Murder on the Lunatic Fringe (Jubilant Falls Series Book 4)

by Debra Gaskill

  Soon after, Duncan’s parents announced they wanted to retire from farming. I knew it was time for us to return to Jubilant Falls. I found a home at the Journal-Gazette and never looked back.

  I’ve been at the Journal-Gazette longer than Isabella has been alive. I covered everything from cops to courts to city hall, county government and schools, before taking the managing editor’s position.

  Now, as I headed into the city, I stopped for a traffic light, taking time to light a cigarette and slurp my coffee before the light turned green.

  I never wanted to do anything else. I was lucky and knew it. Most folks never got to pursue their passion.

  Traffic began to move and I thought briefly about Elizabeth’s interview with Ekaterina Bolodenka. Maybe this Bolodenka woman was one of those people. She could take her passion for weaving and color and turn it into beautiful works of art.

  Maybe that’s the tack I’ll take with this story, I thought, pulling into the newspaper’s parking lot. Maybe this is a woman who has followed her passion and it’s led her to Jubilant Falls, too.

  Chapter 3 Graham

  “You need to see a doctor.” Standing outside my bathroom, I called through the door to Elizabeth Day.

  I heard her flush the toilet, then the sounds of her teeth being brushed. Wrapped in my robe, she opened the door. Her eyes had dark circles underneath and her face was pale.

  “I’m not going to any doctor,” she said. “I know what this is.”

  She picked up her purple wig off the floor and ran her hand across the sparse stubble of her naked head, evidence of the autoimmune disease alopecia. It wasn’t contagious or fatal, Elizabeth explained the first time I’d seen her adjusting her hair from side to side in a mirror. Her immune system for some reason turned on her hair follicles, leaving circular, hairless patches across her head. When her hair got exceptionally thin, she’d just started shaving it off and wearing wigs. It began when she was halfway through college, she told me, and although she was used to it, other people could get weird about her baldness.

  I was the only one she allowed to see her like this. No one in the newsroom knew her violet hair was a wig, or if they did, they never said anything. With Elizabeth’s quirky style and vintage clothes, the purple hair was her signature look. It wasn’t the only wig she had. There were other Kool-Aid colors: red, orange and Kelly green, as well as a conservative brunette wig, which made it easy when we ventured out to dinner in Columbus or Cincinnati.

  We’d been seeing each other for about a year, successfully hiding the relationship from anyone else in the newsroom and hopefully, everyone in Jubilant Falls. As connected as our boss was in the community, it wouldn’t take long for the information to get back to Addison.

  I pulled her close, wrapping my arms around her.

  “Listen, don’t you think I hear you in the mornings puking in the ladies’ restroom?” I asked softly, kissing the top of her patchy, balding head. “You’re doing it two or three times a week lately.”

  She didn’t answer, but wrapped her arms around my waist and buried her face in my chest.

  “You lied to Addison, too.”

  “Oh, like you never have,” she said, into my chest.

  “You’ve got me there,” I answered. “I still think you need to call a doctor.” I let one hand slide down to her belly. “Just in case.”

  Elizabeth stiffened and pulled away from me. “Oh, don’t even go there. I’m not pregnant.”

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “Don’t go there, Graham. Just don’t go there.” She stomped into my bedroom and slammed the door.

  “Elizabeth? Beth?” I knocked on the door.

  “Go to work, Graham,” she said, through the door. “I’m going to go back to bed for a while, then I’m going home. Oh God…” There was the sound of retching again.

  “You OK?” Thank God I lined my bedroom trashcan with plastic bags. I hoped she’d made it there.

  “I’m fine. Go to work.”

  “OK, if you insist. I’ll call you later to check on you.”

  She retched in reply.

  I turned and walked through my tiny kitchen to the only door of my attic apartment, grabbing my keys from a hook on the doorframe. I stopped in front of the last kitchen cabinet and opened the small drawer below the countertop. Opening the drawer, I removed a small blue velvet ring box, put it in my pocket and went to work.

  ***

  I twirled the small ring box with my right hand as I gripped the steering wheel in my left, pulling onto Detroit Street and heading south toward downtown and the Journal-Gazette. Before I got into the newsroom, I would stop at the police department to pick up the reports from overnight, scanning through them for anything story-worthy. If there were, I’d spend a few minutes with Assistant Chief Gary McGinnis getting the details.

  Maybe I shouldn’t have bought this ring, I thought. Maybe that was impulsive.

  Something about Elizabeth pushed me beyond my personal comfort zone into an exhilaration I’d never felt before. We’d never said, “I love you” to each other, but I was confident in my love for her. I just knew she felt the same way about me.

  Being in love was different from what I did at work, where risk and confrontation was commonplace—I got paid for that. At work, it was all about the story, finding the truth, backing up your sources and getting it in print. The story was right or it was wrong, even though what happened in it could be black, white or a hundred shades of gray. As long as it was factual, as long as it was true, that was what I got paid for.

  I could take the easy way out and just write up the facts. Or I could look a little deeper, into the depths of nuance and distinction below every story’s surface, if I wanted to dig.

  I looked at it this way: A guy setting out to rob some pizza joint would be wrong. But finding himself on the other end of the owner’s 12-guage, what would he be then? He might be robbing the place for reasons ranging from drugs to joblessness to just the thrill of taking something that isn’t his. He might be dead or wounded as a result of the confrontation, but he is not blameless and he definitely didn’t think about the possible consequences of his actions.

  But he’s still a victim.

  The guy behind the counter is a victim, too. Maybe it’s the third time this month somebody’s robbed him. Maybe the next time his cash register gets cleaned out, he won’t be able to make a payment on his business or his house, so he decides to do something to make sure that doesn’t happen. He buys a gun and it sits beneath the counter and one night just before closing, some asshole comes in and says four words that change both their lives forever: “This is a robbery.”

  He’s stood up for himself and his business, and odds are, he’s not going to be charged with anything, but he’s got to live with the consequences of what two deer slugs do to a human body late on a Saturday night. And all that makes him a victim, too.

  I could do a routine pizza joint robbery story in four to six paragraphs—and most reporters would. The bigger story behind that could be the collapse of a neighborhood, the collapse of a family due to drugs or whatever, or the collapse of a whole economy. That’s the story I want to do.

  What I said in my story, how I covered that shooting, it had to be right. I had to be careful. I couldn’t assume anything and I had to check my facts.

  But love… and Elizabeth: That was something else.

  We started seeing each other after a boozy night following the Associated Press Awards in Columbus. My story on a major fire at one of the county’s industrial egg farms won a first in Best Breaking News; Elizabeth won for her feature writing. There were some other awards for sports coverage and for our special sections, projects we’d had no hand in but accepted on Addison’s behalf.

  After the banquet, we decided to celebrate.

  I still remember what she wore as she walked to the front of the room to accept her award: That purple wig, a full-skirted, vintage red-flowered dress right out of the costum
e department of Mad Men, denim jacket, orange tights and black, steel-toed work boots. She was a few years older than me, a real woman with her swelling bosom and ample hips. Vintage fifties clothing suited her well.

  After several drinks, we found ourselves outside the bar, leaning up against her car, staring at the full moon. I reached for her hand and she let me take it, giving me an odd look as I did.

  “I’d like to see you again,” I said.

  “You’re drunk.”

  “No, I’m not. I’m serious. Can I take you out to dinner?”

  “Is there a policy on inter-office dating?”

  “Probably.”

  “Then no.”

  “We’ll go out of town when we go out. Nobody will ever know.”

  “No.”

  “C’mon, why not? We’ve had a great time tonight. Why not see if we can keep having a good time together?”

  She shrugged. “OK. If you want to—just this one time.”

  The next weekend, we had dinner and drinks on a Cincinnati riverboat, cruising up and down the Ohio River for four hours under a full summer moon.

  “So the big deal about you, Kinnon, is that nobody knows anything about you,” she said, slicing into her piece of rubber chicken breast.

  “Nobody’s ever asked,” I answered.

  “I am.”

  “OK, here it is: I spent my high school years at a Jesuit boarding school, and I went on to a Jesuit college.”

  “Boarding school? That’s pretty hoity-toity.”

  I didn’t tell her that my mother lost me to foster care when I was six, thanks to drugs, and when she showed up on my tenth birthday, she’d not only cleaned up, but she’d reinvented herself. By then married to a wealthy Indianapolis industrialist, Mom looked like a queen in her rose-colored silk suit as she sat in the courtroom, explaining why her parental rights should be restored.

  Before that courtroom appearance, my last memories of her had been as she was led off to jail, wearing torn jeans, a ripped Led Zeppelin tee shirt, stringy hair and the hollow eyes of a woman beaten by her addictions and the men in her life.

  She met Bill, my new stepfather, when she was a waitress—or at least that’s what she told me. I was a freshman in college before I found out the truth: it was a topless bar and she was a dancer. When Bill rediscovered the Catholic faith of his childhood, he foisted that religion on my mother and together, they thought there was nothing better than the rigid education of Jesuit boarding school for a rambunctious boy.

  For me, family time was Christmas in Bermuda and summers at Bill’s sprawling home in a gated community outside Indianapolis. The rest of the time I spent at boarding school.

  “Yeah. I guess it was pretty hoity-toity,” I said to Elizabeth as the sound of the paddlewheels sloshed rhythmically in the moon-drenched Ohio River. “What about you?”

  “Oh, nothing much. Suburbs. Picket fences. A dog, a cat, a brother, two parents who teach at the high school,” she said. “Good folks. I just went another direction from my parents, but they were cool with it. Tell me more about you.”

  “There’s not a lot about me, either,” I said. “I edited the college paper, interned at the Indianapolis Star, and ended up in Jubilant Falls.”

  What I didn’t tell her then: Two younger brothers, Jackson and James, soon supplanted my place in the family and as they were groomed by Bill to take over the family factory, I was relegated more and more to the background.

  Bill gladly paid for a year-round apartment beginning in my sophomore year of college. As long as my grades stayed up and my record stayed clean, or maybe because I stayed gone, the tuition and rent checks kept coming.

  I found I liked the thrill of the chase in journalism, and probably, as a byproduct of my Jesuit education, the search for justice, with its the moral absolutes of right and wrong. As long as Bill knew I could support myself he didn’t care what I majored in.

  “At least it’s something that will get you a real job,” he said. “Not like philosophy or pottery.” To help me on my way, he said he pulled a few strings for the Indy Star internship.

  My mother, the former crack whore and stripper, wore a Chanel suit to my college graduation, looking ever the part of Indianapolis’s best-known philanthropist and social diva. Bill endowed a business management scholarship before we left. I started at the Journal-Gazette two weeks later.

  Mother and Bill each sent big checks on my birthday and Christmas and postcards from wherever they and my little brothers were vacationing.

  I made sure I worked a lot of holidays. It was easier for everybody that way.

  But Elizabeth, my Elizabeth… That first Cincinnati riverboat dinner-cruise led to another date, then another and another. The night I caught her adjusting her wig in my bathroom mirror was the first time we made love and all the walls came down.

  I told her the truth about my family. She told me about the struggles she had with her alopecia and, with the love and support from her family, how she finally embraced it with the multicolored wigs and funky style.

  I actually begged off working this last July 4th weekend. Addison was surprised I wanted a holiday off, but admitted I probably deserved it.

  “Whatever you’re doing, God knows you’ve earned it. Have a good time.” Addison said. “Duncan and I aren’t doing anything at home. I can catch whatever news breaks.”

  I never told her why I wanted the time off—Elizabeth and I went to Shaker Heights to meet her family.

  Two weeks after we visited Shaker Heights, I’d bought the ring, a simple quarter-carat solitaire. I was just struggling to find the best time to ask her—and when to take her to Indianapolis to meet my family. I wasn’t sure how somebody as plainspoken and grounded as Elizabeth would fare in the self-rarified air of Bill’s new money.

  But what was going on with Elizabeth? Was she pregnant? We were smart enough to use birth control—she’d made it clear she wasn’t going to end up with a baby before she was good and ready. Had something happened?

  I pulled my battered Toyota into one of the parking places in front of Jubilant Falls’ City Hall, where the police department took up the entire basement floor. I opened the glove compartment and pulled out a reporter’s notebook. I placed the blue velvet box next to the notebooks. I couldn’t think about Elizabeth any more.

  It was time to go work.

  ***

  “Chief G wants to see you in his office.”

  The dispatcher, a tiny blonde with big blue eyes, pushed the photocopied stack of yesterday’s reports across the tray beneath the bulletproof glass. Without waiting for my response, she buzzed me through to the police department’s offices.

  I already knew my way through the basement’s labyrinth to the small room that housed McGinnis’s metal desk, city issue chairs and the bookshelf where his gun belt, his Kevlar vest and pictures of his wife and kids sat among his case files.

  Assistant Chief Gary McGinnis was the second in command at the Jubilant Falls Police Department, behind his brother Marvin, the chief, and the department’s most prominent face. Half the force had the last name of McGinnis, so the two were identified as Chief G and Chief M — or, behind his back, The Big M, because of his creeping obesity.

  As I entered, Chief G was sitting behind his desk and stood to shake my hand.

  “Good morning sir,” I said as we sat down. “What’s up? I haven’t had a chance to look at the reports.”

  McGinnis took a gulp of coffee from the FBI mug on his desk before answering.

  “Nothing you’ll find in there.” He nodded at the stack of paper in my hand.

  “Oh?”

  “Have you been watching the news reports out of Collitstown?” he asked.

  Collitstown was a medium-sized city about twenty miles down the road from Jubilant Falls. It was the home of the area’s largest employer, Symington Air Force Base. Like the rest of the area, it was struggling with the decline of manufacturing; the crash of 2008-2009 hit particularly hard. />
  “Only when I think they may have beat us to something.”

  The assistant chief cracked a smile, probably his first this morning.

  “Then you may not have noticed there have been a number of incidents that could likely be characterized as hate crimes occurring there. We have reason to believe the groups may be migrating here and organizing in Plummer County.”

  “Not to be snide, but I’m surprised Plummer County doesn’t have its own homegrown hate groups.”

  “We have had some small wanna-be skinhead groups, idiot teenagers generally. This is the first time we’ve had any indication something serious is about to develop.”

  I flipped open my notebook and clicked my pen with my thumb. Chief G held up his hand to stop me.

  “This is strictly off the record for now. I just want to give you some background. This is a joint operation with the sheriff’s office, so when we are ready to move on these guys, I will let you know.”

  Flipping my notebook closed, I nodded. “Do you have anyone in particular you’re watching? Off the record?”

  Chief G opened a manila folder and slid two photos across the desk. “There are two. One we know, one we hope you’ll know.”

  One was a Jubilant Falls resident and long-time small town crook, whose face had often been on our front page.

  The other was an older version of me.

  Chapter 4 Addison

  Even by Jubilant Falls’ Midwest standards, the woman standing at the door of the Lunatic Fringe Farm was striking.

  Tall and lithe, Ekaterina Bolodenka was dressed in slim jeans and worn brown cowboy boots. The manure clinging to her boot heels and soles told me this woman was a real farmer, not like so many of the suburbanites who came out from the adjacent, more urbanized county seeking to play farmer by raising miniature horses or heirloom tomatoes, whatever the hell those were.

  Bolodenka’s western-style denim shirt highlighted a thin waist and full breasts that looked like the work of a very competent surgeon or the decision not to have children. A green John Deere baseball cap covered dark hair that peeked out from the back of the hat in a ponytail of tumbling curls.