The Green Apple Tree

Gene Fackler

Description

Thomas is about to divulge a fifty-year-old secret that could solve the disappearance of a childhood friend but first comes face-to-face with guilt and the ramifications of a terrible truth.

It’s the summer of 1963, and three teenage boys are busy destroying their innocence, provoking the local law, and sitting in silence as grizzled elders dispense the local lore. Just the usual stuff if you’re a kid growing up in the Texas Hill Country. But for one of them, that summer would never end.

Forward to 1986, and Thomas Kessler is waiting in a bar for the arrival of his old friend Pete, now an attorney who has long been obsessed with a pair of murders that coincided with the disappearance of Bennett, the third member of their youthful tribe. Thomas has long held knowledge that could unlock the case, and has chosen Pete to be his confessor.

But the beer is cold and Pete’s arrival is still an hour or two away, so there’s plenty of time for one more trip back to ‘63 and the secluded stone house strewn with old Colts and fables; to the dingy Gulf station awash in profanity-laced burlesque that offered enlightenment in its darkest corners; to the towering palisade that revealed the town beyond the river without divulging secrets of its own. And Thomas takes us with him.

Sujets

• Psychological
• Thrillers
• Fiction
• Texas

Informations

• Publié par: Archway Publishing
• Date de parution: 29 juin 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781665721493
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

THE GREEN APPLE TREE
 
 
 
GENE FACKLER
 
 

 
Copyright © 2022 Gene Fackler.
 
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
 
Archway Publishing
1663 Liberty Drive
Bloomington, IN 47403
www.archwaypublishing.com
844-669-3957
 
Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.
 
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.
 
Cover illustration by RT Graphics.
 
ISBN: 978-1-6657-2150-9 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-6657-2148-6 (hc)
ISBN: 978-1-6657-2149-3 (e)
 
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022912159
 
Archway Publishing rev. date: 09/06/2022
Contents
Prologue
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
Epilogue
To
Judith and H elen,
Chelsea an gels
Prologue
S u mmer
1986
The glass door hissed shut, and the cold air and darkness pulled him in like a selfish lover. He stepped blindly through the short, contrived foyer, navigating by sliding the knuckles of his right hand along the paneling. At the end, he pushed aside the weighted curtain and stepped through, then waited for his eyes to adjust to the dim light.
Slowly, a bar emerged in the collage of fractured neon. Forms shifting in the glow would turn and reveal faces that would spin away just as he was beginning to comprehend them.
A winding path through the mismatched tables and chairs finally presented itself, and Thomas headed for the end of the bar along the far wall, away from the clattering pool balls and the hillbilly whine of the jukebox. He pulled out the next-to-last stool, and the bartender—goateed and smiling—sauntered over and flipped a coaster onto the scarred oak.
“A Lone Star, please,” said Thomas.
He had worn a dark suit to the General’s funeral out of respect but had forgotten how cruel and unrelenting the Texas heat was in August. Worsted wool was consistently comfortable in Chicago, but not here. He had turned the A/C in his rental car to full blast on his way to the funeral in an attempt to dry out his shirt, but had left the jacket hanging in the car. It was soaked with sweat and wouldn’t be dry by the time he boarded his flight back to Chicago. Not in this god-awful humidity.
First things first. He took a sip of beer, then scanned the room in the backbar mirror. On his way over, he had passed a blonde immersed in conversation with a man in a business suit, and full dilation now confirmed that she was an easy eight, or maybe even a nine, which eliminated her from consideration. Anything above a four or a five wouldn’t grant enough leeway. Besides, the highball in her hand had a Shirley Temple tint, and she was dressed for the office; even if that provocative face hadn’t disqualified her, there was no way she would be around when he really needed her. She was probably on a lunch-hour tryst, seeking anonymity in a dive she normally wouldn’t be caught dead in.
He passed on two or three more, then turned his attention to a redhead smoking a cigarette and sipping a gimlet in the booth along the wall behind him. As a plain Jane, she qualified in appearance, but the size of the four empty glasses in front of her implied doubles, and she was undulating from the waist up like a snake charmer’s cobra. She’d be gone soon too, and not back to a job.
What he needed was a woman who would still be around in two or three hours, when he really would need her—a woman with stamina.
He was on his second beer and considering recruiting the bikinied, lasso-twirling cowgirl on the Shiner Beer calendar taped to the cash register when she walked in. He watched in the mirror as she approached the bar at an unerring clip and took the third stool down on his left. She was a brunette, probably in her mid-thirties and with tired eyes, but there was still an aura of faded beauty.
The drink the bartender began mixing when he saw her walk in turned out to be a Gibson. She took a sip when it arrived, then pulled a pack of Marlboros out of her purse. The bartender held a flame to the tip of the cigarette she slipped between her lips, then turned toward the clatter of stools being pulled out at the far end of the bar.
Thomas watched in the mirror as she set her elbows on the dark wood and blew a thin stream of smoke toward the ceiling.
When her head came back down, her eyes settled into the netherworld of the mirror, and he knew she wouldn’t be going anywhere anytime soon.
Well, hel -l ooo , Miss Drunk -o meter . When you become a seven—aw, hell, make it an eight—I’ll know it’s time to give Virgin Mary a call.

He had always wondered how old the General was, and now he knew. The blown-up obituary mounted on the easel at the church had presented his birth date as July 6, 1887, meaning the General would have been seventy-six in the summer of 1963. And now, after almost a hundred years on this earth, he was gone.
But not that summer. It was still in the air, radiating off the pavement just as it had when the parking lot outside fronted a scooter shop instead of this bar, as immutable as a recurring dream.

It was Pete who had called with the news of the General’s passing. They didn’t have much in common anymore—Pete had zeroed in on a law degree after they graduated high school—but they had been close friends for too long for that to matter, staying in touch through occasional phone calls, randomly instigated and often alcohol-induced. Were it not for Pete’s call, he would have missed the funeral. Thomas’s parents had sold the house on James Place and moved to Florida right after his high school graduation, leaving Pete as his last remaining link to Fuller and the limestone hills south of the Nebraska River.
It had been seventeen years since he had dropped out of Texas College, married, fathered a son, and gone north for an airline job. His first stop had been Chicago’s O’Hare, where schlepping bags through a brutal winter had inspired an escape to sales in Manhattan. Then, ten years later, there had been a painful divorce and the move back to Chicago to his current office in the Loop.
After the service, he had told Pete there was something important he needed to tell him.
“Okay,” Pete replied. “Let’s meet up at Dad’s old scooter shop.”
That’s what this seedy dive had been in ’63, before the plate glass windows were boarded over with plywood and the entrance partitioned to block out the light, and the polished concrete floor had been arrayed with Cushmans, Vespas, and Ducatis instead of cheap bar furniture coated with cigarette tar. Pete’s father had done well until cars started to shrink and scooter and motorbike sales began to plummet. He had held on as long as he could and then finally had shut the doors and gone back to selling insurance. The building had become a restaurant after that, then a florist shop, then a plumbing supply store, then God knows what. Thomas had been in Chicago by then.
Before the divorce, in both Chicago and Manhattan, he had rented in neighborhoods that offered a short rail commute to his job in the city, and the corner bars, glass-fronted and inviting, had been as essential as the churches and temples they often abutted, offering secular souls a spiritual refuge as well.
So different from Texas. Rat traps—that’s all these suburban bars amounted to, a species apart from both the fancy downtown bistros packed with hobnobbing lawyers and the rowdy honky-tonks wailing along the country roads. Segregated by zoning from schools, churches, and anything else claiming innocence and purity, it was as if their sole purpose was to lure vermin off the roads and out of the public eye. They might occasionally change ownership or close to be brought up to code, but they would never lack for customers. Survival was assured.
He glanced at the Coors Beer clock above the mirror, then tilted his wristwatch into the light. The Coors clock was set to bar time, giving a fifteen-minute leeway to clear out the drunks before closing time kicked in.
Pete had said he had a court appearance that shouldn’t take more than two or three hours, and he’d be over after that—no time at all when juxtaposed against the twenty-three years that had passed since the Riverside Drive murders. What difference could a few more hours make?
He slid his eyes across the mirror, to the brunette three stools down. Good. Still a solid five and still sipping those Gibsons away in a world of her own.
He brought his eyes back and let them sink into the mirror, like hers, in search of an escape from the meaningless laughter, from the empty and wasted time, and soon the chaotic rhythms of a long-past summer poured into the void.
It was as if the scooter shop had opened up behind him.

1 CHAPTER
S p ring
1963
Through the splintered light of breaking sleep as he slowly gathered consciousness, the outline of the bomber was muddled, incoherent, even threatening. He pressed his fingertips to sleep-swollen eyes and massaged them to some degree of function, then returned his gaze to the ceili