“Jaylynn! What is it? What are you doing here? Have they found Lyndzee?”
“Nobody believes that Seaford has anything to do with Lyndzee’s kidnapping, but now I’ve got proof!” She let go of Addison and pulled an envelope from her back pocket. “Here! Here’s the proof that he did!”
Addison stepped back, her hands up in alarm. “I’m not touching that thing! I don’t want my prints all over it! What is it? Why didn’t you take it to the police before you brought it to me?”
Jaylynn waved the envelope at her. “You know the truth, Addie. You know what he told me, that he’d take my baby if I divorced him! The police don’t believe that Seaford had anything to do with Lyndzee’s disappearance, but I know he did!”
Addison shook her head sadly and ground out her cigarette in the gravel. “Jaylynn, I told the police he’d said that but after questioning him, they didn’t think he did it. What is that, anyway?”
Shaking, Jaylynn pulled the letter from the envelope. “It’s a letter. To his girlfriend.”
“What?” Overcome with curiosity, Addison snatched the letter and read a few paragraphs. “Oh my God.”
“Darling,
The sight of you every day torments me, yet my situation with my wife and the college will not permit us to go on. You have to understand that. As the president of a Christian college, I can’t be seen as a man who is unfaithful to his wife, even though our marriage is in fact finished. It would be disastrous to my career if I left her for you—and I won’t be forced into visiting my daughter every other weekend. I’d steal her before I’d let that happen.
As a man and a Christian, and as someone charged with providing the moral example to the staff and students here at Golgotha, you have to understand that we have to end this and end it now, even as I long to touch your body.
Yes, I can’t help thinking of you and all of our sweet afternoons then I am a man in torture. Each morning during my devotional time, when I am supposed to be reading my daily Bible lesson, the one I will preach on at noon chapel services, I find myself turning the pages until I find that wonderful book, The Song of Solomon. Those images, of beauty and of love, bring me back to you, your warm thighs, your soft breasts. “Thy lips… drop as the honeycomb; honey and milk are under thy tongue and the smell of thy garments is like the smell of Lebanon.”
I still want you every day, but you must understand how much my situation won’t permit us to be together forever. You can’t contact me at home or at the office any longer. Even though I long for you as a thirsty traveler craves water, I simply can’t permit it.
It was signed with his initials, SRT, scrawled floridly across the bottom of the page.
“Jaylynn, you have to take this to the police.” Addison handed it back to her. “As gaggable as it is.”
“The police won’t believe me, but you do! I need you to run that in your newspaper, show the world what a conniving bastard he really is!”
“Where’d you get this anyway? Here, let’s go inside. Duncan should be just about done with the milking and I promised him I’d make breakfast.” Addison pointed toward the back door. “We need to talk this out a little more.“
“I can’t stay. I slipped out before anyone was up and took Seaford’s car. I can’t let them find me here.”
“You really do give that man entirely too much power,” Addison said with a sigh. “Park that goddamned tank behind the barn so no one will see you. Then I’ll call Seaford and tell him you’re safe.”
“No! Don’t call!” Jaylynn clutched Addison’s arm. “He’ll trace the call! He’ll have someone come get me!”
“Jesus, Jaylynn, it’s not even six a.m.! You can use my cell phone and call his office. Leave a message there. Just tell him you’re safe and that you need some time alone and you’ll be back later. He’s in deep enough shit as it is to leave you alone. Meanwhile, we all need to eat.”
“I suppose.” Jaylynn followed Addison into the house like a puppy that’d been kicked once and was relieved to find another boot wasn’t coming. Addison took her cell phone from the kitchen counter and handed it to Jaylynn, who tapped in Seaford’s office number and spoke haltingly into his voice mail.
“Seaford, it’s, it’s me. Jaylynn. I—I had to be alone for a little bit this morning, so I borrowed the Navigator. I’m safe. I’m, I’m just taking some time for myself at a friend’s house. Yes, that’s it. I’ll be home by this evening.” She held the cell phone away from her ear and touched the ‘End’ button, then smiled sadly. “I’m such a lousy liar, but it does feel so good to be out from under everything. Now, I only wish I had my baby back.”
Frowning, Addison pulled a pound of sliced bacon and a dozen eggs from the fridge, closing the door with her foot. Quietly, she set them on the counter and picked up Isabella’s baseball hat, wiping barn dust from the brim. “So do I,” she said, softly.
“What?” Jaylynn’s eyes widened.
“You haven’t heard? The way Jubilant Falls talks, I figured the whole town knew by now. Isabella tried to commit suicide a couple days ago. That’s why I’m home. My publisher told me to take a couple days off.”
“Oh, Addie, I’m so sorry! We’ve both lost our daughters in a way, haven’t we?” Jaylynn clutched her friend’s shoulders, her eyes filled with bottomless pain.
“They think she’s bipolar. The doctors want to start her on Lithium this morning.” Addison closed her eyes, hoping Jaylynn wouldn’t sense how out of control she felt.
“Here.” Jaylynn stepped up to the stove and began searching through cupboard above the stove for a frying pan. “Let me cook you a good ole Georgia breakfast of bacon and eggs. You got any grits? No? Let me make you some biscuits and red-eye gravy then. We’ve been through so much, it’s not the time for us to worry about our figures, right?” Her smile was sad, but her movements belied her stress as she rapidly searched the cupboards for the flour canister, a bowl and some lard, then pulled the plastic gallon of milk from the fridge. Mixing fiercely with her hands, she combined the lard and the flour with a little baking soda and salt, softening the ingredients with a little milk.
“I can’t believe somebody as thin as you would eat this stuff—this is a heart attack on a plate,“ Addison said, setting the table.
“Honey, beneath all those nice clothes and fancy shoes Seaf says a president’s wife ought to wear, I’m just plain old white trash from the Happy Trails Trailer Park in Suwannee Bend. Before I met Seaf, my whole diet was fatback, grits and beans.” Jaylynn dropped spoonfuls of biscuit dough onto a cookie sheet. Sliding the biscuits into the oven, she wiped her hands on a dishtowel and began laying bacon slices in a frying pan.
Duncan appeared at the door, pulling his work gloves from his hands and nodding as Addison introduced the wife of Golgotha’s president.
“Jaylynn had some information on who may have taken Lyndzee and wanted to bring it to me,” Addison said.
“And you forced her into making breakfast?” Duncan smiled.
“Addison just told me about your daughter and I’m so sorry to hear that.” Jaylynn’s Georgia accent was getting stronger the more she spoke. "I just thought us gals’d just drown our sorrows in a veritable orgy of grease. Excuse me, but my haute cuisine—” her accent made it sound like ‘hot coo-zine’— “is jus’ begging for attention.”
Tossing a handful of flour into a saucepan, she added some grease from the frying bacon, whisking them together with a fork till the mixture was smooth. Slowly, she added milk until she had a velvet white sauce. Reaching across the counter, she picked up the coffee pot, critically eyed the dregs in the bottom of the glass carafe, and then tossed it, grounds and all, into the gravy.
“Nothing like red eye gravy!” she grinned.
In a few minutes, the biscuits were done and Jaylynn scrambled up six eggs in the bacon grease leavings.
“I’m just going to take a plate and go out to the graphics office, so you two can talk. God, if you cooked me breakfast like this every
day,” Duncan began.
“We’d be on a first name basis with the cardiologist!” Addison retorted, shooing him out the door. She turned her attention to Jaylynn. “Now tell me more about this God-awful ‘Dear Joan’ letter you brought me. Where did it come from? Did you have any idea that Seaford was fooling around?”
Jaylynn stabbed a bite of biscuits and gravy and sighed, her words slower and more measured.
“Well, if the truth be known, he’s fooled around before. He’s always wanted to be the center of attention,” she said sadly. “He’s really a performer of sorts at heart. He really wanted to be an actor, but his daddy back in Virginia thought theater was wrong and told him to be a preacher instead. He told me once he truly believed in God and felt the need to bring Jesus to people, but he thought church services were just so much theater a lot of times and what he knew how to do was theater.”
Addison nodded. It made sense. Everything Seaford did was part of some great performance, a mission to provide a positive spin for him and, by extension, the college. The missing money and now his missing daughter proved something was going on that he couldn’t control.
“And you know, as president of the college, he’s always on public view,” Jaylynn continued. “And women just love him.”
“Ever think it might be the other way around?” Addison recalled the way Seaford had looked Dr. Rachel Wiseman up and down the day before Lyndzee went missing. This made the Thorn’s martial problems a little more understandable. Between her recovery from drugs and alcohol and his persistent skirt chasing, what chance did this marriage have? Maybe his performances weren’t so much to make the college look good, as they were to get into some adoring female’s pants, Addison thought.
“Yes.” Jaylynn sighed loudly, her hands on her forehead as she stared down the table. “He says it’s the temptations of the flesh he can’t resist. We’ve prayed about it over and over again, but it’s like he thinks God is going to keep forgiving him every time he commits adultery.”
“Has it happened a lot?”
“In the last year it has—or at least I think it has. He’s traveled a lot and I just think that it’s not all on business. He’s come home smelling like another woman too many times. I finally told him I wasn’t going to sleep in the same bed with him anymore, that he could be putting us both at risk for AIDS or something.”
“And what did he say?”
Jaylynn hung her head. “He just throws my past in my face.”
“How do you mean?”
“I had one serious close call after Seaford and I were first married. I’d got word that my younger brother Dewayne had died in a motorcycle accident and I couldn’t get back to Suwannee Bend in time for the funeral. Of course, no one in my family wanted me back there, anyway—drug addicts who work as strippers aren’t really a welcome addition to any family event, no matter how long they’ve been sober—so I didn’t hear about it until too late. I really went off the deep end. I went back the streets I used to run when I was hooked, looking for just a line or two of cocaine, just to make all the hurt go away. I was gone for two days, trying to find some.” Jaylynn’s voice dropped to a whisper. “And Seaford found me. Just in the nick of time.”
“Where did he find you?”
Jaylynn, her eyes full of pain, looked across the kitchen table to Addison. “In a back alley. On my knees, giving my old dealer a blowjob to pay for some coke,” she whispered.
“Oh God.”
“Addie, I never took the stuff; I never have since I left detox. That was as close as I ever came to even looking at cocaine again! Moe, my dealer, he was making me do that before I got the stuff. I’d told Seaford everything when I was in detox, so he knew where to look for me…And god, he found me. He punched Moe in the face, shook me till I thought my teeth would rattle and took me home. He’s never let me live it down, even ten years later.” Tears rose in her eyes and spilled down her cheeks. “He said my sins are why Lyndzee disappeared. God is punishing me for that one time.”
“If that’s the way your God works, I don’t want to have anything to do with him.” Addison took a final sip of her coffee, wondering if her own sins were why Isabella was hospitalized. “I think we can do enough damage to each other without bringing religion into it. Where did you get this letter?”
“That’s the weird part. It was mailed to me at home—no return address, nothing.”
“Could it be that the ex-girlfriend sent it to you?”
“Oh, yes. Who else would it be? I mean, if she really was intent on stealing my husband, then what better way to do it than by letting me know they’d been fooling around?”
“Do you have any idea who she could be?”
“Who knows? Most all of the support staff at the administration building is female, except of course, for the upper management. They’re all men.”
“Why does that not surprise me? Could it be someone within your household? Like that little Nazi maid, Tina? Or Dr. Wiseman?”
“Oh no.” Jaylynn shook her head. “Seaford may have poisoned Tina against me, but she’s so religious it’s almost creepy. Her parents are missionaries over in Ghana and she had a very strict upbringing. She works for us as part of her scholarship that the church provides for missionary children. I saw her dorm room once and it’s so bare, so abnormal for a college girl. All she has is a picture of her parents by her bed and a plain gold cross on the wall. No posters, no other pictures. The bed was made, too. You know how a military man makes his bead so that a quarter will bounce off it? That’s the way Tina makes her bed.”
“What about Dr. Wiseman?” Addison thought of the strange calm smile Pat Robinette captured on film when the search for Lyndzee was just beginning.
Jaylynn shuddered and took another bite of scrambled eggs. “Who could find that attractive? What a domineering controlling—you know the word I want to use. She’s so focused on building her career that I’d bet you if Seaford did put a move on her, she’d tell him to back off.”
“Jaylynn, something I want you to think about. It’s not just men that commit crimes. Have you considered that whoever sent that letter could have engineered Lyndzee’s kidnapping as a way to get back at Seaford? Or is it possible this unknown woman took Lyndzee to get your husband back?”
Shock and realization filled Jaylynn’s face as her fork clattered to her plate. “What have I done? What have I done? I should have taken this to the police when I got it yesterday!”
“You’ve had this a whole day and you just sat on it?”
“It came in yesterday’s mail and I told you, I thought it just proved that Seaford would steal Lyndzee the first chance he got—and since the police don’t believe he had anything to do with it, I wanted you to see it first.”
“Maybe this little chickee-poo, whoever she is, thinks she’s doing their relationship a favor,” Addison pointed out. “She wants your man back. Maybe she’ll kidnap your daughter as a way to do that.”
Jaylynn stood up, her paper napkin sliding to the floor. “I’ve got to get back! I’ve got to get to the police with this letter!”
Addison grabbed Jaylynn by the wrist. “Now I’m also obligated to tell the police I saw the letter. My prints are all over it. That’s not going to look good for you or me. But that also obligates me to write a story as well. The police and the FBI aren’t going to like that.”
“Oh God, what have I done? What have I done?” Jaylynn wrung her hands.
“I’m not saying that’s the way it happened. I’m only saying that’s a possibility. We’ve had two people, both of them men, show up with Lyndzee’s shoes. One of them was Harmon Ripsmatta, who was found dead in the Jensen’s barn, the other was Talley Lundgren, who says he saw Lyndzee wander into his camp in the woods. And he says she was alone when he saw her. Nobody’s been charged with anything and, except for Talley, nobody’s seen her at all.”
Jaylynn’s voice escalated in hysteria. “I can’t stand the thought of my baby in the woods all alone an
d scared! I can’t take this much more, Addie! Oh, God, I’ve got to get this to the police.”
“Stop it! This isn’t going to do Lyndzee any good. Let me call Gary McGinnis and he’ll come out here to get this.” Addison reached for the wall phone and, from memory, dialed in Gary’s home number. “Hi, Char. Yeah, it’s me Penny. Sorry to call so early. Is Gary still around or has he gone into the office yet?” She was silent for a moment. “Gary, you need to come out here. I’ve got Jaylynn Thorn here and she’s got something you need to see.”
She was silent again. “I see. Uh-huh. Well, she’s been here for about an hour. Do you want me to say anything to her or do you want to be the one to tell her? OK, will do.” Addison hung up the phone.
“Tell me what? What is it?” Jaylynn asked, frantic.
“They’ve heard from the kidnappers. They got a ransom note.”
Chapter 17
“Where did you get this?” Holding the paper by its corners with latex-gloved fingers, Gary McGinnis examined Seaford’s ‘Dear Joan’ letter by the light of the sun pouring through Addison’s kitchen window.
“It came in the mail yesterday.” Jaylynn sat at the table, her bandana twisting in her hands. She’d run a brush through her hair and, running out to the Navigator parked behind the barn, fished a lipstick and blush out of her purse before a caravan of police cruisers and unmarked vehicles blasted up the McIntyre lane shortly after her phone call.
“ What in God’s name do you think you’re doing?” Addison had pounded angrily on the hood of McGinnis’s unmarked Crown Victoria as it came to a stop. Two black and whites and another car she didn’t recognize stopped right behind the Crown Vic. “You come riding in here like the fucking cavalry! I called you to give you a tip on this goddamned case and thought I could depend on you to handle it with a little bit of goddamned tact!”
Duncan rounded the back of the house at a trot. “What in hell is going on here?” he demanded.
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