Hometown Secrets
Page 1
I love fiction. Often it is more alive, and always more magical than real life.
David Bishop
Except as otherwise provided for herein, this book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events or locales is entirely coincidental.
HOMETOWN SECRETS
This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you’re reading this eBook and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return it and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of the author.
Copyright © 2014 David M. Bishop.
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical without the express written permission of the author. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials.
Please visit David Bishop, his books and characters at www.davidbishopbooks.com
You may contact David Bishop at David@davidbishopbooks.com
The author and publisher did not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for any third-party websites or their content.
Cover Designed by Patti Roberts
Please visit the author website:
http://www.davidbishopbooks.com
ASIN: B00UC1XGJ4
Amazon ebook Version 21 October 2016
Stories by David Bishop
For current information on new releases visit:
www.davidbishopbooks.com
Mysteries currently available – By Series:
Matt Kile Mystery Series (in order of release)
Who Murdered Garson Talmadge, a Matt Kile Mystery
The Original Alibi, a Matt Kile Mystery
Money & Murder, a Matt Kile Mystery Short Story
Find My Little Sister, a Matt Kile Mystery
The Maltese Pigeon, a Matt Kile Mystery
Judge Snider's Folly, a Matt Kile Mystery
Maddie Richards Mystery Series (in order of release)
The Beholder, a Maddie Richards Mystery
Death of a Bankster, a Maddie Richards Mystery
Linda Darby Mystery Series (in order of release)
The Woman, a Linda Darby Story
Hometown Secrets, a Linda Darby Story
First Lady's Second Man, a Linda Darby Story
The Ryan Testler Character Appears in: (in order of release)
The Woman, a Linda Darby Story
Death of a Bankster, a Maddie Richards Mystery
Hometown Secrets, a Linda Darby Story
First Lady's Second Man, a Linda Darby Story
Jack McCall Mystery Series (in order of release)
The Third Coincidence, a Jack McCall Mystery
The Blackmail Club, a Jack McCall Mystery
Short Stories
Money & Murder, a Matt Kile Mystery in a Short Story
Love & Other Four-letter Words: a Maybe Murder, a collection of seven short stories
Tentatively Scheduled Future Stories
The Case of the Missing Mistress, a Matt Kile Mystery
The Red Hat Murders, a Matt Kile Mystery
The Schroeder Protocol
Murder by Choice
The Parish Executioner, a Matt Kile Mystery
www.davidbishopbooks.com
david@davidbishopbooks.com
Dedication
This novel is dedicated to all those who have read my novels. I appreciate your interest in my writings and the faith you have displayed by purchasing this novel. I trust you will enjoy it and would be pleased to hear from you after you read it. david@davidbishopbooks.com
The author’s aim is to create characters with which readers can relate, can like or hate as they reach deep within the story to learn if those characters get what they deserve, are captured or saved, seduced or simply survive. The connecting magic of the author-character-reader triad rests in the fact that the readers, like the characters living within the pages of fiction, have themselves endured the trials and tribulations brought to them in their own lives, rather than through an author’s pen.
I would like to acknowledge all who have found their way into my life, challenging me, and enriching me by their presence, goodness, and affection. And last, but certainly not least, this book, as with my others, is dedicated to those I love and my family.
My special thanks to the wonderful people who read early drafts and made suggestions which unfailingly enhanced this novel. Among others, these include:
Martha Paley Francescato, Professor Emerita Professor of Literature, Film, Culture, and Honors and dear friend whose contributions to my novels are too enormous to measure.
Jody Madden, my fiancée, capable editor and best friend.
Sandy Hess, a retired English major and dear friend.
Patti Roberts, founder of Paradox Promotions, who developed the cover of this novel and formatted both the digital eBook and print book editions
Diane Minks, the founder of Focal Point eSolutions, my webmaster (or is it webmistress?), in either case the genius who created and maintains my website: www.davidbishopbooks.com
Telemachus Press, including Steve Jackson, Steve Himes, and Terri Himes, whose wonderful skills enhanced my earlier novels.
These fine professionals, dear friends and others have done so much to advance my career as a novelist. Thank you.
Prologue
Martha Cranston sat inside the ranch house in a hard rocking chair and watched her husband’s eyelids flutter, his nostrils flare. Her hand tightened around a short glass of whiskey, she brought it to her mouth. The soft light from the moon oozed around the back of her shoulders to build shadows of the bedposts against the far wall. This was her nightly vigil: flutter, flare, swallow. Repeating endlessly with nothing, absent her prayers, to suggest Billy’s breathing would not go on at least as long as her own.
Unknown to Martha, things were about to change. Outside, when clouds gauzed over the moon, a man moved through a group of parked pickup trucks to the back of the old barn used to house the family’s pleasure horses. He had carefully chosen this against-the-wind path to break up any minor sounds arising from his steps.
Three minutes after arriving at the back of the old barn, he retreated across the open field to a cluster of trees and thick brush sixty yards beyond the far side of the corral. He made no effort to hide his tracks as he went. He wanted them discovered. He wanted the tracks seen as the likely escape path taken by the person who did what he came to do.
From there, he circled back to the road bordering the front of the Cranston property. When clouds dampened the moonlight, he scurried to the back of the new, modern barn. With the next shrouding cover, he darted over heavily-trod ground to a nearby toolshed, then a pump room. He repeated this pattern until he recaptured the position he had left at the rear of the old barn.
Over time, the Cranston family’s unchallenged control of the town had bred a general laxness, arrogance, and overconfidence that made the man’s invasion rather easy.
Carefully shielding himself behind a small collection of empty 55-gallon drums scattered behind the barn, the trespasser lit a cigarette puffing it adequately to
be certain it would stay lit. He slipped the cigarette into the top of a book of matches so that it trailed above and slightly behind the heads of the paper matches. He carefully nested this simple ignition device into a gathered stack of loose dry hay at the back of the old barn, cresting it to a peak partway up the grayed boards. He then tossed an opened metal cigarette lighter into the hay, leaving it to char in the fire and possibly be falsely identified as the fire-starting tool.
After working his way back around to the corral and along the fence line, he returned to the street. From there he walked fifty yards to his vehicle parked behind some scrub brush off the side of the road. Sitting behind the wheel, he saw a brief spit flash in the distance. The row of matches had burst into a sudden, silent fire. The fallow hay a willing partner, the flames hungrily licked their way up the back of the dry barn, his arson device consumed in the process.
He drove away with his headlights off, the fire busily feasting on the barn and a split rail fence. The commotion he could see in his rearview mirror disclosed the fire had been discovered. That was fine. Whatever the extent of the damage would be satisfactory. This was not about destroying a barn. This was about challenging all things Cranston.
Let the game begin.
Chapter One
In the quiet turnings of her own emotions, does a woman ever fully let go of her first lover?
SUNDAY
Linda Darby knew she should have returned home long ago. Now, her mother was dead and she was going back. Since leaving twenty years before, she had always found convenient reasons not to visit. Mother wasn’t a bad person, simply joyless. Had they lived near the storied seven dwarfs, her mother would have hung around with Grumpy, not Happy. As Linda grew into adolescence and beyond, the primary issue wedged between her and her mother was men. Her mother’s hard-crust toasted view of them versus Linda’s desire to be a warm, buttered muffin.
For many of us there is some measure of unfinished business lying in wait in our hometowns. A school we failed to realize represented the best of times. Friendships sacrificed to the getting-on-with-it of our careers and lives. Emotional issues involving unjust parents, real or perceived, and, for some, unsettled issues with siblings. Then there’s the young loves we just didn’t quite know what to do about, and, through that uncertainty, left fallow without closure.
Linda had taken the normal steps before departing for her hometown, as well as steps far from normal. For this visit, she would not use her real name, Linda Darby. Maybe she would eventually, but not right off.
Before leaving her home in Oregon, she alerted her mercurial friend, Ryan Testler, a man with whom she had kept up since their first meeting. They had been torrid lovers, but somewhere along the way, her relationship with Ryan mellowed into something more akin to hot pudding, covered and cooling. She believed Ryan remained interested in more than just friendship, but that he felt it inappropriate to bring Linda into his world, a world of which she couldn’t be critical. His skills saved her life two years ago. His feelings for her had prevented his taking her life. Last year Ryan had hired her to do a small, quick job in Phoenix, Arizona, a job which paid her most handsomely.
When Linda told Ryan her mother had died and she would be going back to her hometown, he offered to go with her. She refused. Her trip was a family and personal matter. Over time she had told Ryan a great deal about her upbringing in Cranston, Kansas, and her involvement, to use the polite word, with Billy Cranston. Before hanging up she told Ryan she would travel to Cranston by train. At his suggestion, she purchased a ticket that ended not in Cranston, but continued on to Kansas City, a good distance farther. That way, since she was traveling under a false identity, if it became necessary, she could describe Cranston as an impulsive stop in a longer trip, one she needed to continue, and leave.
No nearby airport served Cranston. Only a private airstrip on property owned by Billy Cranston and used by those he favored. Long ago, that would have included Linda, but not today. Billy Cranston was her primary reason for using an alias.
All morning her eyes, ears, and nose reported the train’s tireless work as it chugged and jerked its way through cattle country. That had monotonously continued until about two hours ago when the tracks found a crease and entered what seemed the world’s largest wheat field.
In late May the wheat in this part of Kansas was nearing maturity. The color was still golden and the heads were still standing tall. It would not be long before harvest. Linda expected to be gone before the heads of the winter wheat nodded sufficiently to signal the crop was ready to be disconnected from the soil. After that, the in-ground stubble would be churned under to begin the process for the next crop.
Linda stood on the train platform, mesmerized by the rush of the close wheat, backed up by the windswept wave of the never ending distant golden crop. The sky seemed bluer than she remembered and the clouds whiter. Then suddenly, as if by magic, the wheat field parted and her hometown of Cranston, Kansas, appeared before her. Not more than a couple miles up the tracks, a modern Midwest version of Moses parting the Red Sea.
The train stifled its high-speed click-clack and settled into a hushed strain as it eased forward toward the platform. The scene ahead looked much as it had when Linda used to ride her bike down to deposit a portion of her allowance into the boxy red soda machine that boldly stood against the outside of the stationhouse. That box, now a tiny red dot against the weathered wooden wall.
Chapter Two
The breeze would billow our skirts, tickling the soft whites of our thighs
The first sound to reach Linda’s ears as she stepped off the train was the bell atop Saint Christopher Catholic Church. Her first sight was a small dust devil at the top of the modest rise in the ground west of town, a veritable mountain in this flat part of America. The wind usually blew this time of year, all times of the year for that matter, at something less than ten miles per hour, but often at a more aggressive pace. All in all, her hometown of Cranston looked the same, felt the same. As if she had not arrived by train, but by time machine preset for minus twenty years.
No other passenger got off in Cranston, Kansas.
The first smell reached her nostrils before the train pulled to a complete top. The odor of the Cranston feedlot was always there, everywhere, swamping anything rising from the kitchens of the town’s few downtown eateries. Like towns with paper mills or certain other industries, the aroma of feedlot hung on the town like a wet, putrid shroud no longer noticed by the locals.
The first person Linda saw was a small woman of around fifty. She didn’t recognize her. The woman walked beside a man fingering his toupee, a large man who shaded her the way a double-parked delivery van dwarfed a curbed car. Just before passing the couple stepped to their right and crossed the street. The woman looked over at Linda and smiled. The man glanced and then looked down, his fingers exploring his hairpiece the way ants duck about in a bowl of sugared cereal. Linda was a stranger to them and, she hoped, would be a stranger to the entire town.
The Cranston family had been devoutly Catholic since the founding of the town and outwardly remained so today. The town hinted at religious tolerance by having a second church—a poorly attended Methodist. That congregation included no one who worked for Cranston directly as an employee or indirectly. There was no overt pressure or demands, just subtle leverages applied beneath the surface. A word here, a denial of something wanted there. Over time, most locals who had chosen to remain had fallen into step. If you relied on the Cranstons, as did many of those who called Cranston, Kansas, home, you attended the Catholic Church and supported the Cranston family’s businesses, in particular the latter. For the most part, the ambitious and confident had migrated out of the town, and a go-along-to-get-along attitude settled in.
Helpful to the Cranston’s maintaining their fiefdom was that, in the big picture, those who didn’t reside in town or nearby didn’t give a rip what happened as long as the mess didn’t drift far enough to touch them. Poli
tical contributions by Billy Cranston further muffled any infrequent concerns percolating among state officials.
Linda walked from the train station toward the town square which looked as it did in the header for the town’s small website, the same as it existed in her mind from before she left. Every sixty minutes, a high clock struck the number of bongs necessary to signal the new hour. Concrete walkways ran in grid-like fashion around and through the town square with a center circular area covered in brick. There was a large gazebo for the use of local musicians and politicians. The rest of the town square was comprised of two grass areas for picnicking during the spring and summer months, and some roses planted and lovingly tended by the Daughters of the American Revolution. Most days, the square was inhabited by the urchins of the town. The firemen used it annually for their pancake breakfast, the Kiwanis for their chili cook-off, and several other groups for numerous bake sales put on as fundraisers for local activities.
Everything Linda learned about Cranston for the last twenty plus years had been filtered through cyberspace, further seasoned by her mother’s infrequent and exceedingly brief letters. She never called. Mother had no phone in her home. She avoided the mail because she believed Billy Cranston read her letters before they were transported out of town. Linda imagined her mother being paranoid, but then one of Billy Cranston’s cohorts was the postmaster and another managed the local phone exchange. To cater to her mother’s concerns, Linda had provided the address of a rental box in Portland, Oregon, which Linda visited whenever she traveled from her home in Sea Crest, Oregon, to the state’s major city.