Bandera, Texas, 1987
The crunch of gravel and the thump of a car door alerted the proprietor of the Frontier Times Museum that he had company. He poked a gnarled index finger between the slats of the wood blinds he’d been dusting, widening the space between them, and peered outside. A rusted pickup slowed along Thirteenth Street, the driver’s attention attracted, no doubt, by the shiny black Cadillac parked out front. The bells atop the entrance tinkled, and sunlight flooded into the museum’s dim interior. An elegant woman slipped over the threshold, letting the heavy cedar door slam behind her. The star-shaped window carved into the door’s center panel framed her face like a halo.
The visitor who had come to call was most unexpected. Truth be told, any visitors to the Frontier Times were a rarity of late. The proprietor, also the museum’s self-appointed curator, did not know the woman, but she seemed familiar. He searched his brain, sorting the detritus of memories from a life lived well past the age of ninety.
“Hello?” she called out.
The curator continued to observe the stranger from behind a display cabinet containing a stuffed two-faced, four-eyed baby goat that had come to the museum’s collection after a run at the county fair fifty years prior. He wanted another moment to recall where he had seen this woman before.
His visitor wound her way through the teetering and wobbling exhibits, which were equal parts tribute to Bandera’s legacy as the Cowboy Capital of the World and the long-standing local obsession with taxidermy. She wore less makeup than was the fashion of the times, and soft freckles kissed the bridge of her aquiline nose.
The curator’s breath began to fog the cabinet’s glass, which caught the woman’s attention. He shuffled behind the counter as if he’d popped in from the back room. “Can I help you?” he asked, stuffing his feather duster into a bucket on the floor.
The visitor stepped closer and bent over the glass countertop, surveying the artifacts on display beneath. Wisps of raven hair fell across her cheeks, and she instinctively tucked them behind her ears. She straightened and smiled. A spark of recognition bridged the man’s shriveled synapses. He realized he’d seen that face splashed across the newspaper’s front pages and flashed across his television screen over the years. There’d been a buzz across the county for weeks that some country music starlet had bought the old Anderwald place, seeking refuge from the melee of infamy. But something else tugged at the curator’s memory, a flutter beyond his cognitive grasp.
“Yes, I hope you can,” the woman said. “I bought a ranch near here a few months ago. It’s out on Highway 16.”
“Mm, hmm,” the man nodded.
“The thing is,” the stranger hesitated. “Shoot, you’re going to think I’m crazy,” she laughed nervously.
“You’d be surprised, ma’am. My bar for crazy has always been pretty darned high.” The curator grinned, hoping to put his visitor at ease.
“I think it might be haunted,” she said, leaning in close like she feared being overheard.
“Ah, yes. Peacock Bend. Out on the Old Bandera Road. Yep, I know,” the man said.
Suspicion sparked in the woman’s eyes. “You know I bought it, or you know it’s haunted?”
The man shrugged. “Bandera’s a small place. You’ll need to get used to a fair bit of gum flappin’ around here.” Or, he thought to himself, the petty impulses of those who relish any chance to sit in sanctimonious judgment of their fellow man.
“I see,” she said, still wary. “Maybe you can tell me something about the family who used to own the place? All those graves on the hilltop?”
The curator pursed his lips. Where to begin, he wondered. “As a general matter, the intrepid pioneers who built this town didn’t last long in those early days. But the poor souls of Peacock Bend had a disproportionate share of loss over the four generations that lived out there. That’s for sure.”
The visitor began to say something else but was distracted. Her gaze fell upon two ragged photographs hanging askew on the wall beside the counter. “May I?” she asked, pointing at the splintered frames, cobwebs draped at their corners.
“Be my guest,” the curator said.
The woman lifted the first photo from its hook and brushed it off with the sleeve of her jacket. A pair of wild-eyed Arabian men and a grubby Confederate soldier were posed astride camels, grimacing into the lens. “Would you look at that,” she muttered and replaced the frame on the wall.
The mysterious caller took the second photo from the wall and gently blew the dust from its surface. She began to cough and sputter. A stern young woman who appeared to be in her early twenties stood on a riverbank, staring out from many lifetimes ago. The image was degraded at the edges, leaving the impression that the subject was floating across the water. A name and date were etched on the bottom of the picture: Agnieszka Nowak Anderwald, 1861. The visitor gingerly ran her finger over the figure’s light-colored hair and round face, the detail about the eyes beginning to dissolve. “I know you,” she whispered.
The curator cupped a hand around his ear. “I’m sorry, I didn’t hear what you said.”
“I’ve seen her,” the visitor spoke up, but her voice was thin, and her hands trembled. “At the ranch. And I’ve also seen that thing,” she said, pointing at a dark shadow hovering in the photograph’s background.
A chill raced along the curator’s spine. “Now I see why you have come,” he said. “We all figured the curse of the Anderwalds had lifted after the last of them died out, but maybe not.”
“A curse? You’re not serious,” the woman scoffed.
“I may have spun a yarn or two in my day, but when it comes to the Anderwald family, I never waiver in my faithful commitment to the facts,” the curator insisted.
“I’m sorry. I just...a curse?” The visitor raised an eyebrow.
“I will do my best to explain, ma’am, but as is true of all the best stories, folks don’t always agree on the who, what, where, and when. That said, I am probably the only person left alive who can make any sense of it all for ya.”
“Please tell me. Everything,” the woman said with a note of urgency. “I need to know.”
The curator pulled a stool from behind the counter and patted the seat. After all these years, he relished the chance to set the record straight and lift the burden from his heart. “Why don’t you sit down,” he said. “I’ll get us some coffee.”
