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Mr. William Brackwell

c/o The Sussex Land & Cattle Co.

Somerset House

London, England

Dear Mr. Brackwell:

I trust your journey back to Merry Old was a smooth one, and you met with fewer of the, shall we say, surprises that were so commonplace during your stay in Montana. (By “surprises,” of course, I mean dead folks.) I do hope you won’t let the carnage you witnessed at the Bar VR color your view of the American West. Such goings-on are hardly the norm, no matter what your experience (or the dime novels) might lead you to believe. I mean, here my brother and I are in Utah, and we haven’t witnessed a murder in minutes!

Not that our travels have been boring. Nope, that would hardly do it justice. Tedious—now that hits closer to the mark. Monotonous, wearying, and mind-numbing too.

Except for when it was bloodcurdlingly, hair-raisingly, pants-fillingly terrifying, that is. And for about twenty-four hours up in the Rocky Mountains, that’s exactly what it was.

When we parted ways a couple months back, you asked that I keep you apprised of whatever progress we might make toward my brother’s goal. But I didn’t bother writing before now, as there was no progress to report. And there’s still not. In lieu of news, though, let me present you with this: something you can trot out the next time you’re in need of a spook story to entertain your friends of a dark, stormy evening by the fire. You can tell them one of your American cowboy pals passed it on to you, and such men aren’t given to balderdash or exaggeration. Ever. Any of them. Why, the last time a drover was caught in a lie was 1876, and the scoundrel was immediately stripped of his spurs and sent east to become a banker.

Anyway—on to the yarn.

As you’ll recall, Old Red and I planned to hit the trail in search of jobs as Pinkertons. And we’ve succeeded! In hitting the trail in search of jobs as Pinkertons, that is. As for actually finding jobs as Pinks…there we’ve utterly failed. Believe it or not, when a couple dusty saddle-bums stumble into a Pinkerton office intent on joining the payroll, they are not received with open arms. (Though when one of said saddle-bums tries to explain that he’s actually a “top-rail deducifier” thanks to all the Sherlock Holmes stories he’s studied on, the pair is greeted warmly indeed—with gales of laughter.)

As if this wouldn’t be tiresome enough, it took us days and sometimes weeks to reach each fresh humiliation. Hailing from Kansas Grangers as we do, we were raised to view the Southern Pacific as Satan, the Union Pacific as Lucifer, and the Central Pacific as Beelzebub—different names for the same great evil—and my brother refused to bankroll the bastards with even a penny from our meager kitty.

Conscience rarely comes without a cost, though, and in this case it was paid mainly by our backsides. After leaving the Bar VR, we journeyed first west across Montana, then southeast through Idaho, all of it on horseback. By the time we were skirting around Bear Lake into Utah, my saddlewarmer was bruised black as an anvil.

Now, this wasn’t just Utah Territory we were riding into—it was Mormon territory. And given the clashes of years past, a couple drifting Gentiles like ourselves could hardly assume we’d be welcome…or even tolerated. So we kept to ourselves as we wound down through the Bear Lake Valley, steering clear of the main towns thereabouts.

I didn’t mind missing out on the saggy, smelly, lice-infested boardinghouse beds we’d have no doubt found in places like Pickleville and Fish Haven. Once you’ve been on a few cattle drives, camping out seems like a positive luxury when there’s no night herding to do and no belly cheater waking you at the crack of dawn banging a stew pot over your head. And the Bear Lake Valley made “roughing it” none-too-rough, what with its well-worn trails, ample trees for shade and tinder, and teeming cutthroat trout practically fighting each other for the honor of gracing your frying pan.

In short, the place was Eden without the serpent…or Eve. Or so it seemed.

Our first clue that all was not paradisical came as we rounded the southwestern corner of the lake. Just off the trail was a rotten, falling-down fence and, beyond it, what might have been a field of alfalfa before weeds and grass were allowed to overtake it. It wasn’t long before we spotted an abandoned farmhouse—and then another soon after with its own fields choked with wildflowers and thistle.

This was beautiful country, good for grazing cattle or raising crops either or, and it was a puzzlement to me that farming folk should ever give it up.

“There ain’t never been no Indian troubles up thisaway…have there?” I asked my brother, eyeing the tree line nervously.

Of course, the only “Indian troubles” these days are suffered by the Indians alone, and they run to starvation and disease rather than raiding and killing. Yet the bloodshed isn’t so far behind us that the thought of braves on the warpath can’t still chill the blood.

“Nothin’ but Shoshone and Ute ’round these parts…provided you could still find ’em. Friendly ones, they are.” Old Red leaned out from his saddle and spat. “Too friendly for their own good, I expect.”

“Well, then…where’d everybody go?”

“What you really mean is why’d they go. And you know what I say to that.”

I did indeed. I’d heard him say it often enough. “It is a capital mistake to theorize before you have all the evidence”—my brother’s favorite quote from his hero, your famous countryman, Sherlock Holmes. Most drovers want to be Charles Goodnight or Buffalo Bill Cody if they have any ambition at all, but Old Red’s always been a contrarian (or just plain contrary, anyway). The Holmes of the Range—that’s what he’s set out to be.

We were to rendezvous with ol’ Holmes shortly, as it turned out…and be in need of his particular brand of wisdom, as well.

As we were passing our third deserted farm, the sun was sinking below the mountains behind us, and my brother made a most sensible (though not entirely welcome) decision. We would spend the night in the abandoned homestead visible just off the trail.

It felt a little like a violation, a desecration even, settling into someone else’s house. They hadn’t been gone long—no more than a couple years, Old Red judged by the cobwebs and dust and dry rot—and they’d left some of their furniture behind. A table and chairs hewn from local pine, a bed with a finely crafted headboard of mahogany, even a battered foot-pump organ. I half-expected the rightful occupants to barge in any minute, slack-jawed to find a couple presumptuous cowpokes lighting up kindling in their fireplace.

Yet I might actually have welcomed the intrusion, provided nobody felt the need to shoot us. Old Red’s far from the chattiest man around—very, very far—and whatever topics of conversation we had to chew over had been gnawed down to the bone weeks before. Fresh company would’ve been mightily appreciated. As it was, we had to rely on the old, dog-eared variety: my brother’s stack of Holmes stories.

Old Red requested a rereading of A Study in Scarlet, no doubt because it takes as its backdrop a bloody feud betwixt Utah Mormons. I obliged him, like I always do (my brother, you’ll recall, being unable to tell A from Z unless they’re in a cattle brand).

Round about the spot in the story where Doc Watson gets to writing about “The Country of the Saints,” my brother interrupted me—with his snores. So I put down the magazine I’d been orating from and closed my eyes myself.

Even stretched out there on the floor by the hearth (for the bed frame had no mattress) I was more warm and snug than I’d been any night in weeks. Yet sleep didn’t come. I still had that creepy feeling we didn’t belong there and that someone might come along to confirm it, loudly and forcefully, at any time.

After what seemed like hours, I finally drifted off to the Land of Nod—only to be yanked back to the Land of Here and Now by a noise outside.

Something was moving in the woods a stone’s throw from the front door. And not just moving in it. Crashing through it and tearing it down, by the sound of things.

“Hey,” I groaned groggily.

“I hear it,” my brother said, sounding so crisp and alert he might’ve been polishing off a pot of coffee at high noon.

We lay there a moment, listening to the creaking of tree limbs and the shush-shush of movement through the brush.

“Big,” I said.

“Yup.”

“Bear?”

“Maybe.” Old Red sat up, ear cocked. “Horses ain’t spooked.”

There was a snap outside, loud.

“Yet,” I said.

My brother reached down for the Winchester lying next to him on the floor.

“Better have us a look.”

Together, we crept to the nearest window and peeked outside warily, careful not to create silhouettes against the ember-glow from the fireplace. Mighty good targets, those would make. And if what we were hearing outside was horses—from a party of the faithful come to root out Gentile squatters, let’s say—targets we could well be.

Our own ponies were stabled in a dilapidated barn about a quarter mile off, and that’s where we directed our squints first. My brother and I were safe enough from bear, puma, or wolf long as we stayed inside, but we couldn’t just cower there while something big and hungry made a midnight snack of our mounts. We might yet have to venture out for a face-to-face with who-knew-what.

There was just enough moonlight to make out a shimmying in the trees near the barn, branches dancing in the half-darkness. The movement was high up—nine or ten feet off the ground. Beyond it, a single star flickered in the nighttime sky.

Only it couldn’t have been a star. It was too low on the horizon, not in the sky at all.

Then I saw the other star—another perfect pinprick of yellow light, right beside the first. And that’s when I knew what they were.

Glowing eyes, at least a foot apart. Eyes that were staring straight at us.

“Sweet Jesus,” I gasped. “If that’s a hoot owl, it’s got a wingspan as wide as Texas.”

“Ain’t no owl,” Old Red growled, and he moved to the door, threw it open, and stepped outside.

I came out behind him, Colt in hand, as he took aim.

The lights jerked downward, then disappeared entirely. There was another rustle of quick movement in the trees, and then…nothing. No eyes, no motion, no sound for the next two minutes.

“Well,” Old Red finally sighed, “we’d best pass the rest of the night out with the horses. Just in case.”

I looked back wistfully at our cozy spots by the fire.

“Can’t we bring ’em in here with us?”

My brother just went inside and started gathering up his bedroll.

We split the hours till dawn into watches, but we needn’t have bothered. You try sleeping with only a few planks of knotty, warped barn wood between you and some monstrous whatsis stalking around in the dark. Not that we ever heard the beast come back. But one visit was more than enough to keep me jumping at every cricket chirp all the way to daybreak.

“Well?” I said as my brother and I finally stepped out into the orange-yellow light of early morning.

“Well, what?”

Old Red moved off toward the trees, eyes down, scanning the ground.

“Well, what was that thing?”

“I have no earthly idea.”

“You got an unearthly one?”

My brother glanced back just long enough to shoot me a scowl. “You know I don’t believe in spooks.”

“Me neither…usually. And last night sure as hell wasn’t usual.”

Old Red knelt and picked a broken branch out of the underbrush. It was maybe three feet long and still studded with fresh, green pine needles. One end was splintered, and in the middle was a notched groove cut into the bark, as if the branch had been torn down by one powerful, clutching claw.

My brother looked up, then pointed at something above him.

A broken stub stuck out from a pine tree a dozen feet up.

“Spooks don’t tear down tree limbs.”

“All right, granted,” I said. “So what does?”

“‘It is a capital mistake to—’”

“Oh, for chrissakes!” I spat. “You wanna make a capital mistake? Quote Sherlock Holmes to me after I spent the night lyin’ around waitin’ to be eaten by the bogeyman.”

Old Red put down the branch and moved farther into the brush. “Ain’t no such thing as…hel-lo.”

He stopped cold.

“What is it?”

“Tracks.”

“What kind?” I asked, already feeling relieved. If it steps with paw, hoof, or foot, my brother’ll know what it is. I’ve seen him identify not just a cow’s breed but its age, weight, and brand from one long stare at the pies it left behind.

“Never seen the likes of this,” Old Red announced. He started off again, still crouching low. “Bogeyman tracks, maybe.”

“Har har. Thanks a lot,” I grumbled, following him into the forest to have a look for myself. I assumed he was guying me…till I laid eyes on those tracks.

There were two footprints pressed into the soft, mossy sod beneath the tree, right where we’d spotted those eyes shining in the night. They were side by side, a right and a left, plain as day. What wasn’t plain, though—not plain at all—was what could have made them.

Whatever it was, it had big pads and claws, like a bear. But there was something stretching from toe to toe, mashing the earth down into little humps. Webbing, it looked like, as one might see on a duck or frog or beaver—a water-critter.

“There’s more over thisaway,” Old Red said. “Coming and going.”

He stopped, but his gaze kept on moving along the forest floor, following a trail I was blind to. Soon he was staring straight into the sun streaming down through the trees.

To the east. Toward the lake.

Old Red started off again.

“Uhhh…shouldn’t we be movin’ along?” I called after him. “Salt Lake City ain’t gonna come to us, y’know.”

“Salt Lake City ain’t goin’ nowhere,” my brother muttered.

I sighed, then started after him—but only after dashing back to the barn to collect the Winchester.

It was a comfort having it at hand, for the deeper we went into the woods, the stronger the feeling grew that we weren’t alone. And we weren’t, of course: There were chipmunks and squirrels and songbirds all around us. But they went on about their business in their usual jumpy, oblivious way, whereas the presence I sensed was steady, quiet, watchful.

And purely imaginary…or so I tried to tell myself.

It wasn’t long before the lake came into view ahead of us. I hadn’t spied much more than the occasional dimple in the sod or trampled twig after the first set of prints, but that changed but good as we approached the shoreline. There were tracks in the bank so deep and well-defined even a bottom-rail, bat-blind sign-reader like myself couldn’t miss them.

One set led one-two, one-two straight into the water.

The other led out of the water.

“You know what I just realized?” I said.

“What’s that?”

“Whatever made them prints…it walk son two feet.”

Old Red shook his head sadly, as if—through my keen powers of observation and deducification—I’d just surmised that mud is brown and water wet.

“You don’t say,” he mumbled.

The tracks ran parallel to a big, rotten cottonwood that looked like it had toppled into the lake a half dozen years before, and my brother stepped up onto the trunk and walked along it, using it as a pier. The water was crystal clear back toward the bank, but the farther out Old Red went, the more it deepened and darkened until you couldn’t see what might be beneath the surface.

The tree dipped under my brother’s weight, tilting farther forward with his each step until the water was swirling over his feet.

“You wanna know what else I just realized?” I said.

“Yeah?”

“I wanna get the hell outta here.”

“What are you still doing here, then?” a voice boomed out behind me.

I jumped so high I was wearing the sky for a hat.

“Easy,” the voice warned when my feet touched ground again. “Put the rifle down and turn around…slow.”

I did as I was told and found myself facing a big-boned, potbellied man of perhaps fifty-five years. He had a long, white, wild beard and even wilder eyes, which were glaring at me, incidentally, over the leveled barrels of a scattergun.

“You,” he said to Old Red. “Keep your hands where I can see ’em.”

“Ain’t got nothin’ to do with ’em anyways,” my brother said.

We’d left our gun belts back at the barn.

“Listen, mister—you wanna do us all a favor?” I said. “Point that cannon of yours at the water. Cuz you won’t be gettin’ any trouble out of me and my brother…but that there lake I ain’t so sure about.”

Rip Van Winkle didn’t oblige me. He was about thirty yards off—far enough that a shotgun blast might not kill me outright, but close enough that he couldn’t miss if he tried.

“Oh, ho. Seen something, have we?” he said, and for the first time I noticed a hint of brogue in his voice.

“We seen something, all right—something that come outta the lake, from the look of things.”

“You got a notion as to what our something mighta been?” Old Red asked. He was still balanced precariously on the end of that log with dark water lapping up around his ankles.

“At the moment, I’m more interested in who you are,” Rip told him.

“Amlingmeyer’s the name,” I said. “Otto and Gustav—Big Red and Old Red to our friends.” I grinned as genially as a preacher passing out how-do-you-dos at an ice cream social. “That could include you, provided you point your artillery some other direction.”

The old man tightened his grip on his shotgun. “Your kind and my kind can never be friends.”

“Now, now—let’s not be so hasty,” I said (hastily). “I’ve known cats and dogs that come to be bosom chums, by and by.”

“Which ‘kind’ is it you’re thinkin’ of, mister?” my brother asked.

“What do you think? Gentiles and Mormons.”

“Oh. Those kinds.” I did my best to look guileless. “And which might you be?”

Rip narrowed his eyes. “Which are you?”

Never in my schooling days (all five years of them) had I ever faced a quiz as weighty as this. Stand up and spell “danger” with a j, and the worst you’ll get is laughed at. But answer wrong now, and the punishment might be a bellyful of buckshot.

I peeked over at my brother, hoping he’d Holmesed out which faith it was Rip seemed to hold so dear. As you so well know, it’s amazing the things Old Red can tell about a fellow from little more than a quick glimpse and some careful cogitation. A man’s trade, his home life, his hopes and fears—my brother can see it all in a hangnail and a dirty collar. I’ve often told him he could clean up as a sideshow fortune teller if only he didn’t have his heart set on detectiving.

And yet all I got from him now was a shake of the head.

I couldn’t bullshit our way out of this. I’d have to gamble on honesty.

I hate when that happens.

“I suppose we’d be Gentiles, as Mormons reckon it. We was raised Lutheran, but ain’t neither of us seen the inside of a church in a coon’s age.” I looked heavenward, palms pressed together as in prayer. “Sorry ’bout that. No hard feelin’s…I hope.”

Apparently, He was in a forgiving mood: Rip lowered his scattergun and favored us with a grin wide enough to spy even through the white thicket of his beard.

“Well, then—welcome to Kennedyville, boys!” he said. “I’m Kennedy.”

There were handshakes all around (my brother having been allowed at last to come ashore) while Kennedy made apologies for the less-than-hospitable way he’d originally greeted us.

“Me and my kids, we’re the last Gentiles left around here. The other families pulled up stakes after the valley got to overflowing with Mormons. I’ve just been waiting for the day the Brethren turn up to claim all the old homesteads. And when they do…”

His grin actually grew wider, though there was no amusement to be seen in it. It almost looked like he was a-baring his fangs.

“So what brings you two through these parts?”

I laid out a judiciously expurgated account of our travels, saying only that we were out-of-work drovers headed south in search of jobs. The truth of it—that we’d set out to become sleuths—tends to get folks eyeing you like you’re foaming at the mouth.

“Cowhands, are you?” Kennedy asked, seeming pleased. “So you’ve worked on ranches.”

“Ranches, cattle drives, farms,” I said. “We’ve had dealings with animals about every way you can without joining the circus.”

Old Red cleared his throat. He’d opted for his usual greeting when shaking hands—a grunt—but now he had something to say.

“Speakin’ of animals…”

He nodded down at the peculiar tracks leading into and out of the lake.

Kennedy nodded, his expression turning grim.

“Oh, yes. We’ll talk more about that.”

Then he brightened again—and I did too when I heard what he said next.

“Why not over breakfast? I can have the girls whip up hotcakes and bacon.”

Hotcakes, bacon…and girls? God had most definitely forgiven me.

I rubbed my hands together and tried to keep from drooling on my shirt.

“Lead the way, Mr. Kennedy.”

And so he did, cutting back through the woods to a spread no more than a quarter mile from the farmhouse we’d stayed in the night before. As we tromped past rows of summer-gold wheat, Kennedy and I chatted amiably about his daughters, Fiona and Eileen. (“Pretty as a picture, the pair of ’em,” he boasted. “If there was anything but Brethren around here, they would’ve been married off ages ago.”) Old Red remained silent, though, his gaze darting from side to side as if he might catch a glimpse of our giant, web-footed friend out for a morning stroll.

“Wait here for a minute while I run ahead,” Kennedy said as we approached a tidy little cottage. “The girls would never forgive me if I brought home gentlemen callers without giving ’em a chance to pretty up first!”

He scuttled on into the house, leaving me and my brother out front with the chickens strutting to and fro hunting for grubs.

“Mighty hospitable feller, once he decides not to kill you.” I eyed the henhouse nearby. “Say…when’s the last time we had us some eggs, anyway?”

“That all you can think about? Food?”

“Nope,” I said. “I’m mighty anxious to meet them gals too.”

Old Red rolled his eyes—then turned them back toward the forest.

“You’re wastin’ your time, Brother,” I said. “Bogeymen don’t get around much afore dusk.”

Yet I was feeling it too for all my tomfoolery. That presence again, lurking, watching, waiting.

There were patches back in those trees where the thicket and leaves left it black as night at highest noon. Who knows? Maybe that’d be darkness enough for a bogeyman to do his prowlings, even though the sun might still shine.

Neither Old Red nor myself were superstitious men. But, then again, it’s not a superstition if something’s real. And those tracks sure weren’t an old wives’ tale.

Something was out there. Something…

I forced myself to turn toward the henhouse again.

“Back to more important questions,” I said. “Such as ‘scrambled or fried?’”

“Scrambled, I reckon,” Old Red sighed. “Like your brains.”

“Oh, no, Brother—you’re the egghead of the two of us, remember?”

Kennedy stepped out of the house and gave us a pinwheeling wave of the arm.

“Come on in, boys! It’s time you met the best cooks in Kennedyville!”

Fiona and Eileen proved to be the prettiest girls too—and might have been even if they weren’t the only ones. Willowy, raven-haired, bright-eyed, and smiling, they were visions of loveliness such as a drover carries with him for a thousand miles. By the (alluring) look of them, they fell in age somewhere between myself and my brother—in their midtwenties—and though they teetered on the brink of what some would call old maidhood, their charms had not faded but rather deepened with time.

Then again, I always have been partial to older women.

And younger ones.

And skinny ones, plumps ones, and all the ones in between.

Oh, hell—let’s just face it. I’m gal crazy.

Old Red, on the other hand, is crazy about women in his own way, which is crazy-scared. I doubt if that whatever-it-was in the woods could spook him half as much as a wink from a pretty lady. The more Fiona and Eileen fawned over us—taking our hats, pouring us coffee, asking (huzzah!) how we’d like our eggs—the more Old Red lived up to his handle by blushing as scarlet as a pimpernel.

(I will admit to you here, Mr. Brackwell, that I don’t know what a “pimpernel” actually is. I gather from my readings that some come in scarlet, though.)

“You are a lucky man, Mr. Kennedy,” I said, slathering butter over a stack of flapjacks that stretched halfway to the roof. “Having two such daughters to look after you here.”

Kennedy nodded, his obvious pride slowly giving way to sadness.

“Lucky, I am…though I’d think myself luckier if their mother was still with us.”

Eileen was hurrying past with a pitcher of milk, and she stopped behind him and put a hand on his shoulder.

Kennedy reached up and smothered her fingers under his big paw.

“She died bringing my youngest into the world. It’s been just the three of us ever since.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

Kennedy gave his daughter’s hand a squeeze, then let go.

“Oh, we get along fine. It’s only in the last few years things have turned lonely.”

“With the other families leavin’, you mean,” Old Red said. “So…there any reason they cleared out other than the Mormons movin’ in?”

Kennedy gave my brother a somber nod. “There’s another reason, all right. One I gather you two know about firsthand.”

My mouth was stuffed full of griddle cake and bacon, but that didn’t stop me from offering a reply.

“Well, there weren’t no hands—nor claws—involved, thank the Lord. But yeah, we saw something mighty strange last night. And then there was them tracks we was followin’ when you, uhhhh…stepped out and introduced yourself.”

“What’s goin’ on around here, Mr. Kennedy?” Old Red said.

The old man took in a deep breath. He looked reluctant to speak, and once he got to going I figured I knew why. He was afraid we’d take him for a madman.

“I suppose the simplest way to put it is this,” he said. “We’ve got us a monster.”

Kennedy’s daughters stopped their bustling in the kitchen, listening along with my brother and me as their father told his tale.

“The Utes called it a Pawapict—a Water Indian. A spirit that lives in the lake. A lonely, ghostly thing, they said. Coaxes you in, then never lets you go. They can come to you as a snake, a baby, even a beautiful woman…or so the legend goes. I never put any stock in it myself. Redskin twaddle, that’s all I took it for. But then those Latter Day heretics swarmed in, and before long they were claiming the Indians were right. Some of the Brethren started saying they’d seen a sea serpent up near Fish Haven. The Bear Lake Monster, they called it. Of course, it was obvious what they were trying to do—scare us ‘Gentiles’ off our land. But we just laughed…until we started seeing the thing ourselves. A giant with great, glowing eyes prowling around our farms, frightening our women and children. Well…first the Mormons, and now this? It was more than most people could take. Argyle—that’s what the town called itself then—it just drifted away, scattering like dandelion seeds on the wind until it was all gone.”

Now, if we’d heard such a windy as this around some cattle-drive campfire, I know how Old Red would’ve received it: he’d snort, roll his eyes, and quickly compare it to the fresh little mounds dotting the ground all around the cows bedded down for the night.

My brother heard Kennedy out quietly, thoughtfully, though. He wasn’t quaking in his boots over that “Water Indian,” yet he wasn’t cutting loose with any sneers, either.

“Argyle ain’t all gone, though…is it?” he said.

Kennedy shook his head and chuckled. “No. Not so long as Kennedyville’s still here. And here it’ll stay. Here we’ll stay.”

“Why?” I asked. “I mean—you got a nice spread and all, don’t get me wrong. But it must be awful lonesome up here with all your old neighbors gone.”

Over in the kitchen, behind their father’s back, Eileen and Fiona exchanged a little look. Raised brows, widened eyes, tight lips.

The question I’d just raised—“Why stay?”—seemed to be one they’d done some thinking on themselves.

Eileen caught me watching, and I beamed a grin at her, turning my attentions into something flirtatious.

“And I can’t say I care much for your one new neighbor, from what we’ve seen of him,” I said. “I don’t guess you’d be too happy should he come a-callin’.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Eileen replied, her voice, like her father’s, honeyed with just a drop of brogue. “We’re grateful for whatever company we get.”

“Very grateful,” her sister added, mooning at Old Red.

My brother felt the sudden need to re-butter his hotcakes.

“Lonely or not,” Kennedy said sternly, going stiff-backed in his chair, “we won’t abandon our land. Not to the Mormons, we won’t.”

Old Red peeked up from his pancakes.

“And not to a monster?”

“Ah! That’s all the more reason to stay.” Kennedy leaned forward toward my brother. “I’m going to catch the rascal!”

That was enough to slow even my chewing.

“You aim to catch a ‘Water Indian’?”

“Why not? Whatever it really is, it’s solid enough—you’ve seen the tracks. Why shouldn’t a trap catch it the same as any other animal? And Mr. Barnum…he’d pay thousands for such a thing, wouldn’t he?”

“Maybe he would’ve,” I said. “But ol’ P.T.’s been dead goin’ on two years now.”

“Oh. Well.” Kennedy shrugged. “Some other huckster, then. It hardly matters who. Get your hands on a living, breathing monster, and the showmen’ll line up for the chance to buy him. We’ll be rich.”

I tried for another sneaky peep at the women to see what they thought of their father’s beast-wrangling scheme. But they were ready for me this time with faces as blank as a fresh-wiped chalkboard.

“Of course, it’s not easy without any help.” Kennedy slumped and shook his head. “It’s hard enough to manage the farming, just me and the girls. There’s not much time for tracking or trapping. Still, I’ve come close to catching the big devil. More than once, I have. And one day…”

Kennedy slapped a palm on the table.

“But look at me!” he boomed, suddenly jolly. “Keeping guests from their feed with all my blather. Eat up, boys! Eat up! Then, when you’re done, I’d like to show you around the place, if I may.”

Right on cue, Fiona and Eileen hustled over to re-heap our plates with steaming-hot grub, and when my brother and I stood up fifteen minutes later, my belly sagged out over my belt like an overfilled sandbag. Yet somehow I found the strength to drag my newfound girth around after Kennedy as he gave us a tour of his spread.

He had plenty to be proud of there: acres of wheat, garden vegetables growing in neat rows, a small but hearty assortment of livestock. And the pens, the barn, the water pump—all of it in good repair.

I was amazed one old man and two women could manage so well on their own. But then I learned of the toll it took, and it seemed to make a little more sense.

Behind the barn, in the midst of a small stand of firs, was a single grave marker. Kennedy noticed us eyeing it as he led us past.

“My wife,” he said.

Old Red moved closer to the lonely little family plot. Kennedy and I followed him.

When we reached the cool shade of the trees, we all stopped and doffed our hats.

“A good woman,” Kennedy said. “Been gone many a year now.”

But not as many as I would’ve thought. Carved into the dark, knotty old wood were these words, which I read aloud for my brother’s benefit:

ABIGAIL KENNEDY

BELOVED WIFE & MOTHER

DECEMBER 1, 1847—MARCH 15, 1875

Which meant Eileen wasn’t three or four years my elder, as I’d reckoned. If her mother died birthing her, she was three years younger than me. Pretty though she still was, at the rate she was going she’d be a bent-backed, snaggle-toothed crone by the time she hit thirty.

The Kennedys may have been surviving as a trio, but to thrive they’d need to be a quartet or quintet, at least. If the Water Indian didn’t kill them, the drudgery would.

Well, the only decent thing to do was help out in whatever way we could. It was Old Red who volunteered us, actually, though I’d been just about to do so myself. Kennedy tried to look surprised, but it was plain he’d been hoping all along we’d offer to take on some chores. “No need for that” gave way to “You could nut a couple bull calves for me” in two seconds flat.

The rest of the day passed as so many once had for me and my brother. Collecting prairie oysters, milking cows, slopping hogs, chopping wood—it was our childhood all over again, right down to the womenfolk. Instead of our dear Mutter and sisters toiling away beside us, though, it was Eileen and Fiona. Wherever we were, whatever we were doing, they were somewhere nearby, chattering, singing songs, bringing us cool water and warm smiles.

Hard though the work was, it felt comfortable. Right. Seductive, you might even call it. I’d thought farming was about the last thing I ever wanted to do—all sodbusting ever brought our family was aches, pains, and early graves. But the Kennedys did their best to make it seem pleasant.

And pleasant it was except for the flutter in my stomach, the itch at the back of my scalp, the creepy-crawly feeling that kept pulling my gaze to the woods.

Something’s out there.

The thought stayed stuck in my mind like a bit of gristle in your teeth you keep worrying with your tongue.

Yet Old Red didn’t seem edgy in the least. Even more unlike him, he appeared to be enjoying himself, hotfooting from chore to chore with such cheerful obliviousness I almost expected him to start skipping and whistling. Knowing my brother as you do, you might doubt me more on this than on my sighting of the lake creature, but I swear I saw it with my own eyes. At one point, he approached Fiona—not just voluntarily, but smiling—and offered to help her hang out the washing.

Soon after that, Kennedy invited us to stay the night. It was an offer we all knew was coming, as the sun was practically down in the treetops, and the shadows from the forest were stretching out ever longer and darker. My brother and I had already brought our horses over to be watered and fed, so there was nothing to it but to say yes.

Kennedy seemed pleased—ecstatic, almost—and he immediately set his daughters to cooking up a regular feast. When us men came in at dusk, we found the kitchen table laden with baked ham, mashed yams, green beans in butter, and fresh bread.

I felt a mite guilty about the sumptuousness of it all, these being folks who probably made do with vegetable stew and squirrel meat, most nights. Yet declining such hospitality would be a grievous insult, I told myself. Good manners dictated—nay, demanded—that I stuff myself like (and with) a pig. Which I did my utmost to do.

Yet my utmost, for once, wasn’t up to the task. My stomach was already full…of butterflies. A whole swarm of them, it felt like, all of them a-flapping and a-fluttering and generally giving me the collywobbles. What I did get down my gullet, I barely tasted.

“You don’t like the food?” Eileen asked me from across the table.

I looked up—realizing only then that I’d been staring out the window—and found her pouting at me prettily.

“Like it? Nope.” I popped a forkful of ham into my mouth. “I love it! Why, with you two here to work the stove for him, it’s a wonder your pa don’t weigh a thousand pounds.”

“I’m getting close!” Kennedy chortled, and he leaned back in his chair and gave his big belly a playful pat.

“So I noticed,” my brother shot back with (for him) uncommon impishness. He’d just been picking at his vittles, like me, though for him this was the norm. Most days, Old Red doesn’t eat enough to put fat on a consumptive flea.

“You’re one to talk!” Kennedy joshed him. “You look like you’re about to dry up and blow away. What you need is a good woman cooking for you like this every day.”

Fiona was seated next to him, across from my brother, and she turned and gave the old man a swat on the arm.

“Dad….”

She peeked over at Old Red and batted her eyes.

“I’m just saying,” her father went on, “our friends here should settle down. Drifting from town to town, job to job—that’s all well and good for a young buck, but a man needs more. Sooner or later, you have to put down roots.”

“We used to have roots,” I said. “Then the whole danged family tree up and died on us.”

“We’ll put us down some new roots one day,” Old Red added, looking at me—almost making me a promise, it seemed. He shifted his gaze back to Kennedy and Fiona. “But the thing about roots is, they don’t just hold you steady. They hold you still. Almost like—”

Chains, I think he was about to say. He amended himself at the last second, though.

“…an anchor.”

“Ahhh, but there’s nothing wrong with dropping anchor when you’ve found calm waters,” Kennedy said. “Stormy seas, my younger days were. Up here I finally found safe harbor.”

“Safe harbor? With your Mormon troubles and your…”

I couldn’t quite bring myself to say “monster,” so I jerked my head at the door—and the blackness beyond it.

“…exotic wildlife.”

Kennedy chuckled in a dismissive sort of way.

“Oh, well, as much as I might complain about the Brethren, the worst of those troubles is long past. And as for the Water Indian, whatever it is, it’s never harmed anyone. It’s frightening, yes. But dangerous? That I haven’t seen.”

“There’s a first time for everything,” I said.

“Not for everything,” Kennedy replied. “Not if I can’t catch the thing. Then there’s no way to know what it’s really like…or what it’s really worth.” The old man cocked his head to one side, his eyes flashing so fiery bright it’s a wonder his puffy white eyebrows didn’t burst into flame. “But if I were to have some help…”

I couldn’t stop myself—I jumped. Not that the old man’s words were so shocking. It was the dainty foot stroking my calf under the table that startled me.

“Something the matter?” Eileen asked, all dewy-eyed innocence even as her foot snaked its way up toward my thigh.

I blocked her with clenched knees. Flirting’s all well and good, but even I’m not dumb enough to let a gal toe-tease me when her father’s five feet away and a shotgun’s nine.

“’Scuse me.” I gave my chest a little thump. “Hic-cups.”

And then I jumped again—as did everyone else.

Outside, twigs were snapping, branches creaking, leaves shushing.

Inside, I was quivering.

“Set out another plate, Eileen,” Kennedy said, his voice hardly more than a whisper. “We’ve got more company.”

Eileen didn’t move.

“All we have to do is wait,” her sister said, voice a-tremor. “It’ll go away eventually.”

“We’ll be fine as long as we stay inside,” Eileen added, so straight and stiff in her chair she could’ve been carved out of wood herself. “In the light.”

“That’s right. The nighttime’s his,” Kennedy said. “But we can track him tomorrow, when the sun’s out. With three of us to look, maybe we could finally find his lair. And once we’ve got that, we’ve got him.”

“Oh, please,” Old Red snapped. “That’s bunk, and you know it.”

The old man, Fiona, Eileen, me—we all gaped at him.

“Excuse me?” Kennedy said.

“You’re really just scared to face that thing, ain’t you?” my brother sneered at him. “Well, I’m not. Now’s our chance, and I’m gonna take it.”

Old Red pushed his chair back from the table and came to his feet, his expression a scowling jumble of fear and anger and defiance. There was a wildness in his eyes I’d never seen before. In any other man, I would’ve called it bloodlust.

He stomped to the nearest window and peered out through glass so black it could’ve been a mirror dipped in pitch.

“‘His lair’? ‘His lair’?” Old Red barked out an incredulous laugh. “His lair’s at the bottom of the damned lake. Ain’t no way we could ever…a-ha!”

He jabbed a finger at the window. Even from my spot at the table, I could see what he was pointing at: twin pinpricks of light glowing in the darkness high in the trees outside.

Old Red whirled around to face us.

“I don’t care what kinda critter that is,” he growled—and he marched over and snatched up Kennedy’s scattergun. “Two barrels in the gut’ll kill it quick enough.”

“No, no, no,” the old man spluttered. “We need it alive, remember? To sell.”

“I think we oughta listen to the man, Brother,” I said.

But Old Red was already striding off again.

“Can’t sell it if we never catch it,” he said without looking back. “And a body’ll fetch a pretty penny too.”

He threw open the front door and stepped out onto the porch.

Kennedy hurled himself from his chair and stumbled after him.

“Noooooo!” he howled.

Old Red took aim.

Fiona and Eileen screamed.

Out in the darkness, the lights dropped downward, then disappeared.

Old Red pulled the triggers, and the shotgun spat fire into the night…but not where the lights had been. At the last second, my brother had jerked the shotgun up, spraying buckshot at the stars.

When my ears stopped ringing, I heard a new sound: whimpering. From the women and from somewhere out in the forest too.

“Mr. Kennedy,” Old Red said coolly, all trace of his killing frenzy suddenly gone, “why don’t you tell your boy to stop playin’ games and come on inside?”

“My…boy…?”

“Your son, sir.” Old Red turned back toward the woods. “And bring them special moccasins of yours with you! And your rig for the candles! Y’all owe us a look at ’em, I’d say!”

And with that, he handed Kennedy the shotgun, sauntered inside, and retook his seat at the table.

“That was a cruel thing to do!” Eileen spat at him.

“Oh, I’m sorry. Did he frighten you?” I shot back, matching her venom with acid. “Not a pleasant sensation, is it?”

I still didn’t know all the hows and whys, but the what was plain enough. The clan Kennedy had taken my brother and me for fools. And, alas, they’d been half right.

Fiona and Eileen glowered back at me, sullen and silent.

“Keeley! Keeley, boy! Are you all right?” the old man called out from the porch.

A sniffling “I’m fine” drifted from the darkness of the trees, and then the Water Indian himself emerged from the shadows—a slender, slouching teenage boy. As he and his father shuffled inside, I saw that the kid was carrying a length of rope. Tied to it was a wooden rod sporting a snuffed candle on each end.

“Take those ridiculous things off,” Fiona muttered at the boy. She waved a hand at his feet, which were encased it what looked like Goliath’s furry bed slippers. “You’re not going to track mud all over my clean floor.”

Keeley nodded glumly, wiped his nose on his sleeve, and shuffled back out to the porch.

“Make those yourself?” Old Red asked as the kid kicked off “those ridiculous things.”

“Yes sir,” the boy said, managing a sad little smile. He held up his fuzzy fake feet, both embarrassed and proud. “Bear paws and rawhide.”

“Neat bit of workmanship—you might have a future as a cobbler,” I told him. “Providin’ your career as a confidence man don’t pan out.”

The boy slinked over to the table and took the last empty seat—the one to my left, at the head of the table opposite his father. The rope and rod he put on the table next to the ham.

“Well, isn’t this cozy?” I said. “Y’all got any more kin out scarin’ the bejesus out of strangers? Cuz if you do, may as well bring ’em on in. There’s still plenty of eats to go around.”

“We’re sorry, all right?” Eileen snapped. She pointed dagger-eyes at her father. “It wasn’t our idea.”

The old man had slumped into his seat so limp he could’ve been a scarecrow stuffed with pudding. But his daughter’s spiteful tone brought him up ramrod straight, and he met her glare head on.

Eileen’s backbone slowly lost its starch until at last she was the one hunched in her chair looking wilted. It was as if her father’s gaze had sucked the life right out of her.

Kennedy turned to my brother.

“Tell me. How did you know?”

“Well, sir…usually I make it a point not to have any prejudices and to just let the facts lead me where they will,” Old Red said, paraphrasing a line from You Know Who’s latest adventure in Harper’s Weekly. (“The Reigate Puzzle,” should you care to look it up.) “But it turns out I’ve got me one prejudice I can’t shake. I don’t believe in spooks and monsters. So that’s what’s been leadin’ me today.”

My brother looked at the other end of the table, at the boy.

“Led me to notice how them tracks of yours just happened to go in and out of the lake next to a big ol’ log—which somebody could use to climb out of the water without leaving more footprints on the shore. And led me to notice a notch in a broken tree limb where the ‘Water Indian’ had been skulkin’ around.” He nodded at the rope coiled up on the table. “The kinda notch that might make if it was thrown over and used to shake the branches way up high. Or to dangle something up there. A couple candle ‘eyes,’ let’s say.”

The boy nodded, looking awestruck. Old Red hadn’t shot wide of the target once.

My brother turned back to the old man.

“Course, it didn’t have to be y’all playin’ bogeyman. At first, I thought it might be someone tryin’ to scare you off—some of ‘the Brethren’ hopin’ to clear out Kennedyville for good. But when you run on ahead this morning to tell your family we was comin’? Seemed like a good time to cook up some flimflam. And when you told us your wife died birthing your youngest…and then the gravestone said she passed in 1875?”

Old Red threw Eileen a quick there-and-gone glance.

“I’m sorry, miss, but there just ain’t no way you’re eighteen.”

Eileen perked up just enough to shoot him a hateful scowl.

“So I volunteered to help you hang out the washin’,” my brother went on, turning to Fiona. “Pinned up some shirts and britches a big, bluff man like your father’d bust at the seams. Looked like clothes for a smaller feller. Younger, maybe. Like eighteen, perhaps.”

“My, my…you’re smarter than you look, aren’t you?” Fiona said, something like admiration peeking out from behind weary bitterness. “But I bet there’s still one thing you haven’t figured out.”

“That’s right,” Old Red said. “Why?”

Fiona jerked her head at her father.

“Because the king of Kennedyville commands it, that’s why.”

Then more words spilled out of her, coming so fast, in such a flood burst, she couldn’t even take the time to breathe.

“At first, he sent Keeley out to scare you off. That’s what he does whenever any Mormons try to stay the night around here. But when he found out you were Gentiles, he thought we could trick you into staying. Permanently. As part of the family. Keeley would have to keep out of sight for a while, but that wouldn’t last long—just until my father could catch one of you in the act.”

“Catch us—?”

“—in what act?” I’d been about to ask. But then suddenly I knew, and all I could whisper was, “Oh, my.”

Catch one of us with one of them, she’d meant. With her or her sister.

I couldn’t help myself then: I shivered. When it comes to sheer blood-freezing terror, a lake monster’s got nothing on a shotgun wedding.

“You know,” Old Red said, “if y’all are this desperate to, uhhh…expand the family, I’d say it’s time you moved on to greener pastures, courtin’-wise.”

“Don’t you think we know that?” Eileen cried out, her voice quavering, on the verge of becoming a sob. “Don’t you think that’s what we—”

“No!”

Her father slammed down a fist with such force every plate on the table jumped an inch in the air. “I was here before those bloody Mormon heathens, and I’ll still be here after they’re gone! This is my home! My land! My town! My family! And I’ll never give any of it up! Never!”

When Kennedy was done, Fiona, Eileen, and Keeley were all looking down, silent and still, like worshippers in church competing to seem the most pious. Hate the man as they might—and I suspected they did—a little blustering and table thumping and they were utterly in his thrall.

“Well,” Old Red said quietly, “I think we best be leavin’.”

The old man blinked at him.

“What? You can’t leave now. It’s dark out.”

“Oh, don’t worry about us,” I said. My brother and I stood and started backing away from the table. “We’ve done plenty of night herding. We won’t break out necks.”

“Look…” Kennedy tried out an unconvincing smile. “I’m sorry about the tricks. The lies. Let us make it up to you. A good night’s sleep indoors and a hearty breakfast before you hit the trail. What do you say?”

I say you’re insane, I thought.

For obvious reasons, I kept this to myself.

Kennedy’s smile went lopsided and slowly sank.

“You can have your pick of spreads….”

The old man stood and took a staggering step after us. He stopped next to the spot where he’d left his shotgun propped up against the wall.

“Your pick of wives. Just stay. Please. You won’t regret it.”

We kept backing away.

Kennedy took another step toward us. Beyond him, his daughters and son just watched from their seats, unmoving, unblinking, glassy eyed. They seemed strangely sleepy, as if what they were seeing was merely a dream they’d had before and would no doubt have again.

Old Red and I reached the door.

“Don’t go,” Kennedy said, his voice half-pleading, half-demanding. “We need you here. I need you….”

“Good-bye,” my brother told the old man.

“And good luck,” I said to his children.

And then we were outside in the gloom.

We saddled up quick as we could by lantern light. I kept expecting Kennedy to come out and tell us again to stay…or try to make us. Yet when it came time to swing up atop my mount, I found myself lingering, waiting.

Old Red horsed himself without pausing a jot.

“They ain’t comin’, Brother,” he told me.

He knew what I was thinking. Maybe the boy or one of the women would dart out after us, beg to be brought along. And we could—maybe should—help them out. After all, we knew what it was like to be trapped on a farm, tied down by obligation and expectation. And Old Red, at least, knew what it was like to escape.

He hit the cow trails at eighteen and never saw the family farm again. And in a way, I felt like he was running from the old homestead even still. You can’t get much further removed from the dreary toil of sodbusting than a gentleman deducifier cracking mysteries in well-appointed drawing rooms.

Old Red had freed himself from the past—or was trying to, anyhow, which maybe amounts to the same thing. So if he looked at Fiona and Eileen and Keeley and didn’t see the strength there to do likewise, I suppose it wasn’t there to be seen.

I pulled myself up into my saddle.

“Think they’ll ever get away from here? The gals? Or the kid?”

“Not till the old man’s dead.” My brother gave his pony his heels. “Maybe not even then.”

The horses ambled slowly out toward the trail, finding their way by memory as much as moonlight. It could have been a short journey—all we had to do was head north fifteen minutes and bed down in the same abandoned farmhouse we’d been in the night before. But Old Red and I agreed to push south a ways instead. More than ever since we’d begun our travels, we both felt the need to move on.

I looked back just the once. All I could see was the dull yellow glow from the cottage windows aflicker through the trees like a sunset shimmering on dark, rippling water. Then a turn in the trail blotted it out, and the last of the light was swallowed into the black depths of the forest.

Should you ever make it to America again, Mr. Brackwell, I’d urge you to visit the Bear Lake Valley. It’s beautiful country, and friendly too. Lord knows they like their visitors.

If it should be ten years before you pass that way—heck, a hundred—I feel like you’d find “Kennedyville” there still, utterly unchanged.

Population: Four…but always room for more, if you’re of the right frame of mind.

Yours faithfully,

O. A. Amlingmeyer

Logan, Utah

July 4, 1893