He turned to them. “When I said I didn’t know if the lawyer made an offer, that’s because of a blind trust.”

“We know about it,” Dance said.

“I put all my assets in it when I took office. Barrett controls everything as trustee. But he knows my general investment and planning strategies. And when he heard about the roadhouse, I imagine he made the offer because he knew I was interested in all the property here.

“But the trust sets out the guidelines he has to follow in purchasing property and he’ll stick to those. He’ll buy it if the conditions are right; he won’t if they’re not. I can’t tell him to do anything about it.”

Dance was beginning to feel her A-to-B-to-Z thinking might end up short of the twenty-sixth letter.

The congressman asked, “If you know about the trust then you know about the company it owns. The LLC in Nevada.”

“Yes, planning to do some construction here.”

“That company also owns all of this.” He waved his hand. He seemed to indicate everything from the parking lot to the development where Annette and her neighbors lived.

Ernie would’ve been out to talk to him in a hare-lick.

Nashima continued, “The company I’m referring to is Kodoku Ogawa Limited. The Japanese words mean ‘Solitude Creek.’” He fell silent momentarily. “Curious about the word for solitude, though. In Japanese, it also means isolation, desolation, detachment. Solitude in English suggests something healthy, regenerative.” He turned to them with a searing gaze. “Have you figured out the purpose of Kodoku Ogawa Limited yet?”

No one responded. Stemple was gazing out over the grassy expanse, arms crossed.

Nashima walked to an ancient fence post topped with rusted barbed wire. He touched it gingerly. “In nineteen forty-two, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order Ninety Sixty-six, which gave military officers the right to exclude any person they saw fit from, quote, ‘designated military areas.’ You know what those military areas were? All of the state of California and much of Oregon, Washington and Arizona. And who got excluded? People of Japanese ancestry.”

“The internment,” Dance said.

Nashima muttered, “A nice word for pogrom.” He continued, “Nearly one hundred and twenty thousand people were forced out of their homes and into camps. Over sixty percent were U.S. citizens. Children, the elderly, the mentally handicapped, among them.” He laughed harshly. “Spies? Saboteurs? They were as loyal as German Americans or Italian Americans. Or any Americans, for that matter. If there was such a risk, then why in Hawaii, where only a small minority of Japanese were rounded up, was there no espionage or sabotage among the tens of thousands who remained free?”

“And this was one of those camps?”

“The Solitude Creek Relocation Center. It extended from that crest there all the way to the highway. It was a charming place,” he said bitterly. “People lived in large barracks, divided into twenty-foot apartments, with walls that didn’t go up all the way to the ceiling. There were only communal latrines, not separated by gender. There was virtually no privacy at all. The camp was surrounded by barbed wire, five strand, and there were machine-gun towers every few hundred feet.