Pam

by Druga, Jacqueline

“Where was your husband at the time?” He asked me.

  “Richie was at work. He wasn’t due home for a while. He had to work on Sharon’s car again,” I huffed out.

  “Why am I sensing anger there?”

  I shook my head. “Another time. Another story. Anyhow, he wasn’t there. My mom showed up. Said she’d bathe the baby so I left to finish my errands.”

  “Where did you go?”

  “Where didn’t I go? I was running errands. I … I stopped …”

  Dr. Andrews tilted his head. “Go on, you stopped where? Are you not remembering?”

  “Another story, another time.”

  “How about now.” He lifted his hands.

  I shook my head.

  “Pam. What do not want to tell me? You can trust me.”

  “I know.” I debated, and then I figured he’d find out sooner or later and it was all part of the story, right? After a pause, I told him. “I went to Richie’s garage. I thought maybe put some fire in his ass to get Sharon’s car done. He had it for a while. When I got there, I didn’t see her car. So I went inside, to tell him to get beer and to thank him for finishing the car. And I walked in, he was on the phone. I heard him.”

  I recanted what I heard ….

  ‘Baby, listen to me. I’ll tell her. I promise. Today. Today I will. I know we can’t keep using your car as an excuse.”

  He nodded at me and then asked. “How do you know who he was on the phone with?”

  Because I walked out after I heard him say, “Sharon, listen to me, I love you. You are not her.”

  One would think I hit Dr. Andrews with a concrete slab; he had this look of shock on his face.

  “He told Sharon ... your Sharon … that he loved her?”

  I nodded.

  “Are you sure it was Sharon?”

  “Yes, and it started to make sense. They were fighting an awful lot. Too much. She said he had her car forever.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I drove to the bank; I wanted to believe that it wasn’t her. Maybe another Sharon. But I saw her car. Parked in the lot. Sharon had been avoiding me for weeks saying she didn’t have a ride or she didn’t want to see Richie.”

  “So you hadn’t seen her in a while?”

  I shook my head. “No. So I went into the bank. It was crowded. I got a deposit slip and wrote on the back, ‘Are you having an affair with Richie?’ I took it to the window.”

  “So you called out Sharon?”

  I nodded. “But she ran. Ran out. Didn’t apologize. Didn’t say anything. She ran out of the bank. In fact, she looked angry. I stewed about it and left. I figured it would all come to a head.”

  “Had Richie ever cheated on you before?”

  “Yes, more times than I care to count.”

  Hands folded in a prayer fashion, he nodded. “Okay, so his telling you about the affair and leaving you wasn’t a blindside.”

  “He didn’t tell me about the affair, not the one with Sharon. We never got to talk about it. The day happened.”

  “So his testimony was a lie,” Dr. Andrews said.

  “Yes. We never spoke. Never again. I finished errands and returned home. Did that wife thing in the car and thought about what I was going to say to him after the party. I was upset, yes, but I didn’t know who I was upset with more.” I paused to catch my breath. “When I got home, I knew something was up. That’s when I saw the figure. There was a figure in the bush. I saw it. It moved. I thought it was a teenager and I went into the house. I went in the back way.”

  “Did you tell the police about the figure?”

  “I did. Just once. When I walked in, water was coming out the kitchen door.” Suddenly I lost all breath; I found it hard to breathe.

  “Pam. You okay?”

  I broke down. “The baby.”

  “You don’t have to continue.”

  I violently shook my head. “I have to say it. I never told anyone what I saw. What happened. No one. Not even the police. But please, never ask me again.”

  He nodded. “Agreed. But stop if it’s too much or too painful.”

  “Painful? It will never stop being painful. Ever. Every single morning for years, I would wake up and before I opened my eyes, I prayed to God it was a nightmare. A horrible nightmare. Then when I opened my eyes, I would be home and my babies would be fine. But it wasn’t a nightmare. And I’d be struck with this heartache that I physically felt. A pain that wouldn’t go away. It wasn’t a nightmare; it was real, and I’d never have my babies again.” I grabbed a tissue from his desk and swiped it hard across my face. “My mother tried. I saw that. The water was pink, the sink was still on. My mother was on the floor, holding Lizzy. She held my baby. She was covered in blood, her hands were sliced up as if she was trying to protect the baby.” I paused, the vision was still real in my mind. “And I cried out. I cried, ‘No’, and charged to find my other children. I thought of them. I hoped and prayed that they ran and hid or got out. But as soon as I got to the steps. Doyle was there. My little boy. My precious baby boy.”

  “Pam …”

  I lifted my hand, sniffed hard and looked at him. “They got him as he ran. I could tell. His hand was still on the steps. Then I heard it. A whimper. Mandy. Oh my God, I ran, I ran, calling out her name over and over. I ran into her room and didn’t see her. The room was trashed. Everything was thrown about. I called again and then I found her. She was on the floor by the bed.” I grabbed another tissue; blood rushed to my ears as I told the story and relieved it. The vision of my daughter, her tiny body saturated with blood with the knife still in her chest.

  I continued my story, “I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to leave her, but I had to get help. She was gasping for breath. Gasping. I called her name and slid my hands under her body and she opened her eyes …” I sobbed out the words. “She opened her eyes and said, ‘Mommy, please’. That was it. She didn’t move again. That was when Richie came in.”

  “What … what did he say? What did you do?”

  “He said, ‘what have you done? What have you done?’ and that was it. I remember screaming out and then it all went black. I don’t remember anything until the police showed up. They were grabbing me, Richie was screaming, I tried to call Sharon. My call wasn’t for help. It wasn’t. But they took the phone from me and said I was being ridiculous.”

  “Why, then, did you try to call Sharon?”

  I paused before answering that question. I didn’t know how he’d take it, or what he’d think of me for saying it.

  “Pam, why did you call Sharon?” he repeated his question.

  Another brief moment and then I finally answered his question, “Because I think she did it.”

  Chapter Fourteen – Desmond Andrews

  It would be hard put to find a therapist or psychiatrist who didn’t have a therapist or psychiatrist of his own. It just goes with the territory. The stress of the job requires an understanding ear.

  James Hathaway was my understanding ear and had been so since my days at State.

  I called James for an emergency ‘session’ as soon as Pam left my office.

  I was shaken. Shaken because all that I thought, all that I believed was out the window … sort of, in regards to Pam, that was.

  But I wasn’t there to see him or have a consult about Pam; it was about me and my handling of things.

  He agreed to the emergency session, and since we had a sort of friendly bond, we sat outside a nice little coffee shop. The side patio table afforded us privacy.

  “Dez, what is going on?” He asked in that ‘friend meets father’ way.

  I wouldn’t tell him details or too much; there were times I just needed to talk about my feelings, and after my session with Pam, I had to talk about those feelings.

  James had known me for very long time. Most of us in the field have OCD or are compulsive about something. I was. My disorder and the eventual remission of it led me to the field of psychiatry; if someone helped me, t
hen I needed to help someone else.

  He asked if I was feeling a ‘wave’ or ‘craving’; it was how we liked to refer to my weak times. I told him no; he was glad to hear that, until I said, not yet.

  “Dez, we can keep this in check, can’t we?”

  And I had, once again, after seeing James, years earlier.

  See, the truth is, I wasn’t formally relieved of duties at State. James, who was the senior State doctor, asked me to leave and get treatment. If I did and took a leave of absence, he would not tell the board.

  He warned me several times at State to put down Pam’s folder, but that wasn’t really what made him have the talk with me.

  One night, while doing a sleep study on a patient, James made a surprise appearance and caught me … servicing myself while watching the patient sleep.

  A Pee-wee Herman incident.

  I was embarrassed but I confessed that I had a problem. I was controlled by urges I didn’t want to have.

  I called them waves.

  I didn’t wake up wanting to have sex; often times, I didn’t think of it until something or someone caused a ‘wave’. Once I was hit with the wave, I felt insatiable.

  The problem started when I was sixteen years old, but back then I was more out of control. I had sex with anyone when those waves hit. I mean anyone.

  A person who isn’t a sexual addict hasn’t a clue how the waves take over your every though; you are consumed with the desire to have sex. Fantasies run rampant, and the urges can drive you crazy.

  Being the good Catholic boy that I was, I confessed to a priest. He actually understood it and didn’t condemn me. He found me help.

  I was medicated for years and went on to live normally until I felt I could stop the medication.

  When I did, it barreled back, and I found my trigger lay with the forbidden.

  I’m talking odd forbidden, not illegal. Odd. Like sleeping woman, sad women, any woman and sometimes men that I found helpless or dangerous. The fouler a prostitute the harder the erection.

  Unfortunately, in my field, I ran across many of these people.

  I never had sex with a patient, nor would I. Not in a conventional way. But in my fantasies they invited me to their homes, welcomed me into their beds or performed fellatio on me before they left my office after a session.

  Whenever the waves hit me and became frequent, I’d go back on medication, wean off, and be good for while.

  It had been a while since a ‘wave’ had hit me. James congratulated me on that.

  Over that coffee, I told him about the new patient and how I felt a sadness for her, a connection to her and wanted to hear more of her story.

  “You have an obsessive personality. You remember how you got over that Perkins case.”

  I nodded. I also didn’t tell him I ended up with that case, because I was certain he would try to convince me to give it to someone else.

  “So I don’t understand why you needed to see me,” he said. “Is it just that you feel compulsive about this patient?”

  “I think about her case all the time. It’s not interfering in my other cases.”

  “Not yet?”

  “I hope not.”

  “Just call me. I think you’re good. Maybe it’s just an interesting patient.”

  “That she is.” I smiled.

  James asked a lot of questions, all the right ones. I felt better after I met with him and less guilty for my obsession. I felt like a floodgate opened and I could freely schedule to see her more.

  She needed it and, oddly enough, so did I.

  Chapter Fifteen – Sharon

  Hartford was north of Willow Creek, and my current home was south of my old town. But I felt compelled to drive to Hartford.

  My intention was to stop at the Willow Creek nursing home and visit my father, sneak in and out of town before Pam arrived in her well media noted quest for the truth. But I passed the exit and kept going.

  My rash of memories of Marion Blake was the catapult for my visit.

  I remembered very well where that auto body shop was, and I found it with ease. It was no longer a car shop, but a Vito Electronic store. Televisions graced the windows, and the exterior of the apartment upstairs had received a facelift of new siding. On the window of the apartment was a for rent sign. I thought about going up there and looking at the apartment, but I didn’t know if I could handle it.

  It was like visiting the scene of a crime. A crime I didn’t commit.

  I knew Pam had a dark side, but that side of her only came out to protect what was hers. That’s was one of the reasons I had a hard time believing before the trial that she would hurt her children.

  They were hers.

  But what it boiled down to wasn’t the kids; they were pawns and tools in her keeping Richie.

  In reflection, everything was in protection of Richie. It was a fatal attraction. She did whatever she could to hold on to him as tightly as she could. Having one child after another. … that was probably why Richie was so wayward. Her grip was so tight that he reached for freedom.

  No, that couldn’t have been all of it. Richie was wayward even in school.

  He started school late so he matured earlier than most. When a lot of girls dismissed him for his awkwardness, Pam didn’t. She got him.

  But then he craved attention and ran with it.

  He loved attention, which was also one of the reasons I thought Richie had killed his kids.

  He was tired of being tied down, he wanted to move on, Pam was having another child.

  It made perfect sense. No one even looked at him as a suspect. No one. Until that day in the trial, I doubted his innocence. Then I heard his testimony. Richie wasn’t an actor. He couldn’t lie his way out of an affair when he as busted. His testimony was not a lie.

  But was it really all true?

  Richie took something to his grave about that day; we’ll never know what that was. I feel that because that son, that child born of a madwoman, believes her innocence.

  All those years he spent with his father, and not once did Richie tarnish her memory. Not once did he tell Justin that his mother was a maniac and killed his siblings.

  Why?

  The events of that fateful day had changed and disturbed me so much that I buried all reason about it with the verdict.

  Standing outside that apartment, I realized that I was just as guilty as anyone else because I dismissed, ignored, and even covered up events that had occurred. Not just Marion Blake, but a lot of other things that could have been signs and warnings leading up to that tragic birthday.

  Too self-absorbed to care back then, I vowed not to make the same mistake.

  Because it dawned on me right there and then as I looked at the televisions in Vito’s store that there was another child’s life at stake.

  But did I really care enough, or want to emerge from my protective shadows and intervene?

  Chapter Sixteen – Pam

  In my day, in my time, before I was locked away, when you needed to find something out or do some research, you went to the library.

  It still held true in a sense, only in a new way; in 2004, research was done a heck of a lot differently.

  Dr. Andrews was set to meet Justin to see if the boy’s intentions were true, and if so, he’d arrange a meeting with us.

  I liked Dr. Andrews; there was a connection between the two of us that I couldn’t put my finger on it. As if we knew each other before that first office visit or we had some sort of kinship connection. Although I highly doubt he was diagnosed with some sort of mental illness, you never know. I heard the least sane are those who help the insane.

  I spoke to him on our last visit, telling him that I wanted to start my investigation. He suggested that before I go into Willow Brook, I do some research, perhaps starting with the murders that prompted my sister to seek the help of Freedom Project.

  Personally, I don’t see how murders in the late 1990s could remotely be connected to me. But I�
��d look. In fact, I’d try to look into all unsolved murders in the Willow Brook, Colville, Jamestown, Hartford, and New Haven areas.

  I knew it wasn’t going to be easy. Research never was.

  Perhaps there was a book or something. I envisioned myself at the campus library, going through hours and hours of microfilm of newspapers looking at stories, because I don’t know exactly when these murders took place.

  I headed to the campus library; I thought their resources would be bigger than the local one. They asked for my driver’s license. I was reluctant to comply because of my name. But the young man, whom I’ll assume was a volunteer, didn’t notice. He filled in the information and immediately made me a library card.

  I looked in awe at the thing that resembled a credit card.

  I even chuckled because it was nothing like the paper cards we had years earlier.

  But even I knew that the best resource was the librarian. They were typically historians as well. Surely, she would help me. More than likely, she’d instruct me to go to the local libraries of each community. If I had to, I would.

  But I thought I'd asked first.

  “Can I speak to your librarian?” I asked the young man.

  “She’s in her office. Is there a problem?”

  “I wanted to ask her some question about some research I need to do. It’s been so long since I’ve been to a library; last I recall the librarians were pretty good at that.”

  “I’m good at it.”

  “Really?” I said. “You’re so young.”

  “They train us well.”

  I thought immediately that they didn’t train him too well, considering he didn’t recognize my name. Then again, we were in a bigger town, and why would he give it a second thought.

  “Unsolved murders in the Colville, Jamestown, New Haven areas. Hartford, too. She would know where I’d look in the card catalog.”

  He choked out a laugh. “I’m sorry.”

  “What?” I was confused.

  “We don’t use the card catalog anymore. Not really.”

  “You don’t use the Dewey decimal system?”