The Past is Never Dead. It’s Not Even Past; It’s Locked in a Box
By "William Faulkner" and Sheila Sharpe
Locked in a Box is my first novel, though it's the second in the Kate O’Dade art crime series. It is the prequel to Artist, Lover, Forger, Thief (2025), and I’m thrilled to see it on Amazon and finally out of my drawer, its long-hidden secrets and lies revealed to the world.
A Therapist Investigates Her Own Past
As expressed in the title, the central theme of Locked in a Box is how the past and past trauma come alive in the present, particularly in the mind and life of the novel’s heroine, psychologist Kate O’Dade.
In Artist, Lover, Forger, Thief, I focus on Kate’s present-day mission to save her former client Nick from forging art and facing revenge and death in the treacherous art underworld. As the prequel, Locked in a Box goes back in time to the exploration of Kate’s life, conflicts, and traumatic past. As a therapist who regularly deals in secrets, lies, and betrayals, she’s an expert at digging up everyone’s dirt but her own—until she uncovers her opera star father’s murder.
On the day of her near-death paragliding off La Jolla’s Torrey Pines Bluff, soon followed by being trapped in a dark elevator, Kate flashes back to the night her father died at the Metropolitan Opera. Reliving her near-death in a locked prop box, she sees him dressed for the last act of Carmen, her nine-year-old voice yelling, “I hate you.”
Despite her dread of unearthing the past, suspicion and fear of her own guilt compel Kate to investigate.
Murder Plots Were a Family Pastime
When I began to write this novel many years ago, I thought my strong desire to write a psychological thriller came from two main sources. First was my lifelong love of mysteries and thrillers.
Love of these genres came from my father who spent his boyhood onstage with his Shakespearean actor parents and wanted to be an actor or write plays when he grew up. Instead, he became a popular college professor with a booming bass voice.
When I was a child, we entertained ourselves on weekends with made-up murder plots involving spoofs of our neighbors. The most fun was designing inventive murder schemes for those we particularly disliked. My father also loved opera, so I honored him in the story by making Kate’s father a famous opera star.
(Not so sure what it means that I killed him off. Possibly because of my fierce dislike of opera as a child, though I mourn its dying now.)
At any rate, I progressed from just sharing Dad’s love and creation of neighborhood mysteries into writing my own story. At age 11, I wrote my first mystery-thriller starring two best friends—a twelve-year-old boy and girl—who solve the mystery. I can now see the grown-up versions of these fearless, clever sleuths in my current protagonists of Kate O’Dade and Franscisco Flynn, a half-Apache PI, who becomes her partner in the investigation. In my childhood story, my early version of Kate is also faced with her fear of the dark when pursuing the villain into a cave. Hence came the compelling title of this novella—Into the Slimy Depths.
It occurs to me now that I must have been afraid of the dark as a child, and this old fear pursued me into the story of Locked in Box. Am I still afraid of the dark? I ask myself and start to feel anxious. If so, why? Kate is also claustrophobic because of her locked-in-the-box trauma. I am aware that I am also claustrophobic, but I’ve avoided examining where this phobia might have come from as well, just like my character of Kate does.
Seems she’s trying to tell me something? What am I afraid to find out?
From the Therapy Room to the Page
Moving on…The second main reason I wanted to write a psychological thriller as my first grown-up novel came from my experience with traumatized clients in my therapy practice. As a therapist, I’ve been strongly motivated to show how the destructive effects of significant trauma can result in psychological suffering (like Kate’s guilt, phobic fears, and loss of her soprano voice) but also can lead to pathological hatred and revenge fantasies resulting in murder.
While I haven’t had any clients who have been driven to commit murder—at least that I know of—I do have clients consumed with pathological hatred and fantasies of revenge. At times, some of these seriously troubled clients have scared me. In one instance, a traumatized Iraq veteran leapt up from his chair, crossed the room, and grabbed me.
I wasn’t sure if his intention was to kiss me or shake me in a rage. I just froze, traumatized, and my memory cut out at that point. At other times, clients’ reports of violent fantasies have spooked me, and I would find it difficult to respond appropriately.
However, there have been more clients who have suffered serious losses, abuse, and life-threatening events and have gotten much relief through the hard work of therapy. In my Box story, I have shown certain therapeutic methods that Kate employs to face her fears while attempting to solve the crime. She finally opens the long-sealed storage box containing her father’s belongings saved by her deceased mother for over 20 years, including photographs, recordings, a journal, and the Silver Star for extraordinary bravery in the Vietnam War.
More memories begin to return. She also makes use of her therapy skills by interviewing herself as the child who fears that she or her mother became angry enough at her dad to kill him.
On a more active and dangerous front, Kate returns to the scene of the crime at the Metropolitan Opera, interviews the suspects, and uncovers layers of lies and betrayals involving those closest to her. More dirt is uncovered in a fringe trauma center for Veterans in the Anza Borrego Desert and the nearby Mud Caves, where Kate battles with her claustrophobia and fear of the dark.
Finding My Own Past in Kate’s Story
While I was motivated to write this story out of love for mystery-thrillers and my experiences working with trauma as a therapist, I now see other important but less conscious motives being expressed in the writing. Since I specialize in treating artists and writers, I am very aware of a writers’ personal conflicts and past traumas showing up in their fiction, often without conscious awareness. The links between a client’s past experiences and their present lives will often become apparent during talk therapy and these recognitions also occur in the kinds of stories and characters they have constructed.
Authors seem to be unconsciously seeking solutions to their internal conflicts, along with the fulfillment of unattainable wishes and longings, often including resurrecting the dead. I think this most commonly happens with first novels. I know I was practically bursting with all I wanted to say in Locked in a Box as though I might not get another chance. Surprisingly, it turns out that I wanted to say much more than I consciously intended.
Even though I’ve long been aware of how writers’ issues play out in their writing, it took me a long time and several drafts to see the many ways my issues were emerging in fits and starts from the locked box of my past. For example, I now remembered that my “wicked” aunt had locked me in her dark attic because I’d disobeyed her, and this trauma left me with claustrophobic fears of dark, enclosed spaces.
I was also critical of myself for becoming a physical coward as an adult after having been a foolishly brave child. Kate compensates for this weakness because I give her the moxie to do an extreme sport like paragliding. But for me to convincingly portray her paragliding, I needed to learn how to fly myself. I’m sure I was more terrified than she was leaping off Torrey Pines Bluff. In this case, the character learns from the author and the author develops from her character in a kind of symbiotic relationship.
Opening the Box, Finally
In the Box story, Kate also idealizes Max, her older psychologist mentor, failing to see his feet of clay. I came to recognize that this kind of idealization happened in my own life with my brilliant mentor. Now I can see the parallel, the two of us—author and protagonist—needing to idealize a father surrogate. Likewise, Kate keeps her “saintly” mother on a pedestal and refuses to see her crippling, competitive manipulations.
Somewhere deep into my revisions, I recognized that I had maintained the same kind of pseudo-comforting blindness with my own mother. This recognition was both enlightening and painful.
At least I can chuckle at my own blindness, but I also think this resistance to unearthing past dramas is universal, perhaps because of wanting to escape the excruciating pain of recognizing who we and our families really are. Developmental psychology tells us that the loss of an idealized self, father, mother, or sibling, or an equally unrealistically demonized loved one, are exceedingly difficult losses to accept.
Putting it simply, to see reality requires growing up. But so often it seems better to remain limited, constricted, symptomatic, and a child than become a realistic adult. In this story, Kate opens the box of her traumatic past, cleans it out, and finally grows up. Furthermore, she brings her beloved father and the dying opera back to life!
Novels are not just little stories; they are miracles.
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