Nobody Dies

By Ken Kuhlken

The First novel in the series is Nobody Dies, during which the narrator, fourteen-year-old Skip witnesses his father, Hollywood stunt man Warren Teague, experience an accidental  ten-story plunge onto  pavement . Soon after the fall, Skip's mother Dawn decides  she needs for she and her son to move to Lake Tahoe where she hopes to locate an angel she dreamed about, whom she believes might help get Warren miraculously healed. Skip fears his mom is psychotic.

In the King's Beach trailer park, a short block from Lake Tahoe, where they settle to live in their old motorhome, neighbors include outlaw bikers, an unsightly mutt named Tinkerbell, smart, lovely  Petra, age fifteen, and her guardian Victor, who helps Dawn find housecleaning jobs at Turnberry Estates, an elite enclave where he works as a gardener.

Almost daily, Dawn roams the forests hoping to encounter the angel she dreamed about.

As winter approaches, meaning  fewer days suitable for hiking in the mountains, Dawn has another strangely vivid dream, this one about a murder and about Skip, an avid fan of tv and film detectives, being enlisted by Petra to solve the crime.

Soon thereafter, venture capitalist Preston Meeks, for whom both Victor and Dawn are employed, is found dead in the kitchen of his Turnberry home. His pit bull lies dead beside him, its broken neck apparently snapped.  Victor, -- who becomes the prime suspect because of his size, strength, and employment as the murder victim's gardener, -- soon goes missing.  Smart Petra, fully convinced of her guardian's innocence,  believes the actual murderer could be a mega-church preacher who is a Turnberry homeowner and alleged lover of Preston Meeks' estranged wife. After Petra and Skip  go to the  preacher's church and question him, Petra also goes missing. and Washoe County Sheriffs suspect she has run off to join Victor. But Skip finds her with Foster Meeks, the murder victim's son, preparing to hike into the forest looking for a  wilderness cabin Victor had told her about. Petra hopes to learn that her guardian is alive and well. Foster, she fears, wants revenge for the murder of his father.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hickey And McGee
• Release date: Dec 4, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223649328

Ken Kuhlken

Some of Ken’s favorites are early mornings, the desert in spring, kind and honest people, baseball and other sports played by those who don’t take themselves too seriously, most kids, and films he and his Zoe can enjoy together. He earned degrees in literature and writing including the Master of Fine Arts from the Iniversity of Iowa. His books, which include the HIckey Family Crime Novels and the For America Collection, have gotten honored by Poets, Essayists and Novelists, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Private Eye Writers of America.   

Book preview

This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.

NOBODY DIES

First edition. December 4, 2023.

Copyright © 2023 Ken Kuhlken.

Written by Ken Kuhlken.

Also by Ken Kuhlken

For America

Supermen

hickey Family Crime Novels

The Very Least

Standalone

Nobody Dies (Coming Soon)

Damned Hot (Coming Soon)

Watch for more at Ken Kuhlken’s site.

Table of Contents

Copyright Page

Also By Ken Kuhlken

Dedication

NOBODY DIES

About the Author

About the Publisher

For all three of my amazing children and also Nicholas an Cassius

NOBODY DIES

1. Heretic

You could call my mom a heretic like lots of people have probably done when she wasn't around. She reads too many books besides the ones our pastors have recommended. She reads stuff like Mr. William  Blake and old Emmanuel Swedenborg who claimed he hung out in heaven with angels and dead guys even though plenty believers told her that that talking about those books or writers in church or Bible studies was not okay.

Same with lots of political stuff or questioning whether stories like Jonah getting swallowed by a whale was history or what Mr. Schwendiman, my Hollywood High freshman English teacher called allegory. But Dawn thought worrying about being okay was sort of like lying.

Probably about half the people in our church, the ones who wouldn't call her a heretic, thought she was crazy. Maybe only me, my dad, and our best friend Marvine, didn't think she was either of those. To us she was just Dawn.

But after the fall, even I started thinking she was crazy.

2. The Fall

My dad didn't usually jump off tall buildings. Mostly he crashed cars. He could total the flimsiest, like an old Yugo or Ford Fiesta, and climb out laughing. Way back, even before he turned sixteen, he raced in destruction derbies. And according to Grandma, before that he would wait on the hill on a scooter he built after watching the Little Rascals on tv, and zoom out in front of cars, But one of them swerved and ran over a dog.  So Dad disassembled the scooter and gave the parts to friends.

He didn't intend to be a stunt man. But when you move from Oklahoma to L.A. to become an actor and stay long enough to know the score, and you're broke and somebody tells you to jump, what you'd best do is nod and ask how high.

My mom didn't want me to watch the jump. She said, Skip, a boy of fourteen sees his dad leap from ten floors up, he might just get ideas for wild stunts of his own.

Stunts? Not me, I said.

Dawn rolled her eyes. Still, I pestered, promised, and at last convinced her that I would probably get there anyway. I could hitchhike or ride the bus, even walk. It wasn't that far. Sure, my mom could stay home and keep me from going. But she wouldn't. She wasn't that kind of mom.  

We lived in a Fairfax district apartment within smelling distance of the La Brea tar pits, only a few miles from the Taft Building on the famous corner of Sunset and Vine. A producer named Marshall Pickens was filming scenes there. My dad was the stunt guy for an actor called Fletch something who played a character desperate to land a role as the silent film actor Harold Lloyd. Mr. Lloyd was most famous for scaling an office building to the thirteenth floor and then grabbing and hanging by the hands of a large clock. He never used stunt men.

This Marshall Pickens movie was called The Bravest Fellow. I still haven't watched it. Maybe I never will.

That day we drove out Sunset Boulevard in the '68 Camaro my dad and I rebuilt from one of the stunt cars he crashed. Dawn parked a couple blocks short of Vine Street. Since the movie didn't feature anybody like Brad Pitt or Julia Roberts, only about a hundred of us spectators milled around outside the barricades. Lots of folks wondered out loud what scene they would get to watch. And once a crew dragged a huge blow up  pillow into place and started inflating it, bystanders jockeyed for position.

Inside the barricades were a couple of Ryder trucks and a caterers' van from which crew people walked away munching pizza slices. I asked Dawn if she thought Dad could bring us pizza after his jump. She didn't answer. I let it go, figuring she didn't hear me. Way too often lately she appeared lost in space. Looking back, I'd bet she was having premonitions.

Four or five cameras faced the Taft Building, different angles, distances, and trajectories.

Then Dad climbed through a tenth-floor window to a ledge. He wore an old-time suit with bow tie and a flat brimmed hat he called a Buster Keaton. Old Buster, along with Charlie Chaplin, was a Hollywood silent movie superstar.

When a director used an amplified bullhorn, warning us all to get quiet, we did. Then he ordered the cameras to roll. I climbed the concrete frame of a trash bin and stood on it.

Dad jumped.

His Buster Keaton came flying our way, like a wobbling Frisbee. I don't want to write what happened next.

3. Fragile Dawn

Back when, in ninth grade English, Mr. Schwendiman assigned us to memorize a poem, most kids chose a haiku because they are only three lines. Dawn lobbied and persuaded me to choose a longer poem, a favorite of hers, by John Donne:

'No man is an island,

Entire of itself.

Each is a piece of the continent,

A part of the main.

If a clod be washed away by the sea,

Europe is the less.

As well as if a promontory were.

As well as if a manor of thine own

Or of thine friend's were.

Each man's death diminishes me,

For I am involved in mankind.

Therefore, send not to know

For whom the bell tolls,

It tolls for thee

Her favorite writers were mad Russians like Misters Tolstoy and Dostoyevski. She hadn't yet tried to talk me into reading those fellows' books, but she gave me a t-shirt with a Tolstoy quote: I can only see two kinds of humans. Those who care about nobody but themselves; and those who care about everybody. I didn't often wear the shirt because when I did, People stared like they thought I was a loser.

Dawn took reading seriously. Sometimes I would catch her weeping over a book. She could get mighty sad just reading about people's miseries and troubles, even people who never lived except in some writer's mind. When we watched Robert DeNiro playing the monster in Ms. Shelly's Frankenstein, Dawn got so distressed about both the doctor and the monster, dad and I agreed to stop watching and return the video to Blockbuster. 

Dad had always tried to protect fragile Dawn. He was a man of action, while she was mostly what our friend Marvine calls contemplative. Marvine said if Dawn had lived long ago, she might have been one of those hermit monks who went out to spend their whole lives alone in the desert. I told her Dawn would never be a hermit because she needed people.

But that was before the fall. Afterwards, not so much.  

The first few days, when we believed Dad would soon either recover or die, she acted okay except she prayed more than usual. I heard her praying way into the night while I lay awake waiting for a phone call from the hospital and wondering who would protect my mom if we didn't get Dad back.

On the sixth day, Dad roused himself, opened his eyes, sat up, and bellowed something nobody could translate. So a doctor phoned us. When we reached the hospital, Dad was trying to break the straps they had cinched him down with. But even while he thrashed, his eyes didn't show the slightest emotion. And he didn't recognize us. We might've been nurses, or assassins, or unicorns.

Then twice I woke up to Dawn screaming, on account of nightmares she didn't recall.

Marvine told me that terrifying dreams we couldn't remember were usually sent by the devil.  

By then my dad was a cross between a vegetable and a zombie  who could stand and walk when orderlies unbuckled the restraints

One night after a doctor told us Dad might remain that way for months or years, my mom waited until I fell asleep, then she  took our Camaro for a drive.

She was speeding north on the 405, a couple miles short of the I-10 intersection where she often turned west to Santa Monica to get to her favorite beach, on the north shoreline of  Malibu, when she felt a quick and rather soft blow to the rear bumper.  In the mirror, she saw a Ford Crown Victoria like cops drove. She checked her speedometer. 85 m.p.h. Maybe it was a cop with broken flasher lights and siren, she thought, and maybe the highway patrol had recently painted their cruisers pastel blue. Anyway, she would've pulled to the shoulder except she checked the mirror again and got an eyeful of the driver. He had spiky white-blond hair, gleaming red eyes, and a grin nobody except a demon could manage. 

Dawn gunned the Camaro. In an instant or two she was doing well over 100 m.p.h. Still, she couldn't lose the Crown Vic. It stayed close as though chained to our Camaro.

A couple hours later, in the UCLA hospital in Santa Monica, softly so the nurses wouldn't hear, she told me, I didn't exactly crash on purpose, Skip. I mean I jerked the wheel knowing I might spin out, but there was nobody behind the two of us for a quarter mile or so. It was a fine piece of driving, keeping four wheels the ground instead of going into a roll. Your dad would be proud.

I said, "Mom, have you told anybody but me about the devil in the Ford?

She winked. You think I'm that crazy?

I said, Not quite.

Honest?

Honest.

But the next day, I changed my opinion. Marvine showed up at our apartment while I was deciding which canned soup to make for dinner. Marvine was a wise and sweet sort of grandma. Dawn had given her phone number to the hospital as an emergency contact. After a hug I thought might never end, she asked in her tweety-bird voice, How would you like to spend a few days with me?

She lived downstairs. She usually cared for Down's Syndrome people, but her latest charge had returned to her family, which left a spare room for me. So I stayed there while Dawn got evaluated at Gateway Mental Health, which was across town near Echo Park. What got her sent there, Marvine explained, was a bleeding hole in each of her wrists. Your mom told the doctor it must be a stigmata. Do you know what that is?

Jesus wounds, for no obvious reason. They happened to my mom?

She nodded and hugged me again. "Well, you know how the faithless are. Everything's got to have a worldly explanation. The doctor believes she gouged herself with a pen a nurse loaned her.

Skip, she said, your mom is a treasure Satan would love to get his claws on. You must have heard about the good dying young?

I just nodded.

Well, it's awfully rare that anyone as good as Dawn makes it in this world past, say, seventeen. Your mom's twice that. So, we had best pray hard and watch out for her, okay?

I'm lousy at praying, I confessed. Can you do most of it?

Marvine gave me her wide, cheery smile. If you'll promise to watch out for her.

I'll sure try, I said.

4. Nuevo Eden

The month Dawn spent at Gateway, most all she did was read, except when the psychologist grilled her or the psychiatrist hounded her to quit spitting out the meds he prescribed or when Marvine and I visited, or a fellow patient needed a friend.

That asylum was hard on her, because of her Tolstoy and John Donne mind, since she ached on account of pains and fears of her fellow patients and reading didn't always help her escape since she grieved for people in the books. One such book was about a family of Iowa farmers. Each of the dad farmer's three daughters turns to evil to get the whole farm for herself. Dawn didn't get angry with the selfish daughters or the mean, spiteful father, but she got deeply sad because of what became of them all.

When she told me about that book, we talked for a long time before I said, Mom, it's just a story.

She thought for a minute or two. I know they aren't real people, she said, but too many real people are like them. I guess that's what troubles me.

Another book she read in there was by old Mark Twain. Called Roughing It. That one kept her laughing, except certain parts made her so calm and happy she convinced the shrinks she at least wasn't suicidal or dangerous.

After a lawyer friend of Marvine's wrangled with Prudential Insurance, we got Dad settled into Stanley's TLC on the outskirts of Ojai. There he had a double room with a window that overlooked oaks on a hillside and a sky with a full cast of birds. Dawn and I visited with lots of  residents who could use language and we decided most of them were kinder, more genuine, and more like the folks Jesus said would inherit the earth than most people on the outside. Between them and the good-hearted caretakers with whom Marvine had already made friends, Dawn assured me that Dad would be okay while she went to meet up with some angel she dreamed about.

She wouldn't tell me any more about that dream, only that it came to her the night before she read how Mr. Twain's story told about his finishing the hard climb from Donner Lake to Tahoe's north shore,  Anyway, on account of the dream and some of Mister Twain's commentary, soon Dawn and I headed north, in our rather ancient  motorhome we called Winnie, planning to arrive a few days before I would start tenth grade at a private school, Incline Academy. where I had gotten offered a scholarship for good grades and for batting 310 last season at Hollywood High. 

We spent our first morning on the road alternating between terror and fury on the 101 and the 80, getting honked and screamed at since our old Winnie could only do about half what the speed junkies did. By the time we headed east out of  Berkeley,