Show Me (Thomas Prescott 4), Nick Pirog [classic children's novels .TXT] 📗

“What about these guys?” He looked down at Harold and May.

They were both sitting down on their rumps staring up at me with their big brown eyes. I think they sensed something was happening.

I shook out my arms, took a halting breath and said, “I was hoping you would look after them.” My voice carried a slight quiver.

“Of course I will. And the girls already love them.”

Then he asked, “When are you leaving?”

“Tomorrow.”

“Where are you gonna go?”

“France.”

Lacy was all the family I had left. But she was also all the family I needed.

I said, “My sister is pregnant.”

Randall smiled. “Uncle Thomas?”

“Yep.” I grinned. “Uncle Thomas.”

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Author’s Note

The idea for this book came to me in the last days of December 2015. I live in South Lake Tahoe, but I’d spent Christmas (and my birthday, which is on Christmas) with my family in Colorado. I have two dogs, so instead of flying, I’d driven the grueling sixteen hours. I left Colorado to return home on Dec. 28th, but I didn’t want to do the drive all in one fell swoop, so I stopped at a hotel in Primm, a town near the Nevada/California state line, about thirty minutes from Las Vegas.

A couple hours after arriving at the hotel—a grimy, less than desirable room in a dingy casino—my stomach started to gurgle. You know that feeling, the “Dear God, please don’t let this be what I think it is” feeling.

But it was.

Food poisoning.

I spent the rest of the night “sick” and slept on the floor in the bathroom.

It was, in a word, awful.

The next day, still seven hours from Tahoe, I pondered trying to drive home. But I couldn’t go fifteen minutes without getting “sick” and I still had to drive through Death Valley, which is more than a hundred miles without services. There was no way I was going to make it.

So I got on the internet, and started searching for a room at another hotel. The thought of being “sick” in the room I was currently staying in for another night was terrifying. I was able to get a room at a four-star hotel in Las Vegas for $150, which wasn’t all that bad. At least I would be sick in a nice room and I could take a bath. (I like baths.)

But first I would have to drive thirty minutes to Vegas without getting sick. It was a close call, that’s all I can say. Seconds separated me from getting “sick” in my car and getting “sick” in the hotel lobby bathroom.

Long story short, I ended up getting the sickest I’ve ever been in my life. I’m not sure if it was food poisoning or the flu, but I spent the next FIVE days confined to my room at the hotel. I was so weak and my stomach cramps so severe that I could barely lift myself off the bed. And I was far too sick to try to drive to a cheaper hotel, so I continued to pay $150 day after day.

But, here is the worst part: I had my two dogs with me!!

So I had to force myself to take them outside to go to the bathroom four or five times a day. I can just imagine what some of the people who saw me thought. Me walking my dogs, doubled over, Lamaze breathing because my stomach was cramping so badly, yelling, “Just poop already!”

So from Dec. 28th until January 3rd, I was confined to a bed in a Las Vegas hotel.

It was a nightmare. (A nightmare that cost me almost $1000.)

But two good things did come out of the experience. While sitting in my hotel bed, I came up with two great book ideas. One was for Speed of Souls, the book I will be writing next about a dog that dies and comes back as a cat. And the other one was Show Me.

For the longest time, I had my heart set on the fourth Thomas Prescott book being titled Walking in Memphis, in which Thomas would reinvestigate the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. If you know anything about the event, James Earl Ray was the killer, but there are so many different conspiracy theories out there about who really killed him that there was room for a good story. (Even Martin Luther King Jr.’s son said that he didn’t think JER was the killer.)

Anyhow, I ordered a half dozen books about the assassination, about Memphis, and about all the conspiracy theories. I had the entire story outlined but...I couldn’t get it to work. Thomas’ personality wasn’t going to mesh with the subject matter.

So I scrapped it.

Fast forward to my Las Vegas hotel room, and between getting sick, taking my dogs out, and convincing myself I wasn’t going to die (I’m kind of a hypochondriac), I had this epiphany: Thomas needs to inherit the farm that Harold grew up on in Missouri.

It was perfect.

But that’s all I had. Sure, throwing Thomas into this small town would be great, making him learn how to farm would be great, but I needed a story.

I still liked the idea of Thomas reinvestigating an actual crime as he would have done in Walking in Memphis, and I started searching up “small town murder in Missouri” on the internet.

There were a few things that came up in Missouri, but the crime that really interested me was “The Be-Lo murders.” It happened in North Carolina in 1993. The Be-Lo was a small grocery store. After closing one night, the store was robbed and three people were killed. The murders were never solved.

Initially, I had planned to base the crime that Thomas reinvestigates directly on the Be-Lo murders, but in the end, the only part I used