Shake the Trees (2 page)

PART 1

SUMMER/FALL 2007

CHAPTER 1

She was asleep.  His heart was still racing and she was sound asleep.  Maybe the altitude and a full day in the fresh mountain air had exhausted her, but he doubted it.  She was different and the sex was different.  It was full of aggression - almost violent.  Sam Norden knew something was wrong about Ellen Hughes, and was trying hard to ignore his instincts.

Even though she was breathing heavily, Sam quietly slipped out of bed and groped around for the heavy robe he had last seen on the floor in the corner.  He padded through the small kitchen, grabbed a beer and walked out on the front porch.  The brisk air of early October felt good against his face. 

The aging but solidly built cabin clung to the mountainside, and the few twinkling lights of the San Luis Valley spread out far below.  A nearly full moon illuminated the already snow-capped peaks a few miles to the north across the Colorado line.  Sam slumped into a decaying rocker, took a swig of beer, and closed his eyes.  And then restless sleep took him to the same place - always the same place.

The hollow-cheeked elderly woman lay under a brilliantly white sheet.  The small room was nearly dark; the lights were off and the blinds were drawn.  Clear plastic tubes slithered around her until they converged and pierced the translucent skin of her forearm.  Skin that held only bone, tendon, and sinew.  A younger Sam Norden leaned forward in a tan-colored plastic chair.  His forehead rested on the chrome rail of the hospital bed.

“I should have been here.  I should have been here and things might have been different.”

“You are here.”

The mother’s soft words startled her son.  She had been in a morphine-induced sleep for hours.

“No, Mom.  I should have been here for you when Dad was sick.”  Huge tears, hot and stinging, rolled off his cheeks and onto the sheet.

Her lips moved, but Sam couldn’t hear the words.  He rose and placed his ear next to her faded lips and waited for the whispered words.  But the words never came.

Sam Norden had grown up in the small western Nebraska town of Union situated hard against the banks of the Platte River.  After high school he went off to the University of Nebraska at Lincoln and graduated four years later.  A degree in computer engineering brought several offers of employment, but he had been accepted into the MBA program at the prestigious Wharton School of Finance at the University of Pennsylvania. Sam and his parents agreed that it was the opportunity of a lifetime.

A new MBA from Wharton without stellar grades to accompany it meant that the investment banker, mergers and acquisitions, and consulting jobs were out.  He was tired of the cold and took a position as a stockbroker in San Diego.  A stockbroker specializing in high tech in the 1990s.  The proverbial right place at the right time.  The rising market brought success and money.  Lots of money and lots of toys.  And a new wife with material needs. 

The joy of success was dampened by concern and eventually grief when his dad had his first heart attack and then two more, and, finally, the last one.  Fifteen months later Sam learned that his mother had terminal Stage IV breast cancer.  She had been busy taking care of her husband and had ignored the lumps. 

The same week he returned home to be with her the NASDAQ fell off a cliff.  Calls went unanswered and orders were delayed.  When the tech bubble burst for good, so did the bank accounts of several of his highly leveraged clients, as well as his own.  There were recriminations and lawsuits and he ended up broke and without a job or a marriage.  He ran away to the San Luis Valley.

The San Luis Valley was a sweet spot on mother earth.  It was as if an Arizona landscape had somehow been shoved up against the mountains of Aspen or Vail.  Beautiful pinion-studded red rock canyon country quickly gave way to high mountain alpine meadows and forests. And its isolation meant that it was relatively unspoiled.  The village of San Luis had a population of only 1,800.  State highway 82 became its main street for a brief ten blocks. 

After too much booze and too much self-pity, Sam reinvented himself.  He took the classes and passed the test.  With what was left of his inheritance, he bought San Luis Valley Realty.  The office consisted of a converted single-family adobe-style home right on the highway on the southern edge of town.  

The office staff consisted of Sandi Johnson, a 29-year-old single mother with one year of community college under her belt.  She was an organizing force that kept the business running smoothly.  Sandi was athletic and attractive in a natural sort of way.  She was also a local and her family had lived in the valley for generations.  Sam was, of course, an import, and he looked to Sandi for local knowledge and contacts. 

Although his life had once been turned upside down, it was a subject Sam had largely kept to himself.  He wasn’t bitter, but he wasn’t an open book either.  In fact, many of the residents of the valley considered Sam’s past to be somewhat of a mystery.  He’d dated a few times, but nothing had really worked out.  There had been gossip that his relationship with Sandi was more than purely professional.  The rumors were unfounded.  He loved her son, Dustin, and was in many ways his surrogate father.  But Sandi was his best friend and ran his business.  The last thing he wanted to do was screw that up.

He awoke with a start and his beer tumbled onto the wooden deck.  As Sam watched the foam seep through the spaces between the boards, he thought about the first time Ellen Hughes had come to this valley in the high mountains of northern New Mexico. 

Sitting on the edge of Sandi’s desk that sunny morning in August, he’d realized in mid-sentence that he no longer held her attention.  He’d heard and felt a throaty growl, and turned away from Sandi just in time to see a red Porsche Carrera come to a gravel-slinging stop inches from the large plate glass front window of his office.  A slim but well-endowed blond in a snug low-cut sundress swung her toned and tanned legs out of the vehicle.  Sam had the front door open before she could reach for the handle.  Her brilliantly green eyes were one of the first things he noticed.

He spent the rest of the morning showing Ellen mountain properties.  Mostly small ranches with just enough property for real privacy.  Despite his best efforts, she seemed disinterested.  To his great surprise, however, she asked if he was free for dinner that evening.  Sam stammered but quickly agreed to meet at the only real restaurant in the tiny village.

The High Valley Saloon and Steakhouse was nothing if not authentic.  The structure had been built over one hundred years earlier.  The front of the building was constructed in the traditional Western storefront style.  The rough-cut cedar plank siding had weathered to a rusty brown hue.  An inviting dim golden light poured out of the paned front windows, which were framed by two heavy wooden doors. 

One door opened into an alcove off the dining room and the second into the bar.  The plastered interior walls were the color of parchment, and the pine floor planks of varying widths were polished to a deep chocolate brown by years of boot traffic, spilled beer and peanut shells.  Dusty antlered deer and elk heads and worn horse tack hung haphazardly wherever space allowed.  A long well worn bar lined one side of the interior and was separated from the dining tables by a chest-high wall.  On the bar side, a few high-top tables were pushed up against the partial wall.

Sam arrived a half-hour early for his dinner appointment.  Or date.  He wasn’t sure.  As he entered the door he was met by the mingled smells of smoke, beer, freshly baked rolls and garlic.  After greeting several locals, he took his regular place at the bar where a cold beer was waiting for him. 

Few outsiders stayed at the bar.  The tourists and fall hunters that lingered there too long were ignored and gently pushed aside by the cowboys taking their regular positions.  Eventually they almost all moved to the tall tables a few feet away.  Their money was welcomed, but their presence was only tolerated.  Although Sam would always be an outsider, he was welcome at the bar.

Change had come to the valley, and Sam did his best to smooth its rough edges.  The skyrocketing value of ranch properties meant they were no longer economically viable businesses.  The ranches of San Luis Valley had become expensive toys for rich oilmen from Texas and lawyers from California.  When a cowboy grew too old or tired to scratch out a living from cows, Sam made sure he received the best price for his land. 

Sam also became the absentee landowners’ local contact.  Even though the new owner invariably wanted to return the land to nature and watch the wildlife, Sam explained how thousands of dollars in property taxes could be saved by letting a few cows graze during the summer months, thereby qualifying for an agricultural exemption.  Everybody wanted to beat the taxman.  Sandi meted out the grazing rights to those ranchers who needed the grass the most - in dry years the ungrazed pastures could make the difference between keeping a herd and selling it off at bargain basement prices.  Sam had been accepted - at least as much as an outsider could be.

Ellen was fifteen minutes late and arrived as Sam was finishing his second beer.  She entered through the dining room door.  Sam hadn’t noticed her in the mirror behind the bar, but became aware of her presence as several cowboy hats rotated 180 degrees.  He laid a five-dollar bill on the bar and waved.  Ellen gave him a million dollar smile, and he felt the envious eyes of the other men on the back of his head.  She had taken his advice and worn jeans and boots, but these jeans and boots appeared to have been manufactured in Turin not Tulsa.  Sam suspected they cost more than many of the pickup trucks lined up on the gravel parking lot in front of the bar.

“You look great.  Did you get a chance to take a rest?” Sam asked.

“No.  I had several calls to make, but I feel great.”  She gave him another dazzling smile.

Sam gulped.  He had met this woman less than eight hours earlier and knew virtually nothing about her, but felt slightly out of control as he led her to a table.

”Would you like a drink?”

“A dry California cab would be nice.  Do you want to get a bottle?

“Sounds great.”  Sam turned to their waitress as she rushed by.  “Susie, can you bring us a bottle - a nice dry California cab, please.”

The middle-aged Hispanic waitress did her best to contain an involuntary snort and laugh rolled into one.  “Don’t you want to see our wine list, Sam?” 

She and Sam both knew that the High Valley Saloon and Steakhouse did not have a wine list, and that he would be lucky if there was a halfway drinkable bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon in the whole village.

“No, I’ll trust you on this one, Susie.”

“I’ll try not to let you down, Sam.” 

Ellen and Sam exchanged more small talk, and Susie soon returned with an open bottle of wine and quickly filled two glasses.  There would be no cork-smelling wine-twirling snobbery here, even if Sam was smitten by this blond with the expensive jeans and boots. 

“What would you like, miss?”

“The filet - rare.  Bloody.  And a garden salad.  Oil and vinegar on the side please.”

“You get another side.”

“No, thank you.”

“A filet mooing and a salad.  Sam, you want the ribeye, medium, baked potato, butter and sour cream, and the Caesar salad.”

“Yeah, thanks Susie.”

“Coming right up.”

Ellen studied Sam for a moment.  “You seem to be a fairly predictable man, Sam.”

Good god, Sam thought, she just told me that I’m boring.  “Well, I guess I know what I like and I tend to stick with it.”

“Aren’t you afraid you might be missing something?  You know - something you never tried or didn’t even know about?”

“You might have a point.  But tell me about yourself.  You’re along way from Miami.  Miami, right?  That’s home?”

“Mm-hmm.”

“Well, you’re a long way from home all by yourself.”  Sam knew he screwed up as the words were coming out of his mouth.

Ellen threw her head back with a hearty laugh.  “Do you think I can’t take care of myself, Sam?”

“No, no.  That’s not what I meant.  I mean I was just curious.  I hope I didn’t offend you.”

Ellen chuckled.  “No, you didn’t offend me Sam.  But why don’t you tell me about yourself.  And about San Luis.”

The meal came.  The steak was good and, surprisingly, the wine was okay.  And Sam did tell Ellen about San Luis and his life there.  All about it.  Sam looked down at his watch and realized he had been doing most of the talking for nearly two hours.  He was feeling a buzz from the wine.  Ellen kept filling his glass and he kept emptying it.

“I can’t believe it’s almost ten.  I’ve been talking your ear off for two hours.  I guess that’s what I do when I’m nervous.”  Sam couldn’t believe he had just said he was nervous.  He felt like he was in high school.  What the hell was his problem?

“Sam, you don’t have to be nervous around me.”  Ellen smiled.  Sam looked like a puppy having its belly rubbed.

“So Sam, you’re not married and have no children.  What about family?  Family is important, Sam.”

Sam’s demeanor soured.  “I’m an only child.  My parents are both deceased.”

“I’m so sorry.  Was it an accident?”