Somewhere Over Lorain Road

  Somewhere Over Lorain Road

  For more than forty years, the stain of horrific allegations against their father has haunted the Esker sons. When three little boys were murdered in 1975, their dad was suspected of the crimes. The immense strain of the unsolved case shattered the family, sending the brothers reeling into destinies of death, flight, and, in the case of Don Esker, shame-filled silence.

  Years later, Don returns to the family home in North Homestead, Ohio, to help care for his dying father in his final months. His dad longs for the peace that will only come with clearing his name. If Don can find the killer, he can heal his family—and himself. His own redemption begins when he becomes romantically involved with Bruce, who joins the hunt and forces Don to confront the unthinkable answer they’ve uncovered.

  Advance Praise for Somewhere over Lorain Road

  Can you go home again? Should you go home again? What if you have to go whether you want to or not? This is the dilemma of Don, the protagonist in this very readable, fractured rainbow novel by Emmy-winning author Bud Gundy.

  It’s a mystery and a love story for today’s world, but the book never lets the reader forget the “acidic underground lake” of America’s Midwest, which neither nostalgia nor forgetfulness can completely obliterate, making the book darker and more powerful than its outlines might suggest. Well done!

  —Daniel Curzon, author of Something You Do in the Dark

  The author pulls all the stops out in this gripping story of love, tragedy, and redemption, set against a backdrop of a murder investigation. An emotional roller coaster that will keep the reader guessing until the last, fully satisfying page.

  There is beauty here as well, and wisdom. You come away from this book understanding yourself and humankind a little better, and a writer can’t do any better than that.

  In the end, the author scores a five-star win with the best mystery novel I have read in years, because ultimately, I realized that the mystery the author is sharing is not the murders of a small town, but the mysteries of Life.

  —Alan Chin, author of First Exposure, The Plain of Bitter Honey, and Buddha’s Bad Boys

  Somewhere over Lorain Road

  Brought to you by

  eBooks from Bold Strokes Books, Inc.

  http://www.boldstrokesbooks.com

  eBooks are not transferable. They cannot be sold, shared or given away as it is an infringement on the copyright of this work.

  Please respect the rights of the author and do not file share.

  Somewhere over Lorain Road

  © 2018 By Bud Gundy. All Rights Reserved.

  ISBN 13:978-1-63555-125-9

  This Electronic Book is published by

  Bold Strokes Books, Inc.

  P.O. Box 249

  Valley Falls, NY 12185

  First Edition: February 2018

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

  Credits

  Editor: Jerry L. Wheeler

  Production Design: Stacia Seaman

  Cover Design by Tammy Seidick

  By the Author

  Elf Gift

  Butterfly Dream (cowritten with Dave Lara)

  Somewhere over Lorain Road

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to the members of my writing groups, who keep me busy with revisions that force me to improve: Scott Boswell, James Warren Boyd, Barbara Brunetti, Christopher Calix, Jake Eastman, Pat Elmore, Cleo Jones, Dennis Holahan, Gabriel Lampert, Martin Magee, and Dennis Stradford. Thanks also to the editor with the golden scalpel, Jerry Wheeler, and the Bold Strokes Books team that decided my story was worth publishing. And to my family and friends—you know who you are and I love you.

  For Chris

  Chapter One

  Don Esker looked over his boyhood neighborhood and wondered where the skeleton lay, the lonely bones hidden so long they would likely never be found. Maybe an archeologist would dig them up in a future century and scientists would scratch, pick, and peer at them, trying to divine mysterious burial rites from 1975. Why was this boy buried so differently from the customs of the age? Why all alone? Would murder cross their minds?

  Maybe shoppers walked over the boy’s remains in the mall, which was an undulating, thick field of crab grasses, toothwort, bloodroot, and spotted wintergreen back then. Maybe the bones rested in the backyard of a large home in a fancy housing development up the road, delicately landscaped with tasteful hills and ornamental ponds, in place of the flat, husky cornfield of Don’s youth.

  Don walked to the mailbox at the end of his parents’ driveway as dusk descended. Wood and brick houses lined the road, with neat trim painted in bright contrasting colors. Small flourishes individualized the yards. He sometimes spotted a pink flamingo or a pointy-hatted gnome left over from his youth, bleached from years of service.

  The musty, distinctive smell of autumn filled the air. The trees bristled with anticipation, edged with the first traces of their annual, exuberant transformation, a party of such riotous abandon they dropped their leaves in exhaustion and needed months to recover. He’d been there and understood.

  At some point after Don moved away from North Homestead, Ohio, his dad had replaced the old aluminum mailbox with a heavy plastic version. Almost everyone else had, too, thwarting teens with baseball bats who sped down the streets leaving a trail of leaning, dented carnage.

  Don waited for a car to pass before retrieving a small stack of letters and colorful store circulars. He flipped through the envelopes as he returned to the brick house where his parents had raised four sons born roughly two years apart. Tim was the oldest at fifty-nine and Randy came next at fifty-five. Don was fifty-three. Rich floated in the four-year gap between Tim and Randy, always sixteen.

  He entered through the kitchen door. Panels of tan wood brightened the room, and cream linoleum covered the floor. His mom, wearing a soft pink sweatshirt, her short hair curled, turned from fussing at the sink. He tossed the mail on the table.

  “Anything good?” she asked, meaning a personal letter or a card, something with a handwritten address.

  “Just bills and junk mail.”

  She looked through the envelopes and ads, tossing them aside while shaking her head. “Does anyone ever buy this stuff they advertise in the mail?”

  He turned on his laptop to check the new Wi-Fi he’d installed that afternoon and got a powerful connection right away, a big improvement on the older system he’d set up two years before.

  His mom watched as he tapped and clicked. “Did you really have to go to all the trouble? Your brothers said the old one was perfectly good.”

  “If I’m going to stay here a while, I need to have good Wi-Fi. I have to be able to share docs and Skype with my clients.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t even know what you just said. Here, I need you to do something.” She opened the refrigerator and removed two plastic containers with blue lids. Inside, red sauce mottled with pasta and vegetables, the remains of dinner. She cleared her throat and gave a quick flick of her head, as if steeling herself. “Can you take these across the street for Chief Tedesco and Billy? I should have asked you before you got the mail so you’d only have to make one trip.” She set them on the table.

  “Mom, are you kidding me? You feed them?”

  She flicked a washcloth and wiped a counter that was already clean. “Since Patty died, I make sure they have a home-cooked meal at least two or three times a wee
k. The food they deliver from that home meal service…I’m sure they do the best they can, but I wouldn’t feed it to a dog.”

  “Dog food is too good for them. Let them starve.”

  She clucked her tongue. “That’s very unkind. You’re better than that, Donnie.”

  “I was here just a few months ago. You didn’t ask me then.”

  “You were only here for a few days, and you didn’t notice when I took it over myself. But I’m not going to hide it from you while you’re helping with daily chores for the foreseeable future. I’m also not going to stop. In spite of everything that happened, they’re our neighbors and they’re in need.”

  “How does Dad feel about that?” Don gestured in the general direction of the room down the hallway.

  She looked at the floor, and Don regretted his question. It wasn’t fair to involve Dad.

  “Forgiveness isn’t just a virtue, Don. It’s the only way to heal yourself. It’s in your own self-interest to forgive. You should have learned that by now.”

  “I have, Mom. But some things are unforgivable.”

  “Maybe. But if I can do it in this case, you can, too.”

  He’d never told her everything about that time, so he couldn’t argue.

  She went on. “Now, please. Just humor me. I don’t want to fight about this. I’m not going to let a neighbor go without nutritional meals.”

  He sighed. “I’ll never fight with you, Mom. If you want me to take them over, I will. But I’m doing it for your sake, not theirs.”

  She looked relieved. “Thank you. And remind the chief to take his medicine. He’s so cranky, but remind him anyway.”

  Don took the containers, and the spring-mounted storm door hurled closed behind him. Except for distant headlights, Stearns Road was clear. Don crossed, looking about.

  The city had ruthlessly scrubbed away all traces of the neighborhood’s distant past as a farm, as if to erase all reminders of the summer of 1975. Today’s parents wouldn’t let their kids anywhere near fields with rusty farm equipment hidden among the weeds, or a weathered chicken coop up on stilts, and especially not an old barn with an empty hayloft hung with chains you could swing over the ledge. As a boy, he’d thought they were permanent.

  As he walked up the Tedesco driveway, neglect not apparent at first glance surprised him. The white trim bubbled and peeled, spouts held teetering gutters in place, and the porch railing looked as rickety as a Popsicle stick project.

  Walking across the porch, he wondered how many times he’d raced across this very concrete slab to meet up with his best boyhood friend. Billy was his first love, his first kiss, his first sleeping companion.

  Billy pissing in the weeds. “What are you looking at, faggot?” Billy’s hair ablaze with white fire as he descended on Don with steel-toed boots.

  Don took a deep breath and jammed the doorbell. The classic ding-dong rang inside. Excited feet stomped to the door. It opened with a yank, and Don braced for the visual jolt.

  On the other side of the thin glass of the storm door, Billy’s face broke with joy.

  Before this moment, Don had only seen Billy’s head injury from across the street, where it still had impact. A canyon fissured his skull from his forehead to his crown, like a spear wound from an ancient battlefield. Thick scar tissue, glossy and white, flowed into the hairless valley. Gray tufts covered the rest of his head in the random lengths of home haircuts. The location and size of the injury made brain damage obvious. Billy was the poster boy for not staggering aboard a motorcycle while drunk.

  “Don!” he cried, the name somehow half-formed, a man’s voice with a boy’s enthusiasm. Billy threw open the door, but it swung outward and Don jumped back.

  Billy wore a grungy white T-shirt that ended at the middle of his rounded, hairy belly. His jeans sagged, crumpled between his knees and ankles. His eyes filled with tears, and he slapped Don about the chest and shoulders as if to confirm that he was real.

  “Who’s there?” demanded a sour, suspicious voice.

  Don clenched his teeth.

  “It’s Don!” Billy cried with wonder and happiness. “Don!”

  Billy grabbed Don and pulled him inside. Don stumbled over the threshold, gripping the containers in surprise, but he quickly restored his unfriendly glare.

  The whir of an electric wheelchair came as relentlessly as a buzz saw, and the metal contraption soon rolled into the archway of the dining room.

  “Donnie Esker,” the chief asked. “Is that you?”

  “It’s me,” he replied in a gruff voice to North Homestead’s former chief of police.

  Don saw the Navy SEAL memorabilia still on the living room walls, the core of the chief’s legend. For years, the people of North Homestead had reveled in his status as a member of the elite group of warriors trained for clandestine and rugged adventures in remote regions of the globe. Don remembered people gawking at these spit-polished mementos of gung-ho military glory. Mayors came and went, but Chief Tedesco held his job the way George Washington was always on the dollar bill.

  In his wheelchair, the chief looked as insubstantial as chicken bones. His useless legs leaned to the side, and his arms slanted to his lap.

  Don recalled when, many years ago, his mom told him about the chief’s tumble down the stairs that paralyzed him from the waist down. Don had made a joke about the unfortunate timing, that a paralysis below his waist should have happened a year before Billy’s birth. She hadn’t laughed.

  The chief looked him up and down. “Been spending time at the gym? You were a little wisp of a kid. You look like you could be on those wrestling shows on TV, except you’re probably too old.”

  Don raised the plastic tubs, but the chief ignored them. “How’s your old man doing? He still has a few months, right?”

  “I think he’ll make it through the holidays.” Don’s voice thickened with meaning. “But he’s got a lot of unresolved things on his mind.”

  The chief chuckled and gave his wheelchair arm a light tap. “I understand that, stuck in this thing for so long.”

  Don drew in a breath at the chief’s audacity, as if he’d meant that his dad felt wistful about never seeing the Mona Lisa or hiking the Andes. “I think he’s more worried about being falsely accused of murder.”

  The chief paused before nodding. “I had a job to do.”

  “A job you didn’t do. You let the killer get away.”

  The chief’s face crinkled, but with a touch of understanding and admiration in his eyes. “I respect a guy who defends his family. That’s partly what I was doing, too. I had a responsibility to those other families and the community, but you need to remember that it hit us hard in this very house. My wife was destroyed. None of us was ever the same.”

  Don dropped his voice. “Neither were we.” He held out the tubs. “My mom wanted you to have these.”

  “Billy,” he barked, and Billy jerked to life, took the containers, and disappeared into the kitchen.

  “The kid’s a godsend,” the chief said. “For forty years, I couldn’t get him to do a damn thing worth doing. Screwing off, drugs and girls and booze. A bunch of kids he never saw. Couldn’t hold a job. The kind of low-life trash I used to enjoy locking up. Crashing a motorcycle isn’t the best way to get your life on track, but in his case it was an improvement.”

  Don paused. “My mom says to remember to take your medicine.” He pushed his way out and made it halfway across the porch before Billy cried, “Don!”

  Don stopped. His old friend stepped outside and moved in his direction, eager and yet consumed by caution.

  “Billy, get your ass in here!” his father shouted.

  Billy’s face fell. His eyes flicked, wrestling with his impulses.

  “Billy!”

  He hurried inside, shutting himself up with his father.

  Chapter Two

  1975

  As the summer of 1975 began, both Don and Billy were ten years old. Billy’s little brother Eddie was six.
Billy hated Eddie, and since Billy was his best friend, Don took his side, but he felt sorry for Eddie. Don’s three older brothers treated him like an afterthought, a radio in the background, a teacher at the chalkboard, something easily ignored. Don wished Billy treated Eddie the same way.

  Billy shared a bedroom with Eddie. One afternoon, Don and Billy sat Indian-style on Billy’s bed, flipping through comic books. Across the room under the window, Eddie played with plastic soldiers on his blue cowboy bedspread, making musical sounds and twirling them by the heads, dancing instead of making war.

  “Come on,” Billy said, ripping the comic book from Don’s hands. “Let’s go play in the chicken coop.”

  Eddie sat up, thinking he was invited. Billy set him straight with, “You are not coming with us. I hate the way you always follow me around.” His brother’s face flushed with disappointment, tears flooded his eyes, and his lips quivered. Don felt a stab of sorrow.

  Comic books in hand, Billy knelt in front of his dresser. Quietly, he removed the bottom drawer and set it aside. He threw the magazines into his secret compartment, a shallow dip in the dresser bottom.

  A minute later, the two friends raced outside. As they doubled back in front of the porch, Don saw Eddie peering from behind the summer screen of the storm door.

  They crossed to Don’s side of the street, heading for a field of tall weeds that grew above their heads. This area of North Homestead was a farm in the nineteenth century. Stamped down with no regard for the farm’s structure, suburban lots held scattered remnants of that past. An old chicken coop towered on stilts near the tree line of the field. The farmhouse itself stood a few doors down from Billy’s house, now just another home lining the road.