Chapter 4 Sebastian #2
A deep, guttural, preparing-to-shoot-fire-through-her-nose laugh erupted from Jo. “Township Days, of course! She didn’t say
it specifically, but it was very clearly implied. She said something about how we’re obsessed with colonial days. Obsessed.
Can you believe that? We haven’t celebrated Township Days since the late nineties. And she knows better. She was here in those
golden days. For her to be so demeaning... so dismissive...”
Choose your words wisely, Sebastian.
“That’s not cool,” he muttered. And it wasn’t.
Even if, at this particular moment, he and Brynn Cornell seemed to be the only two people on the planet who saw how absurd their “greatest tradition” was.
But insulting it in front of the biggest morning-television audience in the world was not cool at all.
Doc remained silent, nearly motionless, apart from the thumb and forefinger of his right hand spinning the simple gold band
around the ring finger on his left hand. His eyes seemed focused on the shelf of reference books across the room.
Sebastian sighed. “Well, I’m sorry this happened. I know it has to feel like a pretty major betrayal.” As always, there were
lots of things he wanted to say. Can we please take “Birthplace of America’s Ray of Sunshine” off the city’s welcome sign now? Should we consider suing her,
at least for enough money to expand the “zoo” beyond the various bugs that entomologist left behind when his grant money ran
out and the fat, lazy prairie dogs the school lunch workers feed leftover french fries to? And, of course, No matter how wrong of her it was to say it, shouldn’t we reevaluate the desire to bring back Township Days, now that it’s been made fun of on a national stage?
He'd get to all those things, he figured. But as Doc Atwater’s eyes rose slowly and met Sebastian’s, he realized he hadn’t
heard the whole story yet. Jo had released a deep breath and collapsed back into her chair, seemingly exhausted from the retelling,
and Bill was scanning the pages of the Denver Post as if none of it had ever happened, so he was pretty sure they hadn’t either.
“There’s something else?” he asked.
Doc’s eyes passed slowly across his three fellow council members. “I think it would do us all some good to remember this is
one of our kids.”
Jo scoffed. “I don’t know about that, Doc. She just made it pretty clear that she’s disowned us.”
“Fine. But that doesn’t mean we disown her.” He pushed back from the table enough that he could cross his boot up onto his knee. “You taught her, Jo. Bill, you created a job for her cleaning up the back room at the bar so you could keep an eye on her when Elaine went off the deep end.”
Old Man Kimball glared over the newspaper at Doc. “I did no such thing. I hired her to do a job that needed to be done, plain
and simple. She wasn’t even any good at it. Should’ve fired her right off the bat.”
“Okay, Bill. Whatever you say.” Doc looked down at the still-twirling ring and nodded. And, if Sebastian wasn’t mistaken,
smiled. The smile slowly faded over the next several seconds before he looked up again. “I know none of us were crazy about
the way she left, but I still remember when she and Laila would come over for sleepovers with Addie. In my head I can still
see those three girls sitting around dreaming and conspiring about all the things they wanted do with their lives. All the
things they were going to become. So maybe we don’t like who it seems she’s become. That doesn’t mean we turn our backs on
her.”
Jo grumbled under her breath, and that was good enough for Doc, it seemed.
He returned his boot to the ground. “Let’s officially call this meeting to order.” Doc waited as Jo pulled her yellow legal
pad from her canvas shopping bag and then dove right in. “I have a new item for discussion. Sorry, Jo... I didn’t have
time to get it on the agenda. I got a phone call from New York, right before Brynn’s on-air mishap, warning me it was about
to happen—”
“It was a setup?!” Bill crumpled up the center of his newspaper and looked over it, enraged.
“Time zones, Bill. Time zones.” Doc remained calm and quiet as he carried on. “Of course, they didn’t give me much of a heads-up. I think you guys were seeing it happen before it even registered who I was talking to.”
Time-zone confusions were a running theme in the history of Adelaide Springs, Sebastian had discovered.
Back after the 1960 presidential election, when the tiny little community of Dixville Notch, New Hampshire, gained recognition for being the first in the country to cast their votes by gathering the entire populace (all four of them) at midnight, Adelaide Springs had wanted to prove they were every bit as patriotic.
So, obviously, they started casting their votes at the exact same time as Dixville Notch, which was 10:00 p.m. the night before.
From what Sebastian could tell, no one in Adelaide Springs cast a valid vote again until 1988.
“Who were you talking to?” Sebastian asked.
“A man named Passik.”
“Colton Passik?” Sebastian hadn’t intended to let any knowledge of anything slip in, but once it was out there, all eyes were
on him.
“That’s the one,” Doc confirmed. “You know him?”
“I know of him.” And he’d known him, in a different life. “He’s sort of a bigwig. They must really be scrambling if he’s making
the calls himself.” All eyes were still on him, as if they were waiting for him to reveal more. But this wasn’t about him,
and he’d prefer to keep it that way.
“Rather than call and warn us, why didn’t they just edit that out for all the other time zones? We don’t get anything live
in Mountain time zone anyway.”
Jo raised a reasonable point, but the answer was obvious. At least to Sebastian. “It would still be out there,” he told her.
“Social media and YouTube and the like. And then Sunup would have a much bigger issue to deal with than their star going off the rails. Everyone west of Georgia would start wondering
what was being kept from them every morning.”
It should have clicked for him sooner that something was happening that involved Adelaide Springs directly. He’d seen Doc
leaning against the wall at the Bean, talking on a cell phone.
Doc didn’t own a cell phone.
Adelaide Springs didn’t have a town hall.
There was no one manning the phones or greeting visitors in some outdated office with neglected houseplants.
Jo kept a filing cabinet in her office at the inn, and the historical archives were kept in boxes in the vault at the closest branch of the Mineral County Community Bank, just one town over.
A year ago Sebastian offered to add another cell phone to his service plan, but before that if anyone needed to contact the local government, their best bet was to head to the Bean Franklin or, later in the day, Cassidy’s, the bar and grill owned by Bill Kimball.
Once you walked into either of those locations, you could just talk to whichever city councilor you spotted first. Otherwise, you could call the city’s official landline, which it shared with sheriff dispatch, the library, and the historical society.
Now the council members passed the official town line around in a rotation each month. Well, Doc, Jo, and Sebastian passed
it around. Bill had feigned lack of understanding of how to answer a call on a “newfangled” refurbished iPhone 8 long enough
that the other three had given up on the hope of stretching the rotation to once in four months instead of three. It was March,
and Doc was up.
“I’m guessing Passik didn’t call with a friendly warning out of the goodness of his heart?”
Of course the network was worried the town would sue. If they played their cards right, maybe they could get a lot more than a few
fish tanks and some reinforced fencing for Mr. Ripley, the Olivets’ retired steer.
Doc chuckled. “He seemed like a nice enough guy, but no. There was a bit more to it than that. He said Brynn’s mortified by
what happened. Life pressures, the increased spotlight, exhaustion...” Doc looked pointedly at Sebastian. “You know the
drill.”
Sebastian scoffed and then added in a cough or two to try to cover the reaction.
Brynn Cornell’s cushy celebrity drill was very different from the drill Sebastian knew, as Doc was fully aware.
He and Doc could discuss that later. He’d never been more grateful for the avoidance allowed by doctor-patient confidentiality.
“But she couldn’t even be bothered to call us herself to say all of that?” Jo tsked and shook her head. “What has happened
to that girl?”
“That’s what the call was about. She wants to come out here next week and apologize in person.” Doc sat back and let them
all process that in their own ways. Jo was speechless, Bill was Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino , and Sebastian returned to his thousand-piece puzzle.
If the town wanted to file a lawsuit, there was probably a case there. But it wouldn’t get that far. If Adelaide Springs so
much as made a call to Denver to chat with a lawyer, the network would offer to settle, and that would be the end of it. How
much would they have to take out of Brynn Cornell’s wardrobe budget to offer more money than the tiny little town would know
what to do with? Would she have to wear the same dress to the Emmys and the People’s Choice Awards? No... they wouldn’t go that far. But she might have to wear something off the rack.
They weren’t worried about protecting their money. They were worried about protecting their golden child. Their biggest asset,
as they saw her. Sebastian was willing to bet all the eggs had been placed in her basket. She was the future of Sunup . It had never occurred to them to come up with plan B. Why would it? Until this morning, she’d been a bulletproof angel.
“What sort of crew are they wanting to bring?” Sebastian asked. “And for how long?”
Doc shrugged. “Small. Not sure what that means, exactly. For the week.”
“Footage of her making nice?”