The primary aim of the "Novel Excerpts" blog category is to showcase my creative writing, specifically from the novels I've written. Hopefully, these posts will provide a glimpse into my storytelling style, themes, and narrative skills. It's an opportunity to share my artistic expressions and the worlds I've created through my novels.
The Boaz Scorekeeper, written in 2017, is my second novel. I'll post it, a chapter a day, over the next few weeks.
It was Halloween and only the second time I had returned to the Club Eden cabin at Aurora Lake since the life-changing graduation party on May 25, 1972. Two weeks ago, I had come to deliver a 16-foot aluminum fishing boat to use with Fred’s disappearance. That day I hadn’t gone to the cabin for there was no way to deliver a boat to the lake from there. The cabin was accessible from Shady Grove Road through a locked gate on down a half-mile cherty driveway that wound through a forest of pines and poplars. The Club’s property backed up to Aurora Lake but there was no way to transport a boat from the cabin to the water’s edge. The only thing that passed for a road from the cabin to the lake was the hiking trail the Flaming Five and I had carved out, and it would barely support one four-wheeler at a time.
I had delivered the boat from across the lake via Lawson Gap Road on the north side. That Thursday, I had driven my truck along with boat trailer and boat to Jeff Marks property. I had decided on this access after several trips to the Etowah County Records Department when I was in Gadsden for court appearances. Marks lived in Memphis but had bought the property in late August. I had conducted some simple online research and learned he worked at Kellogg Company and was listed on their employee roster as Vice-President of Distribution. A White Pages search disclosed he was 70 years old and had family in Gadsden. A Google search of, “Betty Marks and Gadsden,” revealed an obituary in the Gadsden Times stating she was 94 years old and was survived by two sons, Jim, deceased, and Jeff. I concluded he had most likely purchased this property for his retirement years. The property didn’t have a formal boat access but my boat was light, not having a motor, and I was able to get within twenty feet of the water’s edge. After the boat was afloat I tied it off and moved my truck and trailer across Lawson Gap Road a hundred feet or so down an almost hidden logging trail. I returned to the boat and rowed it across the lake to the spot the Flaming Five and I had swum on many occasions almost half a century ago. Then, it was just a large pond, years before the Aurora Lake Reservoir was built. I got out and pulled the boat on shore and into a stand of Loblolly pines. I walked west along the shoreline a hundred yards or so to the lake’s dam, then across it and into the final grove of trees before accessing Lawson Gap Road. I walked east to where I had hidden my truck and boat trailer. I traveled east to Mountainboro Road, turned north, crossed Highway 431 and continued to Hickory Hollow.
The Pencil Driven Life 