Sweet Water (14 page)

The alert response aroused her curiosity. She thought of what Mr. Patel had told her and what she suspected was Mr. Ledger’s grand plan. How would the cattle rancher react to the expansion of Agua Dulce into a huge service station? “Of course. Winegardners have been a part of this county for generations. Everyone knows Lanny. He’s one of the good guys.”

She openly looked at the maps on the table, saw the names of Agua Dulce’s businesses printed in tiny, neat letters. Mr. Ledger set down his mug, came to the table and began rolling the top map into a tube. Okay, so she was being nosy. She could accept that he didn’t want her to see his maps and drawings. “Uh, I don’t want to take up your time, but I need to speak to you about something.”

 
He grinned as his agile fingers stretched a rubber band around the map. “Who’re you interceding for this time?”

She let out a great breath, his reading her so well making her visit easier. “It’s Mr. Patel and Bob Nichols. They’re terrified, you know.”

He appeared unfazed by that information as he stood the roll against the wall. He didn’t say anything, so assuming she had been given the floor, she charged ahead. “Mr. Patel’s service station is all he has. He’s owned it since I was in high school. He works really hard. For that matter, his whole family works in the station and they all work hard. He has a wife and two kids. Bright, good kids, I might add. And Bob, well, he’s lived here for over twenty years. He’s built the motel little by little. I think he’s in the same position as Mr. Patel. The motel’s all he has.”

Mr. Ledger took a seat on the sofa arm, his left elbow resting on his thigh. His brown hair, obviously skillfully cut, curled at his collar. “These two are like Gordon Tubbs? Friends of

yours?”

“We’ve all lived together for a very long time, Mr. Ledger. When there’s so few of us, we have to be friends. There isn’t much we don’t know about each other.”

“Hey, call me Terry. ‘Mr. Ledger’ sounds old.”

Except for a few laugh lines at the corners of his eyes and silver at his temples, he didn’t look old. She guessed him to be her age or only a few years older. “Okay. I know what you mean.”

“Since you know everyone here so well, you must be aware that Patel could be closed down by the state and it has nothing to do with anything I might or might not do in Agua Dulce.”

“Well, we know each other, but he doesn’t discuss his business with me. Why would they close him down?”

“Violations of EPA standards. I’d be surprised if he hasn’t already gotten warning letters.”

The gossip about the station’s aged storage tanks leaped into her mind. Even before the emergence of environmental militants, the concern was that the station’s underground gasoline storage tanks could deteriorate with age, seep fuel into the surrounding soil, leach into the aquifer and contaminate the town’s only source of drinking water. “You mean they’d just arbitrarily close him down?”

“Sooner or later. He’s in a no-win position. The legislation requires all the vintage stations to replace their old storage tanks. When the owners dig up the tanks, if they find there’s been leakage, the surrounding soil is supposed to be hauled off and replaced with new, clean soil. So far, leaks have been found in almost every case where the old tanks have been uncovered. The deadline’s long past, but I’ve seen no evidence that Patel’s even done any testing.”

She vaguely remembered hearing something about the issue, but at the time she hadn’t thought she knew anyone directly affected. “So? What, they just force him out of business?”

“The clean-up’s expensive. Most mom-and-pops can’t afford to do it, so they choose not to. A lot of them have just walked off from their stations.”

“I can’t believe that. What about the money they’ve—”

“They leave it up to the state, the taxpayers, to do the cleanup. All too often, it ends up costing more than the property’s worth.”

Marisa swallowed. She hadn’t heard Mr. Patel say one word about being required by the state to replace his gasoline tanks or clean up after them. But as secretive as she knew him to be, perhaps he wouldn’t have mentioned something as incriminating as warning letters from the state.

“And Nichols,” Mr. Ledger went on, “could go out of business tomorrow and not suffer financially if that’s what’s worrying you. He comes from old Eastern money. Pennsylvania utilities, I think it is. He lives off a trust fund. A very nice trust fund. He’s about half a bubble off of plumb. I suspect his family pays him to stay away.”

She didn’t totally disbelieve this. Bob Nichols had always been strange and, in his own way, as secretive as Mr. Patel. Hadn’t she wondered a hundred times where he got so much money to waste on something as foolish as a UFO landing pad? She sank into a chair at the table, a considerable amount of wind taken out of her sails. “How do you know all this? You just spy on everyone, pry into their lives?”

“It’s information that’s easy to get. It isn’t spying or prying, either. It’s prudence. If I don’t know what I’m facing when I start a new development, I can’t protect my investment.

Besides that, my bankers expect me to be on top of what’s going on. If they ask me questions, I have to be able to answer them.”

Development. The word sent a shiver down her spine. Her hunch had been right.

At the same time she worried about development, she couldn’t keep from worrying over what he might have learned about her and her mother. Not that she had anything to hide, but now she felt naked. And vulnerable. “None of that means the people who live here suffer any less if you tear down the whole place. This isn’t like a city, where we can just pick up and move to another part of town. All of us have heard rumors ever since you bought Agua Dulce, but you haven’t told us what you’re planning. That’s all we want to know. You think it’s important to make your bankers happy? Well, our whole lives are invested here. We think it’s important to know what’s happening so we can plan for our own futures.”

He shook his head. “I’m sorry, but I don’t discuss my projects. Everything’s in the very early stages. I’ll tell you this. When I know something for sure, I’ll let you and your friends know. I said the other day, I’m fair.”

All at once she was out of words. He had shut her down completely. Why the hell had she ever agreed to come and see him anyway? “Well, I guess that’s that.” She stood, willing herself not to run from the room.

He stood, too. “Look, I’m being as honest as I can. I’ll give everyone’s circumstances fair consideration, including Patel and Nichols. I always do.”

And what about Pecos Belle’s? she wanted to ask, but didn’t, for fear of hearing his answer. After all, he owned the Pecos Belle’s building.

As she approached the door, he came up behind her. “I’m gonna be here a few more days. Maybe we’ll run into each other some morning on the trail.”

“I—I don’t run cross-country.” Not looking at him, she reached for the screen door latch. “It’s an accomplishment to get up and down Lanny’s gravel road. Besides, I never know what morning’s going to hand me, so I don’t have a schedule. I just run when I can swing it.” She pushed on the latch, but it didn’t open the door.

He reached around her and did it for her, his chest and face so close she could feel his body heat. “Then maybe I’ll catch up with you on the road some morning when you’re out.”

She looked into his eyes, her face inches from his. “S—sure. Maybe so.”

She left his mobile home, frustration hammering her, and headed home to check on Mama. All she could do was berate herself. Her visit had accomplished nothing. Other than his being a cross-country runner, she knew no more about him now than she had known before. In fact, she had gleaned more new information about the friends and neighbors she had known for years than about him.

She had never felt—or been—so powerless.

Then it dawned on her that she had left Ben’s jug of Jack Daniel’s on Terry Ledger’s counter.

****

Seeing Marisa’s distress left Terry with a kind of anxiety about his project that was unfamiliar. It felt almost like guilt.

Lord knew, his business had placed him in conflict and controversy many times. Real estate development changed lives as much as it changed landscapes. Opposition from some quarter came with every project—uneasy neighbors, greedy politicians, litigious special-interest groups. Dealing with one or all of those factions was as common as tying his shoes. But this uprising from Marisa, speaking for a handful of people, was different. As he watched her image grow smaller, he had a compelling urge to run after her and reassure her that his plans for change weren’t directed at her personally.

Don’t be nuts, he told himself. When it came to his projects, he kept his relationships on a professional level, never interjecting himself into anyone’s personal life. Or their personal problems. Mixing with the natives in that way could affect his judgment or compromise his forward movement, either of which could cause him a serious financial loss.

He had to get over it. Why should he feel guilt? All he had done was pay a small fortune for this little piece of dirt that had been legitimately on the market. He had every right to do with it as he wished. The people who lived here had to have known from the get-go that building businesses in a privately owned town was a risk.

His company was well known for producing highly desirable living sites. Wherever a Legendary Development sub-division evolved, contiguous real estate values rose. Sometimes they even skyrocketed. Larson’s Truck & Travel Stop and Legend Ranches would be a boon to a part of the state heretofore passed over by all but oil well drilling companies, roadrunners and rattlesnakes.

Marisa Rutherford had given him this edgy feeling. Her penetrating eyes seemed to look inside him, her frank manner made him question himself. Well, in truth, there was more to it than that. He disliked even the idea of a woman with such delicious-looking lips, not to mention a killer body, being angry at him. She had an earthiness about her and an exotic appearance that made him think of Gypsy campfires and dancing girls and, for some reason, set his juices stewing. Damn. How could he be drawn in that way to a woman so opposite from the cool, sleek kittens with whom he played in Fort Worth and Dallas?

He knew the answer. Mentally, he called it what he wouldn’t say aloud—lust.

But identifying the appeal didn’t mean he had to act on it. She was allied with the locals against him. If there was anyone in Agua Dulce, indeed all of Cabell County, who was most likely to bring him trouble—like lawsuits and injunctions to delay or halt his whole project—that someone was Marisa. Yep, he had to do two things. Number one, play it cool in his interaction with her, and number two, keep a healthy distance.

He turned from watching her through his screen door and saw the jug of Jack Daniel’s she had left on his counter. His first impulse was to call to her, but he thought better of it. He would take it to her the next time he went to the café to eat. That is, if he ever went there again.

On Wednesday, the arrival of Brad England’s surveying crew enabled Terry to divert his attention from the carnal temptation Marisa presented. He had made up his mind the less he saw of her, the better, but the surveying crew’s eating three meals a day at Pecos Belle’s put forth a challenge. Because he worked with the surveyors during the day, he felt obligated to tag along when they went to lunch in the cafe, but he could tactfully avoid having breakfast and dinner with them. Dining in his mobile home made maintaining his intention to give the café owner a wide berth easier.

Thunderstorms delayed the surveyors for two days. They made a plan to work through the weekend, but on Friday, Terry left them and headed east. He needed to check on work in progress in and around Fort Worth and he needed a break if he expected to be at the top of his game for the meeting with Larson’s people on Tuesday. It would take a superb selling effort to convince them that a location in the middle of nowhere was a good place to build a multimillion-dollar plant.

He planned to spend the weekend in Fort Worth doing something that allowed him to clear his head. He planned to spend two days skydiving.

The phone was ringing as he entered his Fort Worth condo. Caller ID told him the call came from his mother’s office in Odessa. When he picked up she didn’t say hello, though he hadn’t seen her or heard from her in weeks. She opened with, “Darling, I ran into Herb on the golf course and he told me you’re borrowing millions again.”

He had never borrowed millions, at least not all in one lump sum. “Hi, Mom. When’d you get back?”

“Oh, days ago. Things didn’t go that well, I’ll tell you. I’m already wondering if I’ve made a mistake.”

Terry knew without asking that she was referring to her honeymoon and her new husband. He closed his eyes, trying to calculate the number of weeks she had been married to husband number four.

“I don’t know why I couldn’t see it before,” she said. “I think he has a drinking problem. I don’t have time to take care of a man with problems.”

Or anyone else but yourself, Terry couldn’t keep from thinking. He held a sour memory of childhood and Mom’s climb up the ladder of success in an Odessa law firm. He hadn’t forgotten how often he had heard her say she didn’t have time to spend with him for this or that or to cook a meal or even to wash his clothes. With his dad constantly traveling and/or living overseas for months at a time, at a young age Terry had learned to do laundry and had eaten a lot of hot dogs. These days his mother had a housekeeper, but in his youth, more often than not, there had been no one at home but him.