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Having finished my conversation with Detective Clark, I spent the rest of the day pondering what had happened. I was still very upset by the way the police had mishandled the whole situation, but I also couldn’t stop thinking about Alan’s role in all of this. Had he put his friend up to this, or was Alan truly unaware of what his friend had done? I wanted to find the truth.
The next morning, I called Alan to talk to him about what had happened. He didn’t answer, so I left a voice mail. "Hi Alan, this is Dave, the guy in the tent", I said. "Listen, I’m out-of-town right now but I just heard about the incident at my tent. I’m getting a lot of broken information and I don’t want to draw the wrong conclusions about you, so please give me a call so we can talk about what happened."
About an hour later, my phone rang. I didn’t recognize the number but answered anyway.
"Hi, this is Dave", I said.
"Hi Dave, this is Tracy, Alan’s wife", said the caller.
In the two years that I had lived in Brandy Station, I had never met Tracy, but I had heard about her. She had a bad reputation with the people I knew. While Alan seemed somewhat reasonable about things, she was apparently obsessed with my tent being so close to her house. My friends had described her as being controlling, obsessive, and manipulative, so I wasn’t quite sure how this conversation was going to go.
"Alan’s busy right now. He’s gonna call you back tonight but I just wanted to reach out to you and talk about this. I’m so sorry about what happened. We had nothing to do with it. I told Alan that his friend was bad news. He’s Alan’s friend, not mine, by the way. I’m just so sorry that this happened", she said.
I said very little during the conversation, but she went on talking for nearly an hour. She was very polite and respectful. She admitted that she didn’t like the tent there, but said that she would never do anything like call the police. And since the incident, she said that her life was a mess. Apparently she and Alan were receiving unwanted phone calls from the guy in jail in West Virginia.
It was an odd call. Tracy’s voice sounded sincere, she even cried a few times during the conversation, but the things that she said didn’t add up somehow, and the whole thing left me with more questions than answers. Why did she feel so compelled to reach out to me when she herself hadn’t done anything wrong? Was she just a really compassionate and empathetic person? Not according to my friends. And why was the guy in jail harassing her if she wasn’t somehow involved in all of this? What could he possibly have to say that was so urgent? And why did she emphasize that he was Alan’s friend, and not hers? So I wouldn’t think badly of her? But why would she care what I thought when we’d never even met?
It was a very odd call indeed, and Alan never did call back.
I would find out a few days later that thing weren’t adding up for the police, either. It was the phone calls from jail that finally led them to investigate Alan and Tracy. Like me, they felt that the whole thing was just too coincidental and that Alan and Tracy may have had a part in it. They investigated for over three months, but in the end couldn’t find enough evidence to charge them. I can only conclude, therefore, that Alan and Tracy are completely innocent in this matter, for they have not been proven guilty.
Maybe I’ll have a chance to talk to Alan about all of this someday, but then again, maybe not.
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