Murder on the Lunatic Fringe (Jubilant Falls Series Book 4) (2 page)

I was a rarity in Plummer County these days. Jubilant Falls born and raised, I returned to my homey little Ohio town, leaving a better job at a bigger paper when Duncan had decided to take on the family farm. Most of my graduating class had left town, finding jobs in and across Ohio or out of state. Just a few of us elected to stay in town.

I was born Penny Addison, daughter of Walt Addison, the commander of the local Ohio State Highway Patrol post. I was six when my parents divorced and my mother left town.

I never saw June again.

Dad and I moved in with his mother, who I called Grandma Ida, in Jubilant Falls’ historic district, just blocks away from the downtown. He still lives there, bad knees and all. He’s made the place into the centerpiece of the Plummer County Historical Society’s Christmas home tours. Although he never remarried, he’s getting to the age where he’s enjoying the attention of more than one widow at the senior center.

I always wanted to follow in dad’s footsteps, but back then, girls didn’t become cops. Instead, I went to Ohio State and majored in journalism, thinking if I couldn’t work in law enforcement, I could certainly write about it with the knowledge that came with growing up a cop’s daughter.

No such luck: my first assignment was what then was called “Women’s News,” soft features about home, fashion and children, none of which I knew anything about. After Duncan and I got married, I started sending out my résumé under a new name, Addison McIntyre.

One crusty editor liked my stories and hired me sight unseen, assuming I was male. The day I showed up, he told me he thought I didn’t belong in the newsroom. As a test, he sent me out on a fatal accident just to see if I’d fold.

Instead, I flourished. I came back with a story about a young man and his date on their way to the high school prom with another couple. The foursome would never see their graduation as a result of fast cars, wet roads and beer purchased with fake IDs.

I still had that story tucked away in a box in the attic. It ran with my picture of a sequined high-heeled shoe lying in the middle of a rain-soaked road as state troopers measured skid marks leading straight to a tree.

I’d stayed a couple years, covering everything from highway deaths and murder to the scourge of drugs, every conceivable inhumanity man chose to practice on his fellow man. The editor conceded that I’d done a good job, but didn’t deserve the same pay as the other men in the newsroom since “most of them had a family to support, after all.”

That old-school editor was the first to test my ability to cover crime, and he wasn’t the last. Folks change jobs frequently in the newspaper business: Whenever the next news editor thought that my possession of a uterus meant an inborn inability to cover trauma, it only took one story to set him straight.

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 costume 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.