A Desperate Hope

by Elizabeth Camden

  Alex held up both hands. The gift of the earthmoving equipment had been a boon beyond measure, and he couldn’t endanger it.

  “Look, I came down here to speak with you as well,” Garrett said. “I’ve been at the new work camp. A bunch of Irish workers there are getting sick. They think there’s a problem with their water. People are having stomach problems, and there’s a baby that’s had diarrhea for a week.” He glanced at the pump a few acres away and then back at Alex. “Have there been any problems with the water from that pump?”

  The water had tasted fine every time Alex drank from it, but he didn’t live up here yet. “Mrs. Trudeau? Have you noticed any problems?”

  “It’s cold and clear, just like all the water here,” she said, but Garrett wasn’t finished yet.

  “People up at the Timberland camp think someone might have tampered with their well,” Garrett said.

  “No one in Duval Springs would poison a well,” Mrs. Trudeau said, and Alex instinctively agreed. Roadside sabotage was one thing; poisoned water was something else entirely.

  But Garrett didn’t seem convinced. “You sure about that?”

  Mrs. Trudeau looked so indignant she could barely speak. “It is an insult to even suggest it!”

  If anything, her response amused Garrett. “You don’t let me get away with anything. I like that. And I wasn’t accusing Duval Springs. I’m wondering if it might be workers from the main camp over near Kingston. The best jobs are going to the Irish crew, and they’re angry, so keep an eye out for trouble. The state already knows about the water issue and is sending someone to test it. In the meantime, I’ve sent for a doctor to look at that baby.”

  “That’s very kind of you,” Mrs. Trudeau said.

  Garrett rolled his eyes. “If we wait for the state to send a doctor, the baby will be in school before he gets treated.”

  Mrs. Trudeau looked as if she wanted to say something more, but Garrett had already turned to mount his horse, and he cantered off toward Mountainside Road.

  As Alex headed to the first of the morning’s inspections, a terrible thought intruded. Maybe someone from Duval Springs had done something to the water up at the Timberland camp. Duval Springs had lost every legal battle to stop New York City from seizing their land, but what would happen if the water was foul?

  Bad water would be the only way to stop the reservoir in its tracks.

  Eloise thought it would only take an hour to appraise the town’s general store, but she was continually distracted by the alluring goods on display. Crates of teas, tobacco, imported herbs, and spices gave the store a heady aroma. The front counter was lined with large glass jars filled with peppermint sticks and jelly beans. Colorfully wrapped soaps and perfume filled the shelves. It was a feast for the senses.

  “You have an impressive store here,” she told Willard, who had bought the store after Bruce lost it as part of the strike settlement.

  “It’s been a sound investment,” Willard said modestly, but it was impossible not to be impressed with the variety of goods. She wandered over to the gallon-sized stoneware pots containing blends of tobacco. On another shelf were vibrantly decorated boxes of cigars. The artwork on the boxes was impressive, and she slowed to admire a sultry-eyed woman in a Grecian toga ironically named “the Queen of Havana.”

  Unease trickled through her, for through the haze of other scents in the emporium, this one made her hackles rise. She lifted the Queen of Havana box and sniffed. The pungent scent of cedar and tobacco made her recoil. This was exactly what she had smelled the night she was shot, and it turned her stomach.

  “Is this a popular brand?” she asked Willard.

  “Our bestselling cigar,” he replied. “People claim to like the taste, but I think they like the box more.”

  The bell over the door dinged, and she was surprised to see Enzo enter the shop, his face narrowed in concern.

  “You are needed at the hotel right away,” he told her. “Claude has a plan to speed up our work so we can be back in the city in two weeks.”

  They weren’t supposed to leave so soon! Alex was counting on them to be available through December. Enzo had supervised every building moved so far, and the townspeople weren’t ready to start moving things on their own. Leaving early would be a disaster.

  “I’m coming,” she said, dropping the box of cigars and heading outside.

  They had to cut around the construction rubble blocking much of the village green but made it to the hotel dining room in short order. Claude sat with Roy, slicing into a plump breast of duck with cherry sauce.

  “Good news!” Claude announced the moment he saw her. “I’m cutting a full month off our schedule.” He went on to say that since so many buildings would be moved rather than demolished, they were ahead of schedule.

  “I’d like to stay until the end of December as originally planned,” Eloise said. “Enzo? Will you stay as well?”

  “Yes, if possible, of course I want—”

  “Well, you can’t,” Claude snapped. “I’ve had enough of the crude hinterlands and am ready to return to the comforts of the city and somewhere we don’t have to listen to that infernal clatter,” he said with a glare over his shoulder, where Kasper Nagy transcribed an incoming telegraph message.

  Eloise scrambled for an excuse to stay. “Helping the townspeople with their move will buy the state tremendous goodwill. It would be a genuine sign of compassion.”

  Claude’s sigh was pained. “Here comes the torrent of irrational female hysteria.”

  “Female hysteria?” Enzo asked in his thick Italian accent. “I’m not sure what that term means, but maybe I have irrational female hysteria too. I want to stay.”

  It was too early to panic, for this sort of timetable shift could only be made by Fletcher Jones, not Claude. “I shall send a telegram to Mr. Jones and ask for his input,” she said.

  “There’s no need,” Claude said. “He and one of the other commissioners are headed up here for an inspection. There’s trouble up at the new work camp. They suspect more sabotage.”

  The scar on her back began to tingle and itch, and the stink of the cedar-scented cigar came back to her. “What is it this time?”

  “Something about bad water,” Claude said with a shrug. “Whoever drilled their well obviously didn’t know what they were doing, and Drake is coming up to check it out.”

  “Nicholas Drake?” Her cousin was the commissioner of labor for the water board and the person who got her this job in the first place.

  “Drake and Jones both,” Claude confirmed. “Everyone needs to be on their best behavior, and I want all our reports and assessments done when they arrive. The sooner they sign off on our work, the sooner we can get out of this awful place.”

  “Shh!” Roy said in a harsh whisper. “Kasper might overhear you. He’s coming this way.”

  Sure enough, Kasper had completed transcribing the telegram and was heading their way with a grim look on his face.

  “This just arrived,” he said as he passed Eloise the card. Her eyes widened at the length of the telegram, and it was hard to make sense of the cascade of legal terminology. Downgrade. Deteriorating water quality. Massive reduction in payments.

  She clamped a hand over her mouth and read the telegram three times before she made sense of it. The note was from the securities firm handling the municipal bond. They had heard about the problems with the well at the Timberland work camp and believed it would affect the long-term viability of the new town. Skittish investors began withdrawing their commitments, and the town’s bond rating had plummeted.

  Which meant the money flowing into the town was about to dry up.

  Chapter

  Twenty

  Alex was in the middle of helping a team pour concrete for the town pharmacy when Eloise came striding across the blank field toward him. He swiped the dust from his face, worried by her grim expression.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  Eloise pulled him
a few yards away, although there was no such thing as privacy in this open field swarming with two hundred workers. His disbelief rose as she explained the bond’s downgrade and how the money to keep fueling the move was hanging by a thread.

  “The bank can’t change the rules on us,” he snapped. “We’re owed another payment next Friday, and I intend to get it.”

  She shook her head. “A bond is a long-term investment, and the rules can change. If the investment starts to look shaky, the bond gets downgraded and your payments shrink.”

  “Fine,” he said. “Where do I go to fight this?”

  “You can’t fight your way out of this. The best we can do is prove the water in the valley is pure, and trust me, New York City wants the same thing. For once, you and the State Water Board are on the same side.”

  Joining forces with the state was appalling, but he would do it. Eloise reported that the state had hired a water specialist to test local samples, and the results would be presented at the town hall tomorrow. The Timberland camp was less than a mile from Garrett’s quarry and even closer to the cement factory. It was possible one of the companies was the source of the contamination, and Alex expected them to be on hand for the state’s meeting too.

  On Friday morning he met Eloise in the lobby of the hotel so they could walk to the meeting together. He’d never gotten along well with Nicholas Drake, the commissioner of labor for the water board. As far as Alex was concerned, Nick Drake was the face of the state that had turned his world upside down. But Nick was Eloise’s cousin, and he’d gone out on a limb to get her this job, so Alex would swallow his resentment and try to get along for her sake.

  “You already know Nick,” Eloise said as they walked toward the town hall. “The scientist in charge of the water test will be here too. Rosalind Werner has a doctorate in biochemistry and specializes in water purification. She’s also engaged to Nick.”

  “Oh, that’s convenient,” Alex muttered as they trudged up the final few yards to the town hall. Anxiety was making him irrational, but everything about this situation aggravated his nerves.

  “Please be respectful,” Eloise cautioned. “I adore Nick. When I was little, he was the only person who was ever nice to me.”

  “He’s the only person who has ever evicted me and two thousand other people from our homes.”

  Eloise sighed. “I know you resent the state for what’s happened, but today we are all on the same side.”

  The meeting room was crowded. Alex recognized Cormac McIntire, the foreman up at the Timberland camp. Bruce Garrett was here, as was Jack Riesel, representing the cement factory. Both men came armed with a lawyer, and Alex wished he had thought to bring one as well. Going unarmed into a meeting like this spelled trouble.

  Nick Drake strode across the room and offered Eloise an affectionate hug. “You remember my fiancée, Rosalind Werner?” he asked as he presented the only other woman in the room.

  Eloise nodded. Dr. Werner was as pretty as they came, petite and slender with silvery blond hair, but Eloise kept glancing around the room.

  “Fletcher Jones isn’t here?” she asked.

  Nick snorted. “Your penny-pinching boss is saving a few bucks by traveling on the Saturday train,” he said. “Just as well. We can talk about water quality today and work on finance once Fletcher gets here tomorrow.”

  Alex filed that bit of information away. It seemed the thrifty Mr. Jones cared more about saving two dollars than showing up to support Eloise when the bond fund she had sponsored was heading south in flames.

  Nick called the meeting to order, and everyone took their seats around the table. It was hard to sit still and listen when Alex would rather stand up and fight, but Eloise was right. All that mattered today was getting a clean bill of health for their water.

  Dr. Werner began with a presentation of her findings. “I was asked to test the well at the Timberland camp because of illnesses that are consistent with waterborne disease,” she said. “In addition to the Timberland camp, I took samples from Duval Springs, the new well at Highpoint, and nine additional samples from groundwater where the new reservoir will be built.”

  “And?” Alex asked. A prickle of sweat broke out over his body at the prospect of a tainted well at Highpoint.

  “And I found a shocking amount of barium carbonate at the Timberland camp. All the other sites tested pure.”

  “What’s barium carbonate?” Jack asked.

  “It is a naturally occurring element in soil,” Rosalind responded. “If ingested, it can cause neuromuscular and gastrointestinal problems. Especially in children. We sometimes see traces of barium contamination next to mining operations—”

  “My quarry is clean,” Bruce interrupted. “And why would it show up at the Timberland camp and nowhere else?”

  Rosalind offered a helpless shrug. “I can’t answer that. All I know is that the concentration is extraordinarily high. So high that it doesn’t seem like a naturally occurring incident, because there is no trace of it elsewhere in the valley. The state has been testing the water quality in this valley for years, so it is odd for it to suddenly appear in only that single well.”

  “Then we move the camp,” Jack said. “I can’t have a sick population on my conscience, in case it’s coming from the cement factory. There is a perfectly good work camp already in operation outside of Kingston. Move the workers there.”

  Nick looked at the foreman from the Timberland camp. “Mr. McIntire? How would your people feel about pulling up stakes and bunking over at the Kingston work camp?”

  Cormac McIntire didn’t look happy. “Some of us lived there when we first arrived. It didn’t go well.”

  “How so?” Jack asked.

  “Oh, you know,” McIntire replied in his thick Irish brogue. “Italians who resent the Irish. Irish who like to thumb their nose at the pasta-eaters. A couple of fistfights, a couple stolen wallets. We like having our own place better, but we’re not so keen on drinking out of that well.”

  Jack rose and began pacing. “The state is paying a fortune to build an entirely new camp. It means additional plumbing facilities, more roads, and ugly power lines once the electrical plant is built. It’s a blot on our valley and a misuse of taxpayer funds.”

  “Fletcher Jones certainly thinks so,” Eloise said. “He asked me to do a cost analysis of that second camp, and he thinks it’s an appalling waste.”

  “Fletcher Jones is a skinflint and doesn’t understand what goes on out in the field,” Nick said. “I ordered a second camp for a good reason. As soon as the Irish teams are done building the roads, they’ll move out and I’ll use that camp to house the engineers.”

  Right now the engineers were living at the hotel, a blessing, since tourists no longer visited the valley. After the hotel was torn down in May, the engineers would need someplace nearby to live, and they expected better conditions than could be found at the first work camp.

  “Besides, something about this doesn’t smell right,” Nick continued. “The Highpoint well is only half a mile away, and it’s clean. This sounds like sabotage to me, and I want to get to the bottom of it. Barrels of clean water will be delivered to the Timberland camp, and I’ll send in security guards. I don’t like being pushed around.”

  Alex had no problems with protecting the Timberland camp, but that wouldn’t help their plummeting bond rating. He turned his attention to the water scientist.

  “I need you to write a report giving the well at Highpoint a clean bill of health,” he said to Dr. Werner. “We’re getting a raw deal over this whole mess.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t do that,” she replied. “Since I don’t know what caused the contamination, I can’t guarantee that it won’t eventually taint the new town’s water too.”

  This was ridiculous. Hadn’t she just pronounced the well clean? “I need the bank to know our water is good. If you can’t do it, I’ll find someone who can.”

  That triggered another round of arguing, and the fate o
f the bond was still in limbo at the end of the meeting. Alex wanted to hire his own scientist to pacify nervous investors, but Eloise was adamant that he join forces with the state.

  “Cooperating with the state is the only logical thing to do,” she urged as they walked back to the hotel. “Highpoint can be saved, but not if this bond falters. The state is your most powerful ally for ensuring the water in this valley is clean. Work with them.”

  He sighed, rubbing at the tightness that gathered in his chest every time he was forced into a corner like this. She was right. If he’d learned nothing else over the last five years, it was that unleashing passion against the legalistic strictures of the state was a losing battle. Eloise had gotten them further along on this quest than he could have gotten on his own. He’d always thought the world would stop spinning on its axis before he ever willingly cooperated with the state . . . but it was time.

  Chapter

  Twenty-One

  Eloise began Saturday morning on her knees, hands clenched in prayer. She was drowning. The bond needed her to save it. The town needed her to persuade Fletcher to let the demolition team stay another month. The people of Duval Springs balanced on a precipice, and she had helped put them there.

  “Dear Lord, please show me the right thing to do,” she whispered.

  It had been so much easier at the convent, where she prayed for cool weather and forgiveness and the chance to be needed someday. Now she had everything she once prayed for and was still drowning. A longing to escape back to the barren simplicity of the desert convent tugged at her.

  Buck up, little cuckoo bird.

  She straightened. Had God just told her to buck up, or was it merely a remnant of the cruel taunt Thomas Drake had so often told her? Either way, it wasn’t bad advice. Now wasn’t the time to wallow in doubt or flee back to the safety of the convent. She could only tackle one problem at a time, and today that meant convincing Fletcher to allow her and Enzo to stay until the original deadline. The town was counting on it. Enzo was essential for training the crews on moving a variety of building types.