Becoming Odyssa - Jennifer Pharr Davis [90]
I saw the rope tied to the rafters, tautly connecting to the neck of a young man. His face was pale and framed by smooth, black hair. His eyes were closed, and his head was cocked to the side above his gruesome collar of rope.
He was wearing a maroon shirt and loose green khakis. His hands were tied behind his back. His fingers were clasped together, and the thin twine was cutting into his skin. His black shoes pointed to the cement floor, with nothing between them and the ground but three feet of air.
I couldn’t breathe; my stomach churned and my eyes watered. I turned and ran. I tried to run as fast as I could, but everything seemed to be happening in slow motion, and my feet stumbled over the rocks. The scene I had just witnessed was preserved in perfect detail in my mind, but my thoughts were moving too rapidly to provide answers.
What had I just seen? Was it a suicide? Was it a murder? Were there other people around? Was this a sick joke? Why were his hands tied? Had I really just seen what I thought I saw, or was my mind playing tricks on me? What do I do?
What do I do? That question stopped the stream of inquiries, and when I was about four hundred yards from the pavilion, I stopped, pulled out my cell phone, and called 911.
I spoke with a dispatcher, who immediately patched me through to the local police. I choked out the details to the police officer. He began to reassure me and give me instructions—and that’s when I lost him. My cell phone had dropped the call.
Frantic, I again dialed 911 and began to talk to a different dispatcher. I told her the same thing that I had told the first dispatcher and the cop, but she refused to reconnect me with police.
“I need to know where your car is,” she said.
“I don’t have a car. I hiked here.”
“Well, where did you park your car?”
“I didn’t park anywhere. I’m an Appalachian Trail thru-hiker.”
“What county are you in?”
“I don’t know what county I’m in. I’m at Sunrise Mountain in New Jersey.”
“So where do you live in New Jersey?”
“I don’t live in New Jersey.”
“Then where is your car?”
“Please, I just came across a dead body, I need to talk to the police. I was just talking to them and I got cut off. Please connect me to the police.”
“First tell me where your car is. Then I will connect you to the police.”
I was scared, I knew I would probably lose cell reception again, and all I wanted to do was talk with the police. Losing my composure, I begin crying into the phone and asking over and over if I could talk to the police. The woman insisted that I calm down and refused to patch me through. But her chiding simply increased my hysterics.
Finally, I took a deep breath and began mumbling an explanation of thru-hiking.
The woman interrupted my second sentence and asked how hiking some trail that started in Georgia was relevant to a death in New Jersey.
“Who are you talking to?” I heard a man’s voice in the background addressing the dispatcher, and then I heard him say, “Patch her through to the police now.”
When I was reconnected with the police, they seemed to know more about the body and the pavilion than I remembered telling them. It didn’t make sense until they called me Susan.
“My name’s not Susan,” I replied.
“You’re not Susan? Have you spoken with the officers at the pavilion?”
“There aren’t any officers at the pavilion.”
“Yes, there are.”
Twenty minutes must have passed since I talked with the initial officer, and within that time another woman, a local day-hiker, had approached Sunrise Mountain pavilion from a parking lot on the north side of the mountain and witnessed the same sight that now haunted me.
The police had been alerted by my initial call, but after I lost the connection, Susan called, and from that point on, they assumed we were the same person. It wasn’t until I assured them that I was not Susan and did not have an officer standing beside me that they sorted out the confusion.
The voice on the other line then asked me to approach the pavilion and talk with an officer.
With a weak and shaky voice, I responded,