Intersection of Intent

By P.A. Bees

One woman’s desperate act starts an apocalypse of events for the residents of New Minden, Ohio. Twenty years later deceit, hidden motives, stale leads, and fresh clues intersect with murder and mayhem when Jacob, Keith, and Bobby, three of the town’s sons, look for the truth. All have their eyes on the young librarian, Colleen – not all for good intent. Intersection of Intent.

• Language: English
• Publisher: P.A. Bees
• Release date: Sep 18, 2012
• ISBN: 9781301966073

P.A. Bees

My goal is to write words that conjure places, people, events, and feelings to transport the reader.

Book preview

Chapter 1

Cheryl stepped out of her car.  The yard depressed her.  It was a physical record of the recent dry spell; yellowed yawning patches, bald dusty scalps.  Someone had once tried to define a flower bed next to the house with small boulders hauled from the woods.  Weeds found hold between the rocks and no one bothered to pull them out.  They made a fuzzy beard on the neglected chin of flower bed.  There was no clear end to the yard and beginning of the fields and tree line.  There were just places where Jack, the owner of the side-by-side double, gave up mowing over rocks and roots.  She missed the watered, green, and neat grass yards in town.

Jacob’s outside toys, his rusty tractors and dump trucks littered the edge of the drive.  She smiled as she thought how her neighbor’s two year old would load the driveway’s gravel, move it only a foot away, and then dump it before moving it back again.  He’d beam as if he had built the Taj Mahal.  She would tease him about filling up the ruts that rocked their cars from the street to the duplex, but he wasn’t allowed to play in the driveway, just along the edge.  She liked Jacob and his mother Lily, they were part of the reason she had stayed for two years, despite the drive into and out of town for everything you needed, despite Lily’s husband, Jack.  That and the rent was cheap.

Cheryl lit a cigarette and perched on the three-course, painted white cement block that served as dividing wall and patio decoration.  She stretched out her thin legs to the early evening sun.  She noted that her white waitress uniform was soiled and ready for the wash.  She inhaled deeply and blew a column of smoke up to the sky.  The future was not in the sky, it was in reconciling with Bob.  Letting him know she had made mistakes and was willing to admit them, and change.  That her friend at work, a born again Christian, had explained to her how she could bend to Bob’s will and still be herself.  Cheryl would convince Bob.  She would be back at the small house in town with the neat yard.  She would not have to work double shifts like today.  She straightened her back and pressed above her kidneys with her fingers where the ache had set in after her first shift and never left.

She would miss little Jacob and Lily, but not the drive out here to the duplex, not the corn and soy bean fields, and not the lonely coyote calls at night.   She would not miss Lily’s husband, Jack.  Jack the jerk.  It was hard for her not to say the name she had given him out loud.  He got drunk almost every night.  His truck would barrel up the driveway, he would slam on the brakes, and gravel would fly up against her side of the duplex.  He waffled between a sneer and a leer every time he saw her.  She had rented the place from Lily and only met Jack afterward.  Her mistake.  He would be easy to leave.

She also would not miss dealing with her son, Bobby, by herself.  At least he was at Bob Sr.’s this evening.  She had the house to herself.

Cheryl stubbed out her cigarette on the block, making one more black streak than yesterday’s, and flicked the butt out into the yard.

She would have to give up smoking.  Bob, Sr. would not allow it in the house and probably would not take her back unless she vowed she had quit.  Might as well finish the pack first, she thought.  Cheryl put a fresh cigarette between her lips.  She held the screen door open, put the key in the lock, swung the door open, and a fraction of an instant before she smelled the gas she bent her head to the lighter and rotated the flint.

The duplex blew up in a cacophony of burst timbers, ricocheting metal, grenade-like glass bombs, and snap-cracking plastic.  When the debris rained back to earth it was mostly unrecognizable.  Scattered over an acre, the scorched remnants smoldered and oozed.  Acrid smoke rose from what looked like hundreds of tiny gnome-lit fires.  Shards of glass and china stuck out of the earth and dared anyone to walk on them.  Nails, bolts, screws, and saw blades impaled themselves in the nearby trees.

There was no dividing wall in the basement between the two units, only a chain link, floor to ceiling fence separated them.  On Cheryl’s side of the basement the concrete laundry tubs moved a few feet across the floor and cracked, probably due to the extreme heat.  The washer and dryer were smoke black and bruised from implosions with tools.  They were tilted against the outside cinderblock wall as if leaning back and conspiratorially whispering to each other about the lives of the people in the house.  The fire was more intense on Cheryl’s side of the duplex.  It was fueled by stacks of newspapers and magazines that had been piled in the basement.

The Brewers’ bathtub and toilet were ejected straight up like jet fighter seats only to come hurtling down with terminal velocity.  The newpaper photo showed the two porcelain pieces, minus the lid of the toilet tank, on top of a brown/grey mass of unidentifiable bits and pieces in the crater of a newly formed volcano, the Brewer’s half of the duplex.

Down the street, the windows at the Stenceks’ house shook violently and pictures flew off the walls.  Mr. Stencek had just stepped out of his truck; he felt the heat of the blast.  Mrs. Stencek called the fire department when she looked out her kitchen window and saw flames and billowing black smoke.

Mr. Stencek was quoted in the paper:  We heard a second explosion as we ran.  Might of been her car.  What was left of the house was all fire and smoke when we got there.  We yelled to see if anyone would answer.  The fire was making a roaring noise up outta the basement.  My wife and I moved back aways.  We weren’t sure if there was going to be another explosion.  I sent my son running back acrost to our house to get the fire extinguisher and flashlight from my truck.  Figured he’d be quicker than me.  David and I made a wide path around the house to see if there was anybody to help.   Mary was crying.  She kept saying that poor woman, that poor little boy.  David stayed once the fire trucks got there, but I had to take Mary home.  She was just too upset.

The newspaper reporter was there when Mr. Brewer made his appearance at the scene an hour or so after the explosion.  He wrote his notes in an abbreviated shorthand, then translated them for the publication later that night.

"The shadows were long when Mr. Brewer arrived home.  The firefighters had extinguished the last of the flames so even the light from the small fires was gone.  He could see that no one could have survived the blast and consuming inferno.  He fell to his knees and cursed, then held his head in his hands and sobbed.

"With the embers mostly tamped, the police and firemen on the crews grew quiet as they poked and prodded at small piles of smoking debris.  They pounded stakes in the ground to cordon off the area and tied yellow tape from stake to stake.

Detective Osland led Mr. Brewer away to the back seat of a police cruiser.

Chapter 2

I’ve gotta be the only police officer left in the country who goes to the library to dig up information.  Keith’s usually smooth, self-deprecating voice had a raw edge to it; his lank frame collided with and then claimed the hard plastic chair.

The microfiche spun as Collette demonstrated the controls.  Let me know if I can help.  She lingered, her blond hair held off her face with a thin hair band, the kind younger girls wore.  She stepped back, slightly behind, to the right of him.  She studied Keith’s profile, the nape of his neck, and his broad shoulders; she ignored the machine’s display.

Keith ignored her, mastered the controls, and started to read.

Collette was on the edge of asking a question when Keith spoke.

Here it is.  May 1998.  Keith repeated the weekly’s headline almost under his breath,

Horrific House Explosion Kills One, Two Missing

Collette walked away with the honed silence of a librarian.

Keith read that the fire chief drew conclusions based on what was found at the site of the house explosion.  He was aided by forensic reports from the insurance inspector.  It was surmised that the owner’s half of the ranch duplex, the Brewers’ house and garage, filled with gas before the stream filled the basement and reached the hot water tank’s pilot light.  That was the only way to explain the immensity and intensity of the explosion.

Keith checked the dates.  The paper came out two days after the explosion.  Keith reasoned Amax had time to dissect the scene and give the readers the details they craved.

The local reporter filled pages with descriptions and pictures of the aftermath, eyewitness reports from the neighbors, and suppositions from people who knew the young Brewer family and their renter, Cheryl Small.

Lengthy comments were posted under Amax’s pictures taking all of the citizens of New Minden and the surrounding townships into the scene, and now Keith too.

Keith reasoned that some information was good, the rest was Amax’s interpretation of events.

Keith read the words Amax repeated verbatim and wondered if either Mr. Stencek, his wife, or his son were still in New Minden.

Keith’s cool, gray eyes flicked as he scanned front page articles in the weeks following the explosion.  Questions nagged at him, Accidental?  Intentional?  Insurance Fraud?  Revenge?  It was a puzzle and he had only the straight edge pieces.  Were the answers about his father’s involvement going to be ones he needed or would he stir up memories better left alone?

Two hours passed before he stretched his arms into the air to relieve the dull ache in his back.  He looked around to see different faces from when he had first come to the library.  He had not registered people coming and going.  He saw Collette at her desk talking to a young mother with two small children.  She smiled and kept eye contact with the woman even as the children whined and pulled at their mother’s skirt.

She was going to be reading stories to the three to four year olds in the afternoon so she was dressed in slacks and a short summer jacket.  She needed to be able to sit on the floor and move around with ease.  Collette and a soft green hand puppet would imitate a lurking, long-necked dinosaur.  She would enjoy this part of her day more than the staff meeting that would come later.

Keith stood and stretched again.  Collette’s head turned at the movement.  He instinctively touched his rear jeans’ pocket, the one that held his wallet and police badge, picked up his notebook and pen, and headed for her desk.  Think I’m done for today.

She refocused her attention to papers on her desk; she kept her eyes down as she asked, Did you make any progress?

The local paper had a lot of coverage of the house explosion.

Anything I can look up for you?  She raised her head and stared into his smokey eyes.  She could not help herself.  As Children’s Librarian she seldom had a chance to talk with people her own age at the library.  She knew Keith from high school and a few times she had ended up in the same group of friends to see a movie or go bowling.

She had been at the checkout desk when he came in and had offered to help him with the microfiche.  She felt his eyes had depth and intelligence and story in them.  When she descended into the basement to get the rolls of film he needed, she let the chill of the basement air cool the blush she got from just talking with him.

If I’ve got some time at lunch, I mean?  She lifted her eyebrows and her forehead rumpled.  She smiled her best ‘librarian at task’ smile.

I really need to read the articles myself.  You know.  To get a feel for what happened.  So I can read about my dad, he thought, but did not say.

Sure.  Her answer was quiet, disappointed.  Her eyes shifted back down to her paperwork.

Keith felt vaguely uneasy.  Was it the question he needed to ask or something about Collette?  Does the library have a place to look up if someone is still alive?

Are you looking for one person or several?  Here in New Minden or elsewhere?  She kept the emotion out of her questions.

Dennis Amax.  He was a reporter for the paper back in ’98.  Don’t know where he lived.  I’d like to pick his brain about what he remembers.  You know.  There might have been stories his editor didn’t let him file.

That’s not a name I’ve ever heard here at the library.  Can’t you find him through the police computers?

Nah.  This is personal and I’d like to keep it that way, at least for the time being. 

He twisted at the waist, still trying to work out the stiffness.  Collette could see his torso flex under his T-shirt.  "I…I can do a search