Theo nods seriously. “A fraction of a fraction. Ten thousand acres, and the road from the highway cuts through a tiny corner of it. The Big House and the barn sit in the absolute northeast corner of the ranch, and the house is angled to face exactly down the middle. So, if you walked out the front door and walked in a perfectly straight line for a whole lot of miles, you’d eventually reach the southwest corner.”
“Tenthousandacres?”
“Yes ma’am.” She spins her glass on the granite. “So.”
I let out a slow breath. “So, I deal primarily in real estate development. Meaning, I’m not a real estate agent in the sense that I buy and sell houses.”
“You buy land and turn it into condos and shit.”
“Essentially, yes. But condos are boring, if profitable. But yes, that’s what I do.”
“Well, there ain’t a single inch of this ranch any of us would let you turn into condos or anything else. We need every blade of grass we own for graze.”
I smile, but I’m getting frustrated with her. “No, listen, Miss Auden—”
“Theo.”
“Theo—listen, Theo. I’m not proposing condos anywhere on your land.” Nearby, maybe, eventually; I saw some likely spots on the freeway not too far away, but I’m not about to say that yet. “No condos, no malls.”
“But you want to buy part of our land,” she surmises, eyes narrowing. “You’re a developer, right? So you want to buy some of our land and develop it.”
“Sort of. But not really.”
She shakes her head. “Well then color me confused.” She sips. “You’re going to have to explain.”
I sigh. “Well, to be honest, I don’t really haveallthe details worked out, as it’s all still in the preliminary stages, but I need to know if you all are willing to even play ball with me before I invest any more of my time in nailing down details.” I hesitate, sip tea to buy myself time to think. “The idea is this—a working, living, breathing historical village.”
Theo snorts. “Uh, maybe you missed it on the way in—I know it’s small, but…we’ve already got that. Auden Town has been the hub of this area for two hundred years, and it hasn’t changed much in that time. You want to buy our town? Why? To make something that’s already there?”
I chew on my words. “Well, yes, it’s there. But I think with the right vision, we could take what you’ve already built here and make it even better.”
“By better, you mean bigger. Newer. Shinier.” She says this as a bad thing.
“Not necessarily. I stopped in town on the way here—I didn’t do a thorough walk-through, but enough to get a good feel for it. It’s really amazing. I felt like I stepped back in time. Truly. So, what I’m interested in expanding on is what you already have—all around.”
“I guess I’m not sure why.”
“To be honest, Theo, because there’s money in it. I’m not talking turning this place into a Disneyland Old West thing, not at all. But with the right marketing, you could get enough traffic to this place to make it profitable all around.”
“But that means people.”
“Yes, it does.”
“Auden Town is a working place. By that, I mean it serves the families of our employees—and we employ several dozen people, as ranch hands, stable hands, groomers, trainers, and the like, as well as their families. The town is their hub—it makes life out here bearable for them, so they can get needful things and have a drink or two without having to drive into the nearest town thirty minutes from here.” She lets out a breath. “We used to employ more, as a matter of fact, but lately, things’ve been…tough,” she muses, eyeing me; none of this news to me, thanks to Tina’s research, but I say nothing. “So, you want to buy the town, but want nothing to do with the ranch itself. Is what you’re proposing? No fancy new structures? No malls, or big ol’ ugly modern buildings?”
“I want nothing to do with your ranch, Theo, I promise. You have a lovely spot out here, and the town as it is now is amazing. A littletoorustic, perhaps, so my thought, off the cuff, you understand, would be to modernize things just a touch—add A/C and Wi-Fi and the like, make things structurally and electrically sound, add a few necessary buildings, another grocery, for example, and let the general store become more of a…historically accurate general store.” I clear my throat. “Run, I would hope, by someone capable of staying sober and conscious past noon.”
Theo snickers. “Yeah, Clancy’s sorta known for tying one on early in the day. But he owns the store, and his dad owned it before him, and so on for, oh, four generations, maybe. A Cartwright has run the general store since there was a store there.”
“Well, that’s a hurdle for down the road.” I wave a hand. “Like I said, what I’m envisioning is adding a few things. An inn, in the bed-and-breakfast style, but right there in town. Have it built to look like it was always there, keep all the modern stuff hidden, so it looks and feels natural. A few things like that.”
“To what end?”
I blink at her. “To what end? Financial gain, Miss Auden. That’s the end. For your family, and for mine. And, as well, it would bring money into the area which would help everyone.”
“It sounds like a lot of tourists up in our business.”
“Well, yes, but…isn’t that the nature of business?” I ask.
