Excerpt from THE EARTHQUAKE LADY

What follows is an excerpt from THE EARTHQUAKE LADY, the third in the Gideon Marshall Mystery Series, due out in February or early March as an e-book available on all readers. This one has a lot of Oklahoma material in it (for my Oklahoma friends and relatives!) Please order the first two: BE CAREFUL, DR. RENNER and THE STITCHER FILE for your kindle, nook, or iPad. Direct links are on my web page. You can also give these e-books as gifts. Here is the excerpt:

When I dig around in my top desk drawer, marveling at the personal history contained in its collection of keys, pens, pencils, combs, letter openers, and paper clips (some from various countries, as a whole revealing the evolution of paper clip design), and retrieving Broderick Burkholder’s business card, I’m not playing the game in a completely honest way, although “honesty” in this case has to be defined in totally pure academic terms. To be completely honest, I would do a detailed analysis of all these plastic bags, write a technical report, deliver that report to DCI, and wait for them to respond. The contents of bag number 83172941336120305245 alters that approach. I manage to find my phone, a Motorola Droid 4G, and tap in Burkholder’s number.

“Burkholder here. Got something for us, Marshall?”

I have never called Broderick Burkholder, so there is no reason for him to have my mobile number in his phone, unless he put it there, having gotten that number in some way known only to DCI and other spooks. It’s almost noon on a Saturday morning and he’s at work, at least mentally. We’ll see how ready he is to go to work physically.

“Good morning, detective Burkholder. Got something to write on?”

“Go ahead.” He’s as ready, and efficient, verbally as I imagine him to be in every other way.

“Sample number 83172941336120305245 has something in it that is interesting. I don’t want to know how you got it, or where it came from, but the material in it is probably from Oklahoma. If I had to make an educated guess, I’d put it somewhere down in southwestern Oklahoma.”

There’s silence on the other end. Then “okay.”

“A slightly less educated guess is that it’s from somewhere around a surface pit that’s supposed to hold fluid from a drilling operation. However, it has a collection of pieces that would not occur together in a single formation, or even in a dirt sample from some field. So it’s mixed in a way that suggests several different underground sources.”

More silence. Then

“You free to travel, Marshall?”

“Maybe; it depends.”

“What are you doing tomorrow?”

“Sunday?”

“Sunday.” There’s a pause. “You folks go to church?”

“I can’t remember the last time we went to church.”

Well, I do remember our wedding, and I remember last fall actually being in a church, talking to a pastor about renting space for classes when our building was sealed off following Stitcher’s murder.

“Good,” says Burkholder. “I’ll be down there about ten.” Detective Burkholder is not much of a talker. I assume he’s equally as efficient in other aspects of his job. His next comment is more conversation than I’m ready for this morning. “Applied for that concealed carry permit?”

“It’s Saturday morning.”

“We talked about this yesterday. You can start the process online.” There’s his typical three-to-five second pause. “We can probably expedite the process.”

“We’ll discuss it tomorrow.”

I am not ready to carry a weapon. I am not qualified to carry a concealed pistol and, with a little bit of somebody’s good judgment never will be. Gideon Marshall and a concealed firearm is, in my opinion, a public health hazard, and not the least of that hazard is to Gideon Marshall. And I am not ready to go to Oklahoma if that’s the plan for whatever trip Burkholder is imagining. Dinner conversation at El Calor this evening will be interesting. Mykala can practice her Oklahoma “shee-ee-it” and I can assess the tamales, in anticipation of comparing them to those I’ll have in the next few days if I end up heading south. I don’t ask him if he knows how to find our house or whether, like officer Branch, he drinks decaf.

Assignment from the writing workshop held Nov 2, 2014, at Audubon Spring Creek Prairie, Denton, NE

Writing About Nature Workshop – The assignment:

(1) Choose a spot somewhere on Spring Creek Prairie that is the center of the 1-acre circle you are going to consider yours, your piece of the plains, for as long as you live. Record the latitude and longitude of that place so you can return to it whenever you feel like it in the future. A 1-acre circle has a radius of about 117 feet, so after choosing your place, you can walk about 40 paces in any direction and still be within your piece of the plains.

(2) Your writing assignment is to answer the question: Why did I choose this place and not another acre?

(3) Techniques, suggestions, helpful (?) hints, etc.

a. Use your eye like a camera with a wide array of lenses, from closeup, to wide angle, to telephoto.

b. Consider what your life is like, and how it is different, now that you “have” this piece of the plains. Consider the natural factors that went into your choice.

c. How many different communities live within your piece of the plains? How do you distinguish those communities from one another? What criteria do you use to establish a community? Do those criteria apply to human communities?

d. How would Darwin have viewed this acre? Who is successful, who seems to be reproducing the most, who has the most biomass, and who is rare?

e. How many pieces of the plains can you see from yours? What does this vision tell you about your own, and what does your own tell you about what to expect if you visited those other acres?

f. What is the difference between a kind and an individual living within your acre? How do individuals of a kind vary among themselves? What similarities can you discover (develop, propose, assert, etc.) between the role(s) that individual plants play in your acre, vs. kinds of plants, and the role(s) that individual people, vs. humans in general, play in the communities you frequent?

g. What will this piece of the plains be like in a thousand years, a million years, a hundred million years? What was this piece of the plains like a thousand years ago, a hundred thousand years ago, a hundred million years ago?

h. How would an artist use this piece of the plains? How would a music composer use this piece of the plains?  

i. What are you going to tell your friends about this piece of the plains?

j. How many different writing genre can I work in and still use material from my observations from today. Genre = romance, mystery, children’s literature, screenplays, science fiction, narrative non-fiction, etc.

k. Work the concept of a signature landscape into your writing. A signature landscape tells you who you are, having grown up in a particular region characterized by that general landscape. That concept of signature landscape, for example, pervades much of Willa Cather’s writing.

l. What don’t you know about the inhabitants of your acre, and how does that recognized lack of knowledge apply to your interactions with the rest of the world beyond Spring Creek Prairie?

m. How can I expand this workshop experience into a book-length manuscript of about 150 pages? What would I accomplish by doing this task? What would I tell my friends about why you are doing this book?

n. Am I willing to let the SCP staff use my writing as part of their marketing efforts?

o. What effect will this workshop writing experience have on the way I view my own back yard?

 p. What effect will this workshop writing experience have on the way I choose what to read in the newspapers, what to check out from the library, etc.

John Janovy, Jr.

Professor Emeritus, UNL

Think like a biologist - handout from a high school class visit to Audubon Spring Creek Prairie, Denton, NE

Think like a biologist:

(1) In what ways are organisms different in spite of their similarities?

(2) In what ways are organisms similar in spite of their differences?

(3) How do individuals within a species vary?

(4) What evidence is there that individual differences are due to development?

(5) What evidence is there that individual differences are due to environmental influences?

(6) Upon what basis do I make a decision about relatedness?

(7) If I were to choose a single species to study for the rest of my life, what species would it be and why would I choose it?

(8) What features of an organism function to promote geographic distribution?

(9) What features of an organism can be interpreted as evolutionary adaptations?

(10) Do the reproductive structures of an organism function to prevent interbreeding between species?

(11) Do particular species tend to occur together and if so, what environmental factors seem to be working to promote that association?

(12) Do particular species seem to influence the distribution or occurrence of other species, and if so, what features of the first species seem to be responsible for the influence?

(13) How do I best describe the structure of a community (and what does “structure” mean in this case)?

(14) What is the best way to teach others about this particular group of species and the places they live?

(15) If I decided to write a children’s book about this environment, how would I do it and what pictures would I include?

John Janovy, Jr.

Professor Emeritus UNL

Excerpt from THE EARTHQUAKE LADY, third in the Gideon Marshall Mystery Series

This excerpt is from THE EARTHQUAKE LADY (tentative title), the third e-book in the Gideon Marshall Mystery Series. This one should be available in February or early March. In the meantime, see my web site for links to the first two.

I’ve spent quite a bit of time learning my wife’s intonations and reading them, most of the time fairly accurately. This one has a mixture of fear, excitement, challenge, desire, and courage. She can see through the binocs as well as I can that the men up on that floor are totally occupied, almost like robots handling large steel objects very rapidly, wrapping chains around pipes, chains that snake over the rig floor, repeatedly, with never a gesture that’s not related to the immediate task at hand, which is to get several miles of pipe out of a hole, a hundred and twenty feet at a time, change a bit, and send that same pipe several miles back down the hole, in an environment of massive machinery, most of it moving, diesel smoke, noise, mud-slicked metal plates, vibration, and dirt.

“This one is destined for hydraulic fracturing,” says Albright, simply, as if she’d reminded us this was Wednesday. What she’s actually said is that in addition to the swinging machinery and tons of pipe stacked on end like a box of straws where four men are working constantly, after the well is completed there will be high pressure lines forcing a specialized mixture of fluids, sand, and salts through that pipe at the end. The pressure will be somewhere around five thousand pounds per square inch, enough to dismember a human being, or a cow, standing near a ruptured pipe. “One of these wells had a broken line a couple of months ago,” she says, again, as if she were giving us the time of day. “One dead; scalded and crushed. Two others hospitalized.” The Burkholder pause. “Don’t remember whether they both lived or not.”

We watch for a few more minutes. It’s a mesmerizing show. I’m surprised the derrick doesn’t tip over as a result of pipe weight, or that the whole stack of pipe, about two hundred tons of it so far, doesn’t simply go crashing through the rig floor.

“Ready?” asks Albright. She leans forward, reaches inside her light jacket, pulls out her handgun and puts it in the glove box. “You both clean?”

“Mine’s in my purse; I’ll leave it in the car,” says Mykala.

“Mine’s in my truck back at the motel in Oklahoma City,” I add.

Albright looks at me as if I were some kind of an idiot.

“Nice place for it to be if you ever need it,” says our host and driver.

“I have a wife who can put forty shots into a paper target’s head.”

Albright smiles.

“Keep her close,” she advises. “And put on your ID badges.”