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 Stenographer, written in 2018, is my fourth novel. I'll post a chapter a day over the next few weeks.
Book Blurb
Walt Shepherd, a 35 year veteran of the White House’s stenographic team, is fired by President Andrew Kane for refusing to lie.
Walt returns to his hometown of Boaz, Alabama and renews his relationship with Regina Gillan, his high school sweetheart, who he had ditched right before graduation to marry the daughter of a prominent local businessman. Regina has recently moved back to Boaz after forty years in Chicago working at the Tribune. She is now editor of the Sand Mountain Reporter, a local newspaper.
Walt and Regina’s relationship transforms into a once in life love at the same time they are being immersed in a growing local and national divide between Democrats and traditional Republicans, and extremist Republicans (known as Kanites) who are becoming more dogmatic about the revolution that began during President Kanes campaign.
Walt accepts two part-time jobs. One as a stenography instructor at Snead State Community College in Boaz, and one as an itinerant stenographer with Rains & Associates out of Birmingham.
Walt later learns the owner of Rains & Associates is also one of five men who created the Constitution Foundation and is involved in a sinister plot to destroy President Kane, but is using an unorthodox method to achieve its objective. The Foundation is doing everything it can to prevent President Kane from being reelected in 2020, and is scheming to initiate a civil war that will hopefully restore allegiance to the U.S. Constitution.
While Walt is writing a book, The Coming Civil War, he is, unwittingly, gathering key information for the Constitution Foundation.
Will Walt discover a connection between the Foundation and the deaths of three U.S. Congressmen in time to save his relationship with Regina, prevent President Kane from being reelected as the defacto head of a Christian theocracy, and the eruption of a civil war that could destroy the Nation ?
Chapter 66
It was dusk. The dark was pushing the last bit of light from the path we traveled. Today, it’s job was easy since a misty fog had hovered from Guntersville throughout Boaz. Regina’s plane had been delayed for nearly two hours in the early afternoon.
She had called at 2:30 p.m. from Huntsville as she was boarding her plane to Chicago. Noticeably absent from our brief conversation was the love language that normally filled our communications. We were at a serious crossroads. Last Tuesday when Zell and Ginger learned that I had not fulfilled my mission to deliver their envelope to Professor Romanov, nor their urgency that he divulge his knowledge of election tampering to the FBI, all hell had broken loose. And, Regina was seemingly caught in the middle. She had been summoned to Chicago. This gave Vann and me the opportunity I wanted to conduct a little search at her house.
Regina, like me, had negotiated a purchase of her parent’s home. The only difference was her mother came with the deal until her death. Brenda Sue Gillan was 88 years old and normally would be sitting, alone, in her easy chair before the big screen TV in the living room. She preferred it over the den. Today, this late Friday afternoon in the winter of 2019, she was out of town with her daughter Belinda. They had traveled to Plains, Georgia to attend the funeral of her oldest sister, Linda, who had died at 92.
The forty acres was just one big rock. It jutted out toward Sand Valley and was the last driveway down Cox Gap Road before dropping off the mountain toward Gadsden. I had visited here only a handful of times, since the ‘old lady’ as Frankie called her, was always around. The house smelled of cigarette smoke and urine. A combination that triggered my gag reflex like no other. Last weekend, I had made an exception after I made my final decision that I had to see what Regina kept in her home office. She had been after me to help her stain the huge deck on the backside of the house that overlooked the valley below. It would be a multi-day project, but we had started a week ago. I had arranged it so that she had to run an errand for me—Vann called and needed a file at my house concerning our book. When he called I acted as though I had to run home. This, without surprise, prompted Regina to volunteer to meet Vann to unlock my back door.
This had given me the opportunity to scout out the best way to enter the house. I knew she didn’t have a security system since we had talked about it several times over the past few weeks, given there had been a spat of break-ins. I had gone into her office and noticed a small safe slid into a bookcase behind her desk. I started to unlock one of the windows in her study but opted to make it harder by going downstairs to the basement, which was really the first floor, since it was mostly above ground. I unlocked a window that was up higher than I wanted to maneuver because it was on the backside of a workbench and was shaded by some type of thorny bush on the outside. I could make it work.
Today, Vann was with me. It has taken two days to convince him he should help me learn the truth, or at least, attempt to. He now knows everything I know about Regina’s deception. I’ve also told him about my connection to Zell and Ginger and the Constitution Foundation. Vann is most troubled by Regina’s past relationship with Thaddeus Colburn, believing there might be a plot at work that is much more sinister than a local affair.
We arrived. I’m wearing a thick pair of coveralls to protect me from the thorny bush. The window was higher than I thought. I wished I had gone outside to judge instead of looking at it from the inside. I was glad I had brought a six-foot ladder. After I got inside and turned my ankle sliding off the counter, Vann and I went upstairs and out on the deck carrying two brushes and a gallon of deck stain. I had decided that if by chance someone came I could tell them I wanted to surprise Regina and have her deck finished before she returned. I opened the can and poured a good amount into a paint tray and went back inside.
Vann was already in Regina’s bedroom. We had discussed his assignment, search through every drawer, under the mattress, over the clothes on a big shelf in a dozen or more shoe boxes I had spotted last Saturday. His second task, assuming we had time, was to look through a wall of cabinets in the laundry and utility room. My focus would be Regina’s office.
I spent nearly thirty minutes going through the side drawers of Regina’s huge desk. These turned out totally uneventful. The left-hand drawer contained mostly household bills, appliance warranties, and legal documents such as her power of attorney over her mother and living wills for Belinda, Frankie, and Freddie. The right-hand drawer was filled with files that reached back to Regina’s days at the Chicago Tribune. I scanned a couple of articles and realized time was getting away too rapidly. I removed the contents of this whole drawer and put them in one of the backpacks I had brought.
I then turned my attention to the safe. It took nearly ten minutes, but I was finally able to break open the door after pulling it out of the bookcase and turning it on its side. It, not doubt, was not a high-quality container or the latch would not have broken. But, I had used a hefty crow-bar and hammer. The only thing inside were several journals and two thumb drives. I placed these in another bookbag and laid it, along with the other one and the crowbar and hammer, in the doorway. I crossed the office to the windows facing the deck. There were two bookcases between the two sets of double windows I wanted to inspect. Just as I squatted down and opened a large cabinet door on the bottom of one of the cabinets I heard a loud blast.
The first thing I thought was a gun had been fired. The sound had come from Vann’s direction, Regina’s bedroom. I tried to run down the long hallway, but my ankle slowed me down. Just as I turned left through her doorway I saw Vann laying at the foot of Regina’s bed. There was blood coming out his mouth as he lay on his stomach but with his head turned towards me. At that moment my mind realized that I had been hearing something out on the deck. The shooter had run over the gallon of deck stain and the paint tray. He had shouted, ‘oh shit.’ I ran, as best I could, and looked out the storm door that had just pulled shut. I caught just the glimpse of the back side of a tall and skinny man with army fatigues, a black hoodie and carrying a pistol in one hand and the dark green backpack that I had given Vann to use during his closet search.
I turned and walked back down the hall and into the kitchen and over to the window above the sink. From there I could see my truck and the man running down the hill towards Cox Gap Road. It was then that it hit me. The hell of a mess I was in. I semi-jogged back to Regina’s bedroom and determined, without any trouble at all, that Vann was dead. I didn’t touch him, but he had a hole in the back of his head that I could have put my hand into. I wanted to lean down and hold him, talk him back to life someway. But, I didn’t. I had to get out of there. It was the hardest thing I have ever done. My mind convinced me I had no choice but to leave this scene just the way it was. I would only complicate things worse by attempting to move Vann’s body. I was also convinced that the gunman had not known I was here. If he had, I had no doubt he would have killed me too.
I walked back to Regina’s study, picked up the two book bags, the crow-bar and hammer, walked down the basement stairs, and outside to my truck. I decided to turn left onto Cox Gap Road instead of right, which would have taken me straight back to Highway 431. I felt I needed to take the long way home. I didn’t want to take a chance that my truck would be seen. Then it hit me. The gunman had seen my truck as he raced out of Regina’s and down the driveway. Oh hell, what a mess. This cannot lead to anything but trouble.
I made my way to Interstate 59 and drove north to the Collinsville exit. By 8:00 p.m., I was at home. Sick was an understatement. I spent two hours showering and squatting beside the commode, gagging and spitting. At 10:05 p.m., I called Regina.
The Pencil Driven Life 