Manuscript Missing
by
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One A shrill ring rouses Sally Taylor from a blissful sleep. She springs up in bed and grabs the phone. Clearing her throat, she whispers, “Hello.” “Sally, come over right away.” The voice is loud and tight, each word deliberate. “Dad, you’re crying. What’s going on?” He gasps. “I … I just lost my manuscript.” To spare Cliff the disturbance, Sally rushes downstairs. “Please say something,” she hears as she plops into her favorite chair. “You’re freaking out, Dad. What do you mean you lost your manuscript?” “I deleted all six chapters,” he says, still gasping. “My second novel. All those words lost.” “This is ridiculous. Do you know it’s three o’clock in the morning?” “Please come over and help me,” he begs. “But it’s the middle of the night.” “I don’t ask much of you.” Sally pictures his pathetic expression. “Okay, tomorrow I have a faculty meeting after school, but I can probably be at your place by five-thirty. We’ll install the chapters back to your C drive.” “How … how can we do that?” “You backed up your work on a floppy disk or CD, didn’t you—you know, the way I showed you?” Silence. “O Dad, you didn’t.” She waits. “Okay, leave your laptop computer as it is. Don’t turn it off.” “You mean . . . leave it on all night?” “Yes, all night and all day tomorrow. Good night, Dad. And don’t worry, we’ll get your manuscript back.” She hangs up, goes back upstairs, climbs into bed, and snuggles up to Cliff. He responds with a funny grunt. ~ ~ No such easy repose awaits Sally’s dad. Kent Rowen lumbers to the family room and pours a hefty Canadian Club. He sits on the sofa, takes a swig and throws his head back. He longs for comfort, for assurance, for love in the arms of his wife. Some rare nights, very late, dead tired, he crawls into bed, keeping his distance from her. But if he sleeps at all the rest of this long night, it will be here on the sofa. Not bothering with pajamas, he stretches out and closes his eyes. Angie comes into focus. The beautiful love affair they shared is gone, a late-day cloud fading into oblivion. His obsession with writing is part of it, he knows.
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About the Book
Kent and Angie Rowen . . . have everything going for them—popular, good jobs, happy children and grandchildren, prominent parents. They are the last couple the people of Newbridge would expect to have a midlife crisis. Trouble in paradise begins when Kent, successful insurance agent, decides to follow his Walter Mitty dream of becoming an author. Not content with one published novel, he is at work on a second, With Hoops of Steel. Night after night he secludes himself in his den, slaving away feverishly at his laptop, neglecting his wife. He is a chapter shy of finishing the manuscript when the sky falls: his laptop and backup CD are stolen! He sinks into a major life-event depression. No one in the family is spared the grief. His psychotherapist is about to recommend new and dangerous deep brain surgery when there’s word that With Hoops of Steel has been spotted in the bookstore. Will this push Kent deeper into his black hole, or will it put him on the road to recovery? But how can he prove the book is his? Hmm. His professor-friend Scott Navano knows.
About the Author
Carl Frey Constein, born into what Tom Brokaw has dubbed The Greatest Generation, grew up in the eastern State Pennsylvania Fleetwood City during the Great Depression of the 1930s. After college he enlisted in the Army Air Corps. For his ninety-six missions as C-46 pilot across the Himalayan “Hump” he was awarded two Air Medals and the Distinguished Flying Cross. He recalls his year in the China-Burma-India theater of operations in the WWII memoir Born to Fly the Hump. After leaving military service in 1945, Constein pursued a doctorate at Temple University, majoring in English and educational administration. He was an English teacher, director of curriculum, superintendent of schools, education writer and columnist, and education director for business-industry. He retired at the turn of the millennium, leaving behind a lifetime of nose-to-the grindstone adventures as WWII pilot and public school educator to chase his favorite phantom—becoming an author. Manuscript Missing is his seventh book. Constein lives outside State Pennsylvania, in the borough of Wernersville.