The Last Chance Olive Ranch Read online

  I dropped my phone into my shoulder bag, frowning. Be careful? Yes, of course. I worry about McQuaid when he’s out doing what he does—an arson investigation, an undercover job in Mexico, baiting an escaped murderer. But Ruby hadn’t been driving recklessly a few miles back, when we came over that hill and nearly ran into that pack of hogs. A few seconds earlier, a faster speed, a slower reaction time on the brakes, and both of us could have been killed. Even ordinary life is full of hazards. It is damn hard to be careful. And being careful may not save you anyway.

  I bought two bottles of water and went back out to the pump, where Ruby was just finishing the fill-up. She had caught the attention of a burly, mustachioed truck driver, who was watching her with an unmistakable leer. He was about to hit on her when I walked up. I winked at him, then slid my arm around Ruby and gave her an affectionate nip on the ear.

  “Hey, sweetheart,” I said. “You ready to boogie?”

  The truck driver gave us a disgusted look and climbed into his rig.

  “I could have handled him.” Ruby plugged the hose back into the pump and screwed Mama’s gas cap on tight.

  “I know.” I grinned at her. “Just thought I’d have a little fun.”

  She took the receipt from the pump. “I guess you couldn’t reach McQuaid.” It wasn’t a question.

  I sobered. “I wish you wouldn’t dial into me that way.” I handed her the bottle of water. “But no. All I got was his voice mail.” I gave her a quick look. “You don’t know something I don’t, do you?” I was halfway hoping that she might have picked something up that I needed to know—and halfway afraid that she had.

  She shook her head. “I can read you, China, but McQuaid has always been sort of a blank page to me. Or a brick wall, to put it another way. It’s hard to get through to him. Even if I wanted to,” she added, climbing into the driver’s seat. “Which I don’t. Especially not today.”

  I got in and shut the door. “He’s a brick wall to me, sometimes, too. That’s the cop side of him, I guess. Cops like to cultivate the art of the impassive look and the flat voice. No expression, no emotion, no clue to what’s going on inside.”

  “There’s a lesson in there somewhere,” Ruby said.

  “Oh, yeah? What is it?”

  “Never fall in love with a cop.”

  “Little late for that,” I said. “You should have stopped me before I went over the cliff.”

  “Not much chance of that,” Ruby said wryly. With a laugh, she cranked Mama’s ignition and we started off.

  We were in Kendall County now, on the western side of the Edwards Plateau, and the trees were a lot more sparse. This is ranching country, settled by the Germans in the 1840s. There are more sheep and goats than cattle, and the goats are Angoras, famous for their mohair, which still brings a decent return. The ranch buildings we could see from the road had a prosperous look.

  I turned to Ruby. “Before we stopped, you were going to tell me why you brought me out here. The workshop is just a cover, isn’t it? This visit is really about Boyd. And his lawsuit.” I hadn’t figured out which, so I included both.

  “No, of course it’s not a cover,” Ruby said indignantly. “Maddie’s advertised it to her mailing list and there are twenty-some people signed up. Your name is apparently quite a draw.” She gave me a rueful, half-guilty look. “But yes, I admit it. I was also thinking about the lawsuit. And about Boyd. I know you don’t want to get involved, legally speaking. But I was hoping . . .” Her voice trailed off. “I don’t really know what I was hoping, I guess. Just that you could do something.”

  “I’m not sure what that would be,” I said. By now, I was beginning to get curious about Boyd, who seemed to be in the middle of just about everything. But I needed to fill in some background first. “Let’s go back to Maddie. I’d like to know more about her.”

  “I actually remember the day Sofia brought Maddie to the ranch,” Ruby said. “I was twelve that summer, and my mother and sister and I were spending a week with Eliza. Little Maddie—she was just starting to talk—had survived the car wreck that killed her parents but she was pretty badly banged up. Her arm was broken, as I recall, and her face was badly cut. In fact, she still has the scar.”

  “Scar?”

  “On her cheek and her neck. It’s a pretty bad one. Maybe that’s why . . .” Ruby sighed. “Why she’s so shy around strangers. She’s sensitive about how she looks. But Eliza fell in love with her immediately. My mother says she must have thought of her as the daughter she never had.”

  “Maybe Eliza needed somebody to love,” I said, “after losing her lover. And I’m sure the little girl needed to be loved, after losing her parents. I paused. “Eliza never married? You said she didn’t have children of her own.”

  “No, and neither did Sofia,” Ruby replied. “So Maddie essentially had two moms. Sofia was the one who cuddled her and looked after her. Eliza made her do her homework and mind her p’s and q’s. After high school, Maddie went away to college, but not very far—just down to San Antonio, where she majored in horticulture at UTSA. She did very well, too. Graduated at the top of her class.”

  “That’s a demanding program,” I said. “She must be smart.”

  “She is. She could have gotten a really good job, but as I said, she’s shy—definitely more confident with plants than with people. At the ranch, she lets the staff deal with visitors, while she works with the trees.”

  “Plant people are like that sometimes,” I said. “You can talk to plants, but plants don’t talk back. They’re nice to be around.” I certainly prefer plants to some of the people I met in my former incarnation as a criminal attorney.

  Ruby nodded. “When she finished her degree, Maddie didn’t even bother to send out her résumé. She came straight back to the ranch and settled in to help Eliza manage the olives. Which was good, because Eliza was getting older and having health problems.”

  “Was it good for her? For Maddie, I mean. It sounds like all work and no play. What about boyfriends?”

  “Good for her?” Ruby repeated thoughtfully. “I’m not so sure. Maybe it would be better if she would get out more. But—well, you’ll understand, when you see her. As far as guys are concerned, she was involved for a while with a man who owns a vineyard just across the river. He seemed pretty serious about her.” She hesitated. “But if you ask me, it’s the olives that matter most to Maddie. I doubt if she’ll ever leave the Last Chance—unless she’s forced to.”

  “You mean, if Boyd gets possession of the land.”

  “It’s not just the land,” Ruby said. “It’s the business, too, and that’s substantial. Eliza made the olive ranch work, right from the start, and in a very big way. She began with just a few varieties of olives—Spanish, mostly—and kept adding more and more, until she was growing a couple of dozen different kinds. Mom used to say that every time we went out to the ranch, Eliza had fallen in love with another olive. She was experimenting, you see, with the varieties that would grow best in the various microclimates around the ranch and in her soils. Some of the experiments were failures, and everybody learned to tiptoe around until Eliza got over her disappointment and started smiling again. But Eliza was simply dogged, and her persistence paid off.”

  We were driving past a flock of scruffy looking Angora goats, scattered across a meadow. A couple of them were pushing their heads through the barbed wire fence, getting after some tasty grass along the road. “I’ve read a little about the olive business,” I said. “Raising olives is more complicated than, say, raising peaches or apples. Or ranching.”

  “It seems to be all very do-it-yourself,” Ruby said. “First you have to figure out which are the best trees to grow where you are. And then you have to grow the trees and prune them and irrigate them and encourage them to produce. And when they do, there’s the harvest. Do you pick the olives by hand, or with machines?” She laughed lig
htly. “Picking olives is serious work, I can tell you, China. I was out here at harvest time a few years ago, and I saw how difficult it is. And you can’t let olives sit around for a few days, like watermelons or even tomatoes. If you’re making oil, you want to press the fruit right away—the same day as the harvest, if you can. It’s a huge challenge to produce an olive oil that is one-hundred percent grown, pressed, and bottled on the ranch. And then, to make it even harder, you have to find the right distributors so you can sell your oil. But Eliza did it. And now Maddie’s doing it, too.”

  “Gosh,” I said, impressed. “And Eliza invented everything from scratch?”

  “Pretty much,” Ruby replied. “Of course, she learned a lot when she was in Spain, but she had to make it work here in Texas. Maddie has been a partner in the business for quite a few years now. When she was in high school, she came up with the idea of developing an olive tree nursery—retail and wholesale—to increase the ranch’s income. She worked with a couple of local soap crafters to develop olive oil skin care products that are sold at the ranch. And before Eliza got sick, they expanded the business to include several guest cabins, a café, and a wine-tasting room. The wines are produced by several local vineyards.”

  “Guest cabins and a café?” I shook my head. “I sometimes think you and Cass and I have bitten off more than we can chew, with our shops and the tearoom and the catering service and all. But olive groves and olive oil production, along with all that other stuff? That’s a complicated business.”

  I considered the other issues for a moment—the kind of things I learned to think about in law school. Had Eliza and Maddie entered into a formal business partnership that protected Maddie’s interests? If so, how was that partnership related to the land on which the orchards were growing? How would it play in the inheritance battle? Intriguing legal questions.

  “How long has Eliza been dead?” I asked.

  Ruby pulled around a slow-moving pickup pulling a cattle trailer loaded with cows. “Almost two years.” She pulled down her mouth. “She drowned, actually.”

  “Drowned? Gosh. How did that happen?”

  “She’d been in ill health, suffering from dementia.”

  “Dementia,” I said. “That’s sad. And it could complicate things, where the will is concerned.”

  “It did,” Ruby replied, and went on. “Maddie and Sofia always kept an eye on Eliza, but she somehow managed to get out of the house one night and wandered down to the river. That’s where Maddie found her the next morning. And that’s when the trouble with Boyd really started.”

  “Ah, Boyd,” I said wryly. “Back to him again. All I know is that he is charming, and that he was Eliza’s nephew. And that he’s sold bad olive oil and he’s trying to steal the ranch. There must be a backstory here. Tell me more.”

  Ruby threw me a glance. “Maybe I should let Sofia do that, China. She has an opinion on the subject.” That was mysterious enough, but Ruby didn’t elaborate. She took a left, heading south down a narrow gravel lane. In a couple of miles, we drove through an open ranch gate. Olive orchards were laid out on either side of the road, the small pale green trees tidily pruned and growing in neat, weed-free rows. The orchards were irrigated, as I could see from the irrigation hoses—a drip system, it looked like—installed along the rows. A painted sign announced that we had arrived at the Last Chance Olive Ranch, and that the ranch house, guest cabins, nursery, and olive works were just ahead.

  I let out my breath. “It’s beautiful here,” I said, looking around.

  “It’s the product of years of hard work,” Ruby replied. She gave me a pointed look and added, “I hope Maddie will be able to keep it.”

  “I don’t think there’s much I can do that Maddie’s lawyer can’t.” I was trying to be realistic.

  With a confident smile, Ruby reached over and patted my arm. “I’m sure you’ll think of something,” she said.

  Chapter Four

  MCQUAID

  Friday Morning

  Mike McQuaid pulled into the parking lot of the strip center where his office was located and—as usual—parked his battered old blue Ford pickup truck in the shade of the large pecan tree at the west side of the lot.

  Nothing different today, he reminded himself. Act like this is just an ordinary day, although of course it wasn’t. Mantel was on the loose. The man had murdered two people, and old reflexes, old cautions, old habits, were already kicking in. For one thing, McQuaid was wearing his Glock 23 in a shoulder holster under his lightweight khaki blazer, which was not something he did every day. The reassuring weight of the gun was a physical reminder of the early-morning phone call, which had been a heavy load of bad news.

  McQuaid sat for a moment, very still, doing a quick survey of the lot and the street beyond, scanning for anything unfamiliar, anything out of place. If it was there, he didn’t see it. What he saw was the usual lineup of cars in front of the Laundromat at the east end of the strip, on Brazos Road. The yogurt shop next to the Laundromat wasn’t open yet, since it was just—McQuaid checked his watch—9:17, and the Thai restaurant next door to the yogurt shop (a good place to pick up a quick lunch) didn’t open until eleven. Their parking spaces were empty. But the copy shop had been open since seven, and a woman was just coming out and getting into a Honda Accord. Next door to the copy shop was a small, nondescript office. Its glass storefront window had been covered discreetly with textured plywood and the only clue to its occupants—McQuaid, Blackwell, and Associates—was a small brass plate beside the door.

  Nothing different, McQuaid reminded himself again. Same old same old, like every other day. But he loosened his jacket as he got out of the truck. As he walked to his office door, he was watching the copy shop window, where he could see a reflection of the lot behind him and the passing cars on the street. Punching in the code that unlocked the keyless deadbolt, he stepped silently inside and shut the door. Hand poised over his Glock, he listened for movement. Hearing nothing, he flicked on the lights and glanced around, relieved to see that everything looked exactly as usual.

  Only a little paranoid, he thought. But paranoia was good, necessary. Paranoia made you vigilant. Kept you alive.

  McQuaid, Blackwell, and Associates occupied four small rooms, altogether about the size of a three-car garage, which was just fine, since it was only himself and Blackie most of the time. Their “associates” worked out of a car, mostly at night, and didn’t need an office. The front room held a couple of upholstered chairs and a decent-looking receptionist’s desk that featured a phone, a silk plant, a couple of framed photos, a notepad, and an open calendar book, all designed to make the desk look occupied. But there was no receptionist. He and Blackie had agreed they didn’t need one, since they mostly worked on contract and didn’t solicit walk-in business. The door to the left led to Blackie’s office, the door to the right to McQuaid’s, and the door in the middle to a conference room just large enough for a table and six chairs, with a sickly looking potted palm in one corner, obviously in need of some green-thumb attention. He should take it home and let China doctor it.

  Charlie Lipman had been there for a meeting the afternoon before and the odor of his Rocky Patel cigar lingered on in the closed reception room. Charlie, a Pecan Springs lawyer, was an old friend and one of the firm’s regular clients—a prompt pay, too, so McQuaid didn’t mind the secondhand smoke. He didn’t enjoy it as much on the second day, though, so he turned on the AC to clear some of the odor. Normally, he’d leave the front door ajar and open the window behind his desk to bring in some fresh air. But not today. No point in taking chances. Door locked, window closed, drapes closed.

  First stop, the coffeemaker on the credenza in the conference room. A few minutes later, cup in hand, he had just stepped into his office when the phone on his desk buzzed. He picked it up fast to keep it from going to the answering machine on the receptionist’s desk, where he hadn’t yet cleared y
esterday’s messages. He was hoping it was Jess Branson, calling with the news that Mantel had been picked up. Or that Mantel was dead, which McQuaid thought was the way things would likely go down. The guy wasn’t planning on being hauled back to Huntsville to wait his turn on Death Row.

  He pulled out his chair and sat. “McQuaid,” he said into the phone.

  “I did your dirty work, Mike.” The frost in the woman’s voice might have chilled a lesser man. “You owe me.”

  “Yeah.” He relaxed into a smile. “Oh, you bet, Sheila. Big time. Thanks.”

  Dealing with Sheila Dawson was always a little complicated, tricky even. She wasn’t just a beautiful woman with a lot of years of solid police experience under her belt, or the first female chief of the Pecan Springs PD, or one of China’s two best friends. She was also Blackie’s wife, and Blackie Blackwell wasn’t just his partner in the PI business but his fishing and poker buddy. He didn’t want to get crosswise with the love of Blackie’s life. He added carefully, “She take it okay, did she?”

  “She wasn’t any too happy about it.” Sheila’s tone was warmer, but still chilly. “I had other things to do, so I didn’t hang around to see them off. But Ruby seemed to have the matter under control. So far as I know, they’ve left for the ranch.”

  McQuaid pulled out the bottom desk drawer and propped his cowboy boots on it, leaning back in the chair, coffee mug in one hand, phone in the other. “Sorry I had to get you involved, Sheila. But I thought it was a good idea if somebody made sure she got out of town—and I didn’t think that somebody should be me. China doesn’t like it when she thinks I’m ordering her around.”