Free Sweet Water by Anna Jeffrey Page A

happen. She had also never been able to do anything about it, but she had always been vocal. “He can’t just put people out of their homes. That isn’t fair. He has to—”
    She stopped herself. Shit! What did the new owner have to do? The answer was, not a damned thing. He wasn’t obligated to a single citizen of Agua Dulce. “He has to give them time to make plans,” she said, putting an effort into making a firm statement.
    “He’s coming here for a few days,” Gordon said. “He plans to start using one of the mobiles. He ordered me to have a phone installed and buy some groceries. Even gave me a shopping list. He sounds like he’s used to giving orders.”
    Gordon wadded the napkin and dropped it on top of his salad. “He sounds like a real piece of work, Marisa. He told me to make sure the trailer’s ready for occupancy when he gets here. Said to make sure there’s no roaches. He wants everything clean as new. The small doublewide’s the newest trailer, so I got Rosia to come up from Pecos and we’re cleaning it now. He even wants the walls scrubbed and the carpet replaced.”
    “No kidding?” Marisa muttered, shocked. “New carpet?”
    Gordon nodded. “I’ve already gone to Odessa and bought it. Rosia’s washing and ironing all the curtains. The carpet’ll go down tomorrow.”
    “Hunh,” Marisa said. Agua Dulce’s new owner sounded like an arrogant nut. Okay, fine. No problem. Marisa could hardly wait to meet him. She had experience with nuts.
****
    Terry returned to Fort Worth on Monday. Spending the weekend in his old stomping grounds in West Texas confirmed his belief in Agua Dulce’s potential. He was so excited he could hardly wait to get started. On Tuesday morning he met with Brad England in the offices of England Engineering, the firm he usually hired to design, survey and lay out a new project.
    In the afternoon, he caught up with his best friend and construction foreman Chick Featherston. Chick was overseeing the building of a two-story cut limestone with three fireplaces, four bedrooms and five baths. It was all crammed into 4,500 square feet in a gated sub-division west of Fort Worth.
    After they covered the progress, Terry led Chick to his truck and pulled out a large plat of Agua Dulce. “Want to go back to West Texas?”
    Chick’s chin dropped and his head slowly shook. “Aww, no, man. You didn’t really do it.”
    Terry grinned as he spread the plat across the truck’s hood. “I won the bid. I closed on the deal yesterday. Just got the town so far, but the ranch is next. I have to do a little more research and get a loan in place.”
    Chick looked at the plat. The blue-line drawing showed the perimeter of the town’s 199.4 acres, with the principal buildings drawn in--water well, flea market/café, adjoining building leased for business, RV village consisting of eight permanent mobile homes, fifty RV spaces and a separate small mobile that served as an office building.
    The foreman shook his head again. “Ledger, that last time you jumped out of an airplane, you must have landed on your head.”
    Chick knew Terry’s passion for sky diving. The cowboy engineer was one of Terry’s few friends who went all the way back to the first time Terry had parachuted from a plane.
    Chick was more like a brother than a friend. They had met as kids in the army boot camp. Both being from West Texas, their friendship had occurred almost automatically. Terry had served as an Army Ranger, where, among other things, he learned to parachute, and Chick had been a combat engineer. Different duties and different assignments, but their paths had crossed in unexpected places in various parts of the world. Together they had partied hard in Germany, chased women in Italy, liberated Kuwait.
    Chick had been the construction foreman at Terry Ledger Homes ever since the company had grown large enough to need one. He was just now surfacing from his second divorce and starting a new life at age