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Published in the United States of America by

Soul Mate Publishing

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Macedon, New York, 14502

ISBN: 978-1-68291-001-6

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The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

For Verna and Joel,

who read them all

Acknowledgements

All writing needs help from first readers, especially short stories, so I wish to thank The Talespinners, my dedicated writers’ group for the past ten years for all of their suggestions, and finding the typos and misplaced semi-colons.

A SMALL-TOWN BEAT

The booklet Beth-Anne Cummings was trying to read was a dead bore. She felt obligated to wade through it but she was distracted by the heavy scent of the old-fashioned lilacs outside her window. Lilacs are dream-inducing on a pleasantly warm evening, and the book concerned the duties of budget committees in those towns that operated, as her town did, under the terms of New Hampshire’s Municipal Budget Act. It was so much nicer to contemplate the lilacs, the town in which they grew and a young lawyer named Duncan McGuire, the chairman of Gavin’s Falls budget committee.

She flipped through the pages of the booklet wondering if the town of Gavin’s Falls was typical of New England small towns which had resisted moving into even the twentieth century, as she had been told. It was certainly different from other towns in her admittedly limited experience, but just the same, it was a little strange.

Beth-Anne decided contemplating the town was a lot safer, from her heart’s point of view, than thinking about one of its more important inhabitants.

She looked at her little book without seeing it, and paid more attention to the flowers outside her land lady’s living room window. The lilacs, and some elegant old maple trees, were surrounded by perennial flower beds, flowers Mrs. Carter said were perhaps a hundred years old. That was older than some parts of the town where Beth-Anne had grown up.

She considered her position in the little town, especially with respect to Attorney McGuire.

There was so much she didn’t understand. New Hampshire small towns had some rather archaic institutions. Institutions they jealously guarded, cherished, and rarely tried to explain. Newcomers were left to discover the workings of the town on their own.

Beth-Anne had a brand-new degree in journalism, but she did not have a New England background, having grown up in suburban Ohio. She was finding the learning process formidable and completely unanticipated. A reporter, she had discovered, unless of the same stock, is regarded with suspicion, treated with a civil reserve, and left in the dark.

She was familiar with traditional town meetings, of course. As a student at a New Hampshire college, she had attended one as well as meetings of several local boards in connection with journalism classes, but she had been left wishing she had understood the comments that had caused so much laughter and the jokes made by the moderator. She had felt left out of something special.

She chose a college in New England because of a love of skiing. She had visited once and fallen in love with the area, and selected a school near the mountains, in the midst of the quiet scenery. Now employed working at a small weekly newspaper in one of those quaint villages, Beth-Anne was learning just how quaint it was. Her job covering the meetings of committees and agencies in Gavin’s Falls, a town of less than two thousand people, should have been simple; but it wasn’t. She should have learned quickly who the key people were, what they did, and how they operated, but that information was elusive. She didn’t think anyone talked to anyone else, least of all to her.

She dutifully attended each session of the planning board and conservation commission and learned the names of all the officials, and they all greeted her politely when she arrived, but thereafter they seemed to talk through her. What they said did not seem to pertain to the subject at hand. She knew the structure of town government, but all the action seemed to be taking place somewhere else, on some other level, a level from which she was excluded.

Like now, for instance. Gavin’s Falls was preparing to hold a postponed meeting of the school district. The postponement was required because last year the planning board approved a major housing development, the town’s first multi-unit, mixed-income apartment complex. The school board found that the projected increase in student enrollment was too large to fit into the village school building. They had not completed their proposal for an addition to the school in time for the annual meeting in March, but now said they had their plans and figures ready for voter consideration.

Based on the information she unearthed, Beth-Anne decided that the town was about equally divided on the subject. Those who said one more classroom and a multi-purpose room were enough were opposed by those who agreed with the school board that now was the time to add a gym, a cafeteria, and a library to the grade school. It was time, they said, to enter at least the twentieth century.

She could not understand the controversy. It was easy to see, from the enrollment figures at least, that the school was too small. Of course kids needed a gym and a library. All kids did. Just because somebody’s grandfather hadn’t had them was no reason to deny today’s kids. Times had changed.

Beth-Anne’s problem in understanding it lay with the budget committee. Not with the workings of it; she understood that fairly well. It was the chairman, Duncan McGuire. If she closed her eyes she could see his well-formed, sensitive face with its dark-rimmed glasses, making him look every inch the brand-new lawyer that he was. He directed the committee with an intensity that was painful. Keeping them strictly to the issue at hand, he allowed little or none of the casual side conversations of other boards, and the missing comments were ones that she might have found illuminating.

And he ignored reporters. That hurt more than a little. He could at least acknowledge that she was there.

Duncan McGuire was the younger son of an old Gavin’s Falls family, a descendant of one of the original founders. The McGuires were well-to-do, prominent and domineering, owners of one of the last mills in the area and officers of several banks, but they were found on the society pages of the paper only in connection with charity events or various conservative causes, and then rarely. For Duncan to serve on the budget committee was a departure from the family style, although several McGuires had served as town leaders some generations ago. Beth-Anne had looked them up in the genealogies. Purely out of curiosity, of course.

She found Duncan McGuire bemusing. He was the leader of the effort to confine the school addition to one new classroom and an accessory room, the plan labeled ‘B’ by the school board. She knew he was a graduate of the village school, of a very good prep school, Dartmouth College, and Harvard Law, and was one of the town’s more eligible bachelors. He should, considering his background, realize the importance of such things as libraries and computer labs, and she couldn’t figure out why he didn’t. She also found him fascinating, and the fact that he continually ignored her presence was disconcerting.

She wasn’t particularly unattractive. Other young men did not seem to find her so. Her face was oval, her complexion creamy, and she wore little makeup. Her naturally blond hair was long, slightly curly, and usually held back with an elaborate glittery clip, one of the few pieces of jewelry she habitually wore. She was short, barely five feet three inches, and not at all tiny.

She realized she had read a whole page of the booklet without remembering a word. The budget committee was not nearly as interesting a topic of contemplation as its chairman. She kept relating what she read to things he had said, and she kept seeing his face as she had seen him last night at the school board meeting. He sat in the sparse audience, arms folded, leaning back in his chair, listening intently. He did not speak during the entire evening except to acknowledge knowing some of those present. He might as well have been alone with the school board.

She had sat to his right and a little behind him, a perfect place from which to study his profile. A most interesting profile. She didn’t think he looked angry, or scornful, or judgmental, as she often heard others call him. He looked, well, thoughtful, and, yes, handsome. At the close of the meeting he rose to leave, and as he turned to pick up his jacket, he had looked at her with a long, searching, unsmiling stare. He nodded in her general direction and left.

Her heart was feeding on that one long look.

It was absurd, of course. She was not of his social class and he did not come anywhere near her long-held ideal of male perfection, which tended toward movie idol looks. He was too tall and thin and he did not appear athletic although she knew that he played tennis; she had seen his name once on a list of participants at a celebrity charity affair. He might even be thinning a little at the temples. It was hard to tell with his dark-rimmed glasses.

She was reading all the wrong things into that one long appraising look, she told herself quite firmly. She had to go to a combined committee meeting tonight, the last one, the big one, before the actual vote on the school addition. She had to be objective about it, even if Duncan McGuire was on the wrong side.

She asked herself why she even cared about the vote. She had no real interest in this standoffish town. She had come here only to learn the job of being a reporter. To get a year or two of experience before she moved on to a real newspaper, a city daily. Not this tiny everyone-does-everything kind of weekly where a school vote could be the important news of the month, even the year. She wanted, she told herself, more excitement, more interesting people, and a wider range of stories.

This vote should be like watching a baseball game in which your team isn’t playing, and she should be completely impersonal. She had chosen a side for this one event only: the side of progress, of growth. All purely academic, but a nagging little thought suggested that her writing was tending to reflect that stand, in spite of her resolve.

Unfortunately, Duncan McGuire was on the other team. He was wrong, but she found herself tending to play down what he said, trying to make him sound a little better, in what she wrote of the meetings. She did not like the feeling this gave her of herself and her own integrity. She wanted to portray both sides evenly, be the disinterested by-stander, purely a reporter of things that did not concern her. This town was not hers, Duncan McGuire was not hers, and she was simply here to learn to be a reporter.

But, just the same, Gavin’s Falls was a pretty town. Its very age, over 250 years, gave it a charm that she had never seen in the more western places she had lived. The hills enfolded it lovingly, the streets’ wide-armed trees shaded lawns and the flower gardens that came only with many years of patient care, and there were lilacs everywhere. It would be a nice place to stay. If they would accept her.

She couldn’t concentrate. Duncan’s face kept forming on the page, and she threw the book away. It was time to face reality, she told herself again. Go to the final hearing, listen to the issues, and completely ignore the chairman except to report what he said. It was what she was trained for, the job she wanted to do. Personal feelings had no place in it, anywhere.

Beth-Anne went early but the meeting room in the town hall was already crowded with chattering people, but except for an occasional glance, they ignored her. She studied the old-fashioned high-ceiling charm of the century-old hall, a room that usually intrigued her with its pressed tin ceiling and heavily draped stage.

The press of bodies made the frequently cool hall warmer than usual. She settled in for a long evening of debate that could get contentious.

As the discussion progressed, the only word she could find for Duncan McGuire was obstructionist, and he based all of his arguments on finances.

“The town can’t afford it,” he said. “There isn’t enough of a tax base here to build that kind of school.”

“We can’t afford not to,” the school board chairman, an older man named Joe Brown, told him. “It’s the kids’ futures we are talking about, the chance to give them the same kind of background as the other kids at the high school they’ll go to. We’re short-changing them.”

“We aren’t,” Duncan said. “Spending more money doesn’t mean a better education.”

The chairman was a persuasive speaker with more than a touch of humor, an older man recently retired and well respected. Beth-Anne found herself agreeing with him, carried away by his arguments. She left the meeting with a distinct feeling that the people present would go along with Joe, though few had said so. She also had the distinct impression that the issue would be decided elsewhere, sometime before the vote was actually taken.

In the morning she read her notes, but with a weekly paper she didn’t have an immediate deadline. She went out for a walk to help her think, to organize her story in her mind. It was a beautiful mid-May morning and the air was full of the scent of lilacs. They were old bushes, some of them almost trees, tucked into odd corners of streets and buildings and they were one of the endearing charms of the village that she would miss.

She stopped on a corner of Main Street outside The Coffee Shop, a diner she rarely visited because she did not find it friendly. She debated going in: they had excellent coffee and apricot Danish.

Duncan Maguire suddenly came through the door beside her and stopped in front of her, not quite running into her and looked down at her frowning. “Miss Cummings?”

She looked up at him, saw that his eyes were almost green, and found she could hardly answer him. “Yes?”

“I would like to talk to you,” he said. There was a cold hardness in his voice that cut her a little. “About last night.”

Her journalistic sense was instantly aroused and it steadied her thinking a little. Almost normally she said, “Yes?”

“I would like to talk about the way you’re going to write the article in
The Recorder
.”

“Why?” she asked, suddenly suspicious.

He smiled thinly. “Over coffee, maybe, or lunch?”

It was so very tempting, what she had so longed for, but she drew herself up as tall as she could. “I write only what I see and hear,” she said, keeping her voice from trembling. “I can only tell it like it is.”

“Come on now,” he said, his voice rising a little in irritation. “I’m only interested in getting the facts straight.”

“I was there. I know what was said.”

“I was only suggesting.”

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