The primary aim of the "Novel Excerpts" blog category is to showcase my creative writing, specifically from the novels I've written. Hopefully, these posts will provide a glimpse into my storytelling style, themes, and narrative skills. It's an opportunity to share my artistic expressions and the worlds I've created through my novels.
The Boaz Schoolteacher, written in 2018, is my fifth novel. I'll post a chapter a day over the next few weeks.
Book Blurb
In the summer of 2017, Katie Sims and her daughter Cullie, moved from New York City to Katie’s hometown of Boaz, Alabama for her to teach English and for Cullie to attend Boaz High School . Fifteen years earlier, during the Christmas holidays, five men from prominent local families sexually assaulted Katie. Nine months later, Katie’s only daughter was born.
Almost from the beginning of the new school year, as Katie and fellow-teacher Cindy Barker shared English, Literature, and Creative Writing duties for more than 300 students, they became lifelong friends.
For weeks, Katie and Cindy endured the almost constant sexual harassment at the hands of the assistant principal. In mid-October, after Cindy suffered an attack similar to Katie’s from fifteen years earlier, the two teachers designed a unique method to teach the six predators a lesson they would never forget. Katie and Cindy dubbed their plan Six Red Apples.
Read this mystery-thriller to experience the dilemma the two teachers created for themselves, and to learn the true meaning of real justice. And, eternal friendship.
Chapter 60
It was 1:30 p.m. Sunday afternoon before I woke up. I was in Cindy’s bed. Wayne was sitting in an old, oak wooden rocker next to a sliding glass door that led to a small balcony. I turned my head and looked the other direction, toward Cindy’s giant walk-in closet. I would have sworn I saw through the closed door and inside to Cindy, on her hospital bed but sitting upright, smiling, with arms wide open saying, “come here my baby dearest. You did it. Now, all is well.”
“Katie, Katie, look at me.” Wayne said. His hand on my shoulder felt foreign, unwelcome.
“How’s Cindy? Where’s Cindy?” I, no doubt, was hallucinating. Dr. Ireland came out of the closet, passed between those thick white curtains.
Wayne pulled back my covers and took my hands. Pulled me up and turned me so I sat on the side of the bed. My feet on the floor. He massaged my face with a wet cloth.
“Cindy is dead. You are still drugged.” He said, I think several times, moving the old rocker next to my bed, Cindy’s bed.
Time stopped. Nothing happened, for hours. Time started. Nothing happened. At some point, time rebooted. I landed. I was back. At least halfway.
“You don’t remember Dr. Ireland coming?”
“Here?” I asked.
“You were a total wreck. Rightly so. I called the hospital, the intensive care unit. The nurse, the nurse who told us about Cindy. She called Dr. Ireland. He was already heading back to Guntersville. He is a good man. He turned around and I directed him here. He prescribed you some Valium.” Wayne said, now holding both my hands.
“The kids. Where are the kids?”
“With Maxine. And, Cindy’s mother is here. Along with a few other relatives. They’re still arriving.” My mind was walking back towards a semblance of normal. I saw his face twitch. It was a combination smile and frown. I read him to say. “Those people are weird.”
“Oh my, oh my Heavens. And, Hell. What am I going to do? What is going to happen to those dear children?” I asked.
“One day at a time. That’s all we can do. Katie, I’m here for you and the children. We, together, will survive. Someday, maybe we can thrive. I know we can get through this.” Wayne Waldrup was my rock. He was the foundation, the only thing that could keep me alive.
He helped me up and into a pink and adorable knee-length house-coat he found in the closet. It matched the gown I was wearing. Both were Cindy’s.
When we walked into the living room and saw the children all sitting like ducks on one couch, like they were marching, but getting nowhere, their faces sad, like they had lost their mother. For Cullie. For Cullie, like she had lost her mother.
I went to them and none of them stood. I knelt and, one by one, hugged them, and cried, and shook, and let Anita and Arlon scream, and Alysa sat along the couch’s edge trying to console all three of us. Cullie, sat motionless, just staring towards the fireplace along the outer wall. I’m not sure how this scene ended but I think it was Wayne, might have been Maxine, encouraged the children to join him, her, for a walk.
I stayed inside and hugged and talked with Cindy’s mother. She looked different now, different from less than two months ago, when Steve had died. She looked older. Talked slower. Cindy’s father hadn’t been able to make the drive up from south of Montgomery, Union Hill, Hope Hull, Hell Hole. I forgot the name of the single-store town. Adelia was eighty-two. Looked, maybe sixty. A tall, thin woman, with a sagging chest and an over-sized butt. She kept bragging about how she was forty-two when Cindy was born. Like Cindy, now forty, was forty, should have survived, not let a simple thing like a pregnancy kill her. She never showed any sadness, any real love for the most remarkable woman I’d ever known. I clearly saw why my dear Cindy thought she had won the lottery when Steve landed in that little diner and whisked the high school senior away.
The next several hours were like two days. I wasn’t a very good mother to Cullie or to my three other children. The thought of the sharp turn my life had taken had led me to visit the pool-house after fleeing the cold, icy Adelia. Wayne had seen me and told me to take care of myself, that he wasn’t leaving the kids.
I don’t know how long I stayed locked up inside the tiny building beside the pool. It was no surprise my mind was determined to reminisce. It took me by both hands and threw me down a deep dark hole. I closed my eyes and dreamed. I lay beside Patrick Wilkins in the grave dug by Cindy and me. Except, he wasn’t there. He had escaped. But, I was there. And, so was Cindy. We were both dead. We both died before we got there.
What woke me, I’m sure, was the smell of those apples. What had started as six red apples laying between Cindy and me in the damp, dark grave, had devolved into six rotten, stinking apples. That’s when Wilkins and Warren and his four fakes appeared. They had dug through the limbs, the leaves, and the dirt and found us. They had crawled in with us. Warren had said, “you may have killed us all, but you killed yourself also. Sooner or later you both will die and you both will still smell like rotten apples.”
Someway, the dream, along with the horrible afterthoughts, ended and the gorgeous Cindy appeared. She even pulled up a chair and sat beside me. Why she pulled a sack of chlorine onto her lap, I’m not sure. We held hands. She talked, and I listened. I heard her say she would never leave me. She would always be there for me and to give me advice. That’s when she reminded me of my promise. The one I would break Hell wide open if I didn’t keep. I had promised to take care of her children. She said, real justice comes with a price. I can almost hear her words, “I paid the ultimate price. You’re getting off on the cheap. My forever friend, I am depending on you to keep your promise. It’ll be easy and enjoyable. Forge forward, living one day at a time, loving our four children. Leading them to a life like I had before trouble appeared.”
It was six o’clock when Wayne knocked on the pool-house door. He was waving my iPhone in front of the window. I got up, walked over, and unlocked the door.
“It’s Riley Radford. She says it’s important. I didn’t know exactly what to do. Here, you decide.” He handed me my phone and walked back toward the house.
For a minute I just stood there, looking out toward the pool, wondering why the cover was lying along the edge and not over the pool. Finally, I faintly heard, “Katie, are you there. Katie.”
“Riley, I’m here.”
“I’m sorry. I tried to warn you.” She said without emotion. What did she mean? Here was a young girl who had just lost her father in the worst possible way.
“Warn me? What do you mean?” I asked.
“Yesterday afternoon I caught Daddy in the garage. He was loading up some rope, tarps, shovels and picks. I confronted him about what he was doing. All he would say is, ‘I’m going to take care of you. You are my one and only daughter. I trust you to trust me.”
“What did he mean? Then, what happened?”
“He hugged me and drove away. It took me an hour or more, but I finally figured it out. It was like the Real Justice Facebook comments scrolled across my mind. You know, Stella’s daughter, Candy. She was kidnapped. I then realized that Daddy was talking about Cullie. He was going to get rid of Cullie.”
“And, you tried to reach me? To warn me?” I asked.
“Yes, I didn’t do a good job until I finally posted a plea on Facebook. Someone said Cindy was in the hospital. I figured you were there. I had my mother take me, but I couldn’t find you.”
“Riley, you tried. While you were trying to reach me, no doubt, your father and his friends had already taken Cullie and Alysa. It’s over now, the girls are safe. And, I’m very sorry about your father. I hate that I had to kill him.” My last statement came out wrong. It was too harsh. But, it was the truth.
“You want to know something weird?” Riley asked.
“I guess so.”
“After all the hell I’ve put you and Cullie through, I’m not mad at what you did. I probably would be trying to kill you right now if it weren’t for my mother. We just had a very serious talk. She revealed to me things about my Daddy, my granddaddy Randall, and my great-grandfather Raymond, that I never knew. Sounds like you got lucky. For the Radford’s, I apologize for all you had to go through.” By the time she finished her little speech I had a whole new and better impression of Riley Radford.
It was Monday morning, Christmas day, before my mind caught the unmoored dots. A house full of at least thirty people had just finished a breakfast that could have fed the staff of Boaz High School and half my students. Wayne and I thankfully had the same idea at the same time. We walked down the little gravel road behind Cindy’s that continued their driveway but went on a half a mile to their pond and barn along the front edge of their second pasture, “the back forty as Steve had called it.” Wayne just held my hand and let me think. That’s when the dots connected.
Saturday night, two days ago, was December the 23rd. That was fifteen years to the day from when the Faking Five had abducted me and driven me to Club Eden’s army tent and gang-raped me for over two hours. Two other dots cried out for attention. The exact times. I had arrived at Club Eden, hidden my parked car, and started making my way towards the rear of the tent hoping to find Cindy and Alysa. The time had to be virtually the time of my arrival fifteen years earlier. That time, tied up in the back of a van.
Wayne and I kept walking. I couldn’t stand to explore the thought of what might have happened to Cullie and Alysa if I hadn’t installed the little Spy Bug. Then, it hit me. I owed everything to Riley Radford. If it hadn’t been for her mischievousness in bugging my office I would never have been able to save my two precious teenagers. It was both real mercy and real justice. I had, Cindy and I had been in charge, pretty much at least, of achieving real justice. I had to think that the mercy, saving Cullie and Alysa from, what no doubt would have been, rape and murder, was God’s work. That’s what I would think. That’s what I would believe. That’s what Cindy would want me to believe.
“Look.” Wayne said as I was still looking down at the road, deep in thought. We had just rounded a little curve and headed up a small hill towards the barn.
“What?” I asked.
“It’s a newborn. A newborn calf. See?”
“I looked to where Wayne was pointing. At first, I only saw a big black cow.
“Besides its mother. The calf.”
Then, I saw four spindly legs trying to gain their balance. We walked over to the edge of the road and leaned against a wooden fence. Unlike the calf that died, the one the children saw, expelled from its mother’s womb, lifeless, bloody, dreamless and hopeless. This calf, now in full view, was looking up, stepping forward. Like it was reaching out and grabbing hold of life, thankful it wasn’t alone.
“It’s beautiful. Take a picture, I left my phone.”
Wayne climbed over the fence to get closer. I continued to lean against the fence and knew without a doubt that someway, somehow, Cindy, and maybe God by her side, had given me this picture of hope. It was all I needed to stand straight and walk forward in my mind. I vowed to do the same with every fiber of my being. I owed it to Cindy. And our four children.
The Pencil-Driven Life 