She smirked. “Thanks. Green said they’d have all the files ready for us to go over tomorrow.”
Decker brightened at this comment. “Good. Maybe something will jump out.”
They fell silent for a few moments.
“Talked to Melvin lately?” asked Jamison.
“No. He and Harper are traveling on vacation somewhere. The Mediterranean, I think. Why?”
“I know how close you and Melvin are. I guess you could have gone on vacation with them, but it might have been awkward with the three of you. Especially in the romantic Med.”
Decker stared absently at his plate of food and didn’t answer.
“FYI, there’s a park near my sister’s house with a jogging trail,” noted Jamison.
He glanced up at her. “And why do I need to know that?”
“I know you’ve been working out, and you have dropped a lot of weight. Just want you to keep it up. You know, it’s harder to get back in shape than it is to stay in shape.”
“Thanks for enlightening me on that.”
He glanced out the window onto the darkened street. A few cars rolled past. And there were a couple of pedestrians. Other than that, downtown Baronville was relatively quiet in the gathering storm. For now.
“What are you thinking about, Decker?”
He continued to stare out into the dark. “I’m wondering who’s going to die next.”
Chapter 11
IT HAD ONCE been a mansion, perhaps beyond compare.
Now it was old, falling down, and possibly no longer salvageable.
It was from an era when money flowed freely, no income taxes were due, the world lived both more ostentatiously and more simply, and everyone knew his place. Globalization was not even a term, and information moved far more slowly, leading to a blissful ignorance among most.
Men were the breadwinners. They came home from work, spent time with their families, smoked their cigarettes, drank their beer, listened to the same radio programs and later TV shows as the rest of the country, went to bed, and got up to do it all over again, while women did the same on the home front.
John Baron looked out over what had once been the exquisitely landscaped rear grounds of his home, but was now merely dirt with weeds topping it.
He was a tall man, over six-three, with broad shoulders and a lean waist. He was physically strong and fit and always had been. However, at age fifty-three he could sense feebleness drifting into some of his muscle and stiffness into some of his joints.
His salt-and-pepper hair was long, and untouched by professional scissors.
His clothes were a hodgepodge of old things: a faded tuxedo jacket, a pair of dungarees, a white polo shirt, and an old leather belt to hold up the britches. On his feet were work boots. His weathered and handsome face was bristly with scruff.
He did not care about his appearance.
He lived alone. There was no one to impress.
His ancestral home was well over twenty-five thousand square feet, with more than half that again in outbuildings and other structures. It was far and away the largest home in the area, and maybe one of the biggest in the entire commonwealth of Pennsylvania. The estate had once covered hundreds of acres, set on the highest point in the eponymous town.
Fitting for the Barons to look down upon all others.
He had lived here since his birth. The only child of Benjamin and Dorothy Baron. The last married couple to reside here. Their son had never taken a wife.
John Baron had been a tremendous athlete, as well as smart and likable. His future seemed assured—enviable and inevitable.
Until his parents had died on the same night, victims of a horrible accident, or perhaps something else; the jury was still out on that. They left John, then only nineteen, as their sole heir. Though he knew his family was no longer fabulously wealthy, he had believed there was some money left.
Until the lawyer and accountant met with him and informed him that the assets left behind were outweighed by debt by a ratio of twenty to one. Now it was time to pay the piper, and the son would be the one to do it.
Thus, decades ago, Baron had sold off many of the remaining family assets and negotiated as skillfully as he could in a desperate battle to keep the house. However, the estate was buried under such a large mortgage that now most of his income simply went to pay the interest. Like his predecessors, he had also sold additional land around the estate. The hundreds of acres had been whittled down to a few dozen. The outbuildings were mostly in ruins. The mansion was a shabby wreck. When he died, without wife or children, he had no doubt that the bank would swoop in, sell it off, and down it would come, with something modern and fresh to take its place, if Baronville still existed by then.
Even the family cemetery, set far away from the house and surrounded by a six-foot brick wall, might well be dug up and moved.
He looked through the window of his study at land that as a boy he had run happily roamed over. He had a lot of stamina back then, but he could never sprint far enough to outrun the grounds of his home. It had been a both comforting and humbling feeling.
He looked over his shoulder at the walls of books. He had read them all and had managed to keep far more than he thought possible. The rarest volumes had long since been sold to pay bills. There was no point in keeping books if he didn’t have a bookcase or a home in which to place them.
He rose, walked over to his desk, and sat down in the chair there. It creaked and groaned under his weight. Everything in this house creaked and groaned when touched.
I creak and groan simply by being alive.
By any measure it was a miserable existence. And one he would have to endure for the rest of his life.
He had had to come home from college to take care of affairs after his parents died. Then he had returned to school on his athletic scholarship, only to blow out his rotator. That was pretty much the death knell for a baseball pitcher. The next year his scholarship was revoked, and, having no funds to continue, he had left without a degree. Repeated attempts at starting a business had failed for want of capital. It seemed that those who had for so long lived under the boot of the Barons now thought it quite pleasing to turn off any aid whatsoever to the last of the family.
Even though other owners had run them for years, when the last mine and mill closed the ousted employees and indeed the entire town blamed only one person for their downfall. Though then only in his late twenties, John Baron had taken the full brunt of the town’s displeasure. There was even a petition circulated to change the name of the town. It had failed, probably because the citizens wanted the name to remain so they could keep blaming the Baron family for their problems.
John Baron had become a pariah. He should have moved. Just walked away from the house and the town and this miserable excuse for a life. Yet he hadn’t. He wasn’t sure if it was stubbornness or lunacy or a potent mixture of both. Yet something in his head had prevented him from chucking it all and starting somewhere fresh. And things in your head could be very powerful, he had found.
Finally, he had sold enough property and paid down enough bills to allow himself to live here, not in any comfort, but just to exist, really. Any ambition to do more had faded along with the passage of years.
As he stared out into the nighttime he was thoroughly cognizant that he had royally screwed up what had commenced as a promising life.
And the town had faded right along with him.
Once-occupied homes and businesses sat empty. The mighty mills and mines his ancestor had erected were gone.
Baronville had come into existence as part of John Baron the First’s dream for riches. Now the dream had become a nightmare. For all of them.