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 Safecracker, written in 2019, is my seventh novel. I'll post a chapter a day over the next few weeks.
Book Blurb
Fred Martin, a 1972 graduate of Boaz High School, returns to his hometown after practicing law and living in Huntsville for over thirty-five years with two goals in mind. First, to distance himself from the loss of Susan, his wife of thirty-seven years who died in 2013 of cancer. And second, to partner with his lifelong friend, Noah Waters, to crack the safes of Elton Rawlins and Doug Barber, two men who got under their skin as high school football players.
Little did Fred and Noah realize the secrets the two old Mosler safes protected. Who murdered three Boaz High School seniors in the fall of 1973? Is a near-half-century-old plan to destroy Fred’s sister and steal the inheritance from a set of 44-year-old illegitimate twins still alive and well? How far would Fred’s mother go to protect her family?
What starts out as an almost innocent prank turns life-threateningly serious the more Fred learns and the more safes he cracks. All the while, he falls in love with Connie Stewart, his one-date high school classmate who may conceal a secret or two herself.
Chapter 22
All day Monday I felt out of sorts. Early morning, Dad had met me coming out of my front door wanting to show me a locket he had found while going through a curio cabinet Mother kept along the side of her clothes closet. “Your mother took this from Deidre when she learned she had disobeyed her strict orders not to see Johnny Stevens.”
I knew Dad was in so much pain and all he knew to do was either talk about Mom or touch and handle her clothes, books, photos, jewelry, even the last towel she used to dry herself off the day before her stroke. It was the only way he knew to be with her and to imagine her voice.
I didn’t get to spend the time with Dad I needed to. Certainly, I wanted to but I had an 8:00 a.m. appointment and it was in Attalla. I promised Dad I would see him later afternoon and that I would bring supper. Just as I was walking off my porch and towards my car Dad grabbed me by my left arm. “Look, this broke your mother’s heart.”
I didn’t have a choice. I set my brief case down and laid my coat across a chair at the end of the porch. Dad handed me the opened locket. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Deidre. Naked Deidre. It was almost like those photos you have made at a fair, but this was a full-length shot of the tall and shapely Deidre. She was standing in front of the Lighthouse. Its sign was shown clearly above the door. It looked like the photo had been made at night.
“At first your mother was going to let her keep it. That was before she had ever looked inside. I think it was the summer before Deidre’s senior year and Harriet had just learned the news.
“What news was that?” I asked.
“Somebody, I think it was one of Deidre’s friends. Might have been Angela or Rebecca, had told your mother that Deidre thought she was pregnant. Turned out she wasn’t but the whole ordeal kind of forced Deidre to confess she had sex with Johnny Stevens. Anyway, I found the locket this morning and that entire bad chapter flashed before me. I had to get out for some air. I really don’t know why I walked down here and showed you this.”
I was only five minutes late to my appointment. My drive to and from Attalla was consumed with my mind pondering the mental image it now had of a naked Deidre and what had gone on between her and our mom. If it hadn’t been for Connie’s call I probably would have thought the same thoughts all day.
She asked me to come tomorrow and look at her lawn mower instead of today because Mollie was still under the weather. She was taking her to Dr. Adams. I told her I hoped the vet could help Mollie, and that I would call her tomorrow. She thanked me and hung up. I could tell she was not herself. I figured it was because of her baby. Mollie was no doubt like family to Connie, who had no children of her own.
At the office I caught up on emails, mostly a back log of both technical and marketing information concerning a new homeowners policy Alfa was about to introduce. At 11:15, Dalton called and asked if I had time to meet with him and one of his clients at 1:00 o’clock. Dalton Martin is an attorney in town and is also my first cousin. The two of us had never been close growing up, probably because he was several years younger. But, since I had moved back to Boaz, he had asked me on several occasions to help him advise a client on proper insurance coverages.
I was out of Dalton’s office by 2:00 and thought about taking the rest of the afternoon off. I was tired from a restless night tossing and turning. My best but limited sleep had come right before daylight and included an extensive dream about bright lights. Crazy how words invade deep sleep. Driving from old downtown Boaz I was about to cross Highway 431 and head home. Instead I turned left, twice, and wound up at the Boaz Public Library. After last night I had a lingering compulsion to see if Ricky Miller’s club, the Brights, had ever made it into the Sand Mountain Reporter.
Once again Brenda Yates, the library’s media expert, guided me with her suggestions on the best query to use with their high-tech microfiche reader. She said if I wasn’t careful, I would call up several years of unrelated articles because a Clarence Bright had been a reporter with the Sand Mountain Reporter for most all the seventies and eighties.
I found a few articles from the fall of 1969 that said the same things that Noah had told me about Ricky Miller and his desire to establish a Brights chapter at Boaz High School. Two other articles provided updates on the controversy and even a couple of quotes from locals who had attended the emergency court hearing before Circuit Judge William Jetton.
I was about to change the date component of my query to 1970 when the last hit caught my eye. I had already discarded it because of its title, “Local Leader Leaves Legacy,” which appeared to be wholly irrelevant to my search. I couldn’t help but wonder why Brenda’s carefully structured query hadn’t easily eliminated such a non-Bright article. I chuckled to myself. For some reason, instead of clicking the ‘Delete’ button or modifying my query, I scrolled down and looked at the photo under the article’s title.
The description under the photo read as follows: “Franklin Ericson, along with his two children, John (age 16) and Angela (age 13), donate coins and jewelry on behalf of their father and grandfather, Benjamin Ericson.” The article revealed that the older Ericson had died and left a sizable bequest to First Baptist Church of Christ. The reporter, Clarence Bright (so much for Brenda’s highly refined query) wrote that although the elder Ericson had make a fortune in buying, selling, and developing real estate all over the county, his true love was sharing the gospel of Jesus Christ and that he wanted to leave something tangible to the church that had inspired him to pursue a higher calling. In the next to the last paragraph, Mr. Bright wrote that Ericson chose to donate these items to honor his mother who had acquired the items almost a hundred years earlier, and to give something to his favorite church that might continue to increase in value.
I was so shocked I lost all interest in pursuing news about Ricky Miller’s club. Although I didn’t know for sure, I had a deep feeling the donated items someway had disappeared from the church’s possession and found their way into Elton Rawlins’ old Mosler safe.
I drove home wondering how on earth I would find out if the extremely valuable items sitting in a metal lockbox in the barn loft behind my cabin were the same as those Benjamin Ericson had bequeathed to First Baptist Church of Christ in late 1969? I felt confident they were, but it seemed odd, outright risky, for Elton to have insured these items with Alfa Insurance Company. I drove under my carport, suspecting that stranger things had happened.
The Pencil Driven Life 