“I understand,” Ronnie said urgently.
“What do you understand?”
“What I almost did tonight. How heavy it would have been.”
“If your father steps out of line again, I want to hear from you. He lays a hand on you or your brother, he gets busy with the Beddoe ladies, you pick up the phone and you call me.”
“You want me to rat out my own father to the police?”
“Not to the police, to me.”
“God, this is too freakin’ weird.”
“Life is freakin’ weird. Get used to it.” Des came to a stop by the stone pillars at the foot of Somerset Ridge. “Up to you, big man. Either we deal or we head for Westbrook. What’s it to be?”
“I’ll call you,” he said hoarsely.
“Smart move,” she said, easing down the road toward his house. “I knew you had it in you.”
“Damn,” Ronnie Welmers marveled, shaking his head. “You’re not very nice, are you?”
“That’s where you are way wrong,” Des said, flashing a smile at him. “Remember this day, sweetness. Remember it often. Because I am the nicest person you will ever meet.”
CHAPTER 15
Des was out there enforcing the seventy-five-foot limit when Mitch pulled into the firehouse parking lot. The polling place was mobbed. Voters lined up out the door all the way to Dorset Street. Dozens of vocal demonstrators crowded the curb with save our school and WE CARE signs. It seemed as if every registered voter in town had shown up to weigh in on the future of Center School. And, quite possibly, the future of Dorset itself.
Mitch tried to wangle a smile out of Des as he eased on past her into a parking space, but the resident trooper had her game face on. All he got was a curt nod.
“Quite a lovely girl, isn’t she?” Sheila Enman spoke up from the seat next to him, her eyes twinkling at Mitch.
“Yes, she is, Mrs. Enman,” he said, watching Des in his rearview mirror as First Selectman Paffin approached her with his hand stuck out and a broad grin on his face.
“One helluva caboose on her, too,” the old lady observed, craning her neck for a better look. “Me, I never looked like that in trousers.”
The polls closed at eight o’clock. The tally, which was posted on the town’s Web site later that evening, was surprisingly lopsided. The thirty-four-million-dollar school bond proposal failed by a no vote of 3,874 to 2,175. The Center School would be spared.
Mitch was positively elated. He liked Dorset just the way it was.
One of the reasons the no vote was so resounding was Wendell Frye’s generous bequest to the town. In the fine print of his amended will Hangtown had pledged one-half million dollars to Center School for the construction of a world-class art studio complex for Dorset’s young people. The money was not transferable to a new school facility-if the town tore down Center School, the bequest would be voided.
Even in death, the old master’s voice was heard. And heeded.
The day after the election Bob Paffin officially said, “Thanks, but no thanks” to the parcel of land on Route 156 that Bruce Leanse had wanted to donate for a new school. The first selectman also announced that he would be forming a committee comprised of town committee leaders and school board members to find out exactly how much it would cost to renovate and enlarge Center School. Chairing the committee would be Colin Falconer, who would be restored to his post as Dorset’s superintendent of schools after completing a two-week medical leave. Colin was officially reprimanded for engaging in a “pattern” of inappropriate relationships, but the town leaders could not bring themselves to fire their troubled school superintendent.
The likelihood of a huge, expensive lawsuit if they did may have had something to do with their decision, though they denied this vehemently.
By chatting up the locals at the market and the hardware store, Mitch gathered that the prevailing feeling around town was that Babette Leanse had overreached-in her zeal to build the new school she had behaved in a reckless, irresponsible manner that was most definitely not Dorset. They were also convinced that her husband had known all about her unsavory scheme to oust Colin, in spite of her insistence that she had purposely kept him in the dark about it. The Leanses simply could not persuade a single soul in Dorset to believe that they did anything without joint, careful calculation. No one believed them. No one.
Meanwhile, the word around town hall was that any future development proposal that Bruce Leanse brought before the planning, zoning or wetlands commission would be viewed most unfavorably. In short, the Brat was toast in Dorset, Connecticut. The Aerie, his self-proclaimed revolution in continuous living, would have to be built somewhere else. And it would be built, because people like Bruce Leanse didn’t quit. They kept right on going.
In fact, he was already gone. When Mitch phoned him for a quote he got a phone machine message that said to try his New York office instead. Intrigued, Mitch drove up to the Leanses’ hilltop house and discovered they had cleared out. The house was vacant. And Ben was no longer enrolled at Center School-he’d been transferred out.
Mitch spent almost all of his time in the days following Hangtown’s death trying to pull all of the pieces of his magazine article together. The Sunday magazine’s editor, who was labeling it “A Grisly Tale of one Famous Family’s Mutual Assured Destruction” wanted it as fast as Mitch could deliver it.
Mitch was still pounding furiously away at it when Jim Bolan came bouncing across the causeway one blustery afternoon in his rusty old pickup, Sam the German shepherd riding next to him in the cab. Stashed in the back of the truck, under a tarp, was the completed copper tower.
“He wanted you to have this thing, son,” Jim informed him, dragging deeply on a Lucky Strike. “It ain’t in his will or nothing, but he told me so right to my face. Day before he died.” Jim dropped the tailgate and carefully lifted out the six-foot-tall copper fountain. “He was real emphatic about it, on account of you helped him make it and all. Even made sure he signed it-etched it right there in acid, see?”
Mitch stared at the great man’s signature, nodding dumbly. He could not speak.
“I guess I don’t have to tell you it’s kind of valuable,” Jim mentioned. “Last piece he ever did. Miz Patterson can sell it for you if you ever-”
“Never,” Mitch said hoarsely. “I’d never sell it.”
“Up to you, son,” Jim said easily. “It’s yours. Want to crank her up?”
They filled the twenty-gallon copper holding tank in Mitch’s bathtub and set it in the center of the living room. The copper tower stood smack in the center of the tank, stabilized by the weight of the water. A submersible pump went right into the tank. Jim connected it to the tower’s skeleton of copper tubing with a short length of plastic hose. As soon as Mitch plugged it in he could hear the pump burp and gurgle. Within a few seconds it had pushed the water all the way up to the top of the tower. Then, slowly, it trickled down through the hundreds of nooks and crannies in between the copper boxes as it made its way back down into the tank to be recirculated again and again.
Mitch stood there watching and listening, transfixed. So did Jim. There was something positively hypnotic about Hangtown’s copper tower. Something timeless and magical. Mitch couldn’t put his finger on what it was exactly. Maybe there were no words to describe it, he reflected, because it touched him in a way that had nothing whatsoever to do with the intellectual side of his brain. He only knew that he was in the presence of great art.
“What will you do with yourself now?” he asked Jim as the two of them stood gazing at it reverently.
“Same as before,” Jim answered. “Take care of the place. Watch his back. He wrote it into his will-I’m live-in caretaker for the rest of my natural days, if that’s what I want. And I guess it is. Right now, I’m helping Miz Patterson catalog all of the pieces he never disposed of.”
“If there’s anything I can do, just yell,” Mitch offered. “And if you ever feel like stopping by some night to watch Celebrity Deathmatch, my door’s open.”
“Likewise, son,” Jim said warmly, clapping Mitch on the back. “I haven’t got me no cable TV, but you want to come by for a beer, you don’t need to call. It’s just me, Sam and Elrod the pig now.”
“Well, at least you won’t be alone,” Mitch said, smiling at him.
