Barn Burner (Jubilant Falls series Book 1)

by Debra Gaskill

Pop’s Carryout was across the road from the college’s large iron gates and a popular place for students living in the dorms to go for soda pop, snacks and fuel for upper classmen who were allowed to have cars on campus. Knowing he had a captive audience at Golgotha, Willie ‘Pop’ Tillman sold everything at the highest prices in town.

  The atmosphere ranged from funerary to carnival-like. As word spread through the campus, students began to stream out the gates of Golgotha toward the carryout, lining the sidewalks on both sides of the streets and impeding the flow of traffic until another officer had to step into the street to contain the crowds. Some students were praying, others singing hymns, still others standing around looking concerned. Neighboring residents—Golgotha students called them “townies”—began to appear on their porches, leaning over the rails to talk to their neighbors, cordless phones in hand to spread further the news that the college president’s daughter was missing.

  Addison stopped at the yellow tape and waved to Assistant Chief Gary McGinnis, who acknowledged her presence with a wave from across the cordoned-off parking lot. McGinnis was talking to Seaford Thorn, who stood jiggling the family dog, a small orange yappy oversized rat named Punky, in his arms.

  From this distance, Addison couldn’t tell the intricacies of Thorn’s expression. Was he truly upset? He didn’t seem to be hysterical—or was he simply projecting a steely calm in the face of crisis? Certainly falling apart wouldn’t do much for the public persona he worked so hard to project.

  Did police consider him a suspect yet? In the event a child is missing, the first people police look at are family members, or somebody close to the family. Addison had covered enough domestic disputes to know that. Maybe Seaford had told Gary about his marital problems—maybe he hadn’t. And where was Jaylynn? Why wasn’t she here when her only child was missing?

  Addison tapped Robinette on the arm and pointed at a crime scene technician dusting the carryout door for prints. Robinette raised his Nikon to his eye and focused, quickly snapping a few shots. Turning to his left he also focused on a group of praying students and fired off a few more shots.

  “Can’t forget the Jesus freaks,” he cracked.

  “They’re all Jesus freaks, Pat,” Addison answered. “That’s why they come to Golgotha. I’m headed up to talk to McGinnis. You see what other kind of shots you can get.” Addison elbowed her way through the crowd until she was as close to the police as she could get.

  “Gary!” she yelled. Seaford Thorn’s face hardened as he recognized her and he turned away.

  Assistant Chief McGinnis walked over to the yellow tape.

  “Hey, Penny,” he nodded, touching the brim of his hat in greeting. A Jubilant native like herself, Gary was among the few people who still called her by her first name. They'd gone to high school together; during her sophomore year, after each of their dates bailed out on them, they'd spent the homecoming dance together.

  After college, McGinnis started as a state trooper the year that Walt Addison retired, then after a few years decided he wanted to join the city police to work alongside his three brothers, Chief Marvin, Harold, one of the JFPD’s three detectives, and Jim, the youngest and the only one still on the beat.

  As a cops reporter, she'd enjoyed working with McGinnis again. In a way, she thought ruefully, they were often still dancing. Back and forth, step, step, dodge, she trying to get as much information from him as she could, Gary knowing he could trust her, but not wanting to let out the details of an investigation too fast or too soon.

  “You filling in for Porter these days?” he asked.

  “Long story, but he’s not with the paper any more.”

  McGinnis raised his eyebrows. “That’s been long overdue, Penny.”

  “I know, I know. Have you got a moment or two to talk? Privately?”

  “Not here. Follow me.” He lifted the tape and motioned for Addison to follow. They walked along the crime scene perimeter to the corner of the carryout, beyond where the crowd, the other cops, and most important, Seaford Thorn, couldn’t see them.

  Once around the corner, Gary leaned his shoulder against the wall and sighed.

  “This doesn’t look good,” he said.

  “What’s the deal?”

  “Apparently, she wanted to walk the dog after school and spend a dollar the tooth fairy left her the night before. Mrs. Thorn—”

  “Jaylynn—”

  “Yes. She’d never let her walk clear across campus by herself before, but Lyndzee apparently was very insistent and the maid, a Tina Andersen, decided that if she took the dog with her she couldn’t get in much trouble.”

  “So when did they discover she was missing?”

  “Dr. Thorn notified us at 6 pm that Lyndzee hadn’t returned for dinner. The carryout closes at 8 pm. One of the employees was locking the doors when they found the dog.”

  Addison nodded as she scribbled the information into her notebook.

  “So you think this is an abduction?”

  “Dr. Thorn is a high-profile person in the community, as you know, and he told me he received some threats in the past few weeks.”

  That’s odd, Addison thought as she wrote. Jaylynn didn’t say anything about that. Was it a ruse on Seaford’s part? Would a man whose marriage was crumbling and who stood accused of possibly pilfering from the college endowment fund engineer the abduction his own daughter? Addison didn’t want to contemplate that.

  “Did he specify the nature of those threats?”

  Gary stood straight, back in his official capacity as department spokesman. “I can’t go into those right now, Penny. This is still an open investigation and we are pursuing all leads.”

  “You know we ran a story about him today—there’s half a million missing from the endowment fund.”

  Gary raised his eyebrows. “He didn’t mention that.”

  “It figures. So what happens now?” she asked.

  “There’s some talk about organizing a search. You know these kids are perennial do-gooders. We’ve got the search and rescue team coming from the sheriff’s office and we’re in the process of organizing student teams to canvass the area.”

  “The biggest concern?”

  Gary sighed. “We used to believe that we had the Golden 24, but that’s no longer the case.” Addison knew the Golden 24 was that first 24-hour period when a missing person, adult or child, was likely to be found alive and unharmed. Also, should the unthinkable happen—a murder—it was the easiest and best time to solve it before the killer’s trail went cold.

  “And now?”

  “Studies are showing that if someone is going to grab you and kill you, he’s going to do it within the first three hours.”

  Addison blanched. “So we could already be too late.”

  “God, I hope not.”

  “Give me a brief description of what she was wearing.”

  “Blue jeans, blue flowered top, white Velcro tennis shoes with pink Winnie the Pooh designs on them.” Gary pulled a notebook from his back pocket and flipped through the pages as he spoke. “She’s a first grader at Greater Grace Christian School. Scar on her chin from a recent playground fall, 70 pounds, blonde hair, blue eyes, missing lower front tooth."

  Addison scrawled the information down, then put her notebook back into her purse and capped her pen.

  “OK, Gary, I’m speaking as a friend of Jaylynn Thorn’s, not as a newspaper person. I had a conversation with Jaylynn today—”

  Before she could finish her sentence, there was a wild, keening scream from the front of the carryout. Gary and Addison stepped around the corner to see Jaylynn Thorn trying to wrestle Lyndzee’s dog from her husband’s arms.

  Her hair was disheveled and her mascara ran in black rivulets down her face. In her haste to get to where her daughter was last seen, she had run clear across the campus, falling more than once. There was a hole in one of her stockings, one of the heels of her pastel pink pumps was broken off and the skirt of her suit was grass -stained
.

  “Give me that dog, Seaford! Give me that goddamned dog!” she screamed as she tried to pull Punky out of her husband’s arms. The crowd gasped as the president’s wife took the Lord’s name in vain.

  It doesn’t matter that a young child could be lying dead in a ditch, beaten or even, God forbid, sexually abused, Addison thought shaking her head. Jaylynn Thorn has cursed.

  A young cop, one Addison didn’t know by name, stepped between the couple and took the dog. “Mrs. Thorn, you need to calm down. This isn’t going to get your daughter back.”

  Jaylynn stepped back, her chest heaving, and arms at her sides, but her fingers extended and claw-like. Suddenly, she flew at her husband again, screaming, her arms flailing. Her mild Atlanta accents gave way to harsher screeches of the Georgia upcountry the louder she shrieked. “You bastard! You stole my child! Yew stole mah child! Give her back, damn you, give her back!”

  Police bundled Jaylynn off in a squad car clutching the dog to her chest before Addison or Gary could get to her.

  “We’re taking her back home, sir,” one of the young cops told Gary. “She’ll be interviewed about the statements that she made.”

  “Dr. Thorn denies them?” Gary asked.

  “Yes sir.”

  McGinnis’s tone turned hard. “I want them kept separate. Take Dr. Thorn down to the station now and have a detective interview him there. If they think they’ve got probable cause, then hold him. I don’t care if he is a college president.”

  Addison touched his arm. McGinnis leaned over to listen. “That was what I was going to tell you,” she whispered. “Seaford has threatened to take the child from her in the event of a divorce. She never mentioned anything to me about anybody getting any threats.”

  Gary lifted his hat and, running his fingers through his thinning hair, gave her a look she’d seen on her father’s face more than once. It was the face of a pissed-off cop. Addison knew Gary well enough to know he was asking himself what the hell kind of a man would engineer the kidnapping of his own child to cover up missing money or to get back at an unhappy wife.

  “That puts a hell of a spin on things, doesn’t it?” he said coldly.

  ***

  Addison milled around with students and cops for another hour before the sheriff search and rescue team arrived. If possible, she would send Pat out with one of the teams while she hung close to the cops for any information she could include in a story.

  Either way, she needed to get in touch with Duncan and let him know what was going on. She pulled her cell phone from her purse and called home.

  “Hey, it looks as if this is going to be a late one,” she said when Duncan picked up.

  “I figured. What’s going on?”

  Briefly, she filled him in, including Jaylynn’s conversation the day before.

  “Do you think he did it?” Duncan asked.

  “At this point, I don’t know, but it sure doesn’t look good. How’s Izzy?” she asked.

  “Still in her room. She’s got her stereo up loud, so she’s probably still pissed off.”

  “Yeah probably,” Addison mused. A stray memory shot through her mind like a bat flying across the night sky: her mother, June Addison sitting in her darkened bedroom, refusing to come out, to eat or to bathe, smoke from her cigarette circling her head. “Duncan, hey, you don’t think anything’s like, wrong with Isabella, do you?”

  “Addie, don’t worry about it. I had four sisters and two brothers and I don’t know a bigger emotional roller coaster than being seventeen and female. Remember what a drama queen Helen used to be?”

  Duncan’s oldest sister Helen lived a quiet life with her three kids in Wisconsin, but as a young woman she’d been known for her performances both on and off the stage.

  “Yeah.”

  “She was just like this in high school. You couldn’t look at her sideways without getting some sort of cry-fest or yelled at or something.”

  “I suppose you’re right. I just couldn’t help thinking—”

  “I know what you were thinking and forget it. She’s not your mother. Don’t borrow trouble by making her that way. I’ll talk to the school tomorrow and see if we can’t work something out. Get them to change their mind about filing charges or something.”

  “OK.” Chagrined, Addison said goodbye and hung up. He was right—he had to be. She just couldn’t help thinking there was something else going on. Isabella had been a pretty typical kid, she thought, until her teen years set in. But then what parent wouldn’t wonder what alien creature took over their child’s mind and body at age thirteen? There were deep moody days, still other days when she laughed and sang and danced around the house in a cloud of teenage euphoria.

  What was so weird about that? Sometimes it seemed extreme, but sometimes it just seemed, well, like any other teenage girl would behave. Her grades hadn’t been great this year, and her choice in clothing was changing from jeans and Old Navy tee shirts to all-out grunge. Isabella was changing, but how weird was that really? We’re all entitled to a bad year at school, she reasoned, and kids experiment with different looks, didn’t they?

  But to assault a teacher? It didn’t fit, not with the Izzy she had known.

  Maybe if Addison had known what to expect, maybe if her own childhood weren’t so stained with blotches from her mother’s behavior, she wouldn’t worry.

  “At least I still have my daughter,” she said out loud as two black sheriff’s sport utility vehicles pulled up to the curb in front of the carryout. Each vehicle had a specially trained search dog in the back. One, named Indy, was a cadaver dog, trained to smell out dead bodies.

  A chill rain up Addison’s spine as she sought out Gary McGinnis again.

  “Don’t you think bringing Indy is a bit much?” she asked. “You don’t know this kid is dead yet.”

  Before McGinnis could reply, a satellite truck from the Collitstown TV station pulled up in front of the carryout. Collitstown was just 20 miles down the road from Jubilant Falls and the home of Symington Air Force Base, where many of Jubilant’s residents commuted to high-tech civil service jobs.

  Before the truck stopped moving, a male reporter, with horsy teeth and too much makeup, jumped from the passenger side and, scanning the scene, headed toward McGinnis. Addison recognized him and groaned. He was one of the young guns the station hired about a year ago following the latest corporate buyout.

  Aggressive and suspecting a potential Watergate in every story, he went by the soap-opera star name of Luke Brockmore and often made real reporters’ jobs more difficult than they needed to be. No one on the Journal-Gazette staff considered local television journalists anything more than over-paid pretty faces who could read a teleprompter, an attitude Addison and her publisher, J. Watterson Whitelaw, encouraged.

  Addison slipped back to the other side of the crime scene tape. If she had been the only one on the scene, Gary would have no problems sharing details with her, and, because of her familiarity with the force she would have access to all but the most sensitive areas of the crime scene. But once other media outlets showed up, he had to treat them all alike—and because it was Luke Brockmore, he’d be forced to really clamp down.

  Chief Marvin McGinnis, Gary’s older brother, hated Luke Brockmore. Indeed, all of the McGinnis brothers did, particularly after a series on city cell phone use alleged that McGinnis was using his own cell phone extremely freely. Journal-Gazette city reporter Marcus Henning had spent weeks poring over the bills and over a six-month period, personal phone calls had amounted to just over $100. The chief had reimbursed the city every time the bill had come in, but Brockmore neglected to report that. The calls had been to his wife Hannah, who was undergoing treatment for breast cancer at the time. Brockmore neglected to report that, too.

  Taint one of us and you taint all of us, Addison believed. Brockmore’s presence turned them both into THE MEDIA, a multi-headed hydra devouring everything around it, including itself, in its search for a story.

>   “Let the circus begin,” McGinnis shook his head. “Hey you! You can’t cross that tape. Hold on! I’ll get there.”

  Brockmore was waving a piece of paper. “We’ve got a statement from the college that the president’s daughter has been kidnapped,” he said. “What’s going on?”

  Addison jogged up to Brockmore. “Let me see that,” she said, holding out her hand.

  Brockmore smiled his perfect grin. “What, you don’t know what’s going on here either?” he cracked sarcastically as he lifted the paper further out of Addison’s reach. He turned his attention to Gary. “Do the police not have any idea what happened here, sir?’

  We have an idea, Luke. If you’d listen to your scanner, you’d know we have the situation well in hand.” Gary grabbed the paper from his hand and briefly scanned its contents.

  “Hey—that’s mine!” Brockmore exclaimed as McGinnis handed it to Addison.

  “I’ll give it back, Baby Face, don’t worry,” she said.

  It was a Golgotha press release written God knows when by David Horatio. Addison hoped there was one waiting for her at the J-G offices, but in light of the missing money story, probably not. Just beneath the letterhead, which featured the spire of the college’s Shanahan Chapel, the release read:

  Golgotha College President Dr. Seaford Rochambeau Thorn regretfully announces the abduction of his six-year-old daughter Lyndzee Thorn this evening by persons unknown.

  While police are working to locate Miss Thorn, they currently have no suspects and efforts are continuing. Dr. Thorn has reported to police that he had received a number of threats and suspicious communications in the last few days that could be connected with his daughter’s disappearance.

  The board of directors, meeting in emergency session this evening, offered their support and prayers for the Thorn family and encourage the Golgotha College community and the public at large to report any knowledge they may have of the whereabouts of Dr. Thorn’s daughter.

  “This is not an official police communication. This comes from the college and makes allegations the police are not yet ready to confirm,” McGinnis said.