Off to one side of the room, Jenny slipped her arm around Kate’s waist and they leaned into each other. “I wish Mama could see this,” Jenny said.
“She sees it, honey,” Kate said. “She sees it.”
Epilogue
Mandy stood uncertainly at the gate of the old house behind the cemetery, cradling an enormous Christmas basket in her arms. There was an intercom by the little guard booth, just as Joe said there’d be. She pressed the button and waited.
“We don’t want nothing,” a woman’s voice said in heavily accented English.
“Are you Hortencia?” Mandy asked.
“Si, I am Hortencia,” the voice said, “but we still don’t want nothing.”
Mandy forged forward, ignoring the words. “Hi, Hortencia. I’m Amanda Lockwood. I have a Christmas basket for you and Mrs. Jones.”
The voice on the intercom repeated the same phrase, only louder with more emphasis on each word as if the speaker was convinced her listener was slow witted. “We. Don’t. Want. Nothing.”
“But it’s Christmas Eve,” Mandy said brightly. “And I baked cookies.”
Static issued from the intercom. Hortencia sighed and began again, “We don’t . . .” but a second voice interrupted her. “Let the young lady in, please.”
Hortencia was so shocked she forgot to close the connection. “In like ‘in the house,’ Señora?”
“Yes, Hortencia, that’s what I said. Let her in.”
There was a pause and then a buzzer sounded and a smaller gate the size of a regular door popped open. Mandy stepped through and found herself in an immaculately tended front garden. As she stood looking around, the front door of the house opened and a small, round Mexican woman appeared. “Don’t just stand there,” the woman said. “Señora said come in the house.”
When Mandy reached the front door, she handed the basket to Hortencia, “Merry Christmas,” she said sweetly.
“You bake the cookies?” Hortencia asked suspiciously. “With the real butter?”
“Of course with real butter,” Mandy said. “What other kind is there?”
The woman let out a snort that was something between agreement and a laugh. “In there,” she said, pointing to a small parlor to the right of the hall.
Mandy entered the room, which appeared to be empty, and almost jumped out of her skin when a voice from behind a folding screen said, “It was kind of you to remember us on the holiday, Miss Lockwood. Won’t you please sit down?”
“Thank you, Mrs. Jones,” Mandy said, sitting gingerly on the edge of an antique sofa. “Uh . . . how are you?”
“I apologize for speaking to you in this way, my dear,” Mrs. Jones said. “Perhaps you have heard that I am a recluse. I am making an exception due to the festive nature of the season, but I am an old woman attached to my eccentricities.”
Mandy looked around the room curiously and her eye fell on a tiny Christmas tree decorated with old-fashioned glass ornaments. “Your tree is so pretty,” she said. “Thank you for letting me come in for a minute. I saw your house when I was visiting the graveyard recently and my fiancé told me about you. He didn’t think you have any family and I, well, this is a very happy Christmas for me and I just wanted to share it,” she finished in a rush.
The woman behind the screen didn’t speak at first, but then said, “How very kind of you, my dear. And congratulations on your impending nuptials. I remember well being young and in love. It does make the heart brim over, does it not?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Mandy agreed. “It really does.”
“Well,” Mrs. Jones said, in a tone that implied she was terminating the interview. “Thank you again for coming.”
“You’re welcome, Mrs. Jones,” Mandy said, rising. “Thank you for seeing me. Bye now.”
She was almost to the hall when the voice stopped her. “Miss Lockwood?”
“Yes, ma’am?”
“Perhaps you could return and tell me of your plans for the wedding. I would enjoy hearing a young bride speak of her special day.”
Mandy’s eyes brightened. “Oh, I’d like that very much! Thank you. Shall I call first?”
“No need,” Mrs. Jones said. “I do not leave the house. I shall tell Hortencia to be more welcoming on your next visit.”
When the front door closed and Mandy was out the gate, Lenore Ferguson stepped into the parlor. “You shouldn’t have done that, Mama,” she said. “You’re playing with fire.”
THE END
Part III
Book 3 - Alice’s Portrait
47
Jenny Lockwood sat on the front porch of her small house on the Rocking L, a sketchpad open on her knee, forgotten cup of coffee cooling on the table. The whitetail deer feeding in the clearing on the other side of the fence completely absorbed her attention. If she could just capture that certain alert nervousness in the way they held their heads as they chewed . . .
The rattling of two pick-up trucks full of workmen coming through the front gate shattered the early morning idyll. The does snorted and bolted into the thick brush and cedar. Jenny sighed, putting down her pencil and reaching for the tepid coffee. She took a taste, frowned, and threw the liquid into the yard before refilling the cup from the thermos on the table.
She heard boots on the gravel path and looked up. Her sister Kate raised the blue-and-white speckled cup in her hand by way of greeting and said, “Quit your scowling. They won’t be on the place much longer.”
“And a cheerful good morning to you,” Jenny said. “Pull up a chair. You need a refill?”
“I’m good,” Kate said, taking the seat next to Jenny and leaning back stiffly. Her left arm was encased in a somber, dark sling, but a ruby signet ring glittered on the index finger of her closed fist.
“How is it today?” Jenny asked.
“Same as always,” Kate said shortly. “Not gonna change.”
Knowing better than to fuss or coddle, Jenny said, “You reckon we’re ever gonna get any peace and quiet around here again?”
Spring had indeed brought a flurry of activity and change to the Rocking L. A year earlier the Lockwood sisters — Kate, Jenny, and Mandy — were reunited to bury their father in the wake of his suspicious suicide. In trying to understand his death, they’d uncovered his secret life.
As a young man, Langston Lockwood loved a girl. Unfortunately, his best friend, George Fisk, loved the same girl. The course of their collective destiny changed on an icy December night in 1956 when Alice Browning died in a car accident. To protect his friend’s hoped-for political career, Langston, who had not been drinking or driving, took the blame.
The real tragedy of Langston Lockwood’s life, however, unfolded in a lonely box canyon known as Baxter’s Draw. There, while seeking shelter from a sudden winter storm, he discovered a treasure cave. No explanation had yet been found for the presence of Aztec gold in the Texas Hill Country. The fact that it was there, however, explained why the Lockwood girls inherited not just the ranch, but millions of dollars they never knew existed.
The father who raised them was a hard and cruel man, parsimonious and tyrannical, always crying poor mouth in spite of his fondness for expensive Stetson hats and antique guns. Now they knew the secret of his wealth, and that he had used part of the gold he found in Baxter’s Draw to transform the crude cave into a hidden sanctuary. What they found behind a hidden door, accessed with a clever mechanical spring was a well-developed and well-furnished room complete with a fireplace.
For long periods of time over the 18 years between his own father’s death and his abrupt marriage to their mother, Irene Northrup of Boston, Langston Lockwood lived in Baxter’s Drawer as a hermit. He left behind hundreds of superbly executed drawings and sketches that created, in excruciating detail, the life he was never allowed to live with Alice Browning.
In those images, his daughters met a different Langston Lockwood. With his pencils and brushes, he made love to a woman who existed only in his tortured mind. He drew
visions of an imaginary wedding day, the birth of a child, and all the other milestones in the life of a growing family. In his journals, he recorded long conversations with Alice that never occurred; and in so doing revealed the inner life of a well-read, intellectual man – a discovery as shocking to his daughters as the Aztec gold itself.
The fact that he neglected and mentally tortured the family he ultimately had was harder to reconcile. The tenderness of those vignettes was completely at odds with the crude and merciless man they remembered. But, whereas, his fantasy world came from a place of deep love, Langston Lockwood’s reality spilled out of a roiling pit of hatred.
From the pages of his journals, the girls learned about the day their father was forced to drive two hours to the closest city for art supplies. He picked up a newspaper and there, on the front page, was an image of George Fisk, campaigning for a seat in the U.S. Congress, a beautiful dark-haired woman on his arm.
Long-buried rage at the injustice of his dashed dreams and wretched life bubbled up in Langston Lockwood, bringing him out of his self-imposed exile and back into the world. He wrote, “I won’t let him get away with it, Alice. I won’t let him build his fame and reputation on a lie. I’ll keep you safe, sweetheart. He’ll never touch the life you and I have built.”
Before Langston was done, George Fisk’s political career would lie in ruins and the man’s fiancé would be Mrs. Langston Lockwood. Three daughters were born to a union forged by a broken man’s insane desire for revenge - and each of those daughters would, in her own way, carry a piece of the unresolved and tragic Lockwood legacy.
At his death, the girls were scattered. The eldest, Kate, estranged from the father she could never please, was a successful rancher in her own right, but a lonely and isolated woman.
Jenny, the middle girl, was a gifted artist. She fled the ranch and her father’s cruelties at 17, paying for her own education, and then working as a graphic artist in New York City. There, wounded by her mother’s untimely death to cancer, and dealing with her hidden insecurities and longing for affection, she made bad choices. When a tyrannical man much like her own father left her with a broken jaw and festering shame, Jenny could not know that a collision course with her family’s past had already been set in motion.
Only the youngest girl, Mandy, seemed to escape the worst of Langston Lockwood’s toxic misery. Unlike her sisters, she was not forced to work on the ranch, nor did she endure the stream of ceaseless criticism he heaped on Kate and Jenny. Pretty, petite, and blonde, Mandy moved among the tall, dark-haired, angular Lockwoods like sunlight dancing on a still pond.
Her forgiving disposition, and effortless capacity for love made her the adored baby in the family. She enjoyed her father’s uncharacteristic support and her sisters’ fond protection and mothering. But even Mandy was, as the sisters learned, a tie to Alice Browning in Langston Lockwood’s mind. He believed his third child looked like Alice; and as his instability deepened, he wavered in his perception of the world. Sometimes he seemed to believe Mandy was Alice brought back to him, and at others, he thought she was indeed the child he shared with the love of his life.
Slowly, over the past year, these details emerged as a dramatic and baffling series of events unfolded. Langston committed suicide. The family attorney was murdered. The girls discovered a treasure cave. Kate suffered a crippled arm in a shooting with an unknown gunman. Then, Jenny’s past drove right through the front gate of the Rocking L, causing all the pieces to fall into place.
Robert Marino, Jenny’s former abusive lover, was not an “importer” as she had believed. He was a black-market antiquities dealer who intercepted one of the artifacts from the cave Langston Lockwood sold to a questionable buyer in San Antonio.
Marino became convinced the ranch held the key to discovering a bigger and more mythical mother lode; the lost treasure of the Aztec king, Montezuma. Marino set out to get his hands on Baxter’s Draw, initially attempting to use Jenny to get close to Langston.
In the end, when all of his machinations failed, Marino came to the Rocking L himself and threatened Kate and Jenny unless they allowed him to examine the treasure. It was Mandy, the gentlest of them all, who showed that a fine steel cable of strength ran true in the family. She shot Marino to save her sisters.
Now, with Marino safely in jail and a new year ahead of them, the women vehemently hoped the ghosts of the past were finally laid to rest. Mandy was engaged to marry the town’s mayor, Joe Bob Mason, who had begun to toy with the idea of running for the legislature.
Jenny, who had decided to return to her own artwork full time, was living on the Rocking L with neighboring rancher and professional photographer, Josh Baxter. He was proving to be a Godsend, helping Kate run the ranch.
For her part, Kate struggled daily to accept the ramifications of her injury. She could move the fingers of her left hand, but had almost no grip. Unless her arm was encased in a sling, she could not raise it to the level of her waist. Months of physical therapy had done little more than aggravate the chronic pain.
The blossoming working partnership with Josh helped her to keep a lid on her impatient anger. The man was blessed with a genial personality and constant good humor. He made Kate laugh, and he never made her feel disabled. They were planning to start a vineyard, and, although his camera was an ever-present accessory, Josh no longer accepted assignments or conducted photo excursions for clients on his own land.
Just after the New Year, Jenny asked him one night how he felt about the changes in his own life and career. He just grinned and said, “I ride for the Lockwood brand, darling.”
The real newcomer in the picture was Dr. Lowell J. Martin, known to his friends as Jake. An archaeology professor from Texas Tech University, Jake came to the Rocking L the previous fall to prove a theory associated with the Spanish mission, Santa Cruz de San Saba.
He continued to believe there was a tie between legends of lost treasure associated with the mission and the artifacts discovered in Baxter’s Draw. Now, however, he found himself heading the newly created Langston Lockwood Institute for the Study of Mesoamerican History.
Currently, Jake was busy terminating his contract with the University, cataloging the artifacts from Baxter’s Draw, and trying to unravel the mystery of how they came to be there in the first place. The carpenters who had spooked Jenny’s grazing deer were on the ranch to finish building a small house and laboratory for Jake’s use while he was away on a three-week research trip to Mexico City.
Although Jake and Kate were not romantically involved, they had become close friends. Often, in the evenings, when he was away from the ranch, they discussed his latest findings via Skype. Her own interest in, and knowledge of, archaeology and Mesoamerican history was growing, and to her pleasure and surprise, Jake had just asked her to help him write his initial paper on the Baxter’s Draw treasure.
All in all, as new leaves began to emerge and the days grew warmer, the Rocking L was a beehive of activity and it did, indeed, seem as if peace and quiet would never reassert themselves.
Kate laughed at Jenny’s question to that very point and said, “Just be patient another couple of days. The carpenters are doing the finishing-up work now and then they’ll be gone.”
“This place is starting to look like the Kennedy compound at Hyannis Port,” Jenny groused.
“And you thought you were going to miss New York City,” Kate laughed.
“Oh, right,” Jenny retorted. “This from the woman who has been threatening to shoot the next treasure hunter she sees coming over a fence line.”
“That’s different,” Kate said sternly. “Trespassing is right up there with horse theft in my book.”
“You know there’ll be more of them now that the weather’s getting better,” Jenny warned.
Kate made a grumbling sound in the back of her throat, “Just as long as we don’t have any more major drama, we can deal with the damn fence jumpers.”
“Don’t say that!” Jenny
squawked.
“Don’t say what?” Kate asked, looking perplexed.
“Don’t say we don’t want any more major drama. My God. You’re just asking for trouble!”
“Since when did you get so superstitious?” Kate asked.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Jenny said sardonically, “maybe about the time Fate started treating our lives like her very own first-person shooter.”
“What’s a first-person shooter?”
“Dear God, Kate, it’s a video game. Hello? Twenty-first century? You have got to quit being so old-fashioned!”
“Simmer down,” Kate said. “I get your meaning, but I really don’t think fate is taking pot shots at us.”
Jenny refused to be mollified. “My point is, you don’t go tempting fate saying stuff like that when you haven’t had a blessed thing but trouble for a solid year.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, stop it,” Kate scoffed. “There’s nothing left to find out now. It’s over, Jenny.”
Lenore Ferguson arranged the vase of yellow roses, turning them around until the best blooms were displayed to perfection. “There, Mama,” she said. “Aren’t they pretty?”
“They’re beautiful,” Elizabeth Jones said, looking up from her book and smiling as best she could. The right side of her face was drawn and scarred, making it impossible for her to raise the corner of her mouth. “Thank you. You always bring my favorites.”
“It brightens up the room,” Lenore said, going to sit with her mother. “Now that the sun’s out, you can read in the garden more. Get some fresh air. It’s good for you. The lavender came through the winter just fine, and I’ll bring some petunias and set them out this weekend.”
“Has Mandy picked the flowers for her wedding, yet?” Elizabeth asked, closing her book.
The Lockwood Legacy - Books 1-6: Plus Bonus Short Stories Page 26
