Where the Dry River Keeps Its Name

Synopsis

Mara Venn arrives in Bellweather with a bullet crease along her ribs, a stolen survey book in her saddlebag, and three riders close behind. The book belonged to her murdered friend, Oren Pike, who claimed that the powerful Rusk family diverted the town's river and built its fortune on water stolen from homesteaders downstream. Mara intends only to deliver the evidence to Oren's widow and leave before the trouble learns her name. Instead, she finds the widow running a near-empty boardinghouse, the sheriff collecting wages from the Rusks, and a town trained to treat thirst as ordinary weather. When Rusk foreman Silas Creed offers money for the book, Mara refuses. When he threatens the widow's young son, the matter grows teeth. With help from a disgraced well digger and a cautious deputy, Mara follows Oren's notes toward an abandoned mission above the canyon, where the river's true course may still be waiting underground.