Arizona Homecoming

Mom thought you were beautiful, Eva had piped up. If Emily remembered, that had been the year Eva went off to the university, driving back and forth every day to Tempe because she couldn’t bear to leave the ranch.

Elise and Emily were a little more willing to spread their wings, but both had flown back.

In a matter of minutes, Emily was out of her museum shirt and khakis and into her blue Lost Dutchman Ranch shirt and jeans with a black apron tried around her waist.

The dining room was at the back of the main house. Picnic tables held guests, visitors and employees. The atmosphere was meant to be fun and relaxed. They did not serve a four-star meal. Tonight’s menu was barbecue pork, beans and potato chips. All homemade by Cook, who’d traveled with Jacob on the rodeo and retired at an early age to work at the Lost Dutchman. His specialty was Mexican food, but actually there wasn’t a food type he couldn’t produce.

Meals were served buffet style with only one server walking around, taking orders, and making sure all the guests had what they needed.

At the back of the restaurant was a game room, mostly a kids’ area, complete with a television for watching movies or playing video games. This late in June, as hot as it was, they didn’t get many kids.

An hour into her shift, Emily’s cell sounded. She took it out and checked the screen: Jane de la Rosa. Looking around, she noted her dad sitting at his favorite table with one of the families who’d checked in today—strangers becoming friends—and Jilly Greenhouse, who lived in the house closest to the Lost Dutchman Ranch. Ducking into the kids’ game room, she answered.

“You’ll never guess! Never,” Jane said.

“Aren’t you working?”

“Yes, though we’re pretty slow tonight.” Jane worked at the Miner’s Lamp, the rustic restaurant in town. It had been around even longer than the Lost Dutchman Ranch.

“What do you want me to guess?”

“I waited on a man tonight. He’s still here. He’s an EPA inspector out of Phoenix—don’t ask me what EPA stands for—who came to check some sort of levels at the Baer house.”

“Okay...” Emily tried to figure why this was news. Since the groundbreaking, Donovan had had one inspector after another at the Baer place.

“Well, I heard this guy on the phone. I guess the levels of something called radon gas were high.”

“And that’s bad?” Emily queried.

“Bad enough that when Donovan called Baer with the news, Baer apparently said to halt construction.”

“For how long?”

“Maybe for good,” Jane said. “The inspector was on the phone with his boss. He sounded a bit surprised. I’m wondering if Baer’s getting fed up. I mean first it’s you protesting, then it’s a skeleton and now this.”

Emily should have felt elated, should have jumped for joy, but all she could picture was the brown-haired man who’d walked in the hot sun for hours picking up an old shoe and plenty of beer cans just because she’d asked him to.

Chapter Five (#ulink_aabd9de6-352e-5251-a63d-aa1138cb6351)

Donovan called it a day. Even with the evac cooler, it was too hot to do much more than complain. It annoyed Donovan that he, out of everyone, did most of the complaining about the heat.

The floors were scheduled for next week; he’d call to reschedule. Surely Baer would come to his senses soon. There wasn’t a house in Apache Creek that didn’t have radon levels. The inspector had even taken the phone and spoken to Baer personally.

But George Baer said to wait. And, Donovan heard something in the man’s voice that hadn’t been there before. A subtle annoyance, the slapping of hands, sounding very much like a silent I’m done.

Donovan very much wanted to be done. He wanted to get back to the life he’d planned for himself: traveling, building the types of structures he wanted to build, adventure. But the phone call he’d made to Nolan Tate hadn’t changed Donovan’s situation. According to Tate, there was no place to put Donovan, so he could just wait.

Great. Every day he worked for Nolan Tate was one step closer to paying his debt to the man. Being out of work meant no debt eliminated and Donovan working for the man longer than he wanted to.

Turning on the camper’s generator, he stepped inside, shed his clothes and hopped into the tiny shower.

Looking for evidence had been hot and tiring. Emily hadn’t been bothered by the heat at all. She’d managed to look as if being outdoors, slow roasted, was an everyday occurrence. He’d checked the weather in California, the location of his next scheduled job if Tate didn’t change his mind. If everything worked out, Donovan would be there at the end of July, beginning of August, about the time Apache Creek, Arizona, went from slow roast to extreme grill.

And there was nothing else for Donovan to do for over a month until the California project.

He wanted to laugh. It was almost too funny. He’d had to take this job with Baer, had compromised his talent for money and now was stuck in small-town Arizona living in his camper.

He’d need to find an RV park soon, now that he was no longer employed. June in Apache Creek, that shouldn’t be a problem. Snowbirds—those who sojourned in this part of Arizona because of the mild winter weather—didn’t start arriving until late September or early October.