The Boaz Scorekeeper, written in 2017, is my second novel. I'll post it, a chapter a day, over the next few weeks.
Matt was so gracious in allowing me to work part time for the remainder of October and the entire month of November 1998. He knew how hard Bill and Nellie’s deaths hit me. But time off from the law practice was insufficient alone to redirect my thinking. Probably, the only thing that kept me from bed-ridden depression was the construction of our home at Hickory Hollow. Karla and I had purchased this 100-acre tract off Cox Gap Road in North Etowah County earlier this year. We had planned this house for months and had only hired Boggs Construction Company in August with plans to break ground the last week of October. The first week was devoted to digging a partial basement, with the second and third weeks focused on pouring a footer and the basement floor. The fourth week was consumed with block laying.
There was something therapeutic about watching the workmen, whether they were operating a track hoe or a bulldozer, or pulling a tape measure and using stakes and string to layout the outer walls of the sprawling ranch style house. I mostly sat in a lawn chair and watched. I occasionally would talk with Stewart Boggs, but that was rare since he was like a machine focused on production. He knew what he was doing. We had spent countless hours since late August hashing through the many decisions before having the plans drawn.
No matter how hard I tried to focus on the construction, my mind kept wandering to the Murrays final night. I didn’t know for sure but I had from the first news of their deaths, concluded the Flaming Five were responsible. No doubt, I didn’t give mere coincidence much of a chance to be the reason. How on earth could their deaths be a coincidence? If only Bill or Nellie had died in their sleep that Sunday night I might could side with coincidence. But, two deaths were a totally different matter. And both deaths just hours before the world was to begin to hear the mountain of evidence Matt and I had assembled that would convince the most skeptical jurors imaginable that Wade, James, Randall, Fred, and John, and each of their fathers, were responsible for the deaths of Wendi and Cindi Murray.
The only consolation I could allow to seed in my mind was that somehow, this time, the ones responsible for the Murray’s deaths would face criminal punishment. They would serve hard time in prison. While sitting under hundred-year-old Hickory trees, my mind sought out the truth of what happened that night. At first, I believed it nothing more than my imagination, but near the end of November I felt I had constructed a foolproof case of reliable and admissible evidence against David Adams and Walter Tillman. I don’t know why I believed these two were the only two who had come to the Murray’s that Sunday night and killed them. How did they kill them? There were no signs of any struggle. Their house had not been broken into. No doubt my mind was using past reality to construct a present reality. David had smothered the final life out of Wendi over 25 years ago while Walter watched. And, just four months earlier, Walter had settled his part of the wrongful death case. He had convinced himself that settling his case had freed him to commit two additional murders. Was his participation forced by the other members of Club Eden? Hadn’t Walter sold-out the Club? Now, he felt he had to make up with the Club to save his skin. Thus, he helped David, the ruthless, evil David, to once again snuff the live out of two more Murrays.
I was merely speculating. My real imaginings sitting in a grove of Hickory trees at Hickory Hollow was simply an exercise in survival. The sun, the wind, the occasional summer shower, flooded my mind with a natural hope but it was my legal training and my inherent bent towards logic and reason that enabled me to sit up and avoid a bed-ridden depression.
While watching workmen at Hickory Hollow, if I had any doubts whether the Flaming Five and Fathers were responsible for the Murray’s deaths, these disappeared when the results of their long-delayed autopsies were released.
The Pencil-Driven Life 