In August of 2012
Melinda went to Jail. She had always been funny about the
police. She had told us she had been
sexual assaulted by an officer many years before. One night in early August, she and her
boyfriend were coming back from Alexandria, in her truck, and for whatever
reason the cops in her town pulled her over, about 5 miles from her house. The truck was registered in one of her son’s
name, and the insurance was also in his name.
Melinda produced an expired out of state license. Her boyfriend also produced an out of state
license, as he had recently moved to Louisiana.
Melinda had been in Louisiana for 11 years. She always gave me some bull shit about,
somebody else had stolen her identity, and that’s why she had never got a new
license. I do believe she had a state
issued ID however. They usually don’t
run you when you get those.
Since they were out of state, the police officer ran a
nationwide search on their licenses. My
guess is to make sure the truck was not stolen.
Melinda’s boyfriend came up clean, but Melinda’s past had come back to
haunt her. She popped on a warrant out
of Tennessee. She was wanted for
stealing an excess of $10,000. The
warrant seemed to have been issued about the time she moved to Louisiana. She called me crying, told me she was being
arrested, and to come and get JB. I got in the car and immediately drove the 15
or so miles to her.
Melinda was booked into jail, and spent the next 17 days
there while things were sorted out. I
was not involved in the process to bond her out, and after a few days one of
JB’s brothers came to get him. I think
he had about 5 brothers or so. I wrote
Melinda in jail, went to see her, did what I could for her, and talked to her
the phone. Our Lughnasa ritual that
year, consisted of us talking to her in jail.
We were on the phone in ritual circle, telling her how much we believed
in her innocence, and how much we loved her.
About that time I had a conversation with one of her sons, because
some of this stuff was just not adding up.
I begin to ask him a host of
questions such as:
Is your mother a witch?
Did she raise your pagan? Was
your grandmother really a witch? Is
there a family tradition of witches in your family? He told me no to all the above, and that as
far as he knew, his mother had been raised a Jehovah Witness, and still was.
I asked him if she had worked as contractor and built
houses, as she told us she had. He said
No. That she had worked with them in the
office, but never in the field. Which
made since to me. Melinda had been
having electrical problems for a long time in her house. She said she knew all about electricity, but
would not fix her problems. A few weeks
before she was arrested, Melinda had seen sparks coming from a socket in her
bedroom. She replaced it herself. On our workday, Jay looked at the
socket. He found it was improperly
installed. He told me that if he had not
fixed it could have burned the house down.
Now don’t you think someone with electrical experience should know how
to redo a simple socket?
I finally asked Melinda’s son if he thought the charges
against his mother could be true? Could
she have really stolen the money? He
said, while he thought she would never steal from an individual, he believed
she could defiantly steal from a company.
This made a lot of since to me, occasionally she would tell
me she had to borrow against her check. She told me she had something to do
with payroll. I knew she bought heavily
on Ebay. In cleaning out her house I
found what had been an old bathroom, full of Ebay boxes. Most of them contained yarn. She called it her yarn room. It was stacked floor to ceiling. It was on of
those rooms that if you opened the door you would kill yourself. It
just did not add up. Melinda was very
poor, where in the hell was she getting money for that much yarn?
Melinda was fired while she was in jail. When she asked to come and get her things,
she was told that the lawyers had advised against it. She was told that everything she had had her
hands on was now being scrutinized by accountants. I still have no idea, if she had been
stealing from her current job. I have
heard rumors, but I will not print them here.
It was my guess that if she was not allowed back on the property, she
probable had been, and it had probable been a lot.
Melinda would spend her 50th birthday in
jail. While she was there, she called to
tell us that she thought she was pregnant.
This ruse she would keep up for months, even after she and were no long
friends. Melinda had told Juno, the baby
was not viable, or she had miscarried. I forget which one. We ran into Melinda’s old boyfriend some
years later, he told us they had finally gone to the dr., who told them she not pregnant. When she insisted, she was. The Dr. told them they had run the test twice
and not only was she not pregnant, she had not been pregnant at any time as of
late. We were not the only ones she was
conning.
When Melinda got out of jail she refused to go home. Even with JB she did not want to be alone in
that house, so JB stayed with his brother, and she came to live with me. That
lasted all of two weeks. You never
really know someone, until you live with them.
Melinda showed us her true colors during that time.
My feelings towards Melinda, as oh-highly-exalted-one, had
begun to change that summer, as I watched the way she treated JB and me, while
we worked so hard to clean her house.
There were few thank you’s, lots of discussion on how we had done it things
wrong, and her unwillingness to help in most of that project. I still have no idea if she cleaned between
the times I was there. I was beginning
to see that everything was about Melinda.
On the one year anniversary of my hospitalization, I could
feel my stress level rising. I had a
feeling that I was going to have another attack, and I was right. Melinda had taken to cleaning my house,
doing the wash and the cooking, all the while telling me how I was doing it
wrong. I never asked her to do any of
that, she just took it upon herself. I
remember getting frustrated at Melinda, and going to be in my bedroom. I was
sitting in Princess’ bed when Jay walked in.
I told him, “I’m going to pop.
You’ve got to get her out of my house!”
He said, “She’s your friend. You
get her out.”
Within a few minutes I was in a full blown panic
attack. My pills did not help and I
regressed to about 6 years old. I spent
most of that day coloring. I was not
taken to the hospital, to my great relief.
We knew it would pass. Melinda
could not have been more wonderful to me, while all this was going on. She sat and colored with me, and fixed me
grill cheese sandwiches. It took most of
the day, to “grow up,” but by the time I went to bed that night I felt like my
normal self. No one outside the family,
and doctors had ever seen me have an attack.
I was still in counseling with Barb at the time. I had a session with her not long after my
attack. I told her what was going on
with Melinda. Barb told me I needed to
set boundaries with her. I needed to
start telling her, “No.” I did and that’s when things started getting really
ugly.
JB had gone back to school and had broken his arm. Now whether his bullies did it, or he did it
on accident, I was never really clear on.
So Melinda was terrified to drive, so we went to pick up JB and take him
to the hospital. He is in quite a bit of
pain at this point. Melinda is insistent
that we must stop at the library to make copies, and then to the post office.
“I must get Tennessee off my back,” she kept insisting. She was more concerned about her own shit,
then her child’s own pain.
The warrant Melinda had been arrested on was expired, but
had never been taken out of the system.
When she called the clerk’s office, to find out who had filed charges
against her, the folder was blank. At
least that is what she told me. Who
knows if it was true? All they could
tell her is the date that the incident was said to have occurred and where. Melinda was released when Tennessee decided,
they did not want her. She was trying to
prove her innocence, by mailing affidavits that she was not even in the county,
where this had occurred, on the date in question.
So she made me make all these stops, before we even could
really get going, to take JB to the hospital.
We were about 15 miles from her house when she says, “Stop! We’ve got to go back to the house. I forgot to get the ham.”
“No Melinda. I am
tried, JB is hurting. There are other
things to eat at my house.” I said. I also knew that ham was more than two weeks
old, and probable no good. Melinda
becomes angry and suddenly hits her phone hard against the car door. Now it was a nice day and were ridding with
the windows down. So when she hit the
phone against the door, it suddenly goes flying out the window, going 60
mph. Melinda yells at me to pull
over. She has to have her phone. I did, and I let her and JB search for
it. I was getting really tired of her
attitude, the way she was treating me, and I was feeling like I was being used.
Ilsa
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