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“YOU SHOULD HIRE HER.”
Flynn stared at Slade as if his friend had just suggested he wear high heels and a thong to the construction site. “Hello? She was waiting for us on our doorstep yesterday. I can think of a dozen slasher movies that started that way. How can I trust her with my grandfather?”
Slade cocked an eyebrow. “You just did.”
“I hate it when you’re right.” Flynn hated that Becca was right, too.
She’d moved with swift, purposeful strides over to the Caddy. All’s well, said the sway of her hips. Mission accomplished, said the swing of her long, black braid. All woman, said the curves covered in black and pink spandex.
The wind picked up, rustling the silver-green eucalyptus leaves on the sixty-foot tall trees separating the river from the vineyards.
A wiry construction worker with a gray goatee and ponytail glanced Flynn’s way, triggering the elusive feeling of familiarity.
Slade shifted, blocking Flynn’s view and disrupting the path to recognition. “Hire Becca. She clearly has Edwin’s best interest at heart. And if she moves here she brings skills to the town we don’t have now. We promised to increase the population and the tax base.”
The population in Harmony Valley was a whopping seventy-seven. All but two of those residents—their business partner, Will, and his fiancé, Emma—were over the age of sixty-five. The construction crews commuted from other, larger towns, the nearest being thirty to forty minutes away. Flynn and Slade were temporary residents, staying only long enough to fulfill their promise to the town council—to create at least one business to revitalize their hometown.
What fools they’d been to think it would be easy.
They’d experienced a series of false starts, but now, construction on the winery was finally moving forward. Also in the works was a communications tower to bring internet and cell phone service to the remote valley. Today was the first big day of work—demo of unusable parts of the barn, utility work needed to upgrade water, sewer and electricity.
Grandpa Ed waved as Becca drove the Caddy slowly around the drive.
Flynn returned the gesture halfheartedly. “I brought him here because I didn’t want to leave him alone.”
There had been indignation in Becca’s dark gaze today, with none of the subtle emotion he had yet to name layered in her eyes. Regardless, Becca was right. Flynn shouldn’t have dragged his grandfather out here, much less left him sitting. As if he needed more guilt.
Guilt greeted Flynn when he awoke every morning, sat on his chest all day and wove through his dreams at night. Guilt that he wasn’t doing enough, guilt that he wasn’t home enough, guilt that he’d put off doing things with his grandfather until it was too late. If he could just speed up construction on the winery, he’d take his grandfather on the trip of his life. The doctors said Edwin needed a few weeks to regain his balance and what little strength he had left before attempting anything so taxing.
After the Caddy disappeared, a faded green Buick appeared between the palms, carrying three occupants—all councilwomen. They might just as well have been doctors, coming to chart his progress and, if required, give him a dose of medicine.
He walked across the driveway to meet them, determined to avoid their daily meds.
When the car stopped, he leaned down next to the open passenger-side window. With a nod to each woman, “Agnes. Rose. Mildred.” Flynn reached for his easiest smile. “Ladies, we’re no longer open to visitors. This is a construction zone now.”
“We won’t be in the way parked here.” Agnes, a gray-haired pixie who also served as the aging group’s ringleader, turned off the ignition.
“We’re old.” From the passenger seat, Mildred squinted at him through lenses as thick as a hard drive. “We won’t get out. You can tell us what’s going on from here.”
“Actually, I came to see the workers with their shirts off,” Rose piped up from the backseat, her snowy ballerina bun windblown. “For efficiency’s sake, you can call them out while you give us a construction update and then we’ll be gone.”
“Rose,” Agnes scolded, her papery thin cheeks pinkening. “We are not here to ogle men.”
Flynn’s jaw ticked, tugging one end of his smile down. “Ladies, I have nothing new to report since yesterday. You’ll need to move along. We’re expecting delivery of a Dumpster.” And they were parked right in its path.
“Young man, our town has a lot riding on this venture.” Rose drew herself up regally, as if she’d already forgotten her shirtless desires. “As councilwomen, we need to be kept abreast of the activities here.”
“I assure you—” as he and his partners had been for months “—that we have kept you up-to-date. But not only is it not safe here, my contractor won’t allow nonessential personnel on-site.”
The three elderly ladies looked crestfallen.
Flynn bent, just a little. “You can park out on Jefferson Street.”
“I can’t see anything that far away,” Rose grumbled.
“We can go home and get our binoculars,” Agnes suggested.
“Brilliant.” Mildred patted his hand. “We’ll talk later.”
That’s what he was afraid of.
Agnes reached for the key in the ignition, but didn’t start the car. “Flynn, before we go, I’d like to put a vote of confidence forward about Becca MacKenzie. She’s a wonderful woman.”
“She knows all the songs from Guys and Dolls. And she can shake her bootie,” Rose, the Broadway musical enthusiast, added.
“Any girl who can drive stick shift is okay in my book.” Mildred patted his hand again. “You won’t make a mistake by hiring her.”
Flynn doubted that. Becca had her secrets and worse: he liked her looks, her smile, her chutzpah. “How long have you known her?”
Agnes’s smile stiffened. Rebooted. “I only met her Friday, but she stayed with me all weekend.”
Flynn mentally chastised himself. The town council loved Becca. And she’d only been in town a couple of days? “Ladies, can you say con artist?”
Their laughter prickled and annoyed and reassured. If they were laughing, chances were his grandfather was in good hands. Flynn had known these ladies most of his life. They were a handful, but they didn’t misplace their trust. There was just that one look of Becca’s to interpret before Flynn felt comfortable.
After they left, Slade walked over, chuckling. “Don’t tell me you thought they’d stop coming once construction started.”
“I had hoped,” Flynn said.
Dane Utley, the project’s general contractor, called them over to the blueprints he had spread out over the hood of his silver-gray truck. “I know we want to fast-track this project, but I’m warning you, old construction has a mind of its own.” Broad shouldered, big-boned, Dane looked like a professional linebacker, but talked with the polish betraying his Ivy League education. “I don’t know how that building has stayed up so long. The beams we examined this morning were either rotted away or split. We’ll shore up everything before we do anything else, starting with the low beams on the north wall.”
“We promised the Preservation Society this would be a restoration,” Flynn said. “If we can’t use the guts of the barn we may lose community support.” And time. Every day they saved meant he had a better chance of fulfilling his promise to Grandpa Ed to take him on that trip.
“She’s a beautiful piece of history and we’ll save what we can,” Dane reassured Flynn. “I stopped by the county office this morning and they were still missing a couple of key permits and agreements. We can demo today, but the lack of a public improvement agreement is going to stop us by next week.”
“Will’s working on it,” Slade said. “He’s in Santa Rosa this morning with our legal team.”
They needed to widen a portion of Main Street and do earthquake retrofits on the Harmony River bridge. Both projects impacted Mayor Larry Finkelstein’s property. His lawyers, their lawyers and Will were handling the negotiations. Flynn was managing the building contractors and the councilwomen’s daily updates. Slade dealt with finances. If they could obtain these last few permits, maybe things would finally run smoothly.
“We could use some good luck to get things back on track.” Flynn voiced the understatement of the year.
Slade nodded.
A white car pulled onto the gravel driveway.
“It’s one of the county building inspectors.” Dane leaned around Flynn and shouted, “County!”
Power tools ground to a halt as word of an inspection spread. Workmen drifted through the red barn doors. The crew turned to watch the inspector approach.
The ominous sound of timbers snapping had them all spinning back to the barn. The southern wing undulated, wheezing and groaning as if straining for breath. And then it broke away from the middle of the barn, lurching to the ground in a drunken stadium wave, kicking up rolling plumes of dust.
Flynn felt the force of the collapse from fifty feet away. It eddied about his ankles, tugged at his determination, laughed at timelines and plans and mocked promises made in good faith.
In the seconds after the barn’s partial collapse, no one moved. Even the building inspector had stopped his car at the fork in the driveway, a safe distance away.
“Everyone back!” Dane leaped forward, gesturing for his crew to retreat. “She’s not done.”
The barn shuddered up to its hay loft and tilted precariously toward the collapsed south wing.
Flynn and Slade ran with the rest of the crew to the inspector’s vehicle.
The wiry construction worker with the goatee and ponytail jumped into a dented white pickup parked in front of the barn. He sped past those running to safety.
“Head count. Now!” Dane focused on the man who’d saved his truck. “Idiot! Is a truck worth your life?”
“Can’t make a living without my tools.” Unfazed by the reprimand, the wiry, gray-haired idiot strode purposefully past Dane to the cluster of workers wearing similar mud-brown Utley Construction T-shirts.
Flynn couldn’t shake the feeling that he’d seen the man before.
“If you weren’t such a good worker, I’d wring your neck, then fire you,” Dane called after him, receiving a shrug in answer.
“I can’t see a thing. And I don’t hear anyone inside.” Slade squinted toward the still-dissipating dust clouds. “Do you?”
“No,” Flynn rasped, listening for any calls for help from the barn.
What if someone had been killed? What if their decision to salvage what they could from the barn instead of razing it meant someone wasn’t coming home tonight? A dust cloud enveloped him. He pulled his T-shirt over his mouth, hoping that would help him breathe easier.
The world hadn’t totally screwed him. The barn held. The sun continued to shine. Beyond that, Flynn was having a hard time finding a silver lining.
“Everyone’s accounted for,” Dane announced moments later.
“Thank God,” Flynn murmured into his shirt. As favors went, that was huge. Unfortunately, his timeline had undoubtedly ballooned.
The balding inspector faced Dane looking like Christmas had come early and Santa hadn’t fulfilled any of his requests. “What happened?”
“We were shoring up the beams on the north side,” Dane said. “It must have caused instability on the south.”
Slade tugged Flynn away from the others. “Let’s tear the barn down and rebuild. It’s safer and cheaper.”
“I know you’re worried about the budget, but this is a piece of Harmony Valley history. We promised to preserve it.”
“Some promises aren’t meant to be kept.” Slade gestured toward the barn. “If someone had been hurt or killed trying to preserve the barn, we’d be ruined.”
The inspector was shaking his head at Dane. “This got away from you. I’m shutting everything down on both structures until you can reassure me that any work—be it demolition or rework—is safe.”
“Which is when?” Flynn quit pretending he wasn’t listening.
“Until it’s safe,” the inspector repeated coldly.
Word quickly spread through the men that work was over for the day, sending them streaming like large ants toward the rows of parked trucks, until only a few of Dane’s crew remained.
“It’s going to be hell proving to County this is a safe construction site unless we take her completely down.” Dane turned to Flynn. “I suggest we demolish the whole thing, salvage what boards, posts and beams we can, and resell the rest. There’s a good market for old, weathered barn wood.”
The promise they’d made to the community warred with the pressing need to speed things up. “How long?”
Dane looked toward the trees lining the river. “We’ll lose three to five days from the collapse and a day or two in salvage. We’re out in the boonies. County inspectors can’t just stop by on their way to another job. We’re at the mercy of their schedule.”
Flynn hated when things were out of his control. A programmer by trade, he liked plugging in commands and seeing them work in predictable, stable order.
“I’d like to see the estimate for a complete demo before we decide how to proceed,” Slade said.
Flynn nodded in defeat. “And we’ll need to confer with Will.”
The construction worker who’d rescued his truck appeared at Dane’s shoulder. His gaze pierced Flynn’s, distracting him for a moment from the outline of familiar cheekbones and sharp chin Flynn suspected was hidden beneath the man’s gray goatee.
“Before you go, I’d like you to meet my job foreman, Joey Harris.” Dane’s voice sounded like it was coming from far away.
Flynn’s vision dropped from those unapologetic eyes to the hourglass prison tattoo on his forearm.
It couldn’t be...
He would never...
But it was. And he had.
Dane’s foreman was Flynn’s father.
CHAPTER THREE
ROSE AIMED HER antique ladies birding binoculars out the window at Agnes hurrying back to the car. “Where did you get that ring?”
Drat. Agnes was hoping that her two friends wouldn’t notice the ruby ring. And Rose hadn’t until she’d retrieved her binoculars, a pair Agnes assumed would only magnify the appearance of a bird if she was standing beneath the tree it was in. And only if it was a small tree.
Agnes slid behind the wheel of her beloved Buick, a pair of binoculars draped around her neck. “I got a call from Mayor Larry. Part of the Henderson barn just collapsed.”
From the backseat, Rose gasped.
“Was anyone hurt?” Mildred lowered her own binoculars.
“No.” Agnes started the car and headed toward Jefferson Street and the Harmony River bridge. The morning sun had yet to chase away the briskness in the air. It reached through the windows and chilled Agnes to the bone.
“Agnes, about the ring?” Rose was doggedly annoying sometimes.
“Which ring?” Agnes tried to play dumb.
“The red ring as big as a stapler on your finger,” Rose said sarcastically. “Do you think I’m as blind as Mildred?”
