Red: The Adventure Begins Page 5

  Red would say, “Yes, Dad. I’m fine.”

  “Are you coming inside?”

  “No, I’m comfortable. I’ll just hang out here.”

  “Are you sure there’s nothing I can bring you? Anything I can do to help?”

  “No, really, I’m fine.”

  “Okay, honey. I’ll leave the door unlocked in case you change your mind. Good night.”

  “Good night, Dad.”

  Still later, as her high school years were coming to a close, she started riding her horse Bonnie out to the far edges of the west pasture and into the woods just beyond it.

  Bonnie was a tall Morgan, as big as any man’s horse. Red liked feeling high in the saddle, and riding a tall horse was a subtle way of showing everyone that she was the equal to any man.

  Bonnie was also a sweetheart, and the best friend a girl could have.

  She always listened to Red without interrupting, or offering unwanted advice.

  And she was very nonjudgmental. She would love Red until her dying breath, no matter what Red had done or what kind of mood she was in.

  Bonnie got antsy as soon as she saw Red take her saddle blanket from the tack room.

  Bonnie loved to ride at least as much as Red did.

  “Hello girl,” Red said as she reached up and scratched Bonnie behind the ears.

  “I need to get some fresh air and think about some stuff. Do you feel like getting out?”

  It was a silly question and they both knew it. Bonnie bowed her head and though she were trying to say “yes.” Actually she just wanted Red to scratch some more.

  Then she raised back up and exhaled, blowing horse snot over the front of Red’s shirt.

  Red didn’t mind.

  She laughed and said, “I’ll take that as a yes.”

  She pulled out a piece of red apple she’d quartered in the kitchen and placed it in her palm.

  There were only four things Bonnie loved in the world. The first, of course, was Red. The second was riding somewhere, anywhere, with Red. The third was getting scratched behind the ears, followed closely thereafter by red apples.

  She wasted no time in accepting the gift and was already looking forward to the next one.

  “Thank you for being my best friend,” Red said as she smoothed the blanket across Bonnie’s back and reached for the bridle hanging on the stable wall. “I can’t imagine life without you. You’ve been there for me as long as I can remember.”

  She looked into the horse’s big brown eyes as she placed the bit into her mouth. She thought she saw a hint of sadness, but she could have been mistaken.

  Or it might have been that Bonnie knew her friend was stressed about something and didn’t like to see her so burdened.

  Red patted the horse’s shoulder and said, “I’ll be right back,” then went to retrieve her saddle.

  “Then we’re going to take a ride, and I’m going to tell you something that nobody else knows.

  “Something that will change everything.”

  Chapter 15

  Eight months to the day after Red and Bonnie took that ride, Red was beaming with pride from her hospital bed.

  In her arms was the newest member of the Benedict family.

  All eight pounds, three ounces of him.

  He looked at his mommy with confusion in his tiny blue eyes. A few hours before he was swimming in a warm pool, without a care in the world.

  Now his life was a blur of strange colors, bright lights, and being passed from one… thing to another.

  He looked at the thing that was presently holding him. For some reason he felt somehow comfortable in her arms. As though he’d seen her before.

  Red looked at him, not having a clue what he was thinking.

  But knowing in her heart of hearts that she loved this boy more than she’d ever loved anyone.

  But she wouldn’t tell Butch or Russell that. It was a secret she’d keep to herself.

  “Well hello, little Riley. What pretty little eyes you have! Well, I guess I can’t call them pretty, huh? I should use the term handsome, since you’re all boy. But just between you and me and the wall, pretty is what they are.

  “And, oh, my goodness! What a big yawn! Such a sleepy boy you are. But wait a minute, how can you be sleepy after sleeping inside me for nine long months? You need to stay awake and talk to me for a while.”

  Little Riley yawned again, closed his tiny eyes, and went promptly to sleep, secure in his mother’s arms.

  He was going to be headstrong, just like his mother and grandfather. And he wouldn’t do something he didn’t want to do just because someone told him to do it.

  Stubbornness, apparently, ran in the family.

  Red had been right when she said her pregnancy would disrupt all the plans they’d made.

  But it wasn’t as bad as she’d feared.

  John Savage rubbed his greedy hands together when he heard. He hoped that there would be complications. That maybe the medical bills would be insurmountable and would cause the young couple to get behind on their mortgage payments.

  But fate wasn’t that cruel. Red had an easy pregnancy, free of problems. Russell had money in the bank left behind by his parents when they died tragically in a car accident four years before, and it was enough to cover the medical bills and the time Red was off work from Austin’s Mercy Hospital.

  And there was enough left over to buy an antique crib and rocking chair that Red had been admiring in the last weeks of her pregnancy.

  She didn’t know anything about it, because Russell had snuck back to the antique store by himself and given the owner enough money to hold the items for him.

  They were already there, in the spare bedroom of the couple’s new house, waiting to surprise Red when she brought the baby home.

  There, in the room that Butch had painted baby blue the day after little Riley was born.

  Red already knew about the freshly painted room, but she wouldn’t let on.

  She could always tell when her father was hiding a surprise.

  When he walked into the hospital room on the afternoon after he’d finished the job, she took one look at him and knew he was up to something.

  “Dad, you look like a possum eating poop. Are you up to no good again?”

  “No, honey. What do you mean? I just came to see my new grandson.”

  He reached out to take little Riley off the bed, where he was sleeping peacefully beside Red’s left shoulder.

  As Butch got close, Red could see traces of baby blue latex paint on a couple of his fingernails.

  As he stood next to the bed, gently rocking the baby in his arms, Red put two and two together.

  “Thank you, Dad.”

  “For what, honey?”

  “For painting the baby’s room. Blue is my favorite color, so I’ll love it too. And I know Riley will.”

  Butch’s jaw dropped, and he immediately turned to Russell, who was sitting in an easy chair on the other side of Red’s bed.

  Russell’s eyes grew big and he held his hands out in a plea of innocence.

  “Hey, I never said a word, I promise.”

  Butch turned back to Red.

  “Then how in the world…”

  “Hey, Dad,” she laughed. “You’ve never been able to keep a secret. I always said you had the worst poker face on earth.”

  She turned to Russell to explain.

  “Dad taught me how to play poker when I was about ten or eleven. Like everything else he taught me over the years, he wanted me to learn so I’d be good enough not to be taken advantage of.

  “And after a few games, I started winning nearly every time.

  “He thought he was just a great teacher, and I let him believe that. And he was.

  “But he also didn’t realize that his eyes always gave him away when he had a good hand. And he also had this weird thing he did with his fingers when he wasn’t sure about a bet. His fingers would twitch before he pushed out his chips. That’s how I always k
new I had him, and if my cards didn’t suck and I didn’t fold, I’d beat him eight hands out of ten.

  “We used to bet things other than chips too. Like we’d play one hand and say whoever lost that hand had to wash the dishes. Or mow the grass. Or change the oil in the car.

  “And after a while, he quit playing me. It was only then I told him that he was a great teacher, who did an awesome job teaching me the basics of the game and some very good strategies.

  “But I was better at reading faces, and subtle changes in them, than I ever was at poker.”

  She looked directly at Russell.

  “And that’s why you must never, ever lie to me. Because I will know you’re lying in a heartbeat.”

  Russell swallowed hard and said, “Point taken. I have nothing to hide from you, and would never lie to you.”

  “Not even when I try on an outfit and ask you if my butt looks big?”

  “Well, maybe then. But only because I love you.”

  Butch said, “Now, wait a minute.”

  Red and Russell, and even little Riley, looked at him.

  “I know I have a terrible poker face. And I know that I have a hard time keeping a secret.

  “And I know that you’re an expert at reading people’s faces.

  “But even after you knew I was keeping a secret from you, how in the world did you know I painted Riley’s room? And how on earth did you know I painted it blue?”

  “That, my dear father, is my secret.”

  “But if you don’t tell me it’ll drive me crazy for days.”

  She smiled.

  “I know.”

  Butch looked at Russell suspiciously.

  “Are you sure you didn’t tell her?”

  “I swear to God I didn’t.”

  Butch decided to use his new grandson as leverage.

  “What if I said I’m not going to give you back your son until you tell me?”

  He looked down at the tiny bundle in his arms.

  “What about it, little guy? Want to go for your very first car ride with your grandpa? I have a brand new car seat down there and I’ll buckle you in real good.”

  Riley just looked at him and yawned.

  Red called his bluff.

  “Ha! You’d bring him back the minute he got hungry. You don’t have the proper equipment to feed him, and he’d cry, and you’d be right back here handing him to me.”

  “Yeah, I guess. But I’ll find out how you knew. It’s just a matter of time.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  Chapter 16

  John Savage was starting to worry.

  Try as he might, he couldn’t find any government officials who would tell him what the government planned to do with the huge tract of land they owned just west of the Benedict place.

  The ones he talked to either rebuffed his efforts to bribe them, or they professed to not knowing.

  Normally hundred dollar bills were very effective in loosening the tongues of unscrupulous government bureaucrats, but he’d had no luck at all finding the information he was seeking.

  Savage was not only a shameless thief. He was also very paranoid.

  He was starting to think people weren’t talking because they were sworn to secrecy and under threat of prosecution if they shared the government’s secrets.

  If that was the case, it meant something big was in the works.

  It meant that either they were going ahead with plans to build a huge Army base on the site.

  Or, they could be planning on selling the oil rights to some of their Washington cronies. Because Washington politicians were as crooked as Savage. They might be taking kickbacks to allow their friends to siphon off the oil before Savage could do it himself.

  And that worried him.

  Savage had also been hearing rumors for several years that the government was going to sponsor a particle collider somewhere in Texas.

  The first time he’d heard the term, he had to ask somebody what it was.

  He still didn’t understand exactly what it was or what it was used for.

  So he drove over to Austin and visited a University of Texas physics professor he’d blackmailed before to get some answers.

  Professor Jacobson suspected that everything Savage knew about physics could fit in a small corner of his palm. So he spoke slowly and tried not to use any big words.

  “Colliders have been built around the world. Scientists use them for research in particle physics by making particles accelerate to extremely high rates of kinetic energy and then making them impact with other particles. Hence the name, particle collider.

  “When scientists break down the data and analyze it, they gain new knowledge of how the subatomic world is structured and the laws of nature which govern it.

  “Why do you ask?”

  By this time Savage’s head was spinning and his eyes were crossed.

  The professor might as well have spoken Latin or Greek.

  Instead of answering the professor’s question, he asked another.

  “If such a thing were to be built here in the United States, what would be the economic impact of it? And would it be a wise investment?”

  “I’m not an economist, Mr. Savage, but I’ll tell you what I do know.

  “If a super collider were to be built in the United States, it would require a huge piece of land and a huge amount of money. Typically they cannot be built without the direct assistance of the federal government because of the high costs involved. Either that or a huge financial and educational consortium. One capable of raising hundreds of millions of dollars for such a project.”

  Savage’s eyelids started to flutter. They always did when he got excited about making or stealing a great deal of money.

  He repeated the professor’s words.

  “Hundreds of millions of dollars?”

  “As a minimum. Maybe more than a billion.”

  “So, building something so expensive would likely pump a considerable amount of money into the local economy? For whatever area was lucky enough to land such a project, that is…”

  “Without a doubt. The best construction firms from around the world would relocate there with their experts and equipment. The construction alone would require hundreds of workers and would take several years to complete. Then hundreds of scientists and technicians would work there full time. It would be a cash cow for the surrounding area.”

  Savage changed the subject.

  “Are you still cheating on your wife, professor?”

  The man winced.

  “Not in a very long time, no.”

  Savaged laughed and said, “The nice thing about photographs and videotape is that they last forever.”

  “Why are you bringing that up again? Do you want more money?”

  “Not right now, no. I’m letting you off easy today. But I was never here. We never spoke, about particle colliders or anything else, understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “If anyone finds out I came to you, or what we talked about, your wife will get a package of photos and the video. Hell, I’ll even send copies to several of your colleagues, and won’t tell you which ones. It’ll drive you crazy, trying to figure out which ones have seen you in action with your blonde bimbo.”

  The professor swallowed hard.

  “Don’t worry, Mr. Savage. No one will ever learn of our visit today. Nor of our conversation.”

  In an effort to assert his power over the professor, and to humiliate him even further, Savage reached over and patted the man’s cheek.

  “Good boy.”

  The professor drew back, repulsed.

  Savage just laughed.

  He whistled We’re in the Money as he walked back to his Mercedes in the parking lot.

  He was convinced he’d solved the riddle. He now knew what the government was going to do with the huge piece of land.

  They were going to build a super-collider, which was going to enrich many people in the Austin and Blanco communitie
s.

  But no one more than him. For Savage would soon go on a buying spree, scooping up as much land as possible on all sides of the government tract.

  And the sweetest thing was, he wouldn’t have to use his own money. He’d purchase the land with oil revenues he’d make by using Red and Russell’s ranch to siphon off all the government’s secret oil reserves.

  Chapter 17

  But Savage had a dilemma.

  Seven months had passed since Red and Russell had brought Riley home from the hospital.

  Savage was sure that Red would rethink her plans to be a career surgical nurse in order to be a stay at home mom.

  After all, he’d used his influence to coerce the Women’s Christian League of Blanco to pay Red and Russell a visit right after Riley’s birth.

  “A woman working outside the home when she has children to raise is against God’s will,” they told her.

  To hear the women tell it, Red was bound for hell on a fast train, just for wanting to pursue a profession in which she helped people.

  The tactic didn’t work for a couple of reasons.

  First of all, both Red and Russell found the women’s argument ludicrous.

  “The God I grew up to worship was a kind and benevolent God,” Russell told the ladies. “He was a God who taught us to love thy neighbor and to help them. Not to imply that all working women are heathens simply because a bunch of old biddies say so.”

  Russell showed the women to the door, and asked them not to return.

  Russell couldn’t bank on being invited to any church socials anytime soon. But he scored a lot of points with his wife that day.

  The other reason the tactic didn’t work was because of Red’s extremely hard head.

  She was as stubborn as an old mule, and was always the first to admit it.

  When Red was riding the fence about something, she frequently chose the path others tried hardest to steer her away from.

  It wasn’t that she was obstinate, she’d say. She just liked making up her own mind despite what others thought.

  If the young parents were divided on the issue, the ladies might have been able to use religion to drive a wedge between them.