Caddo Cold (The Bill Travis Mysteries Book 7)

by George Wier

  Caddo Lake has a timeless beauty and uniqueness that annually draws thousands of people: tourists, sports and game fishermen, photographers, wildlife researchers, botanists―the list is endless. It has an other-worldly quality to it that will not be lost upon even the most jaded of visitors. Once out upon the lake and moving through the stands of bole cypress, one could very well be in another place entirely. Perhaps a South Louisiana bayou, or possibly some place in Florida. This quality has not been overlooked by Hollywood. To date a number of movies have been filmed there, including Universal Soldier II, Two For Texas, Do Or Die, Big Bad John, Soggy Bottom USA, Southern Comfort, The Long Hot Summer, Gator Bait, Bayou Boy, The Boy From Dead Man’s Bayou, The Secret Of The Pond, Weakfoot, and The Ghost Of Cypress Swamp. An episode of Walker: Texas Ranger was shot there.

  As a final word, there are governmental and industrial interests who would like nothing better than to develop areas of Caddo Lake for their own ends, which ultimately comes down to one thing: the pursuit of the Almighty Dollar at the expense of this beautiful natural wetland. The admittedly small but dedicated band of local residents, fish, game and wildlife enthusiasts, and a very few famous personalities (Don Henley of The Eagles, namely) have fought the good fight, long and hard, against the destruction of Texas’ only natural lake.

  This author prays that he may, in the coming years, be able to take his grandchildren out to the lake and show them cypress trees that existed before the birth of Columbus, before The Crusades, and possibly even before a legendary king drew a sword from a stone.

  Please enjoy the first chapter from the next thrilling Bill Travis Mystery:

  Arrowmoon

  Coming soon!

  PROLOGUE

  The gray light of dawn stretches westward over farms and fields and small towns. The night retreats and what was hidden by the night is revealed.

  A lone building, a tin-roofed and aging barn with its weathered skeleton showing in broad swatches where the wind has peeled back its metal skin now glows in the growing light.

  A single shaft of untainted golden light penetrates horizontally into the interior through one of these swatches where a flap of corrugated tin creaks with each sigh of the wind. The light pierces like a medieval lance between two tall stacks of square-baled hay that stand less than a half a foot apart and gleams off of a cold steel wheel about the size of a man’s hand.

  It is the combination wheel for a steel safe. Out of sight. Out of mind. Forgotten.

  The hay itself is nearly ancient and rotting. Were you to press your face against it you would breathe in the sickly-sweet odor of mold and mouse droppings. The rotting hay is evidence of old chores left forever undone and of the sloughed-off dreams of farm and ranch life, the dreamer gone now, taken off for parts unknown.

  Were you to push aside the stacks of hay and allow them to topple, before you would stand a four and a half foot tall black case.

  Had you the proper combination you could, with some effort, turn the dial and hear long-unused tumblers click into place. With a strong-armed tug on the cold handle below the combination wheel, the door would swing open on hinges greased before the first World War.

  And inside?

  Inside: a .45 caliber Navy Colt revolver, its bluing still perfect and its oil still clean, sitting on top of an old tanned leather journal wrapped with a leather draw string.

  Were you to reach inside and pick it up, the revolver would feel heavy in your hands and the coldness of the steel would burn and begin to numb the skin of your palm and fingers. It is what some old-timer might call a hog-leg. Were you to thumb the catch that holds the cylinder in place, it would fall outward from its housing and stop. The six perfectly round chambers inside would contain six cartridges; six silvery casings tipped with rounded lead.

  But the leather journal is there, still untouched.

  Were you to lay aside the heavy revolver and heft the journal it would feel smooth and cool in your hand. The smell of the tannic acid used to cure its cover is already working its way into your nose, calling up images perhaps of old buggy whips or razor strops. The string holding it together is itself a rawhide thong, attached to the journal cover and looped around the old book and back through itself.

  The thong loosens with a creak and dangles in the cool and musty morning air inside the barn.

  Motes of hay, mold and old animal dander dance in the near horizontal sunbeams around you as you open the book.

  Here is the first leaf, cream-colored and yet somehow very new, or rather perfectly preserved. There is spidery writing on it, with the thick loops and blobs of a quilled ink pen and a style of cursive freehand writing now nearly vanished from the Earth.

  It is German. Deutsch.

  But here, set off by itself near the bottom of the page are four Arabic numerals. It is a date: 1899.

  Thumbing the leaves, you note that the pages contain a narrative of some kind and it encompasses almost the entirety of the book.

  But here, what’s this near the end?

  Here are photographs. Tin-types. There are three of these, each sandwiched between its own set of journal pages. The tin-types are sepia-toned, a dismal cream color.

  The first photograph is an old chair of some kind, black and solid and sitting on a concrete floor. It does not look at all comfortable. And here about the room in the picture are bars of black shadow across the floor. Here is a window through which can be seen a lone puff of cloud. But now here: these thin traces of black shadow must be wires connected to the chair. And here, manacles for the wrists and ankles, unless the photo is somehow a fakery.

  But there are more pictures to see.

  This next one; what is this?

  From the architecture it is some sort of church, all crumbling stone. Nothing remarkable here. Except... here is a face in a black window on the second floor. There is no glass in the window and only darkness behind and inside, but for the elfin, pale, almost wraith-like face. It is a small face, its features blurred by the exposure. Either a small woman or a child. Possibly the church with the window and the ghostly, almost featureless face would give you a slight shudder.

  Now, here, stuck fast between two more pages is another picture.

  It is a man, posing. He is looking over your left shoulder and showing you his prominent cheekbones and his piercing eyes and the seriousness of his mouth. He is clean shaven. His hair must be either silver or gray.

  Not a kind man. Not the grand fatherly type.

  Near the end here, after the tin-types, there are other entries. A column of numbers; possibly they are ages as measured in years, next to which are a list of names with a column between them in the formal style: last name, first name. Scanning the “Ages” column we see 7, 5, 11, 14, 6, all random.

  An inquisitive mind, a solution-oriented person, might begin to fit these things―these old objects, these images, these blobs of ink and this old safe inside of this old barn―together into some sort of reality where they all might fit. The prospect of it, however, may seem disturbing.

  But here, let’s put these things away now. Let’s draw the thong tight around the journal and lay it back where it belongs, place the too-heavy revolver back on top of it and close the black steel door until it clicks firmly into place. Let’s give the combination wheel a good spin, step back and, with some effort, re-stack the hay where it belongs.

  The things are all safe now. Out of sight and mind and away from life and living. They are locked away in darkness behind old tumblers for which the combination is no closer to the touch than the combination for the upcoming winning lottery ticket.

  Let’s move back from the barn a safe distance and let time and gravity and mold do its busy work while it can.

  Let’s, for a moment, forget what’s behind a steel black door hidden behind two moldy stacks of hay in a forgotten shell of a barn; a barn that sits on a piece of land that was long ago fenced off from the remainder of the world.

  We look and find that even t
he lane that leads to the barn has been abandoned and is overgrown with trees and brush. Here and there it has been sliced cleanly in places with large crevasses, gullies-in-the-making, as the land itself has slowly changed with the passage of time.

  But drawing further back, and now up the high hill not far away we look back. And what is this new thing?

  It is a long, narrow strip of something tapering off over the horizon beyond the barn and the forest that hides it. It is a scar of some kind. A scar on the land itself.

  We stand steady, squinting into the distance.

  There are men there, working men, determined about some task. It is a road-in-the-building. A broad thing, cutting through hills and forests and pasture lands. Yellow caterpillar tractors are pushing at the earth, moving it, smoothing it. It the distance there is the black smoke of diesel engines carrying loads of gravel.

  If you were to take the distant ribbon of road where it meets the horizon far away and draw a line downward through the center of it, continue it on through the working men and machines, draw it still closer through the woods and across where it bisects another narrower unpaved road, draw it still further through the fence line and through the woods, you would see that the line intersects perfectly with the now completely dark hole in the side of the barn where not long ago a shaft of light penetrated neatly between two stacks of rotting hay.

  But. . . the day passes on and the sun dips inevitably toward its rendezvous with the horizon. The half moon, already limned in crimson, inches up higher into the growing purplish darkness.

  The light retreats and shadows lengthen and join together to become the union of shadow that is night.

  And what lies forgotten waits again in the coolness and the damp and the dark.