Wildwood Creek

by Wingate, Lisa

  After placing all the tags in the low-rent district, I crossed the street and continued up the hill to the high side of town. The wood and limestone buildings there were a marvel of modern set design. Even with tags everywhere and many of the props not yet in place, entering each of those buildings was like walking into a time capsule. They were authentic down to the finest detail and the concealment of the robotic cameras was incredibly well done. High-tech equipment masqueraded as baskets hung on walls, coffeepots strategically placed beside woodstoves, even a child’s rag doll sitting on a windowsill. The only sign of modern technology were well-hidden camera lenses and wires that disappeared seamlessly into walls or floors.

  Halfway along the upper street, I veered into the small alcove of bathhouses and laundries tucked along a spring creek at the base of the bluff. Kim’s future quarters were nothing fancy, that was for sure. Two girls to a room, two rope beds with hand-stuffed mattresses, a row of pegs in one corner for hanging clothes, a tin basin and pitcher for washing. And a chamber pot.

  Kim would love that one.

  She couldn’t hide a cell phone in this place if she tried. There was definitely no room here for privacy. I wanted to snap a photo, but I resisted the urge and placed tags instead. Time was running short.

  Shadows stretched across the main street as I left the bathhouse area, and the light waned into the soft shades of evening. Some sort of animal rustled in the woods, the sound standing every nerve in my body on end.

  “Okay, Allie,” I whispered, looking up and down the street toward my two remaining targets—the small stone schoolhouse and the two-story home at the top of the hill, which would provide lodging for the Delevan family as well as their household workers and slaves. “Time to wrap this up and leave the creepy, empty town behind.”

  It seemed prudent to knock out the bigger job first. The Delevan house would take some time: there were literally pages of tags. Vaguely unwelcoming, the two-story clapboard structure stood massive and shadow-covered. I had no idea what, if any, provisions had been made for lighting on the reenactment set after dark. Nor did I want to find out. One way or another, I was going to finish this job before the last of the evening sun disappeared behind the bluff.

  Something rustled in the woods again, as if to punctuate the idea. “Yeah . . . ohhh-kay . . . definitely time to finish and get out.” This was all starting to feel way too real. Grandma Rita’s wolves-clawing-at-the-cabin story came to mind.

  I double-timed it up the hill, climbed the steep porch steps to the Delevan house, and let myself in through massive front doors, which seemed ridiculously ostentatious for a settlement where much of the community still had dirt floors.

  The interior of the place was equally luxurious, furnished with ornate velvet fainting couches, heavy Renaissance Revival chairs, and a mahogany table large enough to seat eighteen. A gorgeous walnut plantation desk and leather chair graced Harland Delevan’s study, and shelves filled with books stretched to the library ceiling. In the women’s parlor, wooden embroidery hoops, sewing boxes, and baskets of needlework waited near ladies’ chairs crafted with wing seats wide enough to accommodate the hoop skirts of the day. The house even had indoor plumbing of a sort, running water being brought in from a cistern attached to a spring-fed windmill beside the kitchen house out back. For 1861, this was luxury, but as interesting as it was to see, the heavy velvet drapes cast a spooky pallor over the place, and I was happy to finish attaching the wardrobe tags for the three members of the Delevan family and their cast of house slaves.

  I couldn’t leave the Delevan residence quickly enough.

  A crow flew off the porch railing as I stepped out the front door. I jumped out of my skin, then crawled back in again. “Okay, okay . . . just one more building.” The daylight was leaving way too fast, evening cloaking the main street of Wildwood in a murky gray vapor that seemed part fog and part shadow. It followed me as I hurried to the school and went inside, leaving the double front doors open for light. From the center aisle, the building, with its high, whitewashed wooden ceiling and rows of pews appointed with flip-up school desks, appeared surprisingly quiet and peaceful despite the gathering darkness outside. The antique wooden surfaces bore the evidence of use and miscellaneous attempts at refinishing. Their history seemed to travel through my fingers as I touched them. Hairline cracks and fissures testified to the fact that these pieces had seen the ravages of wind and weather. Where had they come from?

  Outside, a wooden shutter fanned the wind, playing with the amber light over one of the pews as I opened the folder to look at the map and the tags.

  “Just seven? Just seven in here?” I continued up the aisle to the pulpit and teacher’s lectern, which were one and the same. Wooden cabinet doors on the front wall concealed an antique blackboard that had undoubtedly seen countless years of lessons in whatever classroom had originally housed it. On the teacher’s desk, inkwells and slates lay already in place. As in the Delevan house, the designers had done a fantastic job of satisfying the finest details.

  Strangely enough, I had only a few tags for the two apartments built onto the back of the school. I had researched the young schoolteacher, Bonnie Rose, with special interest, as Tova had mentioned her name to me during my first interview with Razor Point. Hers was the apartment on the right. The apartment on the left appeared to be vacant. There were no tags to place, but curiosity urged me toward the door and through it.

  The room was the ultimate in efficiency apartments—a small woodstove in the rear corner for heating and modest cooking, a stuffed mattress on a rope-tie bed along one wall, a tiny table, a foldable wooden chair of the style that was used during the Civil War, and a dark mahogany combination dresser and wardrobe cabinet. One oil lamp for light. Near the table, a door with one tiny four-paned window led directly onto a back porch that faced the limestone cliffs behind the building.

  Not much of a view—outhouse, cedars, live oaks, and the cliff face. Somewhere down the hill, the spring cut its way through the rocky soil, hidden by the underbrush. The light in these rooms would be muted even during the middle of the day. Sort of a dingy place to live, but still a step up from the workers’ quarters in the bathhouse district or the shanties in the hills. No doubt the tent homes on mining claims further out would be even worse. On top of everything else, those participants would have to construct their dwellings themselves, just as their impoverished ancestors had.

  Across the adjoining wall, but only reachable by returning to the main schoolroom, the teacher’s quarters were a mirror image, other than a larger wardrobe cabinet, a separate dresser with an oval looking glass on top, and two rope-frame beds. The room was arranged to give the appearance that both Bonnie Rose and her younger sister, Maggie, were living here. In reality, the underage cast members whose parents were not part of the reenactment, like Wren Godley, would be living up the hill in crew camp. Regulations and child labor laws governed working hours for the kids on set. This room was no place for a child, anyway. Too dark. Too confining. Along the back wall, a tall eight-paned window looked toward the bluff. The lack of a door to the back porch gave the place the feeling of a prison cell more than a bedroom.

  I stood for a moment after placing the tags for Bonnie’s belongings—including a bonnet, a cameo locket, two pairs of ladies’ gloves, and three dresses. The remainder of what she owned, she would arrive in. Bonnie’s costumes were being rented from a production warehouse, so I hadn’t even seen her wardrobe or met her modern-day counterpart.

  Standing now where the real Bonnie Rose would have stood, where she’d lived what—by all the evidence—was the last summer of her life, the sadness of her story struck me. She was just a girl, barely out of childhood when she came here to be a teacher. What were her thoughts as she sat in her tiny room? What did she dream of? What did she hope for?

  What brought her here? Judging from its history, this town was no place for a young woman alone. Why did she come?

  The mystery tugged at
me, but came tinged with a palpable sadness. She’d lived and died with almost no record of her life left behind. In our research, Stewart and I had uncovered the one solicitous newspaper piece written by a reporter for a Chicago newspaper. The words made Wildwood sound like the path to wealth and good fortune. In the article, the newly constructed school was touted as a selling point for the town’s “most civilized society.” Wildwood, the words boasted, will soon be sporting an opera hall and a reputable gentleman’s club, as well as a school and house of worship, staffed by a clergyman of great faith and morals and a cultured and dedicated teacher educated in the finest manner.

  Other than that small bit of information, it seemed as though the schoolteacher’s short life had never been. Her trail and that of her younger sister began and ended in Wildwood. Stewart had tried to find out more about them, but nothing existed.

  I closed their door behind me on the way out, then stopped at Bonnie’s desk, ran my hands along the wood, and realized with a sense of pride that, if nothing else, the young woman who had come to this place would finally have a voice through our work this summer.

  She deserved that much.

  “People will know who you were, at least,” I whispered into the empty room, touching her inkwell and slate. Emotion choked my throat. I wasn’t sure why. Maybe because Bonnie Rose was so young. If only the foundations of this old building could talk, tell me her story . . .

  A chill slipped over me. I felt the air shift in the room, the coolness of evening slide in. Uneasiness teased my senses, and with it came a feeling that I wasn’t alone.

  Instinct caused me to spin around, and I gasped at the silhouette of a man in the doorway. My heart lurched upward, then froze momentarily. With evening light shining from behind, he was little more than a shadow. The air in my throat turned solid, the moment seeming to warp and stretch as I floundered for reality. Was all of this a dream? My trip to Wildwood only something my mind had conjured while I was fast asleep, safe in my own bed?

  “And who was she?” His voice was deep and smooth, confident, almost emotionless, bearing just a hint of an accent, the origin of which I couldn’t guess from only those few words. “Who was Bonnie Rose?”

  He was real at least, the man in the doorway. I wasn’t having some sort of strange mental breakdown, inventing people out of thin air.

  “Pardon?” I managed to croak out. The SUV in the parking lot crossed my mind, and I had a mental flash of the license plate. RAV-5. The silhouette in the doorway bore a remarkable resemblance to the one on the balcony the first time I’d entered the Berman Theater, the man Kim had insisted was Rav Singh.

  It all made sense now . . . in a paralytic sort of way.

  Was this him in the flesh? Because if it was, I feared I would faint. This could be the biggest moment of my career, my life, and my meager existence on the planet. Had he been here, somewhere nearby, the whole time I’d been working?

  Thank goodness I hadn’t succumbed to the temptation to snap a photo or two.

  He moved farther into the room. Two lanky, easy steps. He was tall enough to be Singh. He fit the profile Kim had dug up on the Internet. In school in India, he’d followed American basketball and dreamed of one day playing in an American college. Instead, life had taken him into a directing and producing career in Bollywood.

  “Who do you think she was?” he asked again. “Who was Bonnie Rose?”

  I touched my fingertips to the desk and steadied myself against it, my mind racing like a hamster on an out-of-control wheel, round and round, going nowhere and everywhere all at once.

  The right answer. What was the right answer? What would make me sound like I was intelligent, competent, good at my job? Respectful yet not the sort of pathetic underling who would shamelessly grovel to earn brownie points? “I couldn’t find very much of the research on her, other than what was already in the costume diary when it came to me.” Stupid answer. Stupid answer. That made me sound too lazy to dig deeper.

  Come on, Allie. Think. Why couldn’t he have asked me about someone else? Someone we’d actually found more material about? I hadn’t looked at Bonnie’s costume diary since Stewart and I gave up on tracking her any further. “She was young. Too young to be taking on the responsibility of a job while raising a younger sibling, and moving to a strange place. I can’t imagine having that much on my shoulders at eighteen.” Great. Well done. Way to make yourself sound like an immature slacker. “But I guess you do what you have to do to survive. I guess we don’t know what we’re capable of until we’re tested.”

  I ventured across the open space at the front of the room and stood near the pulpit, trying to gain a better view. I wanted to see his expression, to discern whether I was getting any of this right.

  He turned sideways, almost as if to conceal himself from me, then leaned against one of the pews, crossing his legs and threading his arms, gazing into the rafters. “Do you think we can really understand it, that desperate struggle to survive? We, who have been softened by a world of privilege? Where water flows from a tap and food comes in neat plastic containers? Where we can create light and darkness at the flip of a switch?”

  I took a moment to digest the question, to measure its depth. “I don’t know. There’s Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, I suppose.” Thank you, Kim, for making me quiz you on all that counseling homework. “Once we know our basic physical needs will be met, we elevate from survival to more complex emotional needs.” Suddenly, this felt like a psychological profile. It was an odd first conversation to have with anyone, much less your boss’s boss’s boss . . . if that’s who he was.

  “And what do you think survival meant to her?” He waved a hand, indicating the desk behind me. “Bonnie Rose. What did she desire? What did she fear? What drove her?”

  I’d been asking myself almost the same thing only a few moments ago, but trying to answer it under pressure made my mind trip over itself. “Well . . . she was a teacher. I suppose she must’ve cared about children, been devoted to giving them the skills to achieve a better life. Wildwood would’ve been a place where she was desperately needed. Maybe that’s what drew her here.”

  He turned slowly, and I could just make out his features. Angular chin, thin nose, dark hair grown long enough to bind with a rubber band at the back of the neck, somber eyes. This was definitely Rav Singh. “Or maybe she was running from something. Maybe this ragged little settlement on the frontier was the last place she could hide. . . .” He spoke the words as if they were more than just a theory, as if he knew something I didn’t. Like he was enjoying baiting me with little morsels.

  “Running from what?” The image of Bonnie Rose shifted in my mind, and then shifted again, struggling to solidify into one thing. None of this was among the smattering of biographical information in the costume diary. If Singh knew more, why hadn’t he shared it? Why keep it to himself?

  “Who else would she have been?” I asked.

  “A seductress? A murderess on the run, living under an assumed name? A woman who doesn’t seem to have existed in any historical record before or after Wildwood? A bewitching beauty who fell madly in love with the richest man in town, so much so that she killed, then killed again in an effort to secure his affections? Who was so driven to achieve the social position that marrying him would provide, that she manipulated others into doing her dirty work? A woman who masterminded a string of unsolved crimes that eventually drove the town into a sort of mass hysteria?”

  “She was eighteen years old.” For whatever reason, his portrayal felt vastly offensive. “An orphaned girl with a younger sister to raise. It seems like quite a stretch to believe she’d be capable of manipulating an entire town. I mean, she—” I bit off the sentence, realizing that I’d gotten more impassioned then I meant to.

  But the idea of using a girl who’d most likely died at eighteen, who couldn’t defend herself, to add some sort of dark plot twist to this summer’s production both made me queasy and lit a fire inside me. Given Rav
Singh’s usual bent toward warped reality shows—and the sometimes-twisted nature of Mysterious History projects—it didn’t seem outside the realm of possibility that the intentions for Wildwood Creek went well beyond the factual representation of the town. In fact, given Singh’s reputation, his questions about Bonnie Rose seemed a likely answer to why someone like him would take on a project like this.

  He was completely unbothered by my protest. In fact, he didn’t look my way. Instead, he continued speculating toward the whitewashed ceiling. “There were some accounts given after Wildwood was abandoned—claims made by citizens who’d run from this place before its last days, taking almost nothing with them. They told of strange happenings, people jumping off cliffs into the river, people disappearing without a trace. A sort of hysteria among the citizenry. There was talk of some sort of mythical river people who tempted victims from sleep, dragging them to watery graves in the dark of midnight.

  “It has been said that the events began not long after the arrival of Bonnie Rose. Shortly following her installment as a teacher here, a young woman—reportedly Bonnie’s rival—hurled herself to her death. Harland Delevan gave an account of these things to a field reporter during your Civil War. Did you know that? Even as he was dying in a field hospital, he did not change his story. He claimed that Bonnie Rose was some sort of witch—that it was all her doing. Why would a man lie on his deathbed?”

  “Maybe because he wanted the truth to die with him.” My explanation made more sense than his, considering his had to be pure fantasy. “But I don’t believe an eighteen-year-old girl was responsible for the demise of an entire town. I don’t believe in witches, ghosts, and river people either. There’s a logical explanation—there always is.”

  “What do you think happened? What do you believe? I know you’ve done a fine job of researching the place.”

  I hugged the folder against my chest, the shadows falling thicker now. Outside, an owl hooted long and low, and suddenly the conversation, the village, and Singh’s presence were more than disquieting. I wanted to leave. “I haven’t really thought about it. I mean, I’ve just focused on my job. Speaking of, I’d better get back to the Berman. They’ll be wondering where I am, and it’s a long drive to Austin.” So much for making brownie points with the big boss. I was outta here.