“You just let me handle that,” Dorothy said with a smile. “I’m expecting a call from the State Historical Fund board, and I might be able to redirect some things.”

“This is insane.”

“You can design and build things all over Afghanistan and Somalia and wherever else, but you don’t think you can do it in your own backyard?” Dad challenged.

“I thought you didn’t know where I was?”

His eyes narrowed. “Are you going to do it or not? Because I’m expecting Xander to ship me down to the old folks’ home at any minute.”

But then it hit me. Opening the mine would kill two birds with one stone.

“I’ll do it.”

Hours later, when I’d finished reading all of Uncle Cal’s documents, a chill of apprehension raced down my spine.

The town might love me for what I was about to offer, but they could just as easily hate me for what I was about to do to my brother.

Chapter Eight

Chapter Eight

Willow

“Every year we petition for caramel corn, and every year you give it to the Halversons,” Peter Mayville argued at the wooden podium, facing down the almighty Alba Historical Society Council. The town council might handle the administration of the town, but the real power was held by the council of the Historical Society.

Usually, society meetings were held once a month, but with only seven weeks until the opening of the season, they happened weekly. Attendance skyrocketed, too, as families who didn’t winter here came back in preparation for opening weekend. Town Hall, which was pretty much the multipurpose building of modern Alba, was heating up quickly with nearly a hundred bodies straining her capacity.

Every person in this room either owned a building in the ghost town—civic or commercial—which gave them a vote in the society, or their income was directly linked to the money the tourist season brought in.

Gotta love small-town Friday nights.

“Now, Peter, I hear what you’re saying. I do. But it’s not about us giving them the caramel corn as much as it is them keeping it. It’s unfair to take their time-honored tradition when they’ve perfected it over the last fifty years,” Walter Robinson responded, peering over his reading glasses from the center of the horseshoe-shaped dais where the council sat.

I shifted in my folding chair in the back of the room and glanced over this week’s agenda. We were twenty minutes into the meeting and still dealing with item number three, where voting members requested changes to their summer business plans. Luckily, I had snacks, because it could get Survivor in here real quick, and I had to make it to item seven to present my new Alba logo for the marketing plan.