When she got back home, feeling somewhat the better for the sweat if not for the conversation, she found Hawk sitting at the kitchen table, reading the Boomerang and drinking his coffee. She could hear the washer and dryer running, out in the mudroom off the back porch. He looked up with a piece of a smile. “You know, Sal, you need to work on your laundry habits. You’re a real washer hog. I went to do a load and found you’d left your wash in the machine yesterday. I moved it over to the dryer.”
Her wash? She had underwear? “You didn’t put my bras in the dryer, did you?” Speaking of sin.
He was offended. “What do you take me for? I hung the flimsy stuff out on the line.”
She looked out the window. Bras and underpants, even a nightie, flapping happily in the morning breeze. She’d never seen a prettier sight.
“Have I mentioned that you’re the ideal man?” she told him, wrapping her arms around him and giving him a kiss on the ear.
“Get away from me, you’re all sweaty,” he said, swatting her off with the newspaper. “But don’t forget about the love slave thing. So what’re your plans today?” he asked.
“I told Delice I’d go out to Centennial to help her pick up stuff for the white elephant sale on Saturday.”
“Are you really up for this?” He looked worried.
“Yes, I am really up for this,” she said. “I’m not going to lock the doors and hunker down in the house, Hawk. Life has to go on.”
“Where in Centennial?” Hawk asked, hearing something in her voice.
“Wood’s Hole. Actually, we are going to get things for the sale, but Delice thinks it might be a good idea to have a little talk with Mrs. Wood about that land swap Nattie and Dwayne are trying to get her to do.”
“Land swap? Is that the one your Carhart guy’s working on?” Hawk put the paper down. “Is this really any of your business?”
“He’s not ‘my’ Carhart guy, and it’s probably not my business,” she admitted. “But look at it this way. You’re always complaining about all those deals around Tucson, where the developers trade a parking lot for some mountain range, and then they scrape off all the saguaros and ocotillos and turn it into Levittown in the Desert. Your father’s ready to run off to Mexico to get away from the ranchette crowd in the Tortolitas. Could you just let the same thing happen in the Centennial Valley?”
Hawk thought about it. “Maybe you guys need a hand with the more elephantine white elephants,” he said at last.
“We’re taking Brit along,” said Sally. “We can probably manage.”
“Yeah, Brit’s a real Charles Atlas.”
“Don’t you have work to do?” she asked.
“Hey, I’m a college professor. Everyone knows we sit around all summer long and eat bonbons.” Now his eyes turned serious. “Look, I know I’m not supposed to act like this,” he said, “but after what happened last night, I just feel like keeping an eye on you for a while. It’ll wear off soon enough, but for the moment, that’s the way it is.”
She swallowed once, twice. And finally managed, “Oh well. If that’s the way it is.”
Delice was happy to have Hawk’s help. If he was willing to drive his truck, between that and her Explorer, everything would fit. She could cancel the U-Haul trailer she’d rented and save twenty-five bucks. She insisted that Sally ride with her, and Hawk follow along with Brit. They had, she said, things to discuss. “Tell me about Mr. Personality,” Delice demanded, before they’d even gotten out of the driveway.
“Carhart?” Sally asked. “You got a good demonstration. He’s insensitive, boorish, egotistical, sexist, and pompous.”
“The hell of it is,” said Delice, “he’s tolerable on the eyes.”
“And agony on the brain,” Sally retorted.
“Maybe I could just stuff a sock in his mouth,” Delice mused.
“Oh shit,” Sally exclaimed, “don’t tell me . . .”
“You have to admit, he does bear a resemblance to Robert Redford,” Delice persisted.
“Which has served him well over the years. I’m all for Robert Redford of course, but don’t be deceived. Marsh Carhart makes me puke.”
“And he’s had that effect since when?” Delice asked.
“Always. Back in Berkeley, there were a bunch of young hotwires who were going to prevent environmental meltdown with something they called ‘appropriate technology.’ Everything from solar food dryers and composting toilets to personal computers and bioengineering.
“He was one of them. Marsh is a sociobiologist, which means he’s one step away from just making things up as he goes along. He did his dissertation work on birds—sooty terns, to be precise. Evidently, everybody thought these terns mated for life, but Marsh watched them go at it for about six months and then wrote a paper saying that the males snuck off and ‘committed adultery’ with younger females. He concluded that adultery was adaptive behavior for males of all species— those who were most successful at getting their sperm around were improving the gene pool and doing the species a favor.”
“Huh? Adultery?” said Delice. “Do the girl sooty terns go out and get nasty little birdie divorce lawyers? This sounds like total bullshit.”
“Ten-four. At the time his then-wife was booting him out after catching him in the back of their VW van with one of the girls who scooped ice cream at Swensen’s,” Sally said.
“He gets away with this stuff?” Delice was confused.
“What can I say? But he’s the king of headlines. The Redford thing doesn’t hurt when it comes to media coverage, or the fact that he’s marketed himself as a defender of the earth.”
“While porking everything in sight?” Delice asked.
“Especially the young ones, but of course, anything for the species. And then, of course, there’s that stupid book on rape. I hate to think what kind of participant-observer research he did on that one.”
Delice’s eyes went cold. “I doubt that what happened to Monette was a matter of natural selection. Okay, the guy’s a slimeball. He sounds like he and Nattie were made for each other. But my brother will put up with him, if he’s good for their business. I’m just amazed that people aren’t on to him. From what I saw last night it doesn’t take a lot of Stoli to get him talking.”
“Not about business. On the land thing, he was very coy. It’s not that surprising. He’s made some money. He bet large on Microsoft when it was just a couple of dudes with two tin cans and a string, so he must know a good thing when he sees it. I don’t care what kind of crap he slings about not getting involved in the financial end of these deals. If Nattie and Dwayne stand to make some bucks, Marsh probably has a piece of the action somewhere.”
“Maybe he just wasn’t interested in talking to you,” Delice said.
“And with good reason. Trust me, Dee, he does his talking with his wanger.”
“Oh, I believe it. He thinks I ‘run with the wolves.’ Maybe I can use that.” Delice fancied herself a Mata Hari when she needed to be.
“And if that fails,” said Sally, “you’ve got that bag of quarters.”
They fell silent as they passed the West Laramie Fly Store, heading out for the Snowy Range Road. The valley opened up before them, the Snowies looming ahead under the huge blue sky. Black-eyed susans nodded by the roadside, and Sally spotted half a dozen antelope, scattered over a hill. The windows were open, and the smell of sage and clean air enveloped them. The tension of the previous two days began, somehow, to fade. There were so many beautiful spots in Wyoming. It was a sad and amazing thing that somebody like Monette Bandy could have spent her whole life in such a place, and never learned to see or to care. “You know,” said Sally, “this is one of my favorite places in the whole world. If I had a piece of this, I’d never, ever let it go.”
“I’m with you,” said Delice. “And from what I’ve heard, Molly Wood is of the same opinion. That’s why I can’t understand how this deal’s gotten this far. Wood’s Hole is just about the biggest ranch in the valley. There can’t be a piece of property up in the Laramies that’s even close to the size, so there’s gotta be a bunch of cash involved. She must be under heavy pressure to be even considering this swap. And she’s the type to handle pressure. Wait until you meet her.”
As they neared the picturesque town of Centennial, nestled at the foot of the Snowy Range, Delice turned right on a gravel road, Hawk’s truck following behind her. Horned larks shot up out of the ditches as they rolled past. They took the road until it forked, bore left over a rise, and swept down, on a dirt driveway now, curving along the contour of the hill. A row of cottonwoods at the bottom marked a winding creek. Not far from the streambed, a grove of trees sheltered a cluster of weathered outbuildings and a sprawling white clapboard house with green shutters.
“A little bit of New England in the Rockies,” Sally remarked.
“That’d be Molly’s doing,” said Delice. “She’s not from here originally—came out from the East during World War II, to teach school.”
“How’d she come by the ranch?” Sally asked.
“Married money. Zeke Wood was a builder who got a nice chunk of the government contracts that turned Fort Warren, over in Cheyenne, into F. E. Warren Air Force Base, during World War II. And after that, well, let’s say they invested wisely.”
As Sally knew, FDR and his boys hadn’t been too scrupulous about cost overruns in the service of whipping Hitler and Hirohito. But then federal boondoggles during wartime were a time-honored way of getting rich in America. You didn’t have to be a corrupt profiteer to end up seeing some nice returns from government work. Westerners loved to bash Washington and then cash the checks.
Delice parked next to a brand-new Ford Expedition, in a turnaround between the barn and the house. Hawk pulled in beside her and jumped out. “Pretty place,” he said. “I like the house.” Hawk had spent his earliest years in Connecticut, with his grandparents, before his father and stepmother claimed him and took him to Tucson. He’d gone to college at Yale. He had a love-hate thing with New England. After all those years in Arizona, the ancient architecture still called to his Yankee blood.
“When I phoned this morning to tell her we’d be coming, she said she’d be down by the stock pond. I guess she’s a regular with the bird count for the Audubon Society, and she’s putting in a morning down there.”
“Cool,” said Hawk. He’d once confided to Sally that the finest thing his grandparents had ever given him was his first pair of binoculars. The Venerables, as he called them, hadn’t been much for showing affection, but they’d shown him how to look at birds, how to read field guides, how to use his eyes and his head to see the world more clearly. With his mother dead and his father gone, the birds of the Connecticut woodlands had provided little Josiah Green with a lot of company.
Hawk headed around to the toolbox in the back of his truck and pulled out his binocular case. “Check out those redwings and yellow-headed blackbirds, staking out their territory in the willows along the creek. Maybe I can become her assistant. I should have brought a six-pack.”
“She’d probably have appreciated it. Come on,” Delice told them.
They walked along the watercourse, on a path beaten through tall grass, weaving through sagebrush and trees to the pond. Not far along the shoreline, a small, compact woman in a straw hat sat in a folding lawn chair, leaning over a large bird-spotting telescope, mounted on a tripod. As they approached, she straightened, put on reading glasses that hung from a chain around her neck, wrote something in a notebook, took the glasses off and let them dangle, and turned on them a gaze so penetrating, Sally suddenly knew how those long-ago students of Molly Wood’s must have felt when they’d done something to call the teacher’s attention to themselves. Ahem.
Her expression wasn’t unfriendly. It was alert. Her eyes, strikingly blue, were relentless even as she smiled. Straight, short, silver-white hair framed her sturdy, beautiful face. She wore a button-down oxford shirt, pressed to crisp perfection, a pair of equally immaculate cotton pants, and a combination Sally had seldom seen since her fifties childhood: Keds with peds. “Hello there,” she drawled, the music of autumn, and apple cider, and sleigh rides in her voice. Sally instantly wished she could hear Molly Wood reading aloud. Edward Lear, or Thoreau, or Goodnight Moon. “So awfully nice of you to come and pick up all my old stuff.”
“I brought some folks to help,” said Delice, introducing them.
“Oh yes,” said Molly Wood. “I knew Meg Dunwoodie, Dr. Alder—may I call you Sally? I look forward to your biography. And in fact, Dr. Green—did you say Hawk, Delice? I’d thought it was Josiah—I attended your lecture last fall on southern Wyoming mineral deposits. A fascinating subject.”
“Glad to hear you think so,” said Hawk. “Most people don’t.” He swung his eyes to the edge of the pond, where birds with long, slim necks and stilt legs, red heads, white chests, and black and white wings pecked about in the tules. “Avocets,” he said. “Nice. What have you got out there in the way of ducks?”
“Take a look for yourself,” said Molly, gesturing at the scope.
Hawk leaned down and peered in the angled eyepiece.
“Mallards, teal, a couple of pintails,” he chanted. “Coots. Eared grebes. Long-billed curlews. White-faced ibises.” He swung the scope over to look at the tules again. “Some yellowlegs over there too.” He stood a moment and listened, silently. Now Sally was aware of the rustling of the wind in the leaves, the twittering of birds. “Do I hear a chestnut-collared longspur?”
Now Molly smiled broadly. “There’s a Wilson’s phalarope nest over there too. Come back this fall. We get great ducks here then.”
Hawk looked at her and grinned back. “If my grandmother were here, she’d have me down in the rushes, stomping around trying to flush rails.”
“I’m hardly old enough to be your grandmother!” Molly sniffed.
“I never exactly had a mother,” Hawk told her.
“Oh,” she said, taken aback. “Well then.”
“I should’ve brought Jerry Jeff.” Delice tried a diversionary tactic. “He’s very good at stomping.”
“He’s a teenager, yes? I’m sure he is. Teenage boys have feet of lead.” Molly seemed grateful for the shift, but she couldn’t help one sympathetic glance at Hawk. “I’m pretty much done here,” said Molly. “I’ll just pack up my stuff and come up to the house with you.”
“Let me help.” Hawk was trying to put her at ease too. He ran a finger over the aluminum body of the scope. “I don’t mind toting a Swarovski,” he told her.
“A what?” Sally asked.
“This fine piece of Austrian optical engineering. Mrs. Wood here has the Cadillac of spotting scopes.” He turned to Molly. “I’ll wager you take some pictures with this thing from time to time.”
“Not me,” she said. “My husband was the photographer in the family. I never even took snapshots of my children at their birthday parties. I probably should have,” she finished on a mumble, as Hawk stowed scope and eyepiece in their cases, broke down the tripod, and shouldered all the equipment.
“Don’t worry about it,” said Sally. “I’d be just as happy if my mom hadn’t taken a million embarrassing pictures of me in some dress with puffy sleeves that cut off the circulation in my arms, with chocolate cake smeared all over my face and a stupid party hat.” All this talk about parents and children seemed to be making everyone nervous.
Hawk was still looking at the pond, searching for another subject. “You know, Mrs. Wood, for a stock pond, I’d say this one’s in great shape. The tules look good, there are cottonwood saplings, the water’s even clear. How do you do it?”
“Do you see any cows around here?” Molly Wood asked him. “Any cow pies even? I haven’t let them anywhere near this part of the place in almost ten years. We started out back then, just fencing them away from the pond and keeping them downstream. I’ve been reducing the herd steadily over the years, and by next year I’ll be ready to give up on cattle altogether.”
A ranch with no cattle? Not exactly a paying concern, Sally realized. How did Molly Wood make the mortgage? Jerry Jeff had said she’d stabled horses—could that possibly pay the bills? Obviously it would be rude to ask, but after all, they’d come out in part to find out what was up with Molly’s property.
“I was so sorry to read in the paper about your brother’s niece,” Molly said to Delice. “I don’t know what things are coming to around here. I understand that the memorial will be held tomorrow. I expect to be able to get there, but I have some appointments. If I’m delayed, please offer my condolences.”
Delice looked startled. “There’s no need to make a special trip. And thanks, I’ll pass on your thoughts to Mary and Dickie.”
“Don’t be so shocked that I’d attend,” Molly said acidly. “What happened to that poor Monette Bandy is just unconscionable, and I wouldn’t be surprised if you have a big turnout. People haven’t talked of anything else. Maude Stark called me up yesterday to tell me that she was thinking about organizing a demonstration. I don’t know about that, but I certainly believe in paying my respects.”
“Molly’s a Republican,” said Delice. “Republicans don’t demonstrate.”
“At least the ones who have any sense of decorum,” Molly acknowledged.
They’d gotten to the house, and were standing at the front door, when Brit turned an appraising eye on the creek, and the cottonwoods, and the carpet of wildflowers in the ungrazed pasture beyond.
“What are you looking at?” Hawk asked her.
Brit’s expression was halfway between blank and bleak. “I’m trying to imagine a bunch of condos by the creek, and those meadows all full of trophy vacation homes nobody lives in.”
Molly’s eyes flicked to Brit. “I beg your pardon?” she said.
“I understand that my Uncle Dwayne and Aunt Nattie are putting together a deal to get you to swap this place to some California developers, for some acreage up in the Laramie Range,” she said. “People haven’t talked of anything else.”
Molly Wood just stared at Brit. Brit returned the glare. Neither one blinked. A real Wyoming moment.
Molly’s eyes shifted and scanned them all. Nobody said anything. “Well,” she said at last, breaking the silence but smiling pleasantly, as if the conversation had just begun. “Why don’t you come in?”
Walking into her living room, Sally could imagine Ralph Waldo Emerson holding forth to sea captains and Harvard divines and Margaret Fuller. It smelled like lemon furniture polish and lavender sachets. Homey, but not precisely comfortable. Clean plank floor, mahogany chairs, stiff upholstered sofas, gleaming tables, a curio cabinet full of fossils and arrowheads, old coins and tin-types. Rich, red, Persian rugs that somebody’s great-grandfather had probably brought back from the Orient on a clipper ship. Not a single speck of dust, anywhere. The walls held a pair of heavily framed oil portraits, a man and a woman in somber clothes. The woman had blue eyes and Molly’s jaw line. There was a seventeenth-century map of a Connecticut land grant, in remarkably good condition, and a couple of what looked like excellent Japanese prints.
Hawk walked up to the map, squinting. “Walling Plantation?” he said. “I was born five miles from there.”
“And I was born right in the middle of that grant,” said Molly. “In Wallingtown. First person in eleven generations of my family to leave.”
Hawk took the opening. “I wasn’t. You’ve been out here in Wyoming a long time, haven’t you?”
Once again she examined them all. “You are a nosy bunch, aren’t you? Oh, all right!” she exclaimed, exasperated. “I might have known that like everybody else in the county, you want to know what’s going on with my ranch. Maude pumped me for a good half hour. I suppose it makes as much sense to let people hear the truth as to feed the Laramie rumor mill. The things for the rummage sale are in the spare room. Why don’t you load them up, and then we can have some lunch and I’ll explain.”
“We wouldn’t want you to go to any trouble, Molly. It’s nice enough of you to donate to the Historical Society,” Delice said.
“It’s no bother. I’ve got some very good frozen pizzas and some beer,” she announced firmly. “I don’t mind the company, and I’d just as soon have a civilized meal and a conversation as have you try to worm things out of me so deviously.”
“It appears,” said Hawk, “that we’re not so clever after all.”
Molly got lunch ready while they worked. Her white elephants filled the back of Hawk’s truck and most of Delice’s Explorer. She had already wrapped dishes and small objects in movers’ paper and packed them in neatly labeled cardboard cartons. They hauled the boxes out, along with a chrome and vinyl kitchen table set and some other furniture. If you liked Early American stuff, there were some real treasures. Sally had her eye on a captain’s chair and was giving some thought to a drop-leaf Governor Winthrop desk she’d seen Hawk linger over. It was time, she thought, for them to think about acquiring some decent furniture. They lived like grad students.
And besides, she’d been touched by the instant connection between Hawk and Molly Wood. She knew Hawk as a man who took his time getting to know people, and she suspected that Molly Wood didn’t warm quickly. But they’d clicked in a heartbeat.
At last they were all settled on a redwood deck overlooking the creek, sitting at a wrought-iron table eating pepperoni pizza and drinking—what else?—Budweiser. It must be the beer that made New Haven famous.
Hawk watched the redwing blackbirds dart at each other, squabbling over their turf, but returning, finally, to their original perches. “So how far can we see to the edge of your place?” he asked.
“I suspect that’s your polite way of asking how much land I have. About five thousand acres,” Molly replied. “Seven and a half sections. And it’s mine, outright. Most ranchers lease public land for grazing, but Ezekiel didn’t like the idea of having to rely on the government,” she said.
Another Wyoming moment. Oy veh.
“We had a thirty-year mortgage. Paid it off in 1988.”
“Land of the free and the home of the brave,” Sally couldn’t help saying.
Molly was somewhat amused.
“So it doesn’t cost you anything to live here,” Brit said. “Then why would you sell?”
Boy, Brit was really rolling today. She’d either slay them in court or end up looking at a shootout at high noon.
“I don’t need the money myself,” Molly explained. “I’m somewhat choosy about my gear, as you’ve noticed, Josiah. But my needs aren’t extravagant, and the stock market’s done fine for me. I’m not piling up a fortune, but I have no problem living on dividends.”
They waited while she ate her pizza, took a swallow of beer. And then Delice ran out of patience. “Come on, Molly. Why sell paradise? It can’t be that you’ve gotten tired of the winters. It’ll be colder and snowier and windier up in the Laramies.”
Molly took some more time, chewing, sipping before answering. “The land I’d swap for is a seventy-acre tract off the Happy Jack Road. It’s quite private, and it’s exceptionally pretty up there too,” she said at last. “The property has power and well water not too far down, a creek of its own, even a beaver pond. I’ve already seen crossbills and goldfinches up there, and there’s a nice aspen grove that will be heavenly in the fall. It’s an in-holding in the Medicine Bow National Forest, so the land around me would never be developed. I could build a nice, new, small house where everything would work, and I wouldn’t have to deal with constant upkeep and updating.”
“Could you show it to me on a map?” Hawk asked.
“Of course. In a while,” Molly told him. She gazed out at the creek, and continued. “Look around the valley,” she told them. “Out here, the landholders are under so much pressure to sell or subdivide, half my neighbors are saying that it’s not a matter of whether, but when. Right now people are getting an excellent price for their land. But we all know that the booms don’t last forever. A year from now the bottom could drop out of the market, and I’d have let my best opportunity pass me by.”
They all nodded thoughtfully. But here came Brit again. “You have kids, don’t you?”
“Yes. A son and a daughter,” Molly said, without much expression. “And five grandchildren.” There she perked up some.
“Doesn’t it bother them that you’re thinking of selling this place?” Hawk asked, with what Sally considered an uncharacteristic lack of finesse. It bothered him, that was for sure.
Molly thought about it. “They say they understand why it’s tempting.”
And now Delice gave up on subtlety. “Dwayne said something about the deal giving you a nice legacy to pass on.”
Molly laughed cheerlessly. “I could pass on an even better legacy by simply giving Wood’s Hole to a land trust that would protect the place.” She’d finished her pizza, wiped her hands on her paper napkin, and folded it carefully, along the original creases. “My children are, shall we say, not as attached to this place as I am. In fact, they couldn’t wait to get out of here. My son, Philip, went off to college in Boulder, and it took him about eight years to graduate. Drugs had something to do with it. Then he got born-again and joined that football coach thing—the Promise Keepers—and cleaned up his act. Now he lives in Colorado Springs, with his wife and three children, and works for some company that markets what he calls ‘Christian products.’ I confess, I’ve never quite understood how a product could be Christian. But I know that his church tithes. A good percentage of any money I leave him will probably end up with them. I’m not too sure how I feel about that.”
Molly folded her hands in her lap now, as carefully as the napkin. “At least I see Philip from time to time,” she said evenly. “He brings the kids for a visit once a year or so. He’s very worried about my immortal soul. That’s what comes of being a descendant of Jonathan Edwards.”
“The guy who sang ‘Sunshine, Go Away Today’?” Delice wondered.
“The minister who wrote the sermon ‘Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,’ ” said Hawk. “Mighty scary stuff. Better than Stephen King.”
“Indeed. Philip is certain I’m not prepared to meet my maker. I keep telling him I’m in better shape than most people in this world and the next.”
Sally didn’t doubt it. “What about your daughter?” she asked.
“Alice hasn’t been back here in twelve years. Partly it’s because she hates Wyoming. She left for school when she was eighteen, telling me it was the happiest day of her life. Now I hardly ever hear from her, and she claims that her work just doesn’t leave time for a visit where she has to change planes three times just to get here.”
Sally felt a minor pang of guilt. Her own parents were dead, but she hadn’t been back to St. Louis to see her brothers in a couple years. She should at least call. “So what does your daughter do for a living?” she asked.
“I suppose you’d call it e-commerce,” Molly explained. “Five years ago she and a couple of partners started a website. It’s called Alice’s Restaurant. They started with organic food products, but now they specialize in selling personal services, whatever that means.”
“I can guess,” said Sally. “You can get anything you want.”
“Yes. They’ve gotten very big. She must have made a ton of money, but all she does is work. My grandchildren go to boarding school and to camp in the summer. I doubt she sees them for two weeks put together at a time. Her husband left her last year, so when the kids have free time, they’re with him. I don’t blame him for walking out—she never had a minute for him either.”
“So Alice is too busy to care whether you sell or not?” Sally asked.
Molly raised her eyebrows. “Not quite. When I called her to tell her I might have an offer on the place, suddenly she was very interested. Not only does she think I should do it, but she’s urged me to simply give her and Philip the cash from the sale, right now. She’s pointed out that I’ve always intended to leave them everything in my will, and I don’t need the money to live on. Giving it to them now will avoid inheritance taxes. It’s a lot of money, so of course the taxes would be considerable.”
“Excuse me?” Brit said. “Oh yeah. It’s about taxes, not about greed.”
“Perhaps,” said Molly. “Philip assures me that Alice is simply thinking about what will be there for her own children, and he agrees with her. Alice says she could invest the money now, and in short order it would be worth ten times the current value of my land.” Molly sighed. “They’re probably right. And I’d still have a lovely piece of Wyoming to call my home.”
Hawk tilted his head and looked Molly in the eye. “Why not just sell off part of this place? Why the whole thing?”
“I suppose it might be possible. I don’t particularly wish to live here to watch them build condominiums on my creek,” she said, aiming one of her schoolmarm looks at Brit. “In any case, the offer that the California investors have put forward is for the whole ranch, conditional on the swap. Nattie tells me that they want an answer by this weekend. My kids say I should think about it. So I’m thinking about it.”
But Sally was thinking about all those websites blowing up on a wing and a prayer. Hadn’t she read somewhere that most of them operated on three or four days’ cash reserves? Maybe Alice’s Restaurant was one of those undercapitalized high flyers, and Alice Wood needed the dough more than she was letting on, for boarding school tuitions and summer camps and lawyers. And what about Nattie and Dwayne’s investors? Sally wanted to know a lot more about what they were offering, and why. The idea of Nattie Lang-ham and Marsh Carhart out there on one side of the deal almost made her hope that Jonathan Edwards, the minister, had been right about what happened to sinners when they ticked the Big Guy off.