Caddo Cold (The Bill Travis Mysteries Book 7)

by George Wier

  “The set,” he said.

  ****

  Sometimes a father has to make decisions and those decisions are sometimes hard.

  Jessica drove my car and followed Willett and me in his pickup. I needed Willett to talk and I needed my car close by and there was no way I was going to attempt to cram Jessica between us in Willett’s redneck dinosaur.

  Jessica, to her credit, clamped down immeasurably well on her utter glee at getting the chance to drive unsupervised, even though she was following us.

  We headed northeast toward Karnack and Uncertain, as opposed to south towards Houston. Once we were on the outskirts of Marshall, Willett poured on the gas. I resisted the urge to glance over at the speedometer and instead watched the town give way to the country. I did, however, stick my arm out my window and adjust his sideview mirror so that I could keep track of Jessica. She was there, dogging us at unnatural speeds.

  I watched the countryside peel past us. East Texas is dense with underbrush and tall trees and deep, narrow creeks choked with vines, creepers and cypress knees. It is a different world from the one I’m used to. Despite the speed, the sense of urgency and my nervous expectancy that something could go wrong behind us, I forced myself to take in my environment. And I loved every minute of it. There are men and women who live their entire lives in what is colloquially called the canebrakes, and there’s a reason they do. The landscape is stark in its verdant beauty.

  “What did you mean, Willett, when you said ‘then it’s begun?’”

  Willett sighed. It was hardly more than an exhale, but I caught it.

  “I meant,” he began, “that Holt almost died when he fell off that roof. But that wasn’t good enough for them. Chances are he won’t make it back home alive. It won’t do any good storming into that hospital. I mean to take all the attention away from Holt.”

  “Maybe you should tell me some of what’s going on.”

  “Alright,” he said. “Reckon I have to.”

  What followed was the longest speech Willett probably ever gave in his entire life. I listened carefully as the miles rushed by.

  *****

  “From what I know of it, that was no ordinary plane that crashed in that bayou. It was a military plane.

  “You have to look at the time; the events, you know. What was going on. That was how I put some of it together.

  “We were well done with Korea, I think, so we weren’t at war. But still, things were happening. The Cold War was in full swing by that time, had been since the end of World War II. Just telling you that to paint the picture a little better. I’m sure you know your history.

  “Holt disappeared in 1960, according to his papa. No one, not his little sister nor anyone else knew where he had gone. One day he was there, the next he was gone. I reckon Holt told you something about being out on the lake when he saw a plane come down. I don’t know what he was doing. Maybe he was fishing―I don’t know. What else is there to do on the lake? Anyway, his papa died in 1982. Holt didn’t come to the funeral and no one thought he would. You see, everybody thought Holt was dead and gone. Happens all the time, you know. People disappear and the years go drifting by. Or flying by, take your pick. People tend to forget, and if they do happen to remember, they tend to think: ‘Oh, they’re dead now.’ What else is there to think? It’s the quickest shortcut to an explanation.

  “Then, about three years ago, Holt comes back. All of his people are dead and gone, except his sister, who lives in Alaska now. I can’t think of why anyone from East Texas would live in Alaska. Anyhow, Holt Gatlin is back in town. He’s spotted at the grocery store, he’s seen getting gasoline at the Lake Association―that’s a little meeting hall, bar and filling station in Uncertain, and he’s seen everywhere else a normal person is seen.

  “I take it you never knew anything about any of this, Bill. But then, why would you, you know?

  “Holt was back. There was talk. Where had he been? Why hadn’t he come back for his daddy’s funeral in ‘82 and his brother’s in ‘94? Questions. A lot of questions, and damn few answers. Also, Holt wasn’t talkin’.

  “People, Bill. Normal, average, everyday people. They don’t like a mystery. They like things to be the way they’ve always been. Everything level and even. Everything with an easy explanation. It doesn’t have to be the correct explanation, but just so long as it fits, then they won’t pay it much mind.

  “Somehow the talk got back to them.

  “I suppose you want to know who ‘them’ is. Like I said, it was a military plane. I know. I’ve seen it.

  “I don’t know the why of it, and I don’t know the whole ‘who’ of it, but... Holt hired me for carpentry work. He had me helping him to build his house. The old family home―Holt wouldn’t go back there. The place is just a dilapidated shell. It could have been fixed up, but Holt wanted his own home. A new home. So I helped him build it and I’ve been on his payroll ever since. That was three years ago.

  “One morning last summer I had to go to the lumber yard to pick up some four-by-fours for a deck Holt had contracted to build for a local restaurant. There was this fellow at the lumber yard. Skinny fellow. He had on a white shirt and sunglasses. It was sort of funny him wearing sunglasses because it was a dark, cloudy morning.

  “This skinny fellow that certainly didn’t belong in Uncertain, Texas, comes up to me and starts in asking me questions.

  “He wants to know how Holt’s doing. ‘Fine,’ I tell him. But you know me. I don’t normally say ten words when one will do. He asks me something about ’How is business?’ and then something about ‘How is Holt enjoying his retirement?’

  “I decided about that time that something was damned wrong. I tell him ‘Mister, why don’t you just go and ask him?’

  “He gives me this big grin, but it’s sort of the smile somebody might give right before he pulls out a knife and cuts your throat. I turned away and went about my business. I didn’t say anything to Holt about it, though. I didn’t want to scare him none.

  “After that I got to studying on it. By that time I had heard just about every rumor that had gone through the town about Holt. Mysteries never bothered me much, Bill. I don’t really care, you know. Don’t care what people think or what they used to do, or the things they’ve done that they want to keep hid. None of my damned business, you know. But I do listen. Things jam together inside my head and there’s no telling which two or more things will snap together. Well, here was something different. Here was a bit of a threat of one kind or another. If you knew me well, you’d know I don’t take kindly to threats. Not to myself and not to my job. Also, I realized, though it may not come with the job description, but old Holt needed a little looking after.

  “One evening toward the end of the work day I told Holt I wanted to take off a little early on account of it was my birthday and I wanted to go get snockered up.

  “Holt handed me forty bucks and told me to go and get a couple of cases of beer and come back to his place and we’d celebrate together.

  “That night we went through thirty-six beers. Made a little pyramid out of the empties on his dining room table.

  “When he was about standing-up-falling-down drunk, Holt went and got a box and set it down on the table. He told me it was my present.

  “It was a chess set.

  “I’m not much of a game-player, Bill, but that chess set was the nicest dang thing I’d ever seen. I took it and that old buzzard smiled until I thought his face was going to split open.

  “After that he went to bed. I was in no shape to drive so I laid down on his couch.

  “The house was dark and quiet. I could hear him snoring away after five minutes there. I just laid there and sort of let the room spin around me. That’s the good thing about being drunk―the merry-go-round ride that comes with it when you go to bed.

  “Anyway, I laid there and listened to the house settle and that old man snore. I suppose I went to sleep somewhere along in there. It wasn’t terribly late,
but when you’re drunk, you sleep.

  “It was the yelling that woke me up. At first I couldn’t make sense of any of the words. It alarmed me out of sleep and I was on my feet and moving before I even knew I was awake.

  “I turned on the hall light and peeked in his room. I don’t know what I was expecting. Maybe a thief or something half-way in the window. Instead what I found was Holt sitting up his bed. His eyes were open and he was staring straight ahead and he was yelling.

  “‘Shut up! He’ll hear us!’ and ‘They’re burning!’ and ‘No. I’ve got to help them!’

  “I was standing there in front of Holt at the foot of his bed, just a-shivering and a-shaking. It was weird. Still gives me the chills.

  “I don’t know what came over me that made me do it, but I said: ‘Why can’t you help them?’

  “‘He’ll kill us if I do.’

  “And then he started saying ‘No’, over and over again, like it was one word with twenty syllables.

  “That was enough for me. I grabbed him and I shook him good and hard, and he came out of it. But for a second there he was rigid as a board. The strongest man in the world couldn’t have made him lay back down. He was like a ship’s keel. All one piece and stout, even though Holt weighs no more than one-fifty. But when his eyes rolled back in his head for a few seconds, then popped back down, focused on me, I felt the solidness in him just melt away like a breath you can see for no more than a second on a cold, windy day. His eyes focused on me and he said: ‘Willett, what the hell are you doing?’

  “I lied a little bit. I didn’t know what else to do. I told him that I thought he was having a seizure or something.

  “After that we both let it go and he went back to sleep. But I didn’t sleep any more that night. I was stone-cold sober.

  “The next day was a Sunday. By that time I had put a few things together. The rumors I had heard and some of the facts. I decided that something had happened on Caddo Lake that no one in town knew about.

  “And I meant to get to the bottom of it.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “You went looking,” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  We’d made some fast miles down the road and it was getting on to noon. I was hungry again, but I didn’t mention it. A sign loomed ahead:

  KARNACK 2

  We were almost there. I glanced in the sideview mirror during a curve and Jessica was there directly behind his, one hand on the steering wheel in the twelve o’clock position. I thought I heard music for a moment. No, couldn’t be.

  “There were two of them, Willett,” I said.

  He looked away from the road for a moment and regarded me again.

  “That night when the plane crashed. It was Holt and a girl he was in love with. Molly Sue Perkins. Do you know her?”

  “I’ve heard of her,” he said. “Crazy as a bedbug, I hear. Every town’s got at least one. The last I heard she was in the State Mental Hospital in Rusk.”

  “Oh. Okay. I guess it wouldn’t do much good to pay her a visit, then.”

  Willett didn’t answer.

  “So if they’re after the ‘set’, as you call it, why are we going to Holt’s house?”

  “Because,” he said. “That’s where Pierce will be, if I’m not mistaken.”

  “Pierce Gatlin,” I said. “Holt’s nephew.”

  “Right. Holt’s brother’s son.”

  “Why him?” I asked.

  “Because the week before Holt fell, I saw him with somebody. I think he thought he was being sneaky.”

  “Don’t tell me,” I said. “The skinny guy in the white shirt and dark sunglasses.”

  “The same. I had to drive to Marshall to get a load of peat moss. I stopped by a café to get some lunch and Pierce was sitting at the back of the place with Mr. Sunglasses. I almost walked over and started raising hell, but I thought better of it. It’s odd, you know. Pierce lives down in Houston. He’s got a wife and kids and his real estate office there. He started coming around once or twice a year after Holt showed up back in town again. But what business did he have talking to a stranger that had been asking after Holt in Uncertain? That’s what I want to know. And Pierce has been in town ever since Holt fell.”

  “I see,” I said.

  “The way I see it, since Pierce never knew that I’d seen him talking with the enemy, if they are the enemy, the best way to get everybody’s attention is to go straight to the horse’s mouth.”

  “To get the mule’s attention, you first must hit it upside the head with a two-by-four?”

  “Exactly!” Willett exclaimed.

  “So far all you’ve described is Mr. Sunglasses, and the last I checked, that doesn’t make a they, even if you added in Pierce. But I get the feeling you haven’t told me everything.

  “Not by half,” Willett said. He braked the truck to the turnout to Karnack off of the main highway. What there was of the town loomed ahead.

  “Why would Pierce Gatlin be at Holt’s house?” I asked.

  “He left the hospital early this morning and said he was going there to batten everything down for Holt’s hospital stay. At least, that’s what he said he was going to do.”

  “Alright,” I said. “Whatever comes of all this, I have to tell you that I promised my wife there’d be no shooting.”

  Willett laughed.

  “There’d better not be,” he said.

  *****

  We passed through Karnack, one of those blink-and-you-miss-it little burghs that East Texas is famous for. Uncertain was another two miles down the road.

  Uncertain is the home of less than a hundred souls spread in a narrow band around the southernmost bend of Caddo Lake and sandwiched between the main highway, a two-lane blacktop, and the lake. Further on, perhaps half a mile, the road dead-ends at the gates of the Caddo Lake Sportsman’s Club, an invitation-only association that meets whenever it feels like it, or at least that was the way Holt had once explained it to me. We turned left onto an even narrower gravel road that wound close by the lake and continued to the east and curved back to the north beneath the spreading branches of tall pine, sweet gum and cottonwood trees. The surface of the lake itself was infested with the broad trunks of cypress which tapered and thinned quickly the further they stood above the water-line. Cypress tend to be long-lived, and there are a few of the local cypress that were believed to predate Columbus discovery of the New World, which would put them well over five hundred years old.

  With a glance over my left shoulder I made sure Jessica was behind as we made the slow trip around the lake. Jessica waved and I waved back.

  Willett turned off the road abruptly between the broad trunks of a pair of pine trees.

  We were at Holt’s place.

  I had been to Holt’s house only once before. That had been the early summer the year previous. The house looked the same.

  I expected to see Pierce Gatlin’s car or truck in the driveway, but it wasn’t there.

  “Looks like Pierce has already cut out,” I said to Willett as we got out. “What does he drive?”

  “A Lexus. Dark-blue.”

  “Okay. Do we need to take a look inside the house?” I asked. I was curious about what we might find, if anything.

  “Couldn’t hurt,” Willett said. “Besides, I want to see what he’s stolen from Holt.”

  I laughed. “You’ve already concluded he’s a thief.”

  “Yep. Or worse.”

  Jessica pulled in behind us and piled out of the car.

  “So,” she said. “What are we doing here in alligator country?”

  “Hush,” I said. She followed us, but her eyes moved around, taking in everything.

  I felt warmth from the early afternoon sun on the crown of my head between the branch-work overhead as we went up Holt’s front walkway, but the wind was cold and gave me a slight chill. Winter was overdue.

  Willett got his first surprise before we were even inside. The front door was locked.

  �
�Holt never locks this door,” he said. “So that means that Pierce has been here and gone.”

  “You got a key?” I asked.

  “Nope. Never had need for one. I knew something wasn’t right when we drove up.”

  “How?” I asked Willett.

  “The window shades are all drawn. I forgot that Holt even had window shades. You don’t really need them when the brush is so thick that your neighbors can’t see inside unless they walk right up to your window.”

  “Is there anything we need inside this place?” I asked.

  “Nope. What Pierce was looking for is at my house.”

  I paused in my attempt to see through the narrow slit between the set of front door curtains.

  “The set?” I asked.

  “Yep.”

  “What else?” I asked. “What else was he looking for, Willett?”

  “The map.”

  *****

  I didn’t query him further on it then. There would be time.

  We walked around the house, testing windows and doing our best to peer inside.

  “Well,” I began, once we were two-thirds of the way around. “Looks like she’s locked up tight.”

  Willett was behind me, moving along slow. I got the idea that he was looking for something, but I paid him no mind.

  “Dad,” Jessica said. “Are we breaking the law?”

  “No,” I said. “Willett works for Holt and this is Holt’s house. We’re trying to make sure that it wasn’t burglarized.”

  “Ah. That’s why we’re spying. Cool!”

  Willett tried turning the back doorknob, but it was locked as well.

  “I’d say,” Willett said, “that any way we can get inside should be fine. I can fix whatever we have to break later.”

  “I know what to do!” Jessica said. “Follow me.”

  She trotted back around the rear corner of the house. Jessica ducked beneath the edge of a yaupon bush and brought forth a large rock. There was a wicked grin on her face.