As he waited, Jack thought about how much was at stake if he did go through with trying to remedy things for the Armstrong family. He looked around at all the people he knew who populated the café, all the regulars with whom he engaged. There was Mayor John Walters having breakfast with Claire Roberts, one of the biggest property holders in town. Alice Abbott, the editor of the Golden Falls Gazette, shared a table with Steve Kopacik, the news director at KFLS, the local NBC affiliate. There was a group of middle-aged college professors in the big round booth in the corner; they were daily fixtures. All these people, plus the guys on his crew … Fred Moran, the fire chief … Rob and Charlene Pickens, his next-door neighbors and friends with whom he boarded his horse … and hell, his siblings. Josh. Maggie, a nurse in Idaho. Lila and Sophia, his twin sisters who, along with their husbands, lived in Florida. What would all these people think of him if the truth came out?
He loved them and Golden Falls with all his heart. He’d traveled to plenty of beautiful places in the world, but none was as gorgeous as Golden Falls, set like a jewel amidst the wilderness in the long shadow of Denali.
Golden Falls was a small bustling city two hours’ drive northeast of Denali National Park, and home to Alaska State University. It was a place tourists came to stay and play and spend money. It had a tidy, frontier-chic historic downtown complete with an old-fashioned town square and city park where the orchestra performed on summer evenings and where the town’s Christmas tree lighting took place each December.
Adjacent the park was a footbridge leading over the town’s namesake, Golden Falls, a twenty-foot waterfall set in the Nanook River, where hopeful prospectors had once panned for gold. A distinctive heart-shaped rock sat under the falls, and it was a time-honored tradition for young lovers to throw stones toward it, the belief being that if both partners could get their tossed pebbles to stay on the rock, they’d found true love More than one marriage proposal had taken place under the waterfall, most recently by Station One’s own Cody Bradford, who’d proposed to Cassie Holt, the new TV reporter at KFLS Channel Eight.
Jack’s own property was lush with wildflowers in the summer and heart-stoppingly spectacular in autumn when the birch and the aspen trees changed color. In springtime, the river roared with cracking ice as the sun grew high and sparkling to melt the snow. He didn’t even mind the winters because of the camaraderie it brought out in people. In winter, lights were strung across Main Street for twelve solid blocks, and City Park was a magical wonderland the whole winter long.
Golden Falls was home. It held his history and his heart—but would he lose it all if the truth came out?
By the time Doc Bauer arrived, Jack had put himself into quite the miserable funk, but he tried not to let it show.
“How did it go?” he asked as his friend took a seat across from him.
“The young man will be fine,” Doc Bauer said. “No concussion, fortunately. Nothing a good sleep and a few stitches can’t fix.”
The waitress brought coffee, and the pair ordered breakfast. Doc Bauer got his usual oatmeal loaded with dried apples, brown sugar, and cinnamon, and Jack ordered a veggie omelet. Now that he’d reached his mid-thirties, he’d started watching what he ate—for Jack, staying fit and healthy was part of his job description, and one he took seriously.
“So tell me why I made the house call this morning.” Doc Bauer smiled over his coffee cup. “What was so special about this situation? Or should I say who was so special? Because I’m pretty sure I noticed a little spark of something between you and the young woman involved.”
“Young being the operative word,” Jack said, although it wasn’t the operative word at all, just an easy way to deflect. “I’ve got at least ten years on her.”
“That kind of thing doesn’t matter. Not at your age.”
“She and I wouldn’t work at any age.”
“Ah, you have a history.” Doc Bauer’s eyes twinkled. But then he looked closer at Jack’s expression and realized it wasn’t a light matter. “What’s got you so troubled?”
Jack glanced around the restaurant. He would love to unburden himself, to share the secret that was tearing him apart, to get the advice of his most-fatherly friend. But he had the sense that if he began to speak about the Armstrongs and what had happened all those years ago, a hush would fall over the restaurant, and every head would turn toward him. They would all hear, and they would all know, and he’d be judged.
Harshly, as he deserved to be.
“Can I join you back at the clinic after breakfast where we could speak more privately?” he said. “I could really use your advice about something.”
“Of course,” Doc Bauer said.
Once their food arrived, they ate quickly and then made their way back to the Golden Falls Community Health Clinic. Winter mornings were typically slow, and Jack was thankful that the small waiting room was empty of patients.
“Let’s talk in my office.” Doc Bauer gestured toward it. “I’ll tell the receiving nurse to interrupt only for something urgent.” Once they were settled, he said, “All right, tell me what’s on your mind, Jack.”
Jack exhaled in dread. It was hard even to begin. “I hate to tell you because I know you’re going to think less of me. It’s a deep shame that I’ve lived with my entire adult life.”
“I won’t think less of you, Jack. Hell, we’re all just human beings on a journey, getting through life as best we can, and we all have things of which we’re ashamed. I make no judgments. You should know that about me.”
Jack did know that. It was one of his friend’s most admirable qualities.
“How much do you know about the Armstrong family?” he asked. “Specifically, how much do you know about Nate Armstrong, the cop who went to prison awhile back?”
“I read the papers and watch the news. I guess I know a thing or two. Why do you ask?”
Jack took a deep breath, and then he began to speak.
6
Jack tried to keep the story of what happened all those years ago as brief as possible.
He’d been nineteen and a rookie on the Golden Falls Police Department, planning to follow in his father’s footsteps. Bruce was a lieutenant at the time, but he was on leave caring for his wife, Helena—Jack’s mom—who had late-stage ovarian cancer and was having a last-ditch experimental course of treatment in Houston. In his parents’ absence, Jack was holding down the fort at home. He, along with Lila and Sophia, made sure their younger siblings, Maggie and Josh, got to school on time in the morning and had a hot meal at night.
Elizabeth’s dad—Nate Armstrong—was also a police lieutenant. At the time, he was getting a lot of attention and praise for having arrested a major drug kingpin as part of a multi-state narcotics task force, conducted along with the DEA.
Nate liked the attention and the praise—a lot. The Golden Falls Gazette had a front-page picture of Nate standing in the evidence room with half a million dollars of confiscated drug money and a cache of weapons and cocaine seized during the arrest. He had no problem taking the credit for getting a major cocaine distributor off the streets of Golden Falls and bragged about it incessantly, both at work and at the bars he frequented after hours. He’d become insufferable.
A month later, the money was discovered missing.
Since Nate was responsible for the chain of custody of the evidence, suspicion began to fall on him. It was heightened when a junior DEA agent on the task force came forward and alleged that the initial arrest had been illegal because they’d barged into the suspect’s home without knocking first and without producing a search warrant even though the suspect demanded to see one. The agent alleged that afterward, Nate pressured them all to lie in their reports, lest the case be thrown out.
No one who knew Nate and his hard-charging, formalities-later attitude had any problem believing the agent’s story.
From there, blaming Nate for stealing the money was an easy leap of faith, although ultimately there wasn’t enough evid
ence to charge him. In fact, there was no evidence against him, and the money was never found.
Nate pled guilty to obstruction of justice, a federal charge because of the DEA’s involvement. The drug kingpin was released, and the judge sentenced Nate as harshly as he could. The people of Golden Falls turned on Nate not because he’d gone onto a criminal’s property illegally—that, it seemed, would have been a forgivable offense. It was the theft of the half-million dollars people couldn’t forgive, a half-million that would have helped pay for essential equipment for the police force.
Jack paused when he came to the crux of the story. It was a hard, squirming thing in the pit of his stomach, but he looked Doc Bauer in the eye and made himself say it out loud for the first time.
“Nate didn’t steal the money,” Jack said. “My dad did.”
Doc Bauer’s eyebrows shot up. “What? No. Your father? No.”
“Yes, my father stole the money.”
“But—why? Are you sure? What makes you think so?”
Jack felt the old curl of anger rising as he remembered the circumstances of how he’d discovered his father’s crime.
“We got a letter in the mail, at our house here, from the cancer clinic. It was a bill addressed to my dad, but I opened it, and the amount—it was staggering. Fifty thousand dollars. And that was just one invoice. I knew there had been others, and I knew more would come. My parents had already taken out a second mortgage, but I knew it couldn’t cover the cost of my mom’s treatment for long. It was experimental gene therapy, not covered by insurance, and the absolute last resort. So I flew down to Houston both to see my mom and to talk to my dad, see if there was anything I could do to help financially.”
Even now, he could remember the sticky humidity of the Houston summer outside the windows and the particular hospital smell of death, masked by flowers and antiseptic.
“When I arrived, my dad got weird about me seeing the bill and scolded me for opening it in the first place. I asked him how he planned to pay for it, thinking they would have to declare bankruptcy. Instead, my dad said—and I’ll never forget the way he said it—that ‘the money was taken care of.’”
Doc Bauer listened closely. “And that made you suspicious?”
“Definitely. Back in Golden Falls, Nate Armstrong had just been arrested. His fellow officers actually went to his house to arrest him in front of his family and put him in handcuffs to take him down to the station! Can you imagine how humiliating that must have been? I had this horrible thought that Nate didn’t take the money but that my dad did. My own father! I felt like a traitor even thinking it, but I couldn’t help it. So I pressed him on it, kind of got in his face and asked, ‘Was this you, Dad? Did you take the money?’”
Jack fell silent as Doc Bauer gave a short hello-but-don’t-interrupt wave through his office window to a nurse.
“Go ahead,” Doc Bauer said. “You asked your father if he’d taken the money. And he admitted to it?”
“He said, ‘I’m not dragging you into this.’ That he did what he had to do, but he’d been careful, that there was no evidence, and he wouldn’t say anything that compromised me as a police officer. He said he’d do anything to save my mother, even break the law. And I was so …” Jack trailed off, remembering how he’d felt like a bear in a steel-jawed trap, unable to move, furious and in pain at the entire situation, wounded beyond description to learn that his father, who he admired more than any man on Earth, could so betray his department and community.
“I remember when Nate Armstrong was sent to prison, but not the exact details. Was it for theft?”
“He was arrested but never charged with the theft of the money—like my dad said, there was no evidence of who’d taken it. But Nate did admit to the obstruction charge, which got him convicted and locked away for the past seventeen years. And that investigation wouldn’t have happened if the money had never gone missing in the first place. The judge probably wouldn’t have gone for the maximum sentence if he hadn’t believed Nate was guilty of the theft, too. I think he would have gotten a slap on the wrist and a private pat on the back for getting that scumbag off the streets.”
Silence hung between them for a few moments as Doc Bauer processed what Jack had told him.
“Walk me through your thought process back then,” he said. “You were nineteen and therefore young … I imagine family loyalty played into things as well.”
“I kept quiet mostly because of my mom,” Jack said. He rubbed his temples, still feeling that headache coming on. “She’s the reason why I chose not to say anything. My dad might have been careful, and I might not have had an outright admission of guilt or any evidence beyond the circumstantial, but if I’d pointed out the trail, others could have followed it.” He felt helpless all over again. “I had to choose between my duty as an officer of the law and my duty to my family.”
“So your mother knew what your father had done?”
“Not until I told her,” Jack said. He remembered how awful that conversation had been. Heartsick, his mom passed away soon after learning what Bruce had done. Jack had always felt bad about that, too. Not for his dad’s sake, but for his mom’s.
“My mom asked me to say nothing about it,” Jack said. “She said—and it was true—that if my dad went to prison, it would essentially bankrupt and orphan my younger siblings all at once.” At the time he’d flinched at the word orphan, because it told Jack that his mother had given up hope of her own survival, too. “She held my hand and begged me to keep the secret, for the sake of the family. A deathbed request. I wasn’t strong enough to refuse. I did as she asked, but I’ve never been able to forgive my dad.”
“He was desperate to save your mom,” Doc Bauer said, with some sympathy in his voice.
“Right, and I get that, but he couldn’t be bothered to care about what was going to happen to Nate Armstrong’s family. What makes our family more important than theirs?”
“Were your father and Nate friends?”
“Uneasy friends, I’d say,” Jack said. “They were very different types of people and different types of cops. My dad was by-the-book—ironically—while Nate always played hard and fast with the rules, which was probably another reason people were quick to believe Nate stole the money while never even suspecting my dad was capable of it. And then my dad went on to be police chief, and Nate Armstrong’s kids were left to fend for themselves. You saw what their house looks like—it’s practically falling down around them.”
“This is an unfortunate story,” Doc Bauer said. “It’s sad all around. I’m sad for you, and your father, and your family, and I’m sad for the Armstrong family as well.”
“Nate lost everything. His job, his family, his pension, his reputation, not to mention his freedom,” Jack said. “In the meantime, my dad prospered. It was like a sucker-punch when I heard he accepted the promotion to police chief. He didn’t even have the decency to turn it down after perpetrating the largest theft against the department in the city’s history! He’s such a fraud, and it kills me that nobody knows it but him and me.”
“Nobody? Really? You’ve kept the secret all these years?”
“I only told my wife at the time.”
Doc Bauer raised his eyebrows. “I didn’t even know you’d been married.”
“It’s not something I like to talk about,” Jack said. “Jolene was my high school girlfriend. I married her a few months after my mom died. It was a mistake, but I felt so damned alone. The marriage lasted less than a year. She left a note and took off one day.”
“Ouch.” Doc Bauer winced. “So you lost your mom, and then the two people you cared about most betrayed you. That’s not a fun way to spend your early twenties, Jack.”
“Not to mention, my brother Josh thinks I’m an asshole for refusing to have a relationship with my father. He thinks our dad walks on water.” He sighed. “Like I used to.”
“Until you learned he was fallible.”
“Fallible?” Jack
stood and began to pace. “That’s an understatement. He’s a criminal. A hypocrite. Selfish. Lacking in courage. Willing to screw over a fellow cop and let that man’s children believe their dad’s a thief—and they do. Elizabeth has no doubt her dad took that money; she said as much today. In the meantime, people still think my dad’s a pillar of the community.”
“This must have been quite a burden to carry around all these years, Jack.”
“It has been,” Jack said, his emotions caught in his throat. “My dad taught me right from wrong. He was my hero. And then to have to watch him live a lie this whole time and even to benefit from the lie—to rise through the ranks and become chief of police––yeah, it’s been hard.” He raked his hand through his hair. “But I’ve benefited from staying silent, too.” It was perhaps the most painful admission of all. He knew full well that being a Barnes, being the son of Bruce Barnes, had smoothed his path in life and in the fire department. “And I’ll admit I want to keep on benefiting.”
Doc Bauer stroked his chin. “What does that look like? Fire chief?”
“Maybe.” Jack smiled ruefully. “And then I always thought I’d like to be mayor one day.” Doc Bauer nodded as if it was a reasonable idea. “I mean, I love Golden Falls. I want to do good things for this community, and I’d like to try and balance out the wrong my dad did with the good I think I can do. But another part of me thinks that because I kept quiet about my dad, I don’t deserve the opportunity. It should go to someone worthier than me.”
He let out a long breath, relieved to have confided in someone. “So, Doc—what should I do?”
From The Ashes (Golden Falls Fire Book 3) Page 4
