In NAGLER’S SECRET, the work-in-progress Book six of the Frank Nagler Mystery series, Ironton, N.J. Detective Frank Nagler and others have been examining an old farm house that could be the headquarters of a shadowy outfit called Sunshine Farms.
In this scene Nagler stayed behind to look for something when two people enter the building,. He is on the second floor and they entered the front door, a floor below.
The idea is this scene is to use silence to create atmosphere and tension, and then with sound, bring the scene to a conclusion.
The multi award-winning Frank Nagler Mysteries are available in ebook, paperback and audiobook at leading online book sellers and at Book & Puppet, Easton, Pa.
Book 5, DRAGONY RISING, was recently named a Distinguished Favorite in the 2023 Big NYC Book Awards.
The scene:
He put on rubber gloves and with his pocketknife spun the eyehook from the wall and placed it and the footlong piece of frayed hemp rope in an evidence bag.
The voices from below startled him.
“Got company,” Nagler texted Ramirez.
Below, the pair had stopped talking.
With concentrated, squinting eyes he followed their hollow footsteps on the bare wooden floors. They first walked together to the room to the right of the doorway, a parlor that contained one chair and some boxes; the door to the room to the left had been closed.
It scraped open.
The room must have been empty. They didn’t enter. One of them sneezed. He imagined the other’s hard warning face.
He shook his head. Do they think I don’t know they are here? Why are they sneaking around?
Nagler felt his damaged left ankle begin to lock from standing still.
The only way to relieve the pressure was to step or walk; he raised his heel and slowly turned the foot on its ball, hoping the floor would not creak.
In his pocket, his phone pinged.
It was Ramirez: “On our way back. 10 min.”
They didn’t hear that.
Downstairs the pair separated.
While footsteps crossed to the rear of the house where he and Calista found Dwayne hanging, the creak of dry, stuck doors crept up through the thin, wooden walls.
A voice called from the rear of the house, excited but unintelligible. Quick steps toward the voice. Their clomping steps said they were both in rooms he had not examined.
What the hell are they doing? And why didn’t we see them before?
Nagler shook his head and dropped his chin to his collarbone.
They have to know I’m here, so what’s taking them so long?
“Enough of this,” he muttered.
He guessed that he had about thirty seconds before they were climbing the stairs if they heard his noise.
He stepped from the cubicle and kicked opened the door across the narrow hallway, left it open, and in three steps, entered the first door on the right side of the hallways. It stuck and opened with a pop.
Good. They had to have heard that.
Inside, he held the latch open and leaned his shoulder on the door frame.
The stairs creaked under each step; boots kicked the risers until all the foot sounds were at the landing.
They separated; doors on the opposite hall grumbled open.
When steps paused in front of the door to the room here he stood, with gun drawn Nagler pulled open the door and yanked in the intruder by his collar.
“What the …”
Nagler shoved the stunned man and pressed his face into the opposite door.
The other man stepped into the landing with a drawn handgun.
“Morrison?”
“You don’t want to do this, Frank,” Sgt. Jack Morrison said, squaring his posture.
“Do what? Shoot your friend and then shoot you? What the fuck are you doing, Morrison?”
“You need to walk away from this, Frank. It’s gonna get bad for you.”
“Not as bad as it’s gonna get for you,” Nagler said as he turned and in two steps pressed the barrel of his weapon to Morrison’s forehead, pushing the shorter man to the stair railing.
“Hey, Frank!… what the fuck?”
Downstairs the front door was slammed open.
“Frank!” Ramirez yelled.
“Upstairs. Got a couple friends. Tell Calista to stay downstairs.”
“Give it up, son,” Nagler said, glaring as he pulled back his weapon.
“Jesus, Captain, he was going to shoot me.”
“I doubt that,” Ramirez said as she nodded to Nagler and stepped off the stairs behind Morrison. “Let me have it,” and reached a hand out for Morrison’s weapon.
Instead of releasing the weapon, Morrison flinched.
Ramirez dropped him to the floor and pressed a foot onto his wrist.
“Push it away,” she ordered.
His fingers released the handle and with what effort he could muster from his crushed hand, gave up the gun.
Stand with the theater kids as they stand up to censors
Cheers to some Fort Wayne, Indiana high school thespians who defied religious censors and the local school board, which banned the play, by performing it on their own outside the school.
The play featured roles of interchangeable sexuality and clearly expressed the world view of these kids which features tolerance, diversity and equality.
They found community support and even some professional help to stage the play.
And the world did not stop spinning.
Not news, but never ending.
In the mid-1980s I was working at the Waterville, Maine Sentinel when in the nearby town of Skowhegan this scenario of an outraged minority Christian community trying to censor a play was performed.
But unlike the Fort Wayne school board, the Skowhegan Board of Education approved the performance after a marathon board meeting that attracted nearly 600 visitors.
It was a dramatic night of community and a fun night of newspapering in the pre-Internet, pre-cell phone, pre-computer days of the business.
Skowhegan is a mill town that has been a business and community center for about three centuries. It is perched at the modern intersection of U.S. Routes 201 and 2 along the Kennebec River.
Benedict Arnold had to drag his heavy bateau over the tall Skowhegan falls on his way north to Quebec City, Canada where he was defeated in an epic Revolutionary War battle.
It was also the home of U.S. Sen. Margaret Chase Smith whose 1950 Declaration of Conscious pulled the first piece out of the Zenga tower of lies and conspiracies built by Sen. Joe McCarthy.
The play in question was called “When the Lord Come to Sand Mountain” by Romulus Linney. It was a companion to another short play about the lives and tall tales told by Appalachian Mountain folks.
In the play Jesus and Saint Peter are travelling the mountains on sort of a fact-finding mission.
Jesus engages a man in a contest of tall tales, each one stretching the truth evermore.
The last tale Jesus tells is about a carpenter named Joseph and is a parable that sounds suspiciously like the Golden Rule: Treat others as you wish to be treated.
The “why” of the play was to show Jesus seeking the story of his father and how that story offered The Lord the strength and knowledge to continue his mission of salvation.
The fundamentalists objected to the play because it was not exactly Biblical and contained many innuendoes and double-entendres that suggested that there was a lot of “be-getting” going on in those hills, in other words, folks being folks.
So the climax of the debate took place at the school theater and offered about 80 people the chance to speak for 3 minutes.
Yeah, they started early.
The newspaper side of this begins here.
Our reporter Marie Howard was on the scene at the high school. Our only communication devise was a pay phone in the lobby.
The Sentinel at the time published four local editions.
The first went to northwest towns and the second went to Skowhegan.
We were prepared to send the first edition out with a story that said the vote as still being taken.
But we had to have the vote for the Skowhegan edition.
As was the practice, we wrote the story from the bottom, with background in a file and Marie’s life from the scene reporting added about every 20 minutes.
We had to have the decision by 11:15 p.m. to make deadline for the second edition.
About 10:50 p.m. she calls.
This is it, we thought.
No. They were taking a break for 5 or 6 minutes.
The conversation went something like this:
Marie: They’re taking a break.
Me: They can’t. Don’t they know we’re on deadline? Get back in there and tell Betsy (the school board president) to get that meeting started again.
Marie: Laughing.
In the end, the board unanimously approved the performance. Betsy told the church folks that they had made a valid point, but that their right to hold that opinion was no greater than the right of the students to perform the play, and the right of the school district to support free speech.
She basically said, if ya don’t like the play, don’t go watch it.
This tale ends with the Skowhegan kids performing the play at a statewide theater competition.
That was not unusual. Skowhegan had a reputation for challenging, innovative
productions that won many awards.
What was interesting about that night was the pre-performance conversation at dinner. The air in the restaurant buzzed with talk of the Skowhegan play and the fight to perform it.
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