Chapter 7
Chapter Seven
All morning, I kept thinking of the way Ben’s hand had felt when he placed it on top of mine during dinner the night before, the sudden rush of heat that had gone through my body.
It would have been so easy to turn toward him, to move a little closer…
to give the signal that I was finally ready to get out of the friend zone.
Of course, I hadn’t done any of that because I was a raging coward.
But I still couldn’t forget the pressure on my hand, the way the warmth of his fingers had felt exactly right. Was my body trying to tell my brain to get the hell out of the way?
Part of me sure thought so.
The bell on the door to the shop jingled, and I saw Eliza Cartwright come in, eyes shining and face full of stories she needed to tell.
Thank God. I needed the distraction right then.
“You look like someone put a nickel in you,” I told Eliza as she approached me, and she grinned.
“I guess they kind of did,” she replied.
“I got those final nine signatures and took the petition to the town council. They need to verify all the signatures to make sure everyone who signed is eligible to vote in city elections, but it still looks like we’ll have a recall election happening by the end of the month. ”
Not too shabby, considering that this whole recall drive had only started in mid-June. Well, when Eliza got the bit between her teeth, she didn’t let much get in her way.
“And…” she went on, then drew in a breath, “…everyone wants me to run to take over the job. Can you believe it?”
I totally could. She believed in Silver Hollow wholeheartedly…and was also the kind of person who knew how to get things done.
“What about the café?” I asked. While I knew Eliza would do nothing but good for Silver Hollow, I also doubted that anyone wanted to see her restaurant shut down while she was running things at City Hall.
She waved a dismissive hand. “Oh, I’ll keep that going for sure.
Maybe I’ll hire someone to help out, but the thing is, being the mayor of Silver Hollow really isn’t a full-time career.
It sort of morphed into that with the last couple of fat cats we elected to run things, but going back fifteen years ago or so, no one ever expected the mayor to give up their day job. ”
I didn’t know that. True, when I was a kid, I hadn’t paid much attention to how the town was run, lumping it in with all the other adult stuff that older people needed to worry about but which didn’t affect me.
And then I’d been occupied with school for so many years, first at Humboldt State and then at UC Davis, that the day-to-day operations of Silver Hollow had been one of the last things on my mind.
“Well, that’s good news,” I said, although I couldn’t help adding, “but you know Tillman is going to try to paint all this as a power play you made up so you could steal his job.”
“Let him,” Eliza replied, chin lifting. “I’m happy to show the photographic evidence of what Northwest Pacific’s people did to Welling Glen. It’s going to take years for that land to recover.”
I couldn’t help wincing. The glen was the place where that first unicorn had lain its head on my great-times-five-grandmother’s lap more than a hundred and fifty years earlier, and the mere thought that the beauty of the tranquil clearing had been brutalized in pursuit of the almighty dollar made me so angry that I could spit.
I’d visited the spot about a week ago, and although grass and wildflowers had already begun to cover up the ugly tracks the bulldozers and trucks had left behind, nothing could replace the old trees that had been cut down.
Even years from now, the trees that sprang up in their place would be much smaller and provide much less shade.
“Yes, Tillman needs to figure out that the people here in Silver Hollow aren’t exactly on the side of big business,” I said. “He’s going to learn pretty soon that we’re not fans of mayors who’re willing to sell us out to line their pockets.”
Of course, none of us had any hard and fast evidence that Northwest Pacific had been giving the mayor kickbacks to let them go in and clear-cut the forest where they weren’t allowed, but it still seemed fairly obvious — to me, at least — that’s exactly what had happened.
What Jim Tillman would do after he was ousted, I wasn’t sure.
He wasn’t a native of Silver Hollow but had lived here for close to twenty-five years, so it wouldn’t be all that easy for him to pull up stakes and move somewhere else.
Then again, he owned the only apartment complex in town — a cute place with garden-style units, all of them one-story with nice little yards — so maybe he made enough off the rentals there to keep his lifestyle going.
Or possibly Northwest Pacific had paid him so much that he didn’t even need to worry about money. Unfortunately, I doubted we’d ever get all the details as to how much cash they’d tipped into his bank accounts.
“I think he has an inkling already,” Eliza said.
Her hazel eyes danced with amusement, and I could tell she wasn’t too worried about any trouble Tillman might try to send in her direction.
“Anyway,” she continued, “I thought I’d stop in and give you the good news, but I need to go pick up Bethany from cheer practice.
We’re headed over to Eureka — she needs some kind of special shoes that we can’t get online, but a store there carries them. ”
“Well, just let me know if you need me to put up any campaign posters in the shop windows,” I said, and she grinned.
“I’m not even sure if that’s going to be necessary, considering it sounds like I’ll be running unopposed. But I’ll let you know.”
She waved then and headed out, and the bell on the door tinkled faintly as it closed behind her.
Still, her visit had cheered me up. Mayor Tillman would soon be a thing of the past, and in a few hours, I’d be seeing Ben again.
Not for anything romantic, of course, just an expedition to the forest to see if we could find anything that hadn’t turned up on the trail cams, but still, it would be good to spend a few hours together.
And we hadn’t had a single glitch in the town’s electricity today. Maybe that meant things were stabilizing, for whatever reason.
Fingers crossed.
Ben and I actually went out to eat that evening, this time at Molly’s Corner, which was casual enough, with its wood-paneled walls and macramé relics from the 1970s, that we didn’t have to worry about our hiking boots and jeans.
Although we attracted a few curious glances, it seemed the town’s residents had mostly accepted our relationship…
whatever it was…as an established fact and had moved on to more interesting topics of discussion.
“Have you heard anything from Marjorie?” I asked, figuring that was probably a safe enough subject to discuss. She would have been out and about and seen by enough people in town that it wasn’t as if she was a total secret.
He nodded, then set down his French dip. Once again, we weren’t drinking anything stronger than iced tea, since we knew we’d be tromping around in the forest soon enough.
“She said the readings were different from yesterday, practically flat.”
I let myself smile just a little. “Well, I could have told her that. Not a single light flicker or a glitch in my cell service.”
Ben didn’t look as pleased by that information as I’d thought he would. “Same here.”
“Isn’t that a good thing?”
He shrugged as he reached for a French fry. “I’d like to think so. But you know what they say about things being too quiet.”
Yes, I did, and unease stirred in my midsection, even as I told it to settle down, that this could be a good thing. “Maybe we’ve just been experiencing a natural series of fluctuations, and now we’re heading back into calmer waters.”
Ben’s expression was noncommittal, to say the least. “That would be good.”
I could tell he wasn’t buying it, and so for the rest of the meal, we stuck to much safer topics, like Eliza getting the necessary signatures to recall the mayor and set up another election.
“We’ll have to wait until the end of July at the earliest for that to happen,” I remarked. “But still, it’s nice to know that we’re getting close to the end of dear Mayor Tillman’s reign.”
“That is a good thing,” Ben agreed. “And although we sure haven’t seen any sign of Northwest Pacific coming back to finish the job, I know I’ll feel better once he’s out of power and doesn’t have nearly the opportunity to do more damage.”
“Same here,” I said. I was quiet for a moment as I dipped a fry in some ketchup, then added, “Although he has to know that everyone’s keeping an eye out for any skullduggery. Exactly what does he think he could even get away with?”
“Hard to say.” A few seconds passed as Ben swirled the straw in his glass of iced tea, his expression thoughtful. “With a guy like that, it’s probably better to expect the worst.”
Yes, as my mother’s favorite Maya Angelou quote went, when a person shows you who they are the first time, believe them.
And Jim Tillman had definitely shown us that he couldn’t be trusted.
I made a noncommittal sound, and soon afterward, we got up from our table to pay our bill at the counter near the entrance, where you could also get cookies and slices of pie to go.
Just as Teri, the woman working the cash register…
someone who’d babysat me sometimes when I was a little kid…
handed me the receipt, the lights overhead flickered.
She shot an annoyed glance upward. “I was kind of hoping we were done with all this nonsense.”
So was I, went through my mind, but I just nodded. “It is kind of frustrating. I’m just glad that so far it hasn’t glitched when I was right in the middle of a transaction.”
“You’re lucky,” she said. “Happened to me twice last week. Good thing we’re still able to do things the old-fashioned way if we have to.”