“Hey, Grandpa. Where were you?”
“I’m on the old Pape Ranch. Cell tower signal out here is spotty depending on where you are. What did you find?”
“I found a match to a river segment, but it’s not in Texas or Mexico. It’s in Guatemala. There’s about a ninety-seven percent degree of accuracy depending on the scale.”
“What’s that mean?”
“It just means that the closer you zoom in, the less the arcs of the line segment match up.”
“Would you speak in English, please?”
“If you compared the picture you took of the etching to a travel map of Guatemala, it’s a good match. I’m confident enough to say the image is a map of a section of the Motagua River.”
“Nice work, Andy. Now, listen to me. It’s important. You can’t tell anyone about this, understood?”
“Sure, but why?”
“Just do it for me, Andy. I’ll tell you all about it when I sort things out.”
“Sure, Grandpa. You think there’s a treasure in Guatemala?”
“I kind of doubt it after all these years. I’m more concerned with that information you’ve discovered getting out before I want it to. Keep it quiet for me, Andy. I’ve gotta go. And, thanks. Nice work. I’ll talk to you later.”
There was no point in worrying him with my concerns and I doubted that I would ever pursue anything as far away as Guatemala. What worried me, and he didn’t need to know about it, was the vandalism to the capstone. Someone didn’t want us to know about the map and at the moment, I didn’t know who that was.
I lifted my hat and wiped my forehead with my sleeve, adjusted myself in the saddle, and rode in to see what was going on at the ranch house. It didn’t escape me as I rode toward the ranch house that my former ranch hand of twenty plus years, Juan Fuentes, had been headed back to Guatemala with that little she-devil, Angelina, when she and Juan’s wife were killed. Guatemala held some significance to the events on the Howard Ranch years ago, but I doubted there was any connection to the Pape Ranch cistern now. It was just a coincidence. “I’m grabbing at straws, Sally Girl. Truth is, I don’t know shit. I need to sell this place and be done with it.”
Sally was a horse that, in my experience, had a sense for home. You could turn her loose anywhere on the ranch and she’d find her way home. Before we were in sight of the corral she picked up her pace and stepped into a rough, ungraceful trot. Her gait was a bit too hard on my old bones so I slowed her down to a walk, which she didn’t like and threw her head from side to side in annoyance. She was tired and hot like me. I decided I’d use my truck instead of her to go check out the area where I had seen the turkey vultures circling in the sky.
Just as I approached the trucks near the ranch house, Shane and Hannah walked out of the house to greet me. They must have been watching for me.
“Hey, Max,” Hannah said before I could dismount.
“What’s going on?” I said and stepped down off Sally.
“I brought one of the engineers with the company I told you about. He said he’d have to see the site before he could give me an estimate for the LIDAR Imaging. He needs to get back up in there with the van and his equipment. Do you want him to take a look?”
“Sure, you guys go ahead. I’m gonna unsaddle Sally and cool her down. If you finish up before I can get there, stop by here before he leaves.”
“He brought his equipment,” Shane said. “If you agree on his price he could put a camera down there this afternoon using the same hole we drilled. It wouldn’t be LIDAR, but it would be better than what we got.”
“Okay, I’ll meet you out there as soon as I take care of Sally.”
At the corral gate, I loosened the saddle cinch. “Good, girl,” I said to her and stroked her neck. I walked her through the corral to the trough and let her drink her fill of water. While she drank, I ran the faucet and quenched my own thirst. I wasn’t in a big hurry then so I wiped her down and gave her some feed as a treat for taking me up to the top of the mesa. It was hard climb up the mesa for her with my weight.
While she drank, it occurred to me that the Central American country of Guatemala sure seemed to be cropping up a lot lately. First, with Angelina and her jaguar and now with the capstone from the cistern.
Chapter 13
I’ve always believed a man should take care of his animals first before he does anything else. It was just the way I lived and so I had to bite down hard on my itch to be at the cistern as I took care of Sally. I also wanted to see what those turkey vultures were after, but the LIDAR Imaging Team on the property took priority. I set Sally loose in the horse pasture when I was done and then drove out to the cistern site to satisfy my curiosity.
The two men from the engineering firm had driven their van down into the arroyo and backed it up close to the cistern. One man was leaning over the cistern feeding cable down to Hannah. Shane was manning the rope Hannah was on. The other man was in the truck watching a laptop screen. I walked over next to Shane and looked down.
“Looks like they started work already,” I said, somewhat outdone with the fact. “I had thought they just wanted to have a look.” I also noted they had widened the hole we had originally drilled to accommodate their camera.
“He needed to send a probe down to get an idea of what’s there. If you don’t accept their bid, there’s no charge,” Shane said.
“Stanley Evans,” the man feeding the cable down to Hannah said and nodded.
“Max Howard. You’ve done this before, Stanley?”
“Oh, yeah. People in the Hill Country like to know what they’re sitting on. You already had a hole drilled so I wanted to take a peek. I can give you a better estimate if I know how big the chamber is.”
“Holy smokes,” the man in the van said. “Come take a look at this, Stanley.”
The man handed the cable to Shane. “Hold up, Hannah,” Shane called down to her.
I walked over to the van with Stanley. The man in the van turned the laptop so we could see the image. The probe was about twenty feet from a cavern wall, but as the man began to rotate the camera three hundred and sixty degrees, there was nothing immediately visible beyond the light’s reach of about thirty feet.
“It’s a big one,” Stanley said. “What’s the camera’s depth?”
I couldn’t see anything.
“Six point three meters,” Stanley’s associate said.
“Okay, I’ll feed some more down. You let me know when you see the bottom.”
“I’m gonna increase the luminance,” his associate said.
We walked back over to the cistern. “How much cable do you have?” I asked.
“This was just exploratory so I only brought a small spool of twenty-five meters.”
The man in the van eventually stopped Stanley at seventeen meters. “I see something,” he called out to us. I took the rope supporting Hannah from Shane so he could go take a look. Stanley handed me his cable.
“You doing okay down there, Hannah?” I said to her so she wouldn’t get lonesome.
“What did he see?” she said as she looked up at me. I felt sorry for her down in the cistern while all the activity going on in the van. She must have felt left out.
“I don’t know.”
“It’s stalagmite and it’s huge,” Shane called out. “And water. It’s a flowing river.”
Shane and Stanley climbed down out of the van and walked back over the cistern. “That’s a good sign,” Stanley said to me.
He took the cable from me that I was holding in my left hand. “Ms. McCoy, I’m going to bring the cable line up. Make sure the camera housing doesn’t get hung up.”
As he hauled in the cable and coiled it on the ground, I leaned over the cistern. “You did good, Hannah,” I said to her. Truth was if it had been up to Shane and me we would probably be lying on the bottom of the cavern floor now from our rush to discover what was below.
“Thanks, Max. Did you record it, Stanley?”
&nbs
p; “Yes, we recorded everything. We’ll have you up in five minutes. That’s quite a dripstone we’ve spotted. You can plug the hole when you get the probe out. We’re done for the day.”
“That wine stopper isn’t going to plug that hole now,” I said.
“We use a specially designed one for this size probe. She has it,” Stanley said.
Fifteen minutes later, Hannah and I sat in the van and watched the playback. It was color and HD and stunning once the light with the probe was increased. The cavern below was huge and the formation we could see was probably two to three feet in diameter.
“Wow,” was all I could manage. I looked over at Hannah and she was crying. I put my arm around her shoulder and gave her a hug.
“That column took thousands of years to form. It’s so beautiful. We have to be very careful, Max. That formation is so sensitive, the oils from your fingers can change the flow of the water and affect its shape; as well as changed the color of the minerals. Promise me, you will protect the cavern.”
“That’ll be up to you, Hannah. I’m putting you in charge of this. We don’t need Texas A&M University to develop this site, if that’s what I decide to do. I’m curious, though. Why is this cistern here? If it took thousands of years for that column to form, there couldn’t have been water in the cavern, right?”
“You’re partially right. Remember the first time I went down into the cistern, I told you about the hydro tunnel I spotted? Water to the cistern was fed from someplace else.”
“So, the cavern and the cistern aren’t connected?”
“Not hydrologically. It’s here for a reason, though. I think we need to explore the cavern below, first, and then we can explore the historical significance of the cistern site. I’m still hoping the Journal will provide us a clue. You know,” she said and then paused. “No, that would be too farfetched,” she said dismissively.
“What?” I said.
“The Maya had their sacred cenotes; maybe this was a sacred cavern for the prehistoric Paleo-Indian culture in the area; before the Comanches arrived. Yucatan wasn’t the only area that had underground pools and rivers created after that huge meteorite impact sixty-five million years ago.”
Shane was standing at the back of the van watching and listening to us talk.
“You know the wall of the cavern we saw is about under this van. And if you think about it, where the column is, it’s on the other side of this hill. This isn’t really a hill, as much as it’s a dome over the cavern that’s been eroded. And I’d bet when we finish clear cutting the rest of the cedar out of here it’ll stick out like a sore thumb.”
“Especially from the mesa,” I said.
“It could have really ancient significance,” Hannah offered.
“Alright, let’s wrap this up for the day. We need to put our thinking caps on and figure out what we want to do next. I’ll meet you guys at my ranch the day after tomorrow at nine in the morning. I need to talk with the other interests in this venture. Hannah, get me a copy of what we just saw, will you,” I said and climbed out of the van.
Stanley walked over to me. He had the look of a car salesman eyeing a customer walk on the lot with his mind already made up to buy something that day. He had me.
“Make sure Hannah has a copy of what you filmed today. I’ll need a proposal from you for a full mapping of the cavern. And I need you to keep the location of this site confidential.”
“Of course.”
“Hannah McCoy is officially in charge now. She speaks for me.”
“I’ll have a full proposal for her by next week. I think you have something here, Mr. Howard. You might want to consider bringing in an engineering firm on this; one with experience in developing limestone caverns for commercial use.”
“And, you know of one?
He smiled. “I’ll make a recommendation in the proposal. I know of two firms here in Texas.”
“Hannah, walk with me back to my truck,” I said after shaking hands with the two men.
Before I could tell her about Andy’s match with the river in Guatemala my phone rang and I could tell by the ringtone it was Emily.
“Hey. What’s up, besides being outdone with me?”
“Are you going to Ariana’s graduation tonight?”
That news came out of the blue. I had no idea it was that night. Kevin hadn’t said a word about it even before I booted him out of the house. I guessed Sunny had known about it, but it had probably slipped her mind with all that was going on.
“Of course, I am,” I said.
“That’s why I’m calling. Kevin and Ariana asked me to call you. They don’t want you to come.”
“Well, I’ll be damned. I would expect that from Kevin, not Ariana. Okay, I’m not a man to go where he’s not wanted. Tell her for me, I said congratulations. Bye.”
“Dad.”
“Yes?”
“You’re on the wrong side of this. You know that don’t you?”
“It’s par for the course. But that don’t change the fact that Kevin made his bed; he has to lie in it now.”
“That is so stupid. Are you going to risk losing Sunny over this? She’s beside herself. This may be the one that finally ends it for you and her.”
“A man has to do what his conscience tells him to do. And, I don’t believe that for a minute. Sunny knows I love Kevin.”
I noticed Hannah had walked away to give me some privacy. I smiled at her in thanks.
“Have you talked to Ariana’s parents? How do they feel about all of this?”
“I have no idea how they feel. This isn’t about them. It’s about my father being as stubborn as a mule.”
I suppressed my urge to bray into the phone for Emily with Hannah standing just a few yards away. If I was going down for this, it should be with some dignity, I reminded myself.
“I’ve gotta run. Oh, I don’t want Ariana to help with the Journal’s translation any more. It would be too awkward. You’ll have to find something else for her to do at the Center. Bye.”
Hannah gave me a quizzical look after I closed the call. I shrugged as if to say, “What are you going to do?” I sure didn’t know.
After Emily’s call, I wasn’t in the mood to be sociable, but it wasn’t Hannah’s fault, I realized. I brought her up to date on the family situation with Ariana and the Journal. She said she could handle the translation while she waited on the proposal for the cavern’s LIDAR imaging. I didn’t tell her about Andy’s discovery, though. I thought that bit of information might prove a distraction to all that was going on at the site, especially for her boyfriend. Shane was too much like me. If I was his age, I would’ve already been planning an expedition to explore the section of the Motagua River that Andy had identified.
I needed Shane to stay focused and finish the land restoration project on the Pape Ranch and I also needed to keep Hannah occupied while we waited on the bids for the LIDAR imaging. I wanted to know what we had down there before I actually sold the ranch. I also wanted to make sure James Lee and I were in agreement to sell the ranch. I didn’t think he would object, but there would be another major expense to get the ranch appraised. And then there was the State of Texas. What would they have to say about my selling the ranch?
When I arrived at the ranch house I sat in the truck to think a moment and decide what I was going to do about the potential lawsuit I’d face from Constance Pickering if I did sell the ranch. She wasn’t the type of woman to accept twenty-five percent of nothing and would try to claim that I hadn’t done enough to find the Spanish Treasure she knew to be on the ranch. She’d go after the proceeds from the sale of the ranch out of shear meanness. My life was getting more complicated every day I kept the ranch. I looked at my watch. It was time to get off my butt and go see what those turkey vultures were up to before the rest of the day got away from me. I decided to return Constance’s call before I got too sidetracked.
“Good to know you haven’t changed after all these years,” she said aft
er her receptionist put me through.
“Oh, I’ve changed. I’m returning your call, aren’t I?”
“I’ve been thinking about Rebecca Haas. The article in the paper mentioned a gold crucifix was found on her body. Is it the same one you stole from me?”
“I’m a busy man, Constance. I’m not going to sit here and trade insults with you. A judge ruled against you, fair and square. As for the crucifix, she made so many of them, how would you know the difference?”
“Still, it should be worth something. I just didn’t want it to get lost.”
“I’m sure and as Trustee for the estate, I appreciate your concern,” I said.
“One might argue that it isn’t part of the estate.”
“One might, but I’ll let someone else in authority make that determination. What is it you want?”
“I want to see that cistern.”
“I don’t think it’s advisable in your condition. It’s pretty rugged back up in that drainage area.”
“I was thinking I’d send someone on my behalf.”
“You’ve seen the pictures. Take my word for it, there’s nothing there in the way of a Spanish treasure. We’ve breached the cavern below and found nothing but a natural formation. Matter of fact, I’m thinking about selling the property.”
“What?”
“Look, the idea of a Spanish treasure was nothing more than a pipedream that kept Fran Pape and Rebecca Haas going for years. I don’t think there’s a treasure. If you want to keep looking for it, take it up with the new owner after I sell it.”
“You snake. I want the Journal back.”
“That’s not possible right now. Someone is doing their dissertation on it. After she’s finish I’ll probably donate it to a Texas university. In the meantime, you have your own translation, right?”
“I knew I should’ve never trusted you.”
“Bye, Constance,” I said and closed the call.
The woman was complicit in the deaths of the Pape sisters and blamed me for her fall from grace in New Haven. When she had her reputation still intact she was a force to be reckoned with in the Solms County legal arena. Now she was just a spiteful old woman with a dwindling law practice who was looking to vent her spleen on someone and I knew who that someone was.
The Turbulence of Butterflies (Max Howard Series Book 6) Page 16