“Hey, Max. What did you find?” Ava said. She sounded happy to hear from me, more so than Bryan, but there was weariness in her voice. Being a rancher’s wife with three kids was not for the faint of heart.
“Absolutely nothing. We drilled through the chamber vault below the capstone and there appears to be an empty space beneath it so we’re going to explore the area slowly.”
“That’s what you wanted, right?”
“I think a large sinkhole would help to sustain the ranch better than any treasure. After taxes and sharing with the State, I doubt much would be left over for the ranch if there was a treasure. But, be that as it may, the truth is, Ava, I’m leaning toward selling the ranch. I wanted you to know that.”
“Is it because Bryan doesn’t want to move back to Texas?”
“No,” I said and mentally crossed my fingers behind my back. “Just out of curiosity, what do you think that carved chamber beneath the capstone was for?”
“I have no idea,” she said.
“Maybe someone found the cistern years ago and took whatever was in there,” I said.
“That’s possible. Don’t discount that the chamber may have been built with the idea that whoever found it might give up looking any further when they saw it was empty. It could have been a sleight of hand to throw you off. Maybe the real treasure is wherever the map takes you.”
“I should tell you, someone destroyed the capstone.”
“I’m sorry, Max. That’s so depressing to hear. Did they vandalize the cistern?”
“No, they didn’t touch it. They knew to climb down in the well, though, to get at the capstone. All things considered, I think someone was trying to send us a message.”
“What kind of message?”
“I’m still working on it. When I figure it out, I’ll let you know.”
“Be careful, Max. You understand why we couldn’t stay, right?”
“Of course I do, Ava. I only want what’s best for you and Bryan. How are you doing, by the way?
“I’m fine. Bryan is such a help while I get back on my feet. Have you any idea who may have destroyed the capstone?”
“My guess would be one of Shane’s crew. I’m not so worried about losing the map on the back of the capstone as I am about who it was that came on the ranch and why? I’ll let you go and I’ll keep in touch.”
“How’s Hannah taking it?”
“She’s upset.”
“I can imagine. I’ll call her. I liked her. I think we would have made a good team.”
“Me, too. Good night, Sweetheart.”
“Max?”
“Yes?”
“I really wanted to help you.”
“I know.”
I stayed in my recliner to think about the new developments. A quarter moon was up and too dark to see beyond the no-climb fence around the yard. When I got rid of all the livestock on the ranch several years back, except for a couple of longhorns, and the horses, I remembered thinking how nice it was going to be living in a new house without a fenced yard with open pasture to look out over from any window in the house. That lasted the first year until the deer wiped out Sunny’s plantings around the yard. Clete and I spent the next week putting in a fence around the whole house.
My eyelids were getting heavy and I knew I needed to get up and go to bed or I would end up sleeping in the recliner again. I thought I heard Sunny calling me, but I was all cozy, warm, and too comfortable to wake up.
I awoke the next morning at dawn beneath the throw and my boots still on. When I walked into the kitchen, Kevin was asleep at the table, his head resting on two text books for a pillow. By the doodles and the number of times he had written Ariana’s name on the page in his notebook I wondered if he had gotten any real studying done. Probably not. A long drool of saliva hung from his mouth and pooled into a puddle beneath his face. I picked up his cell phone and took a picture for posterity and in case he ever got too full of himself. I sent it to Ariana on his phone.
It occurred to me a few minutes later with my first cup of coffee for the day that I had overlooked the obvious. I was sitting on the front porch and looking out over the rolling hills beyond the fence and thinking about the cistern. Like the old fool that I was, I was so swept up in the idea of finding a hidden treasure on the Pape Ranch that I had ignored the biggest clue of all, the Journal. Almost a century ago Rebecca Haas’ father had come into possession of a journal by a young priest that accompanied a caravan from Mexico City. The journal was part of the Pape Ranch Estate and because it was in Spanish, I didn’t pay enough attention to it. I relied on the translation that Constance Pickering had done on it and the cistern itself consumed most of my attention. I wanted my own translation now, given what I knew about Constance’s involvement in the Pape Ranch Murders. Her translation could be less than a truthful rendering of what the Jesuit Priest had written and designed to mislead me.
. . .
The next morning, I was in the shower when I heard the front doorbell ring. I toweled off and headed downstairs in my terrycloth robe. I figured it was Clete, my foreman. When I spied who it was through the peephole, I cinched up my robe. It was Sheriff Molina.
“It took you long enough,” the Sheriff said when I cracked to door open.
“I was taking a shower. What do you want, Molina?”
“I have some questions about the incident at the Pape Ranch?”
“You couldn’t phone?”
“Yeah, but I wanted to see you in person. Cara a cara, you know. You’re the only hombre in the county who didn’t vote for me.”
“I doubt that.”
“The ME ruled the Haas woman’s accidental death was from a snake bite.”
“In her bed?”
Molina ignored me, but watched me closely through the door opening to see my reaction. I took a deep breath. “So why the visit?”
“I need to get the information you have on the ranch hand that lived on the Pape Ranch.”
“Sure. It’s up at the office. He wasn’t a ranch hand. The only livestock on the ranch are the horses. He’s more a caretaker because of the equipment we have out there.”
“I still need to talk to him.”
I didn’t respond. He was baiting me and I didn’t feel like playing the game now that I knew for sure how Rebecca Haas had died. She must have been bitten in the yard and decided to go inside the house to wait for help. Or, maybe not. Maybe she just said the hell with it and gave up and decided to die in her own house.
“Wait here, I’ll go get dressed.”
“Good. You step outside like that I’d have to arrest you for indecency.”
He didn’t deserve a reply so I didn’t offer him one. When I arrived at the Meeting Center, Emily hadn’t come in yet. I was glad for that. I walked over to Molina’s cruiser. “Stay here. I’ll make copies of his payroll file for you.”
Emily handled the payroll for the Howard Family Trust and the other enterprises I was involved in. She was good at that sort of thing and it freed me up to pretend I knew what I was doing as El Jefe.
“I still have some questions for you,” Molina said before I could get away.
“I’ll come by your office tomorrow with my attorney. You can ask me anything you want,” I said and went inside.
While I was making copies, Clete walked in expecting his morning cup of coffee.
“What’s the Sheriff doing outside?”
“He wanted an address on Tomás Martinez. Why don’t you make us a pot of coffee before Emily gets here? She’d appreciate it.”
“I doubt that,” he said with a grin. “Besides, I like yours better. It keeps me regular.”
I made a copy of the employment application and then took it out to Molina.
“What’s the deal with the crucifix? You seemed to be real interested in it,” Molina said after a cursory glance at the application.
“Only in the sense that I’m trustee for the Pape Ranch Trust and have an obligation with the State of
Texas to preserve any Spanish artifacts that we find on the ranch. It could be that the crucifix she was wearing was the original her father found on the ranch or it could be one of the many replicas she made and sold. I would have to make that determination. Either way, it belongs to the Pape Ranch Trust and the State of Texas now. Oh, and when you finish with her body, let me know. I’ll take responsibility for the disposition of her remains.”
“Damn, you’re a nice guy, Howard.”
I ignored his sarcasm. “So, I’ve been told. Is that all you need?”
“I hear you’re looking for a treasure out there on the ranch?”
“Where’d you hear that?” I said. Had my partner in the treasure search, Constance Pickering, said something? She had been a major contributor to Molina’s campaign in the last election and it wouldn’t have surprised me if she had told him about the treasure. She probably trusted me as much as I trusted her.
“Word gets around. Maybe we shouldn’t close the Haas woman’s case just yet. Word is, she thought you were trying to screw her out of her inheritance,” he offered and let it sit there.
I wasn’t going to take the bait. He was just trying to aggravate me. And he was, but I didn’t see the point in mentioning that his Department had originally missed the poisoning of Rebecca’s aunt in the Pape Ranch Murders
“Did you find the snake?” I said instead. His detectives and forensic team couldn’t find a light switch in a dark room.
“No, we didn’t. It was long gone after two days. Anyway, I’m gonna accept the ME’s findings and close the case file. You let me know if you hear from your caretaker.”
I didn’t say anything and stood there waiting for him to leave. I wanted to ask him why he was looking for Tomás Martinez, but I let it slide. Emily pulled into the parking lot and Molina got into his SUV. He rolled down his window and waved at Emily like they were best of friends and then drove off.
“What did Sheriff Molina want? Are you in trouble again?” Emily asked as I approached the front door with her. I ignored her and gave her a hello-kiss on the cheek instead.
“Good morning, Clete,” Emily said. “I don’t smell the coffee.”
“Oh, we were waiting on you,” he said with a grin on his face that said he was a man that knew which end of the turkey to baste.
“Do you have a meeting room I can borrow?” I asked Emily.
“Sure. Bookings are pretty slow now. How long do you need it?”
“I don’t know. If you need to use it just let me know and we’ll find somewhere else.”
“We?” she said.
“I need to translate an old journal and I need a place for someone to work in.”
“Sure. Does this have to do with the Spanish cistern you found?”
That piqued Clete’s interest. “Cistern?”
“The Journal is from the eighteen century and it’s in Spanish. But I don’t know if it’s connected to the cistern or not. That’s what I hope to find out.”
“You know who could help you…Ariana Alvarado. She speaks Spanish fluently and makes excellent grades in school. She called me the other day to thank me for inviting her to dinner and asked if she could work here over the summer.”
“Kevin’s girlfriend?” Clete said.
“That’s her,” I said.
“I told her I would get back to her. I don’t have enough bookings now for the summer to justify hiring her, so I wanted to talk it over with you first. If she and Kevin are going to get married after she graduates, it would probably help her family with the expenses. You know they are going to have a difficult time paying for her wedding.”
“Really, I didn’t know that.”
“Dad, I swear. You are so clueless sometimes.”
“That aside, what am I missing here? Is there something I should know?”
“Didn’t Kevin tell you?”
“That cayuse doesn’t tell me anything; much less, his mother. What is it?”
“It was in the papers a few months ago about their trip to the Mayo Clinic.”
“I don’t read the papers anymore,” I said.
Clete snickered. “I wonder why?”
The man obviously forgot who he was working for, but I ignored his insinuation. “Will you kindly just tell me, Emily?”
“Their last child was born with spina bifida. She requires around the clock home-care plus significant medical attention. It’s been very hard on the Alvarado family. I thought you knew.”
“I didn’t. So that’s why we could never pin them down on a cook-out at the ranch to celebrate Kevin’s and Ariana’s engagement. I thought it was because of me and what was going on with the Pape Ranch Murders and my involvement at the time. I’m mad enough to kick that boy in the butt for not telling me.”
“I’m sure Kevin was just respecting the wishes of Ariana’s family for privacy, Dad. So, should we give her a summer job?”
“Sure, why not? I’ll tell her.”
“I can call her,” Emily offered.
“No, I need to talk to her about the new job and take her measure. I don’t just hire anybody.”
Chapter 11
Two days after the Sheriff’s visit to the house and Ariana was out of school for the day, she and I were in one of the meeting rooms at the Meeting Center Complex that my ever-organized daughter, Emily, had set up for us to use. She had provided an unopened package of yellow ruled legal pads, a box of felt-tip pens, and water bottles.
I had picked Ariana up after school because Kevin was in San Antonio and man was she nervous. She must have thought I was really interested in what all of her friends thought about Kevin. She started jabbering as soon as she climbed into the truck and didn’t stop until she saw Emily. I should have asked Emily to pick her up.
“I don’t want you to think of this as a contest to see how fast you can transcribe. I want you to go at a pace that you’re comfortable with. At the end of two hours, we’ll see how far you are and then we can determine how long it should take to complete the whole Journal.”
“I saw a few words that I didn’t recognize when I scanned the first few pages. It could be they’ve gone out of usage or they were words from his native tongue. We tend to do that when we get wrapped up in writing and we’re bilingual. Our mind grabs for a word that best describes the thought. I’ll note them and I can try to find them online after I’m done.”
“That’s fine, Ariana. Are you ready?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Okay, I’ll see you in a couple of hours.”
I knocked on the door to the room Ariana was working in two hours later. She held up her hand for me to wait as I entered. She wanted to finish her thought on paper. When she was done, she put her pen down and sighed.
She flipped through the pages of the legal pad. “I did pretty well, I think. I get caught up in his entries, though. It slows me down. Maybe I should dictate the translation and let someone else transcribe it. It would go much faster.”
I was impressed with Ariana. She had just turned seventeen and was years ahead of Kevin in maturity. And, she was sharp. “Alright, we’ll try that tomorrow. I’ll go buy you a recorder this evening. You think you can do this full time when school is out?”
“Sure. This is really so cool, Mr. Howard. Here’s this Priest, not much older than me, who lived hundreds of years ago and I’m bringing his words to light for the first time. It makes me kind of sad, though, to think about it. I read his last entry. It spoke only of what he saw that day. I wonder what happened to him after his last entry in the journal.”
Ariana touched my heart, much as Kevin had for his sensitivity when he was young. We had been close, especially when the spotted jaguar had entered my life. Then he became a teenager and lost that quality about him that said he was a youngster of substance. Perhaps he was in a transitory stage now and that sensitive side in him that I had appreciated and nurtured had found this young girl and won her heart. Or perhaps, Ariana saw in Kevin those qualities that I could
not see in him anymore. At nineteen Kevin had the indifference of a feral barn cat.
“How many pages did you get through?”
“At least twelve. He was just twenty-four, did you know that? He spoke mostly of God and his hopes that he would not dishonor the Monsignor’s trust in him to make it to New Orleans. Oh, he was a Basque from San Sabastian, Spain. And he did not trust the man in charge of the animals. He overworked them and did not rest the mules. He also did not like the officer in charge. He was too profane.”
“Sounds like pretty mundane stuff,” I said and remembered for a fleeting second my time in Vietnam. I could not say with any certainty that I thought about anything over there except what had happened that day and that I was alive. I did not have any self-awareness then and there was little more than fear on my mind. It occupied most of my waking thoughts and as a consequence what I thought about any given day. It was hard to engage in deep thought when you knew there was someone out there waiting to kill you.
“It was. Maybe he’ll tell us what he was carrying,” Ariana said.
“I know what he was carrying. It’s in the inventory list. I doubt the Journal says anything about what happened, but I’d like to know if the cistern on the Pape Ranch is mentioned. Was it a waypoint on his journey to New Orleans or was it built after he passed through. Did he say where he started from?”
“Yes. He joined the caravan in Mexico City because he had traveled to the old mission, Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe de los Nacogdoches, before it was abandoned. He was like a guide as well as being a courier for the Jesuits.”
“Thanks, Ariana. Nice work. I’ll read your notes tonight.”
“I can start full time next week after school is out.”
“That’s fine.”
“I’m going up to the house to see Kevin, okay?”
“Ariana, you’re gonna marry the boy. You’re family. Mi casa es tu casa.”
She smiled and left. I wondered if Kevin appreciated what he was getting in that young girl. Probably not. You didn’t think about such things at nineteen. After Ariana left, I drove into town and the local Walmart to find a recorder.
The Turbulence of Butterflies (Max Howard Series Book 6) Page 13