KooKooLand (51 page)

And it wasn't just the jailers who weren't keen on Susan.

I ran into a roadblock at the Manchester library too. When the friendly librarian learned that I wanted to search the archives to find information about Susan, she became unfriendly. “You don't want to read about
her
,” she insisted. I had to practically twist the old bat's arm to get her to show me the microfilm.

I didn't get any better reception at the local newspaper. I tried to place an ad to solicit information on Susan's whereabouts, but no amount of cajoling could get the paper to run it.

I reached out to some of Susan's relatives. I spoke to her uncle Ted, an ornery man who reminded me a lot of his younger brother, Hank. Ted had an
additional reason to despise Susan. Susan had swiped the gun she'd used to kill Hank from Ted's son, Mark. Ted didn't know if his murderous, thieving niece was dead or alive, but the one thing he was one hundred percent certain of was that Susan had killed more people than she ever got caught for. In fact, she'd killed her own mother and made poor Hank take the fall for it.

“But she was away at college and Hank's truck was seen leaving the house,” I said, incredulous.

Ted looked like he wanted to take a swing at me.

Clearly, he was not going to be of much help.

As a last resort, I turned to Jimmy. If anyone could get a line on where a druggie or thief was holed up, it was him.

Jimmy had settled right back into living with Shirley after his close brush with the law. I didn't talk to either of them very often. When I did, Shirley said Jimmy was a new man. I thought he sounded like the same old Jimmy. Dealing pills, gambling, boozing—but hey, in moderation so he wouldn't get caught by his probation officer.

When Jimmy heard about my search for Susan he told me he'd ask around, but take it from him, I was wasting my goddamn time.

“What is it with you and that hophead? Forget about her, will ya, once and for all! She's rotting in a ditch somewhere. Right where she belongs.”

If anyone deserved to be rotting in a ditch, it was him, but I didn't tell him that. The last thing I wanted was to get him all riled up. He'd already purchased a few guns under the table to replace the ones he'd had to get rid of when he got pinched. A hunting buddy was keeping them for him so Jimmy's probation officer wouldn't find them during his periodic searches of the apartment.

At the time Jimmy bought those guns, he'd called and offered to hook me up with one of my own.

“You need a piece to defend yourself against those niggers in L.A. the next time some lowlife Rodney King fires them up.”

If I needed a piece, it was to get peace from him.

But still, I said no. I didn't trust myself not to pull a Susan and use it on him.

Unable to talk me into getting a gun, Jimmy sent me a can of Mace instead. I stuck it in my underwear drawer and it leaked all over my lingerie.

No doubt he'd gotten it from Uncle Barney, who was still out there moving lousy merchandise.

Jimmy's efforts to find Susan were a dud too.

But he did turn up some upsetting information about her brother, Terry.

He had killed himself at the age of forty.

It seemed incredible. Every member of Susan's family had died violently.

“There's a curse on that family,” said Jimmy, sounding like he wanted to spit. “Don't get yourself in the middle of it.”

I asked him if he knew whether Terry had ever reconciled with Susan.

“Nah, he never had nothin' to do with her. That's what I heard, anyway. Look, I'm tellin' ya, just forget about that hophead. She's gotta be a goner by now.”

But I refused to throw in the towel.

“Something tells me she's still out there. I just feel it.”

“Ya know, you woulda got creamed in the ring,” said Jimmy. “You won't even go down when you're beat.”

He was right. If life was a boxing match—and that's what he'd always taught me it was—I wanted to be the last one standing.

I never,
never
wanted to give up.

So, I went back to where I started. I began calling people in the prison system again. I was convinced one of them must have a bead on Susan. One of them must know
something
.

And at long last, as Jimmy would say,
badoom
—I hit the target.

I got a parole officer on the phone, a guy I'd never spoken to before. He'd been on the job only a few months and I guess he didn't know enough to clam up like everyone else. He told me Susan was incarcerated, had been incarcerated the whole time I had been looking for her. She'd been in the women's prison for a while but they couldn't handle her there and had shipped her off to the men's prison in Concord. She was now in a mini prison within the men's prison, the secure psychiatric unit. SPU—pronounced
spew
—housed the most severely mentally ill criminals, men mostly and a few women. When I called back a prison official I had previously spoken to and told him I knew Susan was in SPU, he seemed surprised I knew and finally admitted that she was there. He grudgingly agreed to check with her treatment team and see if she was well enough to have a visit from me.

I waited and called and waited and called and waited and called. Finally, I got an answer. No visit. Sorry. Tough luck.

I asked if I could at least write to Susan. The prison official said I could try but he wasn't sure they'd pass on the letters. Over a few months I wrote to her several times. The letters were never returned, but I never heard anything back. My biggest fear was that Susan had gotten the letters and didn't want anything to do with me. Or maybe I'd stirred things up for her and made her worse. I
pictured her getting a letter and freaking out and being put in a straitjacket. I didn't know if they still gave shock treatments in those places, but I pictured that too.

One day, with nothing to lose, I picked up the phone and called SPU directly. I was persistent and got the director of the unit on the phone. I told her I was an old family friend of Susan's. I told her I'd been searching for Susan for a long, long time. I told her Susan had been my inspiration to make something of my life.

There was a long pause.

The woman made no promises but said she'd see what she could do.

The next day, a sunny March morning in L.A., my phone rang early.

The caller's voice was throaty and playful, and I would've known it anywhere.

“This is Susan . . . Piasecny . . . Hughes . . . Adair,” she said, pausing between each word for maximum dramatic effect.

I leaned against the wall to hold myself up. I said her name over and over, like the mantra it had once been for me.

Susan. Susan. Susan.

I finally managed to ask how she was. She laughed and said she was pretty good—except for being locked up with a bunch of lunatics. I was relieved to see she still had that sense of humor. In fact, I thought she sounded pretty good.

She said she couldn't stay on the phone because she was on the director's line, but she gave me a number to call back on.

I hung up and let out a scream.

My husband hugged me.

“You found her,” he said. “You finally found her.”

I dialed Susan right back. We spoke for two hours that morning and another two that afternoon. There was so much to catch up on.

We talked about Susan's life over the past several years, her fight to get released from prison, her third marriage to a man who had died, her isolation from her family.

“There's just one thing I'd like to know—how's my brother doing?” she asked.

“I—I'll try to find out,” I stammered.

I didn't know how to tell her about Terry.

Then she asked about Jimmy and Shirley.

I didn't dodge that question. I told her what Jimmy had done to Shirley.

She said Shirley should dump him and join me in California.

“That was my dream, remember, to move out there. Hey, maybe I can come visit you too when I get out?”

“Yeah, maybe,” I said, trying not to sound too ambivalent. I wasn't sure Susan visiting me would be such a hot idea. After all, she was an addict, possibly crazy, and a bit of a con artist. I knew she'd crept into a man's house in the middle of the night and shot him dead, even if it was sort of justified.

I knew she wasn't the person I had imagined her to be when I was nine.

That person had never really existed.

After all these years, I was just getting to know her.

“Can you come visit me?” she asked shyly.

“I'm coming,” I replied, with no hesitation.

Before I could visit, the prison authorities had to run a felony check on me. I assured them they wouldn't find anything. I was so squeaky clean I didn't even have a parking ticket.

“You turned out to be a real Dudley Do-Right,” complained Jimmy, when I told him about the felony check. “Don't you ever just wanna go out and raise hell?”

“Nope.”

I'd seen enough hell; I didn't need to raise any more.

While I waited to be approved for a visit, Susan called me constantly. My phone bills soared, but I couldn't refuse her calls. She had no one else to talk to.

All this time she kept asking about her brother. She told me she'd decorated her cell with images of men that reminded her of him—great athletes and handsome movie stars.

After clearing it with her doctor, I haltingly told her the truth.

She was pained to hear that Terry had died, but not surprised to learn he had killed himself. She said Terry, the strapping ex-boxer, had been pummeled by depression for years.

Hearing that, I was knocked for a loop. I'd spent so much of my childhood wishing I'd been born a boy—a big, strong, fighting boy like Terry. I thought my life would be better if I was a boy. I thought Jimmy would love me more if I could lace up some gloves, get in the ring, and beat someone silly until they tasted their own blood. But I could now see it wouldn't have made a difference.

Boy or girl, son or daughter, life as Hank or Jimmy's kid would've always been a fight. And, sometimes, like Terry, you just went down.

I
left California and flew back to New Hampshire to see Susan. I rented a car and drove north from Manchester to Concord on a pleasant day in June. As I got close to the prison, the sky turned dark as if some numbskull up there had forgotten to pay the electric bill. The moment I pulled into the driveway, three shards of lightning sliced through the darkness and the clouds spilled their guts.

I shook my head. Too frickin' unbelievable.

I ran through the downpour and entered the main reception area, clammy from the rain and my anxiety. While I waited to get checked in, a guard, seeing my driver's license, began to kid me about California. Wasn't I afraid of getting buried in an earthquake? Or creamed on the freeway? Or frostbitten from those brutal winters?

Compared to this place, I joked back, fault lines, traffic, and perpetual sunshine suit me just fine.

After checking in, I was directed to a more remote area of the property, where the secure psychiatric unit was tucked away.

I was buzzed through several thick metal doors and took a filthy elevator up to SPU. I carried five bucks in change—all I was allowed to bring in—to buy Cheez Doodles and Kit Kats for Susan from the vending machines.

Although the main waiting room, where I'd checked in, had been jammed with visitors, the waiting room at SPU was totally empty. I figured the SPU patients were so far gone, most of their relatives had written them off.

I sat down on an orange plastic chair that was bolted to the floor, and nervously waited for someone to bring Susan. A noisy air conditioner blew cold air over my damp body. I wished I'd brought a sweater. I wished I wasn't so nervous. I wished Susan and I were meeting on a warm beach somewhere.

Five . . . ten . . . twenty . . . minutes went by, and still no Susan. I wondered if she was as anxious as I was. I wondered if she was going to stand me up.

Finally, the door buzzed open.

Susan walked through it, all spiffed up, like she was on a first date.

I jumped up to meet her.

She sauntered toward me with an impish smile. Though she had warned me that prison, Percodans, and poor health had taken their toll on her appearance, I would have recognized her anywhere. Now fifty-six, she was still quite attractive. Her dark hair was cut in a cool spiky-on-top, long-tail-in-the-back style. Her light olive skin was unlined and radiant. Her mink-brown eyes still seemed to have a hint of gold.

She turned to the guard and asked if she was allowed to give me a hug, or what. She'd never had a visitor and didn't know the drill. The guard nodded, bored.

We embraced and it wasn't awkward at all. My nervousness disappeared faster than those five bucks.

For three hours we ate piles of junk food and gossiped like old girlfriends. We talked about our fathers, of course, and about my life in the outside world.

She asked if I was going to have any pip-squeaks of my own. I told her I was scared I'd be a crummy parent. Scared of passing on Jimmy's genes. Just. Plain. Scared. I said it was miracle enough that I had a great marriage. I didn't want to push my luck.

She said she had a couple of stepkids from her third marriage but didn't see them anymore. She said she didn't see anyone from the outside anymore but tried not to get down about it.

Her Christianity got her through, she insisted. She took a stab at converting me, but I told her it was way too late for that. Jimmy had gotten to me first. I was an agnostic like him and didn't think that was going to change.

We moved on to talking about other things—Monica Lewinsky, the Oklahoma City bombers, cloning. She was still up on everything.

She kidded me to hurry up and write something about her already, she wasn't getting any younger. She reminded me she'd done some acting in high school and would be open to taking a part in the movie of her life.