Incident At Elder Creek Read online

  Incident at Elder Creek

  Copyright © 2016 by Anna Furtado

  Acknowledgments

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Other Titles from Anna Furtado

  About the Author

  Visit Us On Line

  Incident at Elder Creek

  by

  Anna Furtado

  Quest Books

  by Regal Crest

  Tennessee

  Copyright © 2016 by Anna Furtado

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The characters, incidents and dialogue herein are fictional and any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Print ISBN 978-1-61929-306-9

  eBook ISBN 978-1-61929-307-6

  First Printing 2016

  9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Cover design by Acorn Graphics

  Published by:

  Regal Crest Enterprises

  1042 Mount Lebanon Rd

  Maryville, TN 37804

  Find us on the World Wide Web at http://www.regalcrest.biz

  Published in the United States of America

  Acknowledgments

  First and most important: Thank you readers who give deeper meaning to every word by your reading them. However, this book wouldn’t be in your hands without the following people, who also deserve many thanks: Beta readers Natalie Farias, Earlene Meyer, and Nancy Nunes—you ladies rock; publisher, Cathy Bryerose, and editor, Patty Schramm, without whose dedication and expertise this story would never be made public. Ann McMan: your cover embodies this story in art and gives readers a beautiful first impression.

  Dedication

  To the spirits of the old mining town of Columbia, California, who, during a visit several years ago, whispered in my ear, insisting they had a story to tell.

  Chapter One

  TUCKER STUMBLED AWAY from the saloon struggling to stay upright. Her eyes refused to focus. It took several tries, blinking and opening them wide before she made out blurred details as she gazed up and down the street. The town looked deserted, the street dark. She heard a dog bark from a few streets away, piercing the eerie quiet. As she glanced at the bar behind her, she wondered if she dared go back in. Best not to chance it, she thought. Through the window, she noticed the small nightlight lit behind the long bar, reflecting off the wall mirror mounted behind the liquor shelves. The place looked closed.

  How did she get through that door? Her spinning head wouldn’t let her puzzle it out. She brushed debris from her shoulders and tried not to lose her balance while taking a few tentative steps. As she made her way down Elder Creek’s empty main street, she tried to pretend nothing was amiss. But something was definitely wrong.

  She felt as if she’d too much to drink, yet not quite the same as being drunk. Everything hurt, but she didn’t remember being in a fight. She wasn’t about to give in to how she felt. All she wanted was to get back to her room at the hotel and lie down. She’d figure out what the hell happened to her later, after she slept.

  As she approached the hotel, she glanced around again but stopped because the movement of her head made her dizzy. Still, she saw enough to know nothing looked out of place. The mercantile nightlights were still lit. Mouser, the old black cat with one white paw, who lived in the store, lay curled up in a basket in the window, fast asleep. The faded cardboard sign next to him read “Closed.” Through the imperfect old glass panes, Tucker made out the silhouettes of the neatly lined up merchandise bins.

  In the next block, Joe Dawson’s beat up old green Toyota pickup sat in front of the Elder Creek Bank, the bed stacked high with junk he collected and would yield him a few bucks to keep him going another day. She imagined Joe somewhere close by, foraging in the dark. He did his scavenging in the wee hours of the morning sometimes. He was a strange, solitary duck who collected the detritus of people’s lives. It suited him.

  She raised her head to the heavens, willing her vertigo not to return. The stars in the sky twinkled overhead telling her everything should be right with the world, but she wasn’t so sure it was. As she stood on the wooden sidewalk, her stomach felt a little off, and she tried to remember when she ate last. Maybe she picked up food poisoning. Maybe—or maybe not.

  She pushed on toward the tiny National Hotel and her room there. One thought prevailed in her mind. She needed to lie down.

  As she passed under a still glowing street lamp, she examined her knuckles. They were bruised and discolored, but they didn’t appear to be swollen. When she turned her palm over, she saw an angry redness. A burn? No wonder her hand hurt. A couple of small blisters raised the skin to bubbles. She stopped again and flexed her fingers. She felt some soreness, but she doubted anything was broken.

  She tried to remember.

  Only murky images without form or meaning swirled in her mind. No matter how hard she tried, nothing clear materialized. As she started out toward her destination again, it took every ounce of energy to lift one foot in front of the other. She forced herself to trudge on. Only one more block, she told herself.

  The early morning chill felt good against her throbbing hand. Dark tendrils of her wavy hair, loosened from the ponytail she sometimes wore, blew in the breeze against her cheek. She knew her hair would be even more of a mess than it felt if it weren’t for her ever-present black felt cowboy hat perched firmly on her head. The thin flannel western shirt she wore barely gave her body enough protection against the coolness. Did she leave her jacket somewhere? She couldn’t remember wearing it the last time she’d left her room.

  Her jeans pressed against a painful area of her thigh every time she stepped out, but she tried not to yield to it and limp. Since she didn’t know what happened to her, she didn’t want to let on anything was wrong to the night clerk at the hotel.

  She didn’t have to worry. He barely glanced her way as she came through the door and stepped across the hotel lobby.

  The college kid from the next town over in Portero worked the overnight shift. His head was always in a book. Without knowing what she looked like, but conscious she felt a bit of a mess, she took comfort because her appearance didn’t alarm him when he gave her a ghost of a smile as she entered the lobby.

  The old hotel didn’t have an elevator. The pain in her leg made it difficult to take the stairs, but she managed. Finally, blessedly, she reached the door to her room. As soon as she unlocked it, she fumbled for the “Quiet Please” sign to tell housekeeping not to enter and hung it outside. With the door locked behind her, she fell into bed, exhausted, after only removing her hat. Even though she felt bone-weary, sleep evaded her now, her mind churning.

  What happened to her? She didn’t have a clue. Try as she might, she couldn’t conjure up any identifiable images. When had she last been in this room? At four o’clock in the afternoon—yesterday afternoon, she reminded herself—she finished a chapter in her new novel and headed for the bar. After that, her memory failed her.

  She tried again to grasp for a thread, any recollection of recent events from
after she reached her destination in the afternoon. Did she reach the bar at all? She didn’t know. It took too much energy to pull anything more from her mind. Weariness overtook her and she slept at last.

  TUCKER SAT IN the dark, staring at the golden liquid in her glass. A scalding hot shower and a few sips of the Baker’s Bourbon soothed her after sleeping the day away. She’d woken at seven in the evening, sore as hell, still with no memory of what happened to her. She took another sip of Baker’s and concentrated on the smooth liquid as it slid over her tongue and down her throat while trying to make sense of last night’s events.

  She recalled making her way to The Charlie, as they called The St. Charles Saloon. Entering the bar was her last memory from the previous day, or so she assumed. She intended to stop in for a beer and visit with her long-time friend, Jackie O’Malley, who owned the place. But she didn’t remember Jackie or the beer, and her brain felt like wet cement. If it hardened, she’d be in big trouble.

  The clock next to her computer on the small desk read eight-thirty now. Outside her window, the sky looked like black velvet. She needed to get some writing done but motivation escaped her. A persistent fog clouded her mind. The word forget rattled around in her brain over and over. She snarled in disgust and stared at her computer from across the room, willing its presence to give her incentive to get up and work. It was useless. She knew no words would come to her worth the energy to get up and walk over to the desk.

  She reached for her phone instead. When Jackie answered, Tucker didn’t bother with fanfare. “Were you at The Charlie yesterday afternoon about four o’clock?”

  “Well, hello to you, too, Tucker. And to answer your question, no, I wasn’t there. With Tracey trained and working for me now, I can actually take a day off occasionally. So I was blissfully at home relaxing for the first time in about two weeks.”

  Tucker knew Tracey, but Tracey was not the person behind the bar when she walked into The Charlie yesterday. Ah, a new realization, she thought. Maybe her miasma would finally clear. As she listened to Jackie, a face materialized in her mind’s eye—a bodiless head, akin to the Great and Powerful Oz. A name followed. The source of her new knowledge escaped her. She couldn’t understand how it related to the prior evening’s events, either. “Do you have somebody named Nigel—Nigel Dunbar—working for you?”

  “No. I don’t even know a Nigel Dunbar. Why?”

  Tucker hesitated. “I—I’m not sure,” she said.

  “Tucker, you sound weird. Are you okay? And who is this Nigel Dunbar?”

  “I think it may be kind of a long story, Jack. I’m not even sure I know all the details.”

  “Well, if you want to tell me what you do know, I have time. I don’t need to be at work until opening tomorrow. Have you eaten?”

  Silence.

  “I thought so. Get over here and I’ll make you something to eat.”

  “I don’t know, Jackie. I have work to do.”

  “Then why aren’t you doing it instead of talking to me? Something’s bothering you. I can tell. Come over. We’ll talk while I throw something together. You need to eat something.”

  Tucker sighed. “What shall I bring?” She didn’t have anything to offer in her hotel room, and all the Elder Creek businesses were closed for the evening, except for the saloon. If Jackie needed something, she’d have to drive into Portero.

  Jackie broke into her thoughts. “I don’t need a thing. Just bring yourself. Do not stop anywhere. Do not pass go. Do not collect two hundred dollars. Well, if you find two hundred dollars sitting in the street, bend down and pick it up, for heaven’s sake, but don’t stop for anything else. I’ll expect to see you in five minutes.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Tucker disconnected and stared at the phone. How was she going to explain whatever this was to Jackie when she didn’t understand it herself? Her best friend would think she’d lost her mind. Maybe it was true. Maybe she was more like her mother than she knew. She’d always harbored the fear she’d be like her someday. Mentally unstable. Unpredictable. Battling with depression on good days and succumbing to it on bad ones. Maybe she should call Jackie back and tell her she changed her mind. No. It would never work with Jackie. If she did call her back to cancel, Jackie would be at her door before Tucker hung up the phone.

  She slugged the rest of the Bakers down and slammed the glass against the surface of the tiny side table, vowing to pull herself together. She’d go to Jackie’s and her friend would help her figure out what happened to her. Jackie was always there for her in the past. She would be now.

  “SINCE I’VE BEEN talking about it, it’s starting to come back to me, Jackie.”

  Tucker began by describing the only thing she remembered. She knew she walked into The Charlie, but something was different. She recalled thinking some kid must have been tinkering with the piano against the wall opposite the bar because she heard strains of “Oh, Susanna,” but when she looked over, she saw a clean-shaven man playing the piano. He wore a faded red and white striped shirt accessorized with black sleeve garters. A bowler hat sat atop his head. Under it, shoulder length hair streaked with gray curled over his ears. Fuzzy, mutton-chop sideburns extended down his cheeks from his hairline. When she glanced at the bar, thinking she would ask Jackie if she hired a piano player to give the saloon more ambiance, she looked into the cold, steel gray eyes of the scruffiest, mean-faced guy she’d ever seen. His two-day whiskers darkened his jaw. Greasy, dark hair hung to his shoulders in strings, and he wore a shirt with a banded collar, which might have been white at one time, but now looked dingy and smoke colored, dappled with cinder-hued stains. The dim light in the bar made details behind him difficult to decipher.

  She stepped toward the bar and he grimaced at her. She assumed it to be an attempt at a smile, but she knew he didn’t mean it. He asked her what she was drinking. When she said she’d have a Blue Moon, he gave her a strange look. She clarified by adding, “beer,” and he responded with a surly laugh and told her they only sold home brewed ale, none of that sissy big city stuff. She ordered what he offered, and it took every ounce of her willpower not to spit her first mouthful back in the bartender’s face. It tasted bitter and warm. She took another small sip and asked the man if he was new to the bar. He said he’d relocated to Elder Creek shortly after the Reddman Mine opened in ’forty-nine. His use of the mine’s official name surprised Tucker. Nobody called it “The Reddman Mine” anymore. They called it simply “the old mine” when she was a kid. Some of the older people still called it “Big Red,” but they never referred to it by its official name.

  Big Red closed over a hundred and fifty years ago when the gold veins petered out. As the miners scrabbled to pick out the last few flakes of gold they found ten years after opening, a tragic cave-in occurred. Stories ran rampant with rumors of anywhere from one to fifty miners dying. An accurate number proved impossible because accounts varied so widely and records proved scarce and unreliable. Then, there were the rumors of strange goings-on—ghosts—people said. In reality, the mine remained dangerous, and as a result, they sealed it not too long after it closed.

  Everyone in town knew the stories, but no one really knew truth from fiction. If this guy came to Elder Creek since the mine opened in 1849, she got the feeling she wasn’t any longer where she thought she was—or at least when she thought she was—or he was way older than he looked.

  Not possible, Tucker realized.

  Jackie listened to Tucker’s story without comment until Tucker finally said, “I have no idea what happened after that, although it’s obvious something did. Next thing I knew, I found myself outside The Charlie’s doors and barely able to stand and walk. I actually ended up on my hands and knees for a minute. I pulled myself up using one of the support poles on the boardwalk. I was sore as hell—still am as a matter of fact—and I have blisters on my hands like I touched something hot, so I know it wasn’t a dream.”

  She showed Jackie her palm. Jackie winced at the sight of it.<
br />
  Tucker added, “I don’t know how I found out the bartender’s name, but I did. Someone must have told me.” She repeated it, hoping more would come to her: Nigel Dunbar. Nothing.

  Jackie stared at Tucker for a few seconds before asking, “What kind of story are you working on these days?”

  Tucker wrinkled her forehead in confusion. “What? Why?”

  “Because I’m wondering if you’re working on a story about Elder Creek or another ’49er town. Maybe you were sort of day dreaming all this. You know, like a lucid dream or something. You know how wrapped up you get when you’re writing.”

  “I was not dreaming. I have no idea how it happened, but I was definitely not asleep. Anyway, I’m working on a story about a school teacher in the Colorado territory. It has nothing to do with a mining town and it has nothing to do with Big Red or Elder Creek. Dunbar said he came to Elder Creek shortly after the mine opened. The mine closed in 1870. If he’s still alive, that would make him nearly a hundred and seventy or eighty years old. Impossible, wouldn’t you say?”

  “It certainly is, but I have no idea who this Dunbar is, Tucker. He certainly doesn’t work for me.” Jackie tapped a finger on the table. “I wonder if you’ll ever remember the rest of the story. Maybe it means something.”

  “Hard telling, but if it does, I’m not sure I’ll have any idea what it might be.”

  “Well, maybe more will come back to you later, Tuck.”

  Maybe it would and maybe it wouldn’t. It didn’t matter because Tucker didn’t intend to repeat the experience.

  She decided to leave out the part about possibly having a price on her head. How she knew it, she didn’t have a clue. Besides, it would only alarm Jackie and make her ask more questions, and Tucker suspected she wouldn’t have any answers for them.