Whisper In The Dark (The McKinnon Legends-- The American Men Book One) (2 page)

That memory of Kyle was one of a thousand of her younger days here on the ranch assailing her since she received the call that turned her world upside down. Not that her world was all that level, so a nudge would have accomplished it. The call she received from Robert McKinnon, Kyle’s longtime friend, had been way more than a nudge.

It was still hard to believe Kyle was dead, murdered for ten dollars and a cheap watch. Robbery seemed to be the only logical motive. The Johnson County Sheriff could not find anything else to attribute it to. Since everyone loved Kyle, it was unlikely the motive was revenge. Nor was his death the result of a stray bullet from a hunting rifle. He had been beaten to death, a very up close and very personal assault.

She gripped the steering wheel with sweaty palms, twisting the leather cover with a near death-grip as she maneuvered the rental car off the highway and onto the gravel and dirt driveway leading to the old mansion. She found herself blinking back the tears coming from a well she thought was long dry by this time.

Distracting herself she counted the trees standing sentry, lining each side of the drive just as they had for a hundred years. To her eyes they seemed smaller now than the day she had left here fifteen years ago.

Her perspective was just different, she supposed, knowing growing up has a way of doing that to a person.

“I guess it is all relative,” she said as she parked the car in the front of the old mansion, which until the day before yesterday had never seen a day without a Brandenburg living in it. Again, she could not believe her beloved Kyle was gone forever.

Their communication had not stopped in spite of the fact they had not seen each other for several years. She loved Kyle deeply and she loved this ranch. The Golden Circle was  rich in history, and as a child, she loved to hear the stories from her great aunt, who was the granddaughter of Nathaniel Brandenburg, the ranch founder.

The original house was built in 1868 by Nathaniel after coming west from Missouri seeking riches legitimately, unlike the James and Younger gang he had almost joined. Granted pardon from being part of the Confederate Army during the Civil War, he wisely decided to let the war end by moving west. The Long Riders of the James Gang would go down in legend. However, Nathaniel Brandenburg would not be a part of that history since he always considered Frank and Jesse James and the Younger boys two-bit thugs who only used the war to fuel their lust for blood and violence.

According to her Great-Aunt Louise, lore had it Jesse and his gang came to visit her grandfather in the spring of 1872 laden with four saddlebags full of loot from several successful robberies.

They had left empty-handed.

Thus the legend of the treasure was born.

Sad, Katherine thought, as she considered all the wasted life and all the bloodshed. It was for nothing. Considering all the gold and currency both Frank and Jesse made off with over the sixteen years they were on their rampage, they both died poor. Jesse’s widow had to sell her furniture just to put him in the ground.

However, their names did go down in history as the most notorious gang of the Wild West. Again, Katherine had to wonder at the mentality of those who overvalued the likes of Jesse and Frank James, glorifying them as heros.

Nathaniel, on the other hand, much older and wiser, completely washed his hands of the James Brothers following the fall of the South. He found his riches in the form of longhorn cattle, became a powerful cattle baron, and worked hard until the day he died. The fruits of his labor were still around, she thought. The house and the land were evidence. She was evidence.

He fully understood that the South would rise again, given time. The American spirit was too strong to be harnessed or kept down for long, but Dixieland would never be the same no matter how much the diehards fought for the
good old days
.

Times were different after General Robert E. Lee surrendered the Confederacy at Appomattox in April of 1865. Things changed with the stroke of a pen, never to be reversed. Nathaniel understood and accepted this. Laying down his gun and taking up his plow, he became a rancher.

Robbing and pillaging was not for him even if it was done, condoned, and even encouraged on both sides of the Mason Dixon Line. He had seen enough bloodshed in the years he had carried a gun defending a dying way of life, a way of life he never fully embraced. He never owned slaves. It was a stance that had never brought him much popularity. So, for him, the move west had seemed a natural thing to do.

Nathaniel’s only child, Thaddeus, built the “Big House” in 1898. It was a sprawling mansion with dozens of rooms and at the time boasted indoor plumbing and a running hot shower.

Spoiled and self-serving, Thaddeus refused to continue in his father’s footsteps as a rancher after Nathaniel passed away. Feeling working with his hands was beneath him, Thaddeus mortgaged the Brandenburg lands to invest in several suspect and dubious ventures. The true nature of those investments was still, to this day, blanketed in a shroud of mystery. There had been no paper trail, only rumor and innuendo. Truthfully, given the personal nature of Thaddeus Brandenburg, there was just not much telling what he had ventured into. He had been ruthless, ever seeking to increase his powerbase through wealth and intimidation.

He indeed became what Katherine considered to be filthy rich, even by nineteenth and early twentieth century standards. Exceeding his father’s wealth by millions of dollars, Thaddeus became a powerful icon with which to be reckoned. Along the way, not only did he increase the Brandenburg fortune, he made powerful political and financial enemies. J.P. Morgan and Rockefeller just to name a short list.

So given his track record in human relations, no one was surprised when in 1911 news reached Fort Worth that he was found murdered. He was discovered by a hotel staff member in Hot Springs, Arkansas, floating facedown in a mineral bath on the now famous Bathhouse Row. No one was ever brought to trial because there were never any suspects.

There were probably too many suspects if you got down to it. That was Katherine’s guess.

Kate tried to imagine how shocked his wife Edith would be upon discovering only forty-two dollars in the bank account where she drew her monthly allowance for household expenditures.

Boy, do I ever know how that feels, Katherine thought.

According to bank records, apparently Thaddeus made small deposits weekly keeping just enough in the account for incidentals, never making a secret of his mistrust of the National Banking System, especially after the panic of 1893. He preferred to keep his money elsewhere, and only he had the knowledge of where
“elsewhere”
happened to be. To this day no one knew where his fortune disappeared, just adding to the legend of treasure hidden on Brandenburg lands.

As a child she had always imagined a grand and great treasure hunt. Her great-aunt would just smile indulgently, pat her head, and say that treasure is not always currency.

Well, she could sure use a little of that fortune right about now. She was flat broke by almost anyone’s standards having soon to resort to welfare if she did not hit the jackpot.

Thaddeus spent a lot of time at the gaming tables in Hot Springs and Saint Louis, and some thought he gambled it away though no one ever saw him lose as often or as grandly as he would have to lose to end up that broke. Others thought he invested poorly and lost it. No one knew at the turn of the century what really happened and no one knew today, she thought.

Wherever that fortune disappeared was just as much a mystery as how that same fortune was made.

“So who knows?” she sighed.

Anything was possible she supposed. It was a mystery full of holes, and there was no one left alive to plug them. Old George had not yet been born when Thaddeus died, so he was no help and very mum on the subject when she had pestered him about it as a child.

Legend held Thaddeus buried most of his fortune somewhere on Brandenburg land, and this served only to fuel the fire of the legend that there was still a treasure buried somewhere out there on the ranch which had remained intact with the exception of a few thousand acres sold exclusively to their neighbor on the west.

There was a feasibility it was buried out there, theoretically, but highly unlikely. Katherine was leaning toward the theory of squander on Thaddeus’ part, poor judgment, and too much ego to admit he was bankrupt. He would not be the first or last Brandenburg to fall flat because of pride. All she had to do was look in the mirror to see that fact clear as a bright spring day.

At any rate, each generation coming after had worked hard to make the land profitable. Each generation had succeeded. Some did better than others. Her father had eked a living from the land. Through mineral royalties and corn he grew for ethanol, he managed to make a living. Growing up she never remembered wanting for anything except her father’s approval and her mother’s presence. Both were always in short supply.

However, with each successive year things became tighter, and her dad was quick to point out how times had changed from Nathaniel Brandenburg’s 1868 to the present. Her father claimed it was the reason her mother left them when she was four years old. She figured Krystal McLaughlin-Brandenburg, first runner up for Miss Texas, would have left regardless of the finances. Life on the ranch was hard, and Krystal was not cut out to be a rancher’s wife.

Kyle’s death was just the final blow in a string of events bringing her back to a place she felt she would probably never return. New York had been her home for years. At fourteen, out of the blue, after nine years of total silence, her mother came to get her.

She remembered it like it was yesterday.

Her father did not put up a single argument when Krystal came to
claim
her, as her mother so delicately put it. Katherine shook off the feeling, remembering the way Krystal had phrased it made her feel like a pair of slacks to be picked up from the dry cleaners.

Here is my claim ticket. Now, bring me my pants.

Begging her father to let her stay, he had not said a word. Kyle was the one to protest the loudest, stating her mom gave up all her rights the day she walked out on her as a young girl.

Her mother’s threatening to call the sheriff on him if he ever came close to her again kept him from fighting for her, but she knew Kyle wanted to fight with all his heart. From that point forward until she had turned eighteen, their relationship had been covert using the fruit vendor around the corner from the school where she attended to slip her letters to Kyle.

Years later she asked her father why he let her mother take her without so much as a word. He said he thought she needed feminine guidance.

That might have been true, and probably was, but it would have been nice if that influence had come from a woman who had not walked out, stayed gone for years, come back, and then still left her to be raised by others who could not have cared less about her emotional well being.

Her mother, shortly after divorcing her father, had married a prominent investment banker. Money and influence had never been in short supply for Krystal after leaving Texas behind. Just two short weeks after her mother and she arrived back in New York, her mother and stepfather shipped her off to an elite boarding school.

Katherine shivered thinking about those years.

As long as the check for the tuition did not bounce, the good sisters of The Sacred Heart School for Girls were happy to let her reside in their finely gilded establishment designed to refine the elite of New York and New England.

It wasn’t that they were cruel; they just did not care and finally gave up trying to punish her for unbecoming behavior. They shifted
their goal to just getting her graduated.

“Well, getting me graduated and doing it without me causing too much damage to the other more ‘gently bred’ girls,” she added the verbal note.

Gently bred my ass
, she thought then snorted.

Most could have just as easily been “harbor chicks”. They just bothered to hide their baser natures. She, on the other hand, never bothered to hide the fact she couldn’t care less about which way the knife blade was supposed to be turned for a proper place setting. If it took that for a person to accept her, then they probably had no use for her or she for them.

The sisters, students, and her parents considered her stupid, unsophisticated and beyond redemption. The harder they had tried to mold her, the more she sat down like a stubborn mule. So the quest to turn her into a refined lady had quickly been abandoned for easier obstacles, leaving her to her own designs. It was easier that way for all concerned.

Looking back, the apathy they showed was just about as damning to a fourteen-year-old girl as any corporal reprimand could possibly have been. However, their indifference had managed one positive thing. Having no friends and nothing to distract her from her studies, she had pushed herself to prove them wrong. She may have been crude, she would concede that much. What could anyone expect? She had been raised by ranch hands. However, what she
was
not
was stupid, and she deeply resented anyone who made the mistake of assuming she was the village idiot.

It really royally pissed off the crème de la crème when she graduated top of her class and not by just a small margin either. She had blown the competition clear out of the water, and never being one to conform, unless of course it suited her, she added salt to the wound by walking across the stage in full battle dress consisting of boots, spurs, and a cowboy hat. As if that had not been enough, she accessorized the outfit with the four letters of acceptance, all from Ivy League schools, enlarged and glued on poster board which she draped over her shoulders like a billboard advertisement. She had put a caption under it which read:
I may be an Ass, but I’m a Smart Ass.

Mission accomplished, she thought, smiling, thinking back.

Her mother had been horrified, gasping for breath and spouting that all their money had been wasted on her.