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 27
Time crawled by all afternoon. After leaving Rebecca’s I had driven home and tried to sleep in my recliner. That hadn’t gone so well. Instead, I returned to Alfa and fielded calls for Nell since she was tied up with a State auditor. The other agents had been smarter than me by cold-calling for new prospects outside the office, something we all hated to do.
At 5:00 p.m., I drove home, took a shower, and dressed for my first date (other than with Susan) in almost fifty years. Beginning a year or so after she died on 09/18/2013, Noah had tried to get me back on the circuit, as he called it. I felt guilty even thinking about it. Although Susan and I had, regrettably, lost the passion we experienced the first few years after we married, we were comfortable with the other’s presence. No doubt we loved each other but there was a negative side of becoming comfortable.
Driving to Connie’s it dawned on me she was the last girl I dated before marrying Susan on June 12th, 1976, a little over two weeks after the two of us graduated from high school. I wasn’t exactly sure when it was, but I believe it had to be in the fall of 1969. Susan and I were in the tenth grade and our relationship was more on and off than on forever. That came a little later. Pulling into Connie’s driveway I thought how fragile life really was. Things, simple things, can redirect one’s life so easily. Who knows, just one more date with Connie back when I was barely fifteen could have pulled me away from Susan and every experience we shared for half a century. I guess it was a good thing I had been too scared to ask the beautiful and sophisticated Connie out for that second date.
I walked to the front door and although it was cracked open like before, I rang the doorbell. Connie could have forgotten she had left it open and didn’t intend for it to be a signal for me to come on in. I was about five minutes early. What if she was half-naked running across the great-room? I couldn’t let my mind go there.
It took her a couple of minutes to answer my ring. It was silly, but I had broken out in a sweat while waiting, imagining she had changed her mind. Finally, she opened the door. “Sorry, I was out back looking at my roses. I slipped coming up the stairs when I heard the bell.” She leaned over and I saw a bad scrape on her left shin. I couldn’t help but notice she had on a rather low-cut flowered dress. My suspicion that she was well-endowed was empirically proven.
“Oh, that must hurt. Let’s get that seen about.” Now, I was ready to play doctor. What was my mind doing? I was thinking like that fifteen-year-old teenager I was the last time Connie and I went out.
“I get a little woozy at the site of blood. I’m going to the sun room and sit down. Do you mind getting my First Aid kit? It’s in the linen closet inside the master bathroom, at the end of the hallway on the right.”
“Let me help you sit down then I’ll get the kit.” I took Connie’s left arm with my left hand and placed my right hand and arm behind her for stability. We made it fine until we reached the sun room. It was two steps down from the great room. I stepped down ahead of her, turned and faced her, and took both her hands. She made the first step with only a little wobble. The second step worked perfect for me. It was as though she fainted and fell forward into me. I caught her without discriminating how I did it. She didn’t seem to mind that my right hand had no choice but to grab whatever was available to prevent another nasty fall. Her butt was round and firm. Another hypothesis proved.
“I’m so embarrassed for you to see me this way. I’m such a wimp.” Connie said as I finally got her to the swing. “I’ll be okay here. If you will, go fetch the First Aid kit. You may have to push some towels around to find it.”
“Okay, I’ll be right back. You sit still, don’t try to get up. Promise?” I wanted Connie healthy and mobile. I sure didn’t want to spend Friday night at the Emergency Room.
“I promise.” She said, our eyes meeting for the first time since I discovered her bleeding leg. They seemed a lighter blue than I remembered. That might have been caused by her over-red face. No doubt Connie didn’t like to reveal her vulnerability.
I turned and walked back into the great-room and down a long hallway passing a small library on my left, a half-bath on the right, and a guest bedroom on the left. The master bedroom was on the right and it was a big one. The room was furnished with expensive-looking antiques. The bed was not made. That surprised me. But it wasn’t all tumbled up like my bed at home. The covers on the left side were turned down and two pillows were backed up against the giant oak headboard. She might have taken an afternoon nap. Probably resting up for a hot date with the hot Fred Martin. Settle down Fred, settle.
The master bathroom also was large, over-sized. The linen closet was along the right wall as I entered. Next to it was an antique washstand almost identical to Mother’s. I opened the closet door and didn’t see the kit. I moved some towels around on the shelf that was shoulder height. No kit. It must be on the next one up. There was a step-stool on the floor of the closet under the first shelf from the bottom. I pulled it out and stepped up, giving me another ten or twelve inches of height. The kit was along the right wall of the closet. I could read the lettering on the end of the plastic box. I pushed a stack of sheets to the left and reached in and removed the kit. As I was stepping off the stool it slipped out of my hand and fell to the floor. I knelt on one knee. That’s when I saw it. A small sensor, like the type Noah used with his higher-end security systems. I thought it was an odd place to hang the two inch by two-inch device.
I didn’t have time to ponder. I grabbed the First Aid Kit and shoved the stool back inside the closet and returned to a smiling Connie.
“Do you mind doing the honors?” She said, looking up at me but not smiling. No doubt she was seriously allergic to the sight of blood.
“I’d be honored.” My response made me feel like a drone, someone just tagging alone, virtually useless. I looked around the room and saw a small table holding a single pot of a weird looking flower. It looked almost like a jalapeno pepper plant. I walked to it, set the pot on the floor and returned to Connie who was laying her head back against the top of the swing. “Here, put your leg on top like this.” As I instructed her I took her left leg by the ankle and lifted it across the top of the little table.
It didn’t take but a couple of minutes to open the kit and sterilize the scrap by daubing it with alcohol poured out on a thick piece of gauze. I also sterilized my own right hand and spread some antibiotic ointment around and across the scrap. I was glad the bleeding had stopped. To be frank, I had, many times, worse places on my eyeball, as the old saying goes. This thought led me to think maybe Connie was being overly dramatic just to get me to play with her leg. As I firmly pressed the edges of a four-inch square band-aid over the wound I concluded I would be willing to play that game with the mysterious Connie anytime she wanted.
“Well, that’s about all the doctor can do for now.” I said, hoping she hadn’t fallen asleep as I had given her the healing touch while I visibly explored the shapely and tanned legs of the woman who seemed to defy the aging process.
Connie aroused quickly and within five minutes of me returning the weird flower to its perch while she refreshed her makeup we were in my car headed to Ft. Payne. It had been her suggestion. Oh-So-Good Barbecue had recently opened its second location. The two-location chain had started in Oneonta, Alabama twenty years ago. She shared how her, Angela, and Rebecca had for years eaten there once per quarter.
As we crossed Highway 431 headed towards Kilpatrick on Highway 168 I asked Connie how Angela was doing.
Connie hesitated, as though she didn’t hear me, or she was trying to frame just the proper response. “Guilty, that’s how I would describe her. And, that might not be totally accurate.”
“What would she have to be guilty over?” I asked.
“I don’t know a whole lot, this was one area the two of them stayed mum, as though they held a closely guarded secret.”
“Who is they, you said the two of them?”
“Angela and Rebecca. You must have heard rumors about how their marriages came about.” Connie said, placing her left elbow on the car’s console, touching my arm contending for the same space.
“No, I guess I haven’t.”
“Church scuttlebutt. Elton and Doug fell for Rebecca and Angela’s advances. The two men were still married. This was less than five years ago. You know Elton and Doug are a good ten years older than Rebecca and Angela?”
“Oh yes, I remember the two bastards from high school, hanging around trying to revive their former glory.”
“Woo sounds like you didn’t like those two.”
“I didn’t. Back to your story. How did Rebecca and Angela convince those two?” I must have liked Connie’s description of the two bastards.
“Like I said, I really don’t know the inside scoop. But, I do know that it was after the robbery.” Connie said, now fooling with the air conditioner vent. “My bad fall has me all hot, how do you turn up the air conditioner?” My mind raced to the cesspool Mother constantly warned me about from the time I reached puberty. Hot, hay, heaven. With Connie, naked.
I adjusted the temperature gage all the way to 60 degrees. “What robbery?” I asked feeling like I was a complete outsider to the community I had grown up in.
“First Baptist Church of Christ. Five or so years ago. The coins and jewelry Benjamin Ericson, well, his family after his death, gave to the church. Stolen right out of an old safe.”
“Who was accosted?” It was a confusing question at best. I knew robbery and burglary were two distinct crimes. Robbery was the forceful taking of property from another person. Burglary didn’t include this element.
“Accosted? Do you mean confronted?” Connie asked.
“You could say that. When you said robbery I automatically concluded the coins and jewelry were taken by force.”
“Sorry, I’m not a lawyer. I should have said the items were taken. No one was confronted. I think it was a Sunday night after church. Pastor Warren discovered the burglary the next morning.”
“I’m confused. Refresh me, what does this have to do with Angela and Rebecca?”
“Again, I’m not sure but that’s when two couples started taking shape.” Connie said, pulling a Kleenex from her purse and tamping it across her forehead.
“Are you okay?” You seem uncomfortable.”
“I’ll be fine. I think it’s just one of my hot flashes. Either that or you’re sending out some vibes.” She said and laughed a too-loud a laugh.
“So, Angela and Rebecca kind of conned Elton and Doug into marrying them? Is that what you’re saying?”
“Maybe. Remember, the three of us have been driving to Oneonta for barbecue for years. It seemed they were more open and willing to talk when we were out of town together.”
“My guess is that the two ladies could have wanted to charm the older men. Gain access to their money. Isn’t that how it normally works?” I asked.
“Do you think that’s what I’m doing now? You are definitely older than me.” Connie had a wicked sense of humor.
“By two years. That doesn’t qualify. And, I’m not loaded like I suspect those two were.” I must really like ‘those two.’
“It may have had something to do with the money, but I think it was much more than that. Angela and Rebecca can be, let me see how to put this. They can be cruel. I have a feeling they had something on the two old codgers and played their hand just right.”
This struck me as odd. During my meetings with Rebecca I hadn’t noticed anything but sadness and serious looks of loss. “Do you have any idea what the two ladies knew?”
“Again, I’m not sure, but you should know they, Rebecca and Angela, had every right to seek some revenge against Elton and Doug. Those two were the ring leaders back in high school against Rebecca, Angela, and the other three aliens: Johnny Stewart, Allan Floyd, and Tommy Jones.”
“Those five were called the Aliens. I’ve heard. Did the Bible burning precipitate the bad blood between those seven?”
We continued to talk on the same subject all the way to Ft. Payne. So far, the night hadn’t been much akin to a date. As we walked into Oh-So-Good Barbecue, I hoped things could transform towards becoming friends and more.
The Pencil-Driven Life 