Barn Burner (Jubilant Falls series Book 1)

by Debra Gaskill

  "No."

  Addison nodded. "What else is going on?"

  "Marcus has a story on the Kernenberger barn fire for this morning. Elizabeth is covering the high school graduation this evening and will have something from the college about the investigation into the missing money being temporarily called off until the kidnapping is resolved. I'm running that in the number two news hole next to your FBI story on A1."

  "Seaford Thorn isn't going to like that being brought back up again." Addison sipped her coffee. "Too damned bad. He's had some sort of connection to this little girl going missing. I can't put my finger on it and the police don't believe it, but I've just got this hunch."

  "Anyway, the barn fire story goes in three," Herrick continued. "Pat's got more search photos and a press conference photo. I can throw some wire stories in at the bottom of the page—a couple tornadoes went through Kansas, I think."

  "Sounds like a plan." Addison set her coffee mug down and stretched. "I'm going to go talk to a couple folks who may have known our suspects—"

  "Addison! You need to go home!"

  She waved her hands dismissively at him. "God, you sound like a mother hen. I’m going to talk to the prosecutor about the three suspects the police want to talk to and maybe a few other people. I'll e-mail the story to you later this afternoon from home."

  "If you say so." Herrick shrugged hopelessly.

  "I say so." Addison pulled her purse from behind her desk and fished another notepad from a drawer. "Keep the home fires burning," she called as she strode purposefully from the newsroom.

  ***

  "Harmon Ripsmatta was probably one of the nastiest child sex abuse cases I've ever dealt with." Prosecutor Steve "Dolph" Adolphus leaned back in his chair and bounced his Bic pen on his chin thoughtfully. Addison enjoyed sparring with Dolph, another local son who'd gone off to college and law school at Ohio State and had come back to Jubilant Falls a member of the bar.

  Short, with sandy-brown hair that perpetually fell in front of the thick-lensed glasses framing his painfully shortsighted eyes, Dolph had been in private practice for only about 10 years before he made his first run for the prosecutor's office. It was a credit to his own legal expertise and his family's long history in Jubilant Falls that he was elected his first try—and continued for the next twenty years to be reelected. Periodically, the Plummer County Republican Party tried to talk him into running for the state house or the Senate, but Dolph always declined. He liked Jubilant Falls too much to leave it, he said, so he stayed put.

  "He's one of three suspects in the Lyndzee Thorn case, along with Roy Castlewheel and Talley Lundgren," Addison said as she settled back into one of the brown leather Morris chairs in front of Dolph's big desk. The prosecutor's office was on the second floor of the big stone courthouse at the center of town and looked down on the intersection bordered by Jubilant's last downtown department store, Hawk's, a few empty storefronts and the Aurora Development office building.

  "Well, Talley's too much of a whack job to do any harm—for Christ sake, don't quote me on that—and Castlewheel, I don't think he’d do it. It's not in his modus operandi, it's not in his…" Dolph gestured, searching for words. "…Karma, I guess, to kidnap a little kid. He's a drug-dealing scumbag, yeah, but he's not some bastard pedophile like Ripsmatta."

  "Tell me about Ripsmatta."

  "I prosecuted Ripsmatta about ten years ago. He'd beaten, raped and sodomized his stepdaughter— his wife's twelve-year-old daughter— to the point where she needed extensive surgery to fix just about everything. New cheekbones, new nose, new teeth, the kid lost about six or eight inches of colon, as I understand it, on account of the broomstick he'd used on her, and she'd never be able to have children I guess, from what doctors told me. I found some articles that were written by John Porter on the case. Where is John these days, by the way?" Dolph handed Addison a stack of photocopied articles.

  "He's moved on." She scanned the articles, her stomach turning as Porter's prose backed up Dolph's clinical account of the case. "Oh God."

  "Oh yeah—the wife had served him with divorce papers the week before the assault on account of some fondling that he was allegedly doing to the little girl. This was his way of getting back at the daughter for telling her mom. I didn't mention the extensive psychological trauma. I know she was on every kind of antidepressant and antipsychotic for months, if not years after the attack."

  Addison shivered. "Do either of them still live around here?"

  Dolph shook his head. "No. The daughter committed suicide at sixteen. The mother is long gone, I don't know where."

  "If you were investigating this, who would you look at as a prime suspect?"

  Dolph was quiet for a moment.

  "If I were investigating this—and I know Chief McGinnis and the FBI will be doing everything humanly possible—I wouldn't waste time looking at the father or Lundgren or Castlewheel. They may have been in the store with Lyndzee Thorn, but I don't think they had anything to do with it. If I were law enforcement, I wouldn't sleep until I found that bastard Harmon Ripsmatta."

  Chapter Nine

  A soft breeze caught the lithe green shoots of corn in the front pastures, seeming to wave in welcome to Addison as she guided her blue Taurus up the dusty gravel lane to the farmhouse. Some long-ago McIntyre decided that it was more profitable to have crops than a big front yard, but Addison didn't mind. It kept yard work down to minimum and more often than not, she found the waving wheat—or, depending on the year, corn or soybeans—a gentle welcome, back to a world that was infinitely more restful than the newsroom. In the late summer, the corn would be tall, casting a warm shadow across her car as she pulled up the long graveled drive. In the late fall, after harvest, Duncan would turn the Holsteins out into the stubbled fields to enjoy the remnants of what was left behind. Many times, those black and white heifers would moo in greeting as she rolled by, their capacious udders swollen with milk, waiting for the evening milking to begin.

  Addison smiled to herself as she approached the house, pulling the car up to the back stoop. Duncan, wiping his hands on an old rag, came from the barn.

  "Hey sweetie," she whispered as they kissed. It was good to be home.

  "How's my favorite newspaper editor?" he asked, stuffing the rag into the back pocket of his overalls. "You've had a lot on your plate these last few days."

  "Yeah. It's good to be home." They slipped their arms around each other and stepped into the kitchen.

  "But they still haven't found Lyndzee, have they?" he asked.

  Addison shook her head and pulled a beer from the fridge. "It's not looking good. The FBI's been called in and one of their prime suspects is a registered sexual predator. Where's Isabella?"

  "I've got her shoveling out the goat pens."

  Isabella had a small herd of meat and dairy goats she raised to show at the county fair. Like many kids in Plummer County, she'd been in the livestock show ring since she was eight and old enough to join 4H. Her room was dotted with ribbons and plaques she'd won over nearly nine years. Lately, though she'd spent less and less time with her animals. Addison wasn't sure if that was part of this moody stage she was going through or if she had truly lost interest.

  Duncan reached around her and got his own beer, twisted the top open with a sharp slick of his muscular wrist.

  "So how's it been since she's been home? Have you had a chance to talk to the school yet?" Addison took a long drink from the bottle.

  "Well, yes. I convinced the school to not press charges—"

  "Oh thank God for that."

  "But on one condition. She needs to get psychological counseling and she can't return to the school."

  "That's not a big deal. It’s the middle of May. School will be out in a few days anyway. She'll have the summer to work through whatever it is."

  "Penny, you didn't let me finish. We've got to petition the superintendent in August to let her back in. She's not suspended, she's expelled."

&nb
sp; "Oh."

  "The deal is our little girl has some serious problems and we've got to deal with them soon."

  "But you said this was normal for teen-age girls! You said your sister behaved like this all the time! I don't know what's normal and what's not, God knows, but I don't think my daughter's any worse than any other teen-ager!"

  The screen door slammed behind Addison and she turned to see Isabella, her red hair pulled under a ball cap, and her face streaked with mud and sweat.

  "So, Dad, you told her the school thinks I'm a wacko?" Isabella pulled off her work gloves and wiped her face.

  "The school doesn't think you're a wacko," Addison reached for her daughter, who grimaced and stepped out of her reach. "They want you to get some counseling, that's all, Izzy."

  "Well, they can stuff their counseling—" Isabella hooked her index fingers in make-believe quotation marks. "—Right up their ass. I'm not going."

  She leaned over the sink and took a long drink directly from the faucet.

  "Izzy, please don't do that," Duncan admonished. Wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, she stood and glared at him, then stalked silently from the room and up the stairs.

  Duncan and Addison were silent until they heard their daughter's bedroom door slam.

  Duncan leaned forward and took Addison's hand in his. "We've got real problems. The school psychologist met with me. He thinks she's got some sort of mental illness. He says she has these wild elevated moods and then these dark, dark depressions. She's been violent before, too, but mostly on things, not people. Remember the new locker door we had to buy in the fall? The one she said a kid pushed her into?"

  "Yes."

  "She did that herself—beat the hell out of the door with a textbook in one of her rages."

  Addison sighed. "But what do they say is wrong?"

  "Well, he stressed that he can't make any kind of diagnosis, but he says he's seeing symptoms of bipolar disorder, what they used to call manic depression."

  "What?"

  "I guess it’s a mental illness that is characterized by really wild, extreme mood swings. Wasn't that what your mother did?"

  Addison's mind swirled back to the few memories she had of June. "Yeah, she could be really up and she could be really down, but if she was sick, Dad would have gotten her help—I know he would have,” she mused.

  "Well, this guy said that if it is manic depression, it can run in families, but there's a drug called Lithium that controls it and on that she can lead a normal life."

  "That's just like some idiot school administrator to want to drug up a kid, just to make his job easier," Addison spat out. "We did a whole series on attention deficit disorder and there were more parents who told us—"

  "This isn't ADD."

  "But schools recommend drugs for students just like candy these days, and pediatricians go along with it—you know that!"

  "I know, I know. We'll never get her back into school if we don't take her in for counseling. She's probably OK, like you said, and this is just a rough patch she's going through. Counseling will probably help her work out whatever issues she's got and this way, she can start her senior year off fresh. Also, if she does have this manic bipolar thing—"

  "My daughter is not mentally ill and I will not participate in her sedation just to keep some incompetent teacher happy!”

  "Now, now, I didn't say she was and you're probably right, that this stupid school psychologist would rather put the kid on drugs than deal with her, but we've got to check everything out—or at least look like that’s what we’re doing to keep these bozos happy. We’ll get her into counseling or something, they’ll tell us she’s just fine and we’ll have all our bases covered. That way, in August we can go back to the school and get her reinstated."

  Addison sighed. "And if she doesn't get back in school?"

  "I can home school her or she can get her GED. It's not like the world is coming to an end."

  “But what about college? What about her future?”

  “Let’s get through this first before we start worrying about college, OK?” Duncan patted her hand reassuringly. “It’s not time to jump off that bridge yet and if we ever get to that point, you know I’ll be jumping with you.”

  The rest of the evening was quiet and subdued. After sending Duncan into town to pick up a pizza, Addison went to the computer in the family room to put a quick story together on the suspects in Lyndzee's kidnapping, recapping Harmon Ripsmatta’s sex crimes, and Roy Castlewheel’s alleged drug history, e-mailing it to Dennis Herrick in the newsroom.

  No one brought up the schools request for counseling, but the undercurrent was there, as though they were all trying to have a polite tea party as the family raced down the rapids on a rapidly-disintegrating raft. They sat silently in the living room, all three staring vacantly at the television and afraid to talk about anything deeper than what was flickering on the screen in front of them.

  About 10 p.m., Isabella stood and stretched. "I'm going to bed," she said.

  "Good night sweetheart," Addison answered. "We love you." It was the same thing they'd said every night since she was born, but tonight there was something different. Tonight, Addison's evening ritual wasn't the familiar benediction, but instead seemed to say, "We want you to work all this out, we want you to be happy again, and we don't want you to ruin your life."

  "I love you too." Izzy's voice was sad. She turned to walk up the stairs, then stopped. "I'm so, so sorry, mom and dad. I'm sorry I've screwed your lives up so badly."

  "We're all entitled to make a few mistakes, Izzy," Duncan answered. "Just learn from them and keep going."

  She nodded and silently, slipped up the stairs.

  ***

  It was two in the morning when the scanner tones sounded once more, skipping across the nightstand beside Addison's bed. Wiping the sleep from her eyes, she reached for the lamp as Duncan moaned.

  "Goddammit, I'd like to get just one full night's sleep." Squinting she listened as the dispatcher calmly spoke.: “Barn fire—68734 Old Youngstown Road. Fully engulfed.”

  “Shit. ” Addison tossed the blankets off and her bare feet hit the floor. “Better go.”

  “Isn’t that the farm old Lars Jensen just signed over to his boy?” Duncan asked as he rolled over.

  “Uh huh. Except Lars Jensen is 75 and Larry—his boy as you call him—is damn near 45.” Addison slipped a sweatshirt over her pajama top and scrounged for a pair of jeans or sweatpants in the dirty laundry on the floor.

  A pair of jeans donned, she punched Pat Robinette’s phone number into the bedside phone. She cradled the receiver on her shoulder as she pulled a cigarette from the pack beside the bed.

  Pat answered on the first ring. “Yeah, it’s me. Barn fire— Old Youngstown Road?”

  “Yup. I can be there in about 10 minutes. His farm is about five miles from us as the crow flies.” Addison stepped toward the bedroom window. A pillar of black smoke obscured the full moon’s face. “It’s gonna be a good one. I can see the smoke from here.”

  ***

  Addison could smell the acrid smell of old burning timbers and hear the lowing of cattle as, a few minutes later, she pulled up behind a fire truck parked on the side of Old Youngstown Road.

  She didn’t dare pull into the driveway. Although she’d been to the Jensen farm many times, people, even good friends, always seemed to regard her differently when she showed up at scenes of personal tragedy. It wouldn’t look good to be arrested for trespassing—not while on a story at any rate.

  At the fence line that ran the length of Lars Jensen’s five hundred acres, neighbors had congregated in small groups, shaking their heads, pointing, and talking among themselves.

  The elder Jensen was a withered prune of a man. A stroke had kept him from farming the land his great-great-grandfather, an immigrant from a village outside Stockholm, had purchased right after the Civil War. Lars now walked with a cane, his right arm permanently drawn up, crow-like, to his c
hest. Six months before, he deeded the farm to his only son, Lars, Jr., whom everyone called Larry, and retired to the front porch, where in good weather he sat and watched Larry plow or tend to their herd of Black Angus beef cattle.

  Quickly, Addison made notes of which fire companies had responded—Bethel Township, Miami Township and Jubilant Falls Fire Department had all sent trucks and ambulances.

  Because the remote location meant no hydrants, Bethel Township also sent a tanker truck. A couple volunteer firefighters stood beside a huge blue inflatable tank filled with water, monitoring the water level. Two hoses led from the tank up the short driveway to the barn, where four firefighters, oxygen masks covering their faces, stood perilously close to the flaming barn, shooting water at it. Other firefighters circled the building, some with axes, others with extinguishers trying to keep the fire from spreading to a nearby silo or worse, the farmhouse.

  Addison turned to see Pat Robinette steer his red MG behind her Taurus and put it in park. He pulled his Nikon, outfitted with a huge stalkerazzi zoom lens from the seat beside him and stepped from the car.

  “What do we got here?” he asked as he lifted his camera to his eye for a shot.

  “Don’t know yet. Just got here myself.” Addison motioned and they followed the hose up the driveway toward a cluster of firefighters near the barn.

  From the corner of her eye, Addison saw Lars sitting on the porch, clutching his withered arm closer to his chest, rocking back and forth like an autistic child, watching four generations of hard work waft into the smoke-filled night air. In her worn pink nightgown, Larry’s wife Denise stood behind him, patting her father-in-law on the shoulder and speaking in his ears. Denise’s eyes were wide and terror stricken. Addison looked around quickly and realized Larry wasn’t to be seen anywhere.

  God, please let Larry be safe, she prayed. The thought of Denise left alone to care for an aging father-in-law and two teen-age boys flashed through Addison’s mind. Just as quickly, she quashed those uncomfortable thoughts and switched to reporter mode. She strode into the knot of firemen.