I am posting the beginning chapter of my first fiction novel in order to add to my beta-readers list. I will be sending the chapters out every couple of weeks via email. If you would like to be a beta-reader, please send me your virtual address.

This book is currently called Aesop’s Wager.

Chapter 1

Murders don’t happen in Newton. Nothing really bad ever happens by way of the small New York town. Strange things happen here; the sort of odd events that occur when there is too much room and plenty of privacy. Death visits, as it does all places, but until now, the small community lacked the sophistication for murder.

By all accounts, the oddest death anyone could remember had come, and now a murder was approaching. It was as deliberate, patient, and as unstoppable as the dark billowing clouds beginning to fold in anticipation of another late afternoon thunderstorm.

Tess Delano stood silently; staring down to a note resting on the work table. An oily, but intoxicating odor from the gas can and lawn-mower was carried by the fall breeze wafting through the open door, filling her nostrils. Needing to look away, but unable to walk, Tess lifted her stare from the note to survey the tools Oliver had never been allowed to use.

Shuffling her feet, but going nowhere, Tess’s left heel rolled across something on the floor. Splinters and shavings of wood covered the concrete slab beneath the workbench, but this wasn’t one of those. Tess didn’t need to look down to know what she was stepping on. She rolled her foot back and forth over the long triangular splinter with two perfect sides and one not so much. That was the side that had been ripped away.

Tess’s knew wood. She liked to call it her hobby, or second job, but it looked much more like an obsession to the people that barely knew her. Tess found comfort in crafting; she could make pieces of timber do anything with the right tools. Mostly, she built handmade frames from old barn wood, like her mother had. Tess’s mother had taught her the craft, just as her grandmother had done for her, and most of these tools were on their third generation. As a child, Tess found the hobby tedious and downright boring. She resented being forced to assist her mother with projects, while her younger sister played at whatever she liked.

“Abby doesn’t have the patience,” Tess’s mother would say. Abby didn’t have the patience to do a lot of things; things that Tess was expected to do, like cleaning, homework or crafts. Tess believed for a long time that the word patience meant normalcy, and she would be glad to give hers up.

It did take patience to create wooden frames. Making the angled corners come together to form a perfect box meant cutting flawless miters on exact measurements; not an easy task for an energy-filled eight-year-old girl, even one with patience.

Ollie wasn’t even allowed to touch this table, Tess thought to herself. I would give anything to ground him right now.

Oddly, it was the thought of punishing Oliver that brought new horror to the day. There seemed to be no shortage of fresh horrors today. The last had been finding Ollie’s shiny, freshly oiled baseball glove, wrapped in a towel and jammed into the crevice of her overstuffed living room couch, with a ball tucked inside. Ollie had been so excited that spring to get the glove ready for summer-ball, and then he had just forgotten about it. There was a sharp static spark when Tess reached between the cushions to retrieve the mitt. Her mind pondered the way things like energy build and then explode in a spark.

People’s lives do that too, she thought; still, there were no tears.

Until this moment, facing the forbidden tools, Tess’s focus had been on her loss; all of the things that she would miss. Things like feeding the geese with Ollie at Foggy Park, or their many Sunday picnics at Circle-Back Creek, where they would search for tiny fossilized plants in the tall shale walls; ancient, miniature ferns with palms forever locked in stone. Pictures of their adventures hung on every wall in her home, encased in hand-made frames.

Tess closed her eyes and the memories of their short time together began to cascade the way memories do after a loss; one prized possession after another suddenly revealed to be worthless because they can neither happen again, nor be replaced by new ones.

Tess thought of how she needed to drag Oliver along on their adventures a little more these days, even before his episodes began. The boy was afraid to trust, and began masking that fear the way little boys do; with indifference.

The thought of Ollie’s episodes couldn’t quite register. There was just not enough room yet for her to remember how distant the nine-year-old had become in these last months. Ollie wasn’t her son, but it certainly felt like he was. The boy didn’t even exist in her world three years ago, and now she would live with only the memory of him as her child; her responsibility. In death Oliver Delano would become his favorite character, and like Pan, would never age past nine. The idea hurt Tess where things hurt most, yet there were still no tears.

Tess’s gaze continued to climb to peg-board wall where her smaller tools clung to neatly-arranged silver brackets. Past the saws, sanders and clamps; Tess slowly lifted her head higher and higher, to the top of the wall and finally to the ceiling. Her gaze came to a halt on the newly formed clean spot, on an otherwise dusty wooden support beam above the work-bench. Dirt and cobwebs caked the beam from wall to wall; only the thin strip where the rope had been was spotless. In the center of that spot was an even cleaner place, where a corner of the beam had broken away when Ollie jumped from the bench. It was the piece she now let roll back and forth below her heel. The police had taken the rope into evidence, but there would be no trial. Suicides don’t get trials; there are no verdicts. Suicides are questions with no answers.

But, Tess did have an answer, and it lay on the table in written form. It should be in an evidence bag along with the rope. There was no fathomable reason for the note to exist at all, but nevertheless here it was. Ripped from a spiral notebook; its edges were dangling like chad.

Tess had folded the paper and placed it in the pocket of her jeans yesterday, the same jeans she still wore, before dialing emergency. She had been sitting in her car and somewhat lost in her after-work daze, as the door went up.

Every piece of the world changed as one by one the door’s panels disappeared; slowly revealing the dead body of a nine-year-old boy. Ollie hung low to the ground, swaying gently in a breeze created by the door’s opening. His lips were purple and swollen, and his ashen face was a sharp contrast to his short, dark hair; a ghost locked in a horrifying stare. Tess will always remember the boy this way; swaying peacefully, with his long, bright-white surplice acting as a sail. For whatever time she has left, Tess will be doomed to see Oliver hanging in doorways, beams, pipes and even Christmas trees. It will be a haunting; a real haunting.

There is more rope, she thought, imagining the moment of free-fall she would endure before the tension caught.

Oliver had cut just enough to get the job done, and the remainder lay on the table. The methodical boy had been quietly planning his death for days; maybe even weeks. He would have tested the strength of the rope and the beam. Exact measurements made the rope long enough to keep his feet off of the ground, but just barely. The oddly impressed coroner suspected Ollie was trying to make sure he broke his neck in the fall and would not be conscious for the strangulation. What a bright, dead boy.

Oliver’s neck had not broken.

Tess summoned the courage to pull her phone from her pocket, and then quickly dialed numbers before the moment of bravery had a chance to fade. She had sworn never to dial those numbers again, but who could have imagined this. It has been eight years, but those ten digits have hung suspended in her brain for every moment of this never-ending day. Tess was beginning to wonder if the number even worked anymore, but two rings later, she was greeted by an old familiar voice; Bruno’s voice.

Needing Bruno’s help has made the bile in her otherwise empty stomach rise several times since the day started. Even our worst days begin like any other, and just twenty hours ago Tess had been sitting at her vanity applying lipstick. Her thoughts at that moment had been delegated to solving a work-place issue she could no longer remember.

“Hello Tess.”

Bruno’s voice had rasped slightly; subtly changing with each box of cigars, but the tone was familiar. With only two words, Tess could tell that he already knew what had happened. There was a hint of satisfaction that tainted his sympathy, and from that, Tess could tell that Bruno did not know what really happened.

This man had long ago destroyed what little family she possessed. Bruno’s senseless affair with her sister had decimated Tess’s relationship with Abby, as well as their marriage. Only after six years did Abby return to her, but by then she had been broken by her disease and choices.

Tess knew what was going to come next. More importantly; she knew who was coming next. Tess would be facing the destroyer of innocence in just two days, but she would not be alone.

Soon, Aesop would be on his way. Everybody has a job, and Aesop’s job is to force fates. Aesop would make things right. Regardless of the promise Tess had made to herself, she needed things to be right. Maybe then, when the universe again made sense; Tess Delano might finally cry.