Burt abandoned the pump opposite mine and came over to take a look. “Well, that old saddle is sure a dandy. I don’t think I’d be ridin’ that one, worn as the leather is, but it’s somethin’ to see. That a family heirloom? Got any idea how long ago it was made?”
“Pre–Civil War, is my understanding. It’s just a prop. Nobody’s going to be riding on it.”
Bert and Nester eyed each other, then Nester eyed me. “Yer one of them movie folks. Shoulda known it by the plain white truck with the number on the side. It’s a rental, ain’t it?”
“It belongs to the production company. I’m not sure if it’s a rental or not. Actually, this is my first time to the location. Do you know how long it takes to get there from here?”
Burt and Nester shared a bit of silent eye conversation, and I wondered what that meant. They looked like two kids who’d been caught selling bubble gum on the playground at recess. “We’ve been sworn to secrecy, ma’am,” Burt finally answered. “But if I did know where that filmin’ set was, exactly, I’d tell you it’s closer to get there crossin’ the lake than it is to go overland. To drive it in a truck, you got a good hour of hills and dirt roads waitin’ on you. You know how to operate the four-wheel drive in this thing? It full time, or you gotta lock it in?”
No doubt my cluelessness showed. The pump had just clicked off, and I was staring at the seventy-dollar gas bill in complete shock. Seventy dollars for gas? All at one time? “Four-wheel drive . . . huh . . .”
Nester tsk-tsked under his brushy gray moustache. “Oh, darlin’, you don’t want to be like that other bunch that come high falutin’ out here from Hollywood. Tow truck had to go pull them out after they spent the night in the woods and scared theirselves half to death. Fools got two cars and a minivan high-centered at Bee Cave crossin’. That was back in the spring, when they started construction on the town site out there. They quit the minivans and started sendin’ trucks after that. Now, if they would’ve asked us local folk, we coulda told them that in the first place. You don’t want to be takin’ chances on them roads up in Chinquapin Peaks. Can’t always get cell phone service up there, either. Comes and goes, dependin’ where you’re at.”
“Oh . . .” My glittery sense of excitement and adventure melted quickly into the uncomfortable squiggle of fear and trepidation. Maybe I needed food and extra water . . . just in case I found myself stuck in the mountains like one of those tourists who takes a wrong turn during the off-season and ends up fighting for survival. Maybe Tova had sent me up here on purpose—a clever way of finally getting rid of me.
Nester’s gray mustache twitched upward. “Let me give it a closer look and make sure you’re all set for the roads in Chinquapin. Now, you do know that the Wildwood town site is on fifteen thousand acres of private land owned by the power company, right? You got a key to get in that place? Because otherwise, you’ll be slap outta luck. The construction crew already finished everythin’ and left yesterday. I hear the movie folks changed the locks soon as the crews left, so no one could get back in. They’re keepin’ that place a Class-A secret.” He smiled and winked at me. “’Course, I guess they never thought about the fact that if the fella has a boat and knows his way to the cove along Wildwood Creek, it ain’t hard to get there by water.”
Bert elbowed Nester in the stomach, and Nester let out a soft oof. “Nester, you’re gonna get us arrested. How would that look? Former principal of Moses Lake High School and the head mechanic at the bus barn, thrown in jail?”
Nester waved off the concern. “I’m tryin’ to save this young lady from driving all the way up there for nothin’. If she don’t have the key, we could call Mart McClendon and have him let her in. Game warden has the key to the old electric company gate next to the new one. He could get her on the place.”
I quickly assured them that the combination had been given to me along with my traveling instructions for the day. An analysis of the truck and a rudimentary lesson in four-wheel-drive operation followed, and then I went inside to grab a soda, a chicken finger basket to go, and a precautionary six-pack of bottled water. Nester and Burt accompanied me in—apparently I was the most interesting thing happening in Moses Lake at the moment—and while I waited for my food, Pop Dorsey, the owner of the place, encouraged me to sign the Wall of Wisdom. Offering a Sharpie, he indicated the rear area of the store, where visitors had been leaving signatures and favorite bits of wisdom since the store’s inception in the 1950s.
“It’s good luck to sign the wall,” Nester urged. “Means you’ll always come back to Moses Lake.”
Since I needed all the luck I could get, and I did want to come back to Moses Lake—both today and at the end of the summer on my way home—I felt obliged to add my two cents. After thinking for a minute, I decided to leave that bit of wisdom from Grandma Rita.
Follow your heart, but always take your brain with you.
I signed it with both of our names. Allie Kirkland and Rita Lane Kirkland.
Now we were officially part of the Moses Lake Wall of Wisdom, along with such clever quotes as Early to bed, early to rise, fish all day, tell big lies. And Never test the depth of the water with both feet.
After I was finished, my new friends showed me the way to a massive old cotton barn the production company had rented to house props and construction materials. The barn lay along the lakeshore, behind a massive Greek revival house that had been converted into a bed-and-breakfast. The property owner there, Blaine Underhill, unloaded the boxes and tools into the barn, where buggies, wagons, buckets, tin pots, huge iron kettles, and all manner of other antique materials waited.
I stood in the doorway, admiring the sheer magnitude of the collection, my blood quickening with the whispers in the dusty air. The stories these things could tell . . .
If these were just the props, I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to see, for the first time, Wildwood itself.
Chapter 14
ALLIE KIRKLAND
MAY, PRESENT DAY
I parked a few spaces down from the SUV and sat in my vehicle for a moment, watching for signs of anyone nearby. Along the hillside to my right, the crew camp seemed basic, but efficient—a few dozen plain vanilla, industrial-looking trailers on newly plowed gravel pads. They sat scattered among some stone picnic tables and rock buildings that looked like they might have been part of a campground or ranger station at some time in the past. Electric wires and white plastic pipes crisscrossed the ground everywhere, creating a web of connections that eventually ended at nearby power poles.
To the left of the newly leveled parking lot, old stone steps and a freshly mown path led uphill and past several massive stone blocks that must have once formed the corner of a building or fence. Weeds, trumpet vine, and mustang grapes had overgrown the remains of the structure, making it seem a part of the natural landscape, but for its shape. At the trailhead, a scrap wood sign simply read Wildwood in slapdash letters. According to the map in Tova’s folder, the old town site, now the location of our newly built restoration, was just on the other side of that ridge.
A sudden breeze whipped a dust devil along the parking lot, then died at the edge of the gravel, and everything went incredibly still as I stepped from the truck, the folder clasped against my chest. Goose bumps rose on my skin, and I had that uncomfortable, wary feeling that comes in dark parking garages, empty stairwells, and silent classroom buildings after-hours. Something inside me, the sort of sixth sense that warns of danger, wanted me to leave.
“Is anybody here?” My voice disturbed the afternoon stillness, then echoed into the distance as I stood listening for an answer. Nothing. Silence. Who did the other vehicle belong to? I’d come through a locked gate. If anyone was here, he or she had to be a member of the crew. Another person with the key code, maybe a member of the security team.
Atop a nearby electric pole, a camera in a white metal housing was pointed my way. Who could say whether it was operational and whether I was being watched, but thanks
to a wrong turn on the largely unmarked dirt roads leading here, I’d already arrived later much than planned. The afternoon shadows were lengthening, and one thing was for certain—I wanted to finish the job and get out of here before evening set in. This place was eerie, even in broad daylight.
The tree shade fell inky and cool against my skin as I crossed the parking lot and started up the path marked by the Wildwood sign. Alongside the walkway, the tumbledown cornerstones rested amid a tangle of brambles. I stopped to look and made out a word, etched in and moss-covered. Delevan.
Harland Delevan. Randy had been working on his wardrobe for weeks, based on the costume diary I’d put together. As the founder of Wildwood and a member of a prominent early-day Texas family, Delevan was easier to document than the nameless immigrants who eventually found themselves working mining claims on the massive land grant secured by the Delevan family. Building Harland Delevan’s costume bio was relatively straightforward. Understanding the history of the town he founded was not.
Even with hours and hours of library work, Stewart hadn’t been able to satisfy his obsessive need to know how real or far-reaching the Wildwood gold strike may have been. Some amount of gold-bearing ore was pulled from the hills around Wildwood Creek and assayed, but from what we’d managed to determine, the reports printed in Eastern newspapers, boasting of “a strike of remarkable and promising character both in richness and extent of ore, so as to leave no further doubt of the existence of a gold-bearing belt in the land along Wildwood Creek” amounted to a little more than hype and speculation.
It had crossed my mind many times, while watching the wardrobing crew create fine silk and brocade clothing for Delevan’s modern-day counterpart, how ridiculously out of place those clothes must have seemed amid the trappings of struggling immigrants, frontier shopkeepers, prospectors, farmers, trappers, freighters, and the slaves brought to the frontier by Delevan as his empire expanded. Against the rugged backdrop here, Harland Delevan, his mother, and his aunt must have been peacocks among yard fowl.
In my mind, the man was a faded image from a tintype dated just a year after the ill-fated end of Wildwood. He’d been photographed as a Confederate colonel in the Third Texas Calvary, a striking, dark-haired man, posed with one hand resting on the hilt of his sword, and the other on an officer’s field desk that must have been set up as a prop inside a photographer’s studio. Behind him, the portrait of a sweeping plantation house stretched out in romantic, misty shades. His head was tipped upward, his carriage one of innate arrogance, his lips a thin, unyielding line, his eyes a fathomless black. Less than a month after the photo was taken, he would be dead in battle at Iuka, Mississippi. Stewart had unearthed an account of his death and the defeat of his Texas-based regiment.
Despite Stewart’s intricate research, Harland Delevan had been little more than a spreadsheet of costuming details and production paperwork in my mind. A character. Now the name on the old cornerstone sent my thoughts tumbling end over end. The reality of this place was a wild assault, unexpected and impossible to process. These people were real. I’d scratched the surface of it during those long hours in the library, but I hadn’t felt it. Suddenly the citizens of Wildwood were drawing breath, whispering, moving all around me.
What had happened to them?
Walking up the hillside through the trees, I heard their whispers. They’d lived in this place, left footprints on these paths. The massive live oaks on these hillsides were so large I couldn’t have reached halfway around their gnarled trunks. These very trees had seen the citizens of Wildwood pass by—perhaps sheltered those who first arrived in the town, shielded young lovers as they sneaked away from prying eyes, or provided climbing castles for the children who lived here.
Children who’d vanished, it seemed, off the face of the earth.
What happened here?
I crested the ridge, then stopped as a breath caught in my throat. Nestled along a limestone bluff on a sloping hillside, the village tumbled downward toward the river basin. The rush of seeing it was indescribable.
I’d been imagining it for weeks, but now it was real.
The small main street ran parallel to a spring creek by the bluff, the buildings constructed of stone, log, and roughhewn wood. On the high side of the street, several structures squatted close to the mountain. On the low side of the street, rock foundations propped up buildings constructed of log and chink, as well as bare lumber. It was impossible to tell, at least from this distance, if any parts of the town were original or if it had all been freshly constructed for Mysterious History. Undoubtedly, the wooden structures were new construction, but they had been skillfully built and carefully cosmetically aged by the art finishers. The buildings looked like they’d been there all along.
“Amazing,” I whispered. Above the treetops, Moses Lake peeked through in the distance. Prior to the building of the dam in the 1950s, the area that was now submerged had been a vast, fertile valley. One of the filming challenges here would be avoiding capturing the lake on camera, since it was not authentic to the time period of Wildwood. Work had been done to create a natural-looking shield of brush on the other side of Wildwood Creek, preventing accidental views of the lake through the trees.
More than anything, I wanted to slip my iPhone from my pocket and start taking pictures so I could show them to Kim and Stewart. Kim would have a fit when she found out where I’d been today—that I had actually set foot in Wildwood. She probably wouldn’t believe me. No one could believe this place without seeing it.
Just one little picture, temptation whispered. They’ll so flip out.
I looked around, wondering if there were more remote cameras nearby. Because of the desire to create an authentic experience, very little of the filming would be done with handhelds. As much as possible, life in Wildwood would be recorded by tiny robotic cameras embedded seamlessly in the set—something that had never been tried before to this degree. In Wildwood, Big Brother really would be watching you. Creepy to think about, even now. Despite its amazing appearance of authenticity, the place was a high-tech fishbowl. Within the village, there was no way to play to the cameras. They were everywhere.
Which meant someone really could be watching me right now.
I stopped with my hand halfway into my back pocket, nixing the idea of doing anything I wasn’t supposed to do. Kim would just have to wait until she arrived on the bus with the rest of the cast. Maybe that was a good thing anyway. It wouldn’t be right to spoil the moment of climbing the ridge and taking in the initial view of Wildwood. It was magic—hidden cameras or not.
Opening the folder and finding my site map, I proceeded down the hill and located my first target—the blacksmith shop on the low side of the street. Like most other businesses in the town, it was owned by Delevan. In the small, shed-like building, he used slave labor and charged exorbitant prices for horseshoeing and iron repair work. A slave known in surviving documents only as Big Nebenezer or Big Neb toiled here, sweating over a forge in the summer heat. I’d met his modern-day counterpart, Andy Blevins, during a costume fitting. Nice guy, getting his masters in history at the university. A former hometown football star.
How would he feel about spending the summer here in this rudimentary dwelling? While the history of my own Irish ancestors wasn’t always pretty, as evidenced by the treatment of the immigrants who’d labored in Delevan’s town, Andy’s history was even more difficult. He was a sixth-generation Texan, and while historically Texans were divided on the issue of slavery, Texas had ultimately joined the Confederacy.
In real life, Andy drove a BMW his parents had bought for him. How would he adapt to the tiny nook at the back of the lean-to shop? He’d be surviving with little more than a cot and an open pit out back for cooking. Around the room, the set designers had placed a variety of labels to specify the locations for delivery of everything from tools, to lanterns, to cooking utensils and foodstuffs. I followed the blueprint and added the tags for placement of his wardrobe
and personal items. It didn’t take long. The show’s historians had given Big Neb little more than the clothes on his back and a job to do.
Beyond the blacksmith shop, I continued along the lower side of the street, placing labels in the Baum home, the Forsythe home, the Miners Exchange, and the Assay Office. Then I walked through the trees along the network of footpaths that led into the woods where canvas shacks and modified cave houses would serve as homes for those portraying the recent immigrants to Wildwood. I couldn’t imagine the kind of fortitude it must’ve taken for people to come here, to scratch out a shelter from the unforgiving hills and try to survive. On hot days, this life would’ve been an exercise in swatting mosquitoes and sweating. On rainy days, the humidity would seep in and dampen everything, runoff from uphill creating a quagmire on the floors. How did people keep their clothes dry, their bodies clean?
I’d never considered the trials of my ancestors. I knew so little of my own history. Grandma Rita’s grandmother had lived on a small piece of land outside Lufkin, Texas. She’d cooked at a boardinghouse while my grandfather cowboyed on a ranch somewhere. Grandma Rita told stories about her mother, my great-grandmother, hearing the wolves clawing and growling outside their Piney Woods house at night. My mama used to say she was mighty afraid when her daddy was away, but her mama did whatever it took to protect her babies and their land and their animals. It wasn’t much, but it was all they had. If they lost it, they didn’t survive. Wasn’t any welfare system back then, you know.
Wildwood gave me a sudden appreciation for that story. I might’ve come from hardy pioneer stock, but I had a feeling that the genetics had been watered down somewhere along the way. As much as the Wildwood project fascinated me, I didn’t want to live anywhere that wasn’t within proximity of a hot shower and a well-stocked refrigerator.
Wildwood Creek Page 13
