What Remains of Teddy Redburn

By Lorraine Ray

Teddy Redburn returns to his hometown of Los Hombres after selling his mattress factory in Las Vegas. On his first night home, several townspeople glimpse Teddy's satchel which is crammed with cash. Teddy subsequently vanishes and this triggers a crazed search of his childhood mansion and the town environs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lorraine Ray
• Release date: May 26, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370576944

Lorraine Ray

Lorraine Ray is the author of comedies, mysteries and short story collections. She married an Englishman and has spent several summer vacations with her husband and daughter tramping across the South Downs avoiding sheep droppings. She lives in Tucson, Arizona. Besides writing, one of her favorite jobs was a two-year stint as a lunch lady! She used that job to help her write a book about cafeteria workers who go gold mining. If you like to laugh, and you have a slightly warped view of the world, it's entirely possible that you would appreciate her books.

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What Remains of Teddy Redburn

Lorraine Ray

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2017 Lorraine Ray

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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1.

Even today if you visit Los Hombres you can search for Theodore Pennington Redburn. Signs shouting Treasure Maps to the Lost Satchel! Redburn Mystery Clues Sold Here! appear in the gift shop windows on the way to the interesting petroglyphs on Ghost Hat Hill. These shops hope to sell you the maps and souvenir booklets which some of the more enterprising people in town have drawn up to explain the sightings of the mysterious multi-millionaire. The maps and booklets mark the routes he might have taken when he visited Los Hombres and later disappeared. You’ll see some change back from a five dollar bill before you rush out of the gift shop, bells jangling on the door, and rattle open the folded map right in the middle of our narrow sidewalks on a Saturday morning when we’re struggling to get around you with our bags full of organic grocery shopping. Follow the dotted lines and you’ll be embarking on a search of the environs of Los Hombres for the remains of Teddy Redburn. Once he was a human being, but now he’s best described as a treasure hunter’s goal, an X-marks-the-spot, like the location of the Lost Dutchman’s Mine, etc.

Treasure hunting is a venerable pastime in Arizona, drones the author of a Southern Arizona guidebook in their section covering ghost town, lost mines, and misplaced loot. The names of the forgotten mines and treasures awaiting discovery by the lucky and adventurous can be reeled off by any dedicated treasure-hunter and include: the Mine of the Blind Mule, Screaming Skull Hoard, Vulture Comstock, Treasure of the Weeping Nun, Bloody Skull Pit, Old Blood and Thunder Comstock, and the Mine of the Lost, to mention only a few of the more colorful ones that everybody ought to know. Why, you can cross the whole state and do nothing but lurch from one lost treasure to another, if you care to. While other states around our nation boast of their productive crops like grapes, cherries, and hay, or worthwhile endeavors like building bridges or designing cars, the state of Arizona remains most fertile in the field of abandoned mines or misplaced treasures—like the remains of Teddy Redburn. Whether they were inebriated or shot by arrows when they lost their valuable mine, someone always has an idea where they might have left it. And these charlatans devise ingenious ways to charge you for the information, selling you metal detectors and panning equipment and producing YouTube videos about stashes from famous stagecoach or train robberies, videos which promise to reveal the secret wanderings of the various lost prospectors and robbers for a small fee. You might think this is rather pathetic, but we all crave our dreams and who’s to say fantasies of stumbling upon large sums of money or gold are any worse than dreams of inventing an important medicine or a contraption to go faster. Why are you moving so fast, and why are you so sick, we might ask.

On the face of it, the desert probably doesn’t seem to be a great hiding place, but that’s because you’re thinking of all deserts as sandy desolate locations, like the Sahara sand dunes. Los Hombres sits in an entirely different kind of desert. When old Grundy Pennington Redburn founded the city as a railroad shipping location for cattle ranches in the Huachuca Mountains, he built his mansion into the side of a steep hill named Ghost Hat, and others, who wished to be fashionable, followed his example and built there. Craggy, rock-strewn, the terrain of Los Hombres abounds with ditches, which we call arroyos, with steep sides to them. These arroyos sprout thickets of spiny brush, trees, and cacti. Almost every house either has an arroyo behind it or in front of it, and these steep ditches carry rushing waters during the summer monsoons, and those rushing waters eroded several deep caverns within town and more on the west side, outside town. One cavern high up on the hill even served as our town jail (and is now being converted into a fashionable restaurant promising delicious enchiladas and loud mariachi music). Where these arroyos broaden outside town, sand covers the wide beds and the thickets on the sides merge to form a huge swamp-like bog on the plain. Good luck digging through all that for what remains of Teddy Redburn.

But no one actually hopes they’ll find Teddy. After all these months, he must be dead, and no one wants his corpse, least of all his family. Although some believe a cousin survives Teddy, they say this relative is now far too wealthy to care about his cousin’s remains. Others in town think Teddy fathered children, but most of us believe he lied when he claimed that during his last hours.

The public and the treasure hunters, though, they want what Teddy could have had with him when he died—a satchel crammed full of cash.

2.

That night, when Theodore Pennington Redburn turned off the I-10 and drove the frontage road into Los Hombres, he discovered that his home town, which he hadn’t seen for years, had morphed into a wrecked and deserted landscape with half the buildings boarded up, and the other half functioning in a shambling semblance of what he remembered. It was almost as though everyone had fled to fallout shelters as an air raid siren blared sometime in 1989. But even the air raid sirens in town disappointed; an old ham radio operator and electrical nut who plagued the town claimed critical wires disintegrated years earlier.

I examined that air raid siren in the spring of 2004, said Bernie Goodson, the noted ham radio operator and electrical nut. Our city council decided to disconnect it and send it to the Santa Cruz County museum in Tombstone. A relic of the cold war they called it. I was there the Saturday the city crew took it down, and when they opened the cover to disconnect the wires, the county work crew noticed all the insulation had been chewed to shreds by some damn pack rats! The wires were shot to hell! To add insult to injury the damage was actually quite old. More than a decade prior from what I could see. This means we lived without an air raid siren for all those years when we should have been testing it every month. Think what the commies could have made of that!

But you probably suspect that the air raid siren has nothing whatsoever to do with what happened to Teddy Redburn and his satchel of money. And you’d be right if you