October skies

He looked back down at the open folder and the scanned pages of the Lambert journal. The first entries had been few and far between, sometimes days, even weeks between them. The handwriting was measured, tidy, comfortably spaced and relatively easy to read. But, as he flicked quickly through the pages, they became longer, the handwriting more erratic, cramped, dense and much harder to decipher — like a child running out of space in a school exercise book, the letters were shrinking towards the end, and the ink grew fainter. He found himself squinting with the folder held up almost to his nose as he tried to make out a few random sentences on the last few scanned pages. There the writing was all but indecipherable — careless hurried scrawls.

A word here, a word there stood out of the dense pages. He wasn’t sure if his tired eyes were deciphering the spidery handwriting correctly. But one word he thought he had picked out whilst digitising the pages a couple of days ago, he now saw again.

… murder…

He felt some instinct inside him twitch. He suspected there might be something more to this story than a wayward wagon train that had got lost in the mountains. As soon as he got back home, he planned to set up some meetings, but he was going to have to read through as much of this journal as he could in the meantime, then get the story transcribed and typed up for others to read more easily. More importantly, reading through this diary would help him make sense of the mystery he’d discovered at the very back of the journal — the ragged edges of three or four pages that had been ripped out.

Murder and mystery.

‘This just gets better and better,’ he muttered to himself. The girl beside him looked up from her phone for a moment before turning back to playing her game.

Then there was research. He was impatient to get back to his flat, fire up his computer and start the process of researching this Benjamin Lambert’s background. He suspected it wasn’t going to be too difficult. Even back in mid-1800s England, it was difficult to live a life without leaving behind a forensic trail of yellowing paper records.

First things first, though.

He flipped back several pages in his notebook and resumed transcribing the contents of Lambert’s journal, stopping every now and then to interpret the faded ink scrawls, the gentle buffeting of the plane soon forgotten about.

CHAPTER 14

23 September, 1856

Preston emerged onto the track where Mr Zimmerman stared anxiously down at the tangled wreckage below, holding his sobbing wife in his arms and rocking her gently.

Mr Zimmerman looked up at him. ‘William… is she…?’

Preston, breathless from the exertion of pulling himself up the steep slope, ignored the father and looked around at the gathered faces. He spotted Ben.

‘Mr Lambert?’

Ben nodded.

‘Your trail captain, Keats, says you have some medical knowledge.’

‘What? Just a little. I was training as a doctor before I…’

‘Come with me, now.’

‘Let me get my bag.’

‘Quickly, please.’

Preston led the way back down, a treacherous descent made more difficult by an inch of snow rendering every foothold slippery and unreliable. Near the bottom, as the rush of the stream grew louder, they passed the oxen, wrapped around the base of a stout Ponderosa pine like some many-legged, many-headed beast. To Ben’s surprise, amidst the mass of tan hide, one or two of them were still alive, struggling and bellowing pathetically.

They climbed down further, until Ben could see the tangled remains of the wagon, and the curious sight of modest undergarments and Sunday-best clothing dangling from the higher branches of several trees nearby, as if hung out to dry.

Lower down he could see Keats squatting over something near the stream. Preston stopped and turned round to face him. Ben could see tears in the man’s normally stern eyes.

‘I think young Johanna will not live…’ He struggled to clear the emotion from his voice. ‘She’s down there.’

Preston led him to the floor of the gulch, strewn with boulders, shards of shattered and twisted timber and scattered personal belongings. The small, ice-cold brook energetically splashed and gurgled around them, carrying away with it the lighter things; letters, poems, dried flowers, keepsakes and mementoes sailed away downstream.

‘This way,’ said Preston again, leading him over to where Keats squatted, powder snow gathering on the floppy brim of his tan hat. To his credit, the grizzled old guide had managed to manoeuvre his scarred and pockmarked old face into something that resembled a tender smile for the poor child.

Ben looked down to see him stroking the ghostly white face of a young girl, stretched out across a wet boulder and bathed in the freezing cold water of the stream. Across her narrow waist lay a large section of the wagon’s trap. The heavy wooden frame had crushed her, cutting her almost completely in half.

‘My God,’ Ben whispered and Preston shot him an angry glance.