Alex Scarrow - October skies

He could see it in his dreams, buried somewhere in the deep woods, perhaps in a secure travel chest; seasons changing above it like the seconds on a ticking clock, years, decades drifting by, and there it sat, waiting to be found.

Shepherd had tried and failed. As a younger man with a lot more time on his hands there had been quite a few hikes taken into those mountains, going on whatever hunch was driving him at the time, listening to the inner whisper of divine guidance. But, there was a lot of wilderness to cover out amongst those wooded mountains. It wasn’t like trying to locate a downed plane — at least something like that left a noticeable impact and burn scarring. The Preston party’s camp would now, he surmised, be little more than barely detectable humps on the forest floor.

He sighed.

Somewhere out there.

And now, it seemed, like Bilbo Baggins ill-deservedly happening across a certain ring, there was one Julian Cooke who had stumbled across the place where they lay buried. He knew it would happen one day; a hiker, a party of drunken hunters, a bunch of teens goofing around in tents…

Something of a conundrum, this man Cooke: someone he needed badly, and at the same time someone he needed like a bullet in the head. It seemed from his email traffic that this Cooke could lead him directly to the place where Preston’s people had vanished. Which made him someone he very much wanted to sit down and talk with. On the other hand, this British guy was talking to other people now. If he kept doing that, talking to many more people, he could become something of a liability. The collection of meetings he’d been holding with his media buddies over in London wasn’t good news. He suspected that none of them would probe any deeper than an intriguing survival story set during the days of the old west. But there was always the possibility that someone might be clever enough… intuitive enough, to join together some very obscure dots.

The call that concerned him the most was the long one Cooke had had with the forensic psychologist, focusing on Preston.

It was a little too close for comfort.

Something like Preston’s story was the one and only thing that could come and bite him in the ass when he least needed it.

‘Politics is about nothing more than nuance… finesse.’ Another of Duncan’s very true maxims. ‘Something as trivial as a badly timed facial boil, the tiniest speech fumble or a badly behaved distant nephew can lose you a million votes.’

To be associated, in any way, with what had happened out there, albeit over a century and a half ago, could be damaging, very damaging.

He wondered if it wouldn’t be prudent to deal with Cooke sooner rather than later. This Julian Cooke, a man with a modest level of success in the past, something of a fading star now, was running what appeared to be a failing business — a single, middle-aged man with no close family. Shepherd could imagine he was probably a very lonely, very discontented, disillusioned person. A man like that might easily have one drink too many, might have a dark night of the soul and wonder if it was all worth the effort. A man like that might look down at the busy street below his apartment and decide to find out what it would be like to fly for a few precious seconds.

No. I need him.

Just a while longer. It was clear from the email exchange with his colleague, Rose, that the man was returning to the States in a few days, and then, hopefully, one way or another, Shepherd was sure he could talk him into leading him there. Money usually did the trick.

The crowd erupted with a good-natured roar as the ball flew past the goalkeeper’s hands and tangled with the net. Shepherd smiled and clapped. He knew he wanted this more than he wanted the White House.

I have a higher calling.

Tuesday

Fort Casey, California

The librarian, a bespectacled, plump lady with permanently flushed cheeks and ham-shank arms, looked back at Rose with eyes as wide as Starbucks cookies. ‘You’re from the BBC? You mean from England?’

Rose smiled self-consciously. ‘I work for them, indirectly.’

The woman seemed not to care too much about the distinction. Her friendly face broadened with a welcoming smile.

‘Oh goodness, I love all your TV shows and your World Service. My husband loves your Fawlty Towers and all those Python programmes.’ She offered Rose a hand. ‘I’m Daphne Ryan… pleasure to meet you.’

Rose reached for her hand and shook it. ‘Rose Whitely.’

‘We don’t get many visitors from so far away here in Casey,’ she continued, her voice rising from a whisper with the excitement, ‘especially not from England. Do you live in London? Near that Nottingham Hill place?’

Rose smiled and shook her head. ‘No, sadly not. I live in a place called Clapham. It’s in London, but not near Notting Hill.’

Daphne shook her head in wonder. ‘I’d love to live there; all those quaint little book shops and Buckingham Palace and the Big Ben.. it must be lovely.’

Rose nodded and smiled. ‘It’s okay,’ she agreed.

‘Not like Fort Casey,’ she continued, the enthusiasm quickly draining from her face. ‘Ain’t much going on here. There never is.’

Rose shrugged. ‘It’s a sleepy town. I really like that.’

Daphne lit up again, obviously as proud of her town as she was fed up with it. ‘You do?’

‘Yes, it’s a lovely place, really,’ she replied, managing a sincere nod.

Fort Casey might have been a picturesque frontier town a generation ago, with a square and a gazebo, a town hall, a corner store selling ice-cream sundaes and every home fronted by a white picket fence — all of it perfectly framed by the distant purple peaks of the Sierra Nevada mountains. But now it looked like every other small town: a single through-road flanked by homogenous chain stores and acres of parking tarmac. Unlike Blue Valley, thirty miles east towards the mountains, there was no tourist trade here. No need to worry about appearances.

‘I’m interested in the history of this town.’

‘Oh, you’ve come to the right place!’ she said, her voice beginning to carry across the small library. ‘We have an extensive local history section. History of our town, archives of our paper, the Report, a section on the old army fort and garrison…’

‘I’d like to look at that,’ said Rose. ‘Your paper, how far does it go back?’

‘Oh, golly, it goes back ages and ages. As far back as the town does. We have the archives, every page of every issue on our DVD.’

Rose had already done some homework on the town. It dated from the 1840s when land was purchased for a song by the army, on Paiute territory, to build an outpost and oversee the trickle of settlers emerging from the pass and heading north-west on the final leg towards Oregon. Being directly on the most travelled route from Emigrant Pass, it had developed more quickly than Blue Valley. By the late fifties the small military outpost had been swamped by a bustling town full of traders, merchants and craftsmen looking to resupply and tend to the unending procession of weary overlanders streaming out of the wilderness.

Fort Casey was an unavoidable next stop for anyone heading for Oregon. Rose was curious where this apparently real Rag Man had disappeared to. Presumably his journey would have taken him away from the mountains from which he’d emerged.

That meant north-west. That meant passing through here.

‘Can I look at this DVD?’

‘Sure, I can fix you up on our internet station,’ Daphne said, pointing towards the library’s solitary PC, sitting in an ill-lit corner and currently being used by a sullen teenage lad. ‘Lemme sort that out for you,’ she said, heading out from behind the counter. She approached the boy on the computer, muttered something quietly to him and pointed Rose’s way. He turned to look at her, a dark mop of hair covering his face except the pout of a bottom lip. He shrugged a whatever, closed down the MSN chat box, and shuffled towards the graphic novels and manga section of the library.