ago. He says they all blur together after a while.”
“Probably for Dad, too. What year would that have been? Did Dad remember?”
“He says nineteen seventy-eight or nine.”
“Sounds about right. Dad would have been in his twenties.” Emily took off down the hallway. On each side were photos. A few were of a twenty-something Jacob. Her favorite showed him on a horse in full gallop heading for the camera. His hat was on, but you could see his longish hair breezing from the sides. He leaned forward slightly. His face was mostly in shadow, but no one could fail to notice its beauty.
She’d said that once to her dad, almost to the very word.
Men aren’t beautiful, he’d responded.
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.
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