Heiress (20 page)

As MacCrea Wilder raised the iced-tea glass, Abbie noticed the effeminate crooking of his little finger. The mannerism struck her as being totally out of character with his otherwise ruggedly masculine presence.

"The secret is not the amount of sugar you add, but the amount of lemon. Even with something sweet, you like that hint of tartness," Babs replied.

"That's the way Grandpa always said he liked his women," Abbie recalled, guessing it was MacCrea's reference to him that made her remember that.

"Your grandpa knew what he was talking about." He looked at her when he said it.

Abbie wondered whether he intended it merely as a response or as a personal reference to her. More than once, she'd been accused of having a sharp tongue. She had to admit that, earlier at the stables, she'd hardly been cordial to him. He drank down the rest of his tea, curling that little finger again.

"It was kind of you to let me take up your time this way, Mrs. Lawson. But I don't want to keep you any longer." He set his empty glass down on the tea table beside his chair, picked up his hat, and rolled to his feet, all in one slow, fluid motion. "Thank you. For the tea as well."

"It was our pleasure, Mr. Wilder." Babs stood up to shake hands with him.

He held on to it. "I meant to tell you how sorry I am about your husband."

"Thank you." There was the faintest break in her composure.

Abbie covered for her. "I'll walk out with him, Momma."

"There's no need for you to do that," MacCrea inserted.

"I don't mind." She shrugged. "You left your pickup parked by the stables, and I have to go there anyway."

With the good-byes over, Abbie left the house with him. She couldn't help noticing how preoccupied he seemed to be as they went down the porch steps to the sidewalk.

"You never did say exactly how my father was helping you."

He glanced at her absently, still giving her the impression that his thoughts were elsewhere. "He had talked about possibly becoming involved financially, but mainly he was going to put me in touch with the right people. Even though he wasn't in the business anymore, he still had contacts. That's why I went to him."

"Why?" Abbie frowned, not following him. "I mean, what was the purpose in introducing you to these contacts?"

"Right now, all I have is a prototype of the testing equipment, so I could get a patent on it. But that's all it is—a prototype. Working models have to be built and extensive field testing done. I'm not in any position—financially or otherwise—to develop and market it by myself."

"So what are you trying to do? Sell the patent?"

"Only as a last resort. It's my baby. I've worked on it a long time. I don't want to let it go completely if I don't have to. But maybe I won't have a choice." He shrugged to conceal the anger he felt at finding himself back at square one. All the groundwork he'd laid with Lawson was wasted time and effort. He had to go out and do it all over again. He was beginning to wonder if it was worth it.

"Grandpa always said, 'Houston attracts people who make things happen. You can't keep 'em down, no matter what.'" She smiled carelessly at him. "So, at least you came to the right place."

"Maybe so." He couldn't help noticing the wide curve of her lips, their expression of warmth, and their soft fullness.

The first time he'd seen her at Lawson's office, he'd been aware of her striking looks, that unusual combination of rich, dark hair and incredibly blue eyes. He was a man capable of being aroused as readily as any other by a beautiful, well-built woman, but that day he'd been turned off by her brittleness and demanding ways—phony and spoiled, with nothing behind that beautiful window dressing. At the funeral, he'd seen she could be vulnerable. And now. . . now, he wondered if he'd been mistaken about her. Maybe she wasn't the spoiled, shallow woman he'd thought she was.

"What will you do now?" she asked.

"Start over."

"I might know some people you can talk to." Lane Canfield was the first name that came to her mind. "I'll make some calls and see what I can find out. Is there someplace I can reach you?"

He took a business card out of his pocket and scratched a telephone number on the back of it with a ballpoint pen. "You can get ahold of me at this number," he said, handing it to her. "Don't pay any attention to the one on the front of the card. It's an answering service."

"What's this, then?"

"The phone at the drilling site south of here in Brazoria County. You can reach me there day or night."

"Don't you ever go home?"

"That is home. Once we start making hole—drilling, in layman's terms—I'm there around the clock," he explained, glancing at her sideways, a lazy gleam in his eyes challenging her. "Have you ever seen a rig in operation, Miss Lawson?"

"Lots of times. This is Texas," Abbie asserted, then smiled in mock chagrin. "Of course, I've seen them all from the road."

"For a Texan—and R. D. Lawson's granddaughter—your education has been sadly neglected."

"I suppose it has," she conceded lightly, feeling oddly invigorated by his company—really alive for the first time in a long while. She wondered if he felt the same. But he had a face like her grandpa's. It only revealed what he wanted it to.

"Want to correct that with a tour?

"With you as the guide?"

"You guessed it. If you're not busy after lunch tomorrow, come out to the site. I'll show you around." He supplied her with concise directions as they reached the cab of his truck. "You can see the mast from the road, so you can't miss it."

"It doesn't sound like it. I'll see you tomorrow, then."

He nodded and climbed into the dusty black truck and pulled the door shut. As he started the engine, Abbie stepped farther back and lifted her head in acknowledgment of the casual, one-fingered salute he flicked, in her direction. Then he reversed the truck away from the stables and swung it toward the lane.

"Another visitor?" Ben Jablonski spoke beside her.

Abbie turned with a start. The noise of the truck's engine had drowned out the sound of his footsteps. She hadn't heard him walk up behind her. "Yes," she replied absently and glanced back at the dust being churned up by the departing truck, then realized what Ben was implying by his phrase "another visitor." "You saw her," she stated.

"Yes."

"Why do you think she came here?"

"Perhaps she was curious."

"Maybe." But Abbie doubted it, the feeling again returning that her world was being threatened. As the grimness and tension came back, she turned toward the stables. "I think I'll go check on Breeze."

The oil industry had changed considerably since its early boom days when the famed Spindletop gusher turned Houston into a city and a center of the oil industry with its inland port, oil refineries, and petrochemical plants. Technological and scientific advancement had bought more sophisticated equipment and techniques into use. Environmental and federal controls had reduced pollution and waste, and increased costs. Demand and deregulation of oil and natural gas prices had sent the world price of crude oil soaring in 1980 to more than thirty dollars a barrel, with predictions of future prices reaching fifty, sixty, maybe even seventy dollars a barrel.

One factor remained constant: the key role played by the independent oil men, the wildcatters. They still drilled the vast majority of test wells in the exploration for new fields, as high as nine times the number drilled by the giant oil companies. The wildcatters were responsible for some 80 percent of the gas and oil discoveries in the United States.

Few, if any, wildcatters absorbed the full cost of drilling. They spread their risk, selling off percentages of ownership to the majors or other independents, giving up percentages to the landowner or the drilling contractor or both, and selling limited partnerships to private investors. The successful ones were cautious and conservative gamblers.

MacCrea Wilder might call himself a drilling contractor, but Abbie knew better. She'd listened to too many discussions between her ex-husband and his banker father not to know that most financial institutions were reluctant to speculate on newcomers. They wanted to look at a wildcatter's track record and examine his staying power. With his small deals here and ownership percentages there, MacCrea was establishing a performance record in wildcatting and generating royalties that were both an asset and an ongoing cash flow. His drilling company gave him an independent income and a business history, as well as knowledge and experience in the field.

When everyone from mail-order promoters to lease brokers called themselves wildcatters, Abbie wondered why MacCrea played it so low-key. She smiled at herself, amused by her own curiosity about him. There was no doubt that the man had thoroughly aroused her interest.

In every direction she looked, the scenery was all sky, a blue dome towering over the flat coastal prairie of cropland, broken now and then only by a ground-hugging farmhouse occasionally shaded by a lonely tree. A crop-dusting plane swooped low over a rice field, releasing its white misty trail of pesticide or herbicide, then buzzing her red Mercedes convertible before climbing higher, giving the pilot an eyeful of the dark-haired beauty behind the wheel, dressed in a simple back-less sundress in royal purple, belted at the waist with a chain of silver conchos, lizard-skin sandals on her feet.

Still smiling thoughtfully, Abbie returned the pilot's wave and continued down the road, speeding by a pasture scattered with slow-bobbing pumpjacks rhythmically drawing crude oil from completed wells. She watched the horizon to her right, looking for the distinctive iron skeleton of an oil derrick. According to MacCrea's directions, she should see it any minute now.

Suddenly there it was, poking its head up about a mile off the main road. She slowed the car, anticipating the turnoff that would take her to the drill site. Less than a quarter-mile ahead, a gray-white strip converged on the highway at a right angle. Abbie turned onto the road spread with oyster shells and followed its straight line to the iron-ribbed tower in the distance.

The tall derrick dominated the drill site from its perch atop the substructure platform. Sprawled at its feet were the support components: the diesel engines that powered the rig, the racks of pipe stacked in layers, the mud pumps and pits along with their auxiliary equipment, the fuel tanks, and the on-site office trailers. All were interconnected by a system of walkways and stairs.

More than a half-dozen vehicles were parked in the clearing that surrounded the drilling rig. Abbie parked her Mercedes in the space next to MacCrea's black pickup. The steady roar of the diesel engines covered the slam of her car door as she paused to look around. Several workers were in sight, but none of them seemed to notice her arrival. Without the cooling draft of the moving car, the heat became oppressive. She tucked her hair behind her ears, grateful for the turquoise sweatband across her forehead.

As she started toward the nearest office trailer, MacCrea stepped out, dressed in a pair of blue-green coveralls and a hard hat. Right behind him came a second man, dressed in street clothes—a print shirt and tan trousers—but wearing the requisite hard hat.

"Hello." She walked over to MacCrea, glancing questioningly in his companion's direction. "Have I come at a bad time?"

"Not at all," he replied and introduced her to the on-site representative of the major oil company that had contracted the drilling of the well. "Like me, Chuck lives on the site," MacCrea explained, gesturing over his shoulder at the trailer behind them. "I promised Miss Lawson I'd give her a tour of the operation."

"Be my guest. Anyone who's been in the business any length of time at all has heard about your grandfather. Here." He removed his safety helmet and offered it to Abbie. "You'll need this."

"Thanks." Like them, she had to speak louder to make herself heard clearly above the steady din from the power plant and the equipment in operation.

After MacCrea had adjusted the inner band of the hat to fit her and set it on her head, they started out along the walkway. He took her by the mud pits first, showing her the heavy gray-brown fluid that had been the basis of her family's fortune. He explained how the mud was pumped from the pits through a discharge line to the vertically mounted standpipe on the near leg of the derrick (properly called a mast, since it needed no assembly), and from there it entered the kelly hose down the kelly, the drill pipe and collar exiting at the bit at the bottom of the hole. Abbie discovered that, with all the noise in the background, it was easier to understand everything he said if she read his lips, too.

From the mud pits, they traveled down the elevated walkways to the steel pipe that carried the mud and bit cuttings circulating out of the hole and dumped them onto a vibrating screen called a shale shaker. He pointed out the raised earthen pits behind it where the cuttings were dumped after being extracted from the mud. The mud was recycled back to the pits after passing through some other processes that Abbie didn't follow completely—although that was only indirectly MacCrea's fault. He introduced her to the mud engineer on the site, and when he learned that he was talking to R. D. Lawson's granddaughter, his explanations became very technical.

"You made a big impression on him," MacCrea observed dryly as they headed for the stairs leading to the rig's raised platform. "He'll be bragging to everybody how he explained modern drilling-fluid methods to R. D. Lawson's granddaughter."

"Too bad I didn't understand any of it."

At the bottom of the narrow set of stairs, MacCrea paused and let her go in front of him. As Abbie mounted the steps, she was conscious of the beads of sweat forming above her upper lip—and of the curious glances from the crew when she reached the top. She paused to let MacCrea take the lead again.

"The floor of a rig isn't the cleanest place in the world. There should be an extra pair of coveralls in the doghouse." He directed her to the small storage shed atop the platform a short distance from the stairs. Inside the storehouse, he took a pair of blue-green coveralls, like his, off a hook and handed them to her. "They aren't the latest fashion, but at least they'll keep your clothes from getting dirty."