Love for Sale

kept his promise to Lily about taking her duties in return for letting him off the hook Election Day. Both of them were enjoying instructing the children, so long as it was only half days for each.
    “They wear me out by noon,“ Lily said. “I’m not used to such young people with so much spare energy. I’d be a candidate for the asylum as well as our former guests if I had to do it all day.”
    Walker and his assistants had finally finished examining the rooms and belongings of the guests at Grace and Favor, and normalcy resumed at the mansion as well. Mimi cleaned as if she were demented. Everyone was happy, except for Mr. Prinney, who hadn’t heard back from Jack Summer yet and was getting anxious to help Mary Towerton.
    He dropped in the newspaper office on Thursday afternoon to check with the editor and found Jack nearly buried in snippets of paperwork, fresh new file folders, and a beat-up third- or fourth-hand file cabinet he’d found at the city dump.
    “I’m sorry it’s taken me so long. The mob of reporters is harassing me for inside stuff I don’t know anything about. Their pestering ate up my time,“ Jack said. “And I had much more material about Hoover Dam than I realized. You can’t take the time to sort through all of this, but I’ll have a summary ready for you tomorrow.”
    Mr. Prinney had to be satisfied with this. Looking around at the wealth of various files and articles, he realized Jack was right.

    Jack dutifully turned up at Mr. Prinney’s office early Friday and said, “I’ve made sort of a summary for you. It’s comprehensive, but if there’s anything else you need to know about it, I have it sorted out chronologically now.”
    Jack was prepared to give Prinney his notes, but wanted to read them aloud to him first. Perhaps Mr. Prinney might just happen to say something revealing. Jack assumed this had something to do with Mary Towerton, who was, so far as he knew, the only person in Voorburg who had a personal connection with the Hoover Dam.
    “The plan has been going on for years. The Colorado River, I believe, is the one that carved out the Grand Canyon,“ he began. “At the border of Nevada and Arizona, the river also carved out a deep canyon. At the turn of the century, a government agency decided to divert some of the water by canals to the southern California deserts. This was great for the farmers, until a few years later when it flooded the area so badly it created an enormous lake of red mud and wrecked their farms and homes.”
    Jack turned a page and went on, “Then in 1920 the same idea came under consideration again by the Bureau of Reclamation with a plan for damming it and sending the water to lots of people. In 1922, President Hoover, who was then Secretary of Commerce, got wind of it. As an engineer himself, he liked the idea. But the government didn’t like the price. It wasn’t until 1929 that the funding was approved. Apparently there was some kind of very expensive bond that had to be posted by the people who would do the work, and it took a lot of time to get the money.”
    Mr. Prinney was interested, but waiting for the information he needed. “Yes, go on.“
    “It was too huge a job for any one company to take on,“ Jack said, flipping to the next page of his notes. “So several groups of companies with the necessary skills and reputations formed something called ‘Six Companies.’ Some of them are experienced demolition experts; others are concrete experts. One is a road-building company. I don’t know what the others are. Anyway, they hired a guy named Frank Crowe to oversee the whole thing. He had the reputation of being the best civil engineer in the country.“
    “Is this gentleman still in charge?“ Mr. Prinney asked.
    “Yes, he is. And he’s doing a great job as far as the schedule goes. He’s way ahead of his deadlines, but he’s working the men too hard and not taking the necessary precautions. A number of the thousands of men working there have died. The rumor you said you heard was right. A few accidents have been reported, but mainly what the company says is pneumonia and they’re not to blame. You see, they couldn’t build the dam with a fast-running, hostile river running through it, so the first step was to divert the water into four enormous tunnels through sheer granite.”
    Jack consulted his notes again and said, “The tunnels, two on each side of the canyon, had to be blasted through nearly a mile of rock.