WALKABOUT - Taking a Mulligan (101 - 105)

101

Ty Hamilton

Reposition Cruise Day 2

The next morning, I felt better, and was looking forward to exploring the ship after redressing my arm and having some breakfast. I suppose I should have made a point of mingling among my fellow passengers, but I still wasn’t up to it. I had a lot to process mentally, and a lot of healing to do physically. My cruise would take thirty-six days. This was Day 2. I would socialize when I was ready, and not before.

I decided the first thing I should do was hook up the computer. There was barely enough room for it on the desk, but barely enough is enough. I’d felt dumb, lugging around a desktop in my luggage, and I felt dumb setting it up.

I’d use it for now, but first chance I got, I was going to use Mulligan’s credit card to buy a laptop. That thought prompted me to let the credit card company know that I would be travelling. Otherwise, when I least expected it, the charges would not be approved. I’ve had that happen before. Once in the U.S. which was no big deal. Easy to take care of. And once in Europe, which was a royal pain in the ass.

Still close enough to shore to receive a signal, I picked up the cell phone and tapped in the number on the back of the card. The voice menu prompted me to enter the card number. And then my mother’s maiden name.

Oops. I hung up.

What would Mulligan’s mother’s maiden name be? Or would it be Welch’s mother’s maiden name? He certainly wouldn’t have needed to make a note of that. How could I find it?

My mind began to race, taking into consideration all the many things such as knowing your mother’s maiden name, and much, much more, that comprise a life, an identity. My life, now. My identity.

Did he—Did I, Jared Mulligan, have friends? Most people have friends. Some have really close lifelong friends. I, on the other hand, think of myself as being by nature friendly, but never get too close to anyone. I have always preferred to keep the rest of the world at arm’s length.

The questions kept coming, faster than I could process them. What did Mulligan do for a living? Who did he work for? Who did he work with? Did he own a business? Did he belong to any clubs? What were his hobbies? Did he live alone? Where did he bank? What were his assets? Cash; investments; stocks; bonds; 401K; jewelry; personal property? Real estate; liquid assets; ATM card; credit or debit cards? Debts? Who did he owe? And, how much? I really didn’t care about any of it, except, I was now Jared Mulligan . . . and these are all things you really ought to know about yourself!

And, perhaps the biggest question of all—could I really pull this off? I thought of the consequences of being found out. Arrest. Charged with murder and identity theft. Prison. A hot wave of fear flushed through from my head down through my toes. I was all in now. No turning back.

102

Ty Hamilton

Reposition Cruise Day 3

We would be going through the Panama Canal locks in a few minutes, and I didn’t want to miss it. The decks were already filling up with people. I didn’t particularly want to be standing shoulder to shoulder, packed like sardines, when I could instead sip coffee from my balcony and enjoy a much better view.

A quick visit to the bathroom—can’t help it, I’m almost as bad as Lieutenant Fish on the old Barney Miller show now that I am in my 60’s—and I was all set. I grabbed a cup of coffee and the iPad, headed out onto my balcony. I got on line and checked out the news back home.

Our high school football team was off to a good start. They’d won three of the first four and battled to a tie with the number two ranked team in the state.

There had been a fire at the shop where they made high-dollar customized motorcycles. No injuries. Cause of the blaze still under investigation.

Three teens were killed on County Road 351, when they ran off the road at a high rate of speed a half-mile east of Benson Pike. The coroner’s office said an autopsy revealed the driver had a blood-alcohol level nearly double the legal limit. I knew that area, where the crash had occurred. Half a mile east of Benson Pike was Dead Man’s Curve, an S-turn where teenagers had for decades flirted with death, trying to impress one another by seeing just how fast they could negotiate the hazard. My son Travis had crashed there when he was seventeen, the dumbass. Fortunately he walked away from it. No one else was with him at the time, so I don’t know who he was trying to impress. Himself, I guess.

But the story that grabbed my full attention, was this:

Recovery teams search river for missing fisherman

The Page County Sheriff’s Department has wrapped up a full day of searching for a fisherman who was last seen on Coldwater River. Recovery teams started the search at 9 a.m. on Sunday, and kept divers in the water until sundown in the search for the missing 61 year old, Tyler Hamilton, of Page, Indiana.

The main search area focus is near the area of the river between parking lot where the victim's truck and trailer were parked and where his boat was found half submerged further downstream. Search crews also conducted an aerial and ground search.
The Sheriff’s Office is using six divers in 12 feet of water with near zero visibility. Divers cannot see more than 10 to 15 inches in front of them.

Officials say the victim was not wearing a floatation device, and this has been a recovery search from the beginning. The victim's family was also out searching, and called 911 to report the man missing Sunday morning. Search crews from the Sheriff’s Office will be out again Monday at sunrise to continue their recovery effort.

103

From the comfort of my private balcony, I could see a variety of ships, some carrying passengers, others cargo as we passed one another in parallel channels. Behind them, I enjoyed the view of tropical green mountains in the distance. I kept thinking about the article I’d read. The one about them searching for me. It made me nervous, thinking about the possibility of them finding the man I’d killed. How long ago had it been? Almost a week.

One of the ship’s crew provided a narration over the public address system, informing us that the canal was forty-eight miles long, with locks at each end to lift ships more than eighty feet up to Gatun Lake, which according to her, was an artificial lake created to reduce the amount of excavation required during construction of the canal, which was begun by the French, but eventually completed by the United States in 1914.

On and on the narration went. I couldn’t care less that the locks are a hundred and ten feet wide with another, wider lane currently under construction. And on and on.

The Panama Canal was interesting, but this was way too much information. I just wanted to get through to the Pacific and on with my journey. Before they found the body and realized it wasn’t me, and put two and two together.

104

Ty Hamilton

The next day, somewhere off the coast of Central America, I was seated at breakfast with a group of people, ranging in age from thirty to early seventy, give or take. We did intros, and I was glad to see that most of them wore lanyards with nametags. Apparently, they were all part of a group of writers who had signed up for the month-long cruise. This piqued my interest. “So, you’re all taking a vacation together, as friends?” I asked.

“Not exactly,” one of the women, a plump forty-something brunette with a pleasant smile—Courtney, according to her nametag—answered. “This is the first time most of us have met one another.”

“It’s a floating conference slash workshop,” said the man sitting next to me. His nametag identified him as Alex. I guessed him to be in his thirties, the youngster of the group. The horn of a wooden cane was draped over the back of his chair. He wore a floral shirt and khaki shorts. I tried not to stare at his prosthetic leg. “We attend some presentations,” Alex said. “Early morning, and again in the evening. And work on our novels the rest of the day.”

“That’s great,” I said. “I always wanted to do something like that.”

“Why not start now?” one of them said.

“You mean I could join your group, attend the presentations?”

“Well, not officially,” an older, slender woman with a prominent nose, no nametag, and an air of authority said. “Registration closed two months ago, well before the cruise began. But you can of course start writing at any time in your life. And we would be glad to share our thoughts with you if you have any questions.”

“I’ll give that some thought,” I said.

105

Ty Hamilton

And I did give some thought to the idea of becoming a writer. Now that I’d stepped out of Ty Hamilton’s life and into my new identity, I had plenty of time on my hands. Not to mention access to more money than I’d ever dreamed of having in the accounts Mulligan had so thoughtfully set up for me. I could reinvent myself. That was the whole idea to begin with, right?

Why not become a novelist? All I needed was a main character. A—what do you call it?—protagonist. And a villain. Gotta have a villain. And a plot. That’s all. Hero, villain, plot. I’d think about those things and jot down my ideas. After that, it was just a matter of sitting down at the keyboard for a few hours a day and typing. I read somewhere that Stephen King cranks out about a book a month, or something like that. How hard could it be?

With regard to finding Mulligan’s mother’s maiden name, I tried searching online again. Figuring that regardless of which identity he used, Mulligan or Welch, the mother’s maiden name would stay the same. Why would anyone need to make up a new mother’s maiden name? I did a search on Michael Welch. There were several in the United States.

Long story short, I came up empty. I had nothing. Nothing but a hunch . . . What if Michael Welch’s mother’s maiden name was Mulligan?

I made the call. Answered Mulligan to the question. My hunch paid off. I told the credit card company I would be travelling, and would be transferring funds in a couple of days to cover charges in advance.