Barn Burner (Jubilant Falls series Book 1)

by Debra Gaskill

  She printed the ad out from her office computer and grabbed her purse from beneath her desk. Waving the piece of white paper at Dennis she headed toward the stairs to the classified ad department.

  “I’m going to drop this off in classified, then I’m going to go check on Suzanne Porter and go pick up Isabella. I’ve got the scanner if anything happens,” she called.

  And I can only hope it will, she thought to herself.

  ***

  Lyndzee shook her head, trying to make the fog inside go away. She was back in the closet again. She’d woke up there after eating the lunch that Roy, the man with the bent ears and the squished nose who’d grabbed her in the woods, made for her.

  It was beginning to be part of a routine that developed over however many days she’d been held here. After her capture, her kidnapper tied her hands together and dragged her back to a car parked on the side of the road and then, tied her feet together so she couldn’t run away. He held her head down on the cold plastic upholstery on the front seat, so she couldn’t see where she was going. They’d driven to this small house where Roy clamped a thick dog collar around her ankle. He used pliers to bend nails through the thick leather of the dog collar to make it impossible for her to remove. A long length of heavy chain was welded to the collar, which was hooked to a metal loop on the wall, so high she couldn’t unfasten it and escape.

  During the day Lyndzee sat in a nearly empty room, the chain coiled at her feet. The room was furnished only with a mattress on the floor and a TV tray where Roy would set her meals three times a day.

  For a toilet, she had a bucket Roy emptied every morning, after Lyndzee spent the night on the old mattress covered only with the torn sheet and blankets that smelled like pee.

  Today, lunch was spaghetti out of a can. It didn’t taste right, but he told her to eat it anyway and to eat it all or he’d slap her right in the mouth. She felt kind of funny afterwards and the next thing she knew, she was waking up in the closet. Her hands were tied behind her back with strips cut from the old sheet on the mattress in the corner, the other end of the chain coiled at her feet.

  Even if she could free herself from her bonds, the door to her room was locked from the outside and the tall window was covered with plywood nearly the entire length of the glass. The plywood was high enough to keep her from looking directly outside, but low enough to allow sunlight to come in from the top of the window’s glass.

  When someone came (or Roy thought someone was coming), he’d tie her hands and feet and cover her mouth with tape, then unhook the chain from the wall and shove her into the closet.

  The first time he threw her in there, she’d gone kicking and screaming. That netted her a slap in the face while Roy’s other hand grasped a hank of her hair tightly in his fist.

  “If I have to kill you, I won’t get my share of the money! Shut up, dammit! Shut up!” he’d screamed, his bloodshot eyes, inches from her face.

  The second time, he started taping her mouth shut and she’d gone quietly. Sometimes, like today, her food would taste funny and she’d just wake up in the closet.

  Except when Roy brought her meals in to the rickety TV tray, he left her alone most of the day. As long as he could hear her chain rattle when she moved, he stayed in the other room of the small, dilapidated two-room house, a combination of living and cooking areas. The furniture was as ragged as the house. When the door opened, Lyndzee caught a glimpse of tattered couch where Roy slept, a coffee table covered with dishes filled with half-eaten food and black and white TV with foil extensions on the rabbit-ear antenna.

  From her closet prison, Lyndzee only heard the sound of a door open and a woman’s voice, full of anger. Lyndzee’s head was too fogged to think. The voice sounded familiar. What it somebody who worked in her big white house? No, it couldn’t be. The girl that worked there, Tina, wouldn’t do anything to hurt her, would she? It sounded so much like her, though—young and pretty, but harsh and strict.

  “Was that your foolish idea to send in those two thugs to get that ransom money?” the young woman’s voice asked.

  Roy laughed. “No, but I thought it was funnier than hell that the cops fell for it. What are you bitchin’ about anyway? It’s kept them off our trail for nearly a fucking week, along with my story about drinkin’ the beer I bought that day at my buddy’s place.”

  “I’m glad you think this is so funny. Here’s your groceries—there’s milk for her cereal in the morning and I bought canned pasta again.” Lyndzee heard the sound of metal cans hitting the wood of the coffee table.

  “So who gets the other half of the money, now that Rip’s dead?”

  “Who do you think?”

  “Well, it seems to me that since he screwed up and lost the girl in the woods and you went and—”

  “Stop it! God ordained his death, you understand? God doesn’t want sinners and pedophiles on this earth! And He told—”

  “Yeah, well, it doesn’t matter now,” Roy interrupted. “Rip’s still dead and I want his half of the money. I think I deserve it, after chasing that little shit through the woods.”

  The woman muttered something Lyndzee couldn’t hear. Her head was becoming clearer. If Lyndzee was hearing things right, it had to be Tina who stood in the other room, who’d brought the food she ate and, did something that made the first man grab her outside the carryout.

  But why? Tina had been the one who’d said she was big enough to walk by herself across the campus. She’d been the one who’d fixed her dinners and told her stories about Jesus at night when Daddy was out and Mommy was in her room. Why would Tina want to take her away from her parents? It didn’t make any sense.

  “So what about the money? I wasn’t supposed to have her until later in the week, but I’m the one who found her running through the woods. I oughta get Rip’s portion of the—”

  “Ssshh! I hear something!”

  Lyndzee used her feet to push herself a little more upright. She couldn’t hear anything but maybe they could hear somebody coming. Maybe it was someone to save her! But how would they know she was here? She wiggled around till her back was against the closet door and her feet were propped against the back wall. She drew her knees up to her chest and with one move, kicked the wall. Maybe whoever was outside would hear and come save her. She kicked the wall again and again, screaming through the gray electric tape that covered her mouth.

  Suddenly the closet door opened and she fell backwards onto her back and elbows. Lyndzee looked up into Roy’s face, twisted into an angry snarl.

  “You’re going to fuck this up for all of us, you know it?” he hissed. With one sharp move, he kicked her in the side. Lyndzee cried out through her tape-covered mouth and began to sob.

  “Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!” He kicked her with each command. Lyndzee’s ribs and her hip reverberated with pain. She rolled over on her side as Roy’s foot connected with her lower back. The dirty painted wall in front of her began to dissolve into blackness as she slid toward unconsciousness.

  “Stop it! Stop it!” The woman’s voice screamed from across the room. “You’re going to kill her!”

  Lyndzee felt herself being drawn up unto someone’s arms and opened her eyes. She gasped as she recognized the young woman wearing blue jeans and a pink tee shirt standing above her. It was Tina, the same Tina who brought her breakfast every morning, who’d comforted her when she was sick and told her stories at bedtime.

  But now her eyes held no comfort. They were hard and cold as she looked back at Lyndzee. With a quick move of her hand, Tina ripped the tape off Lyndzee’s mouth. The little girl gasped at the quick pain, but didn’t cry out. She didn’t want Roy to kick her again.

  “Tina! It’s you! Why did you do this to me?” she finally whispered.

  “God says sin must be avenged, Lyndzee. The sins of the fathers will be visited on the next generation—and that’s you.”

  “What sins? What do you mean?”

  Tina laid a finger across Lyndze
e’s lips and her voice became familiar and soft, the one she’d used to tuck her in at night. “There are a lot of people who don’t want anything to happen to you, Lyndzee. Your mother, your father, that nice Dr. Wiseman—they’re all very concerned about your safety–and so are Mr. Roy and I. He just gets a little angry sometimes and can’t control himself.” She shot a harsh glance at Roy, who stood with his arms crossed in the middle of the filthy room. “We are just taking you away from them for a little while, so they know how bad they’ve been.”

  “What did they do? My mommy didn’t do anything bad!”

  Tina shushed her again. “When they know how it was their sins that resulted in the death of a child, an innocent, innocent child…”

  Lyndzee began to scream. “Don’t kill me! Please don’t kill me!”

  Roy and Tina both began to laugh. They were laughing so hard they didn’t hear the tall bearded man dressed in ragged clothes step into the room.

  Chapter 24

  So how’s things been?” Addison sat on Suzanne Porter’s front porch swing across from her friend as a soft warm breeze wafted the scent of roses from the nearby bushes toward the two long-time friends. Suzanne had settled her boys in front of the television set with a summer lunch of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and a bag of Cheez Curls.

  “Surprisingly, not bad at all.” Suzanne delicately picked a potato chip from a battered red Tupperware bowl between them and sipped her Diet Coke. Addison always marveled how tall, blonde Suzanne always managed to look good after running around after five rambunctious boys—even now, as she tried to make ends meet as a single mother.

  “Emotionally or financially?” Addison asked her friend.

  “John is going to start sending me money from Florida,” Suzanne said as she thoughtfully examined her potato chip. “There’s a child support order in force and it’s going to come right out of his check, so I don’t even have to mess with him. When that starts —I’m supposed to get my first check on the first of the month—we should be OK. We’ve filed formal separation papers, but won’t file for divorce until we both get the money together to pay our lawyers. I’m working fifteen hours a week at the Clip’N’ Curl and anywhere between fifteen to twenty hours a week at Groceryland.”

  Suzanne looked sideways at her friend and smiled. “We’re doing OK, Penny. You wouldn’t believe how much calmer things are around here, even with me working two jobs and trying to raise five boys. Does that tell you how bad it got around here?”

  “I feel so bad about not coming around to check on you.”

  “Like either of us had the time to sit? C’mon, these last few weeks haven’t been easy for any of us. You’ve had the Lyndzee Thorn story—really creepy about those guys trying to extort that money out of the family, huh? And I know you’ve had some other things going on.”

  “You know about Isabella?”

  Suzanne nodded and laid her hand on Addison’s. “Duncan called me the night he found her in the bathroom. I met him at the hospital when he couldn’t raise you on the cell phone.”

  Addison turned her head away, ashamed. “I couldn’t even be there for my own daughter when she needed me most.”

  “Listen, we all know that you were covering for my idiot husband. If he hadn’t been screwing up so badly, you wouldn’t have fired him. You might have been able to talk her out of it if John hadn’t been chasing some cheap Wal-Mart tail. You were on a fire that night, right?”

  “Yeah. You know it was the Jensen barn that burned. The sheriff’s investigators found one of the Thorn kidnapping suspects dead in the ashes.”

  Suzanne sighed. “That whole thing is weird. Who do you think is at the bottom of it all? The dad?”

  “No. We haven’t said anything about it, but there was a letter that Jaylynn found that indicates Mr. President was fooling around on her.”

  “Good God, is there something in the water in the town? Does every man screw around on his wife in Jubilant Falls? Except Duncan, of course.”

  “Hey, we don’t live in town! That’s my excuse!” Addison laughed shortly. “No, seriously, I’m looking into some of the women who work around Dr. Thorn. I think that’s where we’ll find the smoking gun.”

  “You think they’ll find the little girl?”

  Addison shrugged. “We’re running a story today where the police say the search has turned from a rescue to a recovery mission.”

  Suzanne sighed. “That’s too bad. You don’t think Lyndzee is alive, do you?”

  “Who knows? Listen, I’ve got to get going. Duncan and I are supposed to pick Izzy up at two, and he wants to talk before we go.” Addison rolled her eyes.

  “You need to be there, Penny. It’s like me and the boys in a way. We’re all starting a new life. All the roles are changed, and nothing will ever be the same,” Suzanne said. “Look at me. I don’t care if John Porter comes to me on his knees, I’ll never let that man back into my life. He’s still the boys’ father, and I’ll never stand in the way of that, but really, I don’t think he’ll ever be much on visitation. Even though the boys and I have new ground rules for just about everything, we’re still a family and they know that. It’s the same with Isabella. She’s been through some rough times, and she needs to know that her parents are behind her. And Duncan has been hurt over this a lot more than you know. We’ve talked a couple times. He needs you to be there for him.”

  Addison nodded. “You’re right.” She took one last drag on her cigarette and flicked the butt away. It arched high across the yard and disappeared into the Porter’s spotty grass. “I’m scared, Suzanne. I’m just so scared to bring Izzy home. What if she tries to commit suicide again?” Addison’s eyes were filled with pain.

  “You can’t worry about those kind of things, Penny. There might be a few rough bumps in the road, but she’s on medication, right?”

  Addison nodded. “Lithium.”

  “Then odds are the worst is behind you. I know you’ll do fine. I also know my best friend has bigger, brassier ones than anybody else in this town.”

  “I used to think so too, Suzanne, but I don’t think that way any more. I want to be a good mother. Isabella needs me to be a good mother and Duncan does, too, but I don’t think I have the first clue on how to do it.”

  “Sure you do. You just don’t know how much strength you’ve got in there.”

  Addison moved toward the porch steps. “I hope you’re right.”

  ***

  “You leave that young ‘un alone!”

  Roy and Tina’s raucous laughter stopped short. They whirled to face Talley Lundgren standing in the door. His beard was scraggly and held bits of food. He wore a polyester sport coat, gray with dirt, one pocket clinging to the side by a few strands of thread. His jeans were torn at the knees and his boots were battered. His powerful body odor filled the room.

  “You let her go. She ain’t done nothing to you.”

  Lyndzee watched in terror as Talley stalked into the room. In one hand, he held a long thick piece of wood. It was smooth and polished yellow wood, with one rounded end and one jagged end, like someone had broken off the shovel or rake that had once been there.

  “I said let her go!” Talley’s speech was slow and deliberate, not the pressured, forced words Lyndzee remembered from her day in his camp. Calmly, he assumed the stance of a home run hitter and, as Roy lunged at him, swung powerfully through the air. The smooth yellow pole caught Roy in the ribs with a sickening thunk. He gasped and grabbed his side as he fell back onto the floor, cursing between Lyndzee’s terrified screams.

  Tina let Lyndzee fall from her arms and lunged at the homeless man, but another swing of the stake kept her at bay.

  “Talley! Look out! Roy’s getting back up!” Lyndzee screamed as she fell to the floor. Frantically, she strained at her bonds, trying with all her strength to rip the pieces of torn sheet that held her hands and feet. Even if she could rip those off, the dog collar with its long heavy chain would be difficult to carry it
in order to run away.

  Lundgren turned and swung again at Castlewheel, the stick connecting with the little man’s side again. This time the force of the blow sent Roy slamming into the wall. The side of his face struck the windowpane, bloodying his nose and turning his left eye into a bluish-purple slit.

  Just as the blow connected, Tina jumped on Talley’s back, locking her arms around his scrawny neck in a chokehold. Talley staggered as he tried to keep standing, dropping the wooden pole. The two stumbled against the TV tray and fell to the floor. Tina was sandwiched between the tray and Talley as they fell. There was a sickening crack as Tina grasped her left arm.

  “My arm! It’s broken!” she cried.

  Talley scrambled to his feet, pulling her up by the front of her pink tee shirt. “You gonna let that girl go now?” He pulled back his fist. “If’n you don’t, you’re gonna be sorry.”

  A defiant look crossed Tina’s face. “This is the Lord’s work, old man. You can’t stand in the way of God’s will.”

  “Talley! Behind you!” Lyndzee screamed again.

  Roy held each end of stick with both hands and was staggering toward the gaunt hobo. He charged at Talley, knocking him against the wall and pinning his arms to his sides. In one swift move, Talley raised his leg and kicked Roy sharply in the stomach. Castlewheel fell to his knees, retching and grabbing his stomach.

  Screaming like a banshee, Tina lunged at the hobo, leading with her right shoulder, holding her broken arm. Talley jumped forward, shoving the flat of his palm sharply into Tina’s face.

  Lyndzee gasped as the young woman she’d once known as a comforter and a friend crumpled to the floor, unconscious and bloody.