District Attorney Tommy Branscum is running for Governor of Vermont. Scion of a prominent family steeped in law and politics, Milford’s native son seeks the prize that has long eluded his forebears. Matt Matheny has returned to his childhood home of Milford seeking to restart a life set adrift by the stillbirth of his only child and the unexpected death of his wife Liz just months later.
Two lives headed in opposite directions. Yet they share in common an event occurring thirty years ago in the parking lot of the Milford Police Department. Tommy and Matt are the only living witnesses to the murder of Caroline Dawson, an innocent child from the wrong side of the tracks. What happened on that summer night has long been forgotten by most in the small community. But not by Caroline’s killer, her grieving parents, a parish priest, and a malevolent family patriarch. And not by a boy of ten unable to fully comprehend what he saw from a darkened alley.
Now, thirty years older and with Marianne Carpenter by his side, Matt makes a shocking discovery that rocks Milford, shakes Vermont’s power structure to its core and threatens their lives.
State of Redemption is a compelling novel by Richard McKeown that is part crime thriller and part political intrigue. It tells a story of how the privileged and the poor, the innocent and the guilty, and the good and the evil finally receive the justice they deserve. And the freedom they need.
Targeted Age Group:: 18 and over
What Inspired You to Write Your Book?
As a child, I lived in a quintessential small Vermont town. It was a great place to be a boy! I recall there being a murder behind City Hall and while I don't remember all the details, it was alarming because things like that NEVER happened in my town. I used that event to construct a story of an 'assault gone bad' resulting in the killing of a 15-year-old girl that was covered up through a conspiracy of silence.
How Did You Come up With Your Characters?
The characters in State of Redemption were developed pretty much out of whole cloth. I took some traits of people I knew and know and applied them to key characters in terms of appearance, personality, ethical standards, etc. Their development became a process through their personalities and character evolved and sometimes changed based on what they had developed into. In other words, some scenes and dialogue were changed along the way to be consistent with how I had previously developed them.
Book Sample
Excerpt
State of Redemption
Chapters 1-3
Chapter One
Gusts of cold air chilled Matt Matheny every time a patron came in or went out of Checkers. He needed his parka after all. Sitting alone and looking out the diner’s wide window, Matt read the digital clock and thermometer on the Vermont Bank & Trust building across Main.
33° / 9:43
Matt was skeptical. Back in South Carolina, such thermometers exaggerated temps by five to ten degrees. Matt assumed the same was true in Milford judging by the chill he could not shake. Exaggerated or not, he needed his parka.
Puffy white clouds were rising beyond the bank building. Vermont was in the middle of its sugaring season when sap from maple trees is boiled into sweet syrup. The process that begins in late February and continues into April fills the crisp air with a distinct sweet-smelling aroma. It signals that winter's end is approaching and spring will arrive after all. Maybe not on the calendar’s schedule, but within weeks thereafter. Some years three to four weeks. Other years, six or seven.
Matt felt old. He didn’t recall being so mesmerized by sweet – smelling tree sap as a ten-year-old living just a few blocks away. Then sap, buckets of it, were poured into a large plastic tank fastened to a crude wood wagon he and his friends toted from tree to tree. Fifteen cents a gallon was the going rate for sap paid by a handful of neighborhood syrup makers. Which amounted to a nickel a gallon split among the three boys it would take to haul a full tank. Plus, a gallon of syrup for the boys’ families at the end of the season. Ben Harmon added that perk one year, much to the consternation of his competitors who nonetheless matched it.
The rising wisps of sap steam and their aroma were not the only thing Matt found familiar all these years later. Green Mountain Lanes was still tucked into the south end of the North Main Shopping Center across the way. The Grand Union, then the centerpiece of the line of stores, was now a flea market. And what was Newsome’s Shoes, half of it anyway, now housed a tattoo parlor, a development Matt noted with irritation. The other half was vacant. That the shopping center was still there indicated Milford had changed surprisingly little since his family moved South when he was ten. Things looked smaller now, but familiar.
The Grand Union and Newsome’s Shoes had long since closed, but not Checkers. The place seemed to be in a time warp. Its silver airstream design looked the same now as it had when the pull-behind trailers were in vogue. And still a gravel parking lot. Better traction than pavement in the winter.
On each table next to the napkin dispensers were black and red wooden checkers pieces chipped and faded by age and use. From the looks of them, they could well be the same pieces Matt used when playing a game of checkers with his sister at the tables. Then as now, they were painted black and white in the fashion of checkerboards. Checkers, the game and the diner, had not and would not change much any time soon. Which Matt found gratifying.
Driving around the small railroad town Matt found most old landmarks, Townley Park at the center of town, the train depot, the Courthouse, and aptly named Church Street intact. Matt found the sameness comforting. After the changes he’d been through, sameness was a good thing.
“How ‘bout a warm-up?” “Uh, yes. Sure. Thanks.”
Matt’s nostalgic trip back in time was interrupted by a matronly, plumpish waitress.
“I’ll drink it as long as you keep bringing it, ma’am,” he said. The waitress smiled as she poured.
“‘Ma’am’. Don’t hear that very often,” she said, filling Matt’s mug to a precise half-inch from the top. “Where are you from?”
“Where am I from or where have I been?”
She furrowed her brow, unsure of Matt’s meaning.
“I guess you could say I’m from here. But I’ve been gone a
while,” he said. “Why?”
“Not too many people around here that talk like that. Ma’am, I
mean,” she said. “With that accent, you must be from Mississippi or Alabama or somewhere down there,” she said.
“South Carolina,” Matt said. “Anderson, South Carolina,” he said, as though a career waitress at a Vermont diner would know, much less care where Anderson, South Carolina was.
“My name is Matt Matheny, by the way,” he said, his hands wrapped around the warm coffee mug.
“My name’s Paulette.”
“I see that,” said Matt with a nod at her nametag. “Do you have a last name?”
“Bouchard. Paulette Bouchard,” she said. Sitting down across from Matt in the nearly empty diner, she kept an eye on its lone remaining customer in addition to Matt. Checkers cleared out by nine most mornings during the week.
“That sounds familiar,” he said. “Bouchard, I mean,” he quickly added, afraid Paulette might think he was being a bit too familiar.
“It should,” Paulette said. “It’s like Smith or Jones up here.”
“I went to grade school with a Peter Bouchard. Over on Franklin Street,” he said. “First, second, third and fourth grades. Reddish hair and Coke bottle glasses.”
“He’s my nephew. Or was,” Paulette said. “Drowned out on the lake about twenty years ago. Ice fishing, the idiot. Drove his car too far out onto the ice too late in the season and it fell in,” Paulette said, pouring herself a cup of coffee. “Ought not slander the dead, I suppose. Especially a relative. But too much beer and too little sense don’t mix well. Not only killed him. Killed my brother-in-law, his father. Shot himself a year to the day later.”
Matt watched as Paulette poured a package of creamer into the other mug on the table and stirred. Her hair had once been reddish, too, he guessed. Now it was mostly gray and pulled up in a bun. Matt correctly guessed she’d worn it the same way thirty years ago. Or longer.
“Wow. That’s…terrible,” he said, somewhat awkwardly. “I’m sorry.”
“Well, you can’t save people from themselves,” Paulette said with a long sigh. “So, what brings you back to this little old outpost?”
Matt’s return to Milford was not so much a step back in time as it was an attempt to restart what had been a good life. Albeit one set adrift and languishing at its midpoint. The sale of Matt’s tech start-up had turned a handsome profit that allowed him and Liz to live comfortably. Extravagance was neither’s style even if a measure of it was affordable. The only extravagance they planned to allow themselves was travel. Which they were making plans to do when they learned Liz was, finally, expecting. Travel was put on hold, then abandoned altogether when their first child was stillborn. Eight months later they learned Liz’s lingering cough was more than an irritation. It was terminal.
Liz’s death was painfully cruel but mercifully quick. Barely four months after their grim sit down with her doctor, Matt received visitors, picked out a casket, selected hymns and listened numbly to a preacher without really hearing a word. People marveled at his strength in the face of such tragic loss. Inspirational they called it. Less charitable souls whispered about his lack of emotion and what it surely meant about his feelings toward his Liz, God rest her soul.
At his sister’s insistence, Matt went to see a psychiatric therapist. Sis had been seeing her for eight years and told Matt, “She’s done wonders for me!” Knowing his sister, Matt wondered about that claim. Yet he went to see the lady out of courtesy to his only sibling more than anything else.
The therapist warned of the sure-to-come post-traumatic-stress- syndrome. Matt promised to call the lady once trauma came calling. Along with a prescription for antidepressants, she gave him a slick business card, the first one he’d ever seen with a photo of its bearer and three cats. He never did fill the prescription. He did tack the business card to the fridge to amuse himself more than anything else. Matt was not one to put much stock in anyone based on a business card, impressive though this one was with a color picture and cats.
Nor had Matt ever put much stock in the therapy profession. His opinion was more than a few therapists had a more compelling business interest in treating than curing. Just once he wanted to hear one say, “It’s time to quit making progress and get better!” It was an opinion Matt kept to himself lest he be accused of insensitivity. And if one wanted a quick trip to social purgatory in the current age, insensitivity was the fastest way to get there.
Matt hoped his return to Milford would help him escape the unpleasantness of the loss of his wife and child. Maybe being back where he started life would help him sort through where he was and where to take it from here. “What you have experienced is tragic, Matt. But it is not an ending unless you let it become one.”
Matt thought the words of the therapist sounded like the old saw, “Today is the first day of the rest of your life.” But the part about “unless you let it become one” stuck with him. If the longevity of his grandparents and parents were any indication, Matt had as many years ahead of him as the forty behind him.
Sight unseen, he leased one of the old houses on Sunset, a steep east-west street in Milford. More than a few homes were over a hundred years old, Matt’s dark brick rental among them. Houses lined both sides of Sunset, shaded by Vermont’s maples tapped for sap in spring and photographed by tourists in fall.
It was while relaxing on the front porch the week he moved in that Matt had the nagging feeling he’d been in the old house before. Its wide porch had a familiar look and feel. The view across the front lawn took him back in time like a vaguely familiar scene, song or scent will. The sidewalk was relatively new, but the large maples were decidedly not. The sidewalk took a slight diversion toward the street to avoid exposed roots of the trees. Matt supposed the same roots had been the demise of the original sidewalk.
Gently rocking in the cool of the evening, Matt caught a glimpse of a bagged, dirty rolled-up newspaper in the bushes. Then it struck him. He had been on this porch before. And on the porch of the house to his left, and the house to his right. Several times. Not in the quiet of the evening, but in the still of the predawn. His house was on a morning paper route he covered for a couple of weeks when he was a boy. Matt had his own route back then but covered this neighborhood a time or two when its regular carrier went on family vacations. Times change, he thought with some melancholy. Back then there was no tossing a rolled up, bagged newspaper from a passing car. It was a time when paperboys walked the neighborhood, bright yellow canvas bags full of newspapers hanging from a shoulder strap. Newspapers went inside porch mailboxes. Or placed inside screen doors. Certainly not tossed on lawns. Or in bushes.
Matt looked over his shoulder to see if his porch still had a mailbox. It did. He noted with relief that Sunset Street was not yet littered with street-side newspaper boxes. Matt’s relief was tempered by the realization there wasn’t much need for paperboys since newspapers themselves were fast becoming extinct. To say nothing of paperboys.
So it was that four days after his return to Milford Matt found himself shivering across from Paulette Bouchard. In fifteen minutes, he pretty much told the waitress his life story up to that point.
“And that’s about all there is to me,” Matt said.
“I doubt that,” said Paulette as she slid out of the booth. “And let me warn you about your neighbor across the street. Flo Carpenter. That woman will know everything you do, everything you say, and everywhere you go. She’ll probably know everything you think, too. And she won’t hesitate to let everyone else know everything you do, everything you say, everywhere you go and everything you think,” she warned. “You may not much care, but you need to know. Most people know when someone moves into town. Especially someone with an accent and who is easy on the eyes.”
Matt blushed at Paulette’s observation.
“Thanks for the warning. And for the compliment,” he said. “At least I’ll take it as a compliment.”
“I’m just telling you, so you’ll know,” Paulette said. “You don’t strike me as the sort who burns the candle at both ends. You do strike me as someone who values your privacy.”
“That’s fair. And accurate. And based on just a fifteen-minute conversation,” Matt said. “You ought to be a therapist.”
They both laughed. Standing up, Matt downed what was left in his mug and slipped a twenty-dollar bill under the edge of his saucer.
“I enjoyed the conversation. Very much.”
Paulette’s eyes widened as she looked down at the twenty.
“Our coffee is good but it’s not that good,” she said. “Let me get
your change. At least some change.”
Matt waved her off.
“Hush. Just mark it up as your counseling fee,” he said. “A dollar
a minute sounds reasonable to me. The advice about my neighbor alone is worth more than that,” said Matt.
“Well, I hope. And you let me know if there is anything you need,” said Paulette, before quickly adding “And I mean that in a proper way.”
Matt looked at her and grinned.
“I know you do. I’ll be back. Probably about the same time tomorrow.”
“I’ll be here,” said Paulette.
Chapter Two
Michael Hewes was ten minutes late and didn’t apologize, even insincerely, as he barged into the jury deliberation room, serving as a conference room on this occasion. Michael shook rain residue off his umbrella before slinging his backpack onto the polished cherry table. He didn’t even have the grace to shake hands with the trio seated at the table before plopping down in a well-padded chair. Michael rummaged through the backpack for a legal pad as Tommy Branscum attempted to introduce Michael to his father and namesake T. Bentley Branscum, III, and Tommy’s legal assistant, Ryan Bond. Michael emptied the contents of his backpack onto the table in search of a working pen. An Advil caplet. Paper clips. Bic lighter. Loose change. No pen. Not until he reached over and snatched a pen on the table next to old Bentley Branscum’s legal pad did he acknowledge anyone.
“Hope you don’t mind if I borrow this, Pops,” Michael said, briefly admiring the hand-crafted wood-grained pen, which he guessed to also be cherry. “I’m going to cut to the quick right up front,” Michael said as he scribbled on a pad with the old man’s pen. “It’ll save you money and save me time. And at my rate, saving a little bit of my time will save you a lot of money.”
Now he looked up and directly at Tommy Branscum. Michael Hewes’ reputation for being brusque preceded him. Still, his directness caught the others off guard.
“If I’m going to be your campaign consultant, rule number one is that I know everything. And by that, I mean everything about you,” Michael said, pointing his finger in the style of Uncle Sam directly across the table at Tommy casually leaning back in his chair.
“If you want me to put together a strategy to make sure you get elected Governor, I need to know what your opponent’s strategy should be for making sure you don’t. And to do that, I need to know it all. Every little piece of information that could be used against you. Truth, rumor, lies. Doesn’t matter. I want it all. Every bad decision you’ve made. Every indiscretion, no matter how small. Every deep, dark secret dating back at least to the age of accountability. Which I figure to be about eight years old. If you ever stole so much as a piece of gum from the corner store, I want to know. If you cheated on a spelling test in fifth grade or snapped the bra of some girl in junior high study hall, tell me now. If you ever smoked a blunt, whether you inhaled or not. Women. Boys. And if there are boys, I’ll be happy to recommend a new campaign consultant. I need to know the stuff nobody knows, the stuff you think nobody knows, and the stuff you think everyone has forgotten. Not what’s on the record. I can get that. I have already started to. By the way, do you ever take a case to trial? Seems to me you cut deals a lot. A whole lot. That might work up here amongst your friends and neighbors, but statewide it will be a hobbyhorse your opponent could ride all the way to Montpelier. And if they’re smart, they will,” Michael said.
It was true. As the district attorney for four counties in Vermont’s northwest corner, Tommy Branscum did tend to swap negotiated pleas for reduced or suspended sentences.
“But we can talk about that later. For now, I want to know the names of the skeletons and whose closet they’re in,” Michael said. “Lay it all out there. I don’t want any surprises. And neither do you.”
Michael Hewes may have been from just across Lake Champlain, but he might as well have landed from an alien planet as far as the others were concerned. His rumpled appearance, blunt manner and frenetic energy were foreign to the trio he was meeting with.
At the head of the table was Tommy’s father, the Branscum family patriarch, who instinctively sat at the head of any table he graced. As a retired justice of the Vermont Supreme Court, Bentley Branscum was accustomed to holding court wherever he was. What he was not accustomed to was being railed at by the likes of Michael Hewes.
Tommy knew his father was irritated by the way he tugged at the sleeves of his French cuffed, hand-tailored monogrammed white shirt. White. Always white. The nervous tugging didn’t mean anything to Michael, but Tommy had seen it throughout his life. It was a sure sign his old man wasn’t happy. Had Michael been paying the slightest bit of attention, he might have noticed the scowl that turned the seventy-seven-year-old judge’s ruddy complexion an even deeper shade of red. It stood in stark contrast to the full shock of white hair he brushed straight back, and which curled at the neck. If he wore an ascot, Bentley Branscum would appear more like a 19th-century Dickens character than a retired Supreme Court justice.
If old Bentley looked irritated, Tommy’s legal assistant appeared stricken. Ryan Bond was just a year out of law school and had never witnessed a performance quite like Michael Hewes’. Ryan was accustomed to watching Tommy aggressively prosecute and harangue defendants in a courtroom. But usually with a rhetorical scalpel. He wasn’t accustomed to watching someone demand Tommy account for himself. Much less with a rhetorical meat cleaver.
Looking at Bentley, Ryan thought the vein in the old man’s left temple might explode at any minute. Only Tommy didn’t seem too out of sorts by Michael’s tirade. More than irritated or stricken,
Tommy was somewhat amused. Leaning back in his chair and swiveling slowly from side to side, Tommy held Michael’s stare while chewing on his bifocals. The resulting silence filled the room every bit as much as Michael’s rapid-fire delivery had.
After a moment, Tommy pulled up to the table, downed the last of his water and, with a perfect bank shot, tossed the empty bottle into a corner trashcan. Then he turned his attention to Michael.
“I’m not sure if I should hire you because I want you working for me or because I don’t want you working against me,” Tommy said with a light chuckle.
Michael smiled and shrugged. Ryan laughed nervously, relieved that the tension had been broken. Bentley wasn’t at all relieved, much less amused.
“Since you seem to appreciate direct talk, let me say this,” Tommy said. “If I hire you, you damn sure better be all you make yourself out to be. Because I can’t afford to pay you what you think you’re worth only to find out you’re not,” he said.
Michael stiffened at the implication.
“Look, candidates don’t lose because of their campaign consultants,” Michael said. “They win because of them. My job is to win the election for you. And to do that I need to know everything you know. As for cost, I never told you I’m the cheapest. I told you I’m the best.
“One more thing,” Michael added. “Lose the ‘Tommy’. From this point forward, it’s just ‘Tom’. Tommy makes you sound more like a boy preacher with a bad haircut than a serious candidate for Governor of The Great State of Vermont.”
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Author Bio:
Richard McKeown is a Southerner by birth, New Englander by experience, and Arkansan by choice. He is a one-time crime reporter, former political consultant, and current communications and leadership development counselor to executives throughout the United States. State of Redemption is his first novel and second book. He is also the author of 'Leave the Last Cookie for Someone Else' a compilation of his insights and observations on living a life of balance, influence, and contentment. He and his wife Tracye are parents of four adult children and grandparents to seven. Richard is a life-long fan of the Boston Red Sox, a (former) marathon runner, and a fan of Larry McMurtry's books, as well as historical biographies. He makes his home in metropolitan Little Rock.
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