Angela Sloan Paperback - 2011

Summary

Excerpt

Yellow Post Road
Wigmore, WV
December 19, 1972

Dear Central Intelligence Agency:

Your polygraph examiner, Mr. Jerry Wicker, has just now left my house. After questioning me for two hours in the voice of a sleepy robot, he has declared me unreliable and unnatural. He calls me a strange, dry girl.

For two hours I sat at the dining room table, wired to his aluminum suitcase, watching a brown felt sideburn curl away from his cheek. Glue failure! Now he accuses me of lying to him. My flat eye line and suspicious hand carriage have given the game away.

Let me say this about lying. When a person is fourteen years old and traveling on her own by car, she has got to have some stories in her pocket. Every trucker with a tremor in his arm wants to know where that girls dad is. Even the clerk at the Lee-Hi Motor Hotel feels he is owed a piece of her life story, if only so he can repeat it when someone comes asking. So yes, I got into the habit of making things up. But the truth was always real to me. I never lied to make myself feel better.

Does somebody in Langley need to feel better?

That is not a good reason to lie.

Most peoples fathers arent perfect, and Ray Sloan is no exception. I dont expect you to defend him in the papers. I admit I didnt help matters any with my activities last summer when the FBI was looking for him. I was trying to lie low, but then I got involved in that other business with the terrorist hippies.

The fiasco at the Watergate was a surprise to me. It was a thing that Ray had really almost nothing to do with. Still, I will tell you what little I know about it, plus everything about the Chinese Communist girl known as Betty or Ding.

Please excuse my faulty typing. Having sat here these minutes beating this out, I have had the chance to remind myself that Mr. Wicker was only doing his job, perhaps to the best of his ability. I suppose he was following some important rule when he did not permit me to answer any of his questions beyond a yes or no. I thank you for your consideration in sending Mr. Wicker here, since driving to Langley for a lie detector test would have required me to miss a day of school. I have Mr. Wickers rubber mole that he left on the edge of the sink.

Now I am going to tell you what really happened. The whole thing. No stories. In order for it all to make sense, I will have to back up first. I will keep it as short as I can.

Because of the truthful and explicit nature of what follows, please consider this a Top Secret Correspondence.

2011 James Whorton, Jr.

Media reviews

Citations

• Booklist, 07/01/2011, Page 29
• Publishers Weekly, 07/04/2011, Page 0