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Once-occupied homes and businesses sat empty. The mighty mills and mines his ancestor had erected were gone.
Baronville had come into existence as part of John Baron the First’s dream for riches. Now thedream had become a nightmare. For all of them.
From his high perch, Baron would often watch the procession of funerals driving slowly to one of the cemeteries in town. The graveyards of the myriad churches had long since been filled. He knew fatal drug overdoses occurred far too frequently. With no hope, people were turning to needles and pills for something to make them forget how desperatetheir lives had become.
And yet he had also watched moving vans coming in, carrying with them new families with fresh hopes. He didn’t know if they were just picking at a hollowed-out carcass. He didn’t know if the town had a reasonable shot at a do-over.
But maybe it did.
Though it was fully beyond his control, he carried the demise of his family’s creation as apersonal failure. And he always would. And anyway, the town would never let him forget that he had indeed failed them.
He rose from behind his desk.
It was too early to go to bed. And he had somewhere he wanted to go. It was sort of a ritual of his, in fact.
He left the house by the kitchen door and entered the six-car garage that had held only one vehicle for thelast three decades.
It was the old gardener’s pale blue 1968 Suburban. Baron had had to let go all of the few remaining household staff after his parents’ deaths, yet he had managed to hold on to the gardener, because there was a lot of property still to keep up. After the land was sold, however, that changed. The gardener, nearly ninety by then, had left his truck to Baron and goneto die in a nearby nursing home, having outlived his wife by several years.
It was fortunate that Baron had been an engineering student in college, with a mind that seemed to know intuitively how any type of mechanical apparatus worked. He had been coaxing life out of the Suburban all this time. Yet, after five decades, he wasn’t sure how much life it had left.
Or how muchI have left.
He climbed into the Suburban and drove out of the garage. The overhead doorsno longer functioned, so hekept them open, with the key to the truck under the visor.
He wound his way down the hill, past the neighborhoods that had sprung up from Baron land and that held the best views in the city, other than his. At least the homes that were still occupied did.
He reached the main road and sped up.
He had money in his pocket. He intended to spend it.
The Mercury Bar was really the only place in town where he felt he could get some peace.
He pulled into a parking space on the street and got out.
He left the tuxedo jacket in the truck. He knew that he was an easy enough target around town without lookingtoo eccentric.
He was a Baron. The last one.
And if his health remained intact, he had maybe thirty more years of this crap to endure. It was no wonder he needed a scotch and soda or two or three of them.
Yet tonight the current John Baron would get more than simply a drink.
