“All the while pocketing large kickbacks under the table,” Josh said. He turned to Rafe. “And I imagine your bank is going to be ever at the ready to offer financing?”
Rafe nodded genially, gesturing with his own cigar. “Purely in the interest of civic mindedness.”
“Of course,” Josh said. “What other motive could you possibly have? Destroying the Lockwoods is just a little extra icing on the cake, eh?”
“Yes,” Retta said, “but cake is not the issue. We need an ice breaker.”
“Which would be?”
“The first major landholder who agrees to sell.”
Josh laughed. “Then you’re out of luck. You’ll never get the Lockwood sisters to sell the Rocking L. It’s not even legal under the terms of Langston’s will.”
“Correct,” Retta said, “which is why the land has to revert to the hands of a Baxter, which would be you. And why the profits will go into your pocket.”
“And how am I going to pull that off?” Josh asked.
“By finding the body of Simpson Browning.”
“The man my grandfather supposedly killed?”
“Yes,” Retta said, “but more to the point, the man whose death resulted in your family’s loss of Baxter’s Draw. Rafe did rather a nice job encapsulating the story, but let me give it to you with somewhat greater detail.”
As Josh sat smoking his cigar, Retta told him about an afternoon in 1982, just months before Sarah Lockwood’s death, when the terminally ill woman came to Retta’s father to confess her sins. “I can’t go to Jesus with two murders on my conscience,” Sarah told him.
Retta lurked in the hallway outside her father’s office, her favorite place to learn the salacious details of his flock’s transgressions. It was from this vantage point that she learned that Milton Lockwood passed a burden of conscience on to his wife prior to his own demise. Felled by a heart attack in the barn, and forced to wait while Dr. Walter Kitterell rushed to the ranch from town, Milton told Sarah the truth about how he took Baxter's Draw.
In a moment of weakness, Daniel Baxter agreed to allow his neighbor, Simpson Browning, to hunt for fossils in Baxter's Draw. Simpson, who taught history at the local high school, fancied himself to be an amateur archaeologist. He routinely talked his way onto remote parts of ranches in the area and had begged Daniel to let him comb through the dry creek bed for years. Over the course of several days, Simpson wandered higher and higher into Baxter's Draw, and ultimately found the entrance to the treasure cave.
Elated by the discovery, he rushed to tell Daniel. The two men returned to the cave, accompanied by Daniel's ranch hand, Clod Fenton. As the men stared at the chests of Aztec gold, Simpson began to talk about how the discovery would put their names in the history books. Enamored by tales of the archaeological greats like Howard Carter, who discovered King Tut's tomb in 1922, Simpson dreamed of taking his place among them.
Daniel wanted the gold for himself. The year was 1937. The ranch was still recovering from the effects of the Great Depression. With the money he could make melting the artifacts down and selling them as bullion, Daniel and his family would never endure another poor day in their lives. He wasn't greedy. He offered to split the haul with Simpson and even with Clod.
Simpson reacted with horror. It would be a sacrilege to destroy the priceless artifacts. They must go to a museum for proper study. The longer the men talked, the more heated the conversation grew, until Daniel lost his temper. He was holding a heavy gold box in his hand, and when Simpson tried to take it from him, Daniel struck him with the object. The box caught Simpson on the side of the head with such force, he fell dead on the spot.
With Clod's help, Daniel dragged Simpson farther back in the cave and the two men left the draw, erasing all traces of their presence there. So far as the community knew, Simpson Browning simply drove off on one of his fossil hunts and never came back. In that regard, good fortune did smile on Daniel. Simpson's twin brother, Benton, and the rest of the Browning family were all in Galveston on vacation. Simpson, a confirmed old bachelor, told no one where he was going.
Daniel and Clod hid Simpson's car in the barn. That night, Clod quietly pushed the vehicle well away from the ranch house. Before dawn, the Buick came to rest in a deep hole at the bottom of the river. If anyone on the Baxter ranch had any suspicions about Simpson's disappearance, they said nothing.
Had it not been for Clod Fenton, Daniel would have gotten away with his crime. But an idea began to trouble Clod. If Daniel could so easily kill a respected leading citizen like Simpson Browning and hide the fact, what would stop him from murdering a common laborer like Clod to ensure his secret was not exposed?
Weighing his options, Clod decided to approach Milton Lockwood with an offer. "I can tell you something that will let you stick it to the Baxter's once and for all," Clod said, "and it'll make you richer than Croesus to boot."
Milton confronted Daniel and stated his terms; the deed to Baxter's Draw in exchange for his silence. Daniel angrily informed him that unless he had a body, no one was going to believe a worthless liar like Clod Fenton.
"Go on," Milton told him. "Go up to Baxter's Draw and try to find Simpson's body. I promise you, it's not where you left it. Cross me, and I'll turn you over to the law and send your stinking Baxter hide to prison in Huntsville where you belong."
It was at that point that Daniel's father, Houston Baxter, well advanced in years, walked into the room. He castigated his son for his recklessness and ordered him to take the deal. "You've got three boys of your own to think about, you damned fool," the old man railed. "We've been crossways with the Lockwoods long enough. Let'em have the damned draw and that cursed treasure. See how much good it does them."
To cover the inexplicable land transaction, the men staged a poker game during which Daniel, pretending to be well in his cups, raised on a pair of fours, throwing a handwritten deed to Baxter's Draw on top of the pot. Conveniently, both the county clerk and the county attorney were present at the game to witness him compose and sign the document.
When the cards were laid on the table, Milton Lockwood, who had dealt the hand, spread aces and eights on the green felt. The look he gave Daniel Baxter was lost on the other players, but the message of the famous dead man's hand was clear to Daniel. He called Milton "a crooked Lockwood son of a bitch" and stormed out.
No one saw Daniel tend to one final piece of business in the parking lot before climbing in his pickup and driving home. He tampered with the brakes on Clod Fenton's prized slantback Ford, creating the circumstances that resulted in Fenton's death in one of the county's most famous car accidents.
The disappearance of Simpson Browning was never solved. Twenty years later a new Browning family tragedy eclipsed his legend among locals, the death of Alice Browning in a crash at the entrance to the South Llano Bridge on her way to a Christmas dance with Langston Lockwood and George Fisk. Coincidentally, Fisk would ultimately marry a woman named Pauline Fenton, who was born just days after her father died on a lonely country lane that forever after would be called New Wreck Road.
Retta Thornton's plan to use all this information was simple. If Josh could find Simpson Browning's body, setting the stage for her to come forward as a concerned citizen who heard a terrible secret when she was but an innocent child, he would have a pretext to take the Lockwoods to court.
When he first heard the idea, Josh laughed. "Do you think anyone cares about a murder that took place in 1937?" he said. "They're all dead. Even if I do find Simpson Browning's body, this is all just hearsay. It won't ever go anywhere."
"Oh, but it will," Retta said. "That poker game was just the last in a long series of questionable land grabs the Lockwoods pulled off going all the way back to the Fisher-Miller land grant. The civil case could keep them tied up in court for decades. Any lawyer worth his salt would recommend a settlement. What I want is the river front property at the back of the cave running downstream to where it joins your existing property. That
entire section was all part of what Milton swindled from Daniel. How do you think the sainted Katherine Lockwood is going to enjoy seeing weekend ranchettes developed right up through the middle of the Rocking L?"
"But what about the cave?" Josh asked. "They're finding artifacts from other eras in there now. Jake thinks it may have been an outlaw stronghold in the 1870s."
"A fact that will allow us to get the state involved to seize the cave for its historical significance, a move that will further fracture the Rocking L," Retta said triumphantly. "With that one piece of evidence, we'll put in motion a landslide that will roll right over the surviving Lockwoods and destroy them and everything they hold dear once and for all."
So Josh had his assignment, but the question with which he now grappled was even more complex. How was he going to turn this situation to his own advantage? Retta had not bothered to belabor the point, but she had more than enough information to destroy him as well, and he had no doubt she would use it ruthlessly.
The woman had him dead to rights. Josh had been working for Robert Marino. Fresh out of college and employed as a photographer in a museum, Josh let his fondness for gambling on sports get out of hand. When his debt reached a level sufficient for his creditors to suggest repayment in broken bones, an alternate solution presented itself. Josh began to work with a forger.
It was simple really. Pass on a few photographs and facilitate switching the authentic items with the fakes. Josh told himself it wasn't so wrong. None of the pieces were major works. He was only doing it to pay off the bookies. Then came the day when he walked in to find the forger dead on the floor of his workshop and Robert Marino standing over the body.
In silky tones, Marino explained that what Josh was witnessing was the aftermath of a "hostile takeover." Josh was another asset in the inventory, therefore he had also been acquired. Should he object, liquidation could be arranged. Every single event from that day forward was, in Josh's mind, the most awful set of coincidences possible.
First there was a map of the county lying on Marino's desk that Josh recognized. Then Uncle Melville conveniently died. Josh inherited the land adjacent to the Rocking L. Josh arranged a meeting between his gambling pal, John Fisk, and Marino. Marino offered a deal: the money for Josh to start his nature ranch in exchange for quiet surveillance of Langston Lockwood.
It was all going perfectly, until he saw Jenny Lockwood's for the first time and felt his blood stir at the timbre of her voice when she demanded to know what he was doing on her land. With her hair wild around her face and her eyes blazing in anger, she was the most beautiful and beguiling woman he'd ever seen – and the one person he did not need to be thinking about right now.
Josh slid the headlamp off and put it on the rock beside him. He ran his hand through his hair and then wearily covered his eyes. Right now he couldn't think about Jenny or his own role in the events of the last two years. Now he had to figure out what he was going to do.
Whether he wanted to be or not, Josh was in love with Jenny Lockwood. There had to be something he could do to save the Rocking L for her and at the same time prevent her from discovering the extent of his own crimes. Right now, she didn't hate him, but if she learned the truth . . . Josh shook his head as tears filled his eyes. He couldn't bear for her to know the things he'd done. That he could not allow.
Crumpling the remains of his lunch and stowing the trash in his bag, Josh put his headlamp back on and stood up. According to the details of Retta's story, Daniel must have killed Simpson in the portion of the cavern over which Langston had built the floor of his hidden sanctuary.
Since the cave-in, that area was off limits to the researchers. With the patience of proper academics, Jake and his team were working backwards toward the treasure itself, mapping and modeling the cave and recording all the relics they found, regardless of the era to which they belonged.
One of their first tasks had been the careful examination and removal of the remains of the Aztec porters who had originally carried the treasure north from Mexico. Since then, the team had turned up an odd collection of coins, spurs, and even a pistol dating from the 1870s, leading Jake to speculate about an outlaw stronghold.
Jake's plan was to do a structural integrity analysis at each stage of their progression toward the treasure trove, shoring up the cave as needed. The plan was proper and prudent, but entirely too slow for what Josh had to accomplish. In theory, he was supposed to be taking photographs and measurements of the rooms ahead of Jake's people, but Josh seized every opportunity that presented itself to conduct solo searches.
He glanced at his watch. Not much time left before someone started looking for him. Thankfully, this deep, underground radios and cell phones were useless, but Josh didn't want to have to explain why he'd wandered so far off his assigned path. One more room, and then he'd turn back.
Josh moved cautiously through the far opening, playing his light over the floor to ensure he wasn't about to step off a ledge. The space was roughly circular, but on the opposite wall, the rock split to create a jagged, black crevice. Josh approached it curiously, and when he shined his light inside, the gaping jaws of a skeleton grinned back at him. He knew instantly he was looking at the body of Simpson Browning. One side of the skull was crushed inward, the bone dented and fractured from the force of a killing blow.
Simpson's clothes, though brittle and dusty, were intact. The man died wearing work boots, khaki pants, and a vest over a blue shirt. A fedora sat incongruously beside the ruined head, wisps of powdery dirt lying in drifts on the brown felt.
Josh's light played over a gold watch chain looped over a button on the vest. The fob, a Masonic square and compass, lay perfectly positioned on the material. Careful not to disturb the remains, Josh leaned into the crevice and removed the watch from the pocket where it had rested since Simpson last put it there in 1937.
Cradling the timepiece in his hand, Josh studied the elegantly engraved initials on the case – LSB. "So," Josh said conversationally, looking down at the bones, "Simpson must have been your middle name. Tell me, L. Simpson Browning, what am I supposed to do with you now?"
At that moment, an idea came to Josh's mind. He opened the small case clipped to his belt and took out the pocket camera he carried at all times. Adjusting a few settings, Josh snapped a series of photographs of Simpson Browning's remains. There was one person Josh could talk to who would understand what it meant to deal with the ramifications of leading a secret life, Elizabeth Jones. In her true identity as Alice Browning, she was this man's niece, and the only person who might be able to help Josh sort out all this business about land and family feuds.
Telling her the truth was a gamble, but why the hell not? Gambling was what started this whole nightmare in the first place. Why not roll the bones one more time? The instant the thought passed through his mind, Josh realized the irony of it and began to laugh softly. He was, after all, standing over a skeleton.
With the sound still echoing in the small chamber behind him, Josh turned and left Simpson Browning once again in the darkness that had been his resting place for almost 80 years. Whether he would continue to lie there or not remained to be seen.
120
That night, Josh headed into town as usual, but he didn’t go to the Bloody Bucket. Instead, he drove to a ramshackle old house behind the city cemetery. When he pressed the buzzer by the front gate, a woman’s voice issued from the speaker box.
“We don’t want nothing,” she said in heavily accented English.
“Hortencia, it’s Josh Baxter.”
“We still don’t want nothing.”
Josh shook his head. Elizabeth Jones' housekeeper would try the patience of Job. He tried again. “Hortencia, come on! You know who I am."
"You don't live with Senorita Jenny no more," she said. "Demasiada cerveza."
"I haven't even had uno cerveza," Josh said, struggling to keep the annoyance out of his voice. "Could you please just come out here and talk to me?”
After a couple of minutes he heard footsteps on the gravel drive. The door beside the main gate opened. “What?” Hortencia demanded brusquely.
Josh held Simpson Browning’s gold pocket watch out to her. “Please show this to Elizabeth.”
Hortencia frowned, but she took the watch and slammed the small door without a word. Her footsteps receded. Five minutes later, they returned. This time the housekeeper, with unspoken but thunderous disapproval, announced sourly, “Mrs. Elizabeth, she say come in the house.”
Josh followed Hortencia through the front door and into the parlor where Elizabeth sat in a high-backed chair beside a modest, well-tended fire. A blanket covered her crippled legs, but the flames vividly illuminated the etched network of scars on the right side of her face.
Still, this woman, born as Alice Browning, who had paid the highest price of them all for Langston Lockwood's madness, retained her graceful beauty. Age had carved a kind of regal forbearance into the unspoiled line of her left profile. She wore her thick, luxuriant white hair twisted high on her head. Sitting with a stack of books at her elbow in the dim light of the parlor, Elizabeth might have been a figure from any place and any time.
It was the very surrealism of the woman's company that Josh had always found appealing, and her removal from the world made him believe he could trust her now.
“Good evening, Josh,” Elizabeth said. “I hope the room won’t be too warm for you. The coming of cold weather is my plague.”
“Not at all,” he said. “Thank you for seeing me.”
“Please,” Elizabeth said, indicating the chair on the other side of the fireplace. “I’m most interested to hear how you came to have Uncle Simpson’s pocket watch.”
Josh sat down and met Elizabeth's eyes. From the tone of her question, there would be no pretense in this conversation. “You’re sure the watch is his?” Josh asked.
The Lockwood Legacy - Books 1-6: Plus Bonus Short Stories Page 81
