After dropping the wrought iron fence and railing off a the Depot Museum for restoration, Nick Hastings was climbing into his truck when Teresa Thompson, or Ray to just about everyone in town, called to him from the front door of the depot.
“Thanks for all your help today, Nick!” Ray called.
Nick smiled and gave Ray a wave in return.
“Oh, Nick,” Ray asked. “Do you have one more minute to help me with something?” She had exited the depot museum and was walking to a spot around the side where Nick had left a neat pile of the remnants of Shep’s gravesite. Nick climbed down from the truck and met Ray near the pile.
“Who was that man who came to the gravesite after everybody left?” Ray asked.
“I don’t know,” Nick answered honestly. “He didn’t say who he was.”
“Well, what did he want?” Ray asked.
“I…” Nick stammered. “I’m not really sure.”
At this point Nick could have shared every detail of the encounter with Ray. He could have even said that he had something that feels like a Gutenberg Bible wrapped in fabric and a King Soopers bag full of ancient Coors bottle caps on the passenger side floor of his work truck. But something made him stop. He trusted Ray. He liked her, even. But he wasn’t ready to share his find. Not yet. At least not until he unwrapped the book. And, after all, the old man seemed to specifically want Nick to have whatever it was that he dug up under Shep. If it was of historical significance, Nick decided, he’d hand it over to Ray and the museum after examining it. But for all Nick knew it was a crazy old man’s old Sears catalogs wrapped up for safekeeping and hidden under a dog’s grave in a highway cloverleaf.
“What did he say to you?” Ray asked, sensing that she wasn’t getting the whole story. Ray always did have a nose for news.
“Again…” Nick paused, “Not much. I told him that he’d just missed all the action – if that’s what you could call it. And that we’d already found the dog. And that there wasn’t anything else to see but me filling up the hole.”
“And what did he say to that?” Ray asked, squinting her eyes a little bit and looking at Nick more than a little suspiciously.
“Nothing.” Nick replied. “I mean, he just started coughing something awful. And then his son turned him around and got him back into their car.”
“How did you know that man was his son? Did he tell you that?” Ray pounced.
“I guess I just assumed it,” Nick replied. “No, wait. He called him ‘Dad’ after he started coughing. That’s how I knew. Then they got in their car and drove off. It was all kind of strange.”
“Yes, I’ll bet it was,” Ray replied.
“I mean,” Nick smiled. “Not as strange as digging up a dog that’s been dead for 45 years and buried in a highway cloverleaf. You know.”
“Umm hmm,” Ray smiled. “I guess ‘strange’ is a relative term in Broomfield.”
“Well, you take care now, Ray,” Nick said and turned to leave. “Be sure to call me if you need any help moving Shep’s grave markers.”
“Oh, Nick,” Ray shouted after him. “You’ll be sure to let me know if you remember anything else that the old man said to you at the grave, won’t you?”
Nick smiled. “Absolutely, Ray. You’ll be the first to know.”
And Nick climbed into his truck and drove straight to his apartment where he quickly deposited the cloth covered book and the King Soopers bag full of bottle caps on his kitchen table. Then he headed back to work for the day.
#####
After work, Nick texted his sister that he was staying in tonight & he wouldn’t be meeting the gang at the bar.
His sister, Tracy, didn’t text back—she called. “What do you mean you’re not meeting us? Sam’s got a pitcher of Coors Banquet and a glass with your name on it. No one else will drink the stuff.” Nick could hear the jukebox and the Friday night crowd gathering.
“You’ll just have to manage without me,” Nick replied. “I’m a working man. And I’m tired.”
“Only crazy people stay home on Friday nights and watch the History Channel, Nick,” Tracy warned.
“But there’s a Civil War marathon…”
“Spoiler alert,” Tracy said, “The North wins. Now get your butt over here and drink this beer so Sam doesn’t have to pour it back into the horse.”
“Maybe after Gettysburg,” Nick replied. “We’ll see how I’m feeling.”
“If you miss any more Fridays, Nick, I’m going to send you to see a doctor. Are you still coming over for dinner tomorrow?”
“Free food, heck yeah!” Nick said.
“O.K., Loser. You get your beauty rest. Sam will just have to settle for beating you at darts tomorrow.” Tracy snarked.
“See you tomorrow, Dork,” Nick answered lovingly.
Nick set his phone down and waited. If he didn’t get a call back in two or three minutes, he was in the clear.
He surveyed the bounty from Shep’s grave arrayed in front of him on the table. The great book, still bound in cloth, sat in front of him. But he first turned his attention to the bottle caps. He dumped the King Soopers bag onto the table in front of him. The caps were caked in dirt, rusted, and decaying. He grabbed a couple of the shinier ones and cleaned them off in his sink. And they were exactly what they looked like. Rusty, old bottle caps.
Nick decided it probably wasn’t worth cleaning up the rest. But he did wonder how many there were. He certainly didn’t get them all. But he retrieved every cap that he could find. The started making discrete piles of 10 caps. And he soon needed to clean off the his entire table to get them sorted into piles of 10 caps each.
Total count: 362 bottle caps.
Nick wasn’t exactly sure what to do with this information, but he wrote it down on a notepad near his phone. Maybe the toll booth operators guzzled Coors in their spare time? Who could blame them? And, maybe they decided the best way to get rid of the evidence was to hide it under the dog buried in the middle of the cloverleaf. No one would ever think of looking there. But if then, where are the bottles?
After the bottlecap inventory, Nick swept them all back into the King Soopers bag and turned his attention to the book. He used an X-Acto knife to break the stitches of the worn fabric sewn around the book. It must have been hand-sewn, but it looked perfectly neat and professional.
After carefully working one end of the cloth open, Nick was able to slide the book out with ease. It looked a thousand years old, and as well-preserved as the day it was buried, 45 years ago. It was bound in red leather, with lots of ornate shapes stamped and cut into the surface. The cover had no words. But there was an image in gold of an ape-man etched deep into the red leather.
Nick opened the book and read the title page: “A Relic of the Benevolent Order of the Broomsquatch. Broomfield, Colorado” written with a flourish on the first page. The pages were well-handled. In the lower right corner there was a note in pencil which has been almost entirely erased. Nick had to hold the book up to the light to make out what had been written there. In an elementary school child’s scrawl the note had said, “Stumpy Was Here.”
On the second page there was a familiar map of the Front Range around Boulder. Like the calligraphy, it wasn’t expertly drawn. But someone had done it carefully. Nick could see some obvious landmarks such as the Flatirons, Boulder, and Eldorado Canyon.
There was considerably more detail in the area of map around Eldorado Canyon and along South Boulder Creek west of the Flatirons. Nick saw familiar names on the landmarks like Walker Ranch and Nineteen Gulch. But there were unfamiliar names, as well. Nick had hiked all around that area since he was a little kid, and he’d never heard of the Copeland Mine, for instance.
The map was covered in different colored symbols, red asterisks, blue daggers, gold and green boxes. There was a key on the following pages. Red asterisks said “sighting.” Blue daggers said “encounter.” Gold boxes were “caps” and green boxes were “100,” whatever that meant. The symbols were all over the map, but they were heavily concentrated in Eldorado Canyon and along South Boulder Creek.
The rest of the book was filled with entries as if it was a diary or some kind of log book. Each entry started with a date, written formally, such as, “Wednesday the 18th of May in the Year of Our Lord Eighteen Hundred and Ninety Two.” But the diary entry itself was a nonsensical form of shorthand. Some entries as brief as “6 chickens & a mule,” “R.H.P. taken,” or “Pepys boy returned.” Another one said, “Tractor axle bent. Crawford grateful.” Each entry gave a location, only a few of which were recognizable to Nick. And the colored symbols were added to these entries, as well. The book was full of this nonsense.
Nick carefully read a few pages at the beginning and then skipped around reading random entries. They were all the same. They were all indecipherable.
Nick flipped to the end of the book. The pages were blank. He had to flip back about a quarter of the way in before he could find the last entry. It read “Sunday the 24th of December in the Year of Our Lord Nineteen Hundred and Fifty.” The entry was a single word: “Woof.” There was a blue dagger and a gold box. And that was it.
December 24th, 1950. That was fourteen years before the book was buried, Nick thought. Why did someone wait that long to bury the book? Why did they stop making entries? What changed on Christmas Eve 1950?
Nick had no answers, just questions. And he knew that he wasn’t going to get much further on his own. He decided to take the whole lot to Ray at the Depot Museum on Monday. He’d come clean and tell her the truth. He wanted to discover this himself before he told anyone else. And besides, Ray knew everything about Broomfield history. She’d probably know who Crawford was and why he was grateful that his tractor axle was bent. And she’d definitely know what the Copeland Mine was.
Nick carefully put the bottle caps back into the King Soopers bag. It was too late head out to see Tracy. And besides, he knew they would have kept that pitcher of Coors Banquet in the middle of the table getting warmer and warmer all night. And they’d just make him drink it if he showed up late. No thank you.
So Nick decided to turn in early. He thought he’d take a hike Saturday morning. And what better place than Walker Ranch. It had been a couple years since he’d hiked it last. And he wanted to see how well everything was recovering since the fire.
Nick pulled out his well-used topographic trail map and began to map his hike against the hand-drawn map in the Red Book. He’d go through Tom Davis Gulch. There were many symbols there on the Red Book map, especially red asterisks and blue daggers.
Nick then began packing his gear and cleaning his water bottles for the hike when a thought struck him. He dropped his bottle in the sink and almost ran back to his kitchen table. He looked at the Red Book map position for the Copeland Mine. This area of the map had far more colored symbols than the rest. He noted the position of the mine relative to the bends in the creeks and the prominent ridge peaks. Then turned to his topographic trail map and triangulated the same position using the peaks and streams.
The Copeland Mine is at the bottom of Gross Reservoir.
