Old bones, p.10
Old Bones, page 10
“Jesus,” Nora said. “And how do you know these details?”
“The historical record. A lot of it is suspect—exaggerated newspaper articles, chapbooks written by people who weren’t directly involved—but the primary documents can’t be ignored. In addition to the details included in Tamzene’s journal, there’s the diary—admittedly sensationalized—of a survivor, Mrs. Horne, who described Boardman’s staggering into their camp. And then there’s the account of the rescuer, Best. Best himself didn’t write it down, but he spoke of it to a few people back in Tamzene’s camp. Best was a tough customer, but what he saw at that Lost Camp must have shaken him to the core. What remains of those horrific secondary accounts are viewed by historians as examples of ‘generation loss’ and the unreliability of oral tradition. The farther you are from the primary source, the harder it gets to be certain the details are one hundred percent accurate.”
“One hundred percent or not,” Nora murmured as these details sank in, “that’s a hell of a lot more than you told me that first day. No wonder Maggie’s so full of tall tales.”
“Some are less tall than others. I wanted to be certain of your gumption. As the excavations uncover the details of what happened, it might get…a little disturbing.”
“And?”
“I’m reassured.”
Nora shook her head. “I wish I’d known these details earlier. I don’t appreciate being blindsided.”
“Sorry. You’re right. I apologize.”
“Accepted,” said Nora. “But now that we’re actually searching for the camp—no more secrets between us. Agreed?”
“Wholeheartedly. But remember, that goes both ways.”
“Of course.” Nora wondered what exactly he meant by that.
They dragged a number of dead branches back, piling them up near the fire. The camp was in the last stages of coming together. Their wall tents were up, the fire was blazing, and Maggie was fussing with a wooden pantry box, unloading two Dutch ovens and organizing the pots, pans, dishes, and silverware in various compartments.
“Oak!” she said approvingly. “Good work! Jason, grab that ax and let’s chop this up.”
Wielding an ax herself, Maggie expertly chopped the oak branches into manageable lengths while Jason started hacking away.
“Hellaboy, you’re going to cut your legs off doing it that way.” Maggie came up behind and, wrapping her ample arms around him and holding his elbows in place, demonstrated how to aim and swing an ax. She glanced over at Adelsky. “See what you’re missing?” she asked with a salacious laugh.
“My loss.” Adelsky waved his vape.
Folding chairs had been stacked against a tree, ready to be placed in a circle around the fire. Jason Salazar pulled one over, opened it, and flopped down on the seat, his face red and covered with sweat. “That woman’s a slave driver,” he said.
“I heard that!” Maggie said while forking steaks onto the grill with a searing noise.
“I meant you to hear it.”
“I’m just putting some meat on those bones of yours. You’ve had your nose in books too long.”
The others came back from their tasks and gathered around the fire as the evening descended.
“Some wine?” Burleson asked, fetching a bottle out of the basket and drawing the cork. He poured it into tin cups and offered them around. “Good Napa Valley cab. Might as well take advantage of the bounty of our great state. No roughing it in my camp.”
The dinner was everything Nora could have asked for, and more: the steaks perfectly grilled, the potatoes crisp, the salad just right—and key lime pie for dessert. Unexpectedly, Jack Peel led them all in a blessing before dinner, which seemed oddly appropriate in the vast wilderness setting. When the dishes were done, Maggie pulled a guitar from among the gear and sang “Tumbling Tumbleweeds” and “Lovesick Blues” by the crackling fire, her surprisingly pure contralto rising into a vast black sky filled with stars. She finished up the mini-performance with an atmospheric rendition of “Ghost Riders in the Sky.”
“Plenty of ghost riders in the sky around here,” she said, lowering her guitar. “I grew up in Truckee, and I could tell you some stories.”
“You implied as much back at the ranch,” Adelsky said eagerly, leaning toward the fire. “So what are you waiting for? Put your money where your mouth is.”
“You pint-sized little varmint,” Maggie said amiably. “Okay, you asked for it. Ever heard the story of the ghost of Samantha Carville?”
Peel rose abruptly and disappeared in the darkness, heading for his tent.
“What’s with him?” asked Maggie, turning to Burleson.
The man shrugged. “Damn good wrangler, but he’s not much for conversation.”
“Go on,” said Clive. “What’s a campfire without a ghost story?”
“Well,” said Maggie, her voice growing hushed, “in my hometown, the old-timers still tell stories of what really went on out here. Like Samantha Carville. She died of starvation up at the Lost Camp, aged only six.”
Clive nodded. “There was a family by that name in the party.”
“They buried her body in the snow. And there Samantha stayed. For a while, anyway. As the starvation time began, two men snuck out one night, dug up her body, chopped off part of her leg, and ate it.”
“There’s nothing about this in the historical record,” Clive said. “It’s hard to believe they would have started with a child.”
“You hush!” Maggie scolded him. “You’ll ruin a good story.” She turned back to Adelsky. “Those two men were bad ’uns, but after starting in on her leg, even they couldn’t finish. They threw away the bone and covered Samantha’s body back up again.”
She paused, her voice deepening.
“And so they say, even today, that on a moonless night, deep in the forest, you can still hear her wandering around, looking for her leg bone. You can’t mistake the sound—a kind of shuffling, knocking, like a one-legged person hobbling on a stick.” And in a sudden, chilling display of mimicry, Maggie put her hands to her mouth as if preparing to yodel, and made a peculiar hollow sound: Ssshhhhhh-KNOCK. Ssshhhhhh-KNOCK.
Nora felt her skin crawl.
Maggie’s voice trailed off, and there was a moment of silence as everyone seemed to be listening in the dark. Then Adelsky began to laugh.
“Wow! Now, that’s a ghost story! We’ll all be lying awake tonight, listening for little Samantha knocking about the trees, searching for her leg.” Huffing and blowing, Adelsky tried to imitate the sound but failed. Then he laughed again, only this time without quite the same gusto as before.
14
May 5
THE FOLLOWING NOON, resting in the shade on a flat rock by Hackberry Creek, Nora pulled from her pack the lunch Maggie had made for her. Clive sat down beside her with his own lunch packet. They had made good progress that morning scouting up the creek, and were almost ready to begin a search for the actual Lost Camp.
“There’s something I’ve been worrying about,” Nora said.
“Let me guess. The gold again.” Clive unwrapped the tinfoil to find a BLT sandwich.
“When we find it, it’s going to be really awkward explaining that we were looking for it all along.”
“Just like it was awkward for me, deciding when to explain it to you.”
“Maybe we should tell them now. They might be upset at being kept in the dark.”
“We don’t know anything about Burleson’s gang. I mean, look at Peel—the guy is so silent. Practically the only thing I’ve heard him say was that prayer last night. Even a normal person might do something really stupid for twenty million dollars.”
“I’m sure Peel’s okay. There’s nothing wrong with having faith.”
“Agreed. But if they learn about the gold before we actually find it, we might have a mutiny on our hands. And what if word leaks beyond the group? This whole area will be crawling with yahoos carrying metal detectors.”
Nora shook her head. “I don’t like keeping secrets.”
“So you’ve said. But we have to keep this secret. When the time comes to explain—with the gold locked safely in the strongbox—then we’ll do so.”
They ate in silence for a while, and then Nora asked: “Weren’t you ever tempted to find the gold and keep it for yourself?”
Clive laughed. “Honestly? Yes. You can’t help but think how that kind of money would change your life. But then I considered all the complications. How do you turn that much gold into cash? How would you pay taxes on it? If you try to sell the coins, you’d flood the market and dealers would know immediately some treasure trove had been found. Even if you were able to sell them, you’d still be faced with the crazy task of laundering twenty million dollars.” He shook his head.
“I can see you really did think about it.”
He laughed again. “It’s only human nature.”
They finished their sandwiches. Clive took a Trimble GPS out of his day pack and checked it against a photocopy of Tamzene’s map. “Here are the clues,” he said. “It seems Tamzene drew one creek on the right when there are actually three. But the camp was definitely down one of those smaller creeks. She also mentioned a couple of landmarks. Not far up from the creek’s mouth was a place where the canyon seems to have narrowed. She wrote: the Carville party’s wagon scraped the wall of a rocky defile and lost a running board. Beyond that lay the meadow where the third group camped. After Boardman later staggered into Tamzene’s camp, she wrote: Mr. Boardman stated in his fever that the only true marker to that dreadful place was the rocky profile of an old woman, visible high on a bluff, as distinct as the famous Old Man of the Mountain in New Hampshire.”
“That’s the key clue,” said Nora. “Let’s go find the old woman.”
They finished lunch and hiked up Hackberry Creek. They passed a couple of canyons to the left of the stream, which they ignored: their destination was to the right. At last, Clive nodded toward a gap in the rocks, almost hidden by trees. “According to my GPS, that’s the mouth of the first creek—Sugarpine.”
“Shall we check it out?”
“What if we go up it two miles, looking for the ‘rocky defile,’ and then if we don’t find it move on to Poker Creek and, if necessary, Dollar Fork?”
“Sounds like a plan.”
They gathered up the remains of their lunch and shrugged into their backpacks. With Clive and his GPS leading the way, Nora followed. They waded across the creek and soon came to the junction where Sugarpine flowed in. They followed it upstream. Instead of a single defile, it seemed to Nora the entire creek was lined with rocky cliffs that a wagon would have to squeeze past. As it was, they had to cross the stream multiple times, and her boots ended up getting soaked. They found no meadow and no old woman’s profile, and finally reached a bottleneck beyond which no wagon could have gone.
They returned to Hackberry Creek and hiked up to the next checkpoint on their list—Poker Creek. This one looked much more promising. It went up a mile and then squeezed past a rocky defile like the one described in the journal, with a cliff on one side and the creek on the other.
“I’m getting a good feeling here,” Clive said, quickening his pace.
Nora felt a similar flush of excitement. The stream took a turn and they tramped across it and passed through a screen of dead trees to where the canyon opened up into a long, broad meadow. Steep ravines covered with scree and cliffs of gray basalt surrounded them, framed against a darkening sky.
“This seems a likely place!” said Clive enthusiastically, turning slowly around with his hands raised.
It was a damp meadow of about ten acres, mostly flat, surrounded by tall firs and slopes of broken scree. Both sides of the valley were lined with dark cliffs riddled with holes and cracks. Looming above were masses of dark clouds. Poker Creek gurgled its way through the middle, a deep, narrow gully almost hidden in grass. It was a bleak place.
Clive came over. “Now to find the old woman on one of these cliffs.”
Nora nodded toward the mountains. “Looks like weather coming.”
“Yeah. You’d better take the right side and I’ll take the left.”
Letting her pack slide from her shoulders, Nora walked slowly, scrutinizing the cliffs on her right, squinting, looking at every rock formation from multiple angles. Once in a while she saw something that looked more or less like a face but on further scrutiny just didn’t seem striking enough to qualify as an old woman. At the far end of the valley, where the stream came out from a stand of trees, she met up with Benton.
He shook his head. “Let’s switch sides and go back.”
When they met again at the base of the meadow, they still had seen nothing.
Nora frowned. “Do you think it might have fallen off, like the one in New Hampshire?”
“Anything’s possible. After all, it’s been a hundred and seventy-five years.” The disappointment in his face was plain.
The wind was picking up, flattening the grass.
“I think it’s more likely this isn’t the place,” he continued. “We’d better move on to Dollar Fork.”
She felt a drop of moisture, and then another. Up the canyon, dark shafts of rain rapidly approached.
“Looks like we’re in for it,” said Nora, pulling a waterproof shell out of her pack and putting it on. Clive did likewise.
The storm hit with a blast of cold wind and a torrent of rain that swept over the meadow in sheets and obscured the peaks around them.
“It’s three thirty,” said Nora. “We can do Dollar Fork tomorrow.”
“Sure you don’t want to check it out now?” Clive’s question was almost drowned out by a sudden rumble of thunder.
“I don’t know. Do you?”
“Um…I guess not. I’ve seen what lightning can do up here. Like that big spruce down the trail, trunk split right to the ground.” He tugged the waterproof plastic tighter. “Me for a steaming cup of Maggie’s coffee.”
Another peal of thunder sounded before Nora could reply. Instead, she just nodded her agreement.
By the time they got back to camp, the rain was turning into sleet and the temperature had dropped into the low forties. Nora and Clive took refuge in the dining area, sheltered under tarps strung between trees. They stripped off their dripping rain gear and hung it on branches.
“Come and get some grub before it’s all gone,” said Maggie, hovering over a simmering kettle of stew. “Better warm your butts by the fire. You look like drowned rats.” A Dutch oven smelling of freshly baked bread stood to one side. Salazar, Peel, Wiggett, Adelsky, and Burleson were sitting around the fire circle, sipping coffee.
“Sorry we didn’t wait,” Salazar said.
“I’m not,” said Adelsky. “When Maggie rings the dinner bell, I know to come running.”
Nora and Clive helped themselves to dinner and took their places by the fire.
“Did you find it?” Burleson asked.
Clive shook his head. “Tomorrow. For sure, tomorrow.”
Maggie joined them. “Your young man here pestered me for another story. I was just about to tell them about the legend of the two prospectors. Happened back in 1872. Maybe 1873. Maybe you know it: one of them was blind in one eye, and the other had a hook for a hand.”
She proceeded to tell a hair-raising story about a pair of lifelong friends who found a vein of gold in the mountains, got greedy, and one stormy night—a night like this one—they laid traps for each other, managing to both die in the process. With relish, Maggie added lots of graphic details, especially about the man with the hook. It was amusing to watch Adelsky’s reaction: he was the one who’d asked for a ghost story, but by the time it was over he appeared a little green about the gills.
Later, Nora crawled into her tent, cold and wet, but she had trouble falling asleep. Thoughts of Clive—his stubborn yet appealing ways, his boyish enthusiasm—came unbidden to her mind. She realized she was noticing him more than perhaps she should, and she resolved to keep things strictly professional. In a small, isolated group like this, any sort of relationship could destroy the team’s equilibrium, and with this thought she drifted off to sleep.
She was awakened in the middle of the night—suddenly—by a strange rumbling, like the scurrying of countless giant rats down a mountain slope. She opened the entrance to her tent and glanced around, but it was pitch-black and the sound was already dying away. Nobody else seemed to take any notice.
The sleet pounded down the rest of the night.
15
May 6
WHEN NORA ROSE at dawn, she could see her breath inside the tent. A light sleet was still tap-tapping on the waterproofed nylon.
She dragged herself out into the icy air and put on her clothes. At the fire, Maggie was cooking a breakfast of bacon and eggs and corn bread, her usually cheerful face a damp mask of annoyance. Burleson was sitting on a log, nursing a cup of coffee, speaking in low tones to Jack Peel about the horses. Clive had emerged from his tent in a brand-new paisley shirt, this one purple, orange, and pink.
“Help yourself to coffee,” said Maggie, gesturing toward a pot standing on a rock beside the fire. “You look like you could use it.”
“I heard something strange late last night. A low rumbling, like a herd of tiny elephants coming our way.”
“That was just a rockfall. Tumbling boulders. It’s not uncommon in the spring. Nothing to worry about—unless one lands on your tent, of course.”
Nora poured herself a cup and warmed her hands with it as Jason Salazar emerged from his tent, hair askew. He walked over, trying to flatten it with one hand and finally, giving up, putting on his hat. Adelsky and Wiggett were nowhere to be seen.
