“Getting pregnant without a husband and having to face you and your… family creates a lot of pressure,” I said.
“She always knew I was here for her no matter what happened. We were very close. She was a happy child. The night she… the night she was murdered, she kissed me goodbye and said, ‘Don’t wait up, Mama.’”
“But why didn’t she tell you about the pregnancy?”
She looked at her hands, trying to justify this to herself. “She came home from Lubbock the last week of June. After a summer class. The first session. It was an English class she said she needed to get out of the way before her senior year. She spent the mornings sleeping. Said she needed the rest…” Her voice trailed off. “Now I know why,” she said. “In the evenings, when it was cool, she went running along the River Walk.”
Marissa didn’t kiss her mother goodbye because she wanted to go commit suicide on the San Antonio River Walk. She wasn’t making plans to cut short her senior year. I knew from experience that people didn’t subject themselves to exercise when they’re too depressed to go on living. When I came home from my final deployment—scarred inside and out—the last thing I wanted to do was go for a jog. In fact, the only time I went out was when I ran out of Jack Daniels. I put on thirty pounds, grew a full beard, and was angry at the world. Moving back in with Grandpa was the only thing that saved me from going off the deep end.
Maybe Marissa had made a decision about the baby that the father didn’t go along with. I doubted it was an answer that her Catholic mother would condone. These were all questions detective Peterson didn’t ask and didn’t have answers to. Marissa had a secret that she took to her grave.
Mrs. Luna took a deep breath. She used a tissue to wipe the tears from her face. She looked at me. Waiting.
“Mrs. Luna, I’ll take the case.”
The tension left her neck and shoulders. She smiled for the first time since we’d met. “Then you believe me?” she asked, letting out a sigh of relief. “Mrs. Davis was right. You are a saint.”
“I can’t work miracles, but I will do everything in my power to find out what happened to your daughter.”
She got up and lit a Saint Jude candle on the mantel. “Mrs. Davis’s mother called you the Saint Jude of detectives. Saint Jude is the patron saint of lost causes,” she said. “I will keep this candle lit and pray for you every day.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Luna.”
She handed me the envelope full of cash.
I didn’t believe in saints, but I took any help I could get. “One last question,” I said. “Who gave you Mrs. Davis’s name?”
She looked at me and chewed her bottom lip, as if deciding whether to tell me or not. After a few moments she took her Bible from the mantel. Inside there was a newspaper clipping. She handed it to me. I read the familiar headline: Ex-UT Football Player Walks Free.
“Where did you get this?” I asked.
“Someone left it in my mailbox.”
Chapter Fourteen
The factory headquarters for the Robert Byrd jewelry store was located about sixty-five miles northwest of San Antonio in Kerrville, Texas. I wanted to see if I could track down a buyer for the bracelet. I also wanted to visit Grandpa to pick his brain about Patrick Allison. I’d grown up with stories about the family feud between the Allisons and the Fischers, but Grandpa also kept track of Patrick’s recent business because it had an impact on his property. An Allison-controlled company was building a gas pipeline across his land.
I got off the interstate at Welfare, a ghost town settled by German immigrants that reached a peak population of two hundred seventy-five in the 1890s before a boll weevil infestation put an end to local agriculture and wild growth. The countryside was dotted with newer homes and trailer houses occupied by retirees or folks escaping the busy city for one reason or another.
I unrolled the window and let Sam get some fresh air. I had brought him along because he was good company and riding in my pickup was one of his favorite things to do. Number one, of course, was duck hunting. He was bred to be in the water searching for birds. But if he couldn’t hunt, he loved hanging his bulky head out the passenger window.
All roads west of San Antonio snaked through the geographical region known as the Texas Hill Country that stretched west from the Balcones Fault, which roughly followed I-35 through Austin and San Antonio. It was a jumbled collection of limestone and granite hills covered with cedar and live oak trees with an occasional flat space for farming. When the first Fischer, along with a boatload of other German immigrants, settled the area in the late 1840s, it was a dangerous frontier between western civilization and native culture dominated by the Kiowa and Comanches. That confrontation lasted longer and was more contentious here than anywhere else in the country and left an indelible impression on the settlers who bore the brunt of the fight and their descedants.
I turned off on the Grape Creek road and noticed that a familiar ranch house that once stood on the corner had been torn down to make way for a new construction. The old homesteads like Grandpa’s were getting harder to find unless you knew where to look. The narrow road was paved now, like more and more of the backroads, to accommodate tourists driving sedans while searching for that authentic rural-Texas experience and staying at one of the many new bed and breakfasts. I slowed down behind a herd of brightly colored bicyclists. It was a group of twenty or more all in matching orange-and-black stretch outfits.
There was no room to pass, so I followed the bikers at a crawl until I got to Grandpa’s road. It was one of the few left unpaved. In the four miles to his gate, three new houses and a double-wide trailer had been installed since Christmas. The new double-wide already had a pickup on blocks in the yard alongside a plastic, toddler swing set and a stack of used tires. There was a large plywood sign painted yellow and green with the smiling face of a cartoon llama inside the neighbor’s pasture advertising a petting zoo.
A neat row of limestone rocks marked the entrance to the ranch. Every winter since I could walk, I had helped Grandpa replace the stones that the weather, animals, or gravity had forced to the ground. I could count on Grandpa to quote his favorite poet while we worked. “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” he’d recite. I agreed. I was one of them. Repairing a rock fence was Grandpa’s way of keeping me busy and out of trouble. Work was his answer for everything. It was a pioneer trait that used to be evident on every neat and tidy farm in the county.
When I opened the door, Sam leaped over my lap. He knew that at the end of the hundred-yard driveway was a pond fed by cool spring water. I heard the distinct hum of a Cessna engine. The blue-tipped wings cleared the trees and buzzed close enough to the ground for me to see the slightly crooked smile on Grandpa’s face. He was probably laughing because he knew I was going to tell him he was too old to be flying this low. Nothing scared him, and no one was going to tell him how or when to fly. Still, it didn’t keep me from reminding him that I’d like to keep him around for another twenty years.
I turned off the a/c and drove with the windows down breathing in the familiar mixture of cedar, fresh-cut hay, and late summer buttercup flowers. The African dust seemed to have stopped at the Balcones Fault line.
Sam ignored me when I circled the pond, his body submerged up to his neck. I drove kicking up a white cloud of caliche dust, passed the tidy limestone-block house and barn built before the Civil War, and crossed the creek before climbing the hill to a level section of land Grandpa used as a runway. I stopped at the small Quonset hut and let the dust settle around me. The field was five hundred yards long and half as wide. Landing and taking off was tricky because of the cedar trees on one end and the abrupt limestone cliff on the other. When the conditions were right, Grandpa only used half of it just to prove he could.
Today, the conditions were right. He swooped over the limestone cliff and touched down like he was practicing carrier landings in the Indian Ocean. He tipped his gray sweat-stained cowboy
hat at me when the aircraft coasted to a stop outside the rusty, half-moon building. He didn’t wear a rattlesnake-skin hatband or trim his mustache to look like Charles Goodnight. He didn’t need to. He climbed down, taking more time than he used to. He still favored the knee he had replaced last year and seemed to be carrying a few extra pounds on his six-foot-two-inch frame, but even though he was over eighty he had no intention of slowing down. He wore a khaki work shirt and Wrangler jeans, the same uniform he’d worn ever since I was old enough to remember. He had a white Cinch shirt with pearl snaps, but it was reserved for church and Oktoberfest.
“Nice landing,” I said.
“Saves tires,” he said, straight-faced. He was modest to a fault, detested a showoff, and would never consider drawing attention to himself.
We shook hands. His grip was still strong, and his palms were still heavily calloused from years of outdoor work. I could remember only two occasions that he’d ever greeted me with more than a handshake. One was at my dad’s funeral when he put his calloused hand on my shoulder. I was sixteen. The other was four years later at Grandma’s funeral. He did the same thing. That touch was the most emotion I’d ever seen him display.
“You keepin’ your nose clean?” he asked. His voice was raspy from years of smoking cigars and breathing Hill Country dust.
“I stay busy,” I said.
“Work is good,” he reminded me. He had been reminding me of the virtue of work my whole life. We got in my pickup and headed to the house.
“One of these days, I’m gonna peel you off a mountaintop and there won’t be enough left to bury. The neighbor will call me after he sees a puff of smoke,” I said.
“The neighbor wouldn’t bother. That’s why I’m up in the air—chasing his damned llamas from my hay. He called the game warden on me last week for shootin’ at one of his miniature horses.”
“Why’d you do that?” I asked.
“To scare it from my field. He opened a petting zoo for kids. More traffic up and down my road. They come in my gate asking to take pictures. I’ve got no time for nonsense. That honyock comes here from Dallas and somehow thinks he’s native.”
We traveled in silence for five minutes. Neither one of us felt the need to fill in the gaps in conversation. My dad had been the same way. We could go for days without speaking. I never knew that was unusual until Sylvia pointed it out on her first visit to the ranch. She couldn’t understand how three people could sit in a room without speaking. Silence drove her crazy.
“Get any rain?” I asked. To a farmer or rancher, speculation about the weather was always a staple of conversation.
“Dry as a bone.” He pointed to the dead, ankle-high grass lining the road as proof. “I’ll need to buy hay this year, I think.”
Sam ran up the road to greet us, his coat covered with mud. I opened the door for him to jump into the back seat. He immediately put his paws on Grandpa’s shoulder and began licking him in the face. Labradors had no qualms about showing affection.
“Ah, teach this dog some manners,” Grandpa growled. He gave him a playful pat on the head, and Sam happily settled down into the back seat. I noticed Grandpa studying my profile. When I slowed to cross the creek, he asked: “Your fancy girlfriend don’t come?”
“Tied up at work,” I said. Sylvia was a little too refined for Grandpa’s taste, and he never missed a chance to remind me without overdoing it. He was always charming to her when she came with me, but I don’t think he ever referred to her by her name. Last Christmas he told me she reminded him of my mother. I thought that was a compliment at first. He waited for me to say more. When I didn’t, he didn’t press me on our relationship. He changed the subject.
“I read about that business with the sniper,” he said.
I coasted the last fifty yards to the barn. I knew what he meant. He was asking if I was okay, physically and mentally. He didn’t have to spell it out. Mentioning the event was enough. He was the main reason I was able to get my shit together when I got out of the Marine Corps. I spent six months trying to drown my guilt in booze. One night after a weeklong bender, I drove out to see him. He listened to me cry in my beer until I fell asleep on the porch. The next morning my keys were gone and my pickup was in the barn. He let me mope around and sober up for about a day and a half, then he put me to work rebuilding fences. It’s hard to feel guilty about being the only one of your platoon brothers to come home alive when every muscle in your body aches from digging post holes in the hot sun.
“Fence needs work,” he said. I smiled. We both knew what he meant.
“I’m good,” I said and parked in the shade of the barn near the deer-high fence surrounding his vegetable garden. “My client met with Patrick Allison the night he was shot. He introduced me to him and his grandson. Allison said he knew you. Offered me a job.”
Grandpa’s eyes narrowed, and the lines around his mouth deepened into canyons. I listened to a mockingbird run through his repertoire of songs and felt the afternoon heat cast a blanket over the Fischer homestead. Sam licked the side of my face, anxious to take another dip in the spring water. Grandpa finally cleared his throat. Sam and I waited for him to speak.
“You’re going to work for Patrick Allison?” he asked, as if I’d just joined a local Al-Qaeda affiliate.
“I didn’t take the job. I wanna find out if Patrick could be mixed up with the Sosa shooting.”
“He ain’t made any friends in this county. Allison is behind a new gas pipeline that’s gonna to cut right through my pasture.”
I drove to the front gate so Grandpa could point out the swath of property that the proposed pipeline would take.
“They’re going to bury a forty-two-inch pipe here and take a hundred feet of easement. And there’s nothing anyone can do about it because of eminent domain.”
“They’re gonna bury the pipe. What difference does it make?”
Grandpa didn’t like my attitude. “It’s the goddamned principle of the thing,” he said.
I changed the subject. “Do you know where Allison’s oil lease is in Edwards County?” I asked. I remembered what Sosa had said about Allison and Marcus Lopez being partners.
Chapter Fifteen
G>randpa pulled a Churchill cigar from his shirt pocket, clipped the end, and lit it up. “I wouldn’t be surprised if Patrick was up to no good.”
I would probably never get the cigar smell out of the upholstery. The price I had to pay for a little information and a visit with Grandpa. He grew up in a time when people didn’t care about secondhand smoke. We had driven southwest of Gillespie County toward Mexico and the edge of the Hill Country. The air was dryer and the vegetation limited to cactus and shrubs. Grandpa pointed out a tiny dot on the horizon that he said was an oil derrick. There was nothing wrong with his eyes.
“Take the next gravel road,” he said, then tapped his cigar ash into the unused ashtray.
“How’d the Allisons and the Fischers end up on opposite sides,” I asked. I had heard the story a dozen times, but I knew Grandpa wouldn’t calm down until he told it again, from the beginning.
“In 1848 the Fischers were newcomers from Prussia, and men like Allison didn’t trust us. We spoke German and were intellectuals. Some were Catholic. Allison didn’t like our politics or religion. He belonged to a group called The American Party—second and third generation settlers. We were all immigrants, but they got here before us, so they figured they had a prior claim. They used to meet in secret and tried to control elections all over the state. New immigrants were not welcome.” He paused to relight his cigar.
“The Civil War added fuel to the fire. The Fischer family and the majority of Gillespie County did not vote to secede from the Union. Our own revolution in the old country had failed to reform the government, and we came here to be free. Allison, and the majority of Texas, saw it differently. They were loyal to the state.” He paused to blow a cloud of cigar smoke at a fly that had found its way into
the cab.
“What happened during the war?” I asked.
“Allison joined the Confederate Army. He was with that group who chased down the German Unionists trying to make it to Mexico.”
“Allison was part of the Battle of the Nueces?” I asked.
Grandpa nodded solemnly. I knew the story of the controversial battle that some called a massacre and some called a war skirmish. The story I read said that both sides were armed and both sides had casualties. The pro-Union Germans traveled south, attempting to escape into Mexico and from there north to join the Unionist forces. A group of Confederate soldiers caught up to them camped out on the bank of the Nueces River. The Germans fought it out and lost. Nineteen of the sixty-plus group were killed and nine wounded. Two of the Confederates were killed and eighteen wounded, including their leader, Lt. C.D. McRae. The massacre part came after the fight when the Confederate soldiers shot the nine wounded they held captive. The tragedy continued when the bodies of the dead were left on the riverbank until after the war when their families gathered their remains and interred them in Comfort, Texas. In 1866 the impressive Treue der Union, a chalk-white, native limestone monument, was dedicated to those who died.
“But our family wasn’t with the Unionists,” I said.
“The Fischers decided to stay home and defend their land. The Kiowas and the Comanches didn’t stop raiding during the war, and the Confederate soldiers harassed all the Germans that held Union sympathies. We planned to join the North if the Union forces invaded Central Texas. Allison took advantage of the turmoil. By the end of the war he had acquired more land and cattle than any bill of sale could account for.” He blew another cloud of smoke at the fly and shooed it out the window.
The oil derrick grew in size as we approached. Grandpa cleared his throat and spit out the window. He was coming to the part of the story he liked the best.
“Your great-great-great-granddad, Johann Fischer, caught Allison’s son-in-law, Roland McCarthy, with a string of his horses. They were tied to the hitching post in front of Doebbler’s Inn all wearing the Fischer brand. Johann waited until Roland came out on the steps and confronted him in front of six witnesses. Roland said he found the horses on Grape Creek. Johann called him a liar. Roland’s hand went for his pistol. Johann shot him with his double-barrel shotgun.” When he finished, he pointed his cigar at my chest and looked me square in the eyes. “That was last time a Fischer talked to a member of the Allison family.”
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