Refuge on Leebrick (The Hills of Burlington Book 4) Read online

  REFUGE ON LEEBRICK

  The Hills of Burlington

  By Jacie Middlemann

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

  REFUGE ON LEEBRICK - A HILLS OF BURLINGTON BOOK

  Copyright © 2015 by Jacie Middlemann

  Cover Art by Anna.

  To My Father…who dreamed his own dreams and made them his…and taught us to do the same.

  CHAPTER ONE

  "Jake."

  Jake Kyle looked up from his computer to the man standing in his office doorway. Recognition of who it was took only a moment and hit hard and brought back a myriad of memories. He stood up immediately and came around his desk without a moment’s hesitation with his hand stretched out in welcome. "Tom!" He clasped the man's hand tightly, held on even as he took in his friend’s somewhat worn appearance. "What brings you here?"

  "You mean how in the world did I find you in this little river town?"

  "Yeah, that too." Jake led him further into his office away from the curious eyes of the newsroom. He crossed over to the small fridge he kept well stocked and pulled out a couple of sodas and handed one over to his old friend even as he gestured him to sit. "I thought you were somewhere on the west coast."

  "I was." Tom Holland flipped the can top open and guzzled down half its contents in short order. "You follow the story on the situation out there?"

  "I don't know many who didn't." Instead of sitting back down behind his desk Jake leaned up against its side. Studied the man he hadn't seen in a long time. "You made even more of a name for yourself out there than I would have thought possible. Pitching that microphone at your on-site producer and diving into the thick of things made for some interesting video."

  "It wasn't meant to." Tom rubbed the bridge of his nose wearily. "I didn't expect him to keep filming."

  "It wouldn’t have mattered whether he did or didn’t. Half a dozen other cameras from half a dozen other networks were aimed dead on you before it was all over with. And that’s not to mention the unknown number of individuals with their trusty phones aimed at you. It's not often those covering the news give up their headliner role to become part of it." He crossed his legs at the ankles, shifting to set his can down on the desk beside him yet still within reach. "It was my understanding that had you not done so, several of those people you helped to pull out who were buried under the rubble may not have stood a chance of surviving." And he began to wonder if some of the other less seemingly accurate rumors that had made their way to him might actually have some figment of truth to them as well.

  "Not everyone saw it that way."

  "Then they need to get a life."

  "Yeah, well...that's pretty much what I told them, too." Tom looked up at his old friend. Shrugged off what they were both dancing around as he had so much else of late. "Need a reporter?" he asked, only half joking.

  Jake took it seriously. "I can always use a good reporter and you're one of the best." He tilted his head to one side studying the man he'd known since college. "I can't pay you diddly compared to the neighborhood of what I know you were making but I'll put you on my payroll in a heartbeat." He paused then decided they'd known each other long enough to ask the questions no one had any business asking. But because the other man looked worn to the bone he did so in an indirect manner. "Are you sure about this? I can't believe they wouldn't take you back no questions asked. And Lord knows if they're that stupid and don't, one of the other big networks will and drool all over their good luck in the process.”

  The man he spoke to leaned forward in the big overstuffed easy chair that should have seemed out of place in an office but wasn’t. He grasped his hands in front of him and spoke out loud for the first time all the thoughts that had plagued him in the weeks since the explosion. "I almost didn't do it, Jake. For a split second it was in my mind that my job was to report the news. Nothing else was more important. At least it seemed so at that moment.” He closed his eyes on the memories of the carnage he'd seen, waded through, then done all he could to somehow salvage just one soul out of that hellacious landscape. He’d realized later that in the process he’d also salvaged his own. He just hadn’t known it at the time. "Knowing that, I have a hard time thinking back, seeing what I saw, and knowing what might have been otherwise." He looked hard at his friend, just as he’d spent the last several weeks looking hard at himself. "Walking away when I did may have saved the person I’ve always wanted to be. I won't go back to it."

  Jake stood, held out his hand. "Then I say welcome to Burlington." And decided any further discussion on this thorny topic could wait until Tom looked and sounded more up to it than he did at that moment. "You got a place to stay?"

  "I checked into an awesome looking hotel a couple of blocks away. Looks like something built a hundred years ago."

  "That's because it probably was, chump," Jake said and laughed at the expression on his friend’s face even as he slapped him on the shoulder. "Get used to it. Just about everything in the city is that or older. Fact is..." he thought about his cousin's most recent acquisition. "I might know of a place you can settle into for a while until you get yourself situated. Let me check on it and I'll get back with you." He took a card from his desk, wrote some numbers on the back of it along with his address. "Come over for dinner tonight." He saw the hesitancy and rammed right through it. "I want you to meet my daughter."

  "Daughter?"

  Jake struggled to hold back his laughter at the shock in his friend’s voice and eyes. "Long story. I'll tell you about it after dinner tonight."

  Unable to resist just as his friend had known...by the time Tom walked out of the building he had a new job and plans for the evening. As he walked back to the hotel he wondered how in the world he'd ended up in a city along the Mississippi River no one including himself had ever heard of.

  

  "I just hired Tom Holland." Jake cruised into Mark's office without bothering to knock and grabbed a soda pop out of the fridge before sitting down in the chair facing the desk. A quick glance told him he'd surprised his friend and business partner. But he knew the man well enough to know that while he was surprised he wasn't shocked.

  "So the rumors were true for once," Mark Danner said thoughtfully. The former head of the news department of one of the larger news networks didn’t miss much. A person didn’t get to where he had by not paying attention to all that drifted by no matter how trivial it might seem.

  "I'm not certain about that. The impression I got was he told them to heave it not the other way around."

  "Well, well, well." Mark leaned back in his chair and let his imagination fly. "Sounds like Tom reached his point of no return." And he wasn’t about to criticize the man for it. He was sitting where he was now for much the same reason.

  "Mark." Jake waited for the other man to look at him. "He looks like he's been through the wringer."

  "Maybe," Mark thought it out, played the possibilities in his mind then calculated the possible ramifications versus the benefits for Tom as well as his and Jake’s newspaper venture. "Maybe his first assignment should be an opinion piece on the fine line between reporting the news and becoming the news."

  "God only knows he’s in a position to craft a fine opinion piece on that. But maybe in the midst of it he could also address the delicate but very human conflict of the important responsibility of reporting the news objectively when lives could be saved if done
otherwise."

  "Choices." Mark tapped his pencil against the smooth desktop. "It's really all about choices." He looked up at the man across the desk from him. "And I think it would be a good introduction about who he is to the folks of Burlington."

  "I'll tell him tonight. I talked him into coming over for dinner."

  "Where's he staying?"

  "I’m pretty certain one of the downtown hotels. He said it was over a hundred years old and that he was walking so it's got to be one of them." Jake took a final long sip, emptying the can of soda. "I'm going to call Mary next and see if he can bunk at the Summer Street house until he decides what he wants to do."

  "Got it all worked out?"

  "Just pieces," Jake said and sighed at the thought of all he couldn’t do for his friend no matter how much he might want to. He'd been there. "And for that matter not even any of the real important ones. Tom will have to figure those out for himself. But if we can ease his way there..." he shrugged at the thought of what Tom had been through, what he had yet to find his way through. With a slight nod he strode out of the office as easily as he'd come in.

  

  CHAPTER TWO

  "So," Jake transferred his steaming cup of just brewed hot coffee from the counter to the small round table that was in the center of the small kitchen. He sat down with it just as his cousin Mary was doing the same. "I was hoping that until he’s able to find something more permanent, maybe even figure out whether being here in Burlington is permanent, that he could stay in one of the rooms over at the Summer Street house."

  "He's more than welcome to, Jake." Mary turned in her chair and leaned forward to grab the ever full canister of cookies. "But are you sure he wouldn't be more comfortable at the Marshall Street house? It's only Aunt Charlie, Mallie, and Addie right now and they’re all out in the Carriage House behind it. He’d be on his own for the most part but he wouldn’t be completely alone. You know how it is, there're always people in and out of the main house.

  "I have a feeling Tom isn't at his most sociable right now. The Summer Street house would probably be right up his alley at the moment with it being empty and not exactly the Grand Central Station that the Marshall Street house can be at times."

  Mary took a sip of her coffee as she simply eyed her cousin. And waited.

  Jake knew the ploy since his younger sister used it often enough from the time she’d been old enough to know it worked. Any day he expected his adult daughter, Beth, to catch on and play the same waiting game though up till now she'd done fine just asking out loud whatever it was she wanted to know. In between bites into the huge sugar cookie he drawn out of the cookie jar he went ahead and filled her in with what little he knew. "Do you remember," he gestured to the small stack of the day's newspapers sitting on the kitchen counter opposite them, "from one of these many newspapers you subscribe to…"

  "Yours included," Mary interrupted with a smile.

  "It never ceases to amaze me that you won't watch the television news but bury your nose into half a dozen newspapers every day," he said even as he shook his head in wonder before continuing. "Being that I know you read them cover to cover do you remember the incident out on the west coast a while back? It's still under investigation as to the cause which is interesting all on its own. There was a huge number of injuries, several deaths but not nearly the number they initially expected."

  "I remember." Mary sat forward, thinking back to what she'd read at the time. "The lower than expected death toll was only because several people who were nearby and not hurt by the blast jumped in to help." She took a sip of her coffee as she ran the story back through her mind wondering what this had to do with her cousin's friend.

  "Exactly," Jake said even as he settled back in his chair. "Tom was one of those who jumped in to help. He was close by working on another story, finishing up an investigative piece." A story, he remembered clearly, that had exposed corruption in that city's purchasing department that would undoubtedly continue to resonate for months to come. "Anyway, he and his crew rushed to the site and of course their first inclination was to cover what they could. From what I know other than the little Tom told me when he popped into my office earlier today, he heard cries for help coming from a nearby pile of rubble, tossed his headset to his on-site producer, and dove in to help."

  "As I remember there were a number of stories just on that alone." Mary tapped idly on the table top as she thought back to what she'd read and specifically about what Jake was telling her. It had been splayed throughout the papers and not just in the news sections. It had gotten plenty of space in the opinion pages as well. "Weren't there some words between him and his producer?"

  "I'm sure there was," Jake said with a small smile creeping up at the edges of his mouth. "But in all fairness the on-site producer was probably being raked over the coals by his next-in-line superior at the station. There they were, among the first on the scene of a major disaster and their prize stand-up reporter is digging in the dirt. That isn't what reporters are supposed to do."

  "Maybe not," Mary agreed slowly, remembering clearly now what much of the story had been. "But it is what we as a civilized people do. We help others. Maybe your friend found that who he was in this instance weighed heavier than what he did for a living."

  "Yeah, I’m with you. But since all you did was read the newspaper stories you didn't see the images plastered all over the internet and on the telly. They got a lot of play time showing the many different angles of Tom throwing his headset at his producer. Neither man had smiles on their faces. There might not have been any other actual news teams at the site reporting at that point but there were plenty of folks with cameras in their nifty little phones. I’m telling you, that image made the TV news and especially the internet from every possible and near to impossible angle you can imagine. And Tom came out on top every time. The station will be a long time living that one down. Not just that moment but their response to it later."

  "I definitely remember that. They would have been wiser to have chosen their words with more deliberation." She most definitely remembered their response. Her outrage to their initial statement still reverberated through her memory every time she thought of it. "They went on and on about the role of the media being one of an independent and unbiased observer. That if they were to interject themselves into every story the story would never be accurately told." She sighed and struggled to tamp down the anger at their impervious attitude even now, months later. "I remember thinking the woman who was giving the statement was unbelievably callous and needed a dose of humanity."

  "Any of us can be maneuvered…conditioned into doing what is expected of us even though it might go against the very grain of who we are….like robots," Jake said in agreement. He was thinking to himself that at times depending on where you were on the corporate ladder it was the only way to survive. "But that by the book statement cost them mightily." He leaned back in the chair with the hot mug clasped between his hands as he remembered the chain of events that had followed. "Not twenty-four hours later one of the survivors Tom pulled from that rubble after digging through to them with his bare hands and nothing else came forward. She gave another local network an exclusive interview. Never said a word about the other network directly but personally thanked Tom for being biased and humane."

  "Biased, selfless, and humane," Mary corrected softly.

  "Yeah. Basically she thanked him for being everything we're supposed to be when tragedy strikes." He thought about the conflicts that he’d witnessed more than once in all the stories he'd covered over the years. Too many to count in war zones where no one won. Not really. "Someone has to report the story, Mary. But in the end we're human and each person has to make that choice of what is more important at that moment in time."

  "I would think the choice is easy. Life trumps photo images every time." She looked at him pointedly, knowing the struggle that would be playing out in his mind even now. "At least it should."

  "How a
bout I bring Tom over sometime soon?"

  "Coward."

  "I'm just ceding the debate early to save us time. Besides you're right so why not?"

  Mary laughed. An easy sound that filled the room and eased away the gloom that had fallen as a result of the topic of their conversation. "Bring him for dinner tomorrow night. We'll eat then take him over to the house and see what he thinks."

  “I can’t see that he would be anything but thrilled. He sounded almost overwhelmed that he was staying in a one-hundred plus year old hotel, especially one with running water. But hotel living gets old fast.”

  “I imagine it does,” Mary said easily. “As long as you think he’s okay with being in the place on his own I think it’s wonderful to have someone there.” But she wondered to herself if being all on his own in such a big and empty house was the best place for someone going through what sounded like a tumultuous time in his life. With a slight shrug she gave her cousin a slight nod. “How does goulash sound?”

  "Sounds great. Thanks Mary." Jake gave her a little salute as he strode toward the front door to let himself out.

  ∞∞∞

  CHAPTER THREE

  Tom leaned back from the table and let out a long sigh. “That was good,” he gave his old college friend and new boss a steady look. “Regardless of how handy I know you are in the kitchen I would have a hard time believing you put this together,” he said as he nodded towards the platters that sat in the middle of the table. He had come to dinner expecting grilled burgers or something. Those had always been Jake’s specialty. Instead he’d sat down to what had amounted to a damn good home-cooked meal of some kind of baked chicken, buttered potatoes, and a vegetable casserole that he’d bit into somewhat cautiously to find out second helpings of it was also on the menu. On top of all that there’d been a cherry pie that he had a strong feeling didn’t come from the frozen section at the local store.