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heavy linen card with a note scrawled on it in a thin, somehow aristocratic hand:

    Welcome, Elena! I hope you’ll be happy here. Rest tonight and call me tomorrow. Julian.

    Bemused, she raised her head, tapping the note against her hand as she admired the glass bricks making a swirl around the shower, the giant raised tub, the elegance of detailing. Alvin padded into the room, snuffling things along the route. She patted his head. “We’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto.”
    Toto flopped down on the thick aqua carpet and licked his balls.
             
    She had planned to head for the restaurant almost immediately, just to take a look around, but a thunderstorm stomped into the valley, violent and flashy. Alvin was not pleased, and Elena curled up with him in the bed, putting her arms around his shivering body. Rain pounded down on the skylights, and the bed was deep and soft, cozy with a thick duvet. She fell asleep.
    When she woke up, the rain was gone, birds singing. She leashed Alvin and headed out to visit the restaurant.
    The newly washed sky was a brilliant, rubbery blue, and leaves on the famed aspen trees glistened with beaded rain. Even in August, there was a bite to the air, and Elena inhaled with pleasure, half dizzy with altitude. She would get used to it again, but in the meantime, it made her feel slightly giddy.
    There were lots of other people about—dogs and runners and tourists. A skinny mother with her healthy brown hair in a ponytail jogged by with a stroller. “Great dog,” she called out as she passed, and Elena smiled in return. Perhaps Aspen would be like Paris, where a dog could provide entrée.
    As if he’d heard the woman, Alvin pranced more prettily, lifting fringed legs like a Clydesdale horse. He stopped periodically to snuffle deliriously at the blog notes left by who-knew-what animals on the bases of trees and lampposts and the springy ground. He’d never lived anywhere but the city. The wild animal scents were making him drunk.
    The restaurant stood on a side street in an older neighborhood, a Victorian-era house that had been refitted as a restaurant in what appeared to be the late seventies, that ever so elegant decade.
Ugh!
    Elena paused on the sidewalk to get a feel for it. And suddenly, there was Isobel, a slim teenager with curly hair tumbling down her back and pale constellations of sexy freckles over her golden skin. A tattoo of a sun adorned her left breast. “Huh,” she said, tucking her hands in the pockets of her jeans. “Not very welcoming, is it?”
    “Not very.”
    Alvin leaned hard on Elena’s knee, shivering slightly. She reached down and threaded his floppy ear through her fingers in a soothing gesture. Very softly, he growled.
    There was a lot of work to be done, but there was a lot of potential here, too. Elena nodded to herself, pulling her fingers through the down-soft hair beneath Alvin’s ears. The old sign, reading
The Steak and Ale,
hung in weathered neglect over the wide wooden porch, where tables and chairs were scattered in clusters. Good. Since Colorado had no indoor smoking, an outdoor smoking area was a boon. She climbed the steps. “Let’s check out the inside.”
    A sign in the window said the restaurant had been closed for remodeling and would be open under new management on November 2. A ripple of nervousness went through her. A little more than two months. Not much time.
    Tying Alvin to a post on the porch where he could watch the passersby, she took the key out of her pocket and fitted it into the front door. It groaned open into a small foyer with a set of stairs leading up immediately.
    “Bad
feng shui,”
Isobel commented. “All the
chi
will flow right outside.”
    “Mmm.” It would also be a headache for wait staff, who’d have to navigate the tiny area and compete with guests waiting to be seated. She pulled a notebook out of her pocket and wrote,
front door/stairs.
    Moving through the rooms, she eyed the window treatments