Dead Echo

  Chapter 2: Leszno’s Acres

  Karol Leszno, commonly known forever after in his new country as ‘Carl’, carried his last name due to a sheer act of circumstance. He’d hailed from a declining nobility in Poland, having entrenched itself somewhat securely in cattle and dairy products, in the rail town of Leszno, Poland. A farsighted ancestor had deposited huge sums in various Swiss accounts through a French agent for various favors and information after World War I, and during the scourge of the Holocaust, Leszno, at the age of 33, saw more human grotesquerie than he could stomach. His belligerence toward the Nazi regime targeted him a political subversive during the summer of 1942, and he was captured (taken really from his country estate as he sipped tea early one morning), imprisoned, boarded on a train like cattle, and shipped off to Buchenwald. Luckily, since he was not a Jew and had transcontinental influence, he was allowed ‘escape’ from the camp, but not until three months had passed. And it was these months that shaped him forever after. The images of death and defilement he’d lived with never retreated far into from his mind. Later he’d say that ‘evil that vicious had a way of seeping in whether you wanted it to or not,’ in his strange, pregnant accent. People would look at him and he’d stand there shaking his head, his eyes like steel, icy rods glowing through you, telling you, he knew, he knew goddammit. Some said that was part of what made him a good businessman: he had the carriage of a soul who’d seen into the pit of Hell and walked away. What could harm him after that?

  He’d handled financial transactions from a safehouse in the Netherlands by the time 1944 rolled around. He lost an uncle, two children, and a sister to the crematoriums but managed to buy asylum for his wife and small daughter. During their escape to Hungary, Ellsie, his wife had died and left him alone with the three-year-old girl. They made a steamer on the Danube as far as Csepel Island, just south of Budapest. From there they took a train southwest to Siofok, situated on the shore of the inland sea of Lake Balaton and made their residence in a grimy dockside hotel, inundated with the reek of spotted foga from dusk till dawn, until better quarters could be secured. By that time the war was nearly at its end, and though conditions were not good for most, money always has a way of lessening a burden. He bought the land of a blasted abbey on the verge of the Bakony range and used the surroundings to cultivate grapes for wine. An extensive crypt below the abbey was converted into a cellar and they lived, both Karol and his daughter Meeta, in solitary, uneventful quiet. Nobody but hired hands was known to frequent the place, and most of these for only short stretches of time. This went on until early 1975, when the place was put up for sale, and the Leszno’s abruptly left for the United States.

  Arriving in New York, in anonymity, they’d hopped a train south, with no apparent destination in mind, at least as far as the remaining relatives they possessed knew. They deboarded, only briefly in Atlanta, to get their bearings and procure the proper real estate literature, and ended up at the Angle Sides Manor two days afterward. The sale was made concrete around a small wooden table with no drawers and a deep gouge straight through the middle. The now young woman, Meeta, watched her father sign the document the great, bearded stranger had brought with him, the room a swirling mass of cigar smoke and low, grumbling voices. And when the bearded man finally left, closing his presentation and disappearing down the ghostly corridor, her father had turned to her and, hands on hips said, in Polish, “Meeta, it’s done.”

  They were on site a day later, a sixty-four year old man and his thirty-four-year-old, unmarried daughter. But it was a new day in a new land and no one knew them well enough to hold any opinion. They were simply a family, a monied-family it was whispered, from Europe, and a person’s business was his and his alone. He immediately hired a crew, had a travel-trailer delivered early one morning, and set out with purpose. Meeta remained the enigma, no classic beauty, but compelling nonetheless in her mysteriousness. She was never seen in town, never far from her father’s shoulder. There was seldom a day when some gigantic piece of machinery didn’t arrive to scalp or push the land into different places. The building of the house became a sort of sideline to the rest of the action taking hold of the place. And it wasn’t long after the endless stretch of barbwire went up along the side of Highway 27 that people began to slow down when passing its length, glancing off to the left or right and wondering just what kind of crazy hell was going on over there? By the New Year, the house was completed and the cattle ranch not far behind. All those hundreds of acres had been put to task and were responding magnificently. Vast cleared areas offered ample space for grazing, and the glades covered well over half of the entire property. The land movers had eaten three great ponds into strategic locations and now awaited the next acquisition. Within the following four months, 350 head of Hereford cattle (ironically enough) were bought by his hand. No one remembered (or at least made it known to anyone it would have made sense to tell) about the incident years earlier. It wouldn’t have mattered if anyone had. This was a new day, in a new land.

  Problems began to occur within the first eight months. Dead animals lying about, having been found under no apparent duress or trauma. In the fields, in the barns. Vets were summoned, tests run, to no avail. No hoof-and-mouth disease, no anthrax. And still the deaths continued. Sometimes it was up to ten a week. And then there started a different angle, cows found floating dead in the ponds, some lying flat on their backs on the shallow banks, some only surfacing days later from the ponds when their bloated, gas-filled bodies rose to the surface. The land began to reek of death. Carl, not known to frequent town often even early on, retreated entirely to the compound he’d built. Groceries and supplies were ordered by phone and delivered by truck, unloaded without a word according to the men who undertook the rides out to the farm. The grass began to grow wild and unkempt along the stretch of barbwire. The hired hands drifted off to other endeavors.

  Except one.

  His name was Eduardo Mendez and he was from a small, destitute village near Matamorus, Mexico. Originally he’d been hired as a carpenter’s apprentice but upon completion of the house, and having proven his work ethic, the Old Man kept him on as a cattle hand. The travel trailer was removed to a corner of the compound as the cattle increased, and up until the spate of mysterious deaths, many of the hands elected to stay there. Eduardo had been one of the first. He was tall, just over six-feet, and bore his muscle within wide, swarthy bands of glistening skin. He had flowing black hair and the tongue of a priest. Early on the other men developed a dislike for the Mexican because of his grace with the lady. Because there was not a day went by that Meeta didn’t bring a fresh pot of lemonade out to whichever outfit Eduardo happened to be in the interest of. And then the deaths started. There were attempts to write off all as natural occurrences, until the vets were brought aboard and continued to meet the wall. Carl became increasingly withdrawn, complaining incessantly of some debilitating “pain in his legs,” one that he refused to see a doctor for and which continued to plague him until his death. More and more Meeta was seen in the company of the hired men, with her eye obviously fixed upon Eduardo. But during those days her demeanor never changed, her distant aloofness remained a constant. However, word did begin to filter around the camp. The cattle continued to die, the revenue to dwindle, and the Old Man was seen less and less, and even then usually in pillowed chairs, his legs set out before him on ottomans. Then came the carcasses in the lake, which led to more odd whispering, and with the new unease of superstition the exodus began. First, one or two of the hands over the course of a week, then a steady, rising stream until Eduardo stood alone. At his little corner of the lot. With the Old Man now confined to the porch, rumored to be dying of some consumptive illness.

  And then he was dead for good.

  The coroner came and went as did the undertaker and his macabre entourage and Meeta was alone, captive to a haunted place. Eduardo remained. Within three weeks he was a fixture in the main house. All correspondence and transactions with th
e cattle ranch on 27 and the outside world abruptly ceased. Effectively they split from the world until almost ten months later, when a public school bus driver reported repeatedly seeing two small children riding horses on the now defunct cattle ranch during school hours. A truant officer was briefed on the driver’s information and took his state vehicle out to investigate several days later. He didn’t get far. At the turn-in to the drive he found an old cattle gate hanging lopsided from a broken hinge. Grass had grown up through the ruts work trucks had left in the hardpan years back, and after the state employee pushed the gate back far enough to get the car through, he continued along the drive to the main house.

  He reported being fired upon halfway down its length, by a shooter he never saw. And yes, the car did have a crumpled left rear fender and no bullet holes, but the employee was very adamant in the defense of his story, to the extent that a sheriff was summoned to check it out. He, too, reported gunfire, but this time from behind the wheel of his cruiser, the butt-end of it planted in a run-off ditch, as he continued to take fire. When he was dramatically cut off in mid sentence, the Sheriff’s Department went into overdrive. Five units were dispatched to the farm, along with an ambulance and a fire truck. For the next six hours the latter two sat on the verge of the highway while an increasing number of law enforcement officers amassed at the scene in hopes of rescuing their downed peer. The raid was commenced an hour before sundown.

  Two SWAT teams filtered off into the brush just at dusk, each with a military sniper. All members were equipped with night-vision goggles and Kevlar vests. One team came in from the southeast, the other from the northeast, both off the highway. No word had been received from the sheriff’s deputy for the better part of an hour and a half. HQ was situated just down the street at a utility companies’ parking lot. A professional hostage negotiator had been called in from New Orleans after the fact was clarified that at least one woman and several children were potentially involved. For the next five hours the area was as still and quiet as the eye of a hurricane, the only subdued buzz from radio traffic coordinating positions. At midnight the perimeter was tightened though no one could be seen moving within or around the house. The deputy had been found two hours earlier, dead in the driver’s seat, his brains blown out against the seat behind him. The car was later counted to have twelve bullet entry holes and most of these were from the driver’s side. Classic ambush. And then, at twelve-seventeen to be exact, years before the Waco fiasco, flames were reported in a downstairs window. Within minutes they had gained the outside wall on that side and were devouring the roof. The command to enter the dwelling was issued and SWAT teams fanned out from their nooks edging steadily closer, all weapons trained on the conflagration building before their eyes. The suicide mission was suddenly aborted when the front door burst open and what appeared to be a woman holding two bundles tore across the porch and into the small, manicured front yard. The woman was Meeta, the two bundles, children. Eduardo’s scorched bones were found the next morning as the arson team picked through the ruins of what had so shortly before been a beautiful home.

  That was on December 14, 1976, just shy of a year and a half since Karol and his daughter had bought the place from their room at the Angle Sides Manor. And in that time they were still relative unknowns. Their reclusive ways had afforded the surrounding gossip mill with no real grist, but of course, that did little to stop its engine running; if anything, it only fueled ambition it would have had a hard time achieving on its own. Serious inspiration held sway of the airwaves in most of the parish by early the next morning. Everything at least third-person, but no one providing enlightenment, on the sickening number they’d allowed among their ranks for the last good while, “right there in our midst,” as even the Methodist minister’s wife was sworn to admit shortly thereafter, the phone lines popping with conversation. Now, even the typically mute mental pygmy voiced his mind on those “foreigners” with their “goddamn Mexican” bunch. How they’d always “been a bomb waiting to go off.” After all, the peculiar behavior between the father and daughter just went to show you. “Why wasn’t that girl married?” Yes, it just went to show you, they assured one another over cups of coffee, Foreigners could not be trusted. Meanwhile Meeta was interrogated, the children taken away as soon as her butt hit the cruiser’s seat, away from any sneaky photog just waiting to grab the next money-shot.