In researching a fiction story (Ice Cold) I chanced upon the scene of a grisly crime that occured twenty years ago in the woods just twenty miles from my home town. In a cave at the bottom of a sinkhole in the middle deep woods at 1 A.M. on a moonless night, two teenage boys brutally murdered three other teenage boys.  Hard for a novelist to conjure such a scenario, but it really happened.

After almost a year of deliberation, I decided this was a story which just had to be told, and so I set about doing the research for what was to become Hear My Faint Cry. It was an excruciatingly moving process, tracking down and interviewing the friends and family of the murdered boys. To gain their confidence, I had to promise that my book would be about the lives of their loved ones, not merely their deaths. And so it is.

Below is a poem which inspired my title for the book, followed by the text of Chapter One. Hope you’ll want to read the whole thing as soon as it’s been published.

I am chasing a fantasy

A ghost in the night

A vision of the future

That fades in the light.

This dream how it haunts

Me, chilling my soul

It thrives in my memory

Taking its toll

Demons begone

Hear my faint cry.

Leave my heart not in misery

At least let me die.

                   Untitled poem attributed to Jeff Waites, age 16

                      Jeff Waites involved in a triple homicide, age 17

                      Jeff Waites convicted of triple homicide, age 18

                                     CHAPTER ONE

Cries in the Night

Midnight. The swamps and forests of North Florida throb with the cruel sounds of predator and prey in their deadly dance.

Now a brief cry. Now an anguished shriek abruptly stilled.

In nature’s forest, there is no right or wrong. No good or evil. There are only those who live and those whose deaths serve the living.

12:30 am. The darkness of the forest is slashed by two sets of headlights threading through a narrow gap in the trees. The lights don’t sweep smoothly through the foliage but careen up and down as first one tire, then another, sinks into rutted holes. All nature falls silent as these trespassers make their way to a small clearing. When the lights are extinguished, the darkness is even more complete.

Now the sounds of the forest are stilled, too. All creatures seem to hold their breaths as the intruders shut car doors behind them with heavy thunks, and nervous laughter splits the night air. Words are slurred and garbled. One voice is female, five are male. The male voices have not yet reached that depth of tone they might one day attain; there are still faint traces of adolescent passage from childhood.

1:00 am. The lights of one vehicle are turned back on but their narrow beams only accentuate the darkness of the forest. Tiny specks of light appear and disappear as five young men and a girl wend their way down a steep, muddy slope into a sink-hole whose bottom disappears into a tiny cavern. Inadequate for the task, the box of matches are abandoned when one boy remembers his lighter. The bright bluish light is a relief from the oppressive darkness. Later, one of the young men will claim the sudden appearance of the lighter’s flame was the trigger for all that was to follow.

The girl, shoes in hand, stands behind two young men in the mouth of the cave. They are arguing and thrusting some object back and forth between them. The three others are lost in the grotto’s black interior. She hears several loud reports. She knows, absolutely, they are gunshots, and what she’d thought was youthful fantasy has actually happened. Her mind is suddenly racing and she listens for more. After anguished cries, all is now deathly quiet, but she is conscious of the fetid smell of rotting vegetation. Suddenly, one of the boys grabs her roughly and thrusts her up the slippery slope.

Back at the cars, the boy who had muscled her out of the sink-hole shoves her into one of the vehicles, a pickup truck. She strains to see another boy emerge from the darkness into the headlights and where the sky reflects the pale evidence of civilization, only twenty miles away but as distant as the Emerald City from this desolate forest. The newcomer removes a box of ammunition from the pickup, stands in the glow of the lights to calmly reload his pearl-handled revolver.

Soon, another boy staggers down the pathway. The gunman walks toward him and empties six bullets into his body. As he lies writhing on the ground the victim pleads, “Help me.” He asks, “What did I ever do to you?” The gunman says nothing, but reloads the gun a second time. He returns to the struggling target and pumps in three more bullets. The pleading voice is stilled forever, as three deformed hunks of lead enter his brain.

The gunman says, “Let’s go get the keys,” and two boys leave the girl in the clearing and disappear back into the darkness. The keys, she knows, are for the other vehicle, an aging maroon Camaro. The keys, she knows, are in the pocket of a young man who is certainly lying dead or dying inside a cave in the bottom of a treacherous sink-hole, in the gloom of a forest whose dance of life and death has lost its innocence. Evil has arrived.