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 38
I had read Marissa’s email at least half a dozen times. I wanted to talk with her and ask twice as many questions, but she was unavailable until later tomorrow afternoon. At the beginning of her email she had said that since today is the seventeenth anniversary of the worst foreign attack on American soil since the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, her department was spending two days, along with their students, in a prayer vigil at a place called The Retreat at Center Hill Lake, located a little over an hour east of Nashville in a town called Smithville.
In her email Marissa had mentioned a recent trip she had taken to Dayton, Tennessee. She said she had decided to visit the area where the Scopes Monkey Trial had taken place because of her father’s frequent trips there when he was teaching in Knoxville at the University of Tennessee, and because of something she had found in the Evernote database. There, Adam had written about how Kurt Prescott had been instrumental in having the drama department at Rhea County High School reenact the Scopes Monkey Trial. This had started in 2012, and became an annual end-of-the-school-year event.
Adam had written about how the local and statewide controversy over the play had grown every year, with Southern Baptists leading the opposition. One thing that fueled the controversy was a young man named Josh Wray. Marissa shared a detailed genealogy. In short, he was the great-great grandson of John Thomas Scopes, the substitute high school teacher who in 1925 had been charged with violating Tennessee’s Butler Act, which had made it unlawful to teach human evolution in any state-funded school. Josh Wray was the son of Deborah Scopes Wray, the great-granddaughter of John T. Scopes.
Two hours before high school senior Josh Wray, as John T. Scopes, was set to take the stage in his final reenactment of the Scopes Monkey Trial, he was found dead outside the Rhea County High School cafeteria. He had been shot once in the head with a Glock nine-millimeter.
Adam Parker had taken great pains to journal the relationship between Josh Wray and Kurt Prescott. Kurt was an active volunteer at Rhea County High School when Josh was in the ninth grade. He visited the school on a weekly basis to encourage students, particularly seniors, to make reading a top priority. It seems, with the insistence and encouragement from Deborah Wray, Kurt went out of his way to connect with the rebellious Josh. After learning about Josh’s family background Kurt was instrumental in the formation of a Humanist Club at the high school. With Josh’s help, the Club grew and persuaded the School’s drama department to develop the Scopes Monkey Trial reenactment.
At three points during her email Marissa apologized for its length. She had said she was attempting to provide a thorough abbreviation of her father’s ten-page journal entry. He had detailed an accounting of the events that had taken place during the weekend of May 25, 2014, beginning with two days of public protest prior to the Friday night Scopes trial reenactment.
One thing that had caught Marissa’s attention was a man named David Patterson. Adam had provided the names of every preacher who had spoken at a town square gathering on Thursday night the 23rd. David was the pastor of First Baptist Church of Dayton. His cousin, from Alabama, also spoke. Marissa had remembered me mentioning my own pastor, Caleb Patterson, after the Saturday First Baptist Church of Christ creationism debate between Gina Lane and Alex Williams. Caleb and David were first cousins. Caleb as pastor, along with three of his deacons, had driven up from their church, First Baptist Church of Prattville, Alabama, to support David and all the other Southern Baptists.
If it hadn’t been for Adam’s perfectionism in creating such a detailed record of the events that weekend, Marissa and I would likely have never known that both David and Caleb had been the initial suspects in the murder of Josh Wray. It seems, if it hadn’t been for the influence of Lamar Kilpatrick, the two would have been formally charged. As it happened, the two were only informally questioned by the County Sheriff. Kilpatrick was in town that weekend as keynote speaker at Sunday afternoon’s baccalaureate service. Kilpatrick was a four-term U.S. Congressmen from the Knoxville area.
Marissa’s next sentence, in all caps and bold lettering read: “LAMAR KILPATRICK IS KURT PRESCOTT’S FIRST COUSIN.” Then she wrote, “as you know, less than six weeks ago President Kane appointed this same Lamar Kilpatrick as Director of the CIA.” In parenthesis she had written: (“Lamar has worked for the CIA as an agent since shortly before Josh Wray was killed.”). She ended her email with a question and a brief comment: “Is Kurt Prescott who he says he is? Dad said in his journal that he had mixed feelings about him. That he was very supportive of his and Kramer Dickson’s work, but that he also was chummy with Pastor David Patterson.”
Every time I reread Marissa’s email the more confused I became. It may have been a secondary thought I had been having all day. Erica Williams had told me last Thursday, five days ago, she would call me today. It was now nearly five and I had not heard from her.
The Pencil Driven Life 