By 1984, it seemed, Camilla Lyman had completely surrendered herself to George O'Neil's care. Just how dependent she had become became obvious when, after moving back to the big house at Ricefields, Camilla apparently surprised a burglar.
O'Neil would later claim that was the last straw for Camilla and that, frightened, she telephoned him, asked him to find her a place to live near his Rhode Island home, left Ricefields and then, rather than wait, loaded up her motor home and parked it in his driveway, where she lived for the next several months until her estate at Hopkinton was bought, paid for, and renovated, right down to the new half-million-dollar kennel.
Maybe it was true that Camilla had been frightened by the incident, frightened enough to pull up stakes and live like a nomad in a suburban driveway. Maybe. But the whole scenario conflicted with everything Allen had been told about Camilla up to that point. As Mary Margaret had noted, Camilla was not the type who was easily frightened.
Nor was she the type to be easily bamboozled, Mary Margaret and others had insisted.
So it is puzzling that Camilla had so dependent on O'Neil. "She wasn't naïve," Allen would later say. In fact, "she was fairly savvy and astute on things.
None of the hundreds of people Allen spoke to could explain it to him.
Even O'Neil was somewhat perplexed by Camilla's attachment to him.
"Why did she trust me," he sputtered to a reporter. "I don't know, she just did."
If Charlie Allen had learned anything in his twenty-odd years in the business it was this: Never ever jump to conclusions. It was engraved in his psyche. But there was something about George O'Neil that made Allen a little bit hincky.
From the moment he met O'Neil, sitting there in a pale blue haze of Pall Mall smoke with what seemed to be a permanent sneer tattooed onto his face, Allen had what he described as a "bad feeling" about O'Neil. Reflecting on it later, Allen realized that at their first meeting he was consciously "trying to hold myself back because I like to go into things trying to be very objective and not having any solid opinion."
"But with him, it was just difficult to do that," Allen recalled. "Early on, I just got this kind of sinking, sick feeling about him and what probably happened."
All the same, he did his best to swallow his distaste for O'Neil, or at least to mask it.
It would later trouble Allen to think that, perhaps, he hadn't pushed O'Neil hard that enough in that first interview, that maybe, if he had, O'Neil might have let something slip. It might not have solved the mystery of Cam's disappearance, but it might just have explained why she doted on O'Neil. It might have helped him understand why Camilla Lyman had trusted him so completely that even when she bought the decrepit Queen Anne house on 36 acres of fallow pasture and creeping swamp at the edge of Hopkinton for $175,000, plus the additional half-million she sunk into the kennel alone, O'Neil handled every detail while she remained camped in his driveway.
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