| Wes Boyd's Spearfish Lake Tales Contemporary Mainstream Books and Serials Online |
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| Wes Boyd's Spearfish Lake Tales Contemporary Mainstream Books and Serials Online |
Mark was only a little way out onto the lake when he began to feel a little remorse. That was a cruel thing to do, he realized, although he felt good about it. He was still shaking from being mad. That woman just didn’t have the good sense to keep quiet, just once, when someone did her a favor. But no, she’d mouthed off, and for once, she’d gotten hers. With all the trouble she’d caused Spearfish Lake, it felt good to be the one to pay her back a little.
Still, he knew he’d stepped out of line. In the winter, that kind of unkindness could be deadly. It probably wouldn’t be right now; it wasn’t that cold, and someone would probably be along fairly soon.
He thought about it as he passed along the lakeshore in front of town. Finally, his guilt overcame him a little, and he hawed the dogs onto the shore, right at Main Street.
With all the snow, the streets were getting covered, and it was no real problem to run right up the street. Fortunately, there were only two stop lights to deal with, and both of them were green, so he didn’t have to go to the hassle of stopping and starting the dogs. "Just gee, just gee," he told the leaders. He wasn’t sure that Ringo knew the command for an easy right turn, but Cumulus nudged him to the side, and they ran down the street right next to the curb.
Mark called "whoa!" right in front of the Record-Herald office. He ran the picket line out to a nearby parking meter for a tieline, and took the snow hook line, and tied Cumulus and Ringo off a couple of parking meters ahead. "Wonder if they’re going to give me a ticket?" he wondered, and bemused by the possibility, he reached in his pocket, and found some pennies there. He walked back down the line of parking meters, and dropped a penny in each one, laughing every time he did so. When he got back to the sled, he noticed a couple of papers stuck in the basket. He bent over to throw them out, and then decided he didn’t want to litter the streets, so he kept them in his hand as he walked into the Record-Herald office.
Mike was sitting in his office, really bored, now, when Mark walked in. "What brings you down here?" he said.
"Kind of a long story," Mark said, dropping the papers onto the pile that overflowed the top of the wastebasket. "I stopped to help out a car stuck in a snowdrift. It turned out to be Heather Sanford, and she gave me a lot of lip about cruel exploitation of helpless animals, so I had the teams drag her car into another snowdrift."
"Serves her right," Mike said. "I’m glad you did that."
"Yeah," Mark said. "But she got knocked down when the dogs took off with her car, and she could be hurt. How about hopping in your car and going out to see if she’s all right? It was maybe a couple hundred yards up 226 from Point Drive."
"I better not," Mike said. "I’m here by myself, and I don’t know that I wouldn’t just let her lay there." He looked at the clock. "But," he said, reaching for the phone, "LeRoy ought to be over at the doughnut shop for his evening coffee break. I’ll give him a shout and have him run over and look. That way, if he gets stuck, it’s the city’s bill."
"Keep me out of it, can you?"
"It won’t do much good," Mike said. "She tells LeRoy ‘dog team,’ and he’s going to know it was you or me. But, he isn’t any happier with her than anyone else in this town, so I suppose it won’t matter much."
"Well, all right."
It took Mike only a minute to tell LeRoy he’d heard that there was a stuck car and a possibly injured citizen out on 226 off of Point Drive. "He’ll check it out," Mike said as he hung up the phone.
"Well, that makes me feel better," Mark said.
"How was Busted Axle Road?" Mike asked.
"It wasn’t bad when I came down it," Mark said, "but 226 was getting a little bad. I’d better run the dogs home, then take a pass down it with the tractor before you try to get to your driveway."
"You brought the dogs with you?" Mike asked.
"Yeah, I got ’em tied to the parking meters outside."
"This I got to see," Mike said, getting up and grabbing a camera.
Outside, there were several people standing around, looking at the strange sight of the dog team. In the gutter, the dogs were standing around peacefully. At that, not all of them were merely standing; some were sitting, others rolling around in the snow, and one was taking a leak on a parking meter. "Doesn’t think much of parking meters," Mark sympathized.
"I agree with him," Mike said. "But, he’s a dog, and he can get away with it. I can’t."
"Mommy," a small child said. "Is that Santa’s sleigh?"
"No," the woman said. "Doesn’t Santa use deer, and not dogs?"
The light was fading fast; Mike took a few pictures, both with and without flash. These photos might not make it into the paper, but they’d look good on the wall. "Why don’t you hang around here, until I give you a call?" Mark said. "That’ll give me time to get the road plowed out."
"Gee, I don’t want to have to hang around here much longer," Mike replied as he untied the tieline that kept Ringo and Cumulus fastened to the front parking meter. "But, I suppose I’d better. I’ll call Kirsten and tell her I’m going to be a little late."
"Give me a call later," Mark said. "Maybe we can take a run tomorrow, with all this snow."
"I’d like to," Mike said, "but unless we’re snowed in, I’m probably not going to be able to. There’s still too much to do to get ready for Sunday."
"Well, sometime," Mark said, unhooking the line to the rear parking meter. He looked up and down the street, and saw that no traffic was coming, then turning to the team, called, "Gravediggers! Beatle Hounds! Up! Hike! Cumulus, Ringo, come haw, come haw!"
Mike stood back and watched as the ten-dog team perfectly executed a U-turn across Main Street. It was pretty to watch, and it made him feel proud to think of how well they’d trained the dogs.
"Are those the dogs that all the gossip has been about?" the woman with the small child asked.
"That’s them," Mike admitted.
"My husband wants to talk to you some time," she said. "He says he thinks that looks like fun."
"It is fun," Mike said. "Tell him to come on out some time. The more, the merrier."
Mike walked back inside. He’d gone outside without a coat, and now he was shivering a little. He glanced at the clock. It was getting close to quitting time, and now he’d sentenced himself to another hour of sitting around. Well, it was for the best; he wouldn’t get stuck trying to get back up Busted Axle Road in the snow. He put his feet up on his desk and thought about going back to cleaning his desk, but even that didn’t thrill him. He thought about booting up his computer, and playing a computer game, or maybe pulling up his notes on his conversation with Fred Linder, when Linder had passed along some of the stories his grandfather had told about working with dogs.
That last seemed like a good idea. He put his feet down, and leaned forward to throw the master switch for the computer. As he did, the "Defenders of Gaea" letterhead in the wastebasket caught his eye.
"Where’d that come from?" he said to himself, then realized it was a paper that Mark had trashed. Curious, he picked it up. It was a little damp from the melting snow, but it was still legible.
As the dog team disappeared into the driving snow, Heather scurried around, trying to retrieve some of the papers that had been spilled from her briefcase, but the wind was taking them, and she was only able to salvage part of them. There were papers there that she didn’t want to lose, mostly concerning the lawsuit, but the wind and pure chance controlled what she could save. In only a few minutes, it was clear that she had saved all she was going to.
She went over to where her car was stuck deep in the snow bank. Being front wheel drive, and stuck backward in the drift, she thought there was a chance that it might be driven out, but it was futile; the front wheels just spun in the snow.
That was the final straw. There was nothing left to do but sit behind the wheel and cry.
She put her arms on the steering wheel, buried her face in them, and sobbed helplessly. Everything had started out so well in Spearfish Lake, and now everything had turned sour.
She wasn’t sure how long she sat there, tears streaming down her face, oblivious to everything, for the next thing she knew, she felt a hand on her shoulder, and a voice ask, "Heather, are you all right?"
She lifted her head, and with her reddened eyes saw John Pacobel standing in the snow next to her car, a look of concern on his face.
"Wha . . . what are you doing here?" she asked. "Don’t you hate me like everybody else?"
"I saw your car stuck here, and I was worried about you," he said. "Are you all right?"
"I think I scraped my knee and bruised myself when I fell down," she replied, a little touched that someone still showed some concern.
John looked down at her legs, and could see that her pants were torn. "I’m not going to be able to get your car out," he said. "Let me take you home, and I’ll call a tow truck."
"Thanks, John," she said, gathering her briefcase, and the sack that she’d gone to Albany River to buy.
It was warm and cozy inside John’s car, and she felt relieved to be there. He got in, and started up the road back to town. "What happened?" he asked, peeling back the hood of his parka. "Looks like you spun out."
"I got towed into the damn snowdrift by a dog team," she said.
"I’ve got to admit," John said, "as many years as I’ve lived in Spearfish Lake, that’s a new one on me."
In a couple of minutes, John was able to pry most of the story from Heather. "That’s strange," he said. "That would have had to have been either Mark Gravengood or Mike McMahon, and those have got to be the two most even-tempered guys in town."
"I know Mike," she said. "It wasn’t him. It must have been Gravengood. Why would he have done something like that to me?"
John shook his head. "Heather, I’d be lying to you if I said that you haven’t made some enemies in this town. I told you back before deer season that there are some things that we have to tolerate, no matter how much we don’t like them. Things aren’t black and white, just shades of gray. I don’t want to have to judge whether running a dog team is being cruel to dogs, or not, but when you consider the alternative, they’re happy, well-kept, living dogs."
"Animals have their rights," she sobbed, not liking John’s lecture.
"They do," John agreed. "If you consider that a right to life, and to a good meal, and care and exercise is important, then those dogs are very well off indeed. They could be dead, would have been dead, all of them, if they weren’t running a dog team. It’s a small price to pay."
"How do you know so much about it?" she asked.
"You remember Josh Archer? That kid I introduced you to at the beach last fall? He’s Mark’s brother-in-law, and he works with Mark training the dogs."
"But they whip the dogs, they mistreat them."
"No, they don’t," John said. "They don’t even own whips. The dogs are all carefully trained to respond to voice commands. Believe me, I thought that too, until Josh set me straight."
"But . . . where are you taking me?" she asked, only now paying attention to where John was driving. "This isn’t the way to my apartment."
"I’m taking you to my place," John said. "I want to get a look at your knee and bandage it up for you. You need that, and a good, stiff drink, I think. Then, I’ll take you to your place."
It was a act of kindness that touched Heather, as misused as she felt just then.
John’s house turned out to be smaller than she had imagined, but cozy and neat, not like a bachelor pad at all. They got inside, and he took her coat and hung it in a closet. There was a gas log fireplace in the living room, and John set it to running, more for the cheeriness, than the chill she still felt. "Anything you’d care to drink?" he asked.
"Whiskey and soda would be my choice, she said," but I’ll take anything that you have."
"Got some whiskey around here some place," he said, "but I’d have to look for it. How about a screwdriver?"
"I can do screwdrivers," she said, sitting down on the couch in front of the fireplace.
In a couple of minutes, he put a drink in her hand, and then brought a first aid kit out from the bathroom. While she watched, he knelt down before her, rolled up her pants leg, and treated her knee. "Just scraped it a little," he said. "No point in putting a bandage on it, but I’ve got some goop I’ll rub on it." He did, and a few minutes later, rolled her pant leg back down and put a couple of safety pins in the tear. "That’ll hold till you get home," he said, "but I think I’d consider it a new rag, after that."
"Thanks, John," she said with feeling. "It seems like forever since anyone’s been nice to me. It’s getting pretty lonely out there."
John shrugged. "Welcome to the club," he said. "It’s been lonely around here, too. It just doesn’t seem like Christmas, this year."
Heather was surprised to detect pain in that statement, something like the pain that she felt. "Why’s that?" she said, pushing a little.
"Well, you know that my wife walked out on Linda and me years ago, so it’s always been just Linda and me for Christmas," he said. "This year, she’s with her husband’s family, and it really feels empty. I’d thought about going to Florida or something, just to get my mind off of it, but I realized that I’d feel just as empty there."
"My folks died in a car wreck, years ago," Heather said. "There just hasn’t been much Christmas for me since then, but this year, I feel lonelier than ever. I hadn’t realized how alone I really felt until I realized just how much people hated me this evening."
"It’s tough," John said. "I guess that’s why I brought you here, instead of your apartment. I don’t feel like being alone, either. Perhaps, under the circumstances, I could seduce you into staying for dinner."
"I’ll consider myself seduced," she said. "That’s the nicest thing anyone has said to me in a month or more."
"I’m afraid that it’s going to be mostly bachelor cooking," he said. "I cooked a lot for Linda when she was younger, and then she took over doing it, bit by bit. Since she left for college, I’ve really gotten out of the habit, since it’s not much fun to cook for myself. How does fish sticks and tater tots sound?"
"I’d settle for sharing a can of beans," she said. "I know all about cooking for myself."
"It doesn’t take much to please you," he smiled.
"Not tonight," she said as he got up to go to the kitchen. She heard him bustling around for a few minutes, but it was nice to just sit and stare into the flickering of the fire. How nice it was that John had come along when he had! His kindness and gentleness had taken the edge off of her loneliness and depression. Apparently, she wasn’t totally without friends in Spearfish Lake, after all.
He was back in a few minutes. He sat down in a chair across from her. "I’ll have to go out and tend the timer a couple of times," he said, "but we should be able to eat in half an hour or so. Can I freshen your drink?"
"No need," she said. "I haven’t touched it."
"So how goes it with the snake?" he asked, looking to make conversation.
"John, just for one night, please indulge me," she said. "There are four things that I don’t want to talk about: Dogs, snakes, sewers, and the Defenders of Gaea."
"That’s fine with me," he said. "I didn’t much want to talk about them, either."
They sat for a while, just looking at the fire, before trying to say anything. "You miss your daughter, don’t you?" Heather said finally.
"I miss her a lot, especially this time of the year," John said. "I tried to be a good father and mother for her. It’s hard when you’re a man with a daughter. There’s some girl things that are hard to share. But, I guess she turned out all right."
They talked for a while longer, with John getting up occasionally to deal with dinner. With her injunction, it was hard to find a safe topic, and John talked for a while about coaching the softball team to the state finals a few years before. Surprisingly, Heather found herself getting interested in the story of how Brandy Evachevski had pulled off two great last-inning saves to pull out the championship. "She’s Danny’s sister," he explained. "There’s been some really good kids come out of that family. Everybody talks about Jennifer, but she’s not the only one."
Heather had heard people in town talking about Jennifer Evachevski but hadn’t yet connected her with Jenny Easton. She was about to ask about Jennifer when the oven timer dinged. "There’s dinner," John said. "I’ll get it out of the oven, and then I guess I’d better call on your car. I forgot all about it."
He was back a couple of minutes later. "Your car’s at the Sunoco station," he reported. "One of the cops found it, and didn’t want it blocking the snowplows, so he had it towed. You can pick it up in the morning."
"Great," she said. "That’s one less thing to worry about. It’s good to know somebody cares."
"I care," John said.
"I know you do," she replied, stabbing at a piece of fish with her fork. "Thank God for that."
All too soon, they were finished with their dinner. "I’ll be glad to make another drink, and you can stick around for a while," John said. "Or, I can take you back to your apartment, if you like."
Tears welled up in Heather’s eyes again. "John, the last thing in the world I want to do right now is to go back to that cold, lonely, empty apartment."
"That bad, huh?"
"You remember that girl at the Halloween party? The one who filled in for the country-western singer, when she got sick? There was one song she sang that really describes how I feel right now."
"She sang several, I seem to recall."
"Yeah, but there was one that hit it on the nose. John, would you take the ribbon from my hair?"
Mike stared at the letter, time passing without notice. What a windfall! The information he had there was dynamite that could blow up the whole impasse over the sewer separation system – if he could figure out how to use it. Under the circumstances, using it might seem a little unethical, but fortunately, he had time to figure out how to use it properly.
The overt tone of the letter indicated that the Defenders of Gaea’s interest in the Gibson’s water snake was mild, at best. Everyone had assumed that it was a big, well-funded thing, but the letter indicated that it was a shoestring operation, on its last legs if further funding didn’t come through. Blackbarn needed to know that; it was an obvious first step.
The puzzle was in the donor. Clearly, the letter was worded to not reveal any information about the source. Mike suspected that Heather knew who the donor was, but couldn’t be sure, and she certainly wasn’t the person to ask. The letter did say that the donor was located in southern California, but that they had Spearfish Lake connections. Also, anyone who could afford to donate $25,000 to the Defenders of Gaea had to have money. "The donor closely monitors events there," the letter said, and all of a sudden, lightning struck.
There was no way of telling for sure, but the easiest way to monitor events in Spearfish Lake was through him – by reading the Record-Herald.
That got Mike up out of his chair, heading for the mail room. He knew of one person, and only one, who fit the description, but there might be someone he was overlooking. He went through the trays until he found the one with the California plates in it, then started leafing slowly through the plates, reading each name carefully.
It turned out that Mike knew most of the twenty-two California subscribers, by reputation, anyway. Several, he had met, at one time or another, but none seemed to fit the bill.
The only name left that fit the bill was the one California subscriber who didn’t have a plate in the Addressograph file – because her paper was hand-addressed for next-day air each Wednesday.
Of course, Mike realized, it had to fit. She’d done those ads for the Defenders of Gaea that he’d seen on TV. Why the hell would Jenny do such a thing?
Jenny’s phone number in Malibu was on her mother’s Rolodex. Mike went to the office and dialed her, but was met with nothing but ringing. On about the tenth ring, he remembered Jenny saying she was doing that Christmas special from Disney World, and of course, she’d be there. There was no way to reach her that he knew of.
With the phone hung up again, Mike stared at the letter some more. Why would Jenny have given them the money to send a troublemaker to her home town?
Be fair, Mike thought. No one thought of Heather Sanford as a troublemaker until a month or so ago, when she’d revealed her true colors. When she first showed up in Spearfish Lake, she’d come like a gift from the heavens, bringing salvation. He hadn’t had any idea she was a troublemaker when he’d written that story on her last summer.
Jenny probably thought she was doing the right thing, Mike realized. That would have had to have been back in the early summer, before her vacation. Perhaps doing something like that would have made her feel a little closer to home.
This all put a little different spin on things. "The donor closely monitors activities there," kept going through his mind. Of course she did. Blake had said that it was downright dangerous to get between Jenny and her Record-Herald. She had to be aware by now that what had seemed an asset had turned into a liability.
Or did she? The news of the lawsuit hadn’t made it into this week’s paper. Certainly the implications hadn’t.
Damn, he’d have liked to talk this over with someone. He couldn’t talk to Mark about it, since he wouldn’t realize all the ins and outs. He couldn’t talk to any of the Evachevskis, because they’d feel defensive about Jennifer. He couldn’t even talk to Kirsten, because she might say something to Carrie, or someone. He could have talked to Webb; he had a twisted mind that loved little gossip puzzles like this, and had a magic for putting two and two together – but Webb and his wife were off in Florida. Mike knew that he’d have to solve this one on his own.
Actually, it was fairly easy to solve, at least part of it. The community needed to be aware of all the implications of the lawsuit, and with it, all the implications of having the Defenders of Gaea interested in the community. That story would have to be aimed at just one person, although the whole community would read it. If the donor weren’t Jenny, it wouldn’t matter.
All of a sudden, he realized that he was just as pleased that he hadn’t been able to reach her. That way, she could take care of the problem without anyone in Spearfish Lake knowing for sure that she’d caused it. And, if it hadn’t been her after all, no big deal.
Quite suddenly, Mike’s thinking changed from strategy to writing, and this story, he could write. He booted up the computer, ready to flesh it out.
The computer was still going through its boot cycle when another thought hit him. He really didn’t know much about the Defenders of Gaea. He’d always thought of it as one of the big, loud-mouthed environmental organizations with more rhetoric than brains, and Heather’s actions in the last month seemed to prove it. He’d never had much respect for groups like that, but he didn’t have the facts to back it up.
He looked at the clock. It was well after five now, pushing six. On a Friday, the weekend of Christmas, it’d be difficult to find out much of anything. There weren’t many places to call, anyway.
There was one place he could call, and they had an office down in Camden. They might be open this late. He grabbed a copy of the paper, and opened it to the classified section.
Apparently the woman at the Better Business Bureau had a computer, too, because she came back with the reply in seconds. "They show only forty-nine percent of their funds actually going to the charity, according to the Philanthropic Activities Agency report," she said. "We consider that pretty borderline."
"Are you saying that it’s a scam?" Mike asked, a little surprised at the reply.
"That close to the borderline, it’s very possible," the woman said. "They show an annual audit, but good bookkeeping could cover up a lot more. I can give you the number of the California Attorney General’s office if you want more information."
"California?" Mike asked. "I thought their headquarters was in Washington."
"It shows their main offices to be in California," she said. "That’s where they file their annual report."
That sounded a little fishy, for some reason Mike couldn’t put his finger on. "Give me that number you mentioned," he said. Webb was going to have little green worms when he saw the phone bill, but all of a sudden, he realized he was on to an even bigger story. There was a good chance he wouldn’t gripe very long.
The California Attorney General’s office couldn’t add much more to what Mike already knew from the Better Business Bureau, other than the fact that the girl there didn’t seem to think much of the Defender’s of Gaea’s administrative-to-charities ratio, either.
All of a sudden, that wing of the story collapsed. He could print that both the California Attorney General and the Better Business Bureau considered the Defenders of Gaea to be a borderline case, but that wasn’t as good as calling them an outright scam.
Just then, the phone rang. It always seemed to ring right when Mike was dead in the middle of a complicated train of thought.
It proved to be Mark. "Your driveway’s plowed, old buddy," he said. "Kirsten says to come on home."
"Thanks, Mark," he said. "Is Kirsten right there?"
"Yeah, I’m at your place," he said.
"Let me talk to her," he said.
Kirsten came onto the phone a moment later. "What’s up, honey?" she asked.
"Something’s come up," he said. "I’m going to have to stay a little longer."
"How much longer? Should I hold supper?"
"Don’t," he said. "I don’t know. I’ll get something."
California. California. Mike wondered how he could find out something that far away. There ought to be someone he could ask.
Of course. Why hadn’t he thought of it sooner? He grabbed the phone book from the desk drawer, checked the area code, and dialed information. "What city, please?" the operator said.
"Los Angeles," Mike told her.
"What party are you trying to reach?"
"Los Angeles Times."
