I told him then about Melissa Barney.
“You’ll never get it closed,” he predicted flatly.
“I tried to keep it from opening to begin with,” I reminded him.
I had just been hired at the old foundation, a decade earlier, when suddenly Pete was ramming a nature trail down everybody’s throat. I had a sense that people weren’t being treated fairly. It wasn’t just that they weren’t being compensated for their property, although that was bad enough, it was that they were losing it, even though their own government had promised that would never happen.
“I was idealistic.” I smiled at Geof. “I wanted to slow down the process, to try to work things out more fairly for both sides. It wasn’t that I didn’t think a nature trail was a fine idea; in fact, it was probably a good and logical use for that old railroad line. But it wasn’t available; it wasn’t ours to give away.”
I had nearly lost my job over God’s Highway, right when I first got hired. Pete had said that if I didn’t back off and stop trying to influence the other board members, he would “influence” them to fire me.
My face was warm with shame, all those years later.
“I caved in, Geof. I let Pete and the foundation and the nature lovers and the government walk all over those people. I’ve always felt ashamed of my part in it.”
He looked impatient with me.
“How old were you, Jenny?”
I thought back. “Twenty-four or -five.”
“Come on! You couldn’t have beaten that crowd!”
“I could have stood up to them.”
“Sounds like you did.”
“Not enough.”
“You were a baby!”
“Boys go to war at eighteen. Joan of Arc was nineteen.” I thought of something, a small historical parenthesis seared into my memory. “I’ll bet you didn’t know that when the church burned her, they hung a sign around her that said ‘Relapsed, Heretic, Apostate, Idolator.’”
He gave me a searching look.
“All right.” I laughed. “So I’m not Joan of Arc.”
“I didn’t mean that, I meant—”
“Geof, Melissa Barney told me a child was also killed at that intersection by Nellie’s house. She said it was a hit-and-run.”
“Still is.”
“You never caught him? Or her?”
He shook his head. “I think we’re all still looking for him, though, sort of unconsciously all the time. If you ever see an old black VW Beetle in mint condition, get his license and let me know.”
“Who saw it?”
“The little girl’s mom. They were on bikes, and the kid raced on ahead and got hit just as the mom showed up behind her.”
I put down my sandwich, which was suddenly tasteless.
“Yeah,” Geof agreed. “Pretty sad.”
“How old?”
“Seven, I think.”
I didn’t say anything.
Geof said, “You see why we still keep looking for the car. What I think, though, is that he was out of state and he just kept driving.”
“Would I know the mother?”
He shook his head again. “Tourists. Bennington, I think. Parked her car in town and then got on their bikes to ride the trail.”
I fiddled miserably with my half-eaten coleslaw. “If I’d stood up to Pete Falwell—”
“You’d be fired,” Geof snapped, though he reached over to cover one of my hands with his. “And that child would still be dead.”
We skipped dessert. Geof was trying to lose twenty pounds from his six-foot-two-inch frame, and I didn’t have much appetite left. We had walked together from Judy’s House, so we parted in front of the restaurant, where he said, “I think the kid’s hanging around again.”
David Mayer, he meant, his unofficial “adopted” son, our own private juvenile delinquent: eighteen years old, stuck in a year of dead space between high school and (we hoped) college, both parents deceased, other family permanently estranged, semiemployed at a service station, smart and smartass. He had a key, and irregularly we found things like ice cream or beer missing from our refrigerator, usually just when we wanted them most.
I called him “the poltergeist.”
When I said as much to Geof, he said, “Maybe David is the Ghost of God’s Highway.”
“The what?”
“It’s got a ghost, didn’t I tell you? Jumps out at hikers. Steals things if you leave them lying around on the trail. What I say is teenagers or wandering bad guys, other people claim is a ghost.”
I laughed. “Could be Big Foot.”
He leaned down, kissed me carefully. “If you ever go out there, watch out for big hairy hands and real bad breath.”
“Maybe it is David.”
Geof looked slightly offended. He really did care about the kid. “He’s not that bad, is he? He’s clean. I think.”
“Well, the dishes aren’t, the ones he leaves in our sink.”
“Is it okay to hug you? Do you still hurt?”
“Nah,” I lied. “I’m fine, so hug away.”
My husband, trying nevertheless to be gentle, grabbed me in a public embrace, which, I gathered, was meant to express his gratitude for my putting up with the poltergeist. Smashed into his throat, I said, “I love you, Lieutenant.”
“I’ll be collecting evidence to support that charge.” He released me, and I tried hard not to wince. He added: “Tonight.”
“Do I need to bring an attorney?”
“Only if you know one who likes to watch. And I should warn you, everything I have will be held against you.”
I punched him in his chest and told him good-bye.
After an hour spent returning phone calls at my office, I made a couple of calls of my own …
“A tarantula, Jenny?”
Nellie Kennedy sounded disbelieving, then defensive. “It couldn’t have come from here. We don’t even sell that kind of thing anymore.”
“Not for Halloween, Nellie?”
“Absolutely not.”
So what did that mean, I asked her, if nobody on her shipping dock had accidentally slipped it into our order?
“Post Haste must have gotten their orders mixed up.” She sounded busy, and eager to escape from talking to me. I pictured her, every black hair in place, and a dozen customers at her elbow. “You got somebody else’s shipment, that’s all.”
“But it had our name on it, Nellie.”
“It did?” The phone was silent for a moment. “Well, whatever, it was just a mistake. Why is this so important, Jenny?”
Good question. It was such a good question, in fact, that I was taken aback and slightly embarrassed by it. Why was I snagged in this trivial spider’s web, when there were so many other, more important, things to do?
“Well, I just wanted you to have it back, if it’s yours.”
Nellie laughed a little. “Oh, that’s okay. You can keep it.”
Before she hung up, she apologized for her daughter’s behavior toward me that morning. I felt like saying, “Oh, that’s okay, Nellie. You can keep her.”
Then—speaking of more important matters—I called Portsmouth.
“Where is it?” I wailed at them.
Not today, they said. Not yet. Tomorrow, they felt, for sure.
“Do you know how important this is?” I begged them.
They knew. They sounded defensive. I backed off.
“I know it’s not your fault,” I said appeasingly, “I know you can’t do anything without the signatures from your home office. But we only have a few days left, and the town council says if we don’t get the papers by their public meeting on Monday night, they will jerk our festival permits.” I tried not to sound as panicked as I felt. “This is Thursday. There’s a weekend in between, so we lose one day of delivery service. Please, please, can you hurry them along?”
I felt undignified and desperate.
They understood, they said, they were doing their best.
I kn
ew that. I thanked them. They reassured me again.
I didn’t know whether to believe them.
The truth was, they didn’t know any more than I did. It wasn’t up to me, or to them. It was up to some damned faceless, anonymous insurance supervisor somewhere in a tall building in Boston. At the last minute, our own fire department had demanded more insurance coverage for the festival. None of us could have been more shocked. We thought we’d already answered all their demands: I’d eliminated the fireworks, we’d cancelled our autumn leaf bonfire for the closing ceremonies, our food booths had agreed to do all cooking off the premises and only to warm things using our temporary electrical system. All that, and more, we’d done to keep the fire department happy, and at the last minute, only two weeks ago, they’d declared it wasn’t enough. More insurance, more, more. We had no choice but to try to comply, but the insurers didn’t like it. They felt it implied much greater risk than they originally anticipated. If our own fire department was this nervous …
Damn! It was possible, entirely possible, they would turn us down. Why were they delaying their decision for so long, if not because they had terrible doubts about us? And I, meanwhile, was trying to keep a calm, confident face on the whole situation, with town council members, and the mayor, and the fire department, and the newspaper, and my other board members, and my husband (!)—nervously and constantly bugging me about whether or not the insurance approval had come through. No, I wanted to shout at them all, no, it hasn’t, and short of going to Boston myself and throttling somebody until she coughed it up, I didn’t know what to do about it.
I called the mayor, before she could call me.
“Mary? Do you have an hour to spare for a hike in the woods?”
Amazingly, the mayor said she did, but only if we left that minute, at a little after three. I thought it might be good for what ailed me, get my stiffening muscles moving again, shake out the pain of my darkening bruises. I grabbed my camera, a 35mm fully automatic “aim and shoot” gadget for mechanical dummies, like me. I often wished a person could enroll in a course that would teach a person (me) how to work … things. Gadgets, gizmos. Computers and I were on fairly good, basic word processing and Internet terms. I was friends with my fax machine and Geof’s car phone, but when it came to f-stops and beyond, I was instantly over my pretty little head. It was kind of embarrassing, like being squeamish about spiders, and I wanted to get over it. One day.
City hall lay right on the path of God’s Highway.
6
ROBERT FROST WAS RIGHT: THE WOODS WERE LOVELY, DARK, AND DEEP. Only a few yards from city hall, Mary and I were in a dappled world: shadowy where evergreens predominated, reddish gold where deciduous triumphed. Below our feet, the shuffle of dry leaves, acorns, walnuts, twigs. In the air, a tangy scent—from somewhere—of wood fire. On my fingertips, I felt the dust of a dry autumn season.
In less than five minutes of sturdy walking, I was sweating lightly, but I was feeling better. Or at least I had myself convinced that I was, maybe because I wanted to be. I didn’t have time for injuries.
I hadn’t even stopped to change clothes again, and neither had our mayor, Mary Eberhardt. Being good little nineties’ executive women, we naturally both stashed spare tennis shoes at the rear of our office closets for nights of working late, or to satisfy sudden urges to walk off tension or take a break outdoors. So there we were, tromping God’s Highway—Mary in a business suit, and I in my suede skirt and fisherman’s sweater, both of us in hose and tennies.
I turned around, said, “Smile, Mayor … say ‘landslide,’” and snapped her picture. An experienced politician, even on such short notice she managed an ingratiating smile for my camera.
The mayor had brought a late lunch along with her, a disgusting-looking egg-salad thing on white bread out of a machine at city hall. She had offered to split it with me; I had, not very respectfully, declined. Mary was one of my three good black friends in town, the other two being her husband and a social worker on our board. In a town of less than three percent minority population, every time Mary won another term she made USA Today and CNN.
“We should do this every day,” Mary said behind my back. We’d have been lousy Indian scouts, crackling through the woods as noisily as we were and chattering like squirrels most of the way. “I’d be back to a size 10. Do you know any women over fifty who have dropped a dress size?” The mayor was so close to the half-century mark she sometimes told people she was already fifty, “just to hear how it sounds.” It looked good on her.
I told her that now.
“Jenny, I want you to know something about menopause,” she said unexpectedly, “before you get there.”
“Okay.” I glanced back over one of my padded shoulders at her. Even hiking, the mayor wore her glasses. “Mom.”
She poked me in my back.
“I want you to know that hot flashes can be wonderful.”
“What?”
“Really. This is the only time in my life I’ve ever been warm. I get up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, and my feet aren’t freezing. It’s delicious. Sometimes I lie in bed beside Hardy, and I think, oh, this is so nice.”
“Only you,” I said, a step ahead of her.
She was laughing, anticipating my response. “Only me what?”
“Only Mayor Feelgood, Mrs. Positive Thinking herself, would claim she actually likes hot flashes.”
“You wait. You don’t know. You’re too young. You’ll see.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” I laughed.
“Where are we going, Jenny, and why are we here?”
Mayor Forthright.
I told her, and in fifteen minutes of fairly rapid clambering, we were there. The intersection of trail and two-lane state highway where Ben Barney had been fatally injured looked harmless in the midafternoon sunshine. But the trees edged right up to the road on both sides, with only the narrowest of verges separating the dirt trail from the asphalt road. I thought I could see how some unwary hiker might step out too quickly. And if a car were coming too fast …
It was quiet now, no traffic, though I had a sense of invisible woodland creatures listening to our conversation.
“I guess he came out of the woods like we are,” I told Mary, “and he stepped onto the highway, like this—” I put action to words. Then I pointed to the top of the hill to our left. There were wide-lawned country houses on either side; I guessed one of them was the Kennedys’, but I didn’t know which it was. “See the back of that stop sign?” It was right at the top of the hill, outside the fence that surrounded the home on our left.
The mayor said she did.
“The way I understand it,” I continued, “is that the driver ran that sign, sped down here, hit Mr. Barney.”
“Yes, I recall that accident.”
“Do you recall that a child died here, too?”
“Yes, of course.”
“That was a hit-and-run. That guy hit her, and then just kept on driving.”
Mary and I both turned and looked the other way, to our right. There, the highway curved a few yards beyond us and traveled on toward a dry creek bed. The railroad had originally followed Crowley Creek for part of its way, and the trail followed the railroad, and we had followed the trail. Crowley Creek usually only flowed during and after the spring thaw and rains, and then it regularly washed out local roads to a depth of several feet, making access impossible for a few hours for the residents.
At the same time, we both heard traffic.
“Get off the road, girl,” Mary directed me. “We don’t want the same thing happening to you. Now what is it that Mrs. Barney wants from us?”
We both watched a blue sedan crest the hill, stop obediently and fully at the sign, and then proceed sedately down the hill, past us, and out of sight around the curve.
“She’d like us to close the trail,” I said.
“No can do.”
“She might be satisfied with making th
is crossing safer.”
“Possibly can do.”
“Pete Falwell has already told me to leave it alone, Mary.” I told her then about my literal run-in with him, and she was instantly full of concerned questions about how I was feeling. To get her mind off my health, I had to remind her that it was she who had more to lose, at this point, from being—figuratively—run down by him and his powerful allies. “Your esteemed opponent and her supporters will line up with Pete.”
“Against us,” she said thoughtfully.
“Against you,” I emphasized. With the election less than a month away, which I certainly didn’t need to say.
“You’re going to study this?” she asked me. “See if it needs fixing? Find out what we might do to improve it? Make recommendations, either way?”
“I’d like to.”
She shrugged, smiled as if nothing were riding on it. “If it needs to be done, we’ll do it.”
“What if Pete and Ardie paint you as an enemy of nature?”
“What a laugh, coming from them!”
“I know, but they will, Mary.”
I had an awful feeling that would be true, even if all we had to do to fix the crossing was to erect simple warning signs. Somehow, because this involved God’s Highway and me, Pete would find a way to use it—and me—in the election against Mary.
But she placed her hands on my shoulders and grinned at me. “If your festival succeeds, I will look so good Pete can paint me as an enemy of babies and I will still win by a …” She smiled photogenically. “Landslide.”
1 looked into her brown eyes.
“The insurance isn’t here yet, Mary.”
She squeezed my shoulders, released me, sighed, and said, “I can always go back to being a full-time minister’s wife. As I always say, compared to that, being mayor is easy.”
While I took photographs of the trail crossing from every angle I thought might help to get a perspective on the problem, Mary wandered off to find a tree stump on which to sit and eat her sandwich. I worked as quickly as possible, knowing mayors never had much time to spare and wanting to be thoughtful of hers.