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Vimanas
Vimanas
Vimanas
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Vimanas

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After putting in his minimum twenty years for retirement from the military, Dan Crandell returns to his childhood home located in the Texas panhandle. Dan shares his life with his handy man, Cisco and his golden retriever, Nero. He plans to resume the pursuit of his first love, archaeology. As he embarks on his explorations, he uncovers what he believes to be a run-of-the-mill Native American burial site in Palo Duro Canyon. In the middle of his dig, an attractive woman, Beth Hornsby, literally stumbles into his site. She has been told of Dan's experience in locating lost artifacts and his extensive knowledge of the area and especially the canyons. She begs him for help in finding out what has happened to her lost father, so she and her family can gain closure. Whether gut instinct or the love and bond of a daughter and father, she refuses to give up hope of finding her father alive, even though he has been missing for ten years. Her only clue lies in his last known destination; Palo Duro Canyon. Crandell agrees to help her and gets caught up in the mysterious disappearance of her scholarly father. The strangely hand-marked maps he locates in her father's study her mother refused to pack away, leads them to a hidden cave in the depths of the canyon that holds secrets, not only of her father's disappearance, but of cultures more than twenty-five thousand years old, and half-way across the world. This discovery surrounds them with murder, artifact theft, and ancient flying machines. The Vimanas have been hidden away at remote sites around the world to be carefully used secretly for the progress of man by members of a group called the Protectorate. A friend turns out to be an unlikely villain, and he leads them on a wild, reckless manhunt to the Mexican border, where Crandell locates what he has been searching for.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateJul 9, 2011
ISBN9781465816535
Vimanas
Author

R. Russell Brown

R. Russell Brown arrived by a circuitous route to the craft of writing of fiction novels. After graduating from West Texas Sate University with a BA degree in English and History, he served two years in the Army as a reserve officer. A year at Ft. Riley Kansas, and a tour in Vietnam, as a company executive officer and an infantry platoon leader paved the way for graduate school, where he worked toward a Masters of Fine Art degree and dabbled in the radio/television field. Brown has worked at many professions throughout his lifetime. He is an internationally known, award winning watercolor artist, worked for an interior decorator, been the Temporary Curator of Exhibits at a top rated Texas museum, he is an accomplished musician, spent two years in a gunfight reenactment group, is a small business entrepreneur and artist in residence for several Texas concerns on a state and local level. Writing and storytelling has been a part of his family history dating back to his roots in Europe and England. He lives in the Texas Panhandle, and operates a gallery featuring his own works. He is married to a retired school teacher and has a grown daughter, who is married, and also lives in Texas.

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    Vimanas - R. Russell Brown

    Vimanas

    R. RUSSELL BROWN

    Published by R. Russell Brown at Smashwords

    Copyright 2006 by R. Russell Brown

    All rights reserved.

    No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by an information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the author, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review.

    Dedication

    This book is dedicated to the memory of my father, who was one of, if not the best storytellers I have ever known. I miss everything about him, even his incessant humming, which I would give anything to hear again.

    Acknowledgements

    I have to give a big thank you to my wife, who has had to put up with a lot during the writing of this series. She has been a constant source of encouragement and help. To Linda Lowes Hatchel, who didn’t laugh when I told her I was going to write a novel and for her help in editing. I have to give high praise to my daughter, the bookworm, who set me straight at the start. I also have to give credit to all the characters I grew up with in a small Texas town and the countless unforgettable ones I have met and continue to meet along life’s rocky road.

    ...there seems to have been another large river, which ran parallel and west of the Indus in the third and fourth millennium B.C. This was the ancient Ghaggra-Hakra River or Sarasvati of the Rig Veda. Researchers are slowly laying out its lost banks. Along its bed, archaeologists are discovering a whole new set of ancient towns and cities.

    -Harappa.com

    The India of 15,000 years ago is sometimes known as the Rama Empire, a land that was contemporary with Atlantis. A huge wealth of texts still exist in India testifying to the extremely advanced civilization that is said by these texts to go back over 26,000 years. Terrible wars and subsequent earth changes destroyed these civilizations, leaving only isolated pockets of civilization.

    Throughout history there have been many common myths and legends of flying machines or devices, the familiar flying carpets of ancient Arabia; Biblical figures such as Ezekiel and Solomon flying from place to place and the magical chariots, or Vimanas, of ancient India and China.

    -A Strange Connection

    by: David Hatcher Childress

    CHAPTER 1

    The blazing hot Panhandle sun brought the temperature above the canyon rim to more than one hundred degrees where the shirtless man slowly excavated what he believed to be an ancient gravesite. The shard of leg bone protruding from the wall in the draw had been bleached white by the elements, but the further back he dug, the more reddish in color the bones became, stained dark by the Indian red canyon clay.

    It felt more like two hundred and ten degrees to Dan Crandell. Hawks circled tirelessly above him, hoping some careless prey would be flushed out by the activity in the draw, or perhaps the majestic birds just enjoyed riding the thermals and flaunting their ability to float through the bright blue, high desert sky. Across the canyon beyond the far rim, dust devils danced across the dry land wheat fields, playing out their short lives with amazing bursts of power.

    There had been no cooling breeze in the draw all day, and he had been digging and scraping at the wall face since early morning. The find didn’t seem like much at first, but as he dug deeper into the gravesite hollowed out by calloused hands perhaps two hundred years ago, it showed high promise of being an Indian grave of some importance. It might have been the lesser chief of a small nomadic band. A hunting party could have suffered a fatality on one of its excursions into the canyon for food and water, burying the hapless victim quickly, and then moving on. The small indenture in the soft, sandy clay canyon wall would have made an easy, fast burial for a small band of men on the move so long ago. So far, it didn't look like an extremely old site, maybe Kiowa or Comanche, one of the nomadic tribes of later years. He wondered what they said around this lonely gravesite two hundred years ago, as they sealed their brother hunter in the canyon wall.

    Dan finally decided from the meager belongings and the position of the body that it wasn't a burial at all, probably a cave off in the bank above the body. No, he decided, it was definitely not a burial site. Time and water moving down the draw had deepened the ravine under the place where the cave off occurred. The combined effects of moisture, cold and intense dry heat made it difficult to estimate the age of the find, on site.

    Dan knew that cave offs happened pretty often in the canyon. Hiking, especially in winter, could be dangerous. When a hiker got cold and perhaps lost, he might without thinking build a fire against a frozen bank of sand and stone permeated with water. When the ice melted, the sand and stone became highly unstable, caving off on the unsuspecting victim.

    In spite of the heat and the dust from the dig, Dan loved this part of archeology. Every turn of the scraping tool uncovered another mystery. The smell of moist dirt dug out of the site and the scent of cedars, juniper, and sage invigorated him. Palo Duro Canyon filled the senses like no place else on earth, a great way to spend a Saturday, peaceful, quiet, and away from telephones or modern convenience.

    He remembered college work projects at the park and the summer, where he, along with some of his friends, had been given a lecture on caution, and then sent forth with dynamite and blasting caps to blow up sand caves in order to protect inexperienced tourists from cave offs such as the one he had just found. The small group of amateur pyrotechnicians had gained some expertise in explosives during the preceding year by blowing out stumps for a housing development along Tierra Blanca Creek. The park superintendent had heard they knew how to handle dynamite and called on them for help. The job instilled in Dan a deep respect, and a good deal of knowledge about the power and characteristics of explosives, which came in handy years later in his military service. Besides, he thought, it afforded a great deal of fun at the time.

    Dan Crandell had loved Palo Duro Canyon ever since his sixth birthday party when his parents decided to have the event down in the canyons along the banks of the Prairie Dog Fork of the Red River. It was love at first sight. The color in the canyon walls, the trails, the smell of Cedar and Junipers, bugs, rattlesnakes, hawks, eagles, and the bright blue skies above the rocky canyon rim seduced the boy in him. The canyon brought out the fantasies and the imagination of a young man like nothing else.

    In later years, he came to the park at every opportunity, leaving his cares and a fast paced society up above the canyon rim, much like he had done in his youth. Many of his friends used to camp every weekend in some part of the canyon, rolling their sleeping bags out in every nook and cranny of the 125-mile long canyon. Crandell gained a great deal of experience in those camping years, and a knowledge of the landscape few others possessed. Since then, he had been one of the first names on the list to call when campers or hikers turned up missing in the Park.

    On one occasion, Dan found a mentally handicapped boy who had been lost for more than 24 hours. He located the disoriented child in only a short time, after predicting where in the search grid the boy would end up following the path of least resistance. This type of disorientation seemed to happen often in the massive canyon, mostly in the summer when the out of state travelers filled the park. The canyon could be dangerous. It didn’t often end in tragedy, though a few times in recent years it had turned out that way. Looking for lost tourists was sometimes exciting, and sometimes tedious, but any event that brought Crandell back to his beloved canyon was cherished.

    The first humans to come upon Palo Duro Canyon must have had the same thoughts as people still have when they see its majesty for the first time. The huge gash in the Texas plains is second in size only to the Grand Canyon, but it has always been more accessible and had more color concentrated in a smaller area than its cousin in Arizona. Palo Duro Canyon wasn't nearly as accessible twelve thousand years ago when man first found it, hunting wooly mammoths and giant bison in its sheltered bottom to survive.

    In later years, the migrating humans from colder regions to the north probably jumped up and down with glee when they stumbled across the huge depression in the flat Texas prairie, finding water, game, and firewood in great abundance. Coronado may have had that same feeling of exuberance when he came upon the canyon in the early 1500s on his quest for the lost cities of gold. All in all, the canyon has seen plenty of activity in twelve thousand years, not to mention the potpourri of strange fossils and bones found there going back past the time of the great flood. If the canyon walls could just talk, Dan thought out loud.

    Once, as a child, Dan had come upon an old man sitting on the canyon floor, dressed strangely, wearing a big wide-brimmed hat with odd-looking tools and utensils stuck in the brim. He was digging in a flat area on top of a rise just above the prairie dog fork of the Red River that meandered through the park. After watching the man for some time, Dan approached him and asked him who he was and why he was digging there.

    The man smiled at Dan and told him he had been an archeologist with a major Washington museum, now retired, but with a love and passion for his work that burned within him. He introduced himself as Olaf Pederson, Dr. Olaf J. Pederson. Then, giving Dan a thin metal scraper along with a soft brush and other strange utensils, Dr. Pederson showed the young man how to slowly and painstakingly take thin layers of soil off the top of his little excavation so as not to damage any artifact. As Dan dug, the man instructed him on how to look for things that appeared to be manmade, or things that didn't seem to occur naturally in the hard packed earth.

    The most important thing the man taught him, however, was how to find things using patience and the lay of the land. The fruit of his labor that afternoon yielded an almost perfect, finely worked arrow point, and an assortment of purplish red flint chips cast off in the flaking process used to create the projectile. The man identified the glass like stone as Alibates flint from the ancient quarry on the Canadian River, some fifty miles to the north of Palo Duro Canyon. He painted a picture in Dan’s young mind of half naked savages sitting there carefully pressure flaking the glasslike shards of rock, their life and the life of their families depending on the accuracy and craftsmanship of making it just right.

    He told him of the ancient cultures that mined the flint from hills north of there trading it to other tribes for foodstuffs, tools, clothing, beads and other things used in their survival in that harsh unforgiving land. He told of the trails to and from the quarry that led hundreds of miles in every direction and the many interesting graves of ancient travelers found along those routes.

    The old archeologist became Dan’s best friend. With the approval of Dan’s parents, the two dug up what seemed like half the Panhandle of Texas on weekends and holidays when Dan was not obligated to be with his family. Olaf Pederson’s passion had become Dan's passion and in recent days, a getaway hobby. Dan tried to involve boys his own age in some of their excavations, but most of them soon lost interest, got bored, and ended up ruining the outing, so Dan finally gave up on asking them.

    Dan, now hooked on things of the past, had majored in geology and history at the local university. He had always kept his interest in archeology, reading everything he could get his hands on about the past of the Texas Panhandle, going all the way back to creation. His knowledge of geology had served him well in the military, too. He had been able to search out terrorist nests in Afghanistan merely by studying the terrain and pinpointing likely hiding places.

    Now most people considered Dan Crandell a middle-aged loner, who kept pretty much to himself. It wasn't so much that he enjoyed being alone, or that he was socially awkward. Dan got along well with almost everyone. The biggest difference between Dan and most people was that his interests were varied, and took up too much of his time to be a socialite.

    The friends Dan made were good ones that he could trust, the kind of friendships that lasted a lifetime. Growing up on a small alfalfa farm not far from town, he had even enjoyed his farm chores and being out in the environment. It seemed as though there was always work to be done on the farm, with early bedtimes, and even earlier sunrises that came much too soon, but Dan enjoyed the hard work because it made him strong, earned him extra spending money, and involved working with the land he cherished.

    Being raised in a small Texas Panhandle town, and being a Texan meant being self sufficient, able to take care of all your own wants and needs. Even though he liked farm life, Dan lusted for knowledge. He had enjoyed every minute spent at the local museum and college library, reading adventure books even more than he enjoyed farm life. He spent most of his time reading about the past, and a world filled with more interesting places than Canyon, Texas, dreaming both asleep and awake of going to those far away lands, and hoping someday to visit them.

    Dan had put in his 20 years in the military, trying to get the yearning for travel out of his system. Serving in the Far East had been an honor, but he had decided the military was not his permanent calling. With 20 years in, retiring as an officer, he had an adequate pension that allowed him to live the rest of his life doing pretty much what he wanted, and the years left to do it. His parents had left him a small sum of money, too. He left that money untouched letting it stay in interest drawing accounts. He had loved his parents and it just didn’t seem right yet to spend his inheritance. Someday he might need it, but as for the present, he was in fair shape, financially.

    By the time he went to war, he had already been through one marriage. It hadn't ended badly. It had just ended. One day after his wife had come back from visiting a girlfriend, who had moved away the year before, she said she didn't love him anymore. There had been no courtroom drama, or even yelling matches filled with accusations, though he suspected and somehow knew, she had been with someone else. They had mutually signed papers, saying it just didn't work out. He tried to pretend that it didn’t hurt, but rejection always hurts, especially when you hold it all inside. It’s a man thing, holding it all inside. Dan had finally managed to let some of it out, but there were still things lurking in the dark places where hurt goes to hide.

    The rejection and loneliness devastated him for months, and then he was sent off to war. War makes you forget things, at least while the action is taking place, and then when boredom sets in, the memories you thought gone return with a vengeance, sapping your emotions and making you think crazy thoughts. After his failed marriage, Dan thought he could understand how some men turned to the bottle, or simply gave up on life. Dan didn’t give up; he just gave in and continued with his life like before the marriage, substituting his work for intimacy.

    All in all, he didn't mind the army or even the war as much as the bad marriage. He had a fairly easy tour in the Middle East, with only a few close calls, and ended up as an executive officer in a military intelligence unit, doing a bit of spook stuff. The counter intelligence and investigative work had given him a good deal of insight on people, especially bad people. The military is a good place to study people. You meet those from every walk of life and when you go overseas, it widens the feel for people dramatically. One thing he had learned was that people everywhere on earth are basically the same. There are language and cultural differences, but the basic needs, both physical and emotional, are the same. Dan had served his country and he took a certain pride in that. He had put in his time and then dedicated the rest of his days to doing the things he wanted to do.

    Palo Duro Canyon, just a twelve-mile drive east of Canyon, Texas had served as Dan's home for almost fifty years, not counting the time away in the Army. As he worked this site on a blistering July day, he couldn’t help reflecting on the canyon and his experiences here. Every experience he could remember involving the canyons had been good ones. All the bad ones had been up on top somewhere. This giant hole in the ground was his sanctuary.

    The giant hole in the ground offered a lifetime of study, digging for small treasures; that’s what he called every small find he made, whether a bone fragment or the skull of some giant creature. They were all treasures from the past. Sometimes he hit the jackpot, finding something quite special; for example, once in South Ceta Canyon, a side canyon just south of the state park boundary, which when it rained served as a tributary for the Red River running through the floor of the main canyon. Around a bend in the creek there in South Ceta he had found an ancient buffalo kill.

    Some ancient hunting party had driven buffalo over the edge of the canyon rim to fall to their deaths below, where hunters waited to slaughter the unfortunate beasts for their meat and hides. What made his find special was the fact that this particular tribe, being either extremely unlucky or not overly bright, had neglected to tell the hunters at the bottom of the draw to retire to a safe distance. Whether by fault, or accident, a good number of the hunting party were killed by falling buffalo and rocks, or just by the sheer terror of seeing forty buffalo and a landslide of rocks coming at them over the canyon wall.

    Either being extremely upset at the misfortune of their fellow hunters, or not able to move that large a number of buffalo from atop the killed and wounded hunters, the rest of the tribe took what they could carry, and left most of the hunters, prey, and tools mashed into the sand of the creek bed to be eroded away by sun, sand and water. Dan had excavated the site for nearly a year and added an amazing number of artifacts to his already vast collection.

    Palo Duro Canyon was not what it used to be when Dan had first grown infatuated with it. The other state parks in Texas were struggling financially, but the local canyon actually made money, so the demigods at the state capital in Austin decided to play rob Peter to pay Paul, siphoning funds from the park's admission fees to pay for the misfortunes of other state parks and wildlife habitats. This legal thievery caused layoffs of park personnel and caused local fees to increase.

    Knowing staff, security, and hours on patrol had been cut to the bare bone, those in the drug culture often set up meth labs in motor homes, using campsites in the park to cook up their deadly product. This made nights under the Texas stars in the canyon a dangerous and sometimes lethal place for family campers.

    One night, several months ago, a family of four sleeping in their pop-up camper had fallen victim to a mobile meth lab explosion. No one missed the two lowlifes who had set up the lab, but somewhere back in Ohio, friends and relatives buried pieces of a fun loving family with two children.

    Though the reduced park staff did their best to maintain the area, beer bottles and cans now littered the once well-maintained park for a longer time than usual. Nature had played her part too. Fires and floods had taken their toll over the years on the massive cottonwood trees, changing the course of the Prairie Dog Fork of the Red River and the look of the park. Times they are a changin', Dan thought.

    Damn it's hot! Crandell muttered to himself. Walking back into the shady overhang on the opposite side of the draw, he plopped down next to a medium sized, Coleman ice chest. Opening the lid, he took out a cold Dos Equis Triple X, popped the cap, and took a long draw on the cooling brew. With the bottle resting on top of the chest, he leaned back against the shaded red clay bank, after checking to make sure there were no scorpions or black widow spiders already using the sun blocking shade. It's always best to check, he thought.

    He had just closed his eyes, thinking about taking a short nap when somewhere up the draw a twig snapped, and a foot slid on gray round gravel followed by a curse in an unmistakably female voice. Crandell thought, Oh great, campers, but he knew it probably wasn’t that. They would have to be totally lost to come in from above the draw instead of up the main canyon trail.

    He listened quietly and heard the sounds again, a female curse, then a fall, a roll, and another curse. Whoever it was had not negotiated the cedars and the underbrush just up the draw from where he sat very well. He laughed inwardly just picturing it in his mind.

    After some ten minutes and a few curses later, small gravel began to roll over the bank of rock just above his dig, followed by a rather good looking female, who half fell and half stumbled down the incline just off to the side of his excavation. She slid to a stop about three feet from his hiking boots making quite a show of it.

    Holy crap, the dusty female said in a shaky voice, spitting sand and shaking the dust out of her long blondish brown hair.

    Without moving from his reclining position and remaining silent, Dan looked her over from head to toe, quickly surveying the damage. She had several rips in her jeans and her arms had begun to redden from mesquite tree scratches. Her denim blouse, still showing signs of freshness around the bottom was dark and circled with sweat under the arms and down the middle of her back. One of her sneakers, now turned red by the canyon clay, lay untied about two feet behind her. She appeared to be quite a bit younger than him, tall, mostly legs, nice figure, with well rounded hips and a very pretty face under the fresh coating of canyon clay. He determined that she had not sustained major injury, as she remained seated, propped up with her hands on the ground behind her.

    Are you Dan Crandell? she asked, spitting out words and sand at the same time.

    I am, and who might you be?

    Not a hiker, that's for sure. She said looking straight at him out of two silver gray eyes amplified by the brightness of the afternoon sun, eyes that seemed to look right through him.

    Dan stood and helped her to her feet, retrieving the sneaker, shaking it out, and handing it back to her.

    Extending her hand full of long well groomed fingernails, she answered, I'm Elizabeth Hornsby. I wondered if I might take just a few minutes of your time?

    Dan took her soft hand in his and said, As long as you dropped in, want a beer? Sorry, it’s all I have in the cooler.

    Very funny, ‘dropped in’, I’d kill for anything liquid right now, she said, dusting off her jeans. I had no idea it was so far into here. It didn't look that far from the road, she snapped, sounding quite irritated.

    No need to get violent. Take this, he said, as he handed her a Dos Equis. What can I do for you?

    Give me a second, for starters. I nearly killed myself coming down that hill! I don't know what the fascination is with this pile of rocks and dirt, anyway!

    She wobbled a little, as she stepped over to accept the cold beer, obviously still shaken from her tumble into the draw. Dan thought she probably came in from the same place where his Jeep sat, out by the county road. She looked like she had walked, or more likely stumbled the mile and a half in from her car, a hike he had negotiated easily that morning.

    She took a long drink from the tall brown bottle, swiping it across her dusty forehead, leaving a muddy red streak, and looked over at Crandell, You are not an easy person to find. I called your listed number and got some Mexican man. I could hardly understand what he said. From what I understood, he wanted me to marry him so he could stay in this country. He finally told me how to get out here. He doesn’t make too much sense, but he gives good directions.

    Crandell looked up and smiled. I guess you got ‘Juan Carlos’ on the phone. He's pretty much harmless, but he’s a good guy. I help him out a little now and then. He’s really a pretty good hand, once you get him motivated, and when he's not evading pickup by immigration. We're working on getting him naturalized at the moment. I just call him ‘Cisco’ like the old TV show character, because he loves to help out people. He’s actually a very good friend, a lot of trouble, at times, but a very good friend.

    Well, the worst you can say is 'no' to my request, and if you do, I'll just have to find somebody else, I guess. I was told you know these canyons better than anyone alive. I don't know if you recall, that some years ago, a man disappeared into here from up around the Claude highway. They never found him. It was in all the papers, she said, turning suddenly serious.

    Crandell didn't show much interest by his expression, but after a moment he said, That's really old news, as he took another long draw on his bottle of Dos Equis, now dripping with condensation.

    I headed up that search party. We tracked that goofball to the State Park road and lost him. He literally disappeared without a trace. It looked like maybe he followed the road, or got picked up by a car there at the riding stables. We never picked up any other trail. Unfortunately, it rained all night and we lost his tracks after they crossed the road. We never picked up another sign anywhere, after that. After my job was done, I never heard if the authorities found any trace of him. I’ve wondered about him and what happened to him every time I’ve come down here for the last ten years. I’ve looked for lots of lost people in this canyon. I’ve found all of them, sooner or later, but he’s always been the one that got away.

    Beth Hornsby, with a defiant look on her face said, That ‘goofball’ was my father and it's never been old news for my mother and me, or the rest of his family. We've gone crazy for ten years wondering about him and what happened to him. It was totally out of character for him to do anything out of the ordinary. He taught history at Amarillo College and besides his family, teaching and history were his passions in life. Worry turned to anger, and then to total confusion after his disappearance. We finally, by law, had to have him declared legally dead so we could settle his estate, but it wasn't easy for us to do that. We still have a little hope he might be alive, although we’ve never heard anything these last ten years. A wife, or a daughter especially, has a sixth sense about death, if a family member has passed. We have just not had that feeling of closure yet.

    Don't tell me. You think I need to spend more time looking for your father, after all this time? I’m really very busy and content with my life, without going on that kind of wild goose chase. Sorry about the goofball remark, but they get all the nuts out here. More than 20 people a year get lost or disappear in this place. We find most of them, in one shape or another. The only difference in your father’s case is the fact that he disappeared with no trace at all. If he'd been in big business, or been an accountant, I would have figured him for an embezzler, and I'd say look for him in Costa Rica or the South of France. Was he mixed up in anything strange with lots of money involved?

    No! That's just it. We were not that well off. I mean, my mother's family had a little money, but they lost most of it when oil went south in the eighties. Dad’s teaching and research were paramount, and you know what teaching pays.

    After ten years, what made you think he could still be found, and contact me?

    We've had private investigators from time to time, all we could afford and we’ve been fleeced by some of them, but nothing ever showed up that rang a bell, saying he had surfaced anywhere on the planet. I recently came into a little money, not much, but it paid most of the old bills and gave me a little more time to carry on the search, not much more, but I just can't give up. He's my father, for cryin' out loud. You know fathers and daughters have a special bond! Your name came up at a Boy Scout meeting I attended with my nephews. The scouts were talking about you and your abilities to find people lost in the canyons. You, as it turns out, are a bit of a legend in the scout circles.

    He could see tears forming in her eyes, making muddy rivulets down her dust-covered cheeks. His mind told him he didn't need this right now, but his eyes and his conscience were telling him something else. He'd sometimes wondered what had become of the mysterious man, who simply disappeared without a trace. It hadn't made any sense at the time, and much less now, after ten years, that his daughter was still trying to find him, but maybe it did warrant at least one more look, if nothing else, just to satisfy his own curiosity.

    "Do you have any new evidence that might help? You said he taught at Amarillo College, but what research did he have going

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