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 15
Camilla couldn’t resist coming for breakfast. All I had to do was promise to prepare her favorite dish, at least her favorite early-morning dish. She called it her ‘sunny day meal.’ She never ate breakfast the other six days of the week, always getting up, grabbing a cup of coffee, and rushing to Serenity Salon at least an hour before the 7:00 a.m. haircut specials began, all to transport her mind into another world. I was more than a little proud I had played a part in her present infatuation with legal and crime novels. I was also proud and honored to prepare two sunny-side up eggs.
She said it was one of only a few things her father, the now deceased Lawton Hawks, had taught her. I had never taken a liking to an egg cooked sunny-side up. The yolk is still completely liquid and the whites on the surface are barely set. To me, an egg fried just on one side and never flipped was asking for trouble, as in Salmonella. I had been greatly relieved six months ago by Camilla who had pointed me to a carton of eggs she had purchased at Publix in Guntersville. It seemed she had listened to her father and learned well. By using pasteurized in-shell eggs, the risk of food-borne illness was eliminated.
After preparing her eggs, and mine scrambled hard, along with buttered toast, bacon, and overly-buttered grits, I asked her if she had slept well.”
“I did until you got up in the middle of the night. What time was that?”
“Probably two-thirty, maybe three. I didn’t look.”
“Still intrigued about that monkey business you mentioned last night?” Apparently, Camilla hadn’t paid too much attention to what I had thought was a detailed description I had provided after making love at 6:30. I was still amazed at her interest in my body.
“No, I had woken up from a nightmare I was having. There was this gorgeous woman chasing me. I had some way gotten involved with her, intrigued by her landscape, all to discover she had an ocean of waves that kept me washed up on a deserted island.”
“If you’re speaking of me, your little metaphor has lots of problems. I would never leave you stranded. Quit trying to be funny. Why did get you up?” Camilla said, reaching over my plate for the strawberry jam.
“You want me to be completely honest?” I asked.
“Okay, what have we decided, like six months ago?”
“To always be fully open and honest, no matter the subject or the risk of vulnerability.” I hoped Camilla never changed. She knew a lot about my background but still loved me, making me promise, from the time things turned serious, that we would be truthful with each other, to a fault.
“Correct, now spill the beans.” Camilla said, already finishing one whole egg.
“I guess I was a little torn over going to church today. I know I promised you I would but, now that it’s here, a few memories have flooded my mind.”
“Like what?” Camilla asked.
“Oh, just my history of growing up in church, then marrying Amy and our faithfulness to not only attending but being involved with the youth ministry. I spent nearly an hour sitting in my lazy boy reminiscing and trying to figure out where things changed.”
“I sense you regret, I guess I could put it like this, you regret falling away from God?” Camilla asked.
“In a way. It did provide a certain stability to our lives.”
“And, if you had remained in church, you and Amy would still be together?”
“I’m not saying that, but maybe.” I said finishing up the last of my eggs.
“Now, we are to the heart of the matter. You woke up because you were heartsick. Still broken-hearted over losing Amy. Right?”
“No, that’s not it. Even though we had nearly twenty-five years together, they weren’t all good. For a number of reasons, I suppose, we drifted apart. I was too invested in my work, going to law school and building a practice within Teague, Loggins, and Spradling.”
“I have to say, I’m feeling a little like a third wheel here.” I still viewed it as a miracle. Maybe God did love me. Camilla had come along at the perfect time. I had just started Connor Ford Investigations and had a haircut appointment at Serenity Salon with Barbara, the beautician I had used ever since moving back to Boaz in the Fall of 2014. Barbara’s sudden sickness that day had been an important part of my miracle.
Camilla Andrews was an apprentice stylist who was from Boaz but living in Birmingham and attending the Midfield Institute of Cosmetology. I was old enough to be her father. He was my age and was in my high school class. For many reasons, including Camilla’s dwindling relationship with Nate Andrews, her abusive and philandering husband, and her openness for a trust-worthy friend, she and I hit it off. Over the next twenty-eight months, our relationship evolved from every-other-week haircuts (my hair, for some reason, grew faster back then), to once-per-week conversations at MacDonald’s over coffee, to a first date picnic to DeSoto Falls on Labor Day in 2016. It had to be God. There could have been no other way for such a beautiful and adorable 32-year-old to have fallen in love with just an average-looking man with a daughter of virtually the same age.
“You are. And, the first, second, and fourth wheel. Sorry, for the pause, I was just reliving how we met and how I fell in love with you. How, particularly, it was nothing short of a miracle. Camilla Ann, I love you with all my heart.”
“Now, you’re talking. And, now we better get ready for church or I’ll have to show you, again, how much I love you.”
“Oh, thank God, it’s Sunday, time for church.” I said, smiling. She knew what I meant. Camilla could be exhausting. But, what normal man on God’s green earth wouldn’t die to have a sexy thirty-two-year-old, curly-headed brunette, always pressing a perfect body next to his?
I hadn’t been to First Baptist Church of Christ since the weekend in 1990 after Amy and I had graduated from Auburn University. Although we had many opportunities to, over the intervening years, for many reasons, we had just slept in, either at my parents or hers.
Caleb Patterson was the church’s first pastor not named Tillman in well-over a hundred years. The last one, Warren Tillman, had just a few months ago been shot and killed by a home intruder. Caleb looked to be about my age but was at least three years younger. He had come to Boaz from the First Baptist Church Prattville, Alabama, where he had served as senior pastor for over ten years. One reason I felt sure that Caleb would win the job was he had grown up in Boaz, being in the ninth grade when I was a senior at Boaz High School. Another reason I believed he was ‘called’ as Southern Baptist churches label it, was his father was a former member of the church’s staff and still a member.
Camilla and I sat up in the balcony. Caleb’s sermon brought back a lot of memories. It was easy to follow, rooted directly in scripture, and provided plenty of modern-day anecdotes. I recalled always being impressed with how preachers could clearly and convincingly tie whatever was going on in the world around us with Bible verses written over two-thousand years earlier.
Caleb’s sermon was based on 2 Corinthians 12:15, “… though the more abundantly I love you, the less I am loved.” It was not a surprise at all that the Apostle Paul was still alive and well in this Southern Baptist Church. According to Caleb, the man whose writings covered more New Testament territory than any other, believed that natural human love was different from God’s love. God didn’t expect anything in return. I guess the main thing I took away from Caleb’s sermon was a need to be much less selfish. It appeared Paul didn’t care at all whether those around him loved him or not. He was hellbent (not Caleb’s word) on pleasing God. Paul’s hero and master was Jesus Christ. Paul had one goal only, and that was to imitate God’s one and only son. I sure wasn’t ready, as the Apostle Paul seemed more than ready, to be completely destitute and poverty-stricken for the God who “though He was rich, yet for your sakes He became poor” (2 Corinthians 8:9).
As my mind was hearing the pastor say, “He did not care how high the cost was to himself, the Apostle Paul would gladly pay it,” I noticed Jake Stone sitting beside his wife Sandy Goble who was sitting beside Hannah Knott and her husband Steven, the minister of music. Whatever Caleb preached for the next fifteen minutes, my mind was fully distracted and tried to imagine whether the two couples had chosen to sit together or if it had simply by chance. If it was not the latter, I needed to know their connection. My focus on these four people had zoned me out, until Steven Knott stood and walked to the choir at the end of the service and I saw Peyton Todd smack dab in the middle of the first row, eager to respond to the Minister of Music’s direction. I think if Camilla hadn’t nudged when handing me a songbook, my mind would have drawn a picture of her leading him in a song of a different sort.
After church yesterday, Camilla and I had to ditch our picnic plans. By the time we got home, it was pouring rain. It was a satisfying moment, one I choose not to share with the visibly disappointed beautician.
Ever since seeing the Stone’s and the Knott’s sitting together, my mind did what it was trained to do, something I will always love and hate about Bobby Sorrells, the virtual twin of Sherlock Holmes. Bobby, from the beginning of my training, had said that a good detective can tell when a bone has been thrown his way. But, a great detective will take it between his teeth and not let go until it is fully consumed, or a better bone comes along. It was like an addiction. It was also one issue that had come between Amy and me. I had to take Pastor Caleb’s words to heart, to not be so selfish. But, yesterday after being showered with a wet blessing from above, I allowed my addiction unfettered reign.
Another blessing had also fallen in my lap. After the only reasonable decision had been made, Camilla decided she would run to Walmart. She normally does this after work on Saturday’s, with me sometimes joining her, but this week she had been too tired. After she left, I decided to go riding around.
I had driven to Grumpy’s Diner knowing that a lot of folks go there after church. I thought I spotted Jake Stone’s black Tahoe and decided to go inside the restaurant to look around. I was lucky. Or, maybe it was the prayer I had said, almost subconsciously, prompted no doubt by the calm and encouraging words of Pastor Caleb. I saw Jake and his three companions sitting in the far left-hand corner. He didn’t notice me, but Hannah did I’m sure. I was glad she didn’t wave or indicate in any way that she recognized her private investigator. I guess it had something to do with her philandering husband sitting next to her. I requested a menu and bought a stick of gum and walked back outside to my car. I repositioned it, so I could get a clearer view of Stone’s Tahoe without being so conspicuous.
Within thirty minutes, the two couples exited Grumpy’s and walked to their cars. All four seemed serious by the looks on their faces. No smiles or noticeably open postures. I even noticed the tension in Sandra’s hands. Jake reached out and shook Steven’s hand. He and Hannah got in their maroon Honda Accord and drove away. Jake and Sandra got in his Tahoe and sat, talking I suspect, for at least five minutes, before they too drove away.
On a hunch, I had driven to Reedy Circle and visited Garrett. I wanted to know if he knew the connection between the two couples. If they had one, I figured Garrett would have heard something. He had this uncanny ability to know what was going on in our mysterious little town.
“Support, encouragement. It’s most likely counseling. It would be the rarest of circumstances. The dynamics don’t fit. I would bet there’s something going on in the Stone’s life that has caused them to reach out for counseling.” Garrett had said after I asked him my question.
“That seems a stretch, especially since you didn’t provide any actual evidence.” I said, always feeling comfortable requesting objective information.
“You do know Steven has a master’s degree in counseling from Auburn University at Montgomery?” Garrett asked.
“No.”
“He earned that while he was at First Baptist, thought he wanted to change his professional focus. Then, from what I’ve heard, he got distracted with another woman, but I don’t know that for sure so that’s not repeatable.” Garrett and I had this agreement to always carefully denote what was rumor and what was truth.
“That still doesn’t confirm that’s what’s going on.” I said.
“No but think about it a little more. To me, Steven had a unique reason to sit where he did at church today.”
“You were at First Baptist?” I asked, knowing Garrett was a member of First United Methodist Church in Albertville.
“Gina just left. She was here and wanted to visit and hear the new pastor. She has been working on a personal project for a couple of years, something about how frequently Southern Baptist preachers refer to Creationism. She has a extensive network of folks who are helping her. Anyway, I love the music there and often go, sometimes twice a month. During preaching, Steven always sits in a chair next to the choir loft, over behind the pastor’s podium. But yesterday, after the offering and the special music, he walked down and sat beside Jake Stone. This says something. I believe it says there is a negative mood, maybe something sad, going on in the Stone family.” I was afraid Garrett would keep on rambling, so I interjected.
“You could be right, but I’m still not convinced. Is there anyone you could call and subtly find out what’s going on?” I asked.
“No, but you could. Isn’t your detective firm doing a little detecting for the counselor’s wife?” I nearly said ‘damn’ but checked myself at the last second. Garrett hated all forms of cursing.
“How in the you know where did you reach that conclusion?”
“You’re not the only one who can sit and watch. Seriously, I happened through town a while back and saw Hannah going into the back door of your office. I figured she wasn’t there to sell cookies or to clean your office.”
“This isn’t repeatable, but you are correct. Joe is doing a little investigating for her. It might be something akin to the unrepeatable thing you mentioned a few minutes ago.” I said.
“Okay, sounds like you’ve got an open door before you. Why don’t you call her right now? I assume you have her phone number in your Contacts?”
“Actually, I do. Can I ask how you reached that conclusion?”
“Personality. You’re a Type A.” Garrett said.
After Garrett and I shared a slice of pound cake that Gina had baked during her weekend visit, I called Hannah Knott. At first, she couldn’t talk but called me back in ten minutes. Seemingly, it was more uncomfortable for me to ask, than it was for her to share. She acknowledged that our relationship indicated she could be open with me. But, she also made me promise I wouldn’t share what she was about to tell me. Garrett had been correct. Steven was counseling both the Stone’s, Jake and Sandra. For the second time on Sunday afternoon, I had nearly said ‘damn’ in front of Garrett. According to Hannah, Natalie Goble was pregnant, and the father wasn’t any one of her young male suitors at Snead College. Instead, it was a married man, one, fifteen years her senior. The father of the baby Natalie Goble was carrying was local political whiz Alex Williams, Alabama’s Republican candidate for governor.
Since Garrett and I had spent nearly ninety minutes together yesterday afternoon, I skipped Pirates Cove this morning. Instead, after my round-trip walk to Oak Drive, I had called Joe and asked him to meet me at Huddle House for breakfast.
“I want you to either do me a favor or arrange for Hannah to come in to the office as soon as possible.” I told Joe after waiting fifteen minutes past our agreed upon meeting time. I had used this extra time to decide this was the best strategy. It seemed Joe and Hannah had a good working relationship. I had picked up on a subtle little sign or two that Hannah could easily become attracted to the ‘gorgeous Joe’ (Blair’s description from last Thursday) if she weren’t married to the consoling Steven.
“What’s the favor?” Joe asked.
“I need to talk with her and find out what all she knows about Natalie Goble being pregnant.” I said, going on to share what I had learned yesterday afternoon at Garrett’s.
Just as Joe said that he would prefer that all three of us meet, my eyes did a double-take. Joe and I were seated in a booth to the far-right corner of the diner’s front door. My back was to the restrooms, so I could see everyone coming and going. I would know the man anywhere. It was Tommy Lee Gore, the recently released felon whose brother, Brandon Gore, I had killed in 2012. He was with another man, another felon I suspected. Within ten seconds of the two men entering the Huddle House, Tommy Lee had concluded his scan and looked me straight in the eye. He started walking my way. I decided to stay put believing the act of my standing might be interpreted as fully confrontational.
Still ten feet away but continuing towards me, Tommy yelled, “Well, here’s the bastard who murdered my brother and got off scot-free.” By the time he reached Joe and my booth I couldn’t have slid out if I had wanted to. Tommy Lee stood with his legs against the table. In the milliseconds after his last word and while I was trying to formulate an appropriate response, the gentle-less giant of a man sat down right next to me.
Finally, I decided to respond. “Tommy Lee, you have no business here. I suggest you rethink what you are doing. Go on over there and sit with your buddy. Try the Southwestern Omelet. It’s wild like you. Add a spoonful of Tabasco sauce and you’ll get a five-minute thrill that won’t have any lasting consequences.” I didn’t have a clue why I had said what I did. It could make things worse.
“Well, Mr. Ford, you have always had a way with words. Especially with them juries, especially with your own jury. Talked them out of sending your sorry ass to prison. Words there wouldn’t do you any good. They won’t do you any good with me either.” Tommy Lee said, reaching over to Joe’s plate and removing a slice of bacon.
“Get your damned hands off my plate or I’ll shove it up your ass.” I was a little surprised by how quickly Joe had responded. He was big enough to back up his words with most any man. What worried me was he had never fought a mean man. Tommie Lee was as mean as they come. He didn’t fight fair. He didn’t care to die.
“Tommie Lee, I’m going to suggest one more time, and only one more time. You get up and walk over there to your friend and we’ll just all forget the little brain fart that prompted you to come join us.” I knew that my words alone wouldn’t likely persuade the lean and mean ex-con. Therefore. I shoved my Ruger SR9 into Tommie Lee’s right side, the one I had removed from its holster while the straggly-bearded and disheveled dumb ass was doing his little reconnaissance dance when he walked in.
“I guess I don’t have much choice now that you’ve brought in your little army. But, let me be clear, I’m coming for you. You don’t kill my brother and get away with it. I’ll find you on AWOL someday. You depend on it.” Tommy Lee got up and walked to a table along the front wall, almost as far away from Joe and me as you could get and remain inside the Huddle House. Tommy Lee’s incoherent AWOL statement certainly revealed his uneducated mind, but that did little to assuage the waves of fear coursing up and down my spine.
The Pencil Driven Life 