A Stolen Life_ A Memoir - Jaycee Dugard [60]
Before she fell I had only seen her a couple of times. She knew me as Allissa, the sister of the girls that Nancy brought over from down the street, which was the story that Phillip told her. Sometimes I think he would say these are your grandkids, too. I’m not sure what she thought. She didn’t do much after she retired; just watched TV all day and sometimes went shopping with her sister Celia, the one Phillip gave my cat to. After Pat’s fall, Celia died and Nancy had to tell her. Some days she remembered and others she didn’t. The Parkinson’s was eating her body and the dementia was eating her mind. It’s a sad thing. Maybe it’s better that she will never truly know that her son did such an evil thing.
Discovery and Reunion
On August 24th, Phillip took the girls to the FBI office in San Francisco. He said that he liked to take the girls with him because he thought that people were more apt to listen when they were with him. I thought that at least it gave the girls a chance to get out of the house for a little bit. We had not been able to go anywhere during that year because we had to take care of Pat and she couldn’t be left home alone for long. The advanced stages of Parkinson’s and dementia were taking a toll on her.
When Phillip and the girls returned home later that afternoon, everything seemed normal. I asked how it went and if everything went the way he wanted it to. And he said he had met two cops from the Berkeley campus who were very interested in what he presented. He said “they flipped” (a term he used often when describing people’s reactions) and were excited to hear more about his discovery, which was that others could hear him speaking with the power of his mind with the aid of his “black box.” He also dropped off his documents entitled “Schizophrenia Revealed” to the FBI office in San Francisco that day, too. He said he was met with similar reactions. According to Phillip, this was it and he was finally going to be able to move forward with his “God’s Desire” church and “fight for God.” I really didn’t think too much about what he said that day because I had heard it countless times before. The truth is, I didn’t want to think about it because I didn’t want to be disappointed again. Time and again he would tell me that we would finally get going and the kids could have a real tutor and we wouldn’t have to work so hard just to get by. Deep down inside I secretly held the hope that someday if he made it big, he would return me to my mom. So it was easier for me to just concentrate on the jobs I had to do and not ask too many questions. I learned not to ask too many questions to protect myself from constantly being disappointed with his answers that were always vague and repetitious.
The next day, the 25th, I was in the “backyard office” finishing up a print job that was due the next day. The girls were outside playing. Nancy was in the house taking care of Pat, and Phillip was probably also in the house, either sleeping or reading the Bible. It was approximately five p.m. All of a sudden, Nancy came running in to tell me Phillip had been arrested. I was in shock. At first I thought she was joking, but then I saw the worry on her face. I told her to calm down, everything would be fine. Phillip always said if anything ever happened that we just needed to get a lawyer, so I told her we should look in the Yellow Pages for a lawyer and a bail bondsman. I told her that Phillip would use his one phone call to call us and he would tell us what to do. I didn’t want to alarm