Jennifer lay on a chaise lounge in the quiet back yard of her parent’s cottage. The sun was waning a little as the afternoon wore down, but it hadn’t warmed up the cold feeling in her gut much.

Jennifer had remembered seeing Jackie around town in the past, but somehow, she’d never quite remembered meeting her. Still, there had been a sparkle in her eye when she’d walked into the sign shop, and she’d known she’d found a friend. They’d flown south slowly, as Jackie related a little of how she and Mark had flown the plane around the country on their honeymoon, and when they’d seen the lights of the police cruiser on the ground behind them, they’d circled out of sight over the woods and flown back north to the club.

Jackie had dropped her off at the club’s airstrip hours before. Jennifer had offered to get her something to drink, or something, at least to thank her for the plane ride, but Jackie demurred. "Thanks, but I’m not a nudist," she’d said. "Stop by the house sometime, and we can have a long talk."

"I think I’ll do that," Jennifer promised, knowing she’d found a new friend.

That had been hours before. Jennifer had kept to herself in the time she’d been at the club. Somehow, it hadn’t seemed like the refuge it had been in the past, and she wondered if she could ever feel free here again.

She heard a car pull up out front, but didn’t get up to see who it was. Probably, it was her brother, back from work, or maybe her parents. It didn’t matter.

"Hey," a voice said, "I didn’t think you’d have a bikini on here."

She looked up; it was Mike, with a big grin on his face. "I borrowed it from Amy Ashtenfelter," she said. "I couldn’t see making some asshole with a telephoto lens an instant millionaire."

"Well, you can take it off," Mike said. "They’ve got to be halfway back to L.A., now."

"Are you sure?" she said, sitting up.

"They were so glad to have someone drive them to the airport that they gave me two hundred bucks," Mike reported. "I deserve an Oscar for the line of bullshit I fed them. Those two aren’t likely to ever be back here again."

"What did you tell them?" she asked.

Mike laughed out loud. "I haven’t had that kind of fun in a long time. I’d sure like to have seen Harold and LeRoy. God, that was funny. After you left, Harold called me up and he asked, ‘What did you mean when you said to hassle those two?’ and I told him, ‘Come on, Harold, you’ve seen movies like Macon County Line. Act like that’. They dropped them off back on the old Ward Grade right where I told them to, and I hit it on the nose. They couldn’t have been out of the woods five minutes when I found them hitchhiking down the highway."

"They’re really gone?" she asked.

"Incidentally, they didn’t get any usable footage," Mike went on. "They only had odds and ends on the tape in the camera, but if they write and ask for their camera back, the only thing the tape is going to show is going to be out-of-focus footage of a car door. I ran the tape back to the beginning and set it running. The other tapes in the car and at the motel were still in the package."

"Well, thanks for being thorough," she said. "Thanks for everything, Mike. I knew I could count on you."

"Like I said, it was kind of fun," Mike said. "What’s more, we didn’t break any laws. Maybe their story will get around the Hollywood underground a little. Might make it easier, next time."

"It might make it harder, next time," Jennifer said, lying back down, still uneasy. "The next time somebody comes, they might be more prepared, and not as stupid. Mike, how can I ever come back here again?"

"It’s that bad, huh?" Mike said, sitting down on the ground.

"It’s that bad," Jennifer said. "I mean, out there, I have to be Jenny Easton, and it’s hard for me to remember that I’m really Jennifer Evachevski. As long as I’ve been able to get back here and be Jennifer Evachevski once in a while, I’ve pretty well been able to get along. But when I’m here, I don’t want to have to be Jenny Easton, here, too."

Mike found himself longing for another one of Webb’s cigarettes. "You said something like that this morning," he said. "I thought about it a bit on the way back from Camden, and look, I don’t know how to say this, but it’s unhealthy for you to believe that you’re still plain little Jennifer Evachevski. You can call yourself whatever you want, but you’ve got to accept that you’re still Jenny Easton, too."

"But Mike," she said. "I don’t know how I can do that and stay myself."

"You aren’t yourself if you don’t accept it," he said. "And, I’m not kidding when I say it’s unhealthy. You know Jackie, the woman who flew you out here today?"

"Yes. I don’t ever remember meeting her before, but we were old friends in thirty seconds."

"You didn’t hear this from me," Mike said. "Kirsten told me about it; she and Jackie were friends, back in high school. It seems Jackie’s mother had trouble telling the difference between who she was, and who she wanted to be, and she wound up spending ten years or more in the state hospital down in Camden, and eventually died there. It’s called acute schizophrenia."

"You think I’ve got that?"

"I think you’re trolling for it, real hard. Jackie could tell you it’s not worth it, although Jackie won’t tell you about it. Her husband, Mark, may not know as much as I’ve just told you."

"But Mike," she pleaded. "What do I do?"

"I’m no expert," Mike replied, "but you are going to have to come to accept that you are really Jenny Easton, then get control of what Jenny Easton is doing that makes you unhappy."

"But Mike, that’s the one thing I don’t know how to do."

Mike furrowed his brow. Jennifer was an old friend, and he was out of his league, and he knew it. Still, maybe some common sense wouldn’t hurt. "What’s so important about being Jenny Easton?" he asked. "I mean, why are you putting yourself through that wringer? There’s got to be some reason for it."

It was a tough question, one that Jennifer had never really asked herself. "The money, the fame, the career," she said, finally.

"You’ve already got all the money you’ll ever want," Mike said. "I follow your career more closely than you might think, and I know you’re not one to throw your money away. I don’t know how much money you’ve got, but your grandfather said you passed him years ago. That’s plenty for anyone. As far as fame goes, you could never sing another note, never act another line, and you’d be as famous as anyone ever could want to be. You said yourself that you’re working more than you want to, and you turn down more yet. I repeat, why are you doing this to yourself?"

"I keep thinking about retiring," she protested, knowing she was evading the question. "Just coming back here, buying a house, and enjoying myself."

"Do that, and you’d really go nuts," Mike said. "Just from sheer boredom. What I’m trying to say is that you’ve seen the other side of the mountain. Sure, it’s fun to come back here and run the Saxmayer, and I know you did yesterday. But it would get real old, real quick."

"Blake keeps telling me I can’t really come home again."

"Blake is right," Mike said. "Sure, you could come back here and live. Maybe it would be a good idea. Hang around till it gets dull, then go do a movie or a tour or something, and when it starts getting wearing, come back home. Think of, oh, Barbra Streisand. She does what she damn well wants to do, and when she wants to take it easy, she does. Jennifer, it would be nice to have you come home to live, but the only way you’re going to be able to do it is to admit you’re Jenny Easton. Oh, you can be Jennifer Evachevski in the phone book, to drive off the curious people, but it comes back down to admitting you’re Jenny Easton, too."

It didn’t happen very often, but every now and then, Mike knew that when he sat down at the computer to write, it was going to ignite a fire storm, and he’d never had the feeling more strongly than right now.

The Spearfish Lake City Council met every second and fourth Tuesday of the month. For twelve years, now, every other week Mike had come back to the Record-Herald after the meeting to do the council story and with it put the finishing touches on the paper.

There were some preparations to be made before he could write. Alone in the building, in the late evening right after the council meeting, he checked the front page, the only page still laid out on the makeup tables. From the agenda, it hadn’t looked like it was going to be much of a council meeting, and he thought he’d been generous to leave fourteen inches for it. The hole left for the council story didn’t lead the page, either, but he could slide the county commission story he’d planned on leading with down, and cut down on the size of the headline, and that would gain a few inches. Not enough.

There was a three-column picture at the upper left of the firemen out fighting a grass fire. There’d been enough of those; they could do without, this time. Yanking the photo opened up a rather ragged six-column hole, clear across the page, and if any story called for a six-column head, this one did. The Record-Herald hadn’t run one of those since the girls’ softball team won the state championships, back in ’83. The page would look unbalanced, but he doubted that anyone would care about the niceties.

With a six-column streamer, that left a hole of about twenty-four inches. It probably wouldn’t be enough, but there was a filler ad back on page seven where the story could be jumped, if it had to be. Mike hated to have to jump the story, especially one like this, so decided to try and write it to twenty-four inches.

He went back down to his office, booted up the computer on his desk, and loaded PageMaker. It wasn’t the greatest program for writing, but he could work right to the size of the hole. He stared at the blank, gray screen, hoping inspiration would come for a headline. He liked to start with a headline, since sometimes it could define the story, but everything he could think of was too long. Maybe the story could help him, so he bit his lip and started,

That wasn’t quite right, and it was unwieldy, but he could clarify it. Best to blame the EPA right up front, he thought; the council is going to take enough heat as it is. My God, am I ever glad Kirsten and I sold out when we did, he thought for the umpteenth time since item number nine had come up on the council’s agenda. He got on with the story:

There, he thought, that clarifies the ambiguity of the lead. Better get into the why a little more, before we get to the bad part.

Mike realized it was time to get to the part that was going to set off the screaming:

Mike floundered for a few seconds. It was necessary to take a fairly complicated idea that Kutzley had presented over several minutes, and sum it up in a second or two, without confusing the reader.

"The fairest way to do it," Kutzley explained, is to assess each property owner in the area by their percentage of land area in the problem zone. "Larger properties contribute more to the runoff than smaller ones do," he said.

That tended to ignore the fact that the city itself was a large landowner in the area, and from what Mike had been able to figure out, Kutzley hadn’t included streets, sidewalks, and parking lots and the like in the runoff, although they contributed. That opened up a can of worms, though, and Kutzley’s plan was admittedly a rough-cut. Which, Mike knew, was a point he’d better make before much longer.

There it was. It was out. Actually, Mike thought, if Kirsten and he had stayed at the old house, it really wouldn’t be anywhere near as bad a hit as he had expected – only something in the thousand- to twelve hundred-dollar bracket. He could have swallowed that, so he was glad he hadn’t used that as an argument to move to the new place. He liked the new house and the location a heck of a lot better, even though the road was getting a little out of hand.

Yeah, Mike thought. It really wasn’t the money; under the circumstances, it wasn’t an impossible figure. It was the EPA cramming it down the city’s throat that really burned.

He checked the inch count. He was getting there, better than he had expected. Better start to wind this up, he thought.

And that meeting will be a zoo, Mike thought. He checked his inch count again. Close; there was only about three inches left. That wasn’t enough to do a sidebar on other council business, which there wasn’t much of, and it would only mean a bigger tear-up of the paper. Good enough, he thought. I’ll just fill it up with an In other business line, and add a few taglines. That ought to hold it.

His fingers flew over the keys, finishing up the last few lines of the story. He ran back up to the beginning of the story and read over it, catching a couple of spelling errors, and suspecting that he missed some others.

That left the problem of a headline. City forced to build drain really summed it up, but there had to be some way to bring out that it was the property owners who were getting hit in the wallet. A kicker reading, Landowners to pay big would do it. He typed the headline and kicker out, and stared at it for a minute. It would have even more impact if it were the other way around, he realized finally, so he changed it. Landowners to pay big would now be spread across the six columns, in eighty-four-point type. There’d be screaming tomorrow; there was no point in being a shrinking violet.

Mike shook his head. It wasn’t a great story, but it would draw a good reaction. He was tired, and it would have to do. He saved it to the hard drive, and to a floppy. He took the floppy up to the layout room, booted up the 286 and laser printer, and ran the story off. It only took a couple minutes to paste down and put in the box, where Sally would find it in the morning. For once, he was glad he didn’t have to make the Camden run the next day; it was always tough after a council meeting, but it was even tougher after one like this one. As an afterthought, he wrote a note to have an extra five hundred papers printed; this one would probably sell pretty well at the dealers.

Mike shut off the computers and the lights, then went out and got in the Rabbit. Though Susan would probably be asleep, Kirsten should still be up. It was kind of a shame that Susan would probably be asleep; so far, she’d been a pretty good baby.

"Marjorie, I’m out of here," Don Kutzley told his secretary.

"Don, you must have at least a dozen phone calls to return," she protested.

"Right," Kutzley said. "I could just about follow the Record-Herald truck around town from where I was getting phone calls. They’ll keep. I’m going to go over and see how they’re coming with the sewer inspection. That’ll get me out of here for a while, anyway." He was gone before Marjorie could protest.

It wasn’t as if he hadn’t expected it, but it was still pretty frantic on the phone after about eleven o’clock. The calls before then had mostly come as a result of the rumor mill, but as soon as the Record-Herald came out, it got bad.

The last phone call was the worst. Don had expected to be cussed out a bit, but Binky Augsberg had lit into him in English, French, and Vietnamese, and he’d been just as glad he didn’t know what she was calling him in any of those but English; that had been bad enough. He hadn’t been aware that she owned as much property in the separation district as she did, but she stood to take as big a hit as the school was going to have to burp up. The school superintendent had been less than thrilled, too.

As Don got into his car, he reflected that there were probably seven city council members who wouldn’t be answering their phones for days.

The car started hard; it was a former city police car that had seen better days, but Don hardly ever drove it farther than the city limits, and it saved the city a few ostentatious dollars.

The sewer inspection crew had been working on the sewer system since Monday, but Don had yet to be able to get out to see what they were up to. He gave Jack Musgrave a call on the city radio, to see if he knew where they were working, and was rewarded with the reply that Musgrave thought they were somewhere out around the far end of Oak Street.

There really wasn’t a lot to see; a big step van, like a bread truck, and a pickup truck, parked on each side of an open manhole. Next to the manhole, one of the city crew helped one of the specialists feed a small cable down the manhole. "The rat’s quite a ways up the street," one of the TV crew said.

"I thought you had to push it up there," Don commented.

"Used to," the crewman said. "This is the latest gimmick. The rat’s got electrically driven wheels all around it, so it drives itself. You just have to keep the cable halfway tight when it’s backing, so it doesn’t back over the cable. If it does, you’ve got a real mess."

Inside the step van, another technician monitored a black and white TV, which gave a real-time playback from the rat while two videotape machines recorded what the TV camera in the rat was seeing. Behind the technician, Pam Appleton sat looking over his shoulder. Don glanced at the monitor, which showed the inside of a damp, rather dirty pipe, but nothing in particular. "Finding any snakes, Pam?" he asked.

"Not a snake," Pam told him. "We’ve gone almost halfway through the sewers, except for the household feeders where we can’t see and can’t make the turn, and haven’t seen one single snake."

"Finding anything else?" Kutzley asked the technician.

"Finding a few breaks," the technician reported, lighting a cigarette for something to do. "Nothing spectacular today, although we found a pretty big one over on Elm Street yesterday. Overall, it’s in pretty good shape, so far." He consulted a map, and pointed at a dark spot that rapidly crawled closer in the monitor. "OK, this has got to be the feeder for 219 coming up."

The dark spot drew closer and closer, until it filled an eighth of the screen, and then it was gone to one side. "It moves along pretty good," Don commented.

"A good, steady walk," the technician said. "Of course, this is good sewer, so we’re buzzing along pretty well here. We slow down in problem areas, sometimes considerably. The rat’ll go along pretty good, until it gets to the point where it has to drag too much cable behind it. Then, we have to back out and come in another way."

"What happens if the cable breaks?" Don wondered.

"Then we go in with a backhoe and dig it out," the technician said, glancing at a computer screen that monitored readouts from the rat. "That’s a hundred-thousand-dollar piece of instrumentation down there, and we don’t intend to lose it down a sewer."

"Does that happen very often?"

"Naw, haven’t had to dig one out in months. Of course, you have to be careful what you poke the rat’s nose into."

Kutzley shook his head. Even ten years before, when he’d started working in public administration, such a thing had been unheard of. You never found out where a sewer main had broken until it started stinking on you, and sometimes that took a while. "Does it beat poking a periscope down a storm drain?" he asked Pam.

"It would," she said, "if we turned up any snakes. But, the only snake I’ve seen in a sewer all summer was with the periscope, and that was a plain old garter snake."

"You’re looking for Gibson’s water snakes, right?" Don asked, remembering the brief letter from the Fish and Wildlife Service the week before.

"Yeah, but I haven’t found any, even in the swamp," she said, a little sadly. "There’s only been the one specimen. Frankly, it’s all starting to look a little hopeless. I’d pinned a lot of hope on finding something with this rig, but we haven’t seen anything."

"Hey, Kutzley," an angry male voice came from outside the van. "What the hell is all this special assessment district shit?"

Don sighed. There was no getting away from it, even here. "Pam, I want you to tell me more about this," he said. "But I can’t do it now. After they get done with the TV, why don’t you drop by the office and tell me about it. I gotta go."

"I’ll be glad to," she said as Don turned toward the door of the van.

"Hey, don’t blame me," she heard Kutzley say. "Blame those idiots in Washington . . . "

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