The reason why I haven't been posting here a lot is because all my attention has been diverted to my novel. :o So here is an excerpt. I'm currently on page 35. (I was much farther along but my idiot brother closed the document with out saving it. Thus teaching me that I should save as I go along, even on my own computer.)

It's about a woman who finds a box that her mother left behind and discovers the secret about why her father left and why he is coming back.

It's a thriller/suspense novel.

Hope you enjoy. :] It's only a first draft. I haven't even read it yet and it will probably completely different after the rewrite.


FIRST DRAFT.

CHAPTER ONE
1
She sat on the porch of her mother’s house, the house where she and her sisters had grown up. The house where they lived as a family, although a broken one, was now the same house where she raised her own family. A mug of coffee was clasped between her hands as she stared at the military ammunitions box. The lock was gleaming in spaces where corrosion had not yet reached.

She knew the key on her necklace matched the lock. Afraid of the secrets her mother had left, still turning like gears in a clock in the years since her death. How could she open this when unwanted memories would sprout from her mind and take over her heart and cast it away into a dark void? A box that was full of a disaster known as depression. Every thing about it assaulted her. The fraying rope handles and the splintered dry wood. Knots were placed above a large crack and it looked like a sickening grin.

It was an icon, more desolate, than that of Pandora’s curiosity.


With finality she sat the mug of coffee down on the table a little harder than she meant, spilling some of the milk chocolate liquid on her hand. She wiped it off on her jeans with out thinking.

That morning, before she woke Kevin, was the morning she had decided to clean out the garden shed. She thought it would make painful memories; and it did. She remembered her mother sitting at her flowerbeds with her little garden shovel in her hand. Packs of seeds that were lying around in the grass. Some with tops ripped off and the wind carrying away the scraps of paper like leaves in fall. The sun hat tilted back on her head and her light brown hair wavering in the soft spring breeze. The flannel shirt she loved to wear in those early cool Pennsylvania months to keep back the chill in the spring wind.

That was a good one. A nice serene memory that made her feel warm, as if she were wrapped in her mother’s flannel shirt. However, it brought up one that wasn’t so serene.

She remembered how her mother used to bitch if the weatherman was wrong about the frost. And how she could bitch! She’d go on and on about her wasted money in the green house and how her poor plants died.

That one was a good one too. A funny one that made her laugh until tears were sitting in her eyes.

The tears didn’t fall until she found the box in the corner of the shed. It had been hidden under a bag of fertilizer that looked ten years old. Taped to the top of the box was a yellowed envelope with her name on it, written in her mother’s hand writing, which shocked her at first. All she could look at were the neat cursive characters that flowed into the letters that formed her name.

Then she spotted the ammunitions box. She remembered her father coming home late one night. She had been sick and her mother was holding her on the couch as they watched one of those mystery shows on the TV. She couldn’t remember just what it was about. Her father came in carrying three boxes stacked on top of each other. His large, calloused hands grasping the thick black cord handles of the bottom box.

He had said he got them from a military base that was giving them out for free because they were closing down. She didn’t believe him and they fought. They didn’t stop until she looked at her ten year old daughter as she started to cry and then cough. She picked her up, patted her back, and took her to her bedroom.

Her mother slept in her room that night cradling her and making shushing sounds to quiet her. How she had loved that. She felt safe, like she was going to get over her sickness that night. Of course, she didn’t. The cold lingered for a few days later.

That wasn’t a good memory and the tears came out with a specific furiousity. How she hated her father! He wasn’t even a father, really. He would work and bring home what was needed but he never payed attention to his children. Never read them stories at night and never looked at them. She hated him for giving her mother so much stress and pain.


Cleaning the garden shed had fled her mind and now all her focus was gathered on the ammunitions box and the letter. The box was calling to her and it was a voice she wished she could resist. Everything about it was screaming at her. The cracked wood and knots in the grain. The dust that settled on it and the lock. Especially the lock.

Now the box sat where she left it, unopened and still locked. She was going to read the letter again. She snagged the paper off the table, the texture already imprinted in her brain from the previous readings. Every time she read it, she felt like she was hoarding up every word her mother had wrote.


"Alice,

I don’t want to write this. It is just one of those things I have to do. I don’t want to come
off as cliché by saying this but, if you are reading this I’m definitely dead. I could never give you what is in that box while I’m still alive. It’s going to hurt you and hurt you bad.

Don’t worry. This is all going to make sense. I’m writing this in 2003. Its June and the weather is doing great for my plants. You saw them already. You brought Kevin with you when you visited a week before. It’s still a while till Christmas and I have thought of giving you this as a present. Then I thought, who would want something like this as a present? I’d rather have you read what is in there when I’m gone rather than seeing the hurt on your face.

You’ll understand why I didn’t tell you anything. It wasn’t something that I could just blurt out or tell you on the phone. I know you aren’t going to enjoy this and I know you are going to cry but please don’t cry. I hate seeing my little girl cry. I’m only saying one thing about what is in the box.

It’s about your father. The horrible man who wasn’t a father. Or even a husband. Just know part of the things you know are lies and only half truths. I felt horrible for lying to you girls but I had to do it. You’ll understand.

However, the most important thing about this is that it is a warning. You’ll figure it all out. You’re a smart girl.

Above all else, I love you. I love all three of you. That is the important thing. I believe that our love for each other will help the three of you through all this. Make sure your sisters read everything too. They deserve to know as much as you do.

I love you,
Mom.


The letter wasn’t long at all and it was easy to tell that she was hurrying as she wrote it. Her mother was left handed and never smudged anything she wrote in a letter. She probably wanted all this out as fast as possible. A few words weren’t even legible. But she had been able to read her mother’s hand writing as easy as she had been able to read her own.

She wiped the tears from her eyes with her left hand. Every time she cried she wiped her tears with her left hand because that was her mother’s smart hand and always the first to come smooth the tears away.

Setting down the note, she pulled the chain, that held the key, out from her blouse. Alice bent forward and looked at the key hole. Her hand shook as she inched it towards the ammunitions box and as she did so she heard the beeping of Kevin’s school bus backing up. She cursed under her breath and wiped her eyes again and put the key back where it belonged under her shirt. Alice lifted the box and hauled it to the far side of the porch.

She jogged through the house to meet her son at the front door.