Sister Mine (11 page)

Chapter Ten

O
NCE WE ESTABLISH
that my role is not to protect Pamela Jameson from Jamie Ruddock but to act as a potential persuasive force if Jamie decides not to agree to Pamela's latest offer, I'm able to convince Pamela that I don't need to be present in the restaurant.

I ask her to show me the photo again of Shannon a.k.a. Jamie, and I tell her that the girl looks vaguely familiar to me. Maybe she is originally from this area. Considering that I was a police officer in this town for over ten years, I don't want to run the risk that she might recognize me and get nervous or suspicious.

I also explain that if I sit within plain view of the two of them, Pamela might subconsciously find herself glancing in my direction and ruin the whole setup.

I tell her we'll keep in touch with our cell phones by using them like walkie-talkies. I have her call me, then leave the line open and lay her phone on the very top of the contents of her purse. I tell her to make sure she leaves her purse unzipped so I'll be able to hear what they're saying.

There's no way I'm going to miss hearing a single word of this conversation.

Pamela heads to the ladies' room first. I don't particularly feel the need to hear her take a piss, so I take a little stroll around the parking lot while I wait for her to meet up with Shannon.

I spot Shannon's car. It's parked around the corner from the entrance. I don't know why she chose to park it there since there are plenty of spots near the door for the time being. In another hour the place will be packed with the after-church crowd.

I checked out her car last night after Kozlowski told me at Jolly's that as far as he knew, Shannon had never lived in New Mexico.

The car had a New Mexico license plate but the glove compartment was completely empty—no registration or proof of insurance or owner's manual—and the rest of the interior was suspiciously clean.

Today it has a New York license plate and a Hertz rental brochure sitting on the dashboard. Pamela told me that Jamie doesn't own a car.

I peer in the side windows more closely and notice the dirty corner of a yellow license plate peeking out from under one of the rear floor mats.

She must have switched plates this morning. There's no doubt in my mind anymore that she came here from New York, where she's known as Jamie Ruddock to Pamela Jameson and Shannon Penrose to Gerald Kozlowski. The New Mexico story is a ruse for me.

I wonder where she got the plate. Probably stole it off some poor tourist's car back in New York City.

I'm reserving my opinion about what's going on between her and Pamela and her and Kozlowski until I know more, but I already know I don't like thinking my sister is a liar and a common thief.

I return to Pamela's SUV and crawl in the backseat, where I keep hidden while I watch the parking lot from the rear window.

This is what I used to do during my six years on Capitol Hill: stand guard; watch and wait; somehow remain intently alert while being bored out of my skull; stay in the same position for hours but be able to spring into action at the first sign of danger; show no fatigue or frustration or fear. It wasn't all that different from life in my father's house.

I suppose I was feeling a certain amount of burnout when I decided to leave D.C., even though this wasn't the main reason I quit my job. But it was true that I was getting sick of babysitting politicians and dealing with their rude staffers and constantly being accosted by tourists who ranged from the slightly confused to the incredibly ignorant. I didn't mind the foreigners who sometimes confused the Capitol Building with the White House, but the Americans who approached me on the Mall, laden with giant Slurpees and foot-long chili dogs and demanding to know where the hell Mount Rushmore was, really got on my nerves.

Some nights when I'd get home after working a twelve-hour shift for the sixth straight day in a row, after I'd send the babysitter home, remove the twenty pounds of hardware I carried around on my body all day long, yank off my boots, peel off my hot, heavy uniform, check on my son, and eat some cereal for dinner while trying not to doze off into the bowl, I'd go to my room and stand naked in front of the eight-dollar Wal-Mart mirror I had nailed to the inside of my bedroom door, in the hopes of recognizing myself after a day of being separated from myself. I'd be overcome with a level of exhaustion that went far beyond the physical demands of my job and raising a child on my own. I was only in my twenties but sometimes I feared I was already tired of living.

I didn't understand the feeling. Clay and I had carved out a nice life for ourselves, certainly a better life than I had ever envisioned having when I was growing up in Jolly Mount.

I had a demanding, potentially deadly, often tedious job, but it was a job that commanded respect and I made good money.

I liked the men and the few women I worked with. I slipped easily and instantly into the confines of cop camaraderie. It was no different than the dynamics I'd witnessed my whole life among the Jolly Mount miners: the blind devotion and dependence on one another and the unspoken acceptance that no one outside the job will ever fully understand you, including spouses and children. Sitting in an Irish cop bar after one of my shifts, I finally began to understand why my dad needed to sit in Jolly's every night after his shift in Beverly. The difference between us was that I wanted to go home and be with my kid.

Clay and I lived in a sprawling redbrick apartment complex about thirty miles outside D.C. that was shaped like a comb that's lost most of its teeth. There were over 500 units, only 300 parking spaces, and no elevators. We had a two-bedroom place on the third floor. It was small but the utilities were free, and we had a tiny balcony we both loved even though it looked out over a highway lined with cut-rate motels and car dealerships. We were able to fit two chairs and a small table on it, and we ate dinner there whenever the weather and my schedule allowed it.

Overall, I was satisfied that I had everything under control. I could look at life's ledger and check off all the big concerns: Job. Home. Child. Friends. Love life.

It was the little things that started to get to me. The traffic. The pointless frantic urban pace. The way the nights were never dark and silence was never quiet. The way people wore their rudeness like a crown.

I hated the fact that Clay couldn't get on his bike and ride for miles, that he would never know the childhood independence of journeying alone on a country road and the freedom of cresting a hill and flying down the other side with the wind bringing tears to his eyes. He didn't even own a bike. There was nowhere to ride it where he wouldn't be run over or robbed.

Sometimes when I look back at that time in my life, I wonder if I sabotaged myself, if I was looking for a way to get Clay and me out of there without having to make the decision by myself. Is that why I chose to have an affair with the self-destructive teenaged son of a foreign diplomat, knowing it would have to end in scandal and that I'd be asked to leave my job at the very least?

I was assigned to protect him and his family during one of his father's visits. I got pulled for diplomatic duty a lot because I was a woman, I was easy on the eye, and I was personable. I got along well with the wives, I knew how to entertain the kids, and the men liked to look at me and fantasize that I might have to shield them from an assassin's bullet by throwing myself on top of them as my shirt flew open and my breasts popped out of a black lace push-up bra.

He was nineteen but he explained to me the first time we met that he had been considered a man in his country since the age of thirteen when he made love to his first woman and killed his first lion on a hunting trip to Kenya with his father.

I told him he sounded a lot like the boys I knew back home, only they killed deer not jungle cats and their first romantic conquests were girls, not women.

He was fascinated by the way I talked about home. He knew America was very big, and that it had many different types of terrain and all sizes of communities ranging from one-dog towns (he meant one-horse towns; I never corrected him) to some of the world's largest cities, but he had always believed that all Americans were the same at their core no matter what their skin color, religion, gender, or class, and that we considered the entire country our home. Wasn't Washington, D.C., my home? Didn't I live here? Couldn't I live anywhere in America and still be at home?

I had never really stopped to think about it before he asked me, but once I did I had to admit to him and to myself that there was only one place I considered home, and right now I wasn't living in it.

Almost all our conversations centered on Jolly Mount. He had no interest in trying to impress me with his wealth and his worldliness, which made him more mature in my eyes than most of the grown men I'd been involved with.

He especially loved my description of a neighbor's hound dog howling over the hill at night, how he only cried when he wanted to mate or kill. He said that was exactly the way he felt.

We had a week together. He was charming and intense but easily distracted, and angered, and bored. It was obvious to me that he was a deeply troubled kid, but I seemed to be the only one who noticed and I wasn't in a position to bring it up to anyone. He had a drug habit and a drinking problem that both parents ignored for different reasons. He was reckless in everything he did, from the way he drove his sports car to the way he fell asleep with lit cigarettes between his fingers to the way he insisted on having a TV set sitting perilously close to the edge of his Jacuzzi.

He was hell around water. When I escorted him to the hotel pool he claimed he'd never been around a pool so small. The pools where he lived were as wide and deep as lakes, he told me, then proceeded to do back flips off the sides and missed smashing his skull into the cement by mere inches.

The day before I put in a request to be relieved of my assignment, I taught him how to make a shallow dive.

He died of a drug overdose the next night. There was some brief talk that it might have been suicide, but he didn't leave a note and everyone in his family was certain he had everything to live for.

I was never outwardly accused of anything, but no one could ignore the fact that I had asked to be transferred away from him the day before he died or that when checking the hotel phone records it was discovered that the last two calls he made were to my home number.

I started to apply for jobs all over the country. I applied to a few in Pennsylvania, but I wasn't trying to move back home. Shannon's death and my dad's life still loomed too large for me in Jolly Mount.

I went back a few times to visit. It was nice to see Isabel and Jimmy even though the black cloud of Shannon's disappearance hung over all our conversations.

I saw my dad, too, despite my suspicions over what he might have done to my sister. I was a grown woman now. A police officer. A single mother of a fine son. I made more money than he did. Yet as soon as I was around him I fell into my old role of subservient daughter, apologizing constantly, never venturing my own opinion, praising everything he said, making him meals, cleaning his filthy house, doing his laundry.

It was a comment from Clay that led me to stop seeing him. He asked me during one of our visits, “Why do you act like you're stupid when you're around Grandpa?”

His question stopped me in my tracks. The way he asked it. The phrasing. Not “Why do you act stupid?” which can basically mean anything, but a very specific “Why do you act like you're stupid?”

I couldn't begin to answer him. I also knew I wasn't going to change. Instead I decided it was in my son's best interest not to see me around my father. I finally had a reason to sever our relationship that I could defend.

I hadn't seen him for four years when I got the news that an explosion in Beverly had killed twelve miners. The job on the Centresburg police force was purely a stroke of luck and timing. I heard about the opening when I went home to bury him.

I came back three months later for an interview and to take the borough test along with seventy men who also showed up at the high school cafeteria. I was the only woman. I knew I was more than qualified for the job, but I was still surprised when I beat out the others.

I found out eventually that the reason the chief chose me was because I offered the perfect solution to a family crisis. One of the candidates was his loser son-in-law, and his daughter expected the chief to give him the job. He knew if he gave it to another male candidate his daughter would never forgive him, and if he gave the job to his son-in-law he'd never forgive himself, so he told his daughter that the latest town budget insisted they hire a female officer in accordance with the Equal Opportunity Employment Act and he hired me. She grumbled and pouted for awhile, but got over it.

My next twelve years as a Centresburg police officer were fairly uneventful although a few of my cases made big local headlines.

PANTSLESS MAN ARRESTED:
A man wearing no pants was arrested outside the Golden Pheasant bar in Centresburg. Local authorities confirm intoxication was a contributing factor in the incident.

MAN FLINGS GRILL:
An Ebensburg man flung a grill at an RV windshield after his wife poured out the contents of a vodka bottle during a domestic dispute at Yellow Creek Campground.

DOWNSPOUTING RECOVERED:
A two-foot long section of white vinyl downspouting believed to be the weapon in a recent assault on Lowe's general manager, Harold Brink, was recovered by Centresburg police.

BIBLE-WIELDING BRIDE SMASHES CHURCH WINDOWS MORNING OF NUPTIALS:
Ashley Dawn Hale, 22, of Marion Center, was charged with destruction of private property and attempted assault Saturday morning after destroying four stained-glass windows in the Pine Mills Presbyterian Church and throwing a Bible at the head of a wedding photographer.