Chapter One

Chapter One


Call it instinct, intuition, or just plain street smarts–whatever it was sent a tingle down Murphy's spine. The clicking noise caused him to leap off the seat of the roller-coaster car as fast as his six-foot-three-inch frame would allow. He sailed over the back, clutching the seat with both hands. As his feet landed on the bumper that ran around the car, he hunkered down and held his breath.

It was not a moment too soon. A rush of wind tousled his hair as two eighty-pound blocks of cement smashed into the seat where he had just been sitting.

Another millisecond and I would have been dead, he thought. How do I keep getting into things like this?

***

It was one of those days when everything inside of Murphy said Don't go to work. It was too beautiful a day to be inside a classroom teaching biblical archaeology. As he reluctantly gathered his papers and stuffed them into his briefcase, the words of Mark Twain echoed in his mind: Do something every day that you don't want to do; this is the golden rule for acquiring the habit of doing your duty without pain.

Murphy never tired of the scenic drive to school and the campus of Preston University. There was something deeply attractive about the lush greenery of the South and the beauty of the magnolia blossoms. Parking his car in the teachers' lot, he meandered up the tree-lined walkway toward his office near the Memorial Lecture Hall. The smell of jasmine in the air filled his senses.

Students were sitting under the trees. Some were studying, but most were just talking with their friends. One group tossed a Frisbee back and forth. Murphy recalled his days as a student. L