Barn Burner (Jubilant Falls series Book 1)

by Debra Gaskill

  Roy staggered back to his feet. With a roar, he lunged at Talley, locking arms in a struggle that was as much good versus evil as it was life and death. The men fell against the wall again, moving along the wall until they reached the boarded-up window. With a crash, they fell through the thin plywood. Lyndzee screamed as the wood splintered and the duo hit the ground with a thud. She struggled to sit up as she watched Talley rise up with a rock in his hand. In one powerful motion, he brought the rock down hard on Roy Castlewheel—once, twice, three times. Lyndzee turned her face to the wall and squeezed her eyes shut, trying not to listen as her captor groaned with each blow.

  Then everything was silent, except the sound of birds singing in the trees. Lyndzee opened her eyes to see the rock fall from Talley’s roughened hand.

  “You all right, Lyndzee girl?” he asked.

  Terrified, she nodded. Quickly, Lundgren was through the window and at her side. He pulled a pocketknife from his boot, and in one swift motion, sliced through Lyndzee’s bonds.

  “Are they going to be OK?” she asked, rubbing her wrists and nodding toward Tina.

  “Don’t you worry about them. We gotta get outa here.” Talley grabbed the chain. “We’re going to have to get this offa you later. Right now, girl, we gotta run.”

  Gathering the chain into their arms, the old man and the little girl ran from the abandoned farmhouse and back into the green sanctuary of the surrounding cornfield.

  Chapter 25

  “This is Duncan and Penny McIntyre. We’ve come to pick up our daughter.”

  Duncan spoke into the intercom next to the door of the adolescent psych ward. With a sharp buzz, the locked door released. Duncan grabbed the door handle with his large hands and they stepped into the sterile hallway where their daughter had spent the last week.

  Isabella was standing near the nurse’s station, chatting to the on-duty staff, her belongings in a brown grocery bag at her feet. Addison noticed that her shoes now had laces and her faded, low-slung jeans were belted around her slim hips.

  “Hi, baby.” Addison smiled as she drew her daughter into her arms. “We’re going home, honey.”

  Isabella smiled and hugged her mother tightly. “I’m so glad. You don’t know how much I want to eat at home.”

  “The food here must be really bad if you want to eat my cooking!” laughed Addison.

  “She’s going to be just fine. She did really well,” a petite brown-haired nurse said. “You do need to see Dr. Fairfax one more time and then we’ve got some papers for you to sign. Hang on just a minute.” She picked up the phone, spoke briefly then hung up. “Dr. Fairfax will see you now—second office on the right.” She pointed to her left, further down the hallway, into the depths of the ward.

  As if on cue, the tall blonde doctor stepped out into the hallway, gesturing with her black glasses held in her hand.

  “Come on, sit down.” Fairfax invited the entire family into her sterile office. “I have to say, Isabella was one of our better patients.”

  Isabella grinned at her mother, who squeezed her hand in response.

  “Before we send you on your way, we do have some instructions, particularly about the drugs she’s taking.” Fairfax pushed a prescription pad across her desk. “Isabella is going to be taking 1200 milligrams a day of Lithium, which is a pretty standard dose for bipolar disorder. That’s two tablets twice a day, morning and evening. This prescription is only good for a 30-day supply, so you’ll need to find a doctor who can continue to monitor her.”

  “I’ve been doing some reading,” Duncan said. “This is a pretty powerful drug.”

  “Yes it is, but it’s the best for her disorder,” Fairfax replied. “She needs to have her blood levels monitored fairly frequently and she needs to drink a lot of water to keep it from building up in her system. You can expect some grogginess, but probably not much, since she’s adjusted so quickly to the medication. She may develop a slight hand tremor. If that happens and it bothers her, let me know and we can switch drugs. What you need to really watch for is seizures, confusion and stupor.”

  “How long will she be on this?” Addison asked.

  “Probably for the rest of her life. But that’s small potatoes to what you’ve already been through.”

  Addison nodded.

  “She’s a good kid. She’s got a good family behind her. You guys will do just fine.”

  “What about school? Next year is my senior year and I got thrown out,” Isabella asked.

  “That’s certainly up to your school, but I would venture that your doctor could provide a statement on your progress if you ask him or her to do so.”

  Isabella sighed in relief.

  “Now, we’re not saying that everything’s going to be rosy from now on out,” Fairfax cautioned. “We still could be adjusting the medication somewhat and she may find that taking the Lithium at times other than breakfast and dinner works better for her. That’s OK. This is going to be a trial and error period for a little bit, but that’s OK, too. And Mrs. McIntyre?”

  “Yes?”

  “The biggest thing you’re going to have to deal with is your father.”

  Addison stared, dumbfounded.

  “We’ve talked a couple times and I think he sees things a little differently now.”

  ***

  “Baby, I owe you an apology.”

  Duncan, Isabella and Addison looked up from their take-out pizza supper to see Walter Addison’s tall muscular frame filling the kitchen doorway, clutching a Cincinnati Reds baseball cap in his hands.

  “Walt! C’mon in!” Duncan, ever the peacemaker, stood up and waved his father-in-law into the kitchen. He tapped the back of his chair. “Have a seat!”

  Addison turned stonily back to her pizza, refusing to look at her father.

  ‘Penny, your dad’s here,” Duncan laid his arm across his wife’s shoulders.

  “I can see that.”

  There was an uncomfortable silence as the two men looked intently at Addison.

  “I think I’ll just take my plate out to the living room so you guys can talk.” Isabella placed a few more pieces of pizza on her paper plate and grabbed her soda can. “Talk to you later, Grandpa.”

  “See you later, sweetheart.” Walt nodded as his granddaughter sashayed from the room.

  Silence returned to the kitchen.

  “I’ve come to say I’m sorry,” Walt began again.

  Addison remained silent, picking the mushrooms from her pizza slice and piling them along the edge of her paper plate.

  “I know you’re angry and you’ve got every right to be, but I want to make things right,” Walt continued. “What I did was wrong. I should have gotten her help, but I didn’t understand what was going on.”

  Addison glared at him.

  “I want to know what happened to my mother. I want to know why she was cut so completely out of my life,” she demanded.

  “I thought what I was doing was the right thing at the time, Penny, you have to understand that.”

  Addison waved her hand dismissively. “Do you know where June went?” Her tone was harsh and her words clipped.

  “What I want to know now is if she ever tried to get back in contact with us.”

  Walt was silent a moment, then he sighed.

  “She wrote a couple times asking to see you, about a year after she left,” he said finally. “Said she’d gotten off the booze. I never answered. After a while the letters stopped.”

  “Did her letters have a return address? What was the post mark?” Addison’s anger dissolved. She’d believed all her life that she’d been abandoned by June, that she’d left them all behind. After all, that was what she’d been told, in between tales of rampant spending, days locked in the bedroom and nights of promiscuity. But to know that June, her mother, the one who she remembered twirling around in circles at that far-away little house, was the woman who did love her after all and tried to get back in touch with her.

  “Chicago, o
r around there, Rockford, Des Plaines, something. I can’t remember.”

  “You said she quit drinking. Did she do it on her own or did she dry out in a hospital some place?”

  Walt shrugged. “I don’t know.” His tone was evasive.

  Addison took a deep breath. “If she was hospitalized, it’s possible she got treatment for being manic depressive. It’s possible she got her life back together.”

  “It’s also possible she didn’t.” Walt was solemn.

  “What’s that mean?” Addison reached for Duncan’s hand.

  “She got off the booze. She told me that in her last letter, but didn’t say how. I don’t know if she ever got on medication or what. She told me she was going to go back to school, and then try to get it together enough so that she could come see you again.”

  “But what happened?”

  Walt was silent.

  “Daddy, what happened?”

  Walt sighed before he answered. “Penny, honey, she’s dead. She got killed. She was coming back from night school and got hit by a drunk driver. I didn’t know about it until I got a phone call from the Illinois State Police. She still listed us as next of kin. She left you a $25,000 life insurance policy. It paid for you to go to college.”

  “When did this happen? How old was I?” Addison was stunned.

  Walt sighed. “It was 1967. You were ten. I wasn’t going to say anything until you asked, or wanted to go looking for her. I didn’t know what you remembered — if you remembered anything at all—and I wasn’t going to—to…”

  “Goddammit!”

  Addison slammed her hand down on the kitchen table and jumped from her chair. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done to me? Every memory I have of my mother is seen through your eyes, your filter and your perception. Momma’s a whore, momma’s a slut. Momma ruined your life and by extension, mine. Do you know what that does to a kid? Do you have any idea?” Her voice escalated, getting louder with each sentence. “And now, I find out she’s been dead for thirty years or more? When the hell did you think you were going to tell me that?” She paced the room, wringing her hands.

  Walt hung his head. “I didn’t know if you’d ever ask. I did what I thought I needed to do, Penny. It was the wrong thing. I see that now.”

  “Do you know how I doubt everything I’ve ever done as a parent because of June? Do you know that every time something happens, I second-guess my child and myself because I have nothing to compare it to? It’s no goddamned wonder my daughter ends up in the hospital, because if I’d known anything about my own mother, I might have been able to get her help sooner. Better yet, if you’d thought a little further than your own career and how you fucking look to other people, she might have been around to help me out!”

  Addison sank back into her chair and covered her face with her hands.

  “Talking with your Dr. Fairfax made me see how wrong I was,” Walt said softly.

  “Kind of hard to dump my mother’s ‘moral choice’ of alcoholism and whoring on your granddaughter, isn’t it? Is that what you thought was going to happen to Isabella? That I was raising someone who would go on to fill June’s shoes?”

  “It wasn’t a moral choice. I see that now. June was sick and I didn’t help her.”

  Addison was silent for a moment.

  “Did you love her, Daddy? Did you ever love my mother?”

  Walt nodded. His words were soft. “There was nobody in the world quite like your mother. I loved her like crazy.”

  “Were there good times? Did you ever have fun together?” Duncan asked as he slid into the seat beside his wife and took her hand.

  A faraway look crossed Walt’s face. “Sure we did. She was the prettiest nurse in the ER.”

  “My mother was a nurse?” Addison was incredulous.

  “That was how we met. I’d come in with the emergency squad on an accident and there she’d be, that beautiful red hair all pinned up underneath her cap—this was when nurses all wore hats and white uniforms—sitting behind the desk. She was hard to resist. She’d work second and third shift mostly, so one morning after a really bad accident, I asked her out to breakfast. She met me outside this diner that used to be downtown. She was sitting on the hood of her car, pulling the bobby pins out of her hair and when that red hair fell to her shoulders, I knew I was a goner.”

  “Was she a good nurse?”

  “Oh, the best. She could handle it all—sick kids, heart attacks, car accidents. Today, she’s probably what they call a trauma nurse.”

  Addison couldn’t believe what she was hearing. She leaned on her elbows, wanting to hear more.

  “In fact, you get that from her, that same clear-eyed ability to walk through a crisis,” Walt continued. “You don’t know how many reporters I’ve talked with over the years who go out to an accident scene and end up puking in the ditch or passing out. You don’t do that and you don’t know how much cops appreciate that.”

  “You think she was medicated then?”

  Walt shrugged. “She might have been. I know that after we got married, it was OK for a while, then she started to screw—” Walt stopped. “—Having problems again.”

  “Did she work after you guys got married?”

  “No. That just wasn’t done in the fifties. It would have been good for her, though, if she had. She wasn’t happy at home, even when she wasn’t sick.”

  Another silence filled the kitchen.

  “I’d like to know where she’s buried,” Addison whispered. “I’d like to see Mom’s grave.”

  “She didn’t have any family, nobody that would claim her. I didn’t have the money for a funeral, so I just had her cremated.”

  “Please, please, please, don’t tell me that you hated her so much you just dumped them somewhere,” Addison said.

  Walt stood and motioned for her to follow him. The three of them trouped out to Walt’s black Toyota Corolla parked outside the back door. The evening summer sun was beginning to set and off in the distance, in a pasture behind the barn a few of the McIntyre Holsteins mooed. Walt opened the trunk and pulled out a cardboard box from the corner. The box was tall and wide; someone had taken two shorter boxes and taped them together at the middle to accommodate the contents. The words “For Penny” were written on the top in black marker.

  Walt set the box on the edge of the concrete stoop.

  “Open it,” he said.

  Addison gently pulled back the top flaps. Inside she saw a thick envelope, a small velvet jewelry box and a polished metal urn.

  “What is it?” she asked, afraid to remove the contents.

  Walt put his arm on his daughter’s shoulders. “I know it’s long overdue, but I was going to give it to you when the time was right. I just wasn’t smart enough to know when that time was. The jewelry box has your mother’s wedding rings and the necklace she was wearing the night she died. The envelope has some small pictures and things, your birth announcement, a couple pictures, that kind of thing.”

  “The urn is Mom, isn’t it?” Addison asked.

  Walt nodded. “I didn’t know what to do with her. She didn’t have any family left. I didn’t want her back here in Jubilant Falls but I couldn’t see burying her in Chicago. The funeral home recommended cremating her until I knew what to do with the body. She’s been in the back of my closet for all these years.”

  Tears welled up in the old cop’s eyes.

  “I’ve done a lot of stupid things in my life, Penny, and this was probably the stupidest. It’s time I said I’m sorry and it’s time we put June to rest.” He reached into the box, pulled the polished urn out and handed it to his daughter.

  Chapter 26

  Addison, Duncan and Isabella sat at the kitchen table this time, examining the contents of the box Walt brought them.

  Their rift healed, however tentatively, Walt had hugged his only daughter good-bye and gone home, saying simply, “I think you’ll want to look this over at your own pace. If you’ve got any questions, just
ask. It’s time you know the truth.”

  The silver urn sat in the center of the table. Pictures and other papers were shuffled back and forth as they examined the contents of the box.

  “Look, Mom—here you are at the park,” Isabella handed her mother a small square Kodachrome print, its colors fading from time. The picture showed Penny Addison as a toddler in a bright blue coat and matching hat tied snugly beneath her chin. She was in a swing, her face filled with the innocence of a toddler’s laugh, leaning forward as she came close to the camera lens. Behind her stood June, her arms outstretched in the act of pushing the swing, smiling. June’s red hair was pulled up into a ponytail, and she wore a short brown coat, pedal pushers and penny loafers. Leaves on the trees behind mother and daughter were just beginning to turn color, some of them as red as June’s hair.

  “Boy, you sure do look like your grandmother,” Duncan leaned over Isabella’s shoulder.

  Addison smiled and held up a small construction paper card. “Doesn’t she though? Look at this. Here’s the announcement my parents sent out when I was born: ‘There’s a brand new Penny in our pockets.’ She made these and glued a new 1957 penny to it.”

  “What’s in the jewelry box?” Duncan asked.

  “I don’t know, I’m halfway afraid to open it.”

  Isabella fished through the pile of pictures on the table. “Look, Mom! A family portrait! There’s you and Grandpa and June. God, you were a fat baby!”

  Addison didn’t hear her. “Duncan, look at this!” she gasped. Lying on a bed of black velvet was a small solitaire diamond in yellow gold sitting next to a thick gold wedding band. Inside the band was inscribed ‘Walt to June, 7-16-55.’ Coiled around the rings was a gold locket on a delicate chain.

  Addison picked it up and examined it closer. With her fingernail, she popped the locket open and gasped.

  Isabella leaned over to look. “It’s this same picture! You and grandpa and your mom! And look! There’s something engraved on the other side.”

  “It says ‘Precious days.’ She was wearing this necklace the night she got killed by that drunk driver,” Addison marveled. “She never forgot me. She really did want to come back when she got better.”