The Rustic Inn:

J.D. Fromm

Description

Welcome to the Rustic Inn, a great place for a relaxing weekend getaway. Sometimes the inn has other ideas for its guests and employees. The inn seems to be judgmental, sometimes harshly, about certain people who work and lodge there, also about certain situations they or their family members may have been involved in at the site on which the inn was built.
A cleansing or recycling, as such, happens every fifteen years on the anniversary of its opening and its counterpart, the Rusty Nail, a restaurant and bar located inside the inn. The inn has surprises of its own for every reader around every corner. This is an exciting look into suspense, terror, and the mystery of things unknown, whether real or imagined. This book contains adult content. Hold on and turn on the lights.

Sujets

• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Xlibris US
• Date de parution: 05 juin 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781669812906
• Langue: English

Extrait

THE RUSTIC INN:
Judge and Jury
 
 
 
 
 
 
J.D. FROMM
 
Copyright © 2022 by J.D. Fromm.
 
Library of Congress Control Number:
2022903405
ISBN:
Hardcover
978-1-6698-1292-0

Softcover
978-1-6698-1291-3

eBook
978-1-6698-1290-6

 
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.
 
Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.
 
 
Rev. date: 03/18/2022
 
 
Xlibris
844-714-8691
www.Xlibris.com
838599
Acknowledgements
T o my son Travis, for without his help this book would have really been difficult for me to finish due to the fact that it was written on my cell phone and had to be transferred to a computer. He got it done!
To Vonda who proofread everything for me for the final draft, and found some things that we all missed. Great Job!
To all of my friends who were with me from the first snippet to the Epilogue: Thank you Candy, Rita, Tom, Amy, Megan, Stacey, Joe, Sherm, Mary, Linda, Jennifer, Gail, Denise and Tracy.
To anyone I may have missed, accept my apologies, so many have been so supportive during this project!
Lastly, to the professional staff at Xlibris Publishing, I can’t thank you enough for your support during my first publication, what a great group to work with!
Please enjoy the adventures of The Rustic Inn: Judge and Jury.
 
 
T he pork processing plant had opened in 1912, the year of the Titanic ’s North Atlantic Ocean maiden voyage. There were two disasters in the same year. One made the New York Times , the other not so much. Both events would not be forgotten as long as man was alive.
The processing plant consisted of containment pens and herding rooms, which led to the kill room, which drained the blood south into the swampy woods. Lastly, there was the freezer and finished product area. One-hundred-pound blocks of ice kept the meat cool until it could be shipped by train to the buyers. It looked like a perfect place to work, but after a couple of years, things began to get ugly, real ugly.
Boredom became a problem, same shit day after day after day. The workers devised sadistic experiments to try on the animals. They were just fucking hogs. Torture became the modus operandi. The horrific sounds that came from that facility made strong men and women have bad dreams and put cotton in their ears for the night shift.
There had been accidents at the plant that maimed, killed, and crippled. There was no such thing as safety. Some workers were trampled, attacked by the swine, and overcome by the sewage gas; several had died horribly by 1940. There were local urban legends being born—werehogs, werewolves, huge spiders, angry ghosts, and spirits. It was as if there was an evil presence lurking, waiting, and watching. A lot of local folk knew this. Sometimes silence is the best solution to the problem—not in this case, as everyone would find out.
In the summer of ’45, World War II ended, and so did the Hills’ sadistic slaughterhouse and pork processing torture chamber. An explosion in the shit pit started a fire, which was fueled by the methane gas, and about ten minutes later, the town of Longleaf thought it had been hit with a hydrogen bomb. There wasn’t anything left except for the concrete floors and a huge hole where the main part of the plant had been. Most in Longleaf said good riddance—not any too soon, others said. Some folks wouldn’t say a word at all
The year 1946 brought an economic boom to most of the country after World War II. Construction began for a twelve-room motel and restaurant with a bar. The building site was in the area of where the pork plant had been before it gave its final barbeque. The price for the eight acres had been too good not to build there; plus, it was only about two miles off the main highway. Tired travelers, lookie-loo tourists, and couples with sin in mind would pay for a night or two, no problem. Ten months later, on June 6, 1946, the Rustic Inn opened its doors. Longleaf and Buena Vista County, Pennsylvania, was about to enter a brand-new dimension of twists and turns.
The fifties passed everyone by like a friendly ghost. Then came 1960 or 1961. Some weren’t sure of the exact date of the first disappearance, but nonetheless, ol’ Bart the barber had just stopped being around. No one ever found a clue, not anything. Bloodhounds scoured the eight acres around the inn—not a trace of Bart the barber.
The Rustic Inn had celebrated its first fifteen years in business that evening. It was its best night ever. A full moon always brought the lunatics out and about. Anyone who was anyone in Longleaf was there, even Bart the barber. Life was good. JFK had defeated Nixon by a tiny margin, and the United States was still in awe over Jack Kennedy. The Rustic Inn was already becoming the place to be.
In 1975, the Rustic Inn celebrated thirty years, a busy but uneventful evening. In 1990, a fire erupted in the caretaker’s cottage on the property. Floyd was gone, but his fish tank and parakeet perished. Everyone said they heard some things going on over by the cottage that night, but they didn’t want to get involved, so they didn’t. Most likely, it had been a wise choice.
In the spring of 2005, there had been an ad in the Help Wanted section for a bartender and a caretaker at the Rustic Inn. Floyd had passed away suddenly, and Josie, the slut of a bartender, was fired for skimming from the register. Bernie did the hiring and firing for the owners. She knew how to read people—a sixth sense of sorts. She was a hell of a Texas hold ’em player; it was like she could see into your soul. There was no bluffing Bernie.
Annie Ramsey and Joe Bushman arrived at the Rustic Inn at exactly the same time. Annie was hoping that he was not applying for the bartender’s job. Jesus Christ, he had eyes that could work the entire room; she’d never seen anything like that, not even in a circus. Joe was thinking he’d never seen such nice titties ever. He had to get to know her. Little did they know that the adventure was about to begin when Bernie said, “You both are hired” and gave them both the grand tour. It would begin fifteen years later, in June 2020.
The Rustic Inn was set on a hill overlooking the woods to the south, the caretaker’s cottage to the north. The town was east of the inn. West of town was the Pennsylvania countryside. The inn was a wooden structure, knotty pine exterior, with cedar shake shingles on the roof. Even in the daylight, it was dark in certain areas of the building. It seemed that the sun never shone in those rooms regardless. It was mostly on the south side of the inn.
The inn seemed to come alive after sundown. Local folks thought it literally was alive with something that they didn’t want to have anything to do with. It actually glowed, as if to say like a Bob Barker zombie, “Cooooome on dooooown. You’re the next disappearance courtesy of the Rustic Inn.” Annie had heard stories, and after Bernie told her about the goings-on, she was never going near those woods. Joe, on the other hand, thought it was all bullshit. Joe would reevaluate his thinking.
Annie opened the door to the Rusty Nail, her new home for the next fifteen years. Something told her to get ready for a wild ride. She clicked on the Hamm’s Bear beer sign. Her first customer was the sheriff—Sherman or Sherm, as he preferred to be called. He’d just been reelected to his fourth term. He was whistling “Folsom Prison Blues.”
He smiled and said, “I guess you’re the new boss hog here, girl.”
Annie thought, What a rude fucker . She thought she was pretty hot. She smiled back, snorted out a laugh, and said, “You better fuckin’ believe it, Barney Fife.”
They were immediate friends.
The Rusty Nail was open for business. Annie thought occasionally that she needed to tone her foul mouth down; the higher she got, the more she could cuss with the best of them. Being a diva really wasn’t Annie’s cup of tea. She laughed—her, a diva. If she had to tone it down, she might not like this gig that much. A Johnny Paycheck song came to mind: “Take This Job and Shove It.” She’d hang on and see how many stuffy-assed patrons she’d convert to her way of thinking. She was one of the best at it.
The Rustic Inn had a bar made out of a huge cypress tree. It was somewhat smooth, but there were furrows in the wood grain. Even if it had been a finished surface, the grooves would still have told a story. The bar was about fifty years old, the tree two hundred years or more. Strange how that works—trees live longer than people. Annie hated the bar. There was a lot of history in those goddamn grooves; most of it was bad memories, lovers, addiction, fuck . Annie was about to lay out a line when the side door of the bar opened.
TA had to walk. He had driven a hundred miles for what was, in his mind, a wild fucking goose chase. He didn’t like the layout. Christ, anyone could commit a