The Turbulence of Butterflies (Max Howard Series Book 6) Page 3

  “I’m sorry, Sunny,” I said. “I hope she gets better.”

  “We’ll be at Sybil’s,” she said and then went to retrieve Katie’s suitcase.

  “What’s wrong with your house,” I said. I knew she was letting her brother live in it, but I kind of resented his freeloading and the fact that she and Katie would be cooped up in Sybil’s small house.

  “Don’t start,” she warned me.

  Her family was off limits to me, but mine wasn’t to her. I would forever be on the outside looking in, as a white man, and so I had no say in her family interactions. She, on the other hand, felt right at home involving herself in every aspect of the Howard family and my relationships with my children. It was just one of those many things that men who can see the end of their life on the horizon had to accept in the women they loved and know better than to argue with them about it. It was what a man did when he held the short end of the stick.

  I walked over and scooped up Katie. “I’m gonna miss you, Sweetpea.”

  “I don’t want to go,” Katie pleaded.

  “Hey, you’ll have a great time. You’ll get to see all your cousins.”

  “What about Apple?”

  Apple was her pony. “I’ll brush her, don’t you worry.”

  “Promise.”

  “Cross my heart.”

  “Why’s Momma upset?”

  I squeezed her and dipped her over backwards. I pretended to steal some sugar from her neck while we tilted over. She giggled in delight and she was three again for a few seconds. I felt her arms wrap around my head and hold me tight as we straightened up. She placed her hands on my cheeks and looked me in the eyes. “Answer me.”

  “Your mother misses her family in Washington and your aunt is sick.”

  “Come on, Katie. We have to go,” Sunny said as she walked to the car.

  The fact that she talked to Katie like I wasn’t there belied my assurances to Katie. She was definitely still upset.

  “No. I want to stay here.”

  “Max, bring her. I don’t want to miss our one-thirty flight.”

  “I’ll drive you guys.”

  “I can manage,” Sunny assured me.

  “I know you can. If I drive you, you won’t have to hassle with long term parking,” I said and I knew I had a few minutes longer with them; Sunny didn’t like to hassle with anything.

  . . .

  It was a bright and cool morning the next day after Sunny had left. Her still at home son, Kevin, had come in sometime around midnight and probably didn’t even know his mother and Katie were gone. I left him a note on the kitchen table to call me later, just in case Sunny hadn’t given him a heads-up. After I had a cup of coffee with Clete and then another one with Emily, I decided to go see where the survey crew was on the Pape Ranch.

  I owned the Pape Ranch and was engaged in the restoration of the ranch’s over-grazed pastures just as I had done on the Howard Family ranch. A few weeks ago, I had hired a surveyor to do a preliminary road survey to the site where we had discovered the old Spanish cistern. The survey crew was there to walk the property and determine where the best route might be if I decided to put in a road to the cistern. They were ground truthing their estimates based on satellite imagery of the ranch.

  Work on the cistern itself had been put on hold until my daughter-in-law, Ava, could come down and look at it. She had been working on her doctorate in Mayan archelogy before real life caught up with her and she got pregnant with her first child. The cistern itself was covered with plastic tarps while work on the land reclamation continued and Ava could arrive.

  I stopped off at the tack room in the barn before I drove out to the Pape Ranch. I threw my favorite saddle in the back of the pickup and then called Shane Wagner at the Pape Ranch. He was my crew chief for the Howard Land Reclamation Company and responsible for the field work. He was a good kid and, like Clete, he was a man I wanted to keep employed for the future success of the Howard Family Trust.

  I had three crews working on the Pape Ranch and tried to keep an eye on what they were doing. The land restoration crew was being managed by Shane, but the ranch house renovation crew was mostly day laborers who needed to be told what was needed each day. The survey crew was not mine to manage. I was just paying them. Nevertheless, I liked to keep an eye on what they were doing. I didn’t want them to get too close to the Spanish cistern.

  I stopped off at the Meeting Center on my way to the gate to see if Emily wanted to go with me for a morning ride. I was feeling lonesome and her company would have been nice.

  “Hi, Sweetheart,” I said with a smile. My daughter always brightened my day. “You want to go with me to the Pape Ranch. It’s a nice day for a horseback ride.”

  “I can’t, Dad. Not this morning. But thanks,” she said.

  “Another time, then,” I said and left her to her business.

  She smiled at me with that look that said she was ready to be done with me. There was more important business at hand than me. We both knew she would never go riding again after her last experience around age twelve, but I always asked. I was ever the optimist. Seeing me fly through the air off my horse had been traumatic for her at such a young age and she’d never ridden a horse again. I think she blamed herself for my injuries, which in the scheme of things over the course of my life, were insignificant. It was a bad time in our lives then and I didn’t help matters by my actions after the incident in front of a County Superior Court Judge who was ready to throw me in jail for violating my visitation rights with her. Thank God, she had turned out okay. I couldn’t say the same for me, though. While I had hopes that one day she would put that incident behind us and share another horseback ride with me one day, I wasn’t one to push her. I tended to remember what I wanted to and that day, that horseback ride with her, that moment in time, would always be special to me no matter what had happened afterwards with some idiot judge.

  Of all my children, Emily and I were the closest. I had put her in charge of the Meeting Center with the idea that when it came time for me to leave this world she would manage the Howard Family Trust. Between Emily’s and James Lee’s common sense approach to business, they would ensure that my life had not been a total waste.

  I rapped my knuckles on her desk to get her attention. “I love you.” I smiled at her and headed for the door.

  “Love ya, too,” she called after me without looking up from her calendar.

  I was at the front gate within a couple of minutes and was walking the gate closed when my cell phone rang. It wasn’t a number I recognized and I almost let it go to voicemail. I tended not to take calls from people I hadn’t put in my contact list. It made the whole business of cell phone usage simpler. Nevertheless, I was in a good mood after seeing Emily, so I answered the call.

  “This is, Max.”

  “Mr. Howard, this Cotton Lehr in New Haven. Good morning, sir!”

  “Good morning,” I said. He sounded pleasant enough and didn’t sound like a telemarketer or attorney, though, I mentally bet myself he sold insurance.

  “I appraise ranches and properties in the Hill Country, but nothing under a thousand acres. I understand from a neighbor of yours, the Pape Ranch may be up for sale.”

  I’d never mentioned to anyone that I had an interest in selling the Pape Ranch. “What neighbor is that?”

  “I keep my ear to the ground, Mr. Howard. Any chance I can take a look at the ranch?” he said. It was obvious he was ignoring my question.

  “No, sir, you cannot. It’s not for sale.”

  “It wouldn’t hurt to be prepared, just in case. You might change your mind down the road, Mr. Howard. There wouldn’t be any cost to you as I only represent bona fide prospective buyers.”

  “And who might that be?”

  “Now, I can’t tell you that, Mr. Howard. That would be unethical since you don’t want to sell.”

  “If I change my mind, I’ll keep you in mind.”

  “I hope you will. By the way,
I read about you in the papers concerning the Pape Ranch Murders. That shouldn’t have any impact on the sale price, if you do decide to sell. If anything, it might create an additional interest in the ranch for some people. I just thought you should know.”

  “If I did decide to sell, those aren’t the kind of people I’d want to sell my ranch to. I’ve got to get going,” I said as I climbed up into the truck. There was no point in talking to him about selling the ranch. Everything I was doing out there on the Pape Ranch was to keep from having to sell it.

  “Thank you for your time. Would you mind if I check back with you?”

  “I can’t think of any reason why, but you do whatcha wanna do. Bye,” I said and closed the call before he could keep me engaged. I didn’t want to be rude to the man, but I had things to do that day. I was mad at myself for answering a call from a number I didn’t know. Annoying phone calls were just one of the many reasons I hated cell phones, but a promise was a promise, and I had sworn I’d keep mine on me while Sunny was out in Washington. I just had to learn to quit answering the damn things if I didn’t recognize the ringtone.

  This week, Shane’s crew was clearcutting the cedar that had taken over most of the northwestern section of the ranch and replanting the hills with buffalo grass and native wildflowers after contouring the ground’s surface. Several months earlier, one of the crewmen had discovered an old Spanish cistern in one of the arroyos near the mesa on the ranch. What made the find especially notable was the quality of the stone masonry work and the carving on the cistern’s center stone. It had certainly piqued Ava’s interest after I sent her pictures.

  I hit the speed dial number for Shane once I had cleared my gate.

  “Hey, Mr. Howard. You coming out today?” Shane said.

  I could tell he was preoccupied with something. It sounded like he had his phone in the crook of his neck.

  “You need me to call you back?”

  “Hang on a sec,” he said.

  I heard him say something to one of his men, and then the engine tried to turn over on the big diesel CAT grader. I knew the minute a mechanic got involved with that beast it was going to cost me a fortune. As it was, we were going to be lucky if we ever broke even on the Pape Ranch land reclamation work.

  “Okay. Sorry. What’s up, Mr. Howard?”

  “I was thinking we should get a look at the bottom of the cistern sometime soon.”

  “I’m gonna be tied up here most of the day. Can we do it tomorrow?”

  “That’s fine. See you first thing in the morning and we can talk about it,” I said.

  “The light’s better at noon in the arroyo. I’ll meet you at eleven at the ranch house. You mind if I bring Hannah out?”

  Hannah McCoy was a Texas A&M University graduate student and Shane’s old girlfriend. Based on what he’d told me, they had recently revived their relationship from undergraduate school days after he’d told her about the cistern.

  “Sure. It’s about time I meet Wonder Woman,” I said to mess with him.

  “I think it might be better if she went down into the cistern instead of you.”

  “Shane, that’s what I pay you for. I wasn’t going down in there,” I said and closed the call. He really must have been distracted. Shane wasn’t normally that slow.

  I called the caretaker on the Pape Ranch, Tomás Martinez, to let him know I was on the way out to the ranch. He didn’t answer, again. If I didn’t know better, I would’ve thought he was dodging me.

  The topography of the Pape Ranch was different than that of the Howard Ranch. My place was more in the center of the county with rolling grass lands, whereas the Pape Ranch was more rugged and higher in elevation. The Pape Ranch bordered the Guadalupe River and was full of arroyos that drained into the river from the higher elevations of the ranch and a high mesa not usually found in the Hill Country.

  The drive out to the Pape Ranch in the southwest corner of Solms County was one of the more pleasant drives in the Texas Hill Country. There weren’t any convenience stores or subdivisions along the way, just ranches with miles and miles of open pasture that had occasional thickets of cedar trees for game cover. It was hard to take it all in while driving because if you had any sense you kept an eye out for a driver coming your way and doing the same thing you were. The other driver could cross the center stripe in a blink of an eye. And then there were the deer crossing the road. Either one of those two things could ruin your day. I kept my hands at ten and two and my eyes on the next hill after having been run off the road not long ago on a ride out the Pape Ranch. It wasn’t my fault, but just one of those things a man of my disposition had to put up with in life. Some men in the Sheriff’s Office, who were friends of the ex-Sheriff, and whom I didn’t get along with, just didn’t like me and wanted to express their dislike by running me off the road.

  To finish off the drive out to the Pape Ranch with a horseback ride made the rest of a day more than bearable to me, especially now that Sunny was out on the Lummi Reservation. The old cowboy in me found some solace in a saddle. I let my mind drift more to Sunny than the scenery as I drove. I knew a man my age had to respect that a younger woman like Sunny could do a lot better for herself than being married to an old buck in the last decades of his life. If it meant letting her go back to her roots and her family on the Lummi Indian Reservation then I had to suck it up and let her do what she wanted. My feelings of abandonment were my own to deal with and not Sunny’s concern. Insecurity was just one of those things that came along with old age like poor eyesight.

  Chapter 3

  After I arrived at the Pape Ranch, I spent a few minutes looking for Tomás and then headed over to the corral. He was nowhere around and that irritated me to no end. He seemed to avoid me every time I came out to the ranch. I had begun to worry that I had made a mistake in hiring him. Usually I was a pretty good judge of character and a man’s work ethic, but in his case I needed someone in a hurry and I hired him on the spot.

  After I selected a horse, I headed out to the top of the mesa, where I planned to inspect the progress on the route for the road that was being surveyed through the back portion of the ranch. I could see it better from on high. The route would cross through a section that was a little over eight hundred acres on the twenty-five-hundred acre ranch. While the ranch had once belonged to Haas family and then to a descendant named Fran Pape, I was responsible for it now because Fran Pape had bequeathed the property to me. After I inherited it, I’d decided the land couldn’t take the abuse of over-grazing any longer and it was up to me to ensure it survived as a Texas Hill Country ranch property sans any cattle.

  I hoped that by developing the old historic Spanish cistern into a tourist attraction it might help to at least pay the taxes on the land. I had lost the County’s agricultural tax exemption for cattle ranches when I sold off the herd and was now paying full property taxes on unused land. I was simply doing what I had done on my ranch several years ago before the tax exemption was repealed. My appeal of the current property tax reevaluation was now making its way through the legal system.

  My explanation that I was trying to save the land’s soil cover and thereby protect the aquifer below it fell on deaf ears and so I sued the County Commissioners in State Court. The Solms County Commissioners were more interested in seeing the land sold for single family housing development than protecting the aquifer through soil conservation and land management practices. It would mean more for the County in property taxes from individual home owners than the taxes I paid as a non-functioning cattle ranch. I had been informed unofficially and off the record that my current tax assessment on the property was just the first round and that I could expect it to be readjusted each year until I sold the ranch to someone who could develop it commercially. Their arguments defied logic and I accepted it as retribution for my earlier win in a court battle with the Sheriff’s Department.

  The mare I had saddled was a five-year old appaloosa and sweet as she could be. I had named her
Sally after a nurse who had taken good care of me a few years back. I rode back through the area where the main ranch house was being renovated hoping to see Tomás around. I saw a trail of dust on the road from the front gate to the ranch. A car I didn’t recognize approached the ranch house a bit too fast to suit me. One, it was raising too much dust and two, its speed meant urgency and probably a disruption of my morning ride. I rode over to greet the visitor.

  The car looked like one a lawman would drive. It was grayish in color and devoid of any bright chrome. The color selection and plainness of the vehicle was obviously designed to blend in with an urban landscape. The windows were too heavily tinted for it not to stand out like a sore thumb. I doubt it fooled anyone. It kinda reminded me of some hunter’s trucks that were painted in camouflage colors to blend in, but with their oversized tires and big engines the game could hear them coming for miles around. Guys that drove those kinds of trucks always seemed to have a heavy foot, too.

  I stayed in the saddle and watched until the car came to a stop. Sally was a little skittish around the car, so I leaned over and stroked her neck and talked to her in a calm voice. Talking to her soothed my nerves as much as hers at the intrusion into our ride. To my delight, Texas Ranger Sabine Henderson stepped out of the car. After seeing who it was, I didn’t mind that she had kicked up so much dust.

  “Hi, Max,” she said and waved.

  She had cut her hair shorter than the last time I’d seen her and she looked downright pretty in that starched white shirt and women’s cut jeans. I had always been partial to a woman in uniform and had pursued Sunny for that very same reason. I just never figured Sunny would let me catch her and proved to me beyond a shadow of a doubt that I was a man who had been graced for some reason.

  “Ranger Henderson, it’s good to see you again. I was just going for a ride. Care to join me? I can saddle a horse for you.”