Empire and Honor (Honor Bound 7)

1015 16 October 1945

Don Cletus and Doña Dorotea Frade were taking breakfast with their children on the balcony of the top-floor master suite of the mansion when the elevator door opened with a squeal.

They didn’t pay any attention. The children’s dog, a large black Labrador retriever named Poocho, was dragging Master Jorge Howell Frade, aged eighteen months, across the floor by his diaper. The toddler was howling. Doña Dorotea was yelling. Don Cletus was laughing.

“You sonofabitch!” Doña Dorotea screamed.

“Are you referring, my dear, to your husband or the dog?”

Doña Dorotea and Don Cletus looked toward the elevator.

Cletus Marcus Howell, wearing a seersucker suit and holding a cigar in one hand and a stiff-brimmed straw hat in the other, stood there.

“Both,” Doña Dorotea said.

“Well, I’ll be goddamned,” Don Cletus said.

The old man whistled shrilly. Poocho let go of Jorge’s diaper, trotted to the old man, sat on his haunches, and offered his paw. The old man solemnly shook it.

Jorge stopped howling.

Doña Dorotea snatched him off the floor and went to the old man and kissed him.

“I just happened to be in the neighborhood,” Cletus Marcus Howell said. “And I thought I might as well just drop in and see my grandson, my great-grandsons, and the beautiful and charming mother of the latter.”

“How did you get here?” Clete asked.

Frade knew that, it being Monday, the next Pan American–Grace flying boat from Miami wasn’t due until Tuesday. He was keenly aware of the details because a shipment of radio parts for SAA had been “misrouted” by Panagra, and only recently “found” and promised on the Tuesday flight. Clete had strongly suspected Juan Trippe’s hand caused that delay.

“In some comfort,” his grandfather said. “I will tell you all about it, but that will have to wait until the ladies—now powdering their noses—are finished gushing over you and your children.”

“Ladies? Plural? You brought everybody with you?

”

Before Howell could answer, the door to the suite opened and three women entered.

“Thank you ever so much for sending the elevator back down for us, Dad,” said one of them sarcastically. She was a stocky, short-haired blonde in her late forties. “All you had to do was close the damned door!”

“Sorry,” the old man said, not very sincerely. “In the States, they close automatically.”

The woman was Martha Williamson Howell. She was Howell’s daughter-in-law and the only mother Clete had ever known. With her were two young women, her daughters, Elizabeth, known as Beth, a tanned and athletic twenty-two-year-old, and her sister, Marjorie, twenty, sort of a smaller version of her sister. They were Clete’s cousins, but he had grown up with them and thought of them as his sisters.

Martha Howell went to Clete and wrapped him in a bear hug.

“Well,” she said, “I can see that Dorotea has been feeding you.”

“Almost every day,” Clete said.

He looked at Beth.

“No, he’s not,” Clete said, answering her unasked question. “And I really don’t know when he will be.”

“You bastard!” she said.

“Isn’t that what you were going to ask me?” Clete asked.

“She’s right,” Martha Howell said. “You can be a bastard. You have your grandfather’s genes.”