October skies

She looked around her motel room. It was a tip, littered with a couple of empty pizza boxes and soda cans, her clothes lying in a mouldering pile at the end of her unmade bed. The muted TV in the corner flickered with the images of a twenty-four-hour news station.

It reminded her very much of her student digs from a few years ago. Only back then it wasn’t just her mess, it was the communal mess of half a dozen of them: ongoing-party mess — empty cider cans, unwashed dishes, overflowing ashtrays, and half-empty packets of cigarette papers… all very cool, very young, very groovy. Looking at the squalor around her right now in her silent motel room, this mess made by one lonely person just looked very sad.

Why the hell did I hit on him like that?

The thought came out of the blue. Rose winced. Keeping busy these last two days and nights, she’d managed not to think about it. But now, having got the job done, there it was: an awkward exchange of mumbled words clumsily loaded with a suggestion.

Check out my broadband.

She shuddered.

What was I bloody well thinking?

Julian had distinctly recoiled with embarrassment. She looked in the vanity mirror above the dresser.

Look at me. A twenty-five-year-old frump.

Her rat-brown hair was pulled back into a practical bun. Her red-rimmed eyes, fatigued from forty-eight hours of staring at a monitor, were small and unappealing. She hated her stubby nose and thin, uninviting lips… and out of view of the mirror was the one-stone-over, bottom-heavy figure she preferred to keep hidden beneath baggy jeans. On any normal high street, she looked average. But amongst the glamorous, waif-like media moppets that populated the world of digital TV, Rose felt like a sack of potatoes.

It was a sad state of affairs that Julian, a man fifteen years older than her, had politely turned her down. And Jules was hardly Johnny Depp, with a choice of fawning waifs to choose from.

She looked at a segment of digital footage on her laptop — Julian talking to camera. She smiled.

Not so much Johnny Depp as a downmarket Louis Theroux.

Again her mind drifted painfully back to that maladroit exchange, and she cringed.

‘Forget it,’ she muttered. ‘Do some more work.’

She watched the loading bar on the screen near completion. Now that Jules had his sizzling trailer to show off at the meetings he’d arranged, she’d decided it might be a useful idea to research this story from the urban myth angle. This small town — Blue Valley — had more than its fair share of them, according to Grace. Rose wondered if they linked back somehow to this lost wagon train. Inevitably most urban ghost stories tend to originate from a root event, usually quite mundane. She wondered whether most of the interesting tales they’d recorded last week whilst interviewing the locals — stories of shrouded figures, walking skeleton-men and glowing lights in the woods — could ultimately be traced back to survivors of that wagon train.

It was a possibility.

There would have been survivors, surely?

Rose wondered if Grace was around in town tomorrow, or whether she was on duty at the National Parks Service camp site up in the woods. Maybe she’d just drive up in her rental and see, take some flapjacks or bagels up, have a natter and a nibble.

Rose liked Grace. She reminded her of a grumpy old chain-smoking aunt she’d had, before cancer got her.

CHAPTER 21

5 October, 1856

Ben could hear children further away in the woods, their voices echoing distantly through the trees.

‘That’s the Stolheim children,’ said Sam. ‘They’re out collecting firewood too.’

Ben bent over, picked up a fallen branch and brushed the snow off it. ‘There’s a lot of dead wood and kindling in this forest. A hell of a lot easier than foraging for buffalo chips out on the prairie, eh?’

Sam grinned guiltily at Ben’s casual profanity.

‘So, where’s Emily today?’

He turned and glanced back through the trees towards the camp. Several pale columns of smoke rose lazily up into the featureless white sky from within the clearing below. ‘She’s at a prayer meeting in the temple.’

Preston’s people had put a lot of effort into constructing one shelter that was larger than all the others in the camp. From the outside, it appeared to be big enough to allow room for the Quorum of Elders, a committee of twelve, who met several times a day in there. They also used it for prayer meetings and scripture studies for the younger ones. It was their church… or temple, as they referred to it, as well as Preston’s shelter.

‘Vander, Hearst and Preston take turns teaching scripture to some of the children directly.’ Sam picked up a branch then turned to look back down at the snow-covered mound of the temple. ‘Vander’s teaching her right now. Teaching her on her own.’

Ben detected something in his voice.

‘I don’t like that,’ said Sam after a while.

‘Why?’

Sam didn’t answer at first, instead busying himself with searching for twigs and small branches.

‘Sam?’