Badder's Bluff

It is twelve pm on the road of Crows, and Lester Cavanaugh has been hitchhiking through the area when he comes across the small community of 4000 people known as Badders Bluff. It offers little in the way of tourism to travelers, but the one café that sits on the side of the road on the way out of the small township, offers a warm place to eat and drink hot coffee on a cold rainy day. To Lester Cavanaugh it is the very thing he needs at the moment, so he enters and takes a seat at the far end of the counter, he places an order for a sandwich and a hot cup of coffee, aside from a chatty waitress named Thelma, he is presently the only patron in the café. Thelma and he strike up a conversation and she wastes no time in giving him a brief history lesson of Crows Crossing Road and Badders Bluff. Perhaps Since the time of prohibition, the two most haunted places in the whole country. Lester Smiles politely as Thelma relates to him a story from that time, a time of young love that ends horribly in the tree covered hills just past the town limits. Lester will not be smiling long.

Screaming Bloody Moonshine..




Welcome to the newly formed township of Badders Bluff population 800. It is in the fall of nineteen hundred and twenty nine, it is October 3rd of that year when a beautiful young lady of the vicinity named Amy Clay, makes the acquaintance of a handsome young high school boy named Tyler Heldon, and although the teenagers form a fast friendship, it soon becomes obvious that their backgrounds and families would get in the way of any budding romance. The two of them come from two very different backgrounds and when it is discovered that they have been keeping their relationship a secret the parents of both forbid them from ever seeing each other again, Amy’s father is the local sheriff and watches her closely, but has little time nor patience in communicating with his wife and daughter, as he busies himself with the tasks of tracking down and stopping the flow of illegal liquor that has been in his area for the past year.


He has found people in possession of what is called moonshine on several occasions, but has yet to find the source of its flow. It is Friday afternoon at the home of Amy Clay, her mother is away playing bridge with her friends, Amy is packing a small bag of clothes, she and Tyler have decided to run away together. They are going to meet outside of town and travel along the tree line so they won’t be seen by passing autos, they know that it will be past dark before any serious suspicions are raised. When Amy reaches the edge of town she proceeds to the place where she knows Tyler will be waiting. When arriving the two young lovers share a passionate kiss before embarking on their journey together.

They travel for the first hour along the tree line so they will not be spotted, three miles from the city limit’s the pair decide to head further into the woods, to find a place to rest, when Tyler Realizes that they have found their way to Milo Hattley’s property, he knows that the dangers that now surround them. Milo Hattley guarded his land and property fiercely, and has been known to actually shoot at people that trespassed here. It is nearing dusk when the Happen upon the strange looking apparatus hidden deep in the woods of Milo Hattley’s property. It starts to rain when the young teenagers first realize that they have found a still, and they have now put themselves at a terrible risk if Hattley had discovered them. They turn back towards the path that bought them there and begin back down the way they came, when Amy hear the terrible sound that she at first believes to be thunder.



But when Tyler falls face down into the rain soaked leaves, she realizes that he is bleeding terribly from the back and is not moving, behind her she sees the hulking form of Milo Hattley moving towards her through the trees with his shotgun in hand, he is reloading when Amy tries to revived the now deceased Tyler. She knows that her love is dead, and if she has any chance of survival she must try to run, she is screaming now as Milo closes in on her. One hundred feet from Tyler’s body, he cuts her down from behind with his second blast from the shotgun, Milo Hattley buries the bodies of Tyler Heldon and Amy Clay together in the same shallow grave there in the deep woods of his property. Ten days later a search party being led by Amy Clay’s father while looking for the missing teenagers, happen upon the still of Milo Hattley during a brief confrontation Sheriff Clay shoots Milo Hattley dead. The bodies of the two young lovers are never found.




As Lester makes his way along the deserted stretch of road, in spite of the thick clouds and billows of distant rolling thunder, the afternoon rain has briefly stopped. He thinks it is a bit strange the way the birds here do not seek shelter from the stormy weather, the Crows seem to follow him along the road and see his every move. And as Lester Cavanaugh walks along, the clouds slowly become fewer and fewer, and he stops to watch a peculiar ray of sunlight that has escaped and fallen down into one area of woods up on the mountain side. He ponders a new sound that rings almost like thunder but slightly different, once and then seconds later twice. He pulls the collar of his coat up around his neck, as the ray of light disappears back into the clouds, the thunder falls silent as the rain returns, and Lester speaks to the Crows. “That was a little too close for me guys.. See ya.” he tells them, and the Crows watch him walk away, each Crow knowing that the thunder never falls silent for long, here on Crows Crossing Road.

Scratch.. A.B.T. Copyright© 2006.