Second Chances Read online

  Helen’s sudden interest in me was motivated by money. She didn’t have to spell it out. Grandpa’s ranch was over four hundred acres along Grape Creek, less than fifteen miles from Fredericksburg, Texas, a town that had become a German-themed tourist destination. Before he was murdered, Grandpa had turned down several very generous offers to buy the place. The prospective buyers wanted to turn the 150-year-old limestone house into a bed and breakfast.

  “Nicky?” Helen called again.

  I could hear her designer boots on the ancient stone steps and quickly slipped on a pair of jeans. She was my mother, but I had stopped thinking of her in that capacity twenty years ago, and I wasn’t about to let her walk in on me in my underwear.

  “I’m coming,” I said and hustled into the bathroom. I closed the door before she could reach the upstairs landing.

  “Do you need some help with your bandage?” she called through the door.

  “No thanks, Helen. I can manage.” I stripped the bandage off my chest and winced in pain when it caught the new growth of chest hair. The edges of the wound were still red and raw, remnants of an infection that I couldn’t seem to shake. The .38 slug was going to leave a nice scar about three inches above my left nipple. I checked the other wound on my upper arm where I’d been hit by a .308 rifle bullet while jogging down the San Antonio River Walk.

  I wasn’t feeling sorry for myself. I was counting my blessings I had survived. I held my arm up so that the wound was visible in the mirror over the sink. If I kept adding new scars to the constellation of marks across my forehead that I’d picked up on my final overseas deployment, I’d look like Deadpool before I turned forty. Maybe I’d start wearing red tights and a mask.

  Helen knocked on the bathroom door. “You all right in there?”

  I had been asked that more times in the weeks following Grandpa’s funeral than I’d ever been asked in my entire life. The two bullet holes had taken their toll. The doc at the hospital had reluctantly let me go home with a truckload of antibiotics and some extra strength pain meds. I had been lying in bed for a month and was getting antsy. Grandpa’s ranch house didn’t have television reception or internet, and I’d already read the collection of history books I’d brought from my house in San Antonio. I wanted to be outside. Starting on the ranch chores would be a great way to step up my rehabilitation program.

  Helen knocked again. I could hear her pacing the wooden floor.

  “I’m fine, Helen,” I said, irritated. I finished applying fresh bandages to both wounds, then waited till her footsteps retreated back down the stairs. I’m not sure which riled me more, her pretending to care or me pretending to be nice.

  When I walked into the kitchen, Helen served me a plate of sourdough pancakes topped with three sunny-side-up eggs, fresh hash brown potatoes, and a side of venison pan sausage. It was my favorite breakfast as a kid, and other than migas or taquitos, it had always been my go-to morning meal.

  “Thank you for breakfast,” I said. It was a meal that needed to be followed by a day of manual labor. I had intended to saddle my horse and ride out to the property boundary to fix the broken wire on the fence, but something told me I wouldn’t get that far.

  Helen sat and watched me use my fork and knife to reposition the eggs on top of the pancakes. I reached for the ketchup, not looking up, waiting for the inevitable questions I knew would eventually emerge like the tomato sauce from the upturned bottle.

  “Would you like some juice?” She held up an orange juice bottle.

  “No, thank you.”

  She poured herself a glass of juice and sat down to watch me eat. She wore jeans tucked into stylishly sequined cowboy boots and a white, long-sleeved shirt. She had a silver bracelet embedded with turquoise and a matching pendant that hung from her tanned neck. At fifty-five she wore her dyed blond hair pulled into a girlishly ponytail, and the only weight she’d added in twenty years came from silicone gel implants. I’d heard rumors of other boyfriends over the years, rich rancher types, but she claimed to be single now.

  “I thought I’d go to town today and pick up something for dinner. What would you like?” she asked, sitting in Grandma’s place at the other end of the table near the stove. She had served me in Grandpa’s place at the other end. I wasn’t ready to take over his place and definitely didn’t want Helen taking over for Grandma.

  “Let me get though breakfast first.” I knew she was filling in dates on the calendar as far ahead as she could. It was another one of her calculated moves to ensure her place on the ranch.

  “Since I’m going to town anyway…” She let the sentence trail off while she grabbed Grandpa’s stovetop percolator and poured us both fresh coffee. It smelled rich and delicious, and strong enough to float a horseshoe. Grandpa would have approved. “I don’t know why Grandpa never used a regular coffee maker,” she said, and filled her cup with French vanilla creamer. “I think I’ll pick one up in town today.”

  “When are you going back to Colorado?” I asked. I decided to plunge into the deep end and sink or swim. I was raised by a no-nonsense Texas lawman and a taciturn rancher grandpa who were both blunt and to the point. When I left home, I’d served four years in the Marine Corps, not the best place to learn social graces. My last girlfriend tried to teach me the art of idle chitchat to improve my people skills, but I wasn’t that interested. It was one of the reasons she was my ex-girlfriend.

  Helen stirred the creamer into her coffee, not looking at me.

  “Don’t you want me to stay?” she finally asked.

  I took another mouthful of egg and pancake while trying to decide how best to put into words what I wanted to tell her.

  “No,” I said, as tactfully as I could.

  Helen went to the sink. Grandpa didn’t have a dishwasher. There wasn’t room to install one in the ancient kitchen, and he scoffed at the idea of wasting water.

  “You need someone here. You’re not fully recovered yet, Nicky.” She made a half-hearted attempt to scrub the pan, pretending to be helpful. She was never handy in the kitchen.

  “I’ve been taking care of myself for a long time,” I said.

  “That’s not fair. You know your father had a lot to do with my leaving.” Her voice had that familiar edge to it.

  I took a bite of venison sausage. I didn’t want to get into an argument about why she left Dad, or why she didn’t make any effort to contact me until after I got out of high school. I was over it.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I just thought…” She stopped working and leaned her back against the sink. “I just thought that with Grandpa gone things would be different.”

  I looked up from my last bite of pancake and egg. Tears were forming in her hazel eyes. She was going to pull out all the stops. I stood and handed her my empty plate.

  “Why don’t you cook that roast that’s in the refer?” I said. I was only putting off the inevitable, but I didn’t want to start my day bathed in alligator tears.

  Before she could respond, tires crunched on the gravel driveway. I wasn’t expecting company. From the front window I could see Helmut Geisler’s Dodge Ram coming up the driveway. Helen saw him too.

  “I forgot to mention, Mr. Geisler called the landline this morning before you got up.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” I found my boots by the front door and slipped them on.

  “It was so early, I wanted to let you sleep.”

  I found my hat and waved to Helmut through the window.

  “Nicky, I know what he wants. You shouldn’t get involved. You’re not ready to go back to work.”

  I didn’t bother to reply.

  Chapter Two

  Helmut Geisler slowly unfolded himself from the cab of his dusty Dodge Ram four-wheel drive pickup. He reminded me of a twisted piece of rawhide wrapped in Wrangler jeans and a faded blue western shirt. His weather-beaten face was shaded by a sweat-stained Stetson Rancher hat. Helmut and my grandpa had been friends s
ince long before I was born, tied together by proximity and a shared livelihood. The Geisler family had been in the area almost as long as the Fischer family. He was one of the few left, now that Grandpa was gone, who still spoke Texas German and loved to tell stories about early settlers to anyone who would listen.

  “Guten morgen. Wie geht es ihnen?” he asked, delivering his German with a Texas accent.

  I understood him because I’d grown up around my grandpa, but if things got more complicated than “good morning,” I was going to have to remind him that I wasn’t fluent. By the time I went to high school, the language was out of fashion.

  He extended a callused palm and shook my hand with the grip of a much younger man.

  “Sorry I missed your call. I didn’t get the message till just now,” I said. “Want some coffee?”

  He looked past me to the front window, where Helen stood staring at us.

  “Is it safe then, to go inside?” he asked with a twinkle in his eye. He knew my family history as well as I did. There weren’t many secrets around the old-timer network of which, until recently, my grandpa had been an intricate part.

  “She was just going to town for groceries,” I said and winked.

  “In that case, I could use a cup,” he drawled, as if his indicator light had come on showing he was a quart low.

  “Good that Otto got his hay in the barn.” He was going to add, before he died, but he stopped himself.

  “Think it’ll last the winter?” I asked, shifting the direction of the conversation away from the raw subject of Grandpa’s murder.

  Helmut rubbed his bony chin. “Almanac says it will be a cold one.”

  We made our way to the porch, where Helen stood.

  “Good morning, Mr. Geisler,” she said.

  “Morgen, Helen,” he said and tipped his hat.

  “How’s your wife?” she asked.

  “She’s up and around now. Busy with the fall garden. Says death will come when it comes.” Helmut’s wife had lived through her fourth heart attack.

  “Let us know what we can do to help,” she said, then put a hand on my arm. “I’m going to town. If you think of anything you need, call my cell phone.”

  Helmut and I watched while she climbed into her white Chevy Tahoe with Colorado plates and drove toward the front gate in a cloud of white dust.

  “So, she’s here now?” he said, following me into the house.

  “Well, she’s here for now. I’ll put it that way.” I tested the coffee pot to see if it was still hot, then poured us both a cup.

  Helmut seemed to be waiting for me to add to the family gossip. When I didn’t, he moved on to the reason he was here.

  “My granddaughter is missing,” he said matter-of-factly. He took a sip of coffee. The twinkle in his eye was gone, replaced by something cold and serious.

  I waited for him to fill in the details.

  “Her name’s Maya Chavez,” he said.

  He held up a picture that looked like it was clipped from a yearbook. Her dark hair was long and flipped over her right shoulder. She had intelligent eyes, and her smile revealed a youthful touch of defiance that stood in stark contrast to her stern Hill Country grandfather.

  Chapter Three

  Helmut gave me the details of Maya’s disappearance. It wasn’t the first time she’d run away from home. Anna, her mother, was a drunk, and raising her daughter had taken a back seat to maintaining her daily alcohol level. I sympathized to some extent. I’d used Jack Daniels to mask the pain of reentry from my final deployment. I got through it, but not without a kick in the butt from Grandpa.

  I knew Anna’s story. She never got the kick she needed and, as those things usually go, ended up ruining more than just her own life. When Maya was ten, Anna took her daughter and moved to San Bernardino, California, to live with Maya’s father. She blamed her drinking on the lack of opportunity in Fredericksburg. She always thought she was destined for bigger and better things but the small town was holding her back. She discovered life was just as hard in the big city. When Maya’s father left the family high and dry, Helmut tried to convince his daughter to move back to Fredericksburg so at least Maya could have a stable home. Anna refused until Helmut threatened to cut off his support. She must have sobered up long enough to realize that her daughter would be better off in a small town close to her grandfather.

  Helmut said Maya wasn’t overjoyed to leave her friends in California for her senior year. She’d spent eight years in very busy Southern California, and now she was confined to a town of eleven thousand where the biggest event of the year was an October festival celebrating the town’s German heritage. Maya was only half German. Her father’s name was Chavez, and she inherited her dark hair and olive complexion from his side of the family.

  Helmut had filed a missing person report with Officer Zeller from the local police department. Zeller had made a few phone calls and talked to the students who knew Maya at the high school and to her mother, but he couldn’t find evidence of a crime. Since Maya had just turned eighteen, he said there was nothing else he could do. Zeller told Helmut that Maya had probably returned to San Bernardino, where she felt more comfortable. Helmut didn’t buy it.

  “Did Zeller check her cell phone records?” I asked.

  He looked puzzled for a moment. Like my grandpa, Helmut had a landline connected to his kitchen and still wrote the occasional letter by hand to his cousin in New Mexico.

  “Oh, yes,” he said, remembering. “I gave him the number I had. He said it wouldn’t help. Something about the kind of phone it was.”

  “A burner phone?” I asked.

  “Something like that.” He dug out a wad of paper from his shirt pocket. “I have the number here.” He sorted through the scraps at arm’s length, not bothering with reading glasses, then handed me a number written on the back of a gas receipt. Like Grandpa, Helmut used his shirt pocket as a filing cabinet.

  I told him I would look into it. Helmut offered to pay up front, but I told him I wanted to be sure there was something I could do before we signed an agreement and made it an official case. He understood that private investigations were my business. He was an old family friend, but also a rancher, which meant he was in debt up to his eyeballs. If it turned out I could be of some help, we would have to negotiate payment. Grandpa’s cattle would need hay for the cold winter if I decided to keep the herd. Helmut also raised goats and domestic hogs. I might not get a mortgage payment from him, but if I took the case, I would have plenty to eat.

  “Ten years ago, I would have gone after her myself,” he said, his voice displaying emotion that he wasn’t accustomed to using.

  I could remember when he and my grandfather seemed to stand ten feet tall. There was nothing they couldn’t hunt, ride, fix, or drive. If someone needed help, they were there. If there was trouble, they took care of it. Now, it was up to me.

  “Halt dich munter,” he said when he climbed back in his dusty Dodge Ram. It was a salutation I’d heard all my life. Grandpa said it meant keep your chin up.

  “Halt dich munter,” I said.

  Chapter Four

  It was the first weekend in October, which meant it was festival weekend, the biggest event of the year. Every weekend brought tourists from Austin and San Antonio, but on Oktoberfest weekend, tourists tripled the population. The Fredericksburg Chamber of Commerce advertised the town as the polka capital of Texas, implying there would be plenty of beer on hand. You couldn’t have one without the other. Main Street was bumper to bumper and parking was scarce, so it seemed the slogan or the implication was working to attract visitors.

  Maya’s mother, Anna, worked at a motel near downtown. Helmut wasn’t sure what her schedule was and didn’t have her cell phone number, because both changed every few months. Maya was in the processes of moving in with her grandparents. She was going to live with them during the school year.

  It was midmorning on a Friday, and I parked
my pickup near the Super 8 motel entrance. The parking lot was already full. People had gotten to town early to see the parade that kicked off the Oktoberfest celebration. I recognized a woman in her forties with stringy blond hair pushing a service cart between rooms. She stopped to light a cigarette and stare at a family of four piling out of a minivan as if she resented the extra work they represented. She wore jean shorts and a Metallica T-shirt and looked like she could use a beer.

  “Hey, Anna,” I said, getting out of my pickup and taking a few steps toward her. I didn’t want to come on too aggressively for fear she’d bolt into one of the rooms. She had a reputation for being flighty and probably owed money to half the people in town.

  “Hey yourself, Nicky,” she said.

  “Busy weekend, huh?” I was working on my friendly chitchat.

  “You come by to tell me that?” So much for idle prattle.

  “Actually, I came by to ask you about your daughter, Maya. Your dad came by the ranch and said she was missing. He hasn’t seen her since the middle of August. The tenth, to be exact. Have you heard from her?”

  “Guess that kinda proves the old man couldn’t handle her either.” She blew smoke through her nose and cocked her left eyebrow. The menthol smoke smelled like it was laced with cheap vodka. If she was fishing for sympathy, she wouldn’t catch any from me.

  “So, you haven’t seen her?” I asked.

  “I told Zeller what I knew. What’s it to you?”

  “You know I’m a private investigator. Helmut thought I might be able to help. He’s worried about her. I told him I’d look around. He said y’all weren’t speakin’ to each other.”