Ben Horne spends the majority of his time at the Great Northern Hotel, where he keeps a private suite for his personal use but just as often sleeps in his office. He appears to spend as little time in the old nearby family manse as possible; his brother, Jerry, still resides in his own private wing there. Ben remains as active in his various businesses as ever, but since the sale of their portion of the Ghostwood Forest—and the impact it had on his daughter’s life—it seems clear that he has conducted his investments and purchases on a more readily apparent ethical footing.
He also remains deeply troubled by the project that was eventually put up on the former Horne land in Ghostwood. The privately held and run prison opened there in 2001, a deeply controversial project not just in the town but regionwide. Owned through a shell company by an opaque consortium of conservative investors in the Midwest, this company has proved itself an absentee landlord in the worst sense of the word. An ugly, brutish structure—built by lowball contractors to save money—the Ghostwood Correctional Facility is widely considered the ugliest object in this otherwise pristine valley. Ben Horne himself has, on more than one occasion, publicly referred to it as “a blight on our land.” While the prison has provided some low-wage, low-skill employment opportunities for many area workers displaced by the shuttering of the local logging industry, it is by all accounts dispiriting work for a company with little apparent regard for employee relations. When workers attempted to unionize in the early part of this century, the company simply refused to recognize their right to bargain collectively, and threatened to bus in workers from out of state. The strategy proved effective, and the employees backed down. The arrival of the prison coincided with a sharp rise within the local community in a number of medical issues: alcoholism, depression, prescription opioid addiction and abuse, illegal trafficking in same, domestic violence, and suicide. A majority of those affected by these issues are prison employees and their families. A Twin Peaks Post editorial has referred to this ongoing tragedy as an epidemic.
(Interesting footnote: The chief administrator of Ghostwood prison at this time, Warden Dwight Murphy, crossed our radar during the recent Blue Rose investigation. It may be worth our time to see if his subsequent murder related back in any way to his years at Ghostwood.)
My personal interview with Ben Horne at the Great Northern—which, surprisingly, he agreed to—revealed a man on the cusp of old age, rueful and filled with regrets for what he sees as his many failings. He openly claims to take full responsibility for the damage wrought upon his family and remains unwilling to blame anything or anyone but himself. He also seems moved by an urgent impulse to find a more spiritual direction for his life, and mentioned that he’s trying to spend more time out in nature than he’s been accustomed to. My impression, in this regard, is that he feels the weight of narrowing time pressing down and seems eager to make amends.
For all this, Ben Horne’s chief regret—or, at least, one that he was willing to express to me personally—remains the sale of the family’s section of the Ghostwood Forest. Having paid a visit there recently, I can personally attest that Ghostwood Correctional Facility is more than just a befouling presence in the once pristine foothills of Blue Pine Mountain. Its long record of ignoring employee complaints places it in the lowest 10 percent among the burgeoning phenomenon of private prisons nationwide. Widespread reports of abuse and neglect toward its inmates place it even closer to rock bottom. I am also looking into rumors of alleged collusion between the prison’s parent company and some regional police forces—not including, I hasten to add, the Twin Peaks Sheriff’s Department—to step up arrest rates and stiffen conviction recommendations on relatively minor offenses, in order to increase what is referred to in company literature as “the prison’s client population.” As an aside, this is a potentially explosive issue that should concern any dedicated law enforcement personnel, one that I believe warrants our attention nationwide.
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Ben’s younger brother, Jerry Horne, his longtime junior partner in business—if not in crime; although Ben has faced accusations of malfeasance many times in the past, let it be stated for the record that neither man has ever come under any felony indictment—has chosen a distinctly different path in the past two decades. A lifelong bachelor, Jerry seems to have floated through his privileged existence without forming any lasting romantic attachments; a string of shorter, more ephemeral affairs of the heart he has amassed in abundance. He remains to this day an enthusiastic world traveler—he is conversationally adept in four languages—and appears to have perpetually filled the role of “advance man” for the family business, bringing in deals from companies throughout the States and, indeed, the globe (Denmark, Finland, Brazil, Norway, France, and Morocco, to name just a few). In other words, Jerry roped ’em in—often lavishly hosting and entertaining clients at the Great Northern Hotel, often referred to in company PR as “the crown jewel of the family’s portfolio”—where Ben assumed the more senior position of the “closer.” A word-cloud analysis of news stories written about Ben’s colorful younger brother over the years yields the following: gadfly, cheerful, enthusiastic, restless, upbeat, good-natured, wild man, spontaneous, life of the party. You get the idea. Whether any of the Hornes’ many and varied business ventures ever actually originated with Jerry alone is hard to determine.
With one notable exception. Over the past ten years, Jerry has originated and pursued one new business venture that is, without a doubt, entirely the result of his own initiative. This operation also appears poised, as a result of rapidly changing social and legal conventions, to become on paper the most massively successful endeavor in Horne Corp. history. One may decide to credit “bohemian” Jerry with no more than wishful thinking, but he did accurately anticipate the legalization of marijuana dawning in the state of Washington. More than that, he was, in fact, one of that movement’s major donors and behind-the-scene organizers for many years before the official legislation finally passed in 2012. Anecdotally, it appears that motivation for his activism went well beyond the libertarian or fiduciary into the personal; by which I mean Jerry, according to a number of sources I’ve heard from, has been perpetually as high as an orbiting communications satellite since approximately 1969.
(For instance, just a small sample of the available confirming evidence: As a college student—Gonzaga, class of ’68—Jerry drove cross-country to attend Woodstock in his own private customized Airstream trailer. He appears briefly in the Oscar-winning documentary of that landmark concert, literally emerging from the Airstream with a bevy of nubile hippie chicks in a cloud of smoke. He was for years a known associate of renowned Oregon-based author Ken Kesey—One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest—a notorious libertine and sixties-style consciousness-raising advocate, as a member of his ragtag entourage of followers, known collectively as the Merry Pranksters. A title which, come to think of it, is as concise a distillation of Jerry Horne’s essence as I could hope to express. For example: Jerry once attempted to obtain a medical license for marijuana use—years before it became legal for that purpose—in order to treat his “addiction to marijuana.”)
Because he acted with uncharacteristic discipline and focus, Jerry’s preparation meshed perfectly with opportunity, resulting in Washington State’s most successful domestic cannabis production outfit in a—pardon the phrase, Chief—highly competitive and tightly regulated business environment. Jerry had privately dabbled for decades as an amateur botanist—“growing your own,” as they say in the “medicinal” community—and, since legalization, has personally developed more than a dozen distinct Frankenstein strains and hybrids of alarming potency. (Among his most popular, to illustrate the point: “Whose Hands Are These?”; “Collateral Damage”; and “The Center Will Not Hold.”) The net effect of this has made his products among the most sought-after in the marketplace, and a recent announcement that he has plans to open a strin
g of brick-and-mortar retail shops (name TBD, but among the domain names he has already reserved: “AHigherCalling.com,” “EightMilesHigh.com,” and “UpUpandAway.com”) indicates he’s positioning the operation for a move into the regional and, they hope, national market as cannabis laws grow progressively less prohibitive.
Jerry has undoubtedly mellowed with time and age, an effect that shouldn’t surprise, given that by this point he must have stockpiled levels of THC in his system that could preserve a woolly mammoth. He remains, as he’s always been, a loner by nature, given to long stretches wandering in the nearby wilderness—his only friend outside of the Horne family appears to be Dr. Lawrence Jacoby (more on this relationship to come). At this time, he has no “significant other” in his life. The most recent in his long string of paramours, Jasmin Caspari, a self-styled “Jungian tantric Rolfer” from Switzerland, returned home to Lake Geneva a few months ago. Jerry’s hobbies include butterfly collecting, bird-watching, and baking—which one suspects may have a correlating professional component—and he’s also a fanatical audiophile. His collection of original and reissued vinyl literally fills a barn, one of a collection of deluxe private cabins he owns next to a small lake far up in the woods above Twin Peaks, where, legend has it, he once collaborated with famed Canadian rocker Neil Young to build a custom sound system that effectively turned two of these cabins into gigantic speakers, utilizing a woodshed as a subwoofer.
Jerry has been known to paddle a canoe out into the middle of the lake, activate the system by remote control, and crank up the volume—as the saying goes—to eleven. The resulting wall of sound from certain recordings is rumored to create whitecaps on the water and terrify most of the indigenous wildlife within a five-mile radius. (Dr. Jacoby was once heard to mention, on his pirate radio show, that one winter Jerry’s blasting of Miles Davis’s album Bitches Brew at top volume triggered a small avalanche.)
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I’ve identified a curious piece of either misdirection or misinformation in Major Briggs’s dossier—or rather the section of the dossier that Briggs attributes to Agent Cooper, two stand-alone chapters about the Andrew Packard case that Briggs claimed to have found in a composition notebook stored in the Bookhouse library. The reason for the discrepancy I’ve uncovered—whether indicative of either man being misled by his sources on this, or the result of his own personal sense of discretion smoothing over a deeply sensitive personal matter—is difficult to pinpoint. (There may also be a motive for this related to a high-level security issue; I’ll elaborate later.) I have my own theory about the reason but will let you be the judge.
On page ten of Cooper’s story, he mentions that Norma Jennings’s father, Marty—owner and founder of the Double R Diner—had been “diagnosed with heart disease” and that Norma’s mother, Ilsa, “left the diner to care for him,” effectively leaving Norma to run the diner on her own. Three paragraphs later, on the following page, without specifying the circumstances, Cooper writes: “Norma lost her dad in 1978.” From what we’ve learned on the previous page, one would naturally conclude from this that Marty Lindstrom had passed away.
One thorny problem: Upon further review, I’ve been unable to confirm this news from any other primary, secondary, or tertiary source. No obituary for Marty Lindstrom appears in the Twin Peaks Post or any other newspaper in the region in 1978. There are no records or mentions of services rendered or conducted at any mortuaries in the area, nor could I find a contemporary death certificate here or in any neighboring county that corresponds to either this time frame or this set of circumstances. Further, no gravestone for Marty Lindstrom can be found in any of Twin Peaks’ three largest cemeteries.
In the next paragraph, Cooper’s story goes on to say, “Ilsa never got over losing Marty,” that her health subsequently failed, and that she died in her sleep in 1984. This much, anyway, I have been able to verify: Ilsa Lindstrom passed when he said she did, at which point Norma inherited the diner.
What I have since uncovered is a trail of evidence leading to a wholly different narrative outcome—one that confirms the idea of “heart trouble” at the core of the family’s breakdown, but of an entirely different variety. Chief, a word of warning: This is not a happy story, it doesn’t begin or end well, and the middle is equally dreadful.
As mentioned in numerous histories of the Double R, prior to founding his restaurant, Marty Lindstrom for twenty-five years worked for the Union Pacific Railroad. It appears he never quite got the wanderlust inspired by a career spent riding the rails out of his blood (emphasis on lust). Since at least the early 1970s, Marty had been taking extended two-to-three-day trips away from Twin Peaks by train—as a retirement perk, he had been given a lifetime rail pass—at least twice a month, along with at least two weeklong solitary “vacations” annually. These trips were made, almost without exception, to the Yakima area, a couple of hundred miles to the southwest, where Marty was said to maintain other business interests, including a vintage roadside motel he allegedly purchased out of bankruptcy in the late 1960s.
I have confirmed that Marty Lindstrom did indeed own the deed and title of a motel on Highway 24, east of Yakima, called the Weary Traveler. Marty’s more compelling interest in the property, however, appears to have been an ambitious thirty-something woman by the name of Vivian Smith, who at the time managed said motel for him. At some point at least five years prior to 1978, Marty’s wife, Ilsa, appears to have discovered the truth about her husband’s double life, which coincides neatly with the onset of his so-called heart disease. It proved to be a fatal case, at least to the Lindstroms’ marriage; Marty left his business and family and Twin Peaks for good in 1978—the same year, as Cooper wrote, that Norma “lost” him. At which point Marty set up permanent housekeeping with Vivian Smith at the Weary Traveler, and, since Ilsa refused to grant him a divorce, their shacking up continued to be of the common-law variety.
Ilsa’s principled denial apparently enraged the socially climbing Vivian—the only daughter of two high school teachers, herself a failed and thwarted former actress and singer from the Seattle area—who took that anger out on Marty, regularly and viciously, according to accounts I’ve sourced from two former Weary Traveler employee witnesses. A remorseful, guilt-ridden Marty—apparently all too aware he’d made a royal hash of his and his family’s life—withered under Vivian’s relentless assault and did indeed leave this life in 1985, less than a year after learning that his abandoned wife had passed away in Twin Peaks.
Marty assigned Vivian all ownership and rights to the Weary Traveler in his last legal will. He also left her with the twelve-year-old daughter Vivian had given birth to in 1973 as a result of their illicit coupling. Her name was Annie, and her arrival lines up perfectly with the onset of Marty’s regular trips to Yakima. Annie’s birth certificate bears her mother’s last name, Smith, and she grew up in and around the motel, apparently without ever being informed that Marty was her actual father. Witnesses told me that Vivian told Annie throughout her early years that Marty Lindstrom was her uncle.
Norma didn’t know about any of this, either, until, it seems, her mother, Ilsa, made at least a partial deathbed confession to her in 1984. At which point Norma decided to reach out to Marty, with whom she’d barely spoken—and she had seen him only once—in the six years since he’d split Twin Peaks and the Double R. It was not a happy reunion, as she apparently found her father at the Weary Traveler in severely reduced physical and mental health. She also discovered that, with Ilsa now dead and gone, Vivian had finally, and hastily, persuaded the obviously dying and mentally diminished Marty to marry her. (Vivian had, in the meantime, marginally upscaled her all-too-common maiden name to its cousin, the more aspirational Smythe.)
During her visit, Norma was also stunned to learn that she had a twelve-year-old half sister who had grown up in painfully tough and tawdry circumstances, with a full complement of psychic scars a
nd emotional fragility to show for it. The shock of this discovery marshaled the essential goodness of Norma’s character into a strong protective instinct toward the girl. Annie responded immediately to some of the only offered kindness she’d ever known, and a permanent loving bond formed between them. For many years, Norma declined to share this secret with either her husband, Hank, or the secret love of her own life, Big Ed Hurley. But for the good of the girl, Norma kept this connection with Annie alive, and in order to help herself cope, she went to extraordinary efforts to maintain a civil relationship with Vivian, the woman who had played such a callous, unfeeling role in the destruction of her own family.
Less than six weeks after Marty’s death, Vivian Smythe Lindstrom married the owner of a successful beer distribution company from the Yakima area named Roland Blackburn, a handsome, chiseled country club lout with a drinking problem and a violent temper. (There’s more than ample reason to suspect that Roland had openly entered into a relationship with her while Marty was still living.) Vivian moved out of the motel and into Blackburn’s manicured suburban estate with her daughter. A few weeks after they set up house, Blackburn officially adopted Annie, and a few days after that, they shipped her off to an almost medievally cloistered Catholic boarding school in Kennewick, Washington, about a hundred miles to the east. According to school records, the only relative who ever visited Annie during her first year at the school was Norma. During the time she spent there, away from her mother and stepfather, Annie seemed to stabilize; her grades were close to the top of her class, and school records invariably describe her as a bright and eager student.