Homestead by Radclyffe

Author:Radclyffe
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781602829985
Publisher: Bold Strokes Books
Published: 2013-10-22T07:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seventeen

Late in the morning of the twenty-eighth day without rain, Tess stood on her porch and shielded her eyes against the ever-present glaring sun, following the dark shapes of the off-road vehicles and trucks crawling slowly along the crest of the hill that rose beyond her barn. Clay’s crew had been prowling about at first light every day for five days, marking drill sites with sonar and boring holes and measuring water pressure in the underground tables and doing whatever else they needed to do to map the configuration of the natural gas pockets and project where the water they pumped down the shafts of the tubes they drilled into the deep shale would come from and go to. As she understood it, the water would be pulled from the local aquifer, millions upon millions of gallons, and forced down narrow channels thousands of feet into the earth to open pathways for the gas to stream upward and be collected. The water and chemical solvents and sand pumped in would flow back out into containment chambers where it could be collected and safely disposed of. She understood the theory, and she understood that theories did not always translate into practice.

The puffs of smoke from the diesel engines, the distant whine of heavy machinery, and the occasional rumble of male voices on the wind were foreign to the usual chorus filling her days. She sometimes felt as if an invading army had camped on her land while she waited behind flimsy barricades for the first volley to sail overhead and shatter the harmony of her life.

She feared the peace she might lose could never be reclaimed, and yet could think of no other course to take. She’d told Clay she would trust her and fretted she might have been a fool to think she could. She hadn’t spoken to Clay except in a brief phone conversation two days after the dinner where they’d declared a temporary truce. Clay had confirmed she would be bringing her crew that day, and they’d been at it all week since. Clay had been polite on the phone, completely professional and carefully distant, and Tess hadn’t known how to ask her if she’d recovered from the hit-and-run.

She heard the distinctive roar of a motorcycle engine most mornings and saw Clay’s Harley parked at the foot of the hill, but Clay didn’t pull up to her porch in a spray of gravel and grit the way she once had, offering her a spin into the freedom of the road. Whatever fragile personal connection they’d forged hadn’t lasted beyond the dinner they’d shared. She’d made it clear she hadn’t wanted anything more, and apparently Clay had heard her.

She should have been happy about that, and she was—or she would be, if the nagging sense of something missing would stop plaguing her. The only thing missing in her life was rain.

Annoyed with her annoyance, Tess turned her back on the activity on the hillside and looked out over the fields as she did almost every hour, as if expecting to see something different.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.