A WINTER'S KEEP
A Novel

A Winter’s Keep
      Based on the novel by David cope
      Copyright 2015 David cope
     
      Contact: James Clois Smith Jr., Sunstone Press / (505) 988-4418
     
      Log Line: A man in a psychiatric facility is unable to stand trial for a crime he cannot remember committing. While someone attempts to break into the building where the prisoner is being kept, another tries to shoot him from a nearby forest. All this as the man’s memory slowly returns.
     
      Act I
     
      It’s deep winter in western Washington state where Joe Barnum is being kept in a forensic psychiatric facility until he can demonstrate an ability to stand trial for a crime he cannot remember committing (if he did) or even what the crime was.
     
      Fade to:
     
      The winter outside fades to a single room (called The Room here), where a psychiatrist named Doctor Amador interviews Joe for the second time of what will become many. Joe remembers he has a wife and a daughter and that he owns and lives on a farm with his family.
     
      Short Flashback:
     
      His wife’s name is Missy and his daughter’s name is Carla. They sit at the breakfast table talking about the weather, school, and farming.
     
      Cut to:
     
      Back in The Room, Amador and Joe speak about why Missy and Carla never come to visit him. Joe can’t remember. Has no idea. And no friends come either. Is that strange? Joe admits he doesn’t trust anyone and maybe that’s the reason.
     
      Fade to:
     
      Outside The Room in the hallway, we see the walls lit from within and a few of the other patients walking around talking to themselves, some obviously depressed. Others look wide-eyed, as if they've seen a ghost.
     
      Cut to:
     
      The Room for Amador and Joe’s third interview (second we’ve seen) continues with the idea of Joe’s lack of friends and why. Lies, Joe claims. No one can be trusted. At least no one he knows, because he puts them through tests. To change the subject, ‘Barnum and Bailey’ come up and the fact that Joe’s last name fits in nicely. Related? No. Amador then centers on Joe’s enemies. He claims he has none. No friends. No enemies. Seems strange.
     
      Fade to:
     
      Amador asks Joe about his parents. Friends or foes? Joe doesn’t know. He remembers his father is dead and his mother lives in New York. No brothers or sisters. They talk again about Missy and Carla.
     
      Cut to:
     
      The guards in the forensic psychiatric facility walk the floors and guard the outer doors. They don’t carry guns. The ventilation ducts have several layers of crisscrossing wire mesh to prevent break-ins.
     
      Flashback:
     
      Amador and Joe talk about dreams, especially one in which Joe is in a jungle with different and dangerous animals. Amador attempts to relate each animal Joe encounters with people in Joe’s life.
     
      Back to present:
     
      The inmates again. Some crawling around on all fours, some sleeping, some whispering unintelligible things.
     
      Fade to:
     
      The Room, where Joe and Amador speak of dreams again, this time one about two people fighting, beating on one another, both women.
     
      Flashback:
     
      Joe relates the women to an actual fight between two men, and then to his Mother and Father and his father using a belt to whip Joe, his Mother protesting.
     
      Back to present:
     
      The guards at the facility subject visitors to body searches like at airport security. Nothing gets by them.
     
      Fade to:
     
      Back in The Room, Joe remembers a little girl coming with her father to visit Joe’s Father once a month.
     
      Flashback:
     
      Joe never spoke to her but the visits seem extremely important to him.
     
      Cut to:
     
      Shows the fence that surrounds the facility, chain link topped with razor wire, as well as several manned towers including guards with long-range rifles.
     
      Fade to:
     
      The Room, where Joe talks about his latest dream.
     
      Flashback:
     
      This time his entire farm is on fire.
     
      Back to present:
     
      Joe and Amador speak about his meds and whether Joe wants changes. Then Joe for the first time wants Amador to tell him about Amador’s life and dreams. Slight shift of character roles here.
     
      Cut to:
     
      The facility’s pharmacy where the meds are dispensed and the security involved between inside and outside (where the inmates live).
     
      Fade to:
     
      The Room and a mistake made with Joe’s meds. Joe uses this as a way to further discuss Amador’s approach to psychiatry. More shift of questioning from Amador doing it to Joe.
     
      Act II
     
      Cut to:
     
      The janitors, their modes of dress, and what they do.
     
      Fade to:
     
      Joe reveals he had a dog as a child name Mutt.
     
      Flashback:
     
      His Father hated Mutt. One day while out working, Joe finds Mutt has been slaughtered in the forest. Joe cries.
     
      Back to present:
     
      Amador has brought along a guest to administer a test for Joe. A written test that Joe finds easy, believes he’s given all the right answers. Unfortunately he’s given all the wrong answers. He’s told that a chimpanzee would have gotten a better score. The tester claims that Joe deliberately chose the wrong answers.
     
      Cut to:
     
      The facility’s business office. Many people using computers and taking phone calls.
     
      Fade to:
     
      The Room where Amador tells Joe about a mistake on the test and that Joe got one hundred percent right and seems to have a photographic memory.
     
      Flashback:
     
      Joe recalls when his father asked him to put the horses away and feed them. Joe forgot to feed them and his father makes him spend the night in the barn where it’s freezing.
     
      Back to present:
     
      Storm clouds gather outside the facility with a major snowstorm in the forecast.
     
      Fade to:
     
      The Room where Joe explains how he met a girl at Niagara Falls once called Missy who would become his wife.
     
      Cut to:
     
      Suddenly a loud horn sounds outside meaning that one of the entrances to the facility has been compromised. Inside no one can hear. It blares for a while and then stops. A mistake? One of the guards inside doesn’t believe it and begins his own personal investigation. His name is Matt and he double checks to see if anyone is missing. In the process he discovers a route to the top of one of the buildings.
     
      Fade to:
     
      The Room. Joe tells Amador more about Joe’s Father.
     
      Flashback:
     
      His Father discovers he has cancer and tries to mate with Joe’s wife Missy supposedly to carry on the family genes since Joe’s failing at it. Joe’s Father then rapes Joe’s wife and Carla is born (at least as Joe tells the story).
     
      Cut to:
     
      Matt finds a way down through a vent on the roof of the very building in which Joe is a patient. The snow is deep from the storm that’s passed making headway difficult.
     
      Fade to:
     
      In the room, Joe now admits the story about his Father and Missy was a lie and the notion of lying once can spoil all further truth from being believed. Amador threatens to quit Joe’s case. Joe admits to Missy being artificially inseminated to have Carla who is not, then, Joe’s actual child.
     
      Cut to:
     
      Matt hears voices in a room below where he’s climbed. How could someone have created this invasion into the building? And why?
     
      Fade to:
     
      Joe tells Amador about him helping his Father as a young man and meeting a young boy named Bradley.
     
      Flashback:
     
      Bradley, who as Joe tells it is mad as a hatter, takes him to the scene of a horrible murder of a blond girl about their age. Every part of her body except her face had been mutilated beyond recognition. Joe runs to get his Father who calls the police. Joe’s Father later tells him that Bradley has killed himself and the death of the girl never solved.
     
      Cut to present:
     
      The guard in the roof area looks for clues as to who might be using the area and for what reason. Matt falls asleep and while he does we see the skirt of a woman step over him, checking on something in the passageway above The Room, and leaving.
     
      Fade to:
     
      The Room where Joe admits to Amador that he had another girlfriend called Nancy when he met Missy at Niagara Falls and that this girlfriend takes his new relationship very badly. They break up.
     
      Cut to:
     
      Matt investigates the administration personnel for a woman candidate, though he’s not convinced the best person for the possible break-in from the roof is a woman, and finds someone called Nancy Buffet with all the necessary access to bring it off.
     
      Fade to:
     
      Joe continues to question Amador and it becomes clear that the roles of the two have significantly shifted at this point.
     
      Flashback:
     
      Joe admits to seeing physical traits in his daughter that reminded him of his father and grandfather. Too many to be accidental, and the possibility of rape comes up again.
     
      Cut to:
     
      Matt follows Nancy and finds he’d been right. She’s the one who has created the passageway through the roof of the building and is now in the process of helping one the inmates to escape, or so he imagines.
     
      Fade to:
     
      In The Room Joe reveals another important story about his youth to Amador.
     
      Flashback:
     
      Joe rams the palm of his right hand on a nail thereby impaling himself to a piece of wood.
     
      Back to present:
     
      He shows him the scar from the wound.
     
     
      Act III
     
      Cut to:
     
      Was Nancy recording private conversations in The Room between psychiatrists and their patients? Why? Matt is now completely obsessed by the inferences his detective work had uncovered.
     
      Fade to:
     
      Amador decides to resign from Joe’s case as he now feels compromised by Joe’s subtle abilities to reverse their roles. Joe is decimated since he believes that Amador is his best chance to get back to his farm, his family, and his life. Joe then confesses that he knows what crime the police are convinced he’s guilty of.
     
      Flashback:
     
      Nancy was shot in the back. He’s also convinced that Bradley, alive not dead, killed both the blond girl and Nancy and is waiting in the forest outside the facility to kill him.
     
      Back to Present:
     
      Amador prescribes some extra medication and instructs Joe to take it immediately.
     
      Cut to:
     
      Matt’s supervisor tells him that Nancy has disappeared from her job. Matt’s attempts to track her down. He finds her apartment and discovers it ransacked.
     
      Fade to:
     
      Joe has called Amador in for a special and confidential visit. He admits to leaving a few things out of his story and about his never taking his meds. He tells Amador that years after he’d married Sissy, Nancy began calling him. Because he and Sissy weren’t getting along well anymore, he and Nancy began seeing one another.
     
      Flashback:
     
      Nancy wants him to divorce Missy and marry her. Joe refuses. Can’t be done. Then one day Joe returns to his farmhouse and finds his wife and daughter carved into pieces, the crime that Joe’s accused of. The heads of his wife and daughter, like with the little blonde girl, are fine, only the rest of the bodies are slaughtered. Joe goes to jail. His guilt for having an affair with Nancy causes his temporary insanity and he’s put under a suicide watch.
     
      Cut to:
     
      As Matt returns to the building in which he works at the facility, he’s shot in the back from someone in a nearby forest.
     
      Fade to:
     
      Joe tells Amador a new story.
     
      Flashback:
     
      He now thinks that Bradley’s father, not Bradley, murdered the little blonde girl and then, because he can’t imagine Bradley spending the rest of his life in jail, his father kills Bradley and makes it look like suicide. Later, because he feels that Joe knows too much, he visits the farmhouse to kill Joe. Instead he finds Joe’s wife and daughter there and murders them instead.
     
      Cut to:
     
      Bradley’s father is arrested for killing Matt. He admits to killing the blonde girl and his son, but tells the police that Joe killed his family.
     
      Fade to:
     
      The Room where again we find Joe and Amador talking.
     
      Flashback:
     
      Joe now thinks that Nancy may have murdered his family and is now planning on killing him when he’s released from the facility.
     
      Back to the Present:
     
      Amador, it turns out, has not resigned from Joe’s case, claims he’s sane making him ready to stand trial, and says that he hopes that Joe’s wrong about Nancy being crazy enough to have murdered Joe’s family and will now attempt to kill Joe.
     
      END