by Lisa Wingate
“She didn’t order,” the cook hollered from somewhere within the Airstream.
Melvin glanced back at me. “Did you want something?”
“Cheeseburgers,” I replied, thinking that, since Zach wasn’t here to see it, I’d treat Mr. Grits to one last hamburger meal before we switched over to dog food. “Three.”
“Comin’ up,” the cook replied. The kitchen door opened with a rusty groan, and I heard him say, “Afternoon, Gracie. What can I getcha today?”
“Coffee. But don’t stop what you’re doing there. I’ll get it. I just came by to fill my thermos. It’s been a long night. We had a stakeout at the locker plant in San Saline. Finally caught the hamburger thief around midnight. Had him red-handed, so to speak.” Crossing the kitchen, Gracie noticed Melvin and me in the first booth and poked her head through the door.
The Blum sisters sat motionless with anticipation.
Gracie exchanged greetings with Melvin, then turned to me. “I got your e-mail. Didn’t have time to answer back right then, but I put out some feelers to see who around here might be buying diamond blades and so forth. Things go all right last night at the Jubilee?” she asked, and I nodded in response.
The Blum sisters jerked closer together, whispering something about Jubilee and diamonds.
“Maybe something will come of it,” I replied, having the uncomfortable feeling that more than just the Blum sisters were listening. In the surrounding booths, people were regarding Gracie, me, and our conversation with mild curiosity.
Opening the top on her thermos, Gracie tipped her hat back and peered inside. “I hope so. Anything else I can do to help?”
“Nothing so far,” I replied. “I want to look around some more this afternoon. And I sent an e-mail out to”—my ex-husband—“a business associate to see if he could add any helpful information. I don’t know if it will lead to anything, but I thought it was worth a try. You may hear from him. Geoff Attwood.”
The Blum sisters whispered, business associate and lead to something.
Frowning over her shoulder, Gracie exchanged a private glance with Melvin. “All right, then, let me know what you come up with.” Pushing off the door frame, she said good-bye to Melvin and me, suddenly turning on the Texas charm. “Y’all have a good day now, y’hear?”
“See you later, Gracie,” Melvin replied, then glanced covertly toward the Blum sisters and smiled at me. “So, like I said, I got something at the store you need to see.”
We stood up and Melvin tipped his hat to the Blum sisters. “Afternoon, ladies.”
“Why, Melvin,” the taller one said, fanning her lashes innocently. “I didn’t even notice you over there.”
TWELVE
MELVIN STARTED APOLOGIZING AS SOON AS WE WERE OUT THE door. “Sorry about all the dramatics in there. It’s part of my God-given mission to give the old Blum sisters something to talk about. This ought to keep them going awhile. They’ll be all over town trying to figure out who you are and whether you’re here to get married or buy some of my pictures.”
“More likely the latter,” I said, as we crossed the parking lot. The words had a wistful sound that surprised me—a sad, lonely, looking-for-love quality that was both obvious and embarrassing.
Melvin delivered an acute glance, his round red cheeks lifting into a smile. “Well, never say never. Strange things happen in this town. We’re famous for a reason, you know. Folks pass under the Lover’s Oak, and bang, next thing you know we’re hitching ’em up and sending ’em down the river. That’s how it was with Vanita and me.” Stopping in the parking lot, he gazed down the road toward the massive tree, and I sensed a story coming on. I had a feeling he’d told it many times before. “She was sitting on the fender of a broke-down ’ forty-two Ford in a pretty blue dress, waiting on her brother to hitch a ride into San Saline and come back with a replacement for the radiator hose. I came along on my way to meet some chums for the big USO dance, and I patched that radiator hose with some rawhide and a piece of tire tube.” He illustrated with his hands, and in my mind I saw the young woman in the starched blue dress, peeking carefully over her rescuer’s shoulder, trying not to muss her clothes.
His face clouded with memory, Melvin went on, “When I got the thing running, she wanted to drive to town and find her brother, only she didn’t drive, so I got in the car and gave her a driving lesson. We went off down the road all catywhompus. I never laughed so hard in my life, and by the time we’d got a mile or so, I was sure she was the prettiest thing I’d ever seen. She had the biggest brown eyes, and a smile that looked like a movie star’s. I knew if we got as far as the USO dance, some better-looking fella was gonna snap her up, so I wasn’t even sorry when that car broke down again. I could have put the patch back on the radiator hose, but by then neither of us cared if we made it to the dance. We just walked back to the Lover’s Oak and danced right there under the branches. Two weeks later we were married right on that spot.” Eyelids lowering, he drew a long breath, then exhaled a slow, contented sigh. “I tell that story to the young folks who come through here, so they’ll know it doesn’t matter what you read in the magazines, or what those TV talk shows say. It’s possible for two people to be in love all their lives. That’s why Vanita and I named the store Over the Moon, because that’s the way it is when you’re in love—you’re over the moon.”
“That’s really nice,” I said, but in my experience love was a fickle and sometimes painful thing, better left alone. “The story, I mean. It’s a nice story.” I knew, of course, that the Lover’s Oak was just a tree, and it couldn’t really bring people everlasting bliss. Melvin and Vanita were just lucky.
Still, there was an ache, a yearning in me as I gazed toward the oak and thought of the young soldier and the brown-eyed girl in the blue dress. I wanted to believe it was possible to stumble upon true love completely by accident.
Shaking my head, I banished the fanciful idea. “Well, I passed under the tree with a big, smelly white dog. So I suppose there isn’t much hope for me.”
Melvin raised a finger astutely as we started toward the store again. “Yeah, but did you like the dog better after you passed under the tree than before?”
I chuckled. “Well, I’m not an animal person, and he’s still with me”—I pretended to consider the question—“but that’s really just because I’m trying to keep Zach Truitt from making off with him.”
“Ahhh,” Melvin replied thoughtfully, steepling his fingers in a wise way that made me uncomfortable.
“Long story.” I changed the subject. “Anyway, I was in the store a few minutes ago, looking at your pictures. I hope you don’t mind. I guess Jocelyn told you why I’m really here?”
“Sure.” Suddenly Melvin was all business. The jolly backwoods philosopher was gone. “I hope you catch whoever stole the tracks from the Jubilee. There’s been an awful run of that kind of thing lately, and I think some of it’s got to be connected. A few of the jobs are real professional, like the one at the Jubilee, and then some it’s obvious are done by amateurs. I think the shoddy jobs might be folks who saw newspaper articles about the thefts and got ideas that they could make themselves a little money.”
I nodded gravely. “I’m putting some feelers out to see if the fossils have surfaced anywhere for sale. It might be possible to trace them back that way. If they do turn up, we can use the rock strata and composition to match them to the site and prove they came from the Jubilee, even if the rock has been recut by now, or the edges polished. The amazing thing to me is that the fossils were deep onto private property, yet the thieves were able to get in there, remove the fossils, load them, and disappear without anyone hearing or seeing anything. Jocelyn thinks someone on the crew might have been involved in setting it up and making sure there was no one in the cabin at the time.”
Melvin drew back, surprised. Glancing nervously around the parking lot, he opened the door and ushered me into the store. “You better watch who you say that to around here. The report
er from USA Today made that suggestion to the ranch foreman, Dan Daily, and got himself run out of town. Dan’s a tough old bird, and he didn’t appreciate his cowboys being maligned that way. Most of those boys have been at the Jubilee for years. They got their housing, their work, their families, their whole lives out there, and they’re devoted to the place and to Pop. Jimmy Hawthorne’s new there, but he’s from a good family in San Saline, and besides, he’s just an aimless little pup. He’s not enterprising enough to think of stealing dinosaur tracks.”
We stepped inside the store, and Melvin closed the door behind us, then crossed to the counter where his pictures were. “Dan thinks it’s likely the theft had to do with that horse psychology camp of Jocelyn’s—maybe one of her customers was involved. Lots of folks have been on the ranch since she started that camp. Maybe word got around until finally someone saw dollar signs. Fossils and petroglyphs sell for some serious money these days, especially ones that are small enough for some rich fella to put out by a fireplace or a swimming pool. Heck, people make coffee tables out of them and everything else.”
Thumbing through his book, Melvin made a disgusted sound in his throat. “I can’t tell you how many sites I’ve photographed, only to find out sometime later that the site’s been vandalized or robbed. And with the petroglyphs, those that haven’t been destroyed are just fading away.” He flipped to a page in his book, and I leaned closer to see the photos. “I call this one my spaceman. The picture on the left is thirty years ago. The one on the right is last year. See how he’s fading right off the rock? Something in the atmosphere is eating the pigments away. Another ten years, he’ll have disappeared for good.” He pointed to the succession of photos, and it was easy to see that the petroglyph was rapidly disappearing. I was struck by the sense of ancient history being lost.
For a moment Melvin and I stood staring at the pictures, neither of us able to think of anything to say.
“I hope you catch the people who destroyed the Jubilee site,” Melvin said finally. “Maybe that’ll put a stop to some of the thefts around here. Sometimes, when the war’s too big, you have to be satisfied with the little battles, you know?”
“True enough.” I thought of my life lately. The situation with Sydney felt like a war I couldn’t win. Sometimes, when I went to bed at night, and I couldn’t kiss her on the forehead as she slept, or when I woke in the morning without her sounds in the house, I felt as if my life were like that giant petroglyph, slowly fading into oblivion, being dissolved by some invisible force of nature. I felt as if I couldn’t breathe another minute, as if the atmosphere were too thin, too polluted with old resentments and lingering pain.
But today I’d won a little battle. I’d gone through an entire morning without breaking down in tears, or suddenly feeling sick to my stomach, or picking up the phone, tempted to call Sydney, even though it wasn’t my day to call, and I knew the sadness in my voice would upset her. Today I’d had a pretty good morning. I’d e-mailed from a mountaintop, I’d learned a little bit about myself in horse psychology class, I’d laughed and flirted with a total stranger. Not bad accomplishments. I felt like I was a far cry from the exhausted, emotionally bereft woman who had arrived in Texas just a little over a day ago.
Shaking off the thought, I returned to the conversation with Melvin. “Anyway … if you hear anything, will you let me know?” I said. “In the meantime, I’m going to ask around the ranch, do some exploring up and down the riverbed and see what other sites are nearby—if there’s anything the thieves might come back for.”
Melvin snapped his fingers like I’d reminded him of something. “There’s one more thing I ought to show you.” Stepping from behind the counter, he opened the door to what looked like a storage room. “Come look at this thing.” Inviting me in with a shrug and a hooded look that added mystery, he pulled a string, turning on the overhead light before he lifted a flowered sheet off something in the corner. The something turned out to be a gigantic fossilized leg bone, a femur, to be exact. It was an absolutely perfect specimen.
“Oh, my gaa …” I whispered, stepping closer so that I could get a better look. Definitely a biped, possibly even a tyrannosaurus. If it was a tyrannosaurus, it would be the first confirmed T. rex discovered in Texas. There had been a suspected rex in the Big Bend area, but nothing could be proven. If this femur could be authenticated as belonging to a tyrannosaurus, it would be a major find. I touched the smooth surface, amazed by how clean and well preserved it was. “Where did you get this?”
Melvin hatcheted a hand back and forth in front of himself. “Now, I didn’t take it out of context, if that’s what you’re worried about. I wouldn’t ever do that. I’m not a scavenger, and I understand the need to keep a site undisturbed. All the rocks and fossils I keep here in the store washed up on the river at one time or another. This one turned up a few weeks ago in a flood. Vanita and I found it just layin’ there on the bank one day when we were out walking.”
Melvin paused to glance out the door, then came back. “Anyway, it was just sitting on the path where we walk, not a mile out of town, I’d say. That was right after we heard about the tracks being stolen at the Jubilee Ranch, so we brought this home and didn’t tell anyone. All the land upstream belongs to the Jubilee Ranch, and Vanita and I figured that if word got out about it, on top of all the news articles about the stolen tracks, well, then, the place would be crawling with treasure hunters. Pop doesn’t need that kind of worry right now, and with the way Dan feels about outsiders coming on the ranch, and all the trouble between him and Jocelyn about her starting that horse camp …” He stopped, like he was telling me too much, then finished with, “Well, Vanita and I just thought it’d be better if we kept this find under wraps.”
“I see.” I was still focused on the dinosaur bone, but my thoughts had wandered to the nest of family intrigue Melvin was describing. Paleontology was all about solving mysteries, and I was beginning to piece together the archaeology of Zach’s family. I couldn’t help digging for a little more. “I can understand why you wouldn’t want to cause any more problems in the family. I gathered that it’s kind of a tough time, with Pop having had a heart attack and then the problems on the ranch… .” The statement was purposely open-ended, like a fill-in-the-blank question on a test.
Melvin answered it with an essay. Relaxing against the wall shelves, he laced his thick arms across his barrel chest, looking at his feet and shaking his head. “It’s been a rough few years for that family, you know. Pop kind of fell apart when Nan died a couple years ago. Then Jocelyn got hit by that drunk driver, and they darned near lost her, too. After that, she moved back home from Austin to start the camp and care for Pop. Dan had pretty much been running that place in the years that Pop was wrapped up with nursing Nan, and so when Jocelyn came back, there were some hard feelings. It probably would of all gone smoother if Zach had moved home again, but he never did.”
“Why didn’t he?” I traced a finger along a fissure in the dinosaur bone, a long, thin crack that showed the animal had a broken leg that had healed slightly crooked. It would have walked with a limp, one leg slightly shorter than the other.
“Why didn’t he what?” Melvin seemed to have lost track of the conversation. I wondered if he was aware that we were unearthing the Truitt family skeletons along with this one.
“Take over the ranch,” I answered, my thoughts alternating between theorizing about the fossil and postulating about why Zach never came back home. Apparently Zach had lived there at one time. What happened?
Stroking his beard, Melvin studied the cluttered shelves over my head. “Well, you know, Zach didn’t grow up there like Jocelyn did. Jocelyn’s daddy ran the place, but Zach’s dad went into coaching and moved off, and it was always a sore spot between him and Pop. Zach’s folks live up in Oklahoma now, and his daddy coaches at one of the colleges there. I think the absolute last thing he wanted Zach to do was come back here and run the ranch, but Zach came back to the Jubilee right after h
e graduated vet school, and—” Melvin snapped shut like a clam, and abruptly finished the sentence with, “Well, that’s a long story. How’d I get started on all that, anyway?”
The doorbell jingled in the main room, and Melvin and I jumped like bank robbers caught safecracking. Tossing the sheet over the dinosaur bone, Melvin walked out ahead of me.
“Well, speak of the devil,” I heard him say as I finished covering the fossil and followed him from the storeroom.
Zach Truitt was standing at the counter, holding a paper plate with three gigantic hamburgers. I had a momentary note of panic that he might have heard me quizzing Melvin about him.
Turning from Melvin to me, he quirked a dark brow, and my heart fluttered upward, then slapped back into place like a hippo in toe shoes. There were a slight narrowing of his thick lashes and crinkles at the corners of his eyes that testified to his suspicion of my presence there.
“Hungry?” He held the plate up. “Vanita asked me to bring these over to ‘that cute little city girl with the pretty brown eyes.’ ”
Quite obviously, the last part was a quote from Vanita, but all I could think was, He called me cute. He smiled slightly, and I felt myself going all moony again. “Thanks,” I said, with a smile.
Zach leaned a little closer. “She also said you didn’t look like such a big eater. I told her you’d had a tough morning in horse therapy class.”
I flushed red. I’d almost forgotten about my humiliating performance. “Very funny. Two of the burgers are for the dog.” Before he could lecture me on proper dog feeding, I added, “It’s just one last treat, and right after that I’m switching him over to dog food. In fact, I came in here for dog food. Didn’t I, Melvin?”
“Sure enough,” Melvin chimed in, and went to the shelf for a bag.
Zach squinted toward the front door. “Where is the dog, anyway?”