Sisterdale Shadows: A Buck Duran Mystery: Buck Duran Mysteries, #5

By Robert Bogan

In the morning paper, Buck Duran reads that a friend of his from decades earlier has been the victim of a terrorist attack. He leaves immediately to help, embarking on a quest that awakens his long-dormant passion and fills a void in his life. The search carries him a century and a half into the past, where he is stranded in the dungeon of a dragon. Buck Duran must fight to free himself and others from demons that lurk in SISTERDALE SHADOWS.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Robert Bogan
• Release date: Nov 14, 2017
• ISBN: 9781386759911

Book preview

SISTERDALE SHADOWS

A Buck Duran Mystery

Robert Bogan

January 1996

ONE

At two o’clock in the morning, a dark crew-cab pickup rolled without lights down Siebeneicher Strasse outside Sisterdale, just south of the Guadalupe River. The truck paused at a predetermined address then backed its dualies over a cattle guard and into the yard of a farmhouse sleeping among oaks on the river bluff. The pickup whose tailgate had already been lowered came to a stop in an open area ten yards from the house. Three men climbed out and executed a series of practiced moves. They blew condensation fog in the chill. The fourth man stayed in the cab and kept the engine running. All four wore white pillow cases over their heads. Eyeholes had been cut in the white fabric.

Two of the men did the work, the third held a camcorder and videotaped the action. They pulled an eight-foot wooden cross from the bed of the truck and laid it flat on the ground. One of the men poured kerosene over the pine beams. The other turned the cross over and kerosene man gave that side a soak as well. Then they hoisted the cross upright and stabilized the base with cinder blocks lifted from the truck bed. One man emptied the kerosene can at the base of the cross, the other struck a kitchen match and tossed it.

Blue flames clawed up the wood to the top. The men reentered the truck and they glided away back into the shadows. Soon the entire cross stood blazing with bright yellow flames. The entire operation took less than three minutes.

TWO

Buck Duran sat near the fire in Mozart’s Coffee on Lake Austin near the dam. Aware he was sitting within the escarpment itself, he stood up and looked out at the cold waves just now catching the morning light. This scene distracted his mind briefly from the topic that had occupied his thoughts for several days: his daughter BB was coming to Austin in a few months. Soon after her arrival she would marry a man her father has never met. Duran and BB’s mother were hosting all events. His mind kept going back to the joy his daughter always brought him, then came the question of how do you pay for everything.

He emptied the coffee mug, unfolded today’s Austin American-Statesman and read the headlines. There was a stink in the Senate because the President’s wife was promoting a sensible health-care plan. Duran let go trying to understand that ruckus. Below the fold he encountered a news item that changed his life.

There had been a cross-burning in the quiet Hill Country hamlet of Sisterdale. The cross was burned in front of a house being rented by a professor on sabbatical. No person or group had yet claimed responsibility for the act.

The waitress refilled Duran’s mug without saying anything.

Thank you, darlin’. He looked up and met her eye.

The fifth paragraph identified the professor on sabbatical as Dr. Dunna Walkurch, age 50, native of Fredericksburg. Duran stared at that name but saw no print. The right age and birthplace. That had to be Daisy Walkurch, a coed he knew thirty years earlier. Once, she had confided that her actual first name was Idunna. He remembered Daisy as a mercurial spirit and one of the smartest people he had ever met.

They were friends in the Sixties when both were residents at the Collegium, a coeducational cooperative dormitory under the aegis of The University of Texas. They shared a German class, studied together and went out a few times. Duran remembered she out-smarted and out-classed him in every way back then. He recalled Daisy’s light-hearted, devastating taunts. In fact those taunts were one of the spurs that nudged him onto the path he continues to follow.

He drained all the coffee, left a big tip and drove home. After Ester died he stayed in San Antonio for more than a year then he moved back to Austin and bought a one-bedroom condominium in Barton Hills just above Zilker Park and Town Lake, where hard freezes were rare and vegetation was lush, even in January. He entered the condominium complex under a canopy of crowded live oaks.

There was a parking place close to the door of his quarters where he parked the Yukon and went inside. He picked up his cordless phone and punched the number for information. They gave him several connections to try but none worked. He threw a few things into a backpack and drove away from Barton Hills. He was on his way to Sisterdale.

THREE

The sky was a uniform pewter gray that morning when Duran headed west through Dripping Springs. From highway 290, he turned south onto 281 and soon cruised through Blanco where the highway passes close to the courthouse that dominates the busy town square. A few miles farther south, he turned west again onto county road 473 and started to climb. An ice storm yesterday had flattened and bleached the vegetation. Blue sheets of ice still spanned the shadows between rock and tree root.

The climb leveled when he reached the top of one long ascent. He slowed, braked and pulled to the shoulder. He had to give a moment to admire the sudden gift. A variety of rugged hills raced all the way to the blue horizon where the farthest hill was a bump almost twenty miles distant. He took a slow breath, wrapped fists around the Yukon’s wheel and plunged down the hill to Kendalia. Skeletal stalks of sotol swayed in his back draft when he plunged past. Spanish daggers leaned sideways and watched. Small herds of goat and cattle huddled from the cold.

At Shepherd Creek, bare cypress spires towered above a fantasy landscape that sheltered a world more suited for elves and trolls than for ranch girls and goat-ropers. Tourists might not see more than a creek and some trees the instant they whizzed by in a blur.

When Duran reached Sisterdale, he turned south onto Sisterdale Road which was part of a regional turnpike that during the Spanish centuries had been called Pinta Trail. The road’s name before that is unknown. It was probably a Jumano trading trail originally blazed using the north star for guidance. Sisterdale was one of three Latin colonies established by German immigrants on the Pinta Trail: there was also Luckenbach eighteen miles to the north, and Boerne nearly as far in the other direction.

The article in the Statesman stated the cross was burned just south of the Guadalupe River, off Sisterdale Road. When he crossed the river bridge he saw there was good flow in the