Free Death Trap by M. William Phelps Page A

is actress-turned-author Fannie Flagg, who brought fame to the town of just under ten thousand via her Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café novel and a later Hollywood film version, starring Kathy Bates, Mary Stuart Masterson and Mary-Louise Parker.
    Comparatively speaking, Shades Valley has a reputation among students and parents as being one of the best schools in the region, if not the state. Of course, this is an open-ended argument, rooted in the deep feelings locals in the South have for their high-school football and basketball teams. Yet, maybe a little bit of God’s grace and goodness seeps into the pores of the people in Irondale, no matter what their take on reglion or spirituality is. The most recent Shades Valley location on Old Leeds Road is a literal neighbor to Mother Angelica’s successful Catholic-based Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN) studios, where Catholic programming is aired worldwide to upward of 160 million households, twenty-four hours a day.
    Alan Bates grew up as the middle child in a household of three boys. Alan and his brother Robert both attended Shades Valley when it was located in Homewood, just off Route 31, near the Birmingham Botanical Gardens. Alan excelled in high school. He was one of those kids every mother prayed their daughter would drag in through the door one day after school and announce as her boyfriend. Alan took Southern hospitality to new heights, learning all he conveyed from two fine and loving parents. Alan was an honor student. He was voted class president three years running, beginning his freshman year, in the tenth grade. (Shades Valley ran things differently than most schools. Junior high was seventh grade through ninth; high school tenth through twelfth.) Not only was Alan an active member of his church and his family, a God-fearing unit of reverent Christians, but Alan played drums in various bands, including gospel and Christian.
    “[Alan] picked up an interest along the way,” his father, Philip, later said, “in technical theater and was responsible for . . . his senior class having a stage production at Shades Valley, which they hadn’t in years. But he was interested in the lights and the sound and the set design and the behind-the-scenes things that make a theater production go. He wasn’t interested in the drama. But he loved that!”
    Alan loved the theater so much, it wasn’t uncommon for friends to stop by the Shades Valley auditorium during lunch hour and find Alan sitting there, eating, relishing the feel and smell of just being around the stage. One such friend, Marley Franklin (pseudonym), who had known Alan and the Bates boys since they were all in diapers, often sat and ate with her buddy.
    “Alan and I,” Marley said later, “were raised like brother and sister. He loved the theater, even then, in high school. He just felt so at home there.”
    It was during the summer break of 1988, Alan heading from his junior to senior year, that he met Jessica Callis, a local Hoover girl. Jessica was every bit the polar opposite of Alan. On paper they should not have clicked. However, they seemed to get along and shared several things in common (what, exactly, no one really could pinpoint, even years later). Jessica grew up the oldest of three children in what was a broken home, over in the Whiting Road section of Hoover. According to Jessica years later, violence was one way to solve problems in the Callis household. Sure, the family sought solace in God’s word on Sundays in the form of the Edgewood Presbyterian Church on Oxmoor Road in Birmingham. But it was obvious the values preached from the pulpit by Pastor Sid Burgess must have gone in one ear and out the other of big daddy George Callis. There were beatings, Jessica later claimed, on top of openhanded slaps that left red marks and bruises; a week hardly went by without her parents getting into some sort of heated confrontation that ended in her mother crying, her dad taking off