nearby baby. Daphne had already changed everything, and Diane suspected the changes had only just begun.
She just wished she had some experience to guide her.
* * *
Blaine stood on the road in question, surveying the situation. The road was elevated a few feet above the surrounding ranch land, which helped keep it dry and, in the case of blowing snow, relatively snow-free much of the winter.
But there was no question that the recent heavy rain and runoff had caused the road to dip dangerously, right over a culvert meant to equalize water buildup between the grazing land on either side and to prevent ponding as much as possible. But the recent rains had been anything but usual for this area, and problems had begun to turn up.
Climbing down to a lower position, Blaine scanned the figures the surveyor had gathered, then eyed the situation for himself. The question was whether they could save the culvert and road simply by clearing the asphalt, building up a layer of solid earth and gravel, then repaving over it.
Neither option would be cheap for the penny-pinching county commission, but the right option had to be chosen regardless of cost. A road cave-in could cause worse problems. And no matter what his decision, a lot of people were going to be bothered by a necessary detour.
His colleague Doug Ashbur, from the roads department, was inspecting the other end of the culvert. He called along it to Blaine the instant he saw him.
“Abandon hope,” Doug called, his voice echoing. “I don’t know about your end, but the metal’s rusting out down here, and the concrete casement is cracking.”
“Grand.” The view from his end wasn’t any better. He saw more than rusting steel and cracking concrete. He also saw a definite dip in culvert beneath the sinking road. The entire thing was trying to collapse.
He stepped back a few yards, being wiser than to enter that culvert in its current condition. Past engineers and road builders had tried their best, but the simple fact was that with the typical hypercold winter temperatures and the eventual thaws, that concrete was bound to crack. Even a minuscule crack would worsen with temperature changes, the ice expanding when water filled the small cracks, enlarging them, until this. The galvanized steel pipe under the concrete had been someone’s attempt years ago to prevent a catastrophic failure.
It had worked so far, but now it was a question of how long they had.
He eyed the ground above the culvert, beneath the road, and saw evidence that the ground was extruding from the smooth slope that must have once been there. So the concrete was no longer adequately bearing the weight of the road, the steel pipe was collapsing and the ground between the culvert and road had evidently washed away from the weeks of rain that must have penetrated through cracks in the old asphalt. An accident waiting to happen.
He called to Doug. “We’d better redirect traffic and close this road. See you up top.” He climbed the bank, using his hands when necessary, then went to his truck, where he pulled off his thick leather work gloves and stood staring at the dip.
It didn’t look like much now. There was also no way to be sure when it would become a big deal. It was far too weakened to be driving trucks and cars over, but it might last months. Even through the winter. And that was counting on luck a bit too much for his taste.
Up here he could feel the ceaseless breeze that never stopped in open places. While it was early autumn, the air was still warm and smelled a bit like summer. A very different summer than in Galway: warmer, drier, dustier. Sometimes he missed the cooler, wetter clime of home, but mostly he liked it here. Different, but with its own beauty, like when he turned to look at the mountains that loomed so close to the west. Any morning now he’d wake up to see the sugary coating of a first snowfall.
Doug joined him. “I’ll order up equipment, Blaine. It might be a few days before I can get it all together. You know how it goes.”
He most certainly did. This county didn’t have any resources to waste, and his too many bosses all had their eyes on things beyond the event horizon, like finally getting that oft-promised ski resort built and finding other ways to make this county more attractive and create jobs. Oh, and wealth. He was sure that had to fit in somewhere.
The ranchers around here weren’t much interested in the big schemes. They just wanted to survive another year. But that meant they needed decent enough roads to carry cattle to the stockyard at the train station, roads over which to get to town and see their kids get to school...oh, a million reasons why folks these days couldn’t just be cut off from the rest of the world for months at a time.
Like it or not, expensive or not, the county was going to have to fix this culvert.
“I believe we’ve got enough in the budget,” he said to Doug. “This clearly can’t wait.”
“I agree. But we’ve got a dozen others that aren’t much better.”
“At least they’re not already collapsing. Let’s get the signs up. You have some barricades?”
Doug laughed. “Never travel without them. Okay, I’ll work on pulling together the equipment and crew.” He paused, looking back at the dip in the road. “How you want to do this? Another culvert?”
“We talked about other solutions, you remember. The problem is that if we don’t use culverts, the erosion just expands to eat the road.” As dry as this place was in general, he was often surprised how much of a headache water gave him. Usually in the spring, however. The last rains had been record-breaking for September.
While he put out some orange cones and staked some detour signs at the crossroad, his thoughts wandered back to Diane. He wondered how she was going to like dealing with the good ol’ boys of Conard County. He wondered if they’d give her a hard time about the baby.
Mostly he wondered why she was haunting his thoughts and why he kept thinking she was a tidy armful. And why his body stirred in response.
Well, he assured himself, that would wear off. It had to. Anyway, he’d hardly talked to her. Chances were he wouldn’t continue to feel the sexual draw when he learned what she was really like.
Wasn’t that always the way?
Diane went to her little rented house that night with a briefcase full of files that had been left on her desk and a baby who’d eaten enough today to satisfy a horse...well, relatively speaking. It seemed as if she needed to be fed about every two or three hours, even though the social worker had said that should begin to slow down. Not yet, obviously, and it might continue through the night.
Oh, yeah, get the girl a pediatrician. Maybe she ought to start keeping a list so she didn’t forget something. The move and taking charge of an infant had left her a bit scatterbrained.
At the last moment, before settling into a small house she hadn’t yet been able to turn into a home, she thought to check her diaper stash even though she’d bought quite a few yesterday. Who would have thought such a bitty thing could fill so many diapers?
She counted and decided she had enough for a couple of days. Plenty of formula, too. And since Candy and Aubrey had brought her a huge lunch from the café, she didn’t need to cook.
Good heavens, she thought. The baby was sleeping contentedly, she could dine without cooking and she had time to kick off her shoes and collapse on the recliner that had been delivered just yesterday. Beaten and creaky, it held a lot of memories of her father, a veteran who had largely retreated to a distant land inside his own head. Memories of her father, as rare as the good ones had been, were something she didn’t want to lose entirely.
She wandered down the hall to the bedroom she hadn’t had time to unpack yet and opened a suitcase to pull out her favorite old jeans and a checked shirt as softened by age as the jeans. Her grungies, her comfies, whatever anyone wanted to call them. That night she had nothing to