A RIVER OF SILENCE with Susan Clayton-Goldner #Interview
Today I am pleased to share an interview with Susan Clayton-Goldner, author of A RIVER OF SILENCE, the upcoming entry in her Detective Radhauser series.
Is There a Message in Your Novel That You Want Readers to Grasp?
A River of Silence is about a hearing-impaired man, Caleb Bryce, who is falsely accused and imprisoned for the murder of a 19-month old child. This is the 3rd book in my Detective Radhauser series. Because of pressure from both the small community of Ashland and his boss, Captain Murphy, Radhauser makes the arrest, but remains convinced Caleb Bryce is innocent. With the help of a young public defender, who wants to prove herself to her father, a world-renown criminal defense attorney, they set out to find the real killer and free Bryce.
The novel deals with issues of abandonment and the effects it has on the child even after he reaches adulthood. It also deals with alcoholism and its aftermath which can cling to the lives it affected for decades. Mental illness and disabilities is also a theme. And the book shows us that sometimes a person who is mentally challenged sees life in a more beautiful way than those of us who are “normal.”
I’d also like to say that I’m so grateful to my readers. I had no idea how much it would mean to me to have a reader write a review or send me an e-mail about how much they enjoyed the book. It means more to me than royalties—just to know someone enjoyed and was moved by my story.
Is there anything you find particularly challenging in your writing?
Writing is hard work. It takes dedication and a willingness to spend long hours in isolation. There are times when family issues get in the way. Balancing can be difficult. And I’m often torn. I want to be the best possible wife, mother and grandmother. But I’m also driven to be the best storyteller I can be.
How many books have you written and which is your favorite?
I’ve written 8 novels so far. I’d say my favorite is A Bend In The Willow because, more than any other of my books, this one draws from my life, what I’ve learned, what I’ve loved and what I regret.
If You had the chance to cast your main character from Hollywood today, who would you pick and why?
I would choose Timothy Olyphant (from the Elmore Leonard Netflix series, Justified) to play Winston Radhauser because of his rugged good looks and the way he fills out a pair of jeans and a Stetson.
When did you begin writing?
I don’t think I decided to become a writer. I believe I was born a writer. I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t writing. Let’s face it, writing is isolating and doesn’t pay very well. I’m not sure many people would choose to write if they could avoid it or were of sane mind. When I was a little girl, my father won a Smith Corona portable typewriter in a poker game. He gave it me. It came with 45 rpm records guaranteed to have you typing. It was the beginning of my life as a writer. I taught myself how to type with the help of those records and starting writing poems and stories. I’ve never stopped. I went back to college after my children started school. This time I majored in creative writing.
How long did it take to complete your first book?
It generally takes me about a year to complete a novel. I’m trying to work faster these days because I now have a publisher and that has changed everything. I recently read a book about a woman who’d taken her productivity from 2,000 to 10,000 words per day. She gave me some very helpful hints about writing faster. And I strive to get 2,000 words a day now. It doesn’t always happen, but I am writing faster than in the past.
Did you have an author who inspired you to become a writer?
I believe the first book I ever read that inspired me to be a writer was To Kill A Mockingbird. I was a child when I read it, but it remains my favorite book. Atticus Finch was such a wonderful character. He fought hard for what was right, for what he believed in, even though he knew victory was impossible. He was a man you never forget. He touched my life. I wanted to touch the lives of others by creating my own memorable characters.
What is your favorite part of the writing process?
The best part of the writing process for me is when I get totally immersed in the fictive dream and all concepts of time disappear. People ask me if it is lonely being a writer and sitting in front of a computer screen for hours on end. Yes, it can be. But once the dream has captured you, it is thrilling, filled with excitement and adventure, and there is absolutely nothing I’d rather be doing.
Describe your latest book in 4 words.
Mysterious, heart-wrenching and human.
Can you share a little bit about your current work or what is in the future for your writing?
I have just completed the edits and handed off a stand-alone novel to Tirgearr Publishing. It is entitled The Good Shepherd and is the story of a priest who falls in love with one of his parishioners and she ends up being murdered. I suspect it will release sometime in the summer of 2018.
I’m also working on the 4th book in the Detective Winston Radhauser series. It is entitled, A River of Shame and it is about the murders of two high school students in what appears to be hate crimes.
About A RIVER OF SILENCE:
When Detective Winston Radhauser is awakened by a call from dispatch at 12:45a.m., it can mean only one thing—something terrible awaits him. He races to the Pine Street address. In the kitchen, Caleb Bryce, nearly deaf from a childhood accident, is frantically giving CPR to 19-month-old Skyler Sterling. Less than an hour later, Skyler is dead.
The ME calls it a murder and the entire town of Ashland, Oregon is outraged. Someone must be held accountable. The police captain is under a lot of pressure and anxious to make an arrest. Despite Radhauser’s doubts about Bryce’s guilt, he is arrested and charged with first degree murder. Neither Radhauser nor Bryce’s young public defender believe he is guilty. Winston Radhauser will fight for justice, even if it means losing his job.
Enjoy this excerpt from A RIVER OF SILENCE:
Prologue ~ 1988
In only eleven minutes, Detective Winston
Radhauser’s world would flip on its axis and a permanent line would be
drawn—forever dividing his life into before and after. He drove toward the Pima
County Sheriff’s office in Catalina, a small town in the Sonoran Desert just
twelve miles north of Tucson. Through the CD speakers, Alabama sang You’ve Got the Touch. He hummed along.
He was working a domestic violence case with
Officer Alison Finney, his partner for nearly seven years. They’d made the
arrest—their collar was sleeping off a binge in the back of the squad car. It
was just after 10 p.m. As always, Finney wore spider earrings—tonight’s
selection was a pair of black widows he hadn’t seen before.
“You know, Finn, you’d have better luck with men if
you wore sunflowers in your earlobes.”
She laughed. “Any guy intimidated by a couple
14-carat web spinners isn’t man enough for me.”
He never missed an opportunity to tease her. “Good
thing you like being single.”
The radio released some static.
Radhauser turned off the CD.
Dispatch announced an automobile accident on
Interstate 10 near the Orange Grove Road exit. Radhauser and Finney were too
far east to respond.
Her mobile phone rang. She answered, listened for
a few seconds. “Copy that. I’ll get him there.” Finney hung up, then placed the
phone back into the charger mounted beneath the dashboard.
“Copy what?” he said. “Get who where?”
She eyed him. “Pull over. I need to drive now.”
His grip on the steering wheel tightened. “What
the hell for?”
Finney turned on the flashing lights. “Trust me
and do what I ask.”
The unusual snap in her voice raised a bubble of
anxiety in his chest. He pulled over and parked the patrol car on the shoulder
of Sunrise Road.
She slipped out of the passenger seat and stood by
the door waiting for him.
He jogged around the back of the cruiser.
Finney pushed him into the passenger seat. As if
he were a child, she ordered him to fasten his seatbelt, then closed the car
door and headed around the vehicle to get behind the wheel.
“Are you planning to tell me what’s going on?” he
asked once she’d settled into the driver’s seat.
She opened her mouth, then closed it. Her
unblinking eyes never wavered from his. “Your wife and son have been taken by
ambulance to Tucson Medical Center.”
The bubble of anxiety inside him burst. “What
happened? Are they all right?”
Finney turned on the siren, flipped a U-turn, then
raced toward the hospital on the corner of Craycroft and Grant. “I don’t know
any details.”
TMC was a designated Trauma 1 Center and most
serious accident victims were taken there. That realization both comforted and
terrified him. “Didn’t they say the accident happened near the Orange Grove
exit?”
“I know what you’re thinking. It must be bad or
they’d be taken to the closest hospital and that would be Northwest.” She
stared at him with the look of a woman who knew him almost as well as Laura
did. “Don’t imagine the worst. They may not have been in a car accident. Didn’t
you tell me Lucas had an equestrian meet?”
Laura had driven their son to a competition in
south Tucson. Maybe Lucas got thrown. He imagined the horse rearing, his son’s
lanky body sliding off the saddle and landing with a thump on the arena floor.
Thank God for sawdust. Laura must have ridden in the ambulance with him.
But Orange Grove was the exit Laura would have
taken on her drive home. The meet ended at 9:00 p.m. Lucas always stayed to
unsaddle the horse, wipe the gelding down, and help Coach Thomas load him into
his trailer. About a half hour job. That would put his family near the Orange
Grove exit around ten.
The moon slipped behind a cloud and the sudden
darkness seemed alive and a little menacing as it pressed against the car
windows.
Less than ten minutes later, Finney pulled into
the ER entrance and parked in the lot. “I’m coming with you,” she said.
He shot her a you-know-better look, then glanced
toward the back seat where their collar was snoring against the door, his mouth
open and saliva dribbling down his chin. It was against policy to leave an
unguarded suspect in the car.
“I don’t give a damn about policy,” she said.
“What if he wakes up, hitches a ride home and
takes out his wife and kids? Put him in the drunk tank. I’ll call you as soon
as I know anything.” He ran across the parking lot. The ER doors opened
automatically and he didn’t stop running until he reached the desk. “I’m
Winston Radhauser. My wife and son were brought in by ambulance.”
The young nurse’s face paled and her gaze moved
from his eyes to somewhere over his head.
With the change in her expression, his hope
dropped into his shoes. He looked behind her down a short corridor where a set
of swinging doors blocked any further view. “Where are they?”
It was one of those moments he would remember for
a lifetime, where everything happened in slow motion.
She told him to wait while she found a doctor to
talk to him, and nodded toward one of the vinyl chairs that lined the waiting
room walls.
He sat. Tried to give himself an attitude
adjustment. Maybe it wasn’t as bad as he thought. Laura or Lucas could be in
surgery and the nurse, obviously just out of nursing school, didn’t know how to
tell him.
He stood.
Paced.
Sat again. The hospital might have a policy where
only a physician could relate a patient’s condition to his family.
His heart worked overtime, pumping and pounding.
When he looked up, a young woman in a lab coat
with a stethoscope around her neck stood in front of him. She had pale skin and
was thin as a sapling, her light brown hair tied back with a yellow rubber
band. Her eyes echoed the color of a Tucson sky with storm clouds brewing. “Are
you Mr. Radhauser?”
He nodded.
“Please come with me.”
He expected to be taken to his wife and son, but
instead she led him into a small room about eight feet square. It had a round
table with a clear glass vase of red tulips in the center, and two chairs.
Though she didn’t look old enough to have graduated from medical school, she
introduced herself as Dr. Silvia Waterford, an ER physician.
They sat.
“Tell me what happened to my wife and son.”
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “It was an automobile
accident on Interstate 10.”
The thread of hope he held started to unravel.
“Are Laura and Lucas all right? I want to see them.”
Her throat rippled as she swallowed. “There is no
easy way to say this, Mr. Radhauser. I’m so sorry for your loss. But there was
nothing we could do for them.”
All at once the scene bleached out. The tulips
faded to gray as if a giant flashbulb had gone off in his face. The doctor was
rimmed in white light. He stared at her in disbelief for a moment, praying for
a mistake, a miracle, anything except what he just heard. “What do you mean
there was nothing you could do? This is a Level 1 Trauma Center, isn’t it? One
of the best in the state.”
“Yes. But unfortunately, medical science has its
limits and we can’t save everyone. Your wife and son were both dead on
arrival.”
His body crumpled in on itself, folding over like
paper, all the air forced from his chest. This was his fault. Laura asked him
to take the night off and go with them. Radhauser would have avoided the freeway
and driven the back way home from the fairgrounds. And everything would have
ended differently.
He looked up at Dr. Waterford. What was he
demanding of her? Even the best trauma center in the world couldn’t bring back
the dead.
There was sadness in her eyes. “I’m sure it’s not
any comfort, but we think they died on impact.”
He hung his head. “Comfort,” he said. Even the
word seemed horrific and out of place here. Your
wife and son were both dead on arrival. Nine words that changed his life in
the most drastic way he had ever imagined.
“May I call someone for you? We have clergy on
staff if you’d like to talk with someone.”
A long moment passed before he raised his head and
took in a series of deep breaths, trying to collect himself enough to speak.
“No clergy, unless they can bring my family back. Just tell me where my wife
and son are.” His voice sounded different, deeper—not the same man who went to
work that evening.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “But when deaths occur in
the ER, we have to move them down to the morgue.”
Radhauser stood. Beneath his anguish, a festering
anger simmered. Laura was a good driver. He was willing to bet she wasn’t at
fault. More than anything now, he needed someone aside from himself to blame.
Outside, a siren wailed, then came to an abrupt
stop. The sound panicked Radhauser as he headed for the elevator, waited for
the door to open, then got inside. He pushed the button to the basement floor.
He’d visited this hospital morgue once before to identify a fellow police
officer shot in a robbery arrest gone bad. The door opened and he lumbered down
the empty hallway.
As he neared the stainless steel door to the
morgue, a tall, dark-haired man in a suit exited. At first Radhauser thought he
was a hospital administrator. The man cleared his throat, flipped open a
leather case and showed his badge. “I’m Sergeant Dunlop with the Tucson Police
Department. Are you Mr. Radhauser?”
“Detective Radhauser. Pima County Sheriff’s
Department.”
Dunlop had a handshake Radhauser felt in every
bone in his right hand. “I’m so sorry for your loss, Detective.”
“Are you investigating the accident involving my
wife and son?” Radhauser looked him over. Dunlop wore a pin-striped brown suit
with a yellow shirt and a solid brown tie—the conservative uniform of a
newly-promoted sergeant. The air around them smelled like antiseptic and the
industrial solvent used to wash floors. “Have you determined who was at fault?”
Dunlop hesitated for an instant. “Yes, I’m the
investigating officer. From the eyewitness reports, your wife was not to blame.
A Dodge pickup was headed south in the northbound lane of Interstate 10 near
the Orange Grove exit. No lights. He hit her head-on.”
Radhauser cringed. The image cut deep. “Was he
drunk?”
“I need to wait for the blood alcohol test results
to come back.”
The anger building inside Radhauser got closer to
the surface every second. Silence hung between them like glass. He shattered
it. “Don’t give me that bullshit. You were on the scene. What did you see? What
did the breathalyzer read?”
Dunlop’s silence told Radhauser everything he
needed to know. “Did the bastard die at least?”
“He was miraculously uninjured. But his twin boys
weren’t so lucky.” Dunlop’s voice turned flat. “They didn’t make it.” He
winced, and a tide of something bitter and hopeless washed over his face. “The
idiot let them ride in the pickup bed. Five fucking years old.”
“What’s the idiot’s name?”
“You don’t need to know that right now.”
Biting his lip, Radhauser fought against the surge
of rage threatening to flood over him. “Who are you to tell me what I need to
know? It’s not your wife and kid in there. Besides, I can easily access the
information.”
Dunlop handed him a card. “I know you can. But you
have something more important to do right now. We can talk tomorrow.” He draped
his arm over Radhauser’s shoulder the way a brother or a friend might do.
The touch opened a hole in Radhauser’s chest.
“Say goodbye to your wife and son,” Dunlop said,
then turned and walked away.
In the morgue, after Radhauser introduced himself,
a male attendant pulled back the sheet covering their faces. There was no
mistake.
“Do you mind if I sit here for a while?” Radhauser
asked.
“No problem,” the attendant said. “Stay as long as
you want.” He went back to a small alcove where he entered data into a
computer. The morgue smelled like the hallway had, disinfectant and cleaning
solution, with an added hint of formaldehyde.
Radhauser sat between the stainless steel gurneys
that held Laura and Lucas. Of all the possible scenarios Radhauser imagined,
none ended like this.
Across the room, two small body bags lay, side by
side, on a wider gurney. The twin sons of the man who killed his family.
The clock on the morgue wall kept ticking and when
Radhauser finally looked up at it, four hours had passed. He tried, but
couldn’t understand how Laura and Lucas could be in the world one minute and
gone the next. How could he give them up? It was as if a big piece of him had
been cut out. And he didn’t know how to go on living without his heart.
###
For an entire year afterwards, Radhauser operated
in a daze. He spent the late evening hours playing For the Good Times on Laura’s old upright piano. It was the first
song they ever slow danced to and over their fourteen years together, it became
their own.
He played it again and again. The neighbors
complained, but he couldn’t stop. It was the only way he could remember the
apricot scent of her skin and how it felt to hold her in his arms on the dance
floor.
Night after night, he played until he finally
collapsed into a fitful sleep, his head resting on the keyboard. The simple
acts of waking up, showering, making coffee, and heading to work became a cruel
pretense acted out in the cavernous absence of his wife and son.
Releasing everywhere January 24th
you can pre-order A RIVER OF SILENCE
for only 99¢ at the following venues:
Barnes & Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/a-river-of-silence-susan-clayton-goldner/1127622337?ean=2940154648674
About The Author
Susan Clayton-Goldner was born in New Castle, Delaware and grew up with four brothers along the banks of the Delaware River. She has been writing poems and short stories since she could hold a pencil and was so in love with writing that she became a creative writing major in college.
Through the writing process, Susan has learned that she must be obsessed with the reinvention of self, of finding a way back to something lost, and the process of forgiveness and redemption. These are the recurrent themes in her work.
After spending 3 years in Nashville, Susan and Andy now share a quiet life in Grants Pass, Oregon, with her growing list of fictional characters, and more books than one person could count. When she isn't writing, Susan enjoys making quilts and stained-glass windows. She says it is a lot like writing--telling stories with fabric and glass.
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