Wildwood Creek (13 page)

A
LLIE
K
IRKLAND
M
AY
, P
RESENT
D
AY

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 rough
hewn 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.

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.”