Authors: Christopher C. Payne
I dropped the kids off at my ex-wife’s parent’s house, and she was not there yet. She was attending church service with her mother. Her father coldly let the kids in the door. I tried helping them up the stairs to the condominium he shared with his wife of more than 50 years. The exchange was awkward and sad for the kids, as he was rudely non-communicative and horrible to deal with. It is not that hard to understand, since he had been filled with lies from my former wife and, with her being his daughter, he most likely felt protective of her.
My wife never seemed to understand the effect that her lies had on her, the kids, and on me, as well as everyone she spoke to. She spread deception as easily as creamy peanut butter, and lies flowed from her with no thought or concern. This was probably the single biggest surprise in my divorce – her ability to distort facts so fluidly until even she believed the words that came from her mouth.
I tried to put this behind me as I kissed the girls good-bye, gave them huge hugs, and headed off to my week in the Caribbean. The sunny beaches and removal of daily distractions would be a nice reprieve from the grind that I had been going through. I would miss the girls, but it would be nice to just get away.
Sudhir awoke to his normal routine, and once he arrived at work, he went about trying to figure out how to look busy. He checked the finance section on Yahoo to see how things were shaping up, read the latest headlines of how Obama was facing a tough uphill climb on the economy, and how tax cuts would save the day. He had to admit that he considered himself lucky in his conservative approach to investing. He didn’t risk anything, and he didn’t gain a lot; but he also had not lost much in the recent downturn.
His job was secure, and he couldn’t say the same for several of his relatives and friends. Sudhir would always have a job as long as he had seniority, and there was a need for a police officer. This was one good thing about working for the city.
Sudhir had spent the last several months doing odds and ends while everyone knew he remained focused on Jill’s case and the missing person aspect. He was now starting to get pressure to move on and let the case die by the wayside. There were other activities surfacing, and he had proven his skills with the big assignment. His captain now wanted to see if he could apply those skills as other crimes surfaced.
Even with the jump-start in his career and the newfound respect, he couldn’t help but feel the failure that he had let Jill, her family, and himself down by not apprehending anyone. He still kept his prime suspect in the back of his mind, but the weekend work that he had put together remained in his truck sealed away as he still refused to believe that the fragile strings holding the pieces together actually made any sense. That, added with his direct knowledge of certain activities, made it impossible for him to fathom that his hypothesis was anything more than a drunken fluke of coincidences that in the end didn’t add up.
Still, he refused to relinquish the file. While he had stated he would accept new assignments, he would never give up his hold on the hope that someday he would find out the truth about Jill and what happened. He was sure by now she had moved out of this world and into the next by some torturous method that he was unable to comprehend, but he would never be able to live with himself if he gave up hope for finding out the truth.
Sudhir, instead, focused on his personal life and waited for the next case to be passed his way. He helped out with minor infractions in the meantime. People tended to revert to their normal daily routine activities. He did the same calling on his retail-owner disputes and domestic violence eruptions that had evaded the everyday patrol personnel.
He planned a weekend in January to the wine country and had plans of giving the trip to Janine for Christmas. He had found a great bed and breakfast for a two-night stay, planned dinner Saturday night on the wine train, and had lined up his parents to watch the kids. The details were all in place down to ensuring that there was a hot tub, and he had a planned wine tour booked at one of the larger wineries.
Neither he nor Janine was heavy wine drinkers, but it is beautiful country. They both enjoyed getting away although they had not done a weekend stay in years now. Kids tend to distract you from your marriage and personal life as all your focus stays on them. Ironically, one day you wake up and realize they don’t want to even talk to you let alone have you in their daily activities.
Then, they go away to college and come home one day married. Suddenly, they have the realization that you were not as stupid as they thought you were. You then develop a mature relationship, and the next thing you know, you are a grandparent, then, you die. He had life all mapped out from beginning to end it seemed. He loved his kids and still appreciated their allowing him to be so involved in who they were, but it was easy to see that in a few short years they would not need him in the same way they did today.
It was in this deep thought that Sudhir went about checking the activities for any missing persons that involved a Volvo SUV or where a lady from the ages of 20 to 40 had disappeared. He had added this to his daily routine about three months ago after getting nowhere with Jill’s case. While it had led him to Manteca on a wild goose chase involving a blonde girl named Brenda, he had not found anything else that had connected to his cases in any way. At least not in any way that he was able to see from the facts that he viewed off the daily wires.
He pulled up the last week’s activity, including the last couple of days having neglected this for a while. He noticed an oddity that felt somewhere along the lines of getting hit by a semi-truck. There was a case of a missing person in Burlingame. A lady named Hannah had allegedly been abducted and had not been seen for a couple of weeks. She fit the profiled age range and was attractive from what he could gather off the dot matrix photo, but that was not what had caught his eye.
Apparently she had been known as an acquaintance of Duncan’s, and it noted that he had been questioned. The report stated that he appeared odd, but seemed to hold up well during the interview. They had no reason to believe he was of any further use in the case. Sudhir fell into his seat and, instinctively, reached in his drawer and without even hiding the fact poured himself a shot of whiskey. He downed it in one quick gulp.
They say an oddity is one thing, but recurring coincidences at some point form a pattern. Even if that pattern is something that does not initially make sense, there is most likely a reason for the pattern having formed. Duncan surfacing again like this was not expected, and it shocked Sudhir into now thinking again that there was too much circumstantial evidence starting to add up pointing at his being involved in this circle of issues.
Hannah had two girls and had lived in the area for several years. Her good friend Sarah had been watching the girls for a weekend as Hannah was going away and was expected to return on Sunday afternoon to pick them up.
When she had not returned, Sarah had called the police station worried; and upon further investigation, Duncan’s name had surfaced as having been dating her a few times over the recent weeks. He had been questioned, had a good alibi, and seemed like a straight-forward person, so the two detectives had moved on. Her ex-husband was also in the process of being questioned even though their association had not been recent. He was not the most upstanding guy and was not diligently paying his child support to say the least.
Life is a mixture of circular events that travel around and around and around. The earth circles the sun, while the moon is circling the earth, and they both spin upon themselves, leaving you wondering at some point where it is that you really stand in life. Everything is constantly moving directionally toward its end, so how can you ever know for sure at what point you currently stand. You don’t know the timing of your death, what tomorrow holds, or what will happen a mere split second from the time you read this single word until you move to the next word, and so on.
Sudhir felt his world crumbling around him as the disintegrating pieces were piling up at his feet. His puzzle was being pulled apart. His wife was living a different life, his friend was adding up slowly to look like a killer, and Sudhir couldn’t keep his grip on what was happening. He remembered his last visit to his parent’s house, and the gossip session that ensued.
His parent’s friends who had two boys were recently in the mix of trying to give back their grandchild to one of the boys who had just been released from prison. The boy had shot somebody over a drug deal, taken the body to a reservoir, tied a few bricks to it, and dumped it in the water. The only reason the body had surfaced was due to the low water levels from the lack of rain.
The boy spent the last seven years in prison while his stripper girlfriend had dumped off their child with his parents for safe-keeping. His parents loved the child, but were in their late 60’s; and the burden of keeping a child full-time was taking its toll. This was a boy that Sudhir had watched grow up. He had seen him in church camp, attended youth group with him, and watched as the boy blossomed into a young adult.
Sudhir had moved on and lost track of the specifics of several younger kids, but now he discovered this young man was getting out of prison for murder. Who are these people that we call friends in life? Who is the person that lives next door to you that you wave to as you pull into the driveway? This is the same person that you feed the dog for as they go on vacation.
Does anyone know who anyone is, or is everyone some fake shell of a human being that hides away their true feelings? Do we only allow the beast out of its inner sanctum when the lights are turned down and the door is shut when nobody knows what is occurring in our individual sanctuaries called home? Internet porn is so lucrative. Do we even have to ask ourselves why? How many husbands scan the Internet for seduction as their wives lie in bed, pretending not to hear the fluttering of the rhythmic beat of masturbation to some dark seductive enticements that can be viewed for $19.99 a month?
God, this world we live in is such a lie of false propaganda blown through a television tube, telling us how great things are. We condemn the Islamic community for their harsh treatment of woman while we in the civilized world treat them like mere fixtures to be viewed at will for pleasure.
Sudhir now realized he could no longer keep Duncan out of the limelight. He needed to be listed as a primary suspect if only for himself. Duncan should be fully investigated to the smallest detail that Sudhir could imagine. He would have to follow him, stalk him, and find out the seedy underpinnings that no one person should ever know of any other individual.
Ask yourself this as you sit at dinner with your group of college friends, sharing wine, and reminiscing on stories of who was with whom and the formal dance that you all attended at the junior prom. If you knew the thoughts of everyone at the table, knew what they were thinking about you and about the person sitting to your right and to your left, knew what they were truly thinking of what you looked like and what you said, would you still be friends?
Sudhir thought about a time long ago. He was in high school as a senior, and he was in the backseat of a car as three of his good friends who happened to all be girls were in the front. Somehow the topic of rape was brought up, and all three girls admitted to being in a situation where they had said no, only to be forced to do things they had no intention of doing and fought not to. All three girls admitted to this, and they were only in high school.
What does it mean when you can’t make it out of high school without a boy whom you know and trust, with whom you play baseball and football, sit next to in algebra turning into this person that can force himself on a girl without remorse? Then, he shows up the next day with his homework done and sits next to that same girl as they talk about the Civil War or the last historic world battles.
These are the good kids. These are the kids who are going to college and will be our future leaders in society – the guy doing your taxes, the one who invests your money or the one who sells you the house that you live in. We concentrate so much on the Middle East or on the slums of Los Angeles, and who is to say that down the road in the high school classroom our kids are any better than the scourge of society that we lift our nose to. The only factual statement you could make is that some are more transparent in their feelings and beliefs while most of us hide who we really are.
Sudhir felt himself getting light-headed, and the room seemed like it was spinning as everyone moved in slow motion. He felt the sluggish mire of being in quicksand as it holds your limbs and you go limp, trying not to sink into the oxygen-sucking pit of blackness. He raised himself up slowly and heard somebody ask him if he were okay. His face was turning paler than the white paper on his desk that held the news that pushed him into his imploding despair.
He shuffled down the hall, braced himself with his hand on the wall, and aimed for the bathroom and the closest stall to the door. He heaved the second the lid was pulled up as the door rang shut behind him, slapping against the latch, again and again, as he had failed to lock it closed. With every gasp, his backside banged against the door causing a loud crack as it rang back and forth.
The cold water from the white-stained porcelain sink was refreshing as he splashed his face. He dumped the water on the top of his head, letting it cascade down his forehead, dripping from his chin and nose. He felt the color slowly creeping back to his body as the flow of blood resumed. He made it back to his desk, pulled out his keys from the drawer ,and headed for his car. He heard somebody asking him something about where he was going or what was wrong, but felt his mouth slur as he mumbled an incoherent response.
He drove to the closest bar and spent the next several hours, drinking into a drunken stupor of scotch-induced numbness. He slowly forgot what it was that instigated his demise down the road of inebriation. He knew he was getting louder and louder with each passing hour, and it was only his familiarity with the nighttime crowd that kept him out of trouble. Eventually, Nathan the local bartender of the night, cut him off and called him a cab, insisting that he not get behind the wheel. A regular crowd in a bar routinely resembles a dysfunctional family of sorts. They do take care of each other to the best of their limited abilities.
The cab dropped him off in front of his house, and the driver seemed to take money out of his wallet, handing him back the worn brown leather container. Sudhir seemed to manage to put it back in his pocket. He, then, stumbled up his concrete drive as the cab pulled away, tripping over the familiar crack that raised up a couple of inches and hitting his head as it impacted against the hard surface.
That is where he lay for the evening. He was passed out in the 55 degree California weather. His kids lay tucked warmly in bed, having dreams of innocence and happiness that they felt might still be within their reach. They did not yet have to face the morbid reality of life as an adult where you come to understand that this is it. There is nothing more, and disappointment is the only truly God-given right that you are guaranteed to obtain.