway was filed with the Shelbyville police, and it was the local police that dropped my picture on the desk of the sheriff’s deputy. He went pale and tried to cover my smiling face. He started shouting at the officer, but she had already seen his guilt. She demanded he speak, that he tell her what he knew, but he shouted louder, forcing her into the hall before slamming the door.

The sheriff was called.

It took an hour to reason with the deputy behind closed doors. When they finally emerged, both looked weak with disbelief, but there was no getting around it, they had to confess what had been done.

When my father showed up, the deputy insisted, “But she spoke Swahili. I know it was a foreign language.”

“Pig Latin,” my father told them. “She speaks fluent Pig Latin.”

They tracked me to the Smyrna Police Department, and then to another cab company. I was last seen at the Nashville Airport, but no one guessed I was already in Dallas.

Sometimes I think there is something slightly wrong with me, and not in the way most people suspect. I lack a proper sense of fear. I’m hard to scare but easy to startle, and I’m not entirely fearless. For instance, I want no part of bungee jumping, skydiving, or any other high-altitude scare; but things on the ground have to get pretty extreme for my heart rate to change. I have a difficult time recognizing danger when walking into it. Before my time in Dallas was over, a mafia henchman was going to hold a gun to my head, and that did not so much frighten as annoy me. So, even though I had no plan, I was not alarmed or concerned. Even though this was going to be the biggest act I had ever put on, I intended to play it as I always had—pure improvisation, all on impulse, with little more known than I would be playing the part of a countess.

In the late afternoon, I had a taxi drop me at an address just outside of Dallas, and then when he was gone, I started walking along the highway. “I’ll be lost,” I started concocting the first act in my performance.  “I’ll be the lost countess.” It sounded quite mysterious.

When a man stopped to ask if I needed help, I graciously accepted and got into his car. “I’m afraid I am a bit turned around.”

“Where were you trying to go?”

“Well,” I looked over the green lawns passing outside the windows, “I was supposed to be in Egypt.”

The conversation wasn’t going to make any more sense as we moved further along either. He took me home and called his church. “She thinks if she gets to Egypt, whoever is looking for her will find her.” After a bit of silence on his end, he agreed with the preacher, “No, we can’t have that. I’ll bring her right over.”

It was Wednesday night and the Baptist church in Plano was packed with hundreds of congregants. I was in the preacher’s large office but he couldn’t make any more sense of me than the motorist had, so they went out and got Mike, a retired FBI agent.

As Mike and the preacher entered the office, I was explaining to a deacon, “I just need to get to Egypt, then I’m sure they will find me.”

Mike took a chair opposite me and wanted to know, “How are they going to find you?”

“Well,” I stopped to consider it, “I don’t know. They were expecting me, so surely they will look.”

Mike settled into a thinking stare, taking in the fur coat draped over the arm of the couch, the black cocktail dress, the high heels, and the accent. I couldn’t tell his age but I thought he was in his forties. What I did recognize was he was serious, and his eyes were critical, not at all like the preacher who worried about my soul rather than the facts. Mike said, “Let’s start again. What is your name?”

“Constance.”

“Your full name.”

I hadn’t thought that far ahead. I paused for the briefest moment to think. I was thinking about my father. His first marriage had been to a Bolivian, and when he gave her full name, it seemed to run on forever. It was gloriously foreign and exotic. As Mike waited to hear my name, I was trying to remember how my father had accounted for them all. Some of her names had come from maternal and paternal grandparents, and then something was from her mother, and maybe more from her father, and lastly she’d taken the surname of my father. If I hoped to pass as foreign, I thought I would need at least four names to be taken seriously.

I started stringing them together, “Countess Constance Anna Marie Tanya Mitchell.”

I dropped countess on them like it were nothing, added my own name because I liked it, and then practically undid myself by choosing the last name of the family dog. The dog was Martha Mitchell, named after the wife of John Mitchell, President Nixon's Attorney General. The dog had come into our family a year old and already named, and I still have no idea what I was thinking when I borrowed her surname, but when you’re making things up as you go along, these things tend to happen.

Mike asked me to say my name again and I nearly laughed. I hoped I remembered the order. “Countess Constance Anna Marie Tanya Mitchell.”

“You’re a countess?”

“Yes.”

“Where are you from?”

“I just came from Kenya.”

“So, you’re Kenyan?” the preacher asked. To Mike he said, “She does sound South African.”

“I have been there, too,” I acknowledged.

“But where are you from?”

I said again, “I just came from Kenya.”

Mike asked, “What country issued your passport?”

I looked confused.

“Your passport. You have a passport, don’t you?”

I appeared to search my memory, but didn’t sound convinced, “I believe so.”

“You need a passport to travel.”

I nodded my head but said nothing.

Mike was quiet for a moment, then he asked, “Have you seen your passport?”

“Maybe. I don’t know.”

“How do you travel then?”

“Generally by plane.”

Now Mike looked confused.

I offered as though it would clarify something, “Sometimes by car. Once on a boat. And a couple times by rail. But mostly planes.”

I didn’t know where this fiction was ultimately going, but I had a goal. I wanted to live in Dallas with the title of countess. The only problem was I had not yet learned how to create a legitimate, federally recognized identity, and as it was 1985, there was no readily available information on the topic. Uncertain how to acquire identification, I needed a compelling history to explain why I had none. Every question Mike asked allowed me to give the tale more detail, but so far, he had about as much of a clue as I did how the story was going to proceed.

Mike said, “When you arrived in this country, you would have shown your passport to immigration.” And when I gave no indication this had happened, he prompted, “Do you remember giving your passport to immigration?”

“No.”

“You don’t remember?”

“No.”

“Why don’t you remember?”

“When you say immigration, I don’t know what you mean.”

Mike inhaled and the preacher struck out with, “How many countries have you been in?”

“Thirty, maybe more.”

Mike sat forward with consternation. It was a far higher number than he was expecting. “You would have gone through immigration at every international airport.”

I looked interested to hear it.

Mike tried to make it simple. “Who are the first officials you meet when you enter a country?”

“Do you mean the military?”

He leaned farther forward. “What is the first thing you normally do when you get off a plane?”

“I give the valise to the person at the bottom of the stairs.”

Mike went rigid and the preacher whispered slow and full of breath, “Oh … my … stars.”

Mike asked, “What’s in the valise?”

“I don’t know.”

“Okay.” He paused to rearrange his thoughts. “
Then
what do you do?”

“Generally, I get into a car.”

Suddenly it was clear to Mike. “You’ve been traveling by private plane.” He sat back thinking he was finally getting a handle on it. “But you’d still have to pass through immigration.” And when I kept my expression blank, he considered something else. “How big are the airports?”

I looked quizzical.

“How big? How many runways? How many buildings?”

“Well, only one runway and there are seldom any buildings.”

The preacher declared with astonishment, “Clandestine landing strips.”

~~~~~~

Mike needed a moment away to organize his thoughts, and then, “When I return, we’re going to start all over again.”

After Mike left the room, the preacher wanted to talk to me about my soul. “Are you a Christian?”

I said with the same doe-eyed innocence I had been using from the start, “I have been.”

He pulled back. “Have you been something else?”

“A couple times I was Buddhist, once a Hindu, and twice a Jew, though mostly a Christian, if not agnostic.”

He was aghast. He needed a moment, too, but there wasn’t a minute to spare if he was going to save me from that blasphemous list. “What are you now?”

I smiled and granted, “While I am in your company, I will be a Christian.”

He was breathless, dropping to his knees before me, already asking, “Will you pray with me?”

“Why, yes, of course, if you like,” but I was pushing back into the couch in a bid for distance, hoping it was not as it appeared, praying all decorum was not about to be lost.

But the preacher took my hands and pulled me forward onto the floor, both of us now facing each other on our knees. He had tears in his eyes wanting to know, “Have you accepted Jesus as your Lord and Savior?”

He was so earnest and I was stunned, overwhelmed with embarrassment for us both. I was trying to figure out how we had come to be on the floor on our knees, because whatever mistake had brought us to this, I wanted to be certain to never make it again. I went with the answer I thought he wanted, the one I hoped would get us off the floor. I said optimistically, “Yes.”

“
When
? When did you accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior?”

Oh Jesus Christ
, my silent mind snapped without any concept of irony. He sounded as though he was pleading for the answer, and my calm ability to lie was floundering on his emotions. I struggled for a response, searching my brain for what it actually meant, what I would be admitting, accepting someone as my lord and savior. Something about it sounded just a little too subservient for my rebellious spirit to accept. I finally reacted with a noise somewhere between a laugh and a whimper.

His shoulders fell with his heavy exhale. “You
haven’t
accepted Jesus as your Lord and Savior.” He was devastated.

Afraid I was about to be made to, I assured a little too enthusiastically, “No, I have, I have. I just don’t remember when. Ha,” I laughed somewhat hysterically. “So many acceptances, it’s hard to keep track. I accept him every day!” and then another whimpering laugh.

I looked around the room. Where was cool, removed Mike? But the preacher put his hand on top of my head and forced it down. He was praying for my soul. And he had a great many concerns. I stared at the carpet wondering when it was going to end, telling myself I needed to figure out this religion thing before I went any further, promising I would never make light of it again in front of someone who could put me on my knees.

~~~~~~

Eventually Mike reentered, and the preacher let me up.

I felt pretty well humiliated, and was thinking I, too, could have used a moment, but Mike didn’t register anything odd about us getting off the floor.

Mike had a new approach. He wanted to take everything backwards from the moment his fellow congregant offered me assistance. “How did you come to be there? Where were you just before you were walking beside the highway?”

“In a car.”

“Good. In a car. Who was driving?”

“I don’t know.”

“Okay, that’s fine; we’ll come back to it. How did you get from the car to the side of the road?”

“I got out of the car.”

Mike was getting the hang of how the whole exchange was going to proceed. “Why did you get out of the car?”

“I was told to.”

And in that exact minimalist manner, we traveled all the way back to Kenya. It had been quite a journey. I explained I had spent the past six months in palatial home overlooking the Savanna, and when it was time to move to Egypt, I was given a valise.

Mike asked, “Do you always change homes with a valise?”

“From my earliest memories, I have always travelled with one.”

“Is it the same valise you arrive with?”

“No, it was never obviously the same one.”

When pressed, I admitted I was being escorted by a man named Alistair who was meant to see me off at a Kenyan airstrip but had instead boarded the plane. We flew to another landing strip, and then to another before driving to a helicopter in a field. Alistair hadn’t explained. He had simply taken the valise, and then pressed hundreds of US dollars into my hands.

Mike looked in my handbag and saw it contained the bills and lipstick, but nothing else. He asked, “Did Alistair appear nervous?”

“I suppose, now that you mention it, he did seem a little anxious.”

“You didn’t question what was happening?” the preacher interjected.

I considered it as though such an action had never once occurred to me, and then answered, “No.”

The helicopter flew over the ocean and deposited me on a ship. From my description, Mike thought it sounded like an oil tanker. I stayed locked in solitude in a little cabin for what seemed like two weeks. Though Mike asked, I could give no details about the ship or its crew as I was never allowed out of the cabin. When the coast began to show lights, I descended a rope ladder to a waiting boat, and this boat landed on a dark, unpopulated shore. A man was waiting for me with a car and we drove through the night until he told me to get out, leaving me without explanation on the side of the road.