Field Trip by Jeff Hammer

**This blog contains adult language.**

Warning: Spoilers Ahead!!!  This is a recap blog which means I read the book and tell you everything that happens so you don't have to read it yourself.  Do NOT continue to read unless you want to know who the bad guy/girl/abominable snowman is.

Tag Line: A night in an old Colonial village turns into a lesson in history, mystery and bloody terror.

From the Back of the Book: It was supposed to be living history.... The weekend field trip to Franklin Forge Historic Village was a step back into Colonial times, and the students' rooms at the quaint old Hogpenny Inn were cozy and comfortable.  Until the screaming began.  "Help! Don't hurt us!" And the students started disappearing one by one without a trace leaving only their blood-spattered beds and the gruesome sights of terrible struggles.  Then came the threats.  "Pay up....or they die!"  And living history turns to living horror.

Trigger Warning: This book contains mention of abduction.  We are never in the heads of the abducted people and I don't believe that there is anything about the scenario that would bother my regular readers but I always try to mention possible triggers.  Please look out for yourself.

This book was published in 1991 and it's my first reading through it.  I actually don't think I've ever read this author before.  I did a quick Goodreads search and found that most of his writing credits are books to teach you how to play the keyboard.  I wonder how he ended up writing one of these?  Maybe it was a dare.

Field Trip starts with a rarity in the PH world - a male protagonist!!!  His name is Tom and he's on a bus going up a snowy hill. The bus is trying to make forward progress but the weather is bad and the incline so steep that it just keeps sliding backwards instead. He's on the bus with fourteen other class members and their history teacher (Mr Cathcart) on a living history weekend. They're all headed to some place called the Hogpenny Inn to take part in a Colonial feast of some sort. His girlfriend Lori is beside him and she's hella bummed about their lack of forward momentum because she's really hungry. Tom is pretty sure that the weather means that they'll be forced to stay the night at the Hogpenny Inn instead of moving on after dinner and he's excited about the idea. He's hoping for a little alone time with Lori.

The bus driver finally determines that they aren't getting up the hill and he turns the bus off and refuses to move. This doesn't sound very safe considering they are in the middle of a road right now in a snow storm. Cathcart tells the students that they will just have to walk up the hill. This would never happen in the real world. That's a good way to get sued.

Hammer does a character dump on us now. We meet Jenny and Nicole who are anxious and worried. We meet Kristi who is beautiful but picky and entitled. We meet Sid and Bill who aren't given any character traits at all other than they're teacher's pets. We meet Dave and Vic who run cross-country and start a snowball fight. And we meet Bowlick, the proprieter of the Hogpenny. He greets the group and tells them that their rooms have been readied which is a neat trick since Hammer told us a few minutes ago that they weren't planning to spend the night here at all.

Keep track of your story, Hammer. It's only page 10.

The girls are to stay in the east wing and the boys in the west wing. Bowlick has his children (Ezra and Amy) show them to their rooms. Tom notices that Amy is absolutely stunning and I'm starting to fear that the Canby Hall Cheater Fever has spread across genres again. Tom feels sorry for the two teens because they live an authentic colonial life. He can't imagine life without Pepsi.

Tom ends up getting a single room. It's pretty tiny but he's happy he doesn't have to share with the other guys. (We meet three more by the way: Chas, Ed and Peter.  We pretty much never hear from them again.  I don't think they have any actual dialogue.)

This is a lot of people to keep track of, Hammer.

Tom and Lori arrange to meet in the common room in front of the fire for some snuggle time. He is really looking forward to it and hopes “she's in the mood” but he gets there late because it takes him so long to get his room assignment. She's impatient and basically orders him to commence snuggle – which is all he's been thinking about doing for fifteen minutes – but he's irritated that she's trying to take “control” and he tells her he wants to look around first. Cutting off your nose to spite your face there, Tom.

Hammer loses the plot now, having Tom look at knickknacks and rhapsodize about teapots which is just stupid. He's a teenage boy – a horny teenage boy judging by the thoughts in his head over the last 15 pages – and he has a willing girlfriend in front of a romantic fire. There's no fucking way he's looking at antique teapots here.

Lori gets impatient with his examination of old things and drags him to the loveseat. She cuddles into his side and he decides that maybe this is better than looking at pottery. He gives us a description of Lori, telling us that she is “soft and cuddly” and, this......

“She had a to-die-for figure, slender and sexy. She was showing it off, too, in a pair of trim jeans and white cotton shirt.”

Have you ever heard a teenage boy call a pair of jeans “trim” before? Because I haven't. It's just weird.

Cathcart comes down the stairs and busts them at this point. He yells at them to “stop your disorderly wicked doings, you scalawags!"

Sigh.

Hammer decides we don't have enough characters and he gives us three more girls: Wendy, Fiona and Rory. I hope I'm not supposed to keep all these people straight. You guys don't pay me enough for that.

Cathcart has put on a ridiculously opulent Colonial outfit, including a tall powdered wig, and has adopted Colonial speech. Tom thinks the man has lost his ever-lovin' mind. Tom and Lori as well as the three new girls we just met are swept along with Cathcart on a tour of the kitchens being led by Bowlick.  They are amazed at the lack of modern appliances and aghast at the recently killed chickens hanging from the ceiling dripping blood into a pot below.  After the kitchen tour, they are taken into dinner with the rest of their classmates. They are the only ones at the Inn because of the snow storm apparently.

During dinner – which is served by candlelight because this is “Colonial times” - Tom is struck by how beautiful Lori looks. I bet he's regretting all that time he was staring at teapots earlier. Bowlick's children serve and Amy purposely spills a tiny bit of soup on Lori. She give Tom a heated look and he wonders if she did it because she was jealous of the way he was looking at Lori. Yes, Tom, every girl in the vicinity is madly in love with you because you're a PH protagonist. Just enjoy it and don't question it. You could have been the red-headed sidekick instead.

After dinner, Bowlick gives a lecture on the history of the inn. No one is paying much attention until Bowlick mentions the resident ghost. They call him “Bloody Billy” and he leaves bloody footprints all over the inn. In life, Billy was a traitor and he was executed by gunshot. Billy was in love with the parson's daughter Abigail but deemed too poor to court her. He enlisted in the army and was later caught selling supplies to try to make his fortune. It just so happened to be the winter of Valley Forge when so many soldiers were starving and dying so it made the transgression exponentially worse. He was tied to a fencepost and shot. After he was dead, he was untied but his corpse didn't fall to the ground. It walked into the woods and now it haunts the Inn.

(((Note from future me: I'm pretty pissed I took all the time to recap that part because it has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO WITH THE REST OF THE BOOK!  I don't even know why Hammer stuck it in there.  I guess he hadn't met his page quota and needed a boost.)))

After the lecture, Bowlick leaves to go to bed. It's nine o'clock so the students figure they're supposed to go to their rooms as well. Tom is hoping to convince Lori to sneak out later for some hubba hubba time.  Please, Tom, some curvaceous teapot will probably catch your eye instead.

As they get up to go upstairs, Cathcart screams at them all to sit back down. He's going to give them an essay test now to make sure they're actually paying attention on this field trip. Kristi gets up and lays into him about being ridiculous and then she leaves the room. Cathcart goes absolutely Grape Ape over this and spends 30 minutes telling his class how useless and stupid they are. This guy seriously needs fired.

So who gets it first? Kristi setting up Cathcart as our suspect or Cathcart setting up everyone as our suspect?  It's even odds at this point so I'm not going to do my thing yet.

After Cathcart gives the test and collects the blue books, he heads upstairs leaving his class in the common room. Tom wonders aloud why Kristi left like that and Rory confides that Kristi is flunking the class. She sits next to Kristi and she's been seeing her test papers. Then she reveals that she overheard Cathcart asking Kristi if she'd made a decision about his offer yet. Tom thinks maybe he was offering Kristi extra credit or a makeup test or something but Rory thinks Cathcart has proposed something much more X-rated and illegal.

Everyone disperses and Tom tries to put the moves on Lori. She's not in the mood, however, because she's exhausted and because the ghost story scared her. He's mad because she's never in the mood.  I guess he's conveniently forgotten how she was in the mood earlier and he decided to leer at teapots instead.

He goes upstairs alone to get ready for bed. He's just taking off his shirt when a knock on the door interrupts him. Lori is standing in the hall in her nightgown. She tells him Kristi is gone and her room is covered in blood.

They go to the east wing and Tom looks at the room. It's been trashed and there's blood on her bed and nightgown. He asks Lori what happened. She's staying in the room next door and she tells him that she heard things being thrown around Kristi's room for awhile after they came back up but she thought Kristi was just having a tantrum. Then she went to brush her teeth. Everything was quiet when she came back so she knocked on Kristi's door to see if she wanted to talk about it. When there was no answer, she opened the door and found the mess and the blood. Tom thinks maybe Kristi just left the room and went somewhere but Wendy tells him she was standing in the hall waiting for the bathroom the entire time Lori was in there and no one came out of Kristi's room.

Cathcart appears but he doesn't seem worried. He tells them all that it's a common occurrence for teens to be kidnapped in Colonial times and sold into servitude. Tom goes into the room to investigate further. He finds a cigarette butt on the floor and an iron pot under the bed. It's the same iron pot he saw in the kitchen earlier that was filled with chicken blood. He tells everyone that the blood on the bed is chicken blood and Kristi probably isn't hurt.

Tom confronts Cathcart about setting it all up and Cathcart eventually confesses. He says he asked Sid and Bill to help him demonstrate one of the dangers faced by Colonial people. He tells them that Kristi is probably in Sid and Bill's room so they all troop down there. No one answers their knock, however, and the door is locked. Tom goes to wake up Bowlick to get a skeleton key. Bowlick isn't very amused about Cathcart's little plan.

The room is completely trashed. There's no blood this time.

Bowlick is pissed about the destruction. He sends all the other boys back to their rooms, keeping Tom and Lori with him. Together they search the entire west wing and then go to the east wing where Cathcart is still lecturing all the girls on being better students of history. Bowlick gets even more pissed when he sees Kristi's room and tells Cathcart that he's going to be billed for the damage. They quickly search the east wing but there's no sign of the missing students. Bowlick orders Cathcart and the other girls to go to their rooms. He's going to take Tom and Lori with him to search the main building because he needs “sensible help”. Cathcart doesn't seem worried until Lori points out that Sid and Bill could be doing something awful to Kristi and Cathcart is going to be held responsible for it.

Bowlick wakes up Ezra and Amy to help. He asks Lori and Amy to search the attic and Ezra and Tom to search the cellar. He plans to look in the kitchen and dining room. Tom asks about the door behind the front desk and Bowlick says it's his office and he doubts anyone is in there. So oddly, the office is the only place they don't look.

Odds of Kristi being in the office: 90%

The only thing of interest in the cellar are huge lye pots. Pretty sure you can dissolve a body in lye. Otherwise, the search yields nothing and Bowlick tells them they'll have to start all over again with the east wing.

On the second pass through, Dave and Vic admit to Tom that they have Sid, Bill and Kristi hidden. They want Cathcart to sweat a little for what he did to them. They admit to tying up Sid and Bill (S & B had tied up Kristi already) and hiding them but deny trashing the room. Dave and Vic say they took the three of them down to the Innkeeper's office and left them in there.

When the three of them get to the office, however, it's completely empty except for a pool of blood.

When Tom turns around, Dave and Vic have vanished. He goes back toward the east wing where he runs into Lori and Amy. He tells them everything and asks if they saw Dave and Vic go by. They haven't. Bowlick joins them again and is filled in on everything. They decide to do another search. Amy is pissed and refuses to help any more. Bowlick tries to order her to stay but she just stomps away.

Bowlick thinks that all five missing teens are in on it. Tom thinks he's wrong but Bowlick won't waiver from his belief. Ezra has had enough. He's tired from a long, hard day of chores and he wants to go to bed. Bowlick doesn't even bother to argue with him. He's lost control of his children tonight. So Ezra heads to bed. Lori splinters off too. She says she wants to go get dressed because she's feeling a little self-conscious wandering around in her nightgown. So Tom and Bowlick go alone to the office.

They find a note skewered into the desk with a large kitchen knife. It's written on parchment paper with a quill pen.

“The goode children fall be kill'd, unlefs you put 5,000 dollars in a fecure Purfe, and await Infructions, Patriots beware!”

Fomeone needf to learn their Fs srom their Ss.

Tom thinks they've truly been kidnapped but Bowlick insists it's just part of the stupid teenage prank. Tom suspects Cathcart might have gone over the edge. My money is on either Ezra or Amy.

Odds that Cathcart is the bad guy: 25%. He's pretty obvious. If it's him we have an effing Justin situation going on.

Odds that it's one of the Bowlick children: 70%

Odds that it's a student prank: 5%

Tom wants to gather everyone in the common room so they can get a headcount and see exactly who is missing. Bowlick agrees this is a good idea and then he commits the cardinal sin of PH books and tries to call the police. Naturally the phone jack has been smashed to smithereens and he's unable to do so. Bowlick tells Tom that there's a pay phone at the gas station down the road but he doubts the police will take them very seriously. Tom wants to try.

This is a switch. Normally in PH land, the teen doesn't want to call the cops because he thinks they won't be taken seriously. It's weird to have an adult fulfilling this role.

They go outside to look for tracks in the snow but find nothing so they conclude that all the missing people must still be in the Inn. I have to point out that the one place they haven't searched is the family/employee's quarters.

Bowlick opens the safe and looks inside. There's just over $4000 in there and it makes me suspicious of his kids all over again. I wouldn't have assumed that a place like that would have that much cash handy.  Only someone familiar with the place would assume thousands of dollars could be rounded up that easily.

Odds that one or more of the Bowlick children are in on this: 85%

While he and Tom are discussing things for us, Lori starts screaming from upstairs. She can hear someone trashing one of the rooms again. The racket is coming from Fiona and Rory's room. Bowlick has the skeleton key but for some reason he isn't able to open the door right away. I think he's giving someone time to get into a secret passage or something. Very suspicious of the Bowlicks here.

When they finally get the door open, Rory and Fiona are both missing.

Tom seems to actually be on my wavelength here and he tries to search the room for some indication of a hidden passage.

He finds nothing but that doesn't deter me. Sometimes you have to know where the switch is and it's impossible to find accidentally. Tom grabs his Polaroid camera and takes pictures of all the evidence they have. He's going to walk the ten miles in the snow to get to the police station. I guess Hammer forgot that there was a payphone right down the road. Oh, well. Lori volunteers to go with him but Bowlick says he needs someone who knows the area. He tells Tom that Amy will go with him.

Tom and Amy get ready to leave. Hammer has remembered the pay phone now so he has Bowlick explain that they're not going to use it because if the police don't see the pictures, they won't bother coming out until morning. It's a little weak but whatever.

Also, how the hell are these two teenagers supposed to walk ten miles in a snow storm that's so severe that a fucking bus couldn't even get up the road?  Tell me this.

Tom and Amy set out. The snow is knee deep in places and the going is slow. It takes them forever to even reach the gas station and Tom estimates the extra miles into town will take them at least five hours. They're exhausted and freezing and he knows there's no way they'll make it that far. They decide to try the phone instead. Naturally it's dead. They decide they need to go back to the Inn because there's no way they'll make it into town.

Back at the Inn everyone is gathered in the common room including all the employees. Cathcart isn't there – he refused to leave his room but Lori says she heard him muttering in there. It's 2:30 in the morning now and everyone is exhausted. The remaining students band together and announce that they're leaving. They're going to walk the ten miles into town because they feel like they'll be safer. Tom tries to warn them against it but they are adamant. They think one of the Colonials is behind everything and they want to get the fuck out. Can't really blame them but it's a pretty stupid plan.

Tom and Lori refuse to go but the others get bundled up and set off in the snowy night. Bowlick sends Ezra and Amy to get more wood for the fire but they don't come back. Everyone searches for them but they've vanished as well.  Then the employees vanish while searching.  Tom sits down to think it all out and comes to the conclusion that Cathcart must be responsible. I really hope he's wrong. If he's right, Hammer sucks.

Odds that Cathcart is our bad guy (and therefore odds that Hammer sucks): 10%.  I hope.

Tom and Bowlick decide to search Cathcart's room. Bowlick instructs Lori to go to her room and wait there. Lori, understandably, doesn't want to do this. Bowlick assures her she'll be safe which pretty much guarantees she's going to vanish. They grab fireplace pokers and head upstairs.

Cathcart opens the door with an ancient gun in his hand. He accuses Bowlick of selling supplies to the redcoats and Tom is sure that Cathcart has had a break from reality. I wonder if the Bowlicks put something in his food at dinner? It would explain some things. But I'm sure he'll just turn out to be “crazy”.

Cathcart and Bowlick have about four pages of ridiculous dialogue where Cathcart continues to accuse him of being a traitor to General Washington. Finally Tom steps into the doorway and throws his poker like a javelin. Despite being poorly thrown, the poke manages to knock Cathcart out.  They tie him up with his own stockings and then decide to drag him into the kitchen.

For some reason that I'm not clear about at all, dragging Cathcart into the kitchen requires Tom to go back into the office. Naturally he finds another note stuck to the desk with a knife.

“You are short $750. Cough it up in ten minutes or we begin killing hostages.”

Apparently the kidnappers have given up all pretense of Colonial now.

Lori's locket is wrapped around the handle of the knife and Tom goes a little nuts. He realizes Cathcart can't be the bad guy because he and Bowlick were with him when Lori must have gone missing. Catch up, Tom. He goes to find Bowlick but he and Cathcart have gone missing. Tom is now the only one left.

Tom wanders around looking for a weapon or some clues. He knows that the only person he can trust now is himself so he doesn't even bother to try to walk to the village. As he's just sort of aimlessly traveling about, he hears glass breaking in the common room. When he runs down there he discovers his favorite teapots missing. He decides that robbery must have been the motive for everything all along. The rooms aren't being vandalized – they're being looted.

I swear the bad guy better not turn out to be a character we haven't been introduced to because that is fucking cheating and I won't stand for it. Do you hear me, Hammer??? I won't have it!!

Tom decides to keep moving. He thinks he'll be harder to find and kidnap if he keeps wandering around. At one point he realizes the grandfather clock has stopped at 3:42. He has no idea what time it is or if help will be coming any time soon. At some point it finally dawns on him that the one part of the Inn that he hasn't searched is the family/employee quarters. He decides to give it a look.

As soon as he gets to the top of the stairs he smells cigarette smoke. Remembering the butt found in one of the rooms, he begins to creep closer. Suddenly Amy pops out in front of him. She's wearing a black body suit and Tom takes the time to tell us that she's “major drool material.” Boys are gross.

Amy tells him that she and Ezra are running away to California and he can come too if he wants. He finds himself mesmerized by her smokin' hotness and he begins to get turned on. Which Hammer helpfully describes to us. Tom feels like he's under Amy's spell and he tries to clear his mind. Amy says that she and Ezra have a few practical problems since they haven't lived in the “real world” for a long time. For one, neither of them can drive. But Tom can. Tom still hasn't figured out that she and Ezra are behind all the disappearances because apparently her boobs are far too distracting but he catches on when she tells him that his friends will be okay as long as he does what he's told.

He asks her how they did it and she takes him into the east wing to show him the trap doors in the floor. The trap doors lead down to the cellar and Amy instructs Tom to climb down. Once down there, he reviews the entire fucking book for us, telling us how Amy and Ezra managed to kidnap each person. It was a pretty self-explanatory thing so we didn't really need his help, but whatever. Ezra joins them at the end with a gun in his hand.

They take a secret passage that ends in an old barn. There's a Jeep inside that Amy hotwired and stole earlier that day from a visitor parking lot in the village. She says they have to leave immediately because the police will be looking for the Jeep in the morning. Tom asks where everyone is and Amy leads him up into the hayloft where everyone is tied up and gagged (including Bowlick and his wife, the employees and the students that tried to walk to town). Amy immediately begins to taunt Lori about Tom being her boyfriend now. He wishes there was some way to signal Lori that he's just playing along until he figures out what to do. Amy kisses him and Hammer goes into a lot of detail about what she's doing with her tongue.

{{{Shudder}}}

Ezra orders Tom into the Jeep at gunpoint and then drops a lit cigarette into a pile of hay. The hay goes up in flames. Tom begs Amy to help him so everyone won't die but her eyes are “feverish” and Tom knows she's “crazy”. Sigh.

Tom decides the only way to save everyone is to play along because Ezra will shoot him dead if he doesn't and then there's no one to help them. He gets in the Jeep and punches the accelerator. Amy and Ezra aren't accustomed to being in the car and they haven't buckled their seatbelts. Tom purposely wrecks the Jeep and then makes a run for the firepole with the alarm that will summon the bucket brigade to the Inn. As he's ringing it, he sees Amy crawl from the Jeep and run toward the barn.

Tom reaches the barn after Amy and sees her up in the loft. She's screaming at Lori for ruining everything and then, to Tom's horror, she pushes Lori over the side. Naturally Tom manages to catch her because he's a PH protagonist and they practically have superpowers. Tom unties Lori and the two of them rush up to the hayloft to rescue the others. I think Hammer forgot Amy was up there because there's no mention of her at all.

Everyone is rescued and taken from the barn. It's then that Hammer remembers Amy so he has her appear up on the roof of the barn. As the fire continues to rage, everyone yells at her to jump into one of the snowbanks. She refuses and goes down with the ship, so to speak.

Everyone is taken back into the Inn and treated for their injuries. Cathcart is carted away by a psychiatric nurse who appeared out of fucking nowhere. I'm sorry but a town that size does NOT have a psychiatric hospital with nurses just waiting to pick people up. In real life, Cathcart would be take to the ER. Tom asks Kristi about what Rory overheard at the beginning of the field trip. Kristi says that Cathcart asked her to be a willing participant in the initial fake kidnapping but she refused so he had the boys take her by force instead.

Lori comes up to Tom and asks him if he wants to sneak away for awhile and celebrate the fact they're still alive. Tom decides she's much too bossy and he doesn't want her to be in control of their relationship so he tells her maybe later.  He has teapots to caress.  And then the book ends.

So my thoughts on Hammer since this is our first exposure to him.......it wasn't awful.  I felt like his protagonist was pretty on the ball and consistently made pretty smart choices (for one of these books anyway).  But it went way too long with nothing happening and then way too long between events.  A good portion could have been removed without changing the story at all and we didn't need half those characters.  I think it would have been a pretty good book if it had been trimmed a little and hadn't relied so much on "crazy" characters to provide plot.