“Murder?” Excerpt 3 from “The G.O.D. Journal,” a novel by Jeff Posey

Chapter 1, Part 3, from The G.O.D. Journal: a search for gold , a novel by Jeff Posey. Read from the beginning here.

From [St. Louis] he spent four slow days hitchhiking back to Dallas wondering how close the police were to his tail. But he figured hitchhiking made him far less visible than buying tickets for any kind of public transportation, or renting a car. And nobody would suspect he would go back to Dallas. He hoped. Once there, he needed wheels, so he got mildly drunk in a bar and bought an old pickup truck from a Mexican laborer. The man handed Baxter the signed title, the buyer information empty. Baxter gave him $700 cash. Made the man so happy, Baxter thought he would pass out. He drove the truck straight to a mechanic he knew by reputation on the south side of the river. Bad part of town.

“What do you want?” the mechanic asked, avoiding eye contact, wiping his hands with a greasy rag.

“I want it to look just like it does now. But I want all the mechanical parts to be in top shape.”

The mechanic nodded. “So you want it to look like crap on the outside but not be crap on the inside.”

“Exactly,” Baxter said.

“How much money you got?”

Baxter didn’t know how much to spend. Didn’t care. He just wanted transportation that wouldn’t attract attention and wouldn’t break down. “Two grand?” he asked.

The mechanic shrugged. He examined the truck for ten minutes then shook his head. “Four or five grand. It needs a lot.” He cited a long list.

Baxter nodded without listening. He felt awful. Strung out from the road, from drinking at the bar, from replaying over and over in his mind what happened with his wife. Constantly worried about the cops. He refused to be caught. Baxter interrupted the mechanic. “Just do it,” he said, giving him a thousand as down payment. He just wanted to drive away. Back to JAB. Back to Pagosa Springs.

As the mechanic did his magic, Baxter crashed in a nearby no-tell motel. He bought newspapers and watched local television news, but he didn’t see anything. No mention of Pam’s death. Or any manhunt for Tom Oley. Had they stopped looking for him? Or was it so routine it didn’t warrant making the news? It didn’t matter. He left evidence all over what appeared to be a murder scene. No way they would let him go without a chase. He had no choice. He had to evaporate.

Three nerve-wracking days later and another four thousand dollars poorer, he drove his mechanically sound but still ugly blue GM pickup truck across the staked plains of Texas and the northeast corner of New Mexico into Pagosa Springs, Colorado. Beyond exhausted, his mind as sour as his mouth and armpits, he turned left just across the river and coasted down Hermosa Street. To the big house on a triple lot, the river sluicing through the back yard. The old Baxter house, a historical marker out front that said so. He remembered it with a sudden shiver. The memory of his grandfather still filled it. And an old woman. His grandmother? That didn’t seem right. Great-aunt, maybe. They weren’t mean to him, though she was a stern, unhappy woman and he never felt good enough around her. But the old man laughed a lot. Let Baxter play in the river. Caught trout big enough to feed them all. Said that’s how you measure a rich man—the fish you can catch from your own back yard.

But the old man died. He remembered the funeral. The graveyard not far from town. And the old woman, she couldn’t deal with Baxter as a boy and made him stay in his room. Then his father came back. Without his mother, who he never knew. His father yelled a lot. Drank a lot. Locked Baxter in the basement a lot. Visited Baxter with his leather belt doubled in his hand a lot. Baxter did everything he could think of to get out of that basement and away from his father, from Pagosa Springs, from his life. Spent hours gouging a hole through concrete. Wore the nails off his fingers. Made mud of the dust with his blood. He hated being trapped. That’s why he wouldn’t stay and face the police after his wife’s death. He would never be trapped like that again. He thought he would die alone in that basement. After the authorities showed up, he spent the rest of his life as a Baxter in foster homes, never good ones, just run-down people living in run-down houses who needed the foster money.

The only thing that saved him were daydreams of becoming someone else. Graveyards and obituaries fascinated him. He would read them and imagine he became the people who had died, only he would keep living for them. Take their lives and leave his miserable life behind. Bury Baxter and everything about it in a deep, dark basement and never let it out again.

He began planning a way out during his freshman year in high school. Studied everything having to do with legal identity and how to change it. Found the name of a boy born on his birthday who died young in a dwindling family line of rich Texas merchants and the day after he graduated from high school he took the boy’s name, Tom Oley, and with it a scholarship to any Texas university. He never looked back. Almost never. Sometimes he would think about the journal and want to go back for it. Before someone else found it. But his father lived in the house for a decade after he disappeared into the ghost of Tom Oley. He started doing well in business and met Pam’s father who pressured them into marriage. He became trapped in a more subtle way. And never went back to look for the journal.

Now he sat idling outside the big abandoned house, looming brown and weather-stained behind tall blue spruce trees, a weather-beaten for-sale sign leaning in the front yard. He’d looked it up a year ago, thought about buying the place, but the owners were shockingly proud of it: $3.5 million. Laughable. That’s why it stood derelict. It made him grin, though. His father had sold it for a mere $72,000 before he died, the same amount of cash Baxter had to reenter his old identity.

At the moment, he couldn’t do anything. Too early. People walked the street. And he was beat. After a few hours’ sleep, he would come back. Take a look inside. See if he could find that secret place behind the boards in the attic. Maybe his grandfather had left the JAB journal there. Maybe he could piece something together from it and find the original JAB’s secret, his family treasure. Visit the history museum. Maybe the graveyard. Anything, he thought, to reconstruct himself. His original self. To find something real he could hold onto. Everything about Tom Oley had been a lie. He had built for himself a different kind of basement. It was time to claw his way out again.

He took a room at the old San Juan Motel east of the river and tried to sleep, but his grainy eyes kept opening and staring at the ceiling. After midnight he took a flashlight and a few tools—hammer, big flat-head screwdriver, his knife—and walked to Hermosa Street. It seemed quiet. So he ducked to the back of the old house and leaned his shoulder into the back door, bile creeping up his throat from his stomach. The roots of the place haunted him, a feeling of dread emanated from the basement.

Breaking in was easy. Too easy. Others had obviously been first. He shined the flashlight around, taking care not to cross windows in case a stray set of eyeballs became suspicious and reported him. He crept through every room except the basement. He would not go down there. Imagined filling it with dirt and rocks, or concrete. Or burning the house, embers and ashes caving into the hole. He hated that basement.

His grandfather’s room still had the faint smell of cigars, and he flashed a memory of his grandfather smoking on the back porch, grinning over a platter with a single gutted trout on it. He made his way to the attic, which baffled him. He didn’t remember it well. The slanting walls, the wooden slates. It had been cleaned out. Nothing but decaying, empty cardboard boxes. He tried various places that looked vaguely as he remembered where his grandfather slid away a board and hid the journal. But nothing.

After a while, he calmed himself and sat in the darkness, dim moonlight spilling in through dirt-filmed windows and he remembered. His grandfather reaching into a black opening, a window to his left. There were three windows. Baxter tried the first two. Nothing. Then on the third, the wood sounded different when he rapped his knuckles against it. He tapped it with his hammer. Found a crack and put in his flathead screwdriver, then hammered it like a chisel. A board fell away with a clatter that made his heart leap into his acid-burned throat. Behind the board he saw a small opening. He shined the light and craned his head, and there at the bottom it sat. He reached in and pulled it out. JAB burned black on the cracked leather. The pages as brittle as his birth certificate, but intact. Behind the front cover, he found a hand-scrawled note. “Glad you found it, Jabber.” That’s what his grandfather called him. He’d forgotten. Jabber. That’s me.

For the first time in decades, he smiled as a Baxter.

 

Short description for The G.O.D. Journal: After he accidentally kills his wife, Baxter runs. Hiding in his derelict boyhood home in Pagosa Springs, Colorado, he discovers a journal that leads to a treasure of gold. With the guiding hand of a deranged hunter and Wall Street financier, Baxter discovers true gold is concealed in the heart of a woman who helps him search for an Anasazi pictograph that is key to his family treasure. Read the full description….

Hot Water Press publications scheduled for 2013: Annie and the Second Anasazi (a trilogy set in the year 2054), and Soo Potter (an Anasazi historical novel). To find out when they’re available, sign up for notification by email here.