The Accident at 13th and Jefferson - 3 Parallel Novels

Extended description

The story opens on a peaceful summer afternoon in southeastern Pennsylvania at Josh Greenwood’s fourteenth birthday party and then random tragedy strikes. Is Josh’s mother, Bonnie, killed? (Book 1) or his father Tom? (Book 2) or Josh himself? (Book 3). As the survivors in each story attempt to carry on with help from a close friend and neighbor Elaine and her son Max, and interference from Bonnie’s dysfunctional family, their fates and even their personalities turn out very differently. And the degrees of connection extend to Max’s issues with the identity of his real father who, as it turns out, is a Presidential contender. The book ends with Book 4, only one scene, in which the original tragedy is averted. How much do we really know about anyone?

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/239391

Sample Chapter:

THE ACCIDENT AT 13th AND JEFFERSON 3 novels By: Brenda J. Carlton Prologue

Miles below the surface of a very young planet, much later to be called Earth, chemistry and physics were at work although there were no humans to put their own names on these processes. Silica, aluminum, oxygen, and curious metals slowly became the little rock of our story, a tiny bit of granite in a formation the size of a small continent. The seas formed and gave birth to life, which spread onto the land and produced great reptiles. The great reptiles vanished, life found new forms and meanwhile the little rock of our story moved for hundreds of thousands of millennia with the shifting, sliding and buckling of the earth’s layers. The rock emerged into the elements for the first time in towering mountains later, after they were worn down to a speck of their former glory, to be called the Poconos. Ice ages later a glacier snapped our little rock from its birthplace, drove it a couple of hundred miles south and left it under twelve feet of rubble.

By the time the Roman Empire fell, countless storms had washed it into a stream, where a human of the Lenni Lenape tribe found it. He used it to build a fire-ring in which he roasted a whitetail deer for his family. It lay by the remains of the fire, eventually beneath two feet of dirt, until the last of his great-great grandchildren had grandchildren.

An oxen-pulled plow churned the rock up in a farmer’s field toward the end of the time when Pennsylvania was considered by certain humans to be part of England. It spent almost two hundred years in the wall of a stone barn and then another seventy years in one of the rock piles that became less and less recognizable as the remains of the collapsed barn.

Then one day in the third century of the existence of a nation named the United States of America, a man called Dwayne loaded cast off furniture into the back of his pickup truck. His wife would finally stop nagging, he hoped, if he delivered it to Goodwill. It was one of the hot gusty summer days that usually meant a thunderstorm was on the way. He tied a plastic drop cloth from his last paint job over the load and set off. He heard an odd puffing sound and looked into his rear view mirror. The wind was catching under the drop cloth and making it billow up as high as the roof of his cab. “Looks like some kind of goddamn demented mushroom, with them colors and all,” he said, aloud. He pulled over and lit a cigarette and studied the situation.

He knew he ought to retie the ropes better, but his buddies were already waiting at the bar. Sloppy job, this was. He noticed a mound of stones on the other side of the road and trotted across. He gathered an armful, took them back to the truck, and dropped them into the valley between a dresser mirror and a rocking chair to weigh down the drop cloth. He looked at the bed of the truck, and then at the rocks across the road. He spotted the rock of our story, which sparkled more than the others in the late afternoon sun. It was about as long as a small chicken egg, but the collapse of the barn had split it lengthwise leaving a pickax-shape useful for Dwayne’s purpose. Dwayne used it as a knife to poke some air holes here and there in the drop cloth and then tossed it toward a hill in his load where it slid down the drop cloth into the valley with the others.