The Lockwood Legacy - Books 1-6: Plus Bonus Short Stories

by Juliette Harper

  “Agreed,” Jake said without hesitation. “This all needs to be photographed and cataloged in situ. It could take days. Hopefully, there’s something here that will tell us how your father found all these artifacts in the first place.”

  Jenny ran her fingers over the top of the oak desk, “It looks like an old school teacher’s desk,” she said. “The blotter has initials on it, B.B.”

  “Benton Browning,” Kate said.

  “How do you know that?” Jake asked.

  “Look at that copy of Paradise Lost over there,” Kate said, pointing to the top of the case where she’d put the volume down at the gunman’s orders. “The inscription inside is signed Benton Browning.”

  “Was he Alice’s father?” Mandy asked, retrieving the book.

  “I don’t know,” Kate said, “but he must have meant a lot to Daddy for his things to be here.”

  Jenny was opening the desk drawers one at a time. When she got to the large file drawer, she said, “Bingo.”

  “Now what?” Mandy asked, looking up from the book in her hand.

  Reaching into the drawer, Jenny began bringing out leather-bound volumes. Each one had a single word embossed on the cover, “Journal.”

  42

  The journals started in the fall of 1958 as nothing more than working notebooks filled with architectural drawings and diagrams. Over time, however, the brief marginal annotations grew longer. More than two years passed before Langston Lockwood began to tell the story. By then, the barebones of the room were in place, and he was spending weeks on end in Baxter’s Draw living as a hermit.

  Langston discovered the cave on a hunting trip the first winter he lived alone on the ranch. He wounded a 12-point buck and tracked the deer into the draw, only to find him dead at the head of the canyon. While Langston was field dressing his kill, he heard the wind whistle through the natural narrow opening of the cave and went to investigate. A blue norther was rolling down from the north, sending the temperatures plunging. He was hunting on foot and needed to take shelter from the elements.

  It was just that, the simple need to come in out of the wind that made Langston fashion a crude torch and enter the cave. What he found, changed his world. When the cold front blew itself out, Langston came down from Baxter’s Draw and put in motion the first steps of an 18-year-project culminating in the finished room that became his hidden world.

  In later years, Langston sold pieces from the cave on the black market, but the first artifacts, the ones that funded the modifications and supplied the seed money for his investments, were handled more expeditiously. He melted them down. According to his notes, gold sold for roughly $35 an ounce in 1958.

  That revelation made Jake turn pale as Jenny read the account from her father’s journal, “I selected what appeared to be the least significant pieces and cast them into one pound ingots. I made about $500 a gold bar.”

  “Even accounting for inflation, do you have any idea how many artifacts he must have destroyed?” Jake groaned. “How could he have known what was of least significance? And where in the world did he learn to smelt gold?”

  “His grandfather taught him blacksmithing,” Kate said. “Daddy re-loaded his own ammunition when we were kids. I remember him melting lead then.” She gestured with her good hand toward the stacks of books that covered every available space. “And it would seem that a man who claimed never to have wasted ‘a goddamned minute’ on reading learned everything on his own from books.”

  Lying interspersed with great works of literature, they’d found manuals on engineering, carpentry, woodworking, and masonry, along with extensive books on locksmithing. Their father had a particular fascination for anything with a hidden, secretive mechanism, amassing an impressive array of tiny tools and magnifying glasses to aid in their construction.

  “We should hardly be surprised about that,” Jenny said, as Josh unrolled a set of expensive, custom-made tools. “His unfinished letter to us was in a hidden panel in his desk, the map was in a drawer built into the hearth in his study, and the door to this place opens with a mechanical rock.”

  “But the journal with the story about Alice was in the poorly glued lining of a hat box he knew we’d pick up sooner or later?” Kate said. “What the hell?”

  “I think he wanted us to know everything,” Mandy said. She was sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of the fire going through loose sketches in a series of portfolios.

  “Why do you say that, little sugar?” Josh asked.

  “You all need to look at these pictures,” she said.

  “The last thing I want to do is look at art drawn by a man who ridiculed me for my own talent my whole life,” Jenny said coldly.

  “I don’t think that’s why he was so mean to you,” Mandy said. “I don’t think Daddy could stand how much joy your drawing gives you. It was something else for him. Look.”

  She began to put pages on the floor in front of her. Every one contained the same woman, Alice Browning. The first scenes were likely drawn from life. Alice and two young boys, undoubtedly Langston Lockwood and George Fisk on horseback, sharing a picnic on the riverbank, and climbing trees.

  Then there were scenes from high school. Alice in a flouncy poodle skirt. Langston and George in FFA jackets with vintage cowboy hats pushed high on their heads. The three of them sitting on the hood of a souped up ’57 Chevy.

  “That’s the car she died in,” Joe said, picking up the sketch and admiring the detail. “Look at that,” he said. “He even drew in the inspection sticker on the windshield.”

  “How do you know that’s the car?” Mandy asked.

  “I talked to my dad about the wreck,” Joe said. “He was already out of high school a couple of years and working with Granddad at the hardware store. The wreck happened on a Saturday night. The next morning after church everybody in town went down to the lot behind the Ford Motor Company to see the car.”

  “Dear God, that’s a little ghoulish, isn’t it?” Jake asked.

  “Probably,” Kate agreed, “but it’s also very small-town Texas. I’m ashamed to say I’ve looked at my own fair share of mangled cars on display over the years.”

  “So he drew their childhood from memory,” Jenny said. “So what?”

  “Then he started drawing this kind of thing,” Mandy said quietly.

  She started laying the pages out one at a time. Alice Browning in a wedding gown carrying a bouquet of flowers and vines that trailed to the floor. Alice as a smiling young housewife in a dress with a boat neck collar. Alice cradling a newborn baby, looking up lovingly at a tall man in profile leaning over her hospital bed.

  “Is that . . .” Jake asked.

  “Yes,” Kate said. “That’s Daddy.”

  Langston Lockwood drew the life with Alice Browning he was never allowed to live. He rendered every milestone in his fantasy in painful, exquisite detail, gently aging Alice through the years but never diminishing her beauty. Love and aching loneliness bled from the pencil strokes as the drawings became more skilled from years of practice, almost photographic in their dimensionality.

  As the images piled up, Jenny moved to sit on the floor beside Mandy, really looking at the drawings, allowing herself to go into the mind of the artist who was her enigmatic and cruel father.

  “He was trying to bring her back to life,” she said, holding up a scene of a middle-aged couple on a dancefloor. The man was Langston Lockwood as they had known him; tall and lean, but with a tender smile where his daughters had only seen a scowl.

  He stood looking down at the woman in his arms as she stood on tiptoe to kiss him. The small space between their lips, only a mere breath on paper, loomed like the unfulfilled desert of a grieving man’s longing

  “He must have been the loneliest man on the face of this earth,” Mandy said. “I feel so sorry for him.”

  “But goddamn it,” Jenny said, her voice breaking, “he had us. He had Mama. He didn’t have to be lonely. We tried. Damn it, we tried.” />
  She was sitting in front of Kate who was still in the chair by the fire. Kate reached forward to stroke her sister’s hair, and Jenny put her head down against Kate’s knee, crying quietly. “Shh,” Kate murmured comfortingly. “I think he tried too, honey. It was just too big for him.”

  Josh, Joe, and Jake exchanged glances and quietly got up to leave. As Joe stood, Mandy caught his hand and looked up at him, her own face wet with tears. “Thank you,” she whispered.

  He squeezed her fingers. “We’ll be outside if you need us.”

  When they were gone, Mandy put her arms around Jenny, who drew her closer. Together, Langston Lockwood’s daughters cried for him for the first time since his suicide.

  Long minutes later, their composure regained, the three sisters sat by the fire. “Can you imagine living in this place?” Mandy said. “No windows, inside the mountain, haunted by his memories.” She shuddered, “What an awful life.”

  “What’s more awful is what brought him down off his mountain,” Kate said. “He came back down to get his revenge on George Fisk by using our mother.”

  “I know,” Mandy said, confusion rippling through her words, “but if he hadn’t done that, we wouldn’t be here, and I wouldn’t have the two of you.”

  “There’s always a cost to everything,” Jenny said, her voice hoarse from crying.

  “That’s called life,” Kate said. “I’d rather know all this about Daddy than go to my own grave believing he treated me the way he did just because I wasn’t his son.” She shifted in the chair, wincing and clenching her jaw.

  “How bad is it?” Jenny asked.

  “Pretty bad,” Kate admitted. “I think I’m about done for the day.”

  “Do you want to stay in here?” Jenny asked. “It’s warmer.”

  “No, thank you,” Kate said with conviction. “I’ve had more than enough of this place for now.” She stood stiffly, holding onto the chair to let a small wave of dizziness pass, then led her sisters out of the cave.

  The three men had built up the campfire and the aroma of cooking chili filled the night air. Jake was putting a Dutch oven over the fire. “Perfect timing,” he said. “We should have cornbread in a few minutes.”

  “Where did you learn to cook over an open fire?” Mandy asked, settling in one of the low camp chairs.

  “I didn’t always go into the field in a restored Airstream,” Jake said. “A man has to eat.”

  Josh appeared beside Kate. “This one’s for you, Boss Lady,” he indicated a chair with a memory foam back. “Easier on the shoulder.”

  Kate eyed the low chair and the hand Josh was holding out. She took it after a moment’s hesitation and allowed him to offer steadying resistance as she sat down.

  “Better?”

  “Much.”

  “How long has it been since you’ve had one of those pain pills?” he asked.

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” she snapped. “Don’t you start in on me, too. I don’t need a damned pain pill.”

  “I was gonna offer you a damned drink of whiskey,” he said patiently.

  Ashamed of her annoyed outburst, Kate said, “Sorry, Josh.”

  “No problem. I just know Jenny will have my hide if I let you mix booze and pills.”

  “A perfectly reasonable precaution . . . about Jenny,” she deadpanned.

  “I heard that,” Jenny said from the other side of the clearing.

  Kate laughed and said to Josh, “You should be safe. I haven’t taken anything since we’ve been up here.”

  “Straight or you want me to cripple it?”

  “Straight.”

  Hot food and good bourbon took the edge off the day. Both the conversation and the silences rose and fell easily until sleepiness began to claim them all. Josh appeared beside Kate again, hand extended, and helped her out of the chair. The couples exchanged good night kisses. Jake caught Kate’s eye, shrugged, and grinned. She grinned back and they both ducked into their respective tents.

  When Jenny and Mandy came in, they found Kate already lying down and almost asleep. Jenny knelt beside her. “Are you comfortable enough?”

  “That damn man,” Kate mumbled.

  “What damn man?”

  “Josh.”

  “What did he do now?”

  “Memory foam camping mattress,” Kate said, barely awake. “Marry him, or I will.”

  Jenny and Mandy both giggled, and Jenny put another blanket over Kate’s sleeping form, absent-mindedly feeling her forehead for a non-existent temperature.

  “She’s fine, Jenny,” Mandy said, putting an arm around her sister. “Just tired.”

  “I know,” Jenny said. “It’s just that I can still see her in that hospital room that night. We almost lost her.”

  “But we didn’t,” Mandy said. “Now come on, you’re tired, too.”

  “Since when do you play mother hen?” Jenny groused, getting into one of the sleeping bags.

  “I know what you saw in there hurt you,” Mandy said. “I wish I could make it better. Please don’t hurt about all this anymore, Jenny. You’re so loving on the inside. You don’t always have to hide that to keep yourself safe.”

  In the dim light of the tent, Jenny could just make out her sister’s worried face. “Quit frowning or you’ll get wrinkles,” she said, ignoring Mandy’s words.

  A quick look of horror crossed Mandy’s features at the word “wrinkles” and then she smiled, shook her head, and got into her own sleeping bag. Just before she fell asleep, Mandy heard Jenny whisper, “Thank you, Baby Sister.”

  43

  Kate opened her eyes well before dawn, sitting up cautiously. Her shoulder felt surprisingly good, stiff and aching, but not the relentless lightning bolts she’d endured the day before.

  The instant Kate moved, Jenny came awake, concern flooding her features. Kate put a finger to her lips, and mouthed, “I’m fine.” She pointed to Mandy, and shook her head, then mimed the motion of drinking coffee, raising her eyebrows questioningly.

  Jenny nodded and noiselessly climbed out of her sleeping bag. She resisted the urge to help as Kate awkwardly pulled on her boots, then got to her knees before standing up a little unsteadily. She regained her balance quickly though and stepped through the tent flap first, holding it open for Jenny with her good hand.

  The sisters emerged into weak pre-dawn light, stifling their laughter as soft snores emanated from the men’s tent. Kate stirred the embers of the fire and added wood until the flames caught. Jenny spooned ground coffee into the pot, poured in water from a canteen, and set the pot on the cooking grate.

  She waited until the coffee boiled over, then removed it from the fire and sprinkled cool water in the pot to settle the grounds. She poured them each a slow cup and then walked into their father’s cave.

  Once they were out of earshot of the late sleepers, Kate said, “I’ll be damned. You remember how to make cowboy coffee.”

  “Black as hell, strong as death, and sweet as love,” Jenny said, as they clinked cups. “And good morning to you, too. You look better than you did last night.”

  “I feel better than I did last night,” Kate said, sipping the bitter brew. “Damn that’s good,” she added approvingly, taking the chair she’d occupied the day before as Jenny stoked the fire back to life.

  They drank their coffee in companionable silence for a few minutes until Kate asked, “How are you doing with all this?”

  “You mean with this place?” Jenny said, looking around the cluttered little room.

  “No, I mean all of it,” she said. “That morning the Sheriff came to tell me Daddy killed himself, I was thinking about putting in the spring garden at my place. Now it’s November and I’m sitting in a hidden room in Baxter’s Draw with you, four feet from a cabinet full of Aztec gold. I feel like I’ve fallen into some kind of James Bond movie.”

  “More like a Clive Cussler novel,” Jenny said.

  “Who?” Kate asked.

  “He writes books about a
very testosterone-infused adventure hero named Dirk Pitt. In the first one I read the guy raised the damned Titanic. Get the picture?”

  Kate laughed, “Well, with the exception of those three guys out there in that tent, I can’t say I think testosterone has done us any good. This whole mess started with two young bucks chasing the same female.”

  “Can you even imagine Daddy being this crazy in love with someone?” Jenny said, picking up the sketch of the dancing couple.

  “Actually, I can,” Kate said. “It takes passion to stay that mad at the world for almost 60 years. You ought to know, you inherited the quality.”

  Jenny looked up, startled. “Why do you say that?”

  “I’ve seen you mad,” Kate said smiling. And then, more gently, “And I’ve seen you cry. Sometimes, honey, I think you’ve bottled up the most pain of us all. Mandy gets her feelings hurt, she goes off and cries, but she forgives and loves as easy as she breathes. Me, I just get quieter, work harder, hide in a book, which apparently Daddy did, too. But you carry pain, Jenny. You hurt with it every damned day trying to punch your way through life on your own terms. Just like him.”

  Jenny looked down, toying with the cup in her hands. “We are indeed Langston Lockwood’s daughters,” she said ruefully. “To tell you the truth, figuring out exactly what that means is more important to me than all that gold over there.”

  “I agree with you,” Kate said. “Intellectually, I want to know how that stuff wound up in this cave, but I don’t give a hoot about some damned treasure. From the minute old Ida Belle Banners told me about Alice Browning, all I’ve wanted to find out is who Daddy really was.”

  “We haven’t even scratched the surface of what’s in this room to answer that question,” Jenny said. “And if word of that gold gets out, it’s not going to be just us picking Daddy’s life apart.”