A fellow author tagged me in a game on Facebook the other day where authors were supposed to “Go to either page 7 or 77 of your manuscript. Count down 7 lines, then copy the next 7 lines to your status. Then tag 7 other writers.”
I don’t like tagging people because it seems rude to include them in a game they didn’t ask to play, but still, all those sevens caught my attention, so I thought I’d play out the game here. Feel free to tag along!
He ushered her toward a battered red Honda Accord that looked as if it could have been one of the first models off the assembly line.
“It has close to two hundred thousand miles on it,” he said proudly, opening the door for her.
To her relief, the heater worked.
They headed down the long sweeping driveway.
“Then he met you,” Kerry murmured, “and found contentment once again.”
Bob swallowed. “Yes. After he finished telling me the story of the figurines, he said a consortium of Japanese executives had approached him. They wanted The Lotus Room for a conference center, and he decided to sell it to them. He said his dreams of looking for the gold Buddha had faded, but he wanted to find the remains of his wife and child, and give them a proper burial.”
“We were inept.” He clamped his mouth shut. The challenging assignments in exotic locales he’d expected when he transferred to Teodora Zaroff’s unit had not materialized, and now it looked as though they never would. He’d have been better off staying in Identification; the work was as elementary, but at least he’d be back in the real world where things made sense most of the time.
Once inside, they could barely move around. A folded rollaway bed, a shallow wooden cabinet, a metal desk and chair took up most of the available space.
“A secret room,” Mary breathed. “It’s like something out of Nancy Drew or the Hardy boys.”
“It’s a storage area,” Bill said.
“Then where’s the door?”
***
Pat Bertram is the author of the suspense novels Light Bringer, More Deaths Than One, A Spark of Heavenly Fire, and Daughter Am I. Bertram is also the author of Grief: The Great Yearning, “an exquisite book, wrenching to read, and at the same time full of profound truths.” All Bertram’s books are published by Second Wind Publishing. Connect with Pat on Google+
Bertram's Blog 
January 19, 2013 at 1:13 pm
I’ve done this too! How about that?
January 19, 2013 at 3:56 pm
Southern Cross –
We all make choices, and tonight the sailor made the right one. Some people are killer-crazy; like a coiled snake, they are best left undisturbed. He had been a knife-blade away from his open grave and a second away from eternity. He didn’t know it, but he was lucky. Schulte was leaving for America in the morning and didn’t feel like killing anyone tonight. Tomorrow might be a different story.
(Pat, just delete this if this wasn’t what you intended. Tom)
January 19, 2013 at 3:59 pm
Tom, Of course I’m not going to delete it! It’s a great excerpt.