Back For Tomorrow

By Marona Posey

In the third book in the Look Away series, the family that started it all with Skye Campbell is growing up, facing college choices, drug addiction, overnight stardom, and ultimately murder.

When Amanda Patterson wakes up in a car in Panama City Beach over Labor Day weekend with a dead body in the back seat, her snap decision will lead to a lifetime of looking over her shoulder. while her story is woven with her roommate's both of them will hold the pieces to a puzzle that will baffle the police and detectives alike.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Marona Posey
• Release date: Aug 4, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310703461

Book preview

Preface

Look Away, Dixieland and The Thirsty Hills are the first two novels in the Look Away series. This novel, Back for Tomorrow, is the third book in the series. There will be a fourth novel, released in the fall of 2014. This will complete the saga of the two families, from the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941 to the bombing of the World Trade Centers in 2001.

In those sixty years, changes in the world were phenomenal. Never before had knowledge doubled as quickly as during the atomic age, the space age, and the electronic age, which brought vast changes that altered the lives of modern man. Yet parts of the world seemed to digress back to the dark ages with horrible crimes against mankind.

Stay tuned and follow me on Facebook under Marona Posey.

BACK FOR TOMORROW

CHAPTER 1

Labor Day weekend, 1975

Amanda Patterson’s throbbing pain told her, Don’t move, be still. Nausea rose in her throat when she turned her head and opened one eye. Shards of brightness entered her brain.

I’m lying on my stomach inside something. I think it’s a car. How did I get here?

Hot air, thick with humidity, covered her like a steaming blanket. She opened her other eye and focused on a dark spot in front of her. She was staring at the underside of a dashboard.

I’m going to throw up.

She found the handle on the door and pushed it open. She slid her body forward then vomited bile, brown sludge, and remnants of a half-digested meal. She crawled out of the car, trying to avoid the contents of her stomach.

She looked up. Brilliant sunshine blinded her. Opening her eyes slowly, she recognized waves lapping on a beach. She squinted her eyes and looked around. Fifty feet in front of the car sea gulls ran toward a baby crab trying to burrow in the wet sand. Drift wood littered the beach and the remnants of an old bonfire were scattered close to the water.

She crawled for a few feet then rose to a standing position. Stumbling into the water she splashed forward, falling into the warm, salty liquid. She rolled over then dipped her head backwards. The water felt good on her face.

Another retching episode brought up more slime and bile. The waves scattered the disgusting mess as she focused on the white car she left, a 1970 Cadillac, shining in the sunlight like a glowing spaceship. Then she remembered how she got into the car.

I was in there with a boy all night. He was all over me and in me. We ran naked down the beach, and drank straight from a bottle of Jack Daniels. Then everything went blank. Where is he? Where is Wilson?

Wilson, are you there? Wilson? Amanda yelled toward the car.

Wilson, wake up, it’s daylight.

No answer, he was still asleep, or out cold like she’d been.

Hey, it’s time to go back to town.

Nothing stirred but a few sand flies. They buzzed around the car as Amanda pulled herself out of the water and walked toward the white vehicle.

Why isn’t he making some sounds? Is he passed out?

Wilson? Oh my God. No, no…. Wilson’s body, dead and stiff, filled the back seat of the Cadillac.

Amanda ran back into the ocean. When she couldn’t touch bottom she twisted around and looked back at the glowing vehicle.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe he put something dead in the car for a joke and what I saw is a blow up doll. Wilson is watching me from a vantage point down the beach and laughing.

Amanda walked back to the car. Wilson’s body filled the back seat. His pale skin, open mouth, and eyes startled her. Flies crawled on his open eyes and buzzed around his body.

A long forgotten memory of her favorite dog on the side of the highway, dead and swollen, flooded into Amanda’s memory. Heat speeds up decomposition, she remembered from her anatomy class, and there was plenty of heat on Labor Day weekend in the panhandle of Florida.

Amanda looked around. The car, parked close to the sparkling waters of the Gulf of Mexico, sat there with a body in the back seat. On the horizon a couple of sailboats traveled toward her. Behind the boat a row of pelicans swept over the water like a practiced ballet, their wings never touching the water as they flapped in unison to a cadence of their own. She wished she was out there, out in the ocean, anywhere but here.

Why did this happen to me? The police, I should call them, but how? I’m out here in the middle of nowhere. And what do I tell them? How do I explain this? I didn’t kill him but I don’t know what did. If I call the police they’ll call my parents, and then what? My parents have been embarrassed enough by that terrible incident I caused. I can’t do this to them. I can’t be in trouble again. I’m on my last chance.

She focused on the car. More flies disappeared through the windows and it would not be long until his body would begin to smell.

Amanda tried to think. From the position of the sun it had to be nine or ten. Her watch, tucked into her duffle bag along with her clothes, lay on the floor in the Ocean View Motel in Panama City Beach where her friends were sleeping under blankets in an air conditioned room.

They’d driven down from the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa for the Labor Day weekend, traditionally the last fling of summer before the fall schedules kicked in with boring lectures, writing assignments, and curfews.

Okay, I have to face this. I have to get this car out of here before people arrive on the beach for their day in the sun.

Amanda approached the car. Her long brown hair, wet with salt water, clung to her University of Alabama T-shirt with the Crimson Tide logo on the front. The shirt covered her green and white bikini. Somehow she’d managed to get her clothes on after she crawled into the front seat. White flip flops were her shoes. She had no money, purse, identification, nothing. She’d left the motel with a car full of girls who decided to check out a party on the beach. They drove to the party on a lark, never intending to say overnight or do the things they did.

Amanda opened the back door and pulled Wilson’s cutoff jeans off the floor. She found his keys in the right pocket and opened the trunk. Inside she found a yellow beach towel patterned with red fish. Scattered on the floor of the trunk were empty Jack Daniel bottles, four crumbled beer cans, two cans of motor oil, a flashlight, and five Playboy Magazines. Nothing, there was nothing in the trunk to drink.

She heard a car come down the road toward the beach.

Oh my god, they’ll walk up to the car.

Amanda ran toward the front of the car, she didn’t know why, it just seemed like the thing to do. The car turned around and pulled back onto the highway on the other side of the sand dune.

That’s it. I have to get this car off the beach. I need to get some liquids in me. I need a clear head so I can make intelligent decisions.

Amanda walked around the Cadillac. It was parked on hard-packed sand with some gravel thrown in. The parking place led to the highway a hundred yards away. A large dune, split just enough for a tiny road to let cars onto the beach, hid the car. The sugar white beach stretched for miles on both sides of the car.

She took the beach towel and threw it over his body, covering his upper torso and arms. She couldn’t look at his eyes again. She slid into the car and held her breath. Flies buzzed her eyes and face. She brushed them off and inserted the key into the ignition. The car started on the first turn.

She pulled off with a spin of sand spewing behind the back tires. Once on the highway she pointed the car west. A half mile away she saw a sign, Panama City Beach, 5 miles. Ordinarily she’d have the radio on but this was not time to listen to the Sunday morning Casey Kasem’s countdown to the top ten.

Little houses on the beach gave way to low slung motels, then a multi-story hotel under construction sported a towering building crane. Townhouses lined up like dominoes, each slanted toward the Gulf so the owners had a view of the water. She slowed down as two families with children ran across the beach highway toward the Gulf.

A mile from the Ocean View Motel she stopped for a red light. A couple walking their poodle stared at the car. She turned down the visor so they couldn’t see her face but she could see them. They looked toward the Cadillac and wrinkled their noses. The dog bolted toward the car. The couple ran across the highway, pulling the dog behind them.

Well, I can’t just park the car at the motel with a body in the back and walk in like nothing happened. Too many people have seen me with him. I would be the first one they’d question and then there would be an investigation by the police. Sorry Wilson, I can’t let that happen. Amanda fought back tears as she talked to the body in the back seat.

I know you have people who love you but you’re dead and I’m alive. My parents told me when I left for college that if I blow this chance I’m on my own. I’ve finally got it all together and I’m not going to let this mess up things.

Amanda kept driving through the strip of motels, hot dog stands, bicycle rental shacks, and beach towel outlets. She had always loved coming to the beach from their home in Vestavia Hills, a wealthy section of Birmingham. Her father, a prominent surgeon at University Hospital, brought them down to the beach every summer for a vacation.

A few miles later she was on the outskirts of town where stores announced Closed and Prices Slashed on their windows in large white letters. It was the end of the season and everyone wanted to sell their inventory, count their profits, and close out the season. Most of the summer employees would return to their college dorms or end up teaching ski lessons on the mountain slopes out west.

When the last store was behind her, majestic pines lined the highway right-of-way where the saw had not touched the trees. Beyond them a new growth of trees struggled in the tangled branches of clear cut debris. A cyprus tree towered above the debris, intentionally left for the winds to reseed the coveted tree.

Amanda found a narrow county road and turned north. Five hundred feet down the road a pine tree farm lined both sides of the roadway. Planted in rows, north and south, east and west, even diagonally, they were grown as a crop in the sandy soil and salty breezes.

She found a stand of trees taller than the car then turned down one of the hard packed sand trails. She drove a half mile into the tree farm before she stopped. Leaving the car, she ran down a row of trees far enough that she couldn’t smell him. She stretched out and curled into a fetal position. She sobbed for thirty minutes.

How could this happen? Why did it happen to me? I didn’t do anything wrong but I can’t call the police and get involved in this. What if they think I killed him?

CHAPTER 2

Labor Day weekend, 1975

Amanda drifted off to sleep. The call of a crow brought her back to consciousness as long shadows sheltered her from the bright sun. The whooshing of pine limbs swaying in the wind and the sounds of the crow reminded her where she was. She stretched her aching muscles and ran her hands around her head. Her mouth was too dry, her head foggy, her pounding heart pushing blood too fast.

She thought about her dorm room where twenty feet down the hall stood a drink machine full of cold sodas. Then she remembered why she was in the pine tree farm. Wilson was in the back seat of the car she drove to this place. Amanda walked toward the car.

I have to bury him. I could do it out here by a pine tree. He would be in a row like the rows of crosses in a cemetery. That would be fitting, but I can’t. I don’t have a shovel.

She heard a horn blowing in the distance. Was someone coming down the road where she parked the car? Would they find him?

She ran forward a few feet but no one was there, no car was visible. She walked back to the Cadillac and circled it. What could she do with him? He was a big person, dead, stinking, swollen and disgusting. But he was a person. He had parents and a brother. He told her about them before they passed out from the Jack Daniels they’d downed straight from the bottle.

She sat down behind the car. Two vultures landed on the roof. She ran toward the car, flailing her arms in the air.

Git away, hey, get out of here, she screamed.

They landed twenty feet on the other side.

Amanda opened the back door and pulled his cutoffs off the back floorboard. She found his wallet in the back pocket. There were two twenty dollar bills, a five, and six ones inside. She flipped to the part that held his identification information. His full name, Wilson Chaim Izack, was on his driver’s license. He had a birthday on September 20. He’d be twenty-two. Then there was a photo of his family, a mother, father, and older brother smiling at the camera.

Then she saw a photo of him with a dark haired girl in a long pink dress, probably a prom photo or some fraternity function. Next she pulled out his Vanderbilt ID card then looked at one of those preprinted cards that come with a wallet. He’d written in his address, phone number, and the person to call in case of an emergency. Amanda noticed the person was his mother, Shirley Izack, New York City.

Amanda took the money, put it on the dashboard, then put the wallet back into his cutoffs and threw them into the back seat with him. She turned the car around and drove back to the paved road. She turned north and found a service station at an intersection five or six miles away.

Inside the store she bought three cold sodas and a pack of Golden Flake potato chips. She paid for them then took the food outside. Leaning against the car she drank two of the sodas and ate half the potato chips. Two men came out and noticed her bare legs under her T-shirt. One sneered at her. The other one mumbled something under his breath.

You don’t want to mess with me, Amanda thought as she slid into the car after they left. She headed north, driving slowly with the window down. She sipped on the other soda. She had to think.

Okay, I need a plan on how to dispose of him. I have to bury him and get back to the motel and act like nothing has happened. I have to fix this and not have my name all over the paper and the police on my ass.

Then she realized she had to get rid of the car. Sooner or later someone would recognize his Cadillac. Before they passed out he told her the car was a gift from his parents for being valedictorian of his high school class. It was easy to spot with the New York plates and Vanderbilt bumper sticker. Besides that, now there would be evidence of his rotting body in the car and people had seen her with him, in the car.

Okay, the best way out of this mess is to bury him and burn the car. I need a shovel and some gasoline and all of this has to be done after dark. You can’t just be there digging a grave for people to see in broad daylight. Shit, this schedule is going to be tight. I have to be back at the motel in the morning before Olivia leaves me stranded down here, and she would. She would, she’d drive back without me.

Olivia hates my guts, she’s the one that will make an issue out of me being gone all night, Amanda said to herself as she continued to drive north.

Amanda thought back to the beach party where she and Wilson connected. She rode to the party with the three girls she came down with, Laura, Patty, and Olivia. Four boys from Vanderbilt, three boys from Auburn, and a couple she knew from Birmingham Southern encouraged them to find the party on the beach. When they arrived, a large bonfire was already burning. Booze had started to flow and dance music blasted from a car radio.

Girls were there from other colleges, most of them in their swim suits, some in shorts and halter tops. Bottles of liquor, beer, and soft drinks went into Dixie cups as various stages of intoxication swept through the crowd. The partying, wild and fast, lasted for hours.

Amanda’s mind went back to the bonfire. The boys piled on driftwood as couples ran in and out of the water, chasing each other and frolicking in the sand. Someone turned on a car radio then she was handed a paper cup full of rum and coke. She sipped it slowly then lost count of how many drinks she gulped.

Someone turned on a flashlight and circled it around, showing four or five couples in various states of making out. Soon a couple of the boys started dancing and pulling down their pants, their hard dicks standing straight out. One girl pulled off her bikini top, ran up to a boy, and they ran off, out of sight.

When the headlight of one of the cars was turned on, couples ran to the illuminated sand. She saw boys humping girls and girls humping boys. No one seemed to care what was happening. Then she remembered taking off her top, her breasts falling out, bouncing around as she danced. She started gyrating to the music of James Brown’s Sex Machine.

A guy named Wilson grabbed her and kissed her. Then he whispered, Let’s do it in the headlights, you sexy bitch.

She remembered the lights shining on her and then he was on top of her, thrusting his penis into her. Like an out of body experience, she felt the physical part but her brain had turned off her ability to make a decision, her desire to protest. She knew it was real. She was sore and sticky down there and she could feel the sand burns inside her, deep inside.

When he finished he carried her to a car and put her in the back seat and held her down. He thrust his penis in her again. She felt him roll off of her then he drove the car off the beach.

She remembered how it hurt and begged him to stop. It wasn’t her first time but it hurt. He laughed and passed more booze to her. They drove for a while then he turned off the road and parked close to the beach. There was no one around. He found another bottle of whiskey in the trunk. Close to passing out, she remembered he was all over her in the back seat, sloppy drunk and dripping saliva on her breasts.

Disgusted, she crawled into the front seat to get away from him. She drifted into a fog, then everything went blank. Then she woke up to his body in the back seat.

Wilson, I’m so sorry. I’m sorry for what I have to do. Please forgive me. Amanda kept driving then saw a sign announcing Crystal Lake, 6 miles. She spotted a gas station with an outside display of sand shovels, floats, beach umbrellas, and a few swim suits. Once inside she bought two plastic shovels, another soda, and a pair of boys swim trunks. She asked the man behind the counter for a plastic jug to hold gasoline.

It’s for my lawnmower, she told him. He narrowed his eyes over the girlie magazine he was consuming.

Look outside in the dumpster. There are plastic containers out there you can rinse out. Don’t leave any water in the jug. Gas and water don’t mix. His eyes darted to her bare legs then he returned to the magazine. He sniffled and wrinkled his nose.

He can smell me, she realized.

She found a plastic container in the dumpster, filled it full of gasoline, paid the man, then found the toilet and pulled out a wad of paper towels. Amanda ran water over them, wiped down her arms, legs, and the space between her legs. She put her head under the faucet and rinsed her hair and face. She put on the boy’s swim trunks. On the way out she bought some matches, a pack of cigarettes, and a small package of cookies.

Turning south, she drove toward the ocean looking around for a place to bury him. At the intersection of the road and the beach highway she noticed construction of a new store, a supermarket from the configuration on the front. The store parking lot had a section blocked off that wasn’t finished. It was perfect, she could bury him there then they would pave over him. His body wouldn’t be found under concrete.

I hope they don’t do the paving before I get back tonight. They won’t, today is Sunday, she said to herself.

Amanda turned the car around and found an abandoned store. She pulled around to the back, got out, and locked the car. She sat down under a tree, ate the cookies, and drank the last soda. With a plan in place her spirits lifted.

When the new moon was high in the dark sky, she drove to the place she would bury him. She pulled the car sideways and waited thirty minutes to see if anyone noticed the vehicle. Past midnight, no one stopped or slowed down. She dug a shallow grave in the sand and pulled him out of the car.

His swollen body barely fit in the hole she’d carved out for him. She raked the sand over him with her feet and the shovel. It was the hardest thing she’d ever had to do but when she patted the sand down with no trace of his body in sight, but she knew she had done the right thing.

Leaving the grave, she drove back to the pine tree farm. She sat in front of the car for hours. When the inky sky lightened in the east, she poured the gallon of gasoline in the back seat on a pile she made with the beach towel and some pine straw. She threw three matches on the seat and watched the car light up, dancing flames leaping out of the half open windows, taking the death smell away.

Then she realized she’d left his wallet in his cut offs in the back seat.

Oh well, they’ll find the car sooner or later and it has tags so they’ll know who it belonged to, she thought as she walked toward the highway.

If she was lucky she would get back to the motel before the other girls stirred.

CHAPTER 3

Before dawn on Labor Day, 1975

Wilson Izack’s body settled into the sand in the unpaved part of the new Piggly Wiggly store where the girl buried him. His body was inflated with gas that filled his cells, organs, and intestines. In the heat, the decomposition of his body accelerated as bacteria and fungi consumed the last food he ingested then turned to eat his intestines and stomach. They manufactured gas as a by-product.

Bacteria, yeast, and fungi also moved into his blood rich organs which contained massive amounts of alcohol backed up in his bloodstream. They loved the sugar-rich, Jack Daniels blood mixture. The organisms multiplied and divided and the new ones were invited to the feast as heat intensified their eating frenzy.

The alcohol Wilson consumed from the binge drinking moved from his stomach straight into his bloodstream. In three minutes, the Jack Daniels began circulating in his body and into his cells, including the ones in his brain stem that controlled his central nervous system. His breathing began to slow, then his heart rate.

Complicating the problem, the cells in his body cried for glucose but Wilson’s pancreas didn’t produce insulin, the key that unlocked the doors to the cells that allowed glucose to be transported across cell walls.

Wilson Izack, a Type I diabetic, had to inject insulin into his body to keep his diabetes under control. The night he died he didn’t take his insulin. He was too busy having sex on the beach and binge drinking. On a thriller high, taking his insulin wasn’t what he had on his mind.

In a drunken stupor and a diabetic crisis too steep for his body to overcome, by the time he pulled into the remote area of the beach with the girl, he had only one thing on his mind. I want my dick in her one more time.

A few minutes later his brain stem told his lungs to stop inflating. Then his heart quit beating. Eight hours before Amanda Patterson woke up and found him, Wilson Isack died in the back seat of his Cadillac.

Right before the sun rose over the Gulf of Mexico, his swollen body, now buried in a shallow, sandy grave, collapsed and made a whooshing sound as the gas escaped out a small hole on his finger. The odor rose up and spread out. It floated toward the ocean where an old man strolling on the beach caught a whiff of it.

Another dead dog on the highway, the old man said, and continued on.

Now there was an indentation where the grave collapsed. Maybe someone would notice and find him. Then there was a lot of noise and someone was shouting. Suddenly there was something hard on top of him, something heavy and wet. It pushed him down and his body flattened with the weight.

***

Florida’s Best Paving Company had a crew working on Labor Day. None of the workers complained, they loved the overtime. In the panhandle of Florida everyone in construction worked six days a week, holidays included. The men arrived at the parking lot of the new Piggly Wiggly grocery store at seven in the morning with a cement truck, ready to pour the rest of the parking lot.

Last week, part of the lot had been paved but someone shorted the estimate. The construction manager spouted off a few curse words when he realized they were short but it was too late to order more concrete. Orders had to be placed the night before. For the Labor Day pour, he ordered a full truck. It would be too much but they would use what was left for a patio at his house. He’d already framed the slab.

Hey, Carlos, it looks like someone’s been digging out here. A weathered worker pointed