Second Chances

by George Lee Miller

  The yard was tidy. The small patch of Bermuda-grass lawn was freshly mowed, and there was a row of peach trees beside the two-story limestone barn. Like grandpa’s property, all the farm implements were in their proper place and looked oiled and ready for use. Fences were mended, and the lines on the corral boards were all straight and at right angles to the sturdy cedar posts. I parked near the house, and Helmut appeared in the open barn door holding a welding torch. Two border collies and a Labrador mix quickly dispersed the goats and stood barking.

  “You need to get another dog,” Kelly said.

  “Yeah, I need a puppy right now to chew up my boots and crap all over the kitchen.”

  “What about hunting season?”

  I couldn’t argue with that. “All right, I need another dog.” It was almost hunting season, and it would be the first one in a long time that I was without a dog.

  Helmut shouted something at his dogs. They instantly retreated behind him. “Guten tag. Wie gehts?” Helmut said as we got out.

  The Lab mix snuck past Helmut and sniffed the cuff of Kelly’s jeans. When she rewarded him with a scratch behind the ears, the jealous border collies rushed her. She laughed and tried to give them all some ranch-dog love.

  “Sehr gut, danke,” I said.

  “Wer ist deine schöne Freundin.” He said a lot more, but that’s all my ear could catch up to before I held up my hand.

  “This is my girlfriend, Kelly,” I said. I gathered more from his expression than my understanding of German that he was asking about Kelly.

  “Sitzen!” Helmut growled. The dogs quickly ran to his heels and sat down wagging their tails. He took Kelly’s hand. “Glad to know you,” he said. Helmut shook my hand too and thankfully switched back to English.

  “It’s good you have come.” He looked up at the mare’s tail clouds. “Going to be rain soon.”

  “We need it. Grandpa’s spring is near dry,” I said. I’d never talked to a farmer or rancher who didn’t mention the weather in the first breath or two.

  “What news?” he asked. He was anxious to hear about Maya.

  “No luck yet. I was wondering if you could answer a few more questions. And maybe we could take a look in Maya’s room. It might tell us something about where she went.”

  Helmut studied me for a moment and rubbed his aged fingers against the stubble on his chin.

  “There’s not much there,” he said after careful consideration. “But you’re welcome to look. We were only preparing for her to move in.

  “I talked to her mother. She said you took her to court,” I said.

  A mixture of anger and regret flickered across his craggy face. “It was the only way to get her to act. Her brain is addled.” He turned to Kelly. “I’m sorry,” he said. “But my daughter’s a drunk.”

  “Kelly is a police officer in Lubbock,” I said helpfully.

  He gave her an approving nod. “This is gut,” he said. “We’ll go into the house.” He abruptly led the way. “I have cold beer.”

  The house was warm with no air conditioning but had obviously been designed to catch as much of the breeze as possible with the many windows. An older woman with her gray hair tightly pulled into a bun, wearing a blue cotton dress and a yellow apron, met us in the front room. The skin on her face and arms was paper-thin, and she couldn’t have weighed more than ninety pounds.

  “We have company, mother,” Helmut said.

  “Mrs. Geisler, it’s good to see you up and around. This is Kelly Hoffman.” I offered my hand. She reached past my hand and gave me a full hug.

  “Oh, goodness gracious,” she said. “Give me a hug. Just terrible what happened to your grandpa. How are you doing?” She had survived her fourth heart attack, and yet she wanted to know how I was doing.

  “I’m fine, thank you,” I said. “How are you feeling?”

  She shrugged and crossed herself. “The Lord has given me one more life to live,” she said, and held out her hand to Kelly. “I’m Elena, honey. Nice to meet you. Can I get you anything to drink? Supper’s not quite ready.”

  “You have a lovely home,” Kelly said. “I don’t think we can stay for supper.”

  “They want to take a look at Maya’s room,” Helmut explained.

  “If you don’t mind,” I said. “She might have left a clue. Something to tell us where she might have gone.”

  “You’re welcome to look. I’ve looked a dozen times and haven’t seen anything. She hadn’t completely moved in,” Elena said. “It’s through here.”

  We followed her down a narrow hall and into a small bedroom that faced the barn.

  “She only stayed with us for a few days. That poor girl’s been through a lot.”

  “With the move?”

  “That and her mother. She’s gonna be a strong woman one day, if she ever gets the chance. She’s hardheaded, that one.”

  “Which bathroom did she use?” I asked.

  “The one at the end of the hall,” she said, pointing. Elena walked back toward the kitchen and left us alone. I went in the small bathroom. There was an old-fashioned tub with legs and a simple cabinet and sink. Judging by the dark tinted age marks around the bottom edge of the mirror and the octagon brass hardware on the cabinets, I’d guess everything in the room was early nineteen hundred vintage. I found a toothbrush in the medicine cabinet along with a bottle of Tylenol and a tube of extra-whitening toothpaste. At least she took care of her teeth. The room was clean, and the old-fashioned tub seemed recently scrubbed. I doubted whether Mrs. Geisler would have had the strength or the energy to clean the bathroom. Helmut might have done it, but I had the idea that it was Maya’s handiwork.

  I walked back to the bedroom. Kelly was standing on a multicolor throw rug in the center of a small ten-by-ten room with hardwood floors.

  “Her toothbrush is still there. What’d you find in here?” I asked.

  “Not much.”

  There was a twin bed with a neat patchwork quilt in one corner and a small desk with a vanity mirror in the other. A matching dresser stood beside the door. There were no boy band posters on the walls or anything that gave the appearance of a teen girl’s room, except the plastic appaloosa horse on the dresser.

  “This was probably once her mother’s room,” I said.

  Kelly opened the top drawer of the dresser and looked at a collection of underwear and socks. The next drawer contained jeans and shorts, all neatly folded and put in place.

  I opened the drawer on the desk and found a small diary with a tiny lock.

  “Here’s something,” I said.

  We looked at the diary.

  “It’s locked.”

  Kelly smirked and quickly extracted a pin from her hair and jimmied the lock open. “I have two sisters,” she said.

  We sat on the bed and thumbed through the pages. The handwriting was easy to read. She had a looping style filled with hearts and exclamation points.

  “Dear diary, I hate my life!!!!!!!!!” The first line read. I flipped to the last page and read the date. It was more than thirty years old. It was Maya’s mother’s diary. She probably still felt the same way.

  The closet wasn’t any more helpful. There were two pairs of Justin Roper boots and three pairs of tennis shoes that looked well used. There were a few modest dresses on hangers and a straw cowboy hat on the shelf. I also found a pink-camo backpack and a large red duffle bag.

  “Why would she run away without taking her toothbrush or packing her suitcase or her backpack? You came for the weekend and you brought a suitcase and a backpack. And you’re a Marine.”

  “I knew I’d be hanging out with you and likely get shot at or chased through the brush,” she said.

  “Good point,” I said, hoping she was teasing me. “Can you imagine a teen girl out here by herself?”

  “I didn’t even see a TV. Did you?”

  “No. It reminds me of growing up with my grandma and grandpa.”
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  “How did you survive?”

  “I got a job and bought a used pickup. They couldn’t argue with work. I bought the things I thought I needed to keep up with the crowd. I made it through high school, then joined the Marine Corps. I heard they were looking for a few good men.”

  “And women.” She laughed.

  I heard steps in the hallway. Helmut opened the door.

  “Find anything useful?” he asked.

  “Are these clothes Maya’s?” Kelly asked.

  “Everything in the dresser is hers. I didn’t keep any of my daughter’s things.”

  We followed Helmut back to the front room, where he offered us both a beer. We took them and went outside to the porch. Kelly and I sat on the double-seat swing, and Helmut sat in a wooden rocking chair. He said Elena had gone to lie down. She could only stay up for a few hours a day. The herd dogs joined us and resumed their flirtation with Kelly.

  “We don’t have a lot of the things young people want out here. We never bothered with TV, and I wouldn’t know what to do with a computer,” Helmut told us.

  “Was Maya worried about that?” Kelly asked.

  “I gave her a horse to ride, and she had plenty of chores to do. She liked to help me feed the goats.”

  “Did she have any of her friends come out?” I asked.

  “She said she hadn’t been in town long enough to make friends.”

  We were getting a bleak picture of Maya’s home life with her grandparents.

  “Did she talk about going back to California?” Kelly asked.

  “Never mentioned anything to us,” Helmut said.

  I drank some beer and thought about Maya. She had spent most of her life in California. Then she was suddenly forced to come back to rural Central Texas for her last year of high school. Maybe Les Zeller was right, and Maya had decided she would rather be in California. Still, it didn’t explain her checking out of social media altogether.

  “You know, Helmut,” I said. “Maybe Maya decided Fredericksburg wasn’t for her.”

  Helmut cleared his throat. I waited a long time for him to speak. I figured he was coming to grips with the idea that I might be right, and that Maya simply chose California over Central Texas.

  “She was taken,” he insisted.

  “I know you’ve had a hard time with your daughter. I get that. She’s an alcoholic. But is there anything else you’re not telling me? I have to know everything if I’m going to find her.”

  Helmut stopped his rocking chair and stared out at his herd of goats. Had this been the nineteenth century, we would be gathering a posse of friends and neighbors to go after his granddaughter. Then, as now, local law enforcement had done little to keep settlers safe.

  “I’m an old man, but by god if I didn’t have my hands full with Elena, I’d go after Maya myself. Zeller’s as worthless as tits on a bore hog.” He challenged me with a watery cataract stare.

  “I’ll find her,” I said. “I just need all the details.”

  He nodded. I went to my pickup and got the standard contract for him to sign that would cover my ass in case I had to explain why I was asking questions and requesting information. Helmut agreed to work out the fee later.

  “I want you to call me if you think of anything else or if she gets in touch with you. Let me do the heavy lifting on this. That’s why you hired me,” I said.

  “Halt dich munter,” Helmut said, shaking my hand.

  “Halt dich munter,” I said.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Kelly and I drove in silence for the first few miles. The sun was going down. The air was dry and had dropped ten degrees. I cut the a/c and rolled down the windows. The smell of cedars and fresh-mown hay filled the cab. We passed a fruit stand advertising fresh tomatoes and apples. Kelly’s blond hair fluttered under her Texas Tech baseball cap. I appreciated the fact that she didn’t feel the need to fill every moment we had together with conversation.

  I wondered if Maya was watching the sun set and smelling the same smells or if she was somewhere nature couldn’t reach her. That she had problems at home was obvious. Her mother couldn’t or wouldn’t provide for her. Helmut was trying his best. His heart was in the right place, but he had his hands full with a teenage girl. Maybe this wasn’t a simple case of Maya running away or a direct kidnapping, but a combination of the two.

  “Why didn’t you tell Helmut about Russell Stevens?”

  “Didn’t want him to get worked up,” I said.

  “You think he’d do something?”

  “Folks like Helmut and my grandpa are used to taking care of things on their own. If he thought Mike Bauer or Owen had anything to do with Maya’s disappearance, he’d likely show up at Mike’s house with a shotgun in his hand. Zeller be damned.”

  “You think he’d take on the Dragon?”

  “In a heartbeat. Helmut’s grandpa was fighting off Indian raids after the Civil War.”

  “Now you wanna form a posse and go after him?”

  “Zeller won’t do anything, and the raiding party is getting away.”

  “So, you’re keeping the pioneer spirit alive or something? I’m not sure I buy that argument. We’re not on the frontier.”

  “You don’t think people should protect themselves?”

  “I’m okay with that. The part about taking the law into your own hands is problematic. There is other law enforcement besides Officer Zeller.”

  “And they’re all waiting for a crime to solve. I wanna find Maya before the crime happens. I just hope I’m not too late.”

  I stopped at a streetlight on Main Street. Traffic was still heavy. Oktoberfest was in full swing until midnight.

  “What’s next?” Kelly asked.

  “I wanna know what the Dragon’s really doing in Gillespie County and where he came from.”

  She smiled. “Relax. The raiding party isn’t getting away. You can’t do anything until you hear from Skeeter. I meant, tonight. It’s my last night in town.”

  I took a deep breath and turned my attention back to her. “I can either turn right and go back to Oktoberfest—we can ask around about Maya, drink more beer, and dance the polka—or I can turn left and go back to the motel room. We could get naked, drink more beer, and make out to a polka band on YouTube.”

  “Why are Germans so romantic?” She leaned over and grazed her lips across mine.

  “It’s the hops,” I said.

  The light turned green. Someone behind me honked. My lips were glued to hers. They honked again.

  “Turn left,” she whispered.

  I found the gas pedal and pulled into traffic with her in my lap. Probably not the safest driving maneuver, but we were cruising at under ten miles per hour. Main Street was crowded with tourists and locals on their way to and from the Marktplatz. All the shops and restaurants along Main Street were open for business, sponging the tourists for every dollar they could get. It was all I could do to keep my attention on the slow-moving vehicles in front of me and off Kelly’s roving hand.

  “I’m gonna miss you when you leave,” I said.

  “Liar. You’ll be working the case. You won’t even notice I’m gone.” She moved her hand a little farther down. “I feel like the mistress. You’re married to the job.”

  “That’s harsh.”

  “The truth always is, mister. I’m a Marine, remember? I can take it.” She traced the scars on my forehead with her finger.

  “I promise to focus on you tonight,” I said.

  She smiled without speaking. By the time I parked near the staircase of our motel room, I had managed to work several of her shirt buttons loose, revealing a good portion of her red-lace bra. We both jumped out of the pickup. I caught her on the bottom step and wrapped my arms around her. Our lips locked together. I heard footsteps on the stairs. A couple in their late sixties dressed alike in white shorts, tennis shoes, and Hawaiian shirts passed us on the stairs. The woman frowned at Kelly.
The man eyed her exposed red bra.

  We giggled all the way to the top of the stairs. I dug the keycard out of my wallet and opened the door.

  Inside, I finished undoing her buttons.

  She let her shirt drop to the floor. The red-lace bra was next. I pulled at her belt, and she pulled at mine. Her bare skin glowed in the ambient light shining through window. I lifted her from below the waist and shuffled toward the bed with my Wranglers around my boots. I felt the sharp sourness in my chest from the bullet wound, but I was prepared to deal with the pain.

  I looked over her shoulder for a soft landing spot.

  There was a naked body on the bed.

  “Oh, shit,” I said, thinking we had somehow stumbled into the wrong room.

  “What? What is it?” Kelly scrambled out of my grasp.

  “It’s a little crowded in here,” I said.

  Kelly saw the body. “Jesus. It’s that girl. It’s Lori.”

  I pulled my jeans up so I could get to the light switch without falling over.

  Lori’s body was lying naked and spread-eagle on the bed. From the marks on her throat, she’d been strangled. There were red abrasions on her upper arms and trauma to her wrists and ankles as if she’d been tied with rope at some point, but the restraints were missing. I put my finger on her neck, searching for a pulse. Nothing. Her skin was cold and chalky, her lips blue from lack of oxygen. The bed cover and the top sheet were on the floor, as were the pillows. We got dressed and stood staring at the body.

  “Who would do this?” Kelly asked.

  “A cold-blooded killer.”

  “The Dragon,” she said.

  My business card was on the nightstand. I picked it up by the edges and turned it over. Kelly’s handwritten name and number were on the back. It was the card I’d given her that afternoon.

  I’d seen death too many times to be completely overwhelmed with emotion, and so had Kelly, but the sight of a person so young and innocent dumped on the bed that we had shared was unsettling to say the least.