Leaving Innocence: A Gran and Bass Olson Mystery

By Donna Lynd

What is the price of justice? Everything.

Bass Olson, a genius, out-of-work software designer, returns to Innocence, Arkansas, to be by his grandfathers deathbed. No one has been able to understand Old Zekes final words, but Bass creates a program that can decipher them. Old Zeke wants his sons murderer caught and brought to justice. The fact that Daniels death seventeen years prior was deemed accidental at the time is just the first of many complications.

Gran Olson is a feisty retired MASH nurse whose ingenuity and devotion are well-known in Innocence. The night her husband dies, everything changes. Once she learns the truth of her son's murder, she dives into the case completely. With the help of Old Zekes million-dollar insurance settlement offered as a reward, Gran and Bass begin gathering old clues. They soon find themselves confronting gangs, the KKK, family members who want more than a small piece of the money, and all sorts of characters comfortable with casual killing. In this world far from Innocence, Gran Olson will have to use all of her common sense and her faith to find the murderer and get herself and Bass out alive.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: May 10, 2016
• ISBN: 9781490894485

Donna Lynd

Donna Lynd is an author, playwright, movie critic, speaker, and professor at various Southern California universities. A world traveler, she has lived abroad and visited over 30 countries.

Book preview

Chapter 1

I knew the wind had to die sometime soon.

It hammered Gran’s house all night, banging tree limbs against the rattling windowpanes. Two days ago, I’d received Gran’s phone call about my grandpa, Old Zeke, being at death’s door. I’d driven thirty-two hours straight to Arkansas to see them. When I arrived, I was exhausted but wired enough on California time to sit by my grandfather’s bedside all evening. He never moved. By midnight my eyes ached from staring at their old Sony TV repeating severe storm warnings on the Weather Channel. I went to bed.

Sometime later, when the windstorm hit with a blasting scream, I woke up sweating, freezing, my teeth chattering, trying to remember where I was.

I was in my dead Uncle Daniel’s room. His stuff was everywhere. Man, I missed that guy. I was only eight when he died but for seventeen years, Gran kept his room so that at any minute, he could walk back in to change his clothes. A deep, black grief had flooded this house then. It never left.

As the wind howled outside, all I could think about was my dead Uncle Daniel, killed in his truck at exactly my age, twenty-five.

The noise of rain striking Daniel’s window was so loud that I could barely hear the TV downstairs in Old Zeke’s room.

Moving aside the stiff curtain to look outside, I saw lightning flashes burst over a hundred wind-whipped live oak trees that lined Gran’s yard and the surrounding acres. The date was May first… tornado season.

I’d driven into the part of the United States that you fly over about three hours into a non-stop LA to DC red-eye. When you look down through the night sky from 33,000 feet seeing nothing but blackness, Innocence, Arkansas is there.

I stood in the heart of that dark space, a long way from LA where I’d been laid off, robbed, and evicted in the past week.

Gran’s telephone message to me was short, final, Bass, you’d best hurry if you want to say goodbye to Old Zeke. I packed my trusty Jeep with everything I still owned: my old surfboard, a change of clothes, my laptop computer, and all my cash, $251.00. I filled the Jeep’s gas tank and left LA without looking back, heading due east fifteen hundred and fifty-five miles. I kept the speedometer at seventy or more until I’d driven over twelve hundred miles east on I-40, stopping only for trucker’s coffee and personal relief.

Gran’s big old house, a no-kidding Civil War site registered with the Arkansas State Historical Society, held my only family, and the best moments of my life. Everything was so much better here than in LA that I didn’t want to ruin it by telling Gran I’d been laid off or about how I was out of money.

Through the cold glass windows, I watched heavy black storm clouds swirl, spewing lightning bolts. The walls crept closer together in the darkness behind me as I shivered, dropping the curtain so it fell closed. Looking around, I saw the walls hadn’t moved and Daniel’s overhead electric lamp still flickered but there was no illumination. No warmth. No comfort.

Walking into the hallway, I held tight to the stair railing going down the worn front parlor steps.

The air was bitter cold as I reached the bottom of the stairway and stepped into the Big Room, my grandfather’s deathbed chamber. After his accident, Gran made Old Zeke’s bedroom in the very heart of the house, called the Big Room. It once was a ballroom, with chandeliers and framed mirrors, but now it held an old TV, his bed, table, rocking chair, and recliner.

My grandfather had not changed much over the years.

He was crippled, curled up on his bed with handmade quilts covering his legs. The room reeked of herbs, liniment, and hospital medicine. Old Zeke was silver-haired and fine featured, like Paul Newman on that salad dressing bottle. His face looked like it always did, except his skeleton was nearer to his skin as if his muscles were disappearing. Gran kept a photo of him on the table. In 1951, he had been a grinning, handsome, blond pilot standing by his F4U-4 Corsair fighter.

Their Sony TV always played the Weather Channel. Old Zeke was blind, so though the TV was right by his bed, he couldn’t see that the serious weather gal gestured to a satellite map of swirling clouds burying northern Arkansas. I called to him as always, Old Zeke, it’s me, Bass. He never moved.

Gran’s threadbare recliner tempted you to take the weight off your feet. Since Old Zeke’s accident, Gran made sure that every honest man in Innocence had at one time or another sat here by his bed. I pulled my keys from my jeans pocket, dumping them on the table, and I parked myself in the recliner. It was as comfortable as I remembered. I reached into Gran’s hand-painted candy dish for a jagged piece of peanut brittle.

Gran was napping in a rocking chair, near Old Zeke’s bed. She looked the same, wiry and silver-haired, but tired. Black circles lined her eyes behind her metal glasses. She smelled of that sassafras herbal cream that she massaged into Old Zeke’s crippled legs. She wore a long-sleeved red corduroy housedress with silver buttons that she saved for Christmas or special occasions, like me coming home. A man’s faded black raincoat covered her red housedress. Sometimes when she knew I was coming home, Gran would leave Old Zeke for a few minutes, stepping outside to see if my Jeep was down the way. More than once, as I was driving in, I saw her from the road standing on her kitchen porch, her head turning back and forth, her eyes searching for me or maybe Daniel, to come home.

When she opened her eyes, I asked, How’s Old Zeke?

She looked me over, without blinking. Not good. Gran grabbed my hand, and, as if she was bringing to light a terrible family secret, she whispered, Old Zeke is losing the battle. He doesn’t have much strength and he can’t say much, but talk to him like always because his mind is fine.

Her fingers were shaking and it scared me. Her nurse-trained hands had always been so strong and steady, but now her fingers, lined with blue, puffy veins, were gaunt, her wedding ring, a narrow band of gold, was loose. Before I could say a word, she let go of me, turning away as if she had never uttered a sound. She walked out.

Returning five minutes later, Gran handed me a platter with a slab of her pecan pie. She whispered, Bass, talk to me.

Nothing to say. Everything’s the same, I lied as I wolfed down her food. Since Daniel died, we ate in front of the Weather Channel. When he was alive, we four always shared meals in Gran’s dining room using cloth napkins, saying grace.

As I ate, Gran chuckled, For being a computer genius, Bass, you are ignorant of the commonest accomplishments of civilization. You cannot tell lies to your poor old grandmother.

What?

Gran poured hot coffee into my favorite mug. There are other jobs. And you can stay here as long as you need.

I choked on the pie crust stuck in my throat. It was like I was swallowing a mouthful of dust with little slivers of glass that ripped my mouth down to my gut. I gulped down Gran’s coffee. My protesting throat closed so I kept coughing and sputtering, trying to get that pie crust down. How could a morsel so mouth-watering be strangling me?

Gran thumped me on the back. She reached around my chest, clasping both hands under my heart to give me a Heimlich maneuver but with a final wheeze, my choking spell passed. When I no longer had to struggle to breathe, I drank, peering at her over the rim of the half-empty coffee mug. She stared back. Her eyes were steady. How did she always know everything?

Bass, your surfboard is in your Jeep. You can’t surf in Arkansas. Handing me a paper towel for a napkin, she added, You only have the Jeep key on your key ring. Where’s your house key or your key to work?

Gran was right. Losing my place was just bad luck, but I had loved my job. I was laid off. Flat. An abandoned orphan, sacrificed by the big bosses. My little computer-geek world had collapsed and burned. Looking at Gran, I realized the deep injustice of it all. I had lost everything except them. And now, Old Zeke was dying. Gran gently turned my head with her hand to kiss me on my unshaven cheek. I am glad you came home.

Me, too. Strengthened by her food, I felt I could sit with Old Zeke for as long as Gran needed. I said as much. She left to rest on the long couch in the living room.

I looked out the rattling windows. The live oak trees’ limbs twisted, moaning and scraping against the house. Branches whipped, snapping in the wind. Broken twigs tapped the windows louder and harder.

I hated that noisy storm.

Lightning flashed.

The Weather Channel babe annoyed me with her fake smile and know-it-all voice. We never changed the station because Gran always said, Your grandfather was a pilot for 55 years. He needs to know the weather. That yakking TV and the noisy storm were driving me crazy, so I reached for the remote to turn it off. Nobody would know except me.

However, as I was about to hit the power button, the Sony blasted an emergency bulletin. The National Weather Service has issued a tornado watch for the northwest corner of Arkansas. The Storm Tracker shows severe winds from Innocence, Arkansas, through the Ozarks, until sunrise…

Suddenly, the wind slammed against the house, so jarring it was as if the whole place was going to be ripped off the foundation. Glass shattered in Gran’s sewing room. The air smelled of wet dirt, as if plants had been yanked out of the ground and flung into the rainstorm. A rumbling was building outside. That storm was upon us.

Flashes of lightning lit the trees, casting shadows outside the windows. With a bang, a charge sucked the energy right out of the air around me. The TV dimmed for a moment, like in the movies when a flying saucer passes overhead...then BLAM! A lightning bolt hit with a pure white flash followed by a deafening burst of thunder.

We had a second of dead silence.

A loud crack echoed, followed by a thundering crash of collapsing lumber. Then the room went black. I touched my eyes to make sure they were open because I was staring into thick darkness like at the bottom of an elevator shaft.

From some place far off, Gran called, Stay put. I’ll get a lantern. I heard her footsteps moving to a distant part of the house.

My heart was beating hard. I loathe darkness.

Ginny! Old Zeke’s panicked voice shouted. GIN-NY, where…r u?

I called to him, Old Zeke, I’m here. It’s Bass. I stumbled in the dark as I made my way to his bedside.

Co-me here, boy. It was the first time he had said anything to me. He talked with a slur since his stroke so it sounded more like Calm ear. When I reached him, he grabbed for my hand. U sti-l…stro-n-g? He measured my large hand to his as I muttered, Yeah. He formed my hand into a fist and pressed it tight. Ba-s…it’s th-e … end fer…me bu-t… His voice had an intensity I’d never heard before. His words slid together too fast. I thought he said,pro mis u l hep gin knee phi end den alz chiller.

What?

Gran appeared at his bedside carrying a glowing Coleman lantern. She said, I’m right here, Zeke.

Old Zeke reached out for Gran’s face and said, I… luv… U…Gin-ny… He dropped his hands, whispering, By…fer…now… He turned his face toward me as if he could see me. He breathed out a final time.

The Big Room was silent. Outside, the trees were still, for the wind had finally died.

Chapter 2

I wasn’t ready for him to die.

I stood there still looking into his vacant eyes, trying to figure out what Old Zeke had said. Gran was okay. She stood right by him, smoothing his hair by the light of the lantern. She closed his eyes, gently moving his jaw so his mouth closed. She adjusted his pillow under his head. He looked asleep. Gran leaned over to whisper something to him, like she always did but he didn’t move.

Then the shock that he was dead hit us both. We grabbed each other, weeping. My heart hurt so bad that I couldn’t inhale. Struggling for air, I hugged her for a long time. She released herself from me, pulling the raincoat tighter over her nightgown. As Gran moved around his bed smoothing his covers, I realized that her faded raincoat belonged to my grandfather. Old Zeke had worn that one in bad storms. Gran tucked the handmade quilts in around his feet again, saying, We’ve had fifty-three years. Now he’s with the Lord. At this moment and forevermore, Old Zeke can see. She smoothed his hair again. I’m going to miss you, fly boy!

Then I heard banging. Not more wind trying to tear the place to bits, but knocking, like on a door in the parlor.

Grandma Virginia! It’s Deputy Black. Are you okay in there? a voice yelled.

I felt my way out of the Big Room, into the front room of the house, Gran’s parlor. I stumbled, bumping into chairs, hollering, I’m coming. Through the open curtains at the bay windows, I saw red and blue rotating lights on a police cruiser lighting up Gran’s trashed yard. The car waited, its engine still running, its lights throbbing blue, red, blue, red against the huge limbs of her oak trees.

Walking fast, Gran passed me, holding the handle of her lit Coleman. That door was never locked but I couldn’t believe she was opening it in the middle of a pitch-black rainstorm.

My heart raced. Something horrible must have happened to have a policeman drive through the darkness to talk to an old lady in the middle of a storm. I tried to remember where her kitchen knives were so I could protect her if there was a convict loose or something. With Old Zeke gone, I was her only defense. I could hear the squeak of the glass doorknob turning. An Officer’s hat, someone’s hand extended into Gran’s lantern light. A voice said, Everything all right here, Grandma Virginia?

Zeke’s gone home to the Lord.

The deputy came in and took off his hat. He hung his head and said I’m so sorry a dozen times. He began to weep, his shoulders shaking. Gran led him into the Big Room where my grandfather lay. Deputy Black stood over my grandfather, repeating, I’m so sorry.

He sat down beside Old Zeke’s body, his hand on the quilts covering Old Zeke’s crippled legs. Gran touched the deputy’s shoulder, saying, It’s time to call Wayne. Wayne was the funeral home guy.

Deputy Black blew his nose, wiped his eyes. He pushed the button on his radio, attached to his lapel, and snapped, Get me Wayne Rose.

The radio asked, Where are you, Deputy?

At the Olson place, Fern. Old Zeke Olson passed on tonight. Wayne needs to come on over.

With a pause, the radio answered, That’s a shame. Tell Grandma Virginia that Fern sends her best.

I will. Deputy Black said. We don’t have any power. Get the power line fellas to step on it. We got old people over here.

The deputy blew his nose again. Glancing past Gran, he looked at me without moving his head. I’m glad you aren’t here alone, Grandma Virginia.

You remember my grandson, Bass.

The Officer aimed a flashlight beam at my face.

By golly! He’s a dead ringer for Daniel.

Bass drove straight in from California.

You look just like Daniel. Exactly! I swear you are the spitting image of him before he…passed on. Atlanta, was it?

Yep, Gran sighed.

Of all places. Rips your heart out, the deputy said.

Everybody nodded. I looked like my dead uncle. I sure wished for Daniel to walk in the door right then.

It’s been seventeen years, said Gran.

Seventeen. Black repeated. I’m sorry, Grandma Virginia, the deputy spoke, his voice all choked up, It was all my fault.

What are you talking about? Gran asked.

I was the one who revived Old Zeke, after he fell at the air strip. His heart stopped. I thought if I gave him CPR… until the medics got there, he’d be okay. Of course, he’d hit his head, and there was a lot of blood… that dark red kind... but I swear I didn’t know he was going to be blind…

You saved his life.

But… him being helpless… for so long. You had to nurse him...

Deputy, don’t you ever regret saving him, Gran scolded. Was a miracle that you were with him. If he’d been alone, he’d have died right then. I would have lost him and Daniel on the same day.

The deputy heaved a sigh.

These years, sitting here with each other was God’s gift, Gran whispered, looking at Old Zeke.

Deputy Black muttered, Hmm, real quiet.

Deputy, what were you doing out there anyway? I asked. The small Innocence airstrip was way out in the country, past the blacktopped farm roads.

The deputy stuttered a little. I went... ah... to tell him something. Too quickly, he added abruptly, I forget what. The deputy looked at his feet, adding, You know, I was in Gary Mac’s dealership when Daniel bought that truck. Old Zeke comes in and says to Gary Mac ‘I want one like his’ and the two of them drove off in twin trucks. Craziest thing I ever saw.

I asked Gran if they were going to take Old Zeke to the hospital. She answered, No need. The hospital is for the sick. Wayne can sign his death certificate. Gran had been a nurse at the hospital for years. She knew what to do. The house was pitch dark except for the flickering lantern and Deputy Black’s flashlight beam. I hate cold darkness, so I filled my mind with echoes of my grandfather’s last words to me, pro mis u l hep gin knee phi end den alz chiller. Thinking about the sounds, echoing each tiny syllable, I coached my brain to understand. My frustration came out as a mutter, Remember his words.

Old Zeke said something? asked Black.

What did he say to you, Bass? Gran asked.

I don’t know, Gran, I grit my teeth. But I need to use my computer upstairs to find out.

You go on ahead. Old Zeke and I are fine.

I stumbled upstairs holding onto the curved banister of the front stairway, afraid I’d forget the sounds that my grandfather uttered.

I tripped over the threshold into Daniel’s room, feeling my way around the wall to his bed. My backpack was on the floor. I dug into it for my custom-built Mac laptop, opened it, and turned it on. Its battery was at full charge and my laptop’s friendly blue glow lit up Daniel’s room.

Uncle Daniel’s room was the safest place in the world. His electric razor was on his dresser, his pillow was on the bed, and his clock radio was on his desk.

My fingers knew their way around on the keyboard, even in the dark. How many thousands of hours had I pressed those keys? Before the big layoff, I wrote programming-natural language processing (NLP) so all the company computers, even the offices overseas, worked like the ones on Star Trek. Sounds easy, but it took me months to create the artificial intelligence. Once my program was running, I imagined hearing all the sounds Old Zeke said to me. Pro mis u l hep gin knee phi end den alz chiller, I carefully repeated each sound into the computer’s microphone and watched the gibberish appear on the screen with a toolbar from my understanding and recognition program. The program ran, coming up with nothing. My logic program couldn’t recognize his final utterances on the first pass.

Deputy Black tromped up the stairs and knocked on Daniel’s open door, shouting, Hey, you got a computer, as he stepped over the threshold into Daniel’s room, walls glowing with the reflected bluish light from my screen.

Ignoring him, I typed in more language rules for the AI program to broaden its logic to filter out the gibberish and translate what the sounds might mean in English. With two commands, the language rules program tightened so only real syntax was accepted. I selected a voice to repeat the possible sentences derived from his last words. I had several hundred synthesized voices on my software program from Captain Picard to Homer Simpson, but I selected Micah as the computer’s voice. He sounded most like Old Zeke.

The deputy’s flashlight beam bounced around the room as I heard him make another radio call. Fern, this is Deputy Black. Did you call Wayne Rose?

Wayne says his hearse is parked right across the road. He’s coming. The power company crew radioed that they are at the house right now. Do you have power?

Nope, the deputy answered, snapping his radio into silence. Then he asked me, What’re you doing?

I’m trying to find out what Old Zeke said to me.

You know, boy, he said, some things we’re just not meant to know.

I glanced at him as he stepped away from me into the darkness. I knew in my heart that he was wrong. My grandfather had looked to me to understand his dying words, so I kept working.

My Mac’s Micah voice announced: Prelim dialog phonetic code, initial try: Dane Alaska ellor, second try: Dee annuals keel lore, third try: Danielle Skeller.

I rejected the results so the computer re-ran the language rules again, with a tighter parameter. Because my program could take hours to get the sounds decoded, I put in the command to Mutter-Until-You-Know, MUYK, so that the volume of the computer’s language trial algorithms lowered until the final solution could be spoken out.

Don’t that beat all? That thing talks, drawled the deputy.

Who is Danielle Skeller? I asked.

We’ve never had a Skeller in this town. Why?

That’s what my computer is asking. Who is Danielle Skeller?

He backed out of Daniel’s room, yelling to Gran in the hallway. Grandma Virginia, Bass has something to ask you.

Silence.

Chainsaws revved up outside.

Hey! The power company boys are here.

Be nice if we had some light, I said.

The deputy yelled for Gran again.

No answer. When I looked out the window, floodlights from the utility company’s truck lit up the side yard. The power crew’s chainsaws were ripping into the trunks of the fallen trees. From my upstairs vantage point, those power company guys weren’t making much headway. It looked like they were gnawing away at the branches with noisy toy saws because nothing was breaking apart. Those huge old oak trees were solid.

Another set of car lights came slowly down the drive. Even with only the power crew’s lights, I could tell it was a hearse. It stopped at the front entrance, headlamp beams bouncing off the downed limbs. I heard the hearse’s horn wail a couple of times. Toppled trees blocked the waylaid hearse

Reviews for Leaving Innocence

[boobalack · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This is a murder mystery along the line of "Murder She Wrote" or of "Diagnosis Murder." There was only a little violence in the current story, but you understood there was violence during the murder, itself. Several different paths led you to suspect one person, then another to be the murderer, but that's what all good mysteries do.The two main characters, Virginia "Gran" Olson and her grandson, Bass decide to try to find out who killed Gran’s son, Daniel, seventeen years previously. This was the dying request of Old Zeke, her husband and Bass’s grandfather. It seems that the nature of Daniel’s death was unknown to Gran and Bass, both of them thinking he was killed in a vehicle accident.The two amateur detectives are what are commonly known as good, Christian people. Religion is mentioned, but rarely, and one doesn't get the feeling of having it crammed down one's throat. There is a blooming romance between Bass and the lady sheriff, Susanna Mason, and I suspect there is a sequel in the works. We need to know what happens with them, as well as what became of Bass’s mother, Annie, along with whether or not Gran and Bass make good use of their newly acquired PI license.This story keeps your interest while you are reading it, but it doesn’t scream out for attention when you are otherwise occupied. It is a refreshing relief from all the blood and gore and graphic sex scenes that are prevalent in so many novels and is a nice little light read.