Page 90 of Night Falls on Predicament Avenue
Effie held her tongue, not wishing to interrupt. But she wanted badly to refute Floyd’s remark.
Nothing? No. He was so wrong. So in error.
It was everything.
Everything.
Cold, Dead, But Never Buried
Hosted by Sebastian Blaine
I’VELEARNEDTHATREGARDLESSof resources like the internet, historical documentation, websites of ancestries and the like, some mysteries areleft to the people who lived them. Maybe they know. Maybe they understand.
I can’t help but think, based on what little actual evidence I’ve been able touncover, that there was more to Isabelle Addington than just simply being a transient passing through Shepherd who was brutallymurdered. Did the Opperman family who owned the property atthe time have anything to do with it? Perhaps. Butin searching the newspaper archives, the story seems to fade away. Unsolved. Questions never answered. Yet maybe that’s theway of it at 322 Predicament Avenue. Maybe theusof today aren’t supposed to understand thethemof yesterday. The people who came and went through 322 PredicamentAvenue. The folks in town who, after the sensation ofdiscovering a crime scene, remained remarkably silent.
Perhaps they were protecting someone. Perhaps each other. Or maybe it was justthat Shepherd, Iowa, isn’t unlike any other small town in America—or the rest of the world, for thatmatter. We love our thrilling stories, that is, until thetruth is revealed and our darker sides are exposed. Thesides we’d rather were kept secret, hidden away forever.
In my career of solving historical cold cases, I’ve come to the conclusion that the story of murder—theheinous taking of a life—is like dominoes falling. Oneperson may be left holding the knife, but many played a part in the process of getting there. Maybe societalpressures.Maybe parental misguidance. Perhaps mental illness or greed. Andwhen I find what I can about Isabelle Addington, I’m led to wonder if she was just a personin the wrong place at the wrong time, or if she was part of something larger. Something that got awayfrom her, and in the end, the consequences were far more than she’d expected to pay.
Whatever the ending to the story of 322 Predicament Avenue, I’ll saythis: Evil never goes away. Once it stains a place, the mark remains for generations. Its horror is repeated. Itrises from the grave to haunt.
So, what do we do with that?
Are you afraid to grieve the loss of a loved one?
Are you afraid to lose a loved one?
Are you afraid to go on living without a loved one?
Or perhaps, in all of this, you’re more like me. You realize you’re missing timewith your loved one because you’re afraid you will fail them.
This is evil at its core.
Fear.
Fear is a lack of hope and a belief in themurder of our dreams, our lives, and even our salvation.
But if I’ve learned anything during my stay at 322 Predicament Avenue, it’s that to live—to trulylive—is to hope that there’s a deeper purposefor our lives. That a person’s life, no matterhow short or how long, how peaceful or how turbulent, how adventurous or how tragic, is not wasted. Not whenyou have hope. It might be a tiny pinprick oflight in a world of darkness, but it’s there all the same. It was planted there by God, andthe more you pursue hope, the brighter it becomes, and the more we discover that fear is not of Him. Hope is. We need only to surrender to it.
Most of us resist this surrendering to hope, and yet wesurrender to fear every day, easily and without much of a fight.
Today, listener, I challenge you. Surrender to hopeinstead.
33
NORAH
Present Day
FORNORAH, 322 Predicament Avenue would never be the same. It wouldn’t hold the nostalgia it had before, and yet it was enveloped in something entirely unexpected.
She sat beside Ralph, both of them on the back steps of the porch overlooking the cemetery. The old graveyard with all the people no one remembered anymore, and with Isabelle Addington and Naomi Richman. Someday no one would be left to remember them either. To remember any of them really. But Norah had today. Today was still alive, still a part of her. In spite of the grief and the agony of betrayal, Norah sensed a new beginning on the horizon.
“It will be hard,” she stated.
Ralph knew what she was talking about without her having to explain. There were more new lines in his aged face, a deeperstoop to his shoulders. There was a guilt he should have known, should have suspected.
“Yes, it’ll be hard for a while,” he agreed. Then, after a pause, he added, “Maybe for the rest of my life.”
