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 Case of the Perfectionist Professor, written in 2018, is my sixth novel. I'll post a chapter a day over the next few weeks.
Book Blurb
Late on New Year’s Eve in the small town of Boaz, Alabama, Snead State Community College teacher Adam Parker was found dead slumped over in his car. A preliminary investigation indicated the fifty-year-old biology professor died of a heart attack. Marissa Booth, Adam’s daughter and Vanderbilt School of Divinity professor, didn’t agree.
Four days later, Marissa hired the local private detective firm of Connor Ford to investigate her father’s death. She declared local police officer Jake Stone had likely murdered her father. She pointed Ford to a multi-month Facebook feud between Adam and several local people, including Stone and Boaz City Councilman Lawton Hawks. The controversy allegedly related to Adam’s research that contended that, in layman’s terms, long-term indoctrination caused actual genetic mutations that directly affected future generation’s ability to reason.
Over the next year, Connor Ford discovered multiple and independent sources of motivation to quiet and possibly murder the controversial professor. Ford learned that a civil lawsuit and widespread public outcry had effectively run Adam out of Knoxville, where he was a biology professor for over thirteen years. Ford also learned that Adam had become the number one enemy of Roger Williams, a self-made local businessman, and his son Alex, who is a Republican candidate for governor of Alabama. Adam had discovered Alex and Glock, Inc., the Austrian-based gun manufacturer, was exploring not only the possibility of setting up a large facility in Boaz but also supplying pistols for Alex’s highly touted and controversial ‘arm the teachers’ proposal.
Connor Ford has his hands full enough with these suspects. Add in his need to determine whether Lawton Hawks and Jake Stone are friends or foes of Roger and Alex, which accentuate the pressure no normal small-town private detective can handle.
Will Connor’s discovery there is a link between Dayton, Tennessee, and the 1929 Scopes Monkey trial and a rogue group of CIA operatives bend Connor and his two associates to the breaking point?
Read this mystery/thriller to find out if Adam Parker was murdered and how, and what role the long-standing controversy between science and religion had in destroying the life of a single perfectionist professor.
Chapter 8
It was too cold over the weekend to visit DeSoto Falls, just south of Mentone. It was a favorite spot since it was last September, Labor Day weekend, that we had descended the stairs to a visitor viewing area and had first discussed getting engaged. Looking back, it was a lamebrain idea. Not that Camilla had been too rude or disinterested. She had commented, “your kind of weird Connor Ford, a true romantic man would have simply gotten down on a knee and presented me with a diamond ring while asking if I would marry him. You are too scared, thinking you had to do a little investigative work before making any type commitment.” She had been right. I was fortunate that she hadn’t asked me to call her a cab. I was also lucky that I had found Mother’s ring in my middle desk drawer the following Tuesday morning. Camilla had cried when I, on bended knee, after coming in, unannounced, to Serenity Salon, and popped the big question. I loved how Camilla put up with my slow but steady attempts at becoming a true romantic.
Camilla and I spent Friday night through Sunday afternoon in the Orange Room at the Mountain Laurel Inn, braving the near-zero degree, howling-wind weather, only once. And that was Saturday afternoon to venture across the street to the Wildflower Cafe, only to find it closed due to frozen water pipes. We had quickly returned to stand beside a roaring fire in the giant rock fireplace at the Mountain Laurel Inn, the quaint bed and breakfast that was becoming our favorite weekend getaway.
Being locked away for nearly two days with the gorgeous Camilla was unlike the last time when my movements were fully restricted. I’m not sure why I had brought up my prison days when I did. I probably should write a book, a type of instruction manual on how not to be a true romantic. It was after nearly setting our pants on fire standing beside the fireplace. We had retired to the Orange Room and easily slid beneath the sheets. It was only a moment after Camilla had convinced me I was still man enough to meet her almost insatiable desires, that I had said, “prison was the most boring time of my life.” She, not surprising, now that I’m looking back, had thought I was expressing my boredom over her sweet smile, and her smooth, sensuous, and steady kisses. It was my quick thinking that had saved me. I was able to clumsily quote a little stanza from my favorite poet, Donald Hall, and his poem Love Is Like Sounds:
Love is like sounds, whose
last reverberations
Hang on the leaves of strange
trees, on mountains
As distant as the curving of
the earth
Where the snow hangs still in
the middle of the air.
Rolling onto our sides, her left and my right, had spun-up a slight smile on her natural face, untarnished by Mary Kaye. I had attempted to give her my interpretation, “love is like my moans and groans that hang on these strange orange walls.” Her sly smile had transformed into a wave of laughter. She finally had responded, “you’re totally weird Connor Ford, but at least you make the effort to touch my heart. You’re a keeper but a lifetime will be needed for you to reach those distant mountains.”
I had not been the only one to mention the past. After our love-making we had stayed in bed until dinner downstairs. She had never asked me much about mine and Amy’s relationship. The only thing Camilla knew specifically was that I had caught Amy in an affair in 2012. For some reason, she was interested in details. Pretty much during the entire two plus years we had been dating, she knew only a framework of my past. I thought it strange that she had waited until shortly before our engagement to probe into such a natural subject—the background of the one you have just promised to marry. She wanted to put flesh on the past skeleton of my life.
Camilla started at the beginning, more specifically, the beginning of mine and Amy Vickers’ relationship. I was open and honest. I knew from experience that dishonesty in any degree was no way to build a sustainable foundation for any two people, especially two people who were promising to spend the rest of their lives together in holy matrimony.
I had shared how Amy and I had met at Boaz High School and had started dating when I was in the eleventh grade and she was in the tenth. It was, for me at least, true love. I thought it was for Amy. Until I learned several months later that she had lied to me. It was in April of 1971 that a friend of mine had shared with me a rumor he had heard. That in the ninth grade, Amy had dated Brandon Gore and that he had gotten her pregnant. When I confronted Amy about it she at first had denied even having sex with him, much less becoming pregnant. I shared that the love I had for Amy enabled me to forgive her after she finally confessed. She made me believe that she had made a mistake, that Brandon Gore was three years older than her and had manipulated her into having sex. One time and that she had never been pregnant, never even thinking she was pregnant.
The rest of the weekend was spent answering Camilla’s questions. I never got mad or even frustrated with her. Although it continued to puzzle me why she had waited so long to bring up the past, I was patient and wanted to be as open as possible. She covered a lot of ground, about twenty-five years of my life. I think she agreed with me on the importance of honesty and trust in our relationship. As we drove back home on Sunday afternoon, I felt I had violated my own rule by withholding the fact that Amy’s affair had been with Brandon Gore, the same Brandon Gore she had sex with in the ninth grade.
We arrived home just a little after dark. I felt Camilla and I both needed a little breathing room, so I drove to the office. I opened my email and soon became bored with a long list of questions Bobby had left me concerning a couple of witnesses in my report. My mind couldn’t get interested in his case. But, my newest case flooded my mind when I noticed the keys to Adam Parker’s home and office still lying beside my computer.
I drove to the one-story rental house on West Mann Avenue, just past Snead College. From the outside, it looked old, virtually the same age as all the other houses surrounding the school. Inside, was a different story. The house had been completely remodeled. It wasn’t fancy, but it was clean, bright, and had the feel of simple elegance. The walls were all painted beige and the floors were oak hardwood with a natural finish. I must have misunderstood Marissa. I thought she had implied her father’s house was, at a minimum, fully disheveled. I had been expecting to have to hold my breath as I squeezed between piles of books and mountains of garbage. All six rooms were neat and tidy: two bedrooms, a study, a bath/laundry room, a den/kitchen combination and a large sun-room across the entire back of the house. It was obvious the sun-room had been added when the house was remodeled.
I had ignored Marissa’s note in the middle of the den floor when I had arrived, choosing instead to take a full tour. After playing with the automatic blinds built into the glass windows out back I had returned to Adam’s study and the journal entry Marissa’s note had suggested I read. She had left it open on the giant roll-top desk in the corner. The entry was dated January 1, 1981. It was over a page long. Adam was in the ninth grade at Dearborn High School in Chicago. His parents, both professors of linguistics at the University of Chicago, were the cold cerebral type.
Adam shared his deepest thoughts about what a horrible Christmas vacation he had as his parents tried to instill in him the importance of good grades and setting goals at an early age. Adam used some graphic language to describe how his father castigated him about his laziness and his unwillingness to deal with reality. It seems Adam had made a B on his first semester report card, the first grade less than an A he had since second grade. It was particularly damning because it was in English.
Marissa had boldly written in her note for me to read the sideways writing that Adam had apparently written much later than the first day of 1981. It read, “it was that Christmas holiday that I first realized I would never be able to please my parents, but for some strange reason (one I will forever be eternally grateful. Reader, I’m not fully sure what I mean here.) I will be eternally grateful that they instilled in me the deep longing for dissatisfaction.”
I had carried Adam’s 1991 journal out into the sun-room when my iPhone vibrated. It was Camilla, and she was suggesting I come home. Emily was there, wanting my help. I turned off the lights, locked the door and drove home to Hickory Hollow, the log cabin my dear parents had left me in their Joint Will.
The Pencil Driven Life 