Isabelle was sitting outside on the steps with Pecos Bill when I returned to the studio with a hot pot of decaf and bursting with news. The air had cooled down considerably from the warm late September afternoon. She turned when I stuck my head out of the screen door. “Lily, you know, I’ve been thinking—”
“Wait, wait! You’re not going to believe this! Betty just told me she’d heard from her pal Gary Rogers in Santa Fe—you know, the guy I told you about who got me into Andrea Brubaker’s.”
Isabelle nodded, but looked confused. I rushed on, “She said he’d been curious about our little adventure and had dug around a little more in Andrea’s history after we left, and came up with … ready? Remember the part about Andrea’s financial troubles a couple of years ago, that almost put her under? Guess who caused the whole thing to start to snowball by pulling in his loans to Andrea?”
Isabelle just looked at me.
“Cowboy! Cowboy Binder!” I sputtered out before she could respond. “Now there’s a connection! Those two? But what does it mean?”
“Now, wait. What are you talking about?”
“Gary Rogers told Betty that at the beginning of the recession and real estate downturn—well, really, it went into a freefall in Santa Fe—that Brubaker’s was heavily invested in land development in northern New Mexico and southern Colorado. I guess Cowboy Binder was the major financier of some huge projects and he pulled in his loans when the projects tanked!” I sat down on the steps next to Isabelle and looked up at the show of Jupiter hanging large over the trees in the southeastern sky, showing order in the infinite galaxy. And then there was us down here—small humans—specks—the epitome of insignificance and disorder in the Universe. Yet it seemed that we were always messing with each other.
“The rumor was Andrea tried to get him to extend the terms but he refused, and her company started to go down. The gossips gleefully reported that he publicly humiliated her with his loud enjoyment of her predicament at a regional real estate meeting!” I continued.
“Whoa, Cowboy Binder? He caused her fall? But then she got the money from somewhere, didn’t she? Money that saved her company? You said that she pulled it around and everything worked out, especially for her, right?” Isabelle asked, twirling around in her hand an orange marigold she’d picked from the yard, the crushed flower exuding a pleasant, pungent sharpness.
“Right,” I said, “but where did that money come from?”
“Do you think Binder might have lent her the money anyway later?”
“Doubt it. Sounded like he enjoyed besting Andrea, really lording it over her. Betty said it was clear at that banquet that Andrea Brubaker despised Cowboy Binder with a hatred reserved for those who have betrayed one in either sex or money—or both.” We got up to go inside to escape the bombarding bugs attracted by the studio lights shining through the windows.
“I wonder what that history is all about,” Isabelle said, holding the door for Pecos and me. The scent of marigold still lingered on the porch.
“Who knows? Sheesh, where does this leave us?” I wandered over to find the coffee thermos pot by the blackboard, and pour myself and Isa a fresh cup.
Isabelle jumped to the next point. “If she hated Cowboy Binder that much, why did she get a job for Shannon at Binder Enterprises? If it had to be real estate, why not at one of his competitors, at least?”
“That does seem odd, doesn’t it? I could see Cowboy Binder agreeing to it as another way to make Andrea Brubaker beholden to him, though.” I ran an arrow from Andrea’s box to Binder’s box.
“But why would the proud Andrea want another scenario where she owed the despised Cowboy a favor?” Isabelle asked as she paced back and forth in front of the blackboard. By this time it was filled with boxes connected to other circles connected to other boxes, and arrows and stars and question marks and triangles, and just too much stuff.
We both stared at the board as we sat together in silence for a while and listened to the crickets outside. “So now we can add more questions,” Isabelle said ruefully, “and not many answers.”
We sat for a while longer, but it was late, and she had to get back to her aunt’s house.
Before she left, Isa asked me to take a picture of the blackboard and email it to her. “Get close enough so I can read everything on the board,” she reminded me. “I want to study it, you know!”