Property Of. . .

By J. N. Sadler

Impulsive young heiress, Minn Rockwell, falls in love with Granville Lyons, a handsome Navajo Indian, when she vacations out west with two friends in Idaho. She marries him and brings him east. They buy a house. He cheats on her and physically abuses her. She divorces him with the help of her rich Uncle Charles, who handles her accounts.

She meets another man at a singles club. His name is Jackson Lock. They fall in love; however, she packs her bags and disappears, never leaving notice for anyone about where she has gone. He thought things were going well in their relationship and is curious. He breaks into her empty house and listens to her phone messages. One is her Granville telling her to come home. She is going to have his baby. Jackson hates children and has never been with Minn, so she can't rope him into marriage, telling him the child is his. She keeps her pregnancy a secret from Jackson.

Thinking that she has been kidnapped, he goes to Idaho to look for them. They are living in a trailer in Blackfoot. Minn has a miscarriage before they leave for the east coast. Granville knows about the aborted infant, but Jackson is kept in the dark.

Jackson shoots Granville, leaving him for dead, and brings Minn back to New Jersey, where he gets a secret vasectomy.

A horrendous surprise is in store for Minn and Jackson. The police become involved, and there is somewhat of a happy ending

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 23, 2013
• ISBN: 9781483665566

J. N. Sadler

Janet Sadler is a resident of Havertown, Pennsylvania. She has published two volumes of poetry with her illustrations: Headwinds and Full Sail and has been published in many small literary magazines. Once member of the Mad Poets Society in Media, PA, and also the Overbrook Poets in Philadelphia, she reads her poetry at local venues. She was the former poetry director at Tyme Gallery in Havertown, PA and at Baldwin’s Book Barn in West Chester, PA. She has authored thirty flash fictions novels. Twenty-seven titles have been published through Xlibris and can be found at Xlibris.com, under J. N. Sadler Author’s email address: [e-mail]

Book preview

PROPERTY

OF…

by

J. N. Sadler

Copyright © 2013 by J. N. Sadler.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

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

The cover photo 1967 Elcona Mobile Home is copyright (c) 2004, by M. Thivierge

User Markt3 on en.wikipedia and made available under Creative Commons Attribution-

Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Rev. date: 07/19/2013

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

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Contents

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

CHAPTER 27

CHAPTER 28

CHAPTER 29

CHAPTER 30

CHAPTER 1

Jackson Lock walked out of the CVS. He bought antihistamine for his flu symptoms. Although the weather was unseasonably warm for April, it had turned cold. He caught a chill when the weather changed, and he didn’t wear the appropriate jacket to keep him warm. Still, not wearing the appropriate jacket for the unseasonably cold spell, he shivered, feeling out of it, feverish. It was dusk. It was the time when most workers returned to their homes for dinner.

A frigid gust of wind felt like ice water across his shoulders and back as he walked to the car. He felt in his pocket for his keys. After waiting for a sneeze, he started the car and rolled out of the parking lot, heading for home.

Two weeks had gone by, and he hadn’t heard from Minn Rockwell. They had met at a singles meeting one night last fall in the banquet room over the firehouse. It was a beef and beer to raise money for their chapter’s skiing event in January. Minn met her ex-husband, Granville, in Idaho while vacationing with a couple of friends. His family owned and operated a potato farm in Nampa. It was just he and his mother living in the farmhouse after his dad died. Granville was looking for a wife. He met Minn at a small bar in the city, which was a short distance from their spread. He convinced his mother to move in with her sister in Boise and let him handle the farm. Minn coaxed him into marrying her and move to the east coast. There wasn’t much going on in Idaho. Granville wasn’t keeping up the farm. He let go the few workers that they had. She couldn’t stand the isolation under the big sky and was homesick for New Jersey and the Atlantic beaches. She divorced him shortly after they returned to the east coast. They had no children.

She told Jackson that Granville lived in a remote area. They had a big ranch house with a second-floor deck and a patio beneath it. There was an enchanting gazebo in their woodsy back yard. When her divorce was final, ex-hubby went back to the hills of Idaho to live on the farm until his mother died. Like Minn, he was an only child. He didn’t like New Jersey or the ocean and beach, anyway. He was a hunter and a solitary man, except when coupled with girls that fell prey to his rugged charms and shared a king bed with him in the local motel. Beer was his mood elevator of choice.

What happened to the marriage? he asked.

It was a nightmare. It didn’t take me long to find that out. He was rough with me. I told him I didn’t like it. I sported a few bruises in the short time we were married. And he liked females; big, little, it didn’t matter. Only the extremely old were not appealing to him. But, at the end of my marriage, when rage was my only mood, I pictured him fornicating with corpses in the potato field.

So, he was violent with you?

You could say that. It was a whirlwind romance that should never have happened. My friends went home without me. I told them I was madly in love and would be coming back east with the cowboy husband of my dreams. I’m glad he is a good distance away now.

She drank another Cosmopolitan and changed the subject. He didn’t ask her any more questions. They danced a slow dance, and he took her home. There were many long, passionate kisses on the doorstep, but no overnights where Jackson might father an illegitimate child.

They all had stories at the singles group. Jackson was not a group person, though. He hated being at the same place every week on a designated day. It bored him. But, Minn was pretty, and her story about ex-husband, Granville Lyons and his strange prairie life fascinated him.

Jackson thought of Minnie as he shivered from chill. He sneezed a couple of times and had no tissue, so he blew his nose into his shirttail. He couldn’t wait to get home to bed. Life was like a free fall now. He had no job, and his girl disappeared, but why? Minn never said she didn’t want to see him again. They were getting serious.

He never met Granville. She had shown him a picture of him mounted on a horse, wearing spurs and a Stetson hat. He used to ride bulls in local rodeos.

You never told me he was an American Indian, said Jackson, examining the picture.

Navajo, she said, watching him scrutinize the darkened Polaroid image.

He was lanky with long dark hair and deep set eyes. The expression on his face was without smile, in fact, it was dead serious, almost frightening.

Jackson was about five foot eleven with a muscular build. His hair was medium brown. His eyes were jade green. He was a looker; something special for the ladies. He was thirty and had never been married.

Children were something that he never wanted. He couldn’t imagine sharing his woman with anyone, especially wailing infants. He’d watched children break up the marriages of some of his friends. But, he thought he loved Minn, and she said she wanted lots of children.

There were no messages on his machine when he walked into the living room of his apartment. He stooped to turn on a table lamp. The light on the machine was a steady red bead. He would leave another message for her. He had forgotten how many he had left during the last two weeks. There were quite a number. She stubbornly did not return his calls.

He picked up the phone and punched in her number, reaching for a glass of water in his tiny kitchen. It rang and rang. Still, no one was home, or she wasn’t answering. Maybe she had a bad cold, too, worse than his and couldn’t answer the phone.

He slammed down the glass of water on the counter, opened the fridge to get a piece of leftover hoagie, and popped two pills. The kitchen had a sink of dirty dishes, even though he had a dishwasher. There were crumbs on the counter and on the floor. He was too depressed to care. Part of his depression was being without work. There was nothing out there. He might just have to take a menial telemarketing or sales job to get back on his feet. The unemployment checks helped out a lot. He could scrape by, so he really didn’t have to look too hard until the money ran out. It gave him too much time to think about how lost he was. Minn was his lifeboat. He would go to her house and see what was going on. He was starting to worry. Could she have gone back to Idaho to that no-account potato head? Women were strange, he thought. There had been only one in his life that meant anything to him, and that was Jennifer Bartlett, high school sweetheart. They had gone together for four years. They were going to get married, but she developed an inoperable brain tumor before graduation. He stayed with her through hospice, until the end. He was so grief stricken that he wanted to die, too.

I’m not going to drink or take pills. I will get through this myself. I’m going to change things for the better, but it will take time. He gave this speech to his image in the mirror.

After putting on his jacket, he turned out the lights and left his apartment. The car was parked out front. It wouldn’t take him long to get to her house. She and Granville had bought a small Cape Cod in an older development. After a few lights and a few turns, he was there.

She lived at the bottom of the street that backed up to the woods. It was dark. There were no lights on in her house. He wondered if she was permanently gone. He approached the front door. The trees were just beginning to blossom. He smelled hyacinth and daffodil and fresh, spring soil. After inhaling the fragrance, he sneezed, loudly, four times. Pollen made his nose itch. Maybe it wasn’t the flu. He didn’t know.

He knocked on the door and craned his neck to see if there was light inside in any of the rooms. Her drapes were closed. No one came. He knocked harder—nothing. No lights were on inside. He checked her mailbox. There were a few bills and a letter that he had sent her four days ago in an attempt to communicate with her. Something wasn’t right. He looked in her garage window. The car was gone.

Why didn’t you call me? I need you. He scribbled this note on a piece of paper from his wallet and left it in the mail box and took the letter home with him. Where else could she be for two weeks? What about her job? She worked as a manager in La Femme, a French boutique. They were always busy there, located in the shopping center where the movie theater was.

Damn! he muttered as he walked toward the car, kicking pebbles on the walk.

The singles group met once a month. The next night was their ladies night. This meant that the ladies picked up the bar tab and also initiated any dancing. He thought it was fair because he wasn’t working, and they were. Most of the women made more money than him when he was working at the cement plant. He had developed a strong back and upper arms lifting all of those bags and loading them onto the fork lift. There was really no future in what he did, but what did he have to strive for? It was easy to provide for just one person. He wasn’t particular, had no aspirations of getting ahead or having a family. He was a Pisces.

He wondered how many single guys would be there under these turnabout circumstances; probably more than ever before. The odds were in their favor to have a good time as kept men for one evening.

When he got home, he checked the paper, circling jobs that he thought he could muster. Most of them were construction. Some were looking for drivers for delivery, like florists and pizza places. He didn’t want to commit yet. He was kind of having a good time on unemployment, calling in for his check every two weeks.

His hands began to shake as he perused the want ads. He guessed he was a disappointment to Minn. Carla’s number was pinned next to the wall phone. She was the singles club secretary. He called her. It rang. No one answered. Most people were working and would not be home until dinner time. It was true in her case. She worked for a doctor’s office. He left a message.

Hi, Carla, it’s me, Jackson Lock. I wanted to know if somehow you might have heard from Minn Rockwell. I haven’t been able to reach her for two weeks. She didn’t tell me she was going away or anything. I…

There was a beep. He didn’t get to finish his needy message. He thought of calling again to finish the message but decided to let it go. Maybe Carla didn’t even know who they were.

There was an ad in the paper for a job