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Overview
“An ingeniously dark comic thriller about greed, gluttony and murder that is destined for the big screen.” –Best Thrillers
Aimee Trapnell reluctantly leaves her apartment on Manhattan’s Central Park West to return to her childhood home in Georgia for her father’s ninetieth birthday. Also on hand are her two brothers, wily Marsh and ne’er-do-well Trainor. With a forty-billion-dollar inheritance at stake, they’re willing to do whatever it takes to make the old man happy.
To their shock they learn that what their father wants for his birthday is to kill someone. He doesn’t care who it is. He just wants to know what it’s like to commit murder.
Betrayal, double-dealing, and fast-paced action set the Trapnells on a collision course with an unexpected villain. Their journey takes them from the swamps of Georgia, to Italy’s glittering Amalfi coast, to rugged Yellowstone National Park.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781684332830 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Black Rose Writing |
| Publication date: | 05/30/2019 |
| Series: | Trapnell Thriller , #1 |
| Edition description: | First Printing ed. |
| Pages: | 228 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.52(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The Road Rocket
Three days before the murder a lemon yellow Lamborghini Aventador LP 750-4 SuperVeloce swung into the parking lot of Buzzy's General Store in Cobbs, Georgia. It was moving at fifty miles per hour, trailed by an extravagant plume of blood-red dust. Crows perched in the loblolly pines cawed and took wing, startled by the throaty shriek from the exhaust and intake at 4,000 rpms.
The car slewed sideways as its driver fought for control. For a moment it appeared it would keep sliding until it smashed into the black and white police cruiser parked in front. Sun glare on the windscreen made it impossible to see who was behind the wheel. Whoever it was drove like a madman. What sort of emergency could have occasioned such haste?
The Lamborghini lurched to a stop two feet shy of T-boning the cruiser. Gravel kicked up by the big Gallardo tires clattered against the side with a sound like shrapnel hitting a tin roof.
The store's screen door flew open and smacked against the ice machine, which was situated too close to the front door when it was installed, back in 1983. Gordon Buzzy had considered moving it, but he died before he could get around to it. His son, Gordon Jr., inheritor of his father's kingdom, which amounted to the decrepit general store and the living quarters behind it, likewise thought of moving it a little farther to the right.
It goes without saying, Gordon Buzzy, Jr., not exactly being a coiled spring of industriousness, that he too would die without moving the ice machine, as would his son and his son, and so on, until either Buzzy's went out of business or the world came to an end, whichever came first.
Boyce County Sheriff's Deputy Ewell Haskins emerged onto the wooden porch, primed for action. In his left hand was a partially consumed moon pie. With his right, he unsnapped the leather guard over the Smith & Wesson M&P semi-automatic pistol in his service holster. The screen door thwacked shut behind him. Above it a hand-lettered sign warned anyone having the effrontery to take the Lord's name in vain not to expect a warm welcome at Buzzy's, where bait, tackle, beer, and sundries could be purchased between the hours of 7 A.M. and 6 P.M. every day except Sundays and major holidays.
Haskins stood open-mouthed, staring at the yellow roadster.
It looked like something from a future century, at once sleek and angular. "Hot damn," he whispered, spying the orange and black New York license plate. A Yankee! Driving recklessly! Perhaps the Yankee speed demon was under the influence of drugs. From what Haskins understood, a large percentage of the Yankee population customarily went around hopped up to the eyeballs. If such was the case, he would soon be a very sorry Yankee indeed.
Haskins licked his lips like a dog smelling steak. The deputy still felt the sting of the conflict that a certain type of white Southerner refers to as the War of Northern Aggression. Arresting a rich Yankee who was endangering the citizens of Cobbs by ramming the roads in what amounted to a deluxe hot rod would soothe that sting considerably. It might also put Haskins in line to become the next sheriff when the current sheriff either retired or dropped dead of the heart attack that must surely be coming to a man who weighed close to four hundred pounds. Haskins rolled his eyes heavenward and offered a silent prayer to the Almighty to please bring about a vacancy for the position of sheriff as swiftly as was convenient. Thank you and Amen.
Haskins squinted at the mysterious vehicle through a shimmer of heat. It was such a bright yellow it made his eyeballs throb. Who'd want a car that gaudy color? Cars should be black, white, gray, or blue, in that order. It was permissible for pickup trucks to be red; that signified a certain self-confident, assertive masculinity, but red sports cars were looking for trouble, their drivers just begging to be given a speeding ticket. A yellow road rocket like this one was utterly and flagrantly wrong, to Haskins' way of thinking.
An idea crossed his mind, one which amazed and delighted him with its breathtaking implications. Could the driver be one of those rappers, all gold chains and surly attitude? Haskins hated rap music, considering it to be nothing but a string of filthy words interspersed with boasts about engaging in criminal activity.
The Lamborghini sat motionless in the baking heat, sun-dazzle bouncing off the windscreen, making its driver invisible. Haskins wondered how large the rapper might be, and whether he had an open container of alcohol in there or anything else that would qualify him for a trip to join the bad boys in the county lockup. If the rapper was riding dirty and he put up a fuss, mouthing off about his rights or illegal search and seizure, the usual crap, then the deputy would deliver a beat down, courtesy of his steel baton.
Haskin's mind was not the most agile. The moon pie began to melt in the heat, its chocolate icing oozing between his fingers as he considered how things might play out. Might the rapper, once subdued, be discovered to have a wallet stuffed full of hundred-dollar bills? Might some of those bills make their way into Haskins' pocket with no one being the wiser, except for the rapper? And who cared what sort of accusations such a person might make against an officer of the law? Haskins offered up another silent prayer to the Almighty to make it so.
The driver's door opened vertically, gullwing-style. In one smooth movement, a woman got out. Her legs seemed to go on for miles in a short white linen dress imprinted in red and cobalt blue with the pictogram that was the international chemical weapons warning symbol. In the merciless south Georgia heat, with the mercury in the rusted Beech-Nut chewing tobacco thermometer nailed to the front of the general store standing at a hair over one hundred and three degrees, she looked as cool as a Rocky Mountain breeze, like a supermodel stepping out of the cover of Vogue to grace the humble town of Cobbs.
Haskins gaped, transfixed, as she raised a nearly empty bottle of Southern Comfort to her perfect red lips and took a long drink. Then she headed toward him, her gold high-heeled sandals crunching in the gravel of the parking lot. With three swift strides, she climbed the sagging porch steps.
"Dispose of this, would you," she said, handing him the empty bottle.
This close, he could smell the liquor on her breath as well as her perfume, which reminded him of rich, moist soil in which night-blooming flowers grew. They would be the kind of flowers that had an intoxicating scent but would prove toxic if eaten. Beneath the dangerous flower smell was something else, something he couldn't identify. Whatever it was, it put him in mind of petrochemicals, or maybe plain old road tar.
Wherever her perfume came from Haskins was sure it wasn't Walmart or even Dillard's, where they sold fancy perfume like the Youth-Dew favored by his mother. Haskins' mother devoted herself to running the local chapter of the Eastern Star with the single-minded aim of rewarding her friends and punishing her enemies, in much the same way that Sam Giancana used to run the Chicago mafia. No, perfume like that had to come from one place: Paris, France.
He was correct. The scent the woman wore was made in small batches at a fragrance house occupying the ground floor of a building on the Rue du Mont Thabor, a narrow three-block side street between the Place Vendome and the Tuileries. The perfume had no name and was made expressly for one client: the razor-thin woman with chin-length, glossy chestnut hair who stood before him wearing wraparound Chopard sunglasses.
"Sure thing, Miz Aimee," Haskins replied, accepting the bottle. He would have tipped his broad-brimmed hat, but his hands were occupied with the dripping moon pie and the empty bottle of Southern Comfort. Instead, he bobbed his head respectfully, the way he did in church when the pastor made a particularly telling point.
Aimee von Helgern was married to a man who lived in a castle in Germany and who held the heredity title of margrave. Such things might matter in Europe, but they cut no mustard in Cobbs. What cut a considerable amount of mustard was who her father was: Blanton Trapnell, the richest and most powerful individual in the state, if not the entire South.
Aimee didn't visit Cobbs often, but when she did, she was treated to bowing and scraping from everyone from the state senator, who lived in a 14,000-square-foot house overlooking the golf course, on down to the semi-literate occupants of the miserable shacks out by the fertilizer factory. Blanton Trapnell owned those shacks, along with the fertilizer factory. He also owned the golf course.
"That's a nice car you got there," Haskins ventured.
She regarded the Lamborghini as if she'd never seen it before.
"It's not the most comfortable car to take on a long drive, but I was tired of flying and thought perhaps driving would make an amusing change." She frowned, causing Haskins to frown in sympathy. Apparently driving had failed to amuse her. "There's no place in it to put my purse." She raised a slim wrist to display a plastic purse with big-eyed Japanese anime characters on it. It was barely large enough to hold a lipstick and a tin of breath mints, plus the black American Express Centurion card that enabled her to buy anything from a cup of coffee to an ocean-going yacht. The purse cost more than Haskins made in four months.
"That's too bad," he said.
"It's not easy finding places to garage my cars near the Dakota." She removed her sunglasses to reveal eyes the same witchy pale green as absinthe. While much of Aimee had been surgically improved and artificially enhanced, her eye color was entirely natural.
"Are you living out West now?" Haskins asked. It was hard for him to follow what she was saying, what with her accent, which sounded part-Yankee and part from someplace overseas. Aimee and her siblings were rumored to own homes all over the world. She might conceivably own one in North or South Dakota.
"The Dakota. It's an apartment building on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. I own two apartments there, one for me and one for my snakes. I have a large collection of snakes, including the only known example of a white Darevsky's viper outside of the Ljubljana Zoo."
"Well, ain't that nice!" Haskins said heartily. Snakes gave him the creeps. They had ever since he stumbled onto a nest of baby cottonmouths on the farm where he lived when he was a boy. He'd never forgotten the way they writhed, all balled up together. Snakes not only looked repulsive, they stank to high heaven, as he'd learned to his dismay during a raid on a meth lab. The wild-eyed amateur chemist who produced his wares from a trailer deep in the woods kept cages full of snakes. Their sour-milk stench stayed with Haskins for days, despite his showering repeatedly, scrubbing until his skin was red and raw.
He couldn't imagine what an apartment filled with snakes smelled like. He tried not to think about it. Instead, he held the screen door open for her. "I got to get back on the road. Y'all have a good day," he said.
He thought about telling her to drive safely but abandoned that idea. The Trapnells could drive any way they pleased.
Aimee gave him a negligent salute. "Goodbye, deputy."
CHAPTER 2Gong-Gong's Bird Book
Thirty minutes later the yellow Lamborghini came barreling down the mile-long crushed oyster shell drive that led to White Oaks, the Trapnell family's Greek Revival plantation. The grass on either side was the deep, vibrant green of the felt on billiard tables. It was sumptuously thick and weed-free, kept that way by six full-time groundskeepers, who also tended to the formal gardens with their central water cascade, as well as the rare orchids and other plants in the greenhouses. High privet hedges screened the property from the curious gaze of anyone passing by on the road.
Aimee parked between her father's 1959 white Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith and a red Ford pickup truck belonging to her brother Trainor. A sticker on the truck's rust-eaten rear bumper said GAS, GRASS OR ASS. NOBODY RIDES FOR FREE. That charming sentiment perfectly summed up Trainor's attitude toward life.
Aimee glanced at the disreputable vehicle as she walked through the muggy heat and up the front steps. She passed through the white-columned portico and into the cool confines of the house, kept at an even seventy degrees year-round by a heating and air conditioning system that was a marvel of engineering.
Old houses tend to have a specific scent, resulting from a long accumulation of years of being lived in. It is a scent made up of dust and fireplace ashes and gently rotting fabric, as well as decades of breakfasts, lunches, and dinners. White Oaks smelled of nothing at all.
In the entry hall, Aimee slammed the item she'd gone to Buzzy's for down on a round ebony and ivory inlaid French Second Empire table. Its gilded, curved columns were shaped like bare-breasted women wearing Egyptian-looking headdresses. Her heels clicked on the black and white marble floor tiles as she veered diagonally, like a bishop moving across the squares of a chess board. She passed through an archway into a room the house's architect had designated as the gentlemen's parlor. There she found her brother Trainor lounging on a Le Corbusier sofa upholstered in black leather with a tubular steel frame.
The room's walls, ceiling, and floor were stark white, like a research laboratory. The sterile theme continued with the furnishings, which were mid-twentieth-century modern, a style better suited to a spaceship than a plantation house. The stark white setting formed a backdrop for the blazing colors of a dozen original works by Roy Lichtenstein, Jackson Pollock, and David Hockney. It was a tiny sampling of Blanton Trapnell's art collection, most of which was on loan to museums.
"I got his darn old Brunswick stew," Aimee informed her brother. She unbuckled her sandals and kicked them off with a sigh of relief. She sank into a powder blue Arne Jacobsen egg chair across from the sofa where Trainor sat and placed her stockinged feet in his lap.
"Rub my feet," she commanded.
He did so, with considerable skill. His first wife had been a reflexologist, and she'd taught him how to give a good massage.
Aimee sighed contentedly as Trainor dug his thumbs into her arches.
"You got it down to Buzzy's?" Trainor asked, meaning the stew.
Aimee wiggled her toes. "Yes. They don't sell the kind he likes at Publix anymore. Rub harder." She eyed her feet unhappily. "I think I might be getting bunions. If I get bunions, I'll be so ashamed. Waitresses get bunions."
"Nurses, too," Trainor said. "Anybody that's on their feet a lot is pretty much condemned to gettin' bunions. Stay off your feet. That's my advice."
Massage over, he pushed her feet roughly off his lap. He took a drink from a glass that was about half full of dark red liquid then set it down on the kidney-shaped Noguchi coffee table in front of him. Aimee immediately picked it up and drained the rest.
"This isn't bad. What is it?"
Trainor reached over the back of the sofa and retrieved a bottle, holding it out for her inspection. "Ch?teau Latour 1961. It goes for about fifteen thousand bucks a bottle. I checked online. I swiped this one from the wine cellar when Hillman wasn't looking. There's plenty more; he'll never miss it. Gong-Gong's got enough wine down there to float a battleship."
Hillman Parks was their father's ancient African-American butler. He was also rumored to be his first cousin. Gong-Gong was their father, Blanton Toombs Trapnell.
"I wish you wouldn't call him Gong-Gong. Call him Daddy like we always did. Gong-Gong sounds stupid," Aimee said.
"He likes to be called Gong-Gong; it's what his favorite grandchild calls him, Trainor said smugly, referring to his own six-year-old daughter, Jubilee.
Trainor was in the process of getting divorced from Jubilee's mother, a dog groomer from Milledgeville. She was his third wife and by far the most cunning. She'd managed to maneuver him into giving her the house in Atlanta's upscale Buckhead neighborhood, and the condominium in Longboat Key, Florida, as well as an allowance of twenty thousand dollars a month. Trainor had a team of lawyers battling her demands for more money. Upon advice of counsel, he was feigning poverty, hence the beat-up truck out front, which had rolled off the assembly line in 2002 and been hard-used ever since.
In the meantime, he had Jubilee for a month while Palmer, his soon-to-be-ex, was in Thailand, prowling the beaches and floating markets with three of her girlfriends. Trainor devoutly hoped that while she was there, she would die of food poisoning or be swept away by a tidal wave. In the meantime, he was making the most of it by using Jubilee's adoration of the flinty-eyed old man she called Gong-Gong to insinuate himself into the position of favorite child.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "White Oaks"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Jill Hand.
Excerpted by permission of Black Rose Writing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Title Page,
Copyright,
Recommended Reading,
Dedication,
Chapter 1: The Road Rocket,
Chapter 2 – Gong-Gong's Bird Book,
Chapter 3 – A Fine Old Southern Family,
Chapter 4 – The Princess's Collection,
Chapter 5 – Sideshow Royalty,
Chapter 6 – Into the Swamp,
Chapter 7 – A House in Mourning,
Chapter 8 – Huckle Buckle Beanstalk,
Chapter 9 – Petulia Puddlehopper,
Chapter 10 – Aimee's Happy Place,
Chapter 11 – An Old Acquaintance,
Chapter 12 – It's Not Hitler,
Chapter 13 – Bring Me My Gun,
Chapter 14 – It Came from Outer Space,
Chapter 15 – Poker Was Not Travis Montenay's Game,
Chapter 16 – The Criminal Mastermind,
Chapter 17 – Throw Me Something, Mister,
Chapter 18 – The Buckle on the Boot of Italy,
Chapter 19 – Marsh's Surprise,
Chapter 20 – Casa di Fuga,
Chapter 21 – Betrayal,
Chapter 22 – A Grave in the Sand,
Chapter 23 – A Name Like Tea,
Chapter 24 – Smith and Jones Again,
Chapter 25 – Telling Pork Pies,
Chapter 26 – Big Macs in the Eternal City,
Chapter 27 – Arrivederci, Roma,
Chapter 28 – Aimee's Confession,
Chapter 29 – Retirement,
Chapter 30 – The Extra Body,
Chapter 31 – What Peewee Pelletier Found,
Chapter 32 – The Golden West,
Chapter 33 – Geology,
Chapter 34 – How Hard Can it be to Defuse a Nuclear Weapon?,
Chapter 35 – Marsh's Romance,
Chapter 36 – Blow-up,
Chapter 37 – Two Funerals,
About the Author,
BRW Info,
Customer Reviews
