“I saw it,” Clint said. “That was really amazing, wasn't it?”
Connor nodded and rolled back over.
Clint pulled Jennifer close to him. “Missed you today.”
“You saw me this morning.”
She lay backward in his lap and kissed him. Connor turned over again.
“You guys! Why are you doing that now? You’re missing everything! All the good stuff!”
Jennifer sat up and composed herself. “All right Con-O. We’re paying attention now.”
“Good.” Connor returned his attention to the TV.
The Hubers had had no more problems with the house at 1120 Dunham Drive, of course. Oddly enough, though, they sometimes found themselves mourning the Vennekamps. Like Chris Whitaker, they couldn't understand why the Vennekamps had clung to others so stubbornly—to Josie Taylor, to Whitaker, and later to them.
“It was all so unnecessary,” Clint had said to his wife one day, shortly after the triple shooting at the farmhouse. “Absolutely none of it had to happen.”
Rather than responding to this, Jennifer had let her husband talk, sensing that he needed to.
“Sometimes I feel bad about the three of them dying like that,” Clint admitted. “I mean—don’t get me wrong: Better them than us, if it had to come to that. But I wouldn't have wanted it to end that way, not for any of them. And don’t forget about that girl, Josie Taylor—who died for no good reason at all.
“I keep asking myself: Why? Why did they do any of it? Why did Marcia choose to kill that girl over Chris Whitaker, when she could have gone to college, married someone else, and lived a normal life?
“Why were David and Deborah so obsessive about the same girl? They might not have killed her, but they both hated her for different reasons. And she was really no harm to either one of them.
“They could both have simply left her alone. No one would have died. Everyone could have walked away.
“Why—” Clint asked his wife. “Why don’t some people know when to walk away from a situation? Why don't some people seem to know when to cut their losses and move on?”
But there was no answer, Jennifer knew. The Vennekamps had made their own choices, time and time again. And those choices had led to a series of tragic events—for the Vennekamps as well as for others.
The Hubers had remained in contact with Chris Whitaker for a few months, but that relationship too, faded away. It was clear to all of them that Whitaker wanted to forget, to focus on his music and his band.
“I might still hit the big time,” he’d said to the Hubers one night around Christmas—the last time they met with him, at a restaurant in Cincinnati.
It was also clear that Whitaker had no desire to be some sort of a hanger-on who exploited their gratitude. “It’s over, dude,” he told Clint, when the latter thanked him for what might have been the twentieth or the hundredth time. “So let’s just let it be over.”
Jennifer resigned from Ohio Excel Logistics the week after the shootout at the farmhouse. On her way out, she and an attorney met with the company’s human resources manager. They laid out evidence for a sexual harassment suit, a hostile work environment suit, and a lawsuit for discriminatory treatment.
The human resources manager listened with a poker face. But a week later, having reviewed the situation with the company’s top management, she called Jennifer’s attorney with a settlement offer. The company would provide Jennifer with a severance package of one year’s pay, plus several glowing letters of recommendation that she could hopefully use to land another job. Would that be satisfactory?
It was. Like Whitaker, Jennifer wanted to move on. She had no stomach for an extended period of litigation. The settlement contract arrived by express mail at the attorney’s office, and Jennifer signed it.
Shortly thereafter, Jennifer did land another job—at a company called Industry Force Logistics—the chief competitor of Ohio Excel Logistics. For the first time in a long time, Jennifer found that she loved her job.
About a week after Jennifer began her new job, Clint Huber received a video clip file from an anonymous email address. He deleted the entire email without viewing the attached file. Jim Lindsay’s termination had not been part of Ohio Excel Logistic’s settlement with Jennifer. But they had both heard through the grapevine that the company had let him go.
Such was the course of events that gave the Hubers their lives back—not to mention the home that they had duly purchased and were paying for with each month’s mortgage check.
The house at 1120 Dunham Drive had once belonged to someone else, and for a while its status had been contested.
But it was their house now. Its ghosts were banished forever.
Also by Edward Trimnell
Thanks for reading 1120 Dunham Drive.
Check Amazon for the latest titles in the Clint & Jennifer Huber Mysteries series.
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Blood Flats
Lee McCabe is on the run from the law, mafia hitmen, and rural meth dealers. A gun-blazing chase through the badlands of Kentucky.
Please visit my website, EdwardTrimnellBooks.com, for a full list of current and upcoming titles.
Until next time!
Edward Trimnell
1120 Dunham Drive: A Clint & Jennifer Huber Mystery Page 38