White Oaks by Jill Hand Sale Blitz and Giveaway!
White Oaks
by Jill Hand
Genre: Thriller
“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.
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Chapter 31 – What Peewee Pelletier Found
Earlier
that morning a man named Pewee Pelletier drove his pickup truck
through a gap in the tall privet hedge in front of White Oaks. A
discrete metal sign, white letters on a forest green background,
declared it to be the service entrance to the estate.
The truck’s tires crunched on the gravel roadbed as Pewee drove
past the kitchen wing, past the greenhouses and the water cascade,
water burbling over its stone steps, and down beyond the old slave
graveyard. He parked beside the white granite mausoleum. TRAPNELL was
carved in stern block letters in the triangular pediment above the
door.
It’s only seven-fifteen and already it’s hot as a crotch,
Peewee thought, squinting at the white disc that was the sun, blazing
mercilessly above the tangle of trees marking the beginning of the
swamp. He wanted to finish the day’s work early and go fishing.
He’d sweep out the mausoleum and get it looking shipshape for
Blanton Trapnell’s big sendoff. Then he’d swing by Holy Redeemer
and White Knoll cemeteries and cut the grass before knocking off for
the day. With any luck he’d be on the lake in his bass boat by
noon, along with a cold six-pack and a container of minnows from
Buzzy’s. Perhaps he’d get Gordon Buzzy to sell him a bottle of
Old Rocking Chair. He bit into the egg salad sandwich his wife had
made for him.
Chewing egg salad on white bread liberally smeared with mayonnaise he
looked at the mausoleum and snorted in contempt. The damn thing
probably cost more than his house. Rich people, he thought
resentfully. At least rich people died, just like everybody else.
Blanton Trapnell wouldn’t be driving his Rolls-Royce through town
anymore, not deigning to wave at Pewee when Peewee drove past going
the other way in his truck.
Peewee always waved when he encountered other drivers. It was the
neighborly thing to do, but Blanton Trapnell thought he was too good
to acknowledge people like Peewee who weren’t born with a silver
spoon in their mouth. Blanton Trapnell wasn’t neighborly. Now he
was dead and good riddance. Let’s see what Saint Peter would have
to say about his lack of neighborliness when he showed up at the
Pearly Gates. Peewee bit into the dill pickle his wife had packed
along with the sandwich. Pickle juice ran down through the beard
stubble on his chin as he smiled, thinking of Old Man Trapnell being
denied admission to Heaven and instead being cast, shrieking, into a
lake of fire.
He crumpled the pieces of wax paper the sandwich and the pickle had
been wrapped in and stuck them in the hip pocket of his green
Carhartt work pants. Then he took the key hanging from a cardboard
tag marked ‘Trapnell’ that Chapman had given him and went to
unlock the door.
Leaving the bronze door open to let it air out inside, Peewee got a
push broom and a pry bar out of the truck. He carried them into the
cool interior of the mausoleum and sniffed cautiously. It smelled
musty, like closed-up spaces always did. He also detected the
unmistakable stink of decomposition.
The decomp odor wasn’t coming from any of the corpses in the
crypts. Those were embalmed and would be as dry as old leather. It
was something freshly dead, most likely a possum or a raccoon that
had crawled through the ventilation shaft on the roof. Pewee figured
he’d find whatever it was lying in the shadows, paws-up. He drew on
a pair of rubber work gloves and patted the black plastic trash bag
tucked in his belt. Ms. Possum or Mr. Raccoon would be going into the
bag. He just hoped they weren’t too gooshy.
A stained glass window in the rear wall threw splashes of red, blue
and green over the stone floor. The window’s subject was utterly
inexplicable to Peewee: not Jesus or some saint but three naked men
being attacked by huge snakes. Peewee stared at it, trying to recall
which Bible story it could have come from. There were several
involving animals. There was Daniel in the lions’ den, and Jonah
and the whale, and one about a talking donkey that got pissed off
when its owner kept hitting it with a stick, but he couldn’t think
of anything involving snakes, other than the Garden of Eden thing.
“Rich people,” he muttered shaking his head.
He leaned the broom against the wall inside the door. He’d sweep
the floor before he locked up.
The double crypt where Blanton Trapnell’s coffin would go was on
the left wall, down near the snake window. Trapnell’s second wife
was in there and he would be going in beside her. The late Mrs.
Trapnell had been a terror. Peewee wouldn’t want to wait for the
last trumpet to blow while lying beside a bitch like Deirdre
Trapnell. Fortunately he wouldn’t have to. He’d be buried out at
Holy Redeemer with his wife and his mama and daddy and the rest of
his family. The Trapnells could keep their old mausoleum with its
bizarre naked-men-and-snakes window, thank you very much.
Pewee intended to use the pry bar to remove the granite slab known in
the funeral trade as a shutter from the front of the double crypt.
The shutter was inscribed with Blanton’s name and date of birth, as
well as his wife’s name and her dates of birth and death. A
stonecutter would add Blanton’s final date and it would go back in
place and be sealed, after his bronze casket went in.
The casket was a model called the Chancellor made by the Batesville
Casket Company. It cost $25,000. It had a variety of high-end
features, including a rounded glass seal, bronze swing-bar handles,
fully adjustable inner bed with head and foot velvet pillows and
matching velvet blanket and a hidden locking mechanism.
Blanton’s purchase of the most expensive casket among those on
display in Chapman’s showroom had been a red letter day for Lycott
and Joelle Chapman and their two children. The family celebrated by
taking a trip to Jekyll Island, where they’d gone to a water park.
Peewee walked down the center aisle, pausing to kick at a drift of
leaves that must have blown in under the door. As he kicked at the
leaves, scattering them, his work boot came in contact with something
unyielding. He looked down to see what it was and found it was a
foot, clad in a narrow, polished black shoe.
The pry bar hit the stone floor with a clatter as Peewee turned tail
and ran.
Jill Hand is a member of the Horror Writers Association and International Thriller Writers. Her Southern Gothic novel, White Oaks is available on Amazon and from the publisher, Black Rose Writing.
Advance readers called it a fast-paced, hilarious account of three siblings who are competing for their father's forty-billion-dollar fortune while trying to prevent the destruction of Planet Earth.
Diane Donovan, senior reviewer from Midwest Book Review praised White Oaks, calling it, "an unusually multifaceted tale that holds the ability to prompt laughter from thriller-style tension."
Jill Hand's novel, Rosina and the Travel Agency, and The Blue Horse, a novella, follow the adventures of a young woman rescued from a railway accident in 1889 by a twenty-fourth-century enterprise in the business of time travel tourism.
A $20 Amazon gift card and a Kindle version of the book
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