“I thought maybe I could come up here and deal with you, man to ma—neighbor to neighbor. But I can see plain dealings won’t work with you. Never mind, then. I’ll be back with the sheriff in one hour.” He turned toward his truck.
She slapped the gloves against her thigh, wishing she could whack his hat off with them.
“The sheriff can keep me off your road, but that is all!” she shouted, even though, now, the crushers were silent. “And that’ll end soon enough when we put a stop to your blamed injunction. By the way, I’ve added the crushers to the countersuit I’m bringing to court—” her voice went spiraling up to a shriek “—and the dynamite!”
Coffey froze with his hand on the door of his pickup. His head swiveled toward her. For the first time he shouted back at her. “Dynamite?”
“My attorney’s faxing your attorney a letter right now.” Cassie waltzed toward him. “We’re going to get this damn road business squared away, once and for all, and we may as well settle up on the noise deal, too, because it looks like some blasting’s gonna be called for.” She tended to fall into her father’s tough speech patterns when she felt threatened. Normally, Cassie tried never to think about Boss McClean during the course of her workday. But this morning she’d thought of him twice already. Not a good sign.
Her aunt Rosemarie always said that Cassie’s father was not a bad man. Only weak. And Cassie had to admit, his legacy to her, good and bad, had certainly amounted to a lot more than blunt language and hot temper. From him, and from her grandfather, she had learned the nuts and bolts of the building business, had absorbed it into her very cells. But her grandfather had shown her the rewards for doing things right, while her father had shown her the penalty for doing things wrong.
“Dynamite?” Jake Coffey repeated, and his dry lips looked paler.
But the haughty answer Cassie might have tossed back died in her throat, because even as the booming vibrated through the woods again, they both heard a horrified scream above it, followed by frantic shouting from the men up on the roof.
Cassie whirled to see Tom Harris, the youngest of the stonemasons, skidding down a valley of the roof like a puppet whose strings had snapped. The young man’s face looked shocked, disoriented, as he tumbled sideways with such force that he knocked toe boards loose on his way down. The other men scrambled along the shingles grabbing for him, but he slipped from their hands and went flying over the edge, hitting a high scaffolding before bouncing down thirty feet onto a jagged pile of limestone below.
Cassie emitted a choked cry, then raced to the fallen man. She threw herself to her knees on the mound of rocks, tossed aside her sunglasses and shouted, “Tom! Tom!”
The young man, an apprentice barely out of his teens, lay perfectly still, white-faced, with eyes closed. But he was still breathing. Blood pooled onto the limestone from the back of his head. Cassie jerked off her flannel shirt and pressed it against the gash.
“He grabbed ahold of a live wire up there!” Darrell Brown shouted as he crabbed his way down the scaffolding toward the ladder braced against it. Other men were crawling down behind him like ants off a mound.
From inside the structure, the banging of hammers, the whining of saws and the loud rumbling of a rock radio station all ceased. The framing carpenters rushed out and gathered around with the stonemasons.
High up on the house, a new man—a loner named Whitlow—stood and pointed with a long piece of board at a thick white wire. Up there, Cassie knew, the dangling wire was the power to the decorative lighting that would eventually illuminate the massive chimney.
“That one shouldn’t be hot!” she argued senselessly.
“This thing’s hot, all right,” the carpenter called back. He casually flipped it with the stick, and sparks flew.
The man’s fearlessness with the arching wire snapped a red flag in Cassie’s mind, but she was too distracted by Tom’s condition to puzzle its meaning.
Why the hell was that wire hot? It wasn’t like her electrician to make a mistake and switch the temporary with the main power.
“Somebody go kill that damn power,” she ordered.
A gangly young man hollered, “Yes, ma’am!” and sprinted away.
“Somebody go down to the site trailer and get the big first-aid kit.”
Again Cassie’s order was obeyed with a “Yes, ma’am!”
Jake Coffey had dropped to one knee on the other side of Tom and was pressing two fingers against the victim’s neck. “His pulse is okay,” he said quietly.
Cassie fumbled around in the bib of her overalls, pulled out her cell phone and punched 9-1-1. Electric shock was a worry, but she was more concerned about the effects of the fall. She told the dispatcher the problem quickly, while Darrell scurried over the stones toward them.
“No,” Cassie shouted into the phone. “There’s a shortcut, a private gravel road—” she looked pointedly at Jake Coffey “—through Cottonwood Ranch.” Jake nodded. His dark brown eyes were alert, concerned. His mouth looked grim.
“How far is the turnoff from Highway 86?” She searched Jake’s face imploringly while the dispatcher held.
“Let me.” He took the cell phone from her. “It’s two-tenths of a mile. Hard to see. I’ll phone someone at the ranch and tell them to park one of our red trucks out there and flag the paramedics.”
He handed Cassie the phone. “They want us to stay on the line.”
She nodded, pressed the phone to her ear and looked down at Tom.
“Think he broke his neck?” she heard Darrell calling to Jake Coffey, who was sprinting toward his pickup.
“We’d better not move him, just in case,” Jake called back. Cassie looked up and saw him pull out his cell phone. She turned her full attention back to Tom.
The men stood in a circle of stunned silence, watching as Jake, Darrell and Cassie covered Tom with emergency blankets, then padded the man’s limbs against the sharp rocks as best as they could. They bandaged his burned hand, and then there was nothing to do but wait on the ambulance.
In the distance the rock crushers resumed their methodical work, the operators oblivious of the tragedy up on the hill. The sound filled Cassie with a mixture of guilt and nausea. She wanted the noise—that aggressive sound of progress—to stop. She knew there was no rational reason for work all over the development to halt. Still, her ambitious concerns of only moments ago seemed utterly callow now.
Please let him be okay, she prayed as she studied Tom’s unconscious face. “Hold on,” she told him gently. “Help is on the way.”
She kept up this litany of silent prayer and verbal reassurance while they waited for the medics.
Time stretched taut, and she glanced up once to find Jake Coffey, wearing his sunglasses again, obviously studying her. When he caught her glance, he removed the shades, poked them into his breast pocket and squatted down on his haunches next to her.
As their eyes met in mutual concern, her fear mysteriously seemed to abate and a strange lightness overcame her.
“Is
