I started to say where’s the “we” in that plan, but I didn’t. “I wanted to offer it to you first, Bryan, that’s all. Did you and Ava decide on a name for the baby?”
“Not yet. She gets to choose the girl’s name; I get to choose the boy’s. Zoe was just my suggestion.”
“Well, good luck with your plans. It sounds like you have your future all mapped out. We’ll keep you informed of what we’re doing down here,” I said and knew the issue was settled. It was time to move on to a Plan B; except I had no Plan B.
“Thanks for thinking of us,” Bryan said with obvious relief in his voice.
Hannah and Shane sensed my disappointment and didn’t say much after Bryan went back inside. I knew what was on their minds, though. They wanted to know what I was going to do now. The truth was, I didn’t know.
Hannah was the first to speak. “If we go at the cavern through the cistern we could end up disturbing the stability of the site. Maybe we should put a borehole further over from the cistern to drop a camera down. If it looks promising, we should come back with sonar or LIDAR imaging. That way, if we want to explore the cavern we’ll know what’s there. If there’s not a large cavern system there worth developing then we can focus on the cistern.”
“Alright, that sounds like a plan, Stan. Give me a week. We’ll meet again next week and talk about our options. In the meantime, keep all of this to yourselves.”
“What about the Pape Ranch House?” Shane asked.
“What about it?”
“Since Bryan and Ava won’t be moving down here, I was thinking it might be a good idea if we had someone on site twenty-four seven.”
Now that Bryan and Ava were out of the picture I could sense he wanted to step up and manage the Pape Ranch. He was an ambitious young man and a good one to boot.
“What do you think, Hannah?” I asked.
“I wouldn’t mind living there, myself, it’s pretty nice.”
“It would cut down on my travel time,” Shane offered quickly to counter.
“It’s a big enough house for two, I suppose. It’s got two bedrooms,” I said to mess with them.
Shane and Hannah looked at one another, and then at me. I was sticking my nose in their business, I knew, and it didn’t matter to me what their living arrangements were. Shane was a good kid and sometimes when you’re young and starting out you just need a nudge in the right direction. Hannah was the right direction, in my humble opinion.
. . .
Saying goodbye to Bryan and his family was more difficult than I imagined for some reason. It was like saying goodbye to good friends who lived overseas and you knew you’d never see them again. Bryan and Ava were young enough to think they had endless tomorrows and we of course said our farewells under that guise. We would see one another again maybe at Thanksgiving or Christmas. I knew better, though. It got harder every year to bring the Howard family together in one place. A pig roast in the backyard for Thanksgiving was our celebration that brought everyone together every few years. I had passed that torch to Emily’s son, Andy. I’d taught him enough of the basics of cooking in a pit for him to be in charge at the next family gathering on Thanksgiving. I decided I would talk to Andy about handling the roasting of a pig this year when I saw him at Emily’s on Saturday.
Still, the realization that none of my children or grandchildren had any interest in the ranches I owned was disheartening and I said goodbye to Bryan with a heavy heart. Maybe it was time to give serious consideration to selling the Pape Ranch and take the money and ensure that the Howard Ranch would survive for the next several generations. Before I saw them off at the airport, I had made up my mind. I knew what I had to do with the Pape Ranch.
I stayed long enough to watch their plane leave. I was in the office in a private hanger and watched the small jet taxi out on to the runway. Ava’s father had sent a time-sharing jet down for Ava and her family. Barbin had told me her parents felt Ava and the baby would be more comfortable and safer in a private plane than in a commercial one. They could set down quickly if she had any problems flying home so soon after giving birth, or that was their rationale. I had never heard of a time-sharing jet, but what the hell did I know. With each passing year, I seemed to know less and less.
After I left the airport, I stopped in New Haven to drop off the rental car and then buy a new mattress for Katie’s bed. When I arrived home and pulled into the turnoff for the gate to the ranch there was a woman parked in front of the gate. She was leaning over the hood of her car studying a map. She was my kind of woman; she didn’t use GPS. I pulled in behind her car.
“You lost?” I said and stepped out of my truck.
“I sure am. I’m really turned around,” she said as I walked up to her. “Which way is San Antonio?”
“You need to turn around and go back to New Haven. You can pick up Interstate 35 and be there in thirty minutes.”
“I wanted to take the scenic route,”
“Let me show you the way on the map. You can get lost easily up here in the hills.”
“Thank you,” she said and extended her hand. “I’m Chrissy.”
“Max Howard, Chrissy. Nice to meet you.”
She reached under the map and extracted an envelope. “Mr. Howard, you’ve been served. Would you be kind enough to sign for the papers?”
“Hell, no, I won’t sign your damn papers. Get out of my way, lady; you’re blocking my gate.”
“He refuses to sign,” she said, gathered up her map, and got in her car.
She must have been recording the conversation because I didn’t see anyone else around. I drove back to the ranch house and stopped out front of the house long enough to read the document. Damn if Elizabeth’s husband hadn’t filed a temporary restraining order against me and the hearing was next week. I’d have to call my attorney about it. Maybe the best thing to do was just ignore it. It would save me Sam’s legal fees and I had no plans to contact the sumbitch again anyway. I noticed Elizabeth’s name wasn’t in the request before the court, which I took as a good sign.
Kevin helped me unload the mattress from the truck and get Katie’s room back to normal. I was glad Katie was with her mother and hadn’t had to deal with the aftermath of childbirth at home. When I had called Sunny about Ava’s visit and her having the baby, she was upset that she hadn’t been there. And, of course, she insinuated that it was my fault for taking Ava to the cistern site. I didn’t remind her that it was Ava who insisted on going in her condition. I’d learned a long time ago to let Sunny believe what she wanted to believe and keep my opinions, right or wrong, to myself.
“You told Barbin my sister was sick, right? Oh, never mind, I’ll call her today. God, she’s going to wonder why I wasn’t there.”
“I wouldn’t worry about it, Sunny. It was pretty hectic around here with all the people. I doubt they noticed you weren’t here.”
“What?”
“You know what I mean.”
“I’m coming home.”
I wasn’t deliberately playing on Sunny’s fears of being thought of as an outsider; as far as I knew she was as close to my children as I was, but I was pleased nevertheless that her insecurities would motivate her to return early to Texas.
Chapter 7
“Now, listen up you cayuse. I don’t want you to say one word about Afet Güler to Andy,” I said to Kevin as we walked to the truck. It was Saturday afternoon and we were headed to Emily’s for dinner.
Kevin and his fiancée, Ariana, walked together as one, an arm around each other’s waist. He grinned.
“I’m serious,” I warned him.
“Who is she?” Ariana asked Kevin.
“She was a beautiful young woman who swept Andy off his feet and who is of no consequence any longer. At the time, though, your boyfriend here took great pleasure in teasing Andy and Nick about the Güler sisters. I don’t want him to embarrass Andy in front of the young woman he’s brought home this weekend to meet his parents.”
“Kevin wouldn’t do that,” Ariana said quickly in his defense.
Kevin beamed at me as if her display of loyalty erased all that I knew about him. Never mind that she was barely out of her sixteenth year and I had helped Kevin to grow up. “She dumped him,” Kevin said to Ariana. “She got engaged to some rich guy.”
“That’s awful. Poor, Andy. Don’t you dare tease him.”
Well maybe she did know him. I grinned at him. Kevin had been the youngest of the three boys on the trip to Istanbul and he took some satisfaction in the misery of Andy and Nick after our return from Turkey. Andy must have been around twenty-two and Nick was probably seventeen. Kevin was more than likely on the receiving end of their teasing too. I figured it all came out even in the wash between the cousins. Still, I’d always felt sorry for Andy with my role in breaking up his relationship with Afet Güler. It was one of those things that grandfathers did behind the scene for their grandchildren when the parents didn’t have the fortitude to act.
Emily’s husband, Ted, had BBQed some chickens halves for dinner that evening. After we did a number on the main course along with the potato salad, and black beans Ariana had made, we stayed out on the patio in the dwindling light of the evening watching Jamie’s kids on the swing set and the younger generation sitting at the second table in the grass, beneath a large pecan tree. Jamie was Emily’s oldest child and had returned to New Haven sans her husband not long ago.
Kevin and Andy were laughing at something and Ariana looked embarrassed. The girl Andy had brought home for the weekend was a beauty and she too was not very amused. She had sparkling green eyes, short blonde hair, and long legs that would have made her an outstanding point guard on any woman’s team. In my day, she would have parted a crowd of men faster than Moses did the Red Sea. She was a Texas icon in the hearts of men from my generation who had a thing for long-legged women. Political correctness had squashed the appreciation for beauty in Texas women and it was just one more reason to feel sorry for the young men of today. She looked bored too and didn’t seem to share the humor of the conversation at the second table.
I was tempted to go over to their table and regale them with some good yarns about Texas and Hopalong Cassidy, but I was too obvious. Emily put her hand my arm to tell me settle down, so I tuned the conversation at our table back in. However, I couldn’t get interested in the Solms County School District’s new tax proposal that Ted was complaining about to his daughter, Jamie. It must have been an old-man-thing; I was drawn to the younger generation’s table.
After a few minutes, I was about to doze off from all the food, so I got up and went over to the table with Andy and the others when Emily went inside to get the dessert and coffee. Shane had sent me the pictures of the cistern that were on his iPhone as backup and I wanted to show Andy and Kevin. Shane had them stored somewhere in the cloud network, but I had wanted physical copies on my phone. I showed Andy the back of the capstone and he passed the phone over to his new friend, Kimberly. Kevin held out his hand for the phone and Kimberly ignored him and passed it to Ariana.
“You think the treasure is on the Guadalupe River?” Kevin asked me when he finally got the phone and pictures.
“That would be a logical guess, but that squiggle could be any river between here and Mexico City,” I said.
“Let me do an analysis on it. Send me a copy of this image so I can scale it to its original size and then I’ll digitize it. I’ll compare it to every river here in Texas and Mexico for you.”
“You can do that?” I asked.
“Grandpa, I have my Masters in Geographic Information Systems,” he said as if I knew what the significance of that was. “I’ll finish my doctorate up next year.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Be sure to send the image’s metadata with it,” Andy added.
I knew what metadata was from the Pape Ranch Murders. The lack of metadata with a cell phone picture had caught Rebecca Haas in a lie and helped to convict her of murder. The prosecutor had convinced the jury that if a defendant told one lie everything else was suspect. I assured Andy I would send the metadata to him.
. . .
I brought some of the dishes inside to the kitchen where Jamie and her mother were sharing a bottle of wine I hadn’t see on the table outside for guests. Jamie was rinsing the dishes and Emily was loading them in the dishwasher.
“Dad, I talked to Elizabeth, yesterday,” Emily said. “She told me that Scoot had petitioned the court for a TRO against you. You need to be real careful with him now.”
Scoot Needham was Elizabeth’s husband. Nobody at the feed store knew whether that was his given name or his nickname, but there sure was a lot speculation as to why he went by Scoot.
“I’m not worried about a weaner like Scoot Needham. And you can tell your sister that I won’t try to contact her again.”
“Good,” Emily said.
“Is he still abusing her?” Jamie asked.
The plate slipped out of Emily’s hand and a look of panic crossed her face.
“What?” I said.
Emily shot her daughter a look that could have singed her eyebrows right off her face.
“That was years ago, Honey. Everything is fine, now,” Emily said.
It was one of those moments when I wanted to shout, “Ah-Hah! I knew you had been keeping something from me,” but my rage at myself for being so stupid and at Needham for laying a hand on a child of mine was more than I wanted to control. I let the adrenalin roll over me like the warmth of a shot of Don Pilar tequila and then waited for the Hoppy Gene to fire-off. It was not a time for introspection. It was time for ass-whupping, mano a mano.
I pivoted and headed for the living room and the front door. There was no point in talking to Emily. She had deceived me all these years. Emily raced past me and jumped into my truck on the driver’s side and hit the master door lock. She shook her head at me that I wasn’t going anywhere and assumed I couldn’t walk the two miles to Elizabeth’s house to kick Scoot Needham’s ass. I kept walking past my truck and into the street. I couldn’t look Emily in the eyes, I felt so betrayed by her.
I heard someone running behind me out in the middle of the street and Andy caught up with me in the next block.
“Come on, Grandpa, Mom says to come back. She wants to tell you something.”
“I have nothing to say to your mother.”
“Come on, you owe me.”
“What?”
“I said you owe me. And, you know it.”
Did he know about my role in the engagement ruse with Afet Güler? I’d hoped to take that secret with me to the grave.
I could see Emily walking down the middle of street toward us. Everyone who had been at Emily’s was now in her front yard watching Andy and me in the street.
“Okay, go on. I’ll talk to her,” I said. As outdone as I was, I hadn’t forgotten that I had put her in the hospital not too long ago. She had a heart problem and I didn’t want to contribute to another heart attack.
“Nuh-uh, I’ll wait.”
“Thanks,” Emily said to Andy as she walked up.
“Are you okay, Mom?”
“Yes, I’m fine. Go tell everyone to go back inside. Your grandfather and I will be there in a minute.”
After Andy was out of earshot, I said, “You’ve been holding back on me, Emily.”
“I know. It was for you own good. Now, listen to me, Dad. If you go near Scoot Needham, not only will you go to jail for violating the TRO, but Elizabeth is prepared to say that you molested her as a child. Do you understand the implications that something like that would have on your family?”
“What? I don’t believe that. Elizabeth would never say I molested her. It never happened.”
“I know that. She told me as much, but her threat is real. She has problems, okay. She does not want you to involve yourself in her life. She thinks Scoot is the last chance she has. And she will say those terrible things if you come near her again. I know she
will.”
“My, God! I don’t understand why she hates me so much. ”
“She was molested when she was nine, by one of mom’s boyfriends. She’s never gotten over it and has never had a solid lasting relationship with any man in her whole life. She’s insecure, but most of all, she’s angry. It’s easier for her to blame you for abandoning us than to deal with the trauma she went through.”
“I didn’t abandon you, I was in Vietnam.”
“I know that, Dad. Elizabeth has been in therapy most of her life and I doubt she’s going to change now. I accepted her long ago. Let it go and just leave her alone. That’s what she wants.”
“How is it that you don’t hate me and she does?”
“Well, we had a good relationship, considering.”
“Did he… touch you?”
“No, thank God. Elizabeth eventually told Mom and she called the police.
“I’m sorry, Emily. I didn’t know.”
“Well, now you do. Promise me that you will never go near Elizabeth again. If you do and she makes that false charge against you, I’ll lose her in the end, for defending you. I don’t want that to happen. She needs me. Can you understand that, Dad?”
“Yes, in a weird way, I do. I promise-not for me-but for you. I love you, Sweetheart,” I said before I gave into the scourge of sentimental old men and cried. I held her tight so no one could see me and embarrass her.
The next morning after breakfast I drove into town and joined the herd of early customers at Home Depot. It was more crowded than the Solms County Fair in September. I think I managed an hour’s sleep after we got home from Emily’s Saturday night so I pretty much walked around like Kevin the first hour after waking. I eventually bought a tarp on the second walkthrough of the store and a circular hole saw for my drill. It was made in China and so cheap I bought two of the saw bits especially made for soft stone. After leaving Home Depot I stopped off and bought a bag of ice for the cooler to have for the next day. Later, after I got home, I called James Lee and invited him to come down from Houston the next morning. I had decided, contrary to what I’d told Hannah and Shane, we were going to breach the cistern floor and lower a camera to get some pictures. I figured he should be there as he was financing the work on the Pape Ranch. I also told him to bring along his new employee, George Landau, so I could meet him.
The Turbulence of Butterflies (Max Howard Series Book 6) Page 8