Read the first chapter of Evan Myers' upcoming new release: The Cottage at Prince Lake.

Memories can be strange...especially for storytellers.

Joel O'Donnell comes from a long line of storytellers, each with a knack for spinning yarns that blur the line between truth and legend. His fondest memories are of summers spent at Prince Lake, where his family's tiny lakeside cottage in Southern Indiana became the stage for a series of unforgettable adventures. 

Looking back to the summers of his youth, Joel recalls a series of family sagas brimming with hilarity, love, mystery, and heartache. As Joel grows older, he realizes that these stories—whether fact or fiction—are more than just tall tales to tell by a campfire. They are the heartbeat of his family, a lifeline to their past, and a way for their legacy to endure.

The Cottage at Prince Lake is a heartfelt celebration of the stories we tell, the ones we keep, and the ones we must uncover for ourselves.

--

The Cop and the Carpenter

 Part 1

Grandpa Bump was known to most of Crayford County as “Mother Goose,” given that he loved a good tall tale as much as he loved a pint of cold beer at the Frosty Mug. He was a short but powerful man, lacking in verticality but more than making up for it with a barrel chest and a big mouth. The bulk of his stories go way back. When he left the Army after the war in 1945, he allegedly found work as a motorcycle stuntman in a traveling circus that went all over the country, all over the world. After a few years of that rambling life, he settled down and found a new career in law enforcement.

One day way back in 1958, Bump was patrolling the backroads on his motorcycle in northern Crayford County, near the Derick Harris State Penitentiary. Grandpa Bump was cruising down McKenzie Road and the emergency alert came over his state-of-the-art vehicle-mounted radio.

Calling all units. We have a jailbreak at Derick Harris State Penitentiary. I say again, we have a jailbreak at Derick Harris. The prisoners are out of their cells and tearing the place apart. The guards are overwhelmed. Situation is out of control. Calling all units. If anyone can hear this, we need all the backup we can get. 

Bump stared at the Motorola radio transceiver fixed to the handlebars of his motorbike. A prison break? In Crayford County? Nothing exciting EVER happened around here, let alone something as violent and dramatic as a damn jailbreak.

His tires screeched on the road as he wheeled his bike around and roared away, sending up into the air  a powerful aroma of burnt rubber and exhaust fumes. He hauled ass, flying down county roads en-route to Derick Harris, for the prison guards were counting on him.

He had no time to circle back to headquarters to double check everyone had received the message. But he figured that all available local police and sheriff’s deputies were likewise rushing to the prison to assist. Bump was only a few miles from the location when he received the call, so he was the first one to arrive. As soon as Bump blasted through the entrance gates, a lone security guard wearing a steel helmet and a plexiglass riot shield smacked the button that unlocked the tiny security office leading to the rest of the complex. Once he was inside, Bump witnessed the horrifying sight of a war breaking out in the outdoor rec yard.

Through the wire fence, Bump saw dozens of prisoners, each of them decked out in their bright orange jumpsuits, engaged in a brutal mass melee. The prisoners had a myriad of improvised weapons in their hands: wooden billy clubs, shivs made out of spoons, he even saw one wielding a nine iron he must have found lying around someplace. The inmates pummeled the uniformed guards and one another with little discrimination; most of them just seemed like they were itching to hit someone, and it didn’t rightly matter who. Bump saw the bodies of at least three guards on the floor, knocked out or worse. All the hundreds of screams and shouts and cusses flying through the air blended up together into one giant roar of rage and confusion. Everything appeared to be every bit as insane in the cell block as it was out in the rec yard. The situation looked bad. Real bad.

“What the hell happened here?” Bump asked the security guard next to him.

The guard was trembling  and pacing from one end of the office to the other, unsure of what to do with himself.

“I don’t know!” he finally responded. “They all just went crazy. My boss and the rest of the guys took off running and told me to hole up here. I think I might be the only one left. What the hell am I supposed to do?! I’ve only worked here for a month!”

Now Bump didn’t have any proper experience when it came to quelling a riot; like the guard next to him, he was still pretty wet behind the ears. He’d gotten drafted and fought in the war just out of high school, but so had nearly every other man in the community at that time. Bump had decent marks on his annual physical fitness and marksmanship tests, but it had been a while since he’d encountered danger while on duty. In fact, the most exhilarating thing he’d done that year was pull some lady over for going 55 in a 45. And even with that, he’d let the young lady off with a warning because she’d started crying her eyes out and it didn’t feel right to write her up.

The big difference between Bump and the security guard, however, was that Bump had a little thing that the French call savoir faire. Literally, “knowing how to do.” Bump tended to approach every situation, even if it was wildly dangerous and wholly unfamiliar to him, with a cool head and a keen eye. This unusual confidence ordinarily carried him pretty far in life.  But sometimes, he let it go to his head, which were the moments that got him into trouble.

The armored security guard next to Bump had his helmeted head cradled in his hands.

“What are we gonna do? I mean, what are we gonna do?!”

Bump patted the man on the shoulder and pushed past him toward the door leading to the rec yard.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll get this under control.”

--

Bump strutted into the chaos of the rec yard with total inexperience yet endless confidence. He faced a sea of violent inmates in orange jumpsuits who outnumbered 10 to 1 the small pockets of uniformed guards still putting up a flicker of resistance. Bump walked out into the center of it all, and in a moment, he was in the thick of the madness, amid the flying fists, clubs, and projectiles. Then, he belted out a shout with as large a voice as he could muster.

“Hey! Hey!” he bellowed in his deepest baritone.

His voice didn’t even cut through the earsplitting chaos; it was like he was trying to have a conversation with someone while at a rock and roll concert. Seeing no other choice, the idea came to Bump to remove his sidearm from his holster and point it at the sky.

BANG BANG BANG!

Three shots rang out, which certainly gave Bump the attention that he was looking for, although not exactly in the way he would have liked. I believe he may have thought that the gunshots from his revolver would have put the fear of God into the horde, that the overall dread of hot lead and death might have scared the men into submission, that they would have decided to line on up in an orderly fashion like school children coming back from recess. And in any other crowd, that may have been true. Nobody wants to get shot, of course, and I suppose that introducing a genuine threat of death into the air had potential to frighten most regular folks into calmness. However, introducing a gun into volatile circumstances like this turned out to be a pretty bad idea for three main reasons.

One, this was a group of hardened criminals, not so easily spooked as most laypeople.

Two, it turns out that a bunch of convicted murderers, robbers, and thieves are not the biggest fans of police officers, and these fellas were already looking for an excuse to kill someone.

Three, I’m not so sure that Bump was counting the number of bullets he had in his gun versus the number of inmates in that angry mob.

Now there were dozens upon dozens of bloodthirsty felons in there. And Bump’s six-shooter pistol held, well, six shots. After the three he sent into the air as a warning, that left him with three left. I figure the crowd was able to do this quick math as well because instead of pacifying them, the gunfire just seemed to piss them off. They stalked toward him menacingly. Bump had just walked into a cage full of starving grizzly bears while wearing a suit made of raw meat…and then he rang the dinner bell.

Before Bump could panic, or even contemplate how he might make use of those three remaining bullets in his gun, his guardian angel decided to jump on in and deliver my grandfather from his own naiveté (or what some might venture to call stupidity.) Before the angry pack of killers could tear him apart, though, Bump felt a pair of strong hands seize him by the back of his shirt collar and drag him across the yard.

“Easy there, Deputy,” a deep base voice murmured into his ear. The tone was urgent, but not aggressive. The speaker was calm and collected.  “Follow me and you might live.”

Bump, scared stiff after realizing his own foolishness, obeyed this voice without question, somehow knowing that this one meant him no harm. In another moment, his pistol was pried from his grip and tossed into the thick of the throng. That gun might as well have been a rawhide bone tossed into a ring of junkyard dogs. The prisoners pounced on the pistol, their attention momentarily diverted from the lawman who had fired it in the first place.

Bump’s rescuer dragged him clear to the other side of the yard, where they slipped into a corridor leading to the cell blocks. It was safer here than in the pandemonium in the rec yard, although a few people still battled one another in the musty-smelling hallways. Bump felt himself get shoved into one of the empty jail cells, and just as he collided with the tiled floor, he heard the metal gate clang shut, locking him in.

At first, Bump’s heart leapt up into his throat, but when he looked up he relaxed. His rescuer standing up inside the cell next to him, offering a reassuring grin. The man was black, and a little older, in his 60s, Bump wagered. Despite his age, he was nevertheless a big, burly man with deep ebony skin and short, frizzy hair. He wore the same orange jumpsuit as the other inmates, but he had no malice in his expression. As a matter of fact, his eyes were filled with kindness. This was a good thing for Bump because he was now locked in a cage with this fella, and he didn’t even have his firearm in case things went sideways.

Here my grandfather was, a deputy of the Crayford County Sheriff, locked up in a state penitentiary. The irony wasn’t lost on him. The man with whom he shared the cell leaned against the iron bars, shook his head, and chuckled.

“This must be your first rodeo,” he said to Bump. “See, the safest thing to do during a jailbreak is to stay in your cell. Lucky for you, I don’t mind sharing mine for a while. Least until things calm down.”

Bump was too stunned to speak at first; a full ten seconds passed before he found his voice and rasped out a word of gratitude.

“Thanks,” he managed. Then, after a moment, he said again. “Why did you help me?”

“Oh, I figure you didn’t realize what you’d got yourself into. Felt bad for you.”

“That was pretty foolish of me, wasn’t it?”

“Aw, no. Well, yes. Yes it was.”

Bump broke out in nervous laughter. He stood and looked around the jail cell. The quarters were sanitary enough, although the environment was bleak and colorless. Stone gray walls, a single creaky cot in the corner, a sink and a toilet. The one oddity that he noticed was a nightstand, upon which he saw an open wooden cigar box. Inside appeared to be a humble collection of old pennies, quarters, and half dollars. When Bump examined these closer, he saw that some of the coins dated all the way back to the early 1800s. The man watched Bump with a neutral expression while he admired his modest personal possessions.

“I suppose after that performance in the rec yard, I probably deserved to get trampled, didn’t I?” Bump said sheepishly.

The man shook his head. “No, ain’t nobody deserve that. You was trying to help and just made a mistake. You don’t need to go and get killed for that. A man ought to go out on his own terms.”

Bump stared at him. “What’s your name?”

“Carter,” he replied. “Josiah Carter.”

Bump reached out his hand to shake. As he did so, he felt Josiah’s big, strong, heavily calloused hand gulp up his own.

“I’m Charles O’Donnell,” Bump said. Thank you, Josiah Carter. I believe you just saved my life.”

--

The rest of the Crayford County Sheriff’s Department arrived in full about twenty minutes later. The combined efforts of the law enforcement’s goon squad had a little more firepower and capability than one half-cocked deputy, so they were at last able to get things under control. Once order was restored and Bump was let out of his cell, he debriefed the Sheriff on the details of the incident. One can only imagine the look on the Sheriff’s face after seeing one of his deputies emerge from a jail cell, but he seemed to accept my grandfather’s story, which credited Mr. Carter in full for his role in saving his skin. Bump was commended for his bravery and quick thinking, putting himself in the line of danger for the sake of justice and order. He was subsequently chastised for his idiotic handling of the situation, and for firing a gun into a crowd of brawling convicted felons. But it seems the Sheriff must have liked my grandfather well enough, for most of those embarrassing details were left out of the official police report and Bump was put right back on duty.

What happened after the riot is where the story actually begins to get interesting. A few days after the kerfuffle at Derick Harris rec yard, Josiah Carter had a visitor. Now Mr. Carter had never received any guests before, for no one important in his life was alive or willing to talk to him. He’d developed a habit of keeping to himself in his cell during visitation hours, accepting his perpetual loneliness as something that was a given. So you can imagine his surprise when the guards interrupted him from his sad and isolated life to escort him down to the visitor’s center, where he was greeted at one of the tables by Bump, who wore a pair of cowboy boots and  blue jeans, plus a visitor’s badge pinned to the collar of his button-down shirt.

“Josiah Carter,” Bump said, rising to greet him. “How the hell are ya?”

“Hello, Deputy,” Josiah said.

Bump waved his hand dismissively. “I’m off duty, if you noticed the lack of an officer’s badge. No need to be so formal. I’m Charles, but my friends call me Bump.”

“Oh, so we’re friends now?”

“I’d say so. I sure as hell want to be friends with anyone who saves my life. Wouldn’t you?”

“Okay then, Mr. Bump. Pleased to see you.”

“I have a gift for you. The warden said it was okay for you to have it.”

Bump slid a scratched up pencil box across the table where Josiah sat. The prisoner eyed it suspiciously, but his interest soon got the better of him and he popped off the lid to take a peek inside. His dark brown eyes grew wide, and he failed to prevent his enthusiasm from stretching a big old smile across his face. He reached inside and retrieved a paper-thin copper disc shaped like an oval and smooth on both sides. He held it between his thumb and forefinger, squinting to look at the flattened coin in finer detail. In an instant, Josiah Carter went from a veteran criminal to a child in a candy store with a $50 voucher ticket.

“Now what kind of coin is this?” Josiah asked. “Did it get all messed up at the mint or somethin’?”

“Nope,” Bump said with a grin. “Some kid was trying to derail a train. I found it on the railroad tracks just a little ways away from Prince Lake. I used to do this sort of thing when I was younger. You place the penny on the track, Lincoln’s head facing up, wait for the train to pass, and then go and retrieve your prize after it’s been flattened out. Pretty cool looking, ain’t it?”

“Yes it is.” Josiah said. There was gratitude in his voice. “Thank you, sir.”

“You have a little cache of coins like this, don’t you?”

Josiah nodded. “They let me have my little collection, yeah. Just a hobby.”

“Interesting. When did you start that hobby?”

A pause. Josiah breathed out through his nostrils, scratched his chin, and looked down at his feet. “A while back. What exactly are you here for, sir?”

 “Would you mind if I asked you a question?”

Carter frowned. “I’m listening.”

“The warden told me that you used to be a carpenter. Is that true?”

Josiah nodded slowly, not breaking eye contact. “Yes sir. Used to be, before I ended up stuck in here. Most recently worked as a foreman on a few commercial jobs up near Madison, way back.”

“You ever work on any residential projects?”

“Sure. A few. Why do you ask?”

Grandpa Bump grinned. “Well, I have a unique opportunity for you. If you’re interested.”

Want to read more? The Cottage at Prince Lake will be available January 2025 in paperback and as an ebook. Follow Evan Myers on Amazon for updates!