A Man of His Word. Merline Lovelace

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      His broad shoulders lifted in a shrug. “And people in small towns like to talk, even to strangers. I’ve been hearing about your return to the Chalo Canyon for several weeks now.”

      “About my departure from said canyon ten years ago, you mean?”

      He leaned back, his long legs sprawled under the desk. The chair squeaked with his weight as he regarded her through eyes framed by ridiculously thick black lashes.

      “That, too.”

      Sydney had come a long way from the hopelessly romantic nineteen-year-old. She wasn’t running away this time, from Sebastian or Jamie or herself. Nor, she decided grimly, from this chief engineer.

      “Listen, Mr. Henderson…”

      “Reece.”

      “Listen, Reece. What happened ten years ago is, if you’ll excuse the lame pun, water over the dam. Something I’d like very much to forget.”

      “Folks around here seem to want to remember it.”

      “That’s their problem, not mine.” She leaned forward, jabbing the air with the pencil to emphasize her point. “And even though it’s none of your business, I’ll tell you that the only reason I came back to Chalo Canyon is to capture the ruins on videotape. I started the project a decade ago. This time I intend to finish it.”

      He studied her through hooded eyes. “Why is this particular project so important to you that you’d spend ten years planning it?”

      Sydney forced down the lump that tried to climb into her throat. Her father’s death was too recent, the scar still too raw, to talk about it with strangers.

      “I’m a documentarian,” she said with a tight edge to her voice. “Like you, I take great pride in my work. By themselves, the ruins emerging from their long sleep make a good story. Supplemented with historical background material on the Anasazi and the legend of the Weeping Woman of Chalo Canyon, I can craft a good story into a great one.”

      She pushed to her feet.

      “Now if you don’t mind, I’d like to hitch a ride back to town. The rest of my crew is supposed to arrive around noon, and I want to be ready to roll as soon as they get here.”

      It was, Reece decided as he watched her drive off with one of his underlings, an impressive performance.

      He might even have believed her if he hadn’t been sitting front row, center stage when she made her grand entrance at the Lone Eagle Café some eight hours later.

      Chapter 3

      L ike the clientele it catered to, the Lone Eagle Café made no pretensions to elegance. Most of its business came from locals, the rest from pleasure boaters and fishermen who passed through town on their way to or from excursions on the vast man-made lake behind the dam. Occasionally work crews hunkered in and made the motel and café their headquarters during visits to the hydroelectric plant powered by the Chalo River.

      Reece had stayed at the motel during his initial site survey last winter and again during the preplanning phase of the dam’s inspection and repair a few months ago. He’d returned three weeks ago to supervise the project itself. By now he pretty well knew the café’s menu by heart, and had settled on the rib-eye steak and pinto beans as his standard fare.

      The beef came from Sebastian Chavez’s spread north of town, or so he’d been told by the friendly, broad-hipped Lula Jenkins, who, along with her sister, Martha, co-owned and operated the Lone Eagle Motel and Café. The pinto beans, Lula had advised, were grown on a local farm irrigated by water from the Chalo River Reservoir.

      “And if you want to keep on shoveling in these beans,” she reminded Reece as she plunked his over-flowing plate down in front of him, “you’d better see that you get that reservoir filled in time for the fall planting.”

      “Yes, ma’am.”

      “Folks hereabouts depend on that water. Depend on the revenues from boaters and fishermen, too.”

      “I know.”

      Inviting herself to join him, Lula eased her comfortable bulk into the chair opposite Reece’s. Her heavy-lidded brown eyes, evidence of the Native American heritage shared by so many in this region, drilled him from across the green-and-white-checkered plastic tablecloth.

      “How long will it take to restock the reservoir with fish after you boys get done messing with the dam?”

      Reece’s nostrils twitched at the tantalizing aroma rising from his steak. He hadn’t eaten since his hurried breakfast of diced-ham-and-egg burritos, wolfed down during the drive out to the dam just after dawn this morning. Despite the rumbling in his stomach, however, he knew his dinner would have to wait a while longer. Lula’s question wasn’t an idle one. It echoed the worries of a small town that depended on the Chalo River Reservoir for its livelihood.

      Reece had prepared detailed environmental-and economic-impact assessments as part of his prep work for the repair project. He’d also conducted a series of meetings with local business and property owners to walk concerned parties through the process, step by step. Slides and briefings didn’t carry quite the same impact for the people involved as seeing their water supply disappear before their eyes, though.

      As the nation’s fifth-largest electric utility and the second-largest wholesale water supplier, the Bureau of Reclamation’s network of dams and reservoirs generated more than forty billion kilowatt-hours of electricity and delivered over ten trillion gallons of water each year. One out of five farmers in the western states depended on this water for irrigation to produce their crops. Additionally, hundreds of thousands of sports fishermen and recreationists plied the man-made lakes behind the dams, contributing their share to the economic fabric of communities like Chalo Canyon.

      Even more important, the dams harnessed rivers like the Salt and the Gila and the mighty Colorado, controlling the floods and the devastation they’d wrought over the centuries. Born and bred to the West, Reece had grown up with a healthy respect for a river’s power. In college he’d double-majored in civil and hydroelectric engineering. After college he’d worked dam projects all over the world. His father’s death and the itch to get back to the vast, rugged West where he’d grown to manhood had led to a position with the Bureau of Reclamation’s Structural Analysis Group in Denver. The Chalo River inspection and repair project had brought him home to Arizona.

      Patiently he addressed Lula’s concerns about the project’s impact on the serious business of pleasure boating and sports fishing. “My headquarters in Washington began coordinating this project more than a year ago with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Arizona Fish and Game Department. The government facility at Willow Bend has doubled its rainbow trout output to resupply the reservoir. The state hatchery will restock channel catfish, black crappie, perch and striped bass. The take won’t be as plentiful for a year or more after the lake refills, but it should still provide enough catch to bring in the sport fishermen.”

      “It better,” Lula grumbled. “Things are lookin’ pretty thin now, I can tell you. Martha said she doesn’t have a single room reserved after your crew and Miss Fancy-Pants Scott’s folks leave.” The waitress shook her head. “Imagine her driving right off a cliff!”

      Reece took a long pull on his beer while Lula rambled СКАЧАТЬ