Summer on the Cape (15 page)

“Oh, yeah—”

“Yeah—”

“Who do they think they are, coming in here like that, pushing us around—”

“—waving around a lot of dollars—”

“—undermining a way of life goes back hundreds of years—”

Allie realized this was going to be a lively meeting, and she returned eagerly to the auditorium. The room was filling up quickly and she got herself settled into her seat, getting a small sketchpad and a soft pencil out of her bag.

At exactly seven-thirty, the moderator stepped to the podium and began the proceedings, explaining that this special town meeting had been called to present specific articles on a warrant of the Board of Selectmen.

Among the five selectmen who were sitting at the tables on the stage, Allie recognized only one face, that of Mort Emerson from the hardware store where she bought her turpentine. She began work on a drawing, quickly capturing Mort’s canny, cautious expression and the weathered texture of his skin. Then, quietly, she went to the next page, turning her pad sideways, and worked on a group sketch, showing the whole stage scene, moderator at the podium, selectmen at the tables, the bleachers folded back against the wall behind them.

As she worked, she listened only casually to the proceedings, letting the mood and the tone of the meeting reach her rather than the content. She didn’t notice, especially, the demands that were being made for an environmental impact study. She paid little attention to the details of the report that was being presented concerning the need for a Proposition Two and a Half Override. Allie didn’t know what a “Proposition Two and a Half Override” was, and she didn’t care. She was concentrating on locating good subjects for her sketches, and as the tone of the meeting became increasingly confrontational, she was having more difficulty finding faces that were animated and interesting without being angry. She certainly didn’t want angry faces for these pictures, which she intended to offer for promotional purposes.

Allie also hadn’t noticed that some folks sitting near her had been watching what she was doing, that fingers were surreptitiously pointing at her and that a small buzz had moved down the row. In a few moments, people sitting at the back of the roped-off section had become aware of her. Heads bent close to each other, faces turned, whispered questions passed through a small knot of people. Finally, a hand went up.

“Point of order! Mr. Moderator, point of order!”

A balding man with pointy features, his folded-up raincoat clutched tightly in his lap, was calling to be recognized. Next to him his wife, a woman with a face as sharp as her husband’s, a chin pulled in tight, and her lips thin and suspicious, kept glancing over her shoulder at Allie, her eyes narrow and wary behind her glasses.

“What is it, Ben?” The moderator seemed annoyed at the interruption. This meeting was going to be hard enough to control without Ben Rankin’s bad temper. “What’s your point of order?”

“There’s a lady back there, in the visitors’ section.” He pointed at Allie, and all the heads in the auditorium turned in her direction. “She’s drawing pictures of us. I want to know what she’s drawing pictures of us for. Is she drawing pictures for a newspaper or something? I want to know, Lester, did you authorize her to draw our pictures?”

At the back of the room, one man was smiling, amused by the commotion Allie’s presence was stirring up. Zach had been meeting earlier with the selectmen in a back room and had come late into the auditorium. He had chosen to stand unobtrusively near the door and from there he had immediately noticed Allie’s golden head bent over her sketchpad. He’d known right away there was going to be trouble. This crowd was in a hostile mood to begin with, and it wasn’t going to take much to set everyone’s teeth on edge. Anything out of the way, especially from an outsider, was going to be practically intolerable.

“Damn,” he said to himself for the thousandth time, “that woman is nothing but trouble.”

And now, just as he was trying to figure out what she was doing here, what kind of mischief she was up to, suddenly everyone in the place was looking at her, and Lester Pinns was questioning her.

“Ma’am?” He had stopped everything and was looking directly at Allie. She looked up from her sketchpad, startled to realize he was talking to her. “What are you doing there, ma’am?”

“Who, me?”

She glanced around quickly and realized three hundred pairs of eyes were focused on her. She could hear her voice quavering nervously. “Nothing. I mean, I’m just sketching.” She held her pad against herself protectively.

“Are you representing someone, a newspaper or something?”

“No. I’m just an artist.” Allie tried to keep her voice firm, but she could hear it fading away before all those hostile faces. “I’m just doing some sketches?” Her rising inflection made a nervous question of her statement.

“Well, ma’am, I’m going to have to request that you put your pad away.” Lester’s voice was growing still firmer as he continued. “These are serious proceedings, ma’am, and they’re not for the entertainment of every outsider who decides to drift in just to amuse himself. Or herself,” he added sarcastically.

At that, Allie’s back stiffened. “I’m not ‘amusing’ myself. My work is serious, too, and painting pictures is the work I do!”

“I’m sure your work is serious ma’am”—the emphasis he put on “ma’am” made his sarcasm very clear—“and the next time you want to come in and sketch people at a town meeting, you just come and get permission from the moderator first.” He glared at her with the full force of his authority. “That’s the way we do things around here and I’ll thank you to remember that in the future. If you have a problem with that, I’ll just ask our marshal here to conduct you out of this auditorium!” With that, he squared his shoulders and rearranged the papers on the podium in front of him. “And now, if you’ll just put your things away in your bag, we’ll be able to get back to our meeting!”

She was mortified. Ben Rankin and his wife gave her one last self-satisfied, righteous smirk before they turned their faces away from her. Allie felt a powerful impulse to stick her tongue out at them, but managed to control herself, thankful, at least, that the three hundred pairs of eyes were no longer on her.

Except one pair, of course. Though Allie was still not aware of his presence, Zach had watched the whole thing, at first with amusement at her discomfort, thinking it served her right to be stuck on the hot seat like that. But as he watched that golden head bent over her bag, putting her things away, he knew how painfully embarrassed she must be, and realized that his anger was as much on her behalf as it was directed against her. Lester needn’t have been so rough on her. She hadn’t been doing anyone any harm. And that Rankin pair, Ben and his wife. He’d like to have smacked their smug faces!

Allie tried to listen to what was going on around her but she was now too angry and too mortified to pay attention. Dimly, she heard the arguments for and against the project. Tempers were flaring as the president of the town’s Chamber of Commerce lost his patience, trying to explain how the plan would increase the town’s tax base, while owners of small restaurants and diners argued that the park’s theme restaurants would drain off their business. Affluent residents, those who had planned all their working lives to use this quiet, attractive community as a retirement getaway place, were fighting to preserve its peaceful atmosphere, and ordinary folks worried about the increased traffic and the burden on community services and infrastructure.

Ken Rice, who owned a small landscaping business, thought the project might mean more work for local people, but he was shouted down by those who were sure that a project of this size would bring in only off-Cape contractors, and the local construction people wouldn’t benefit at all.

And Judy Jackson, who was five feet tall and all brass, and who could always be counted on to be ready to fight with someone, was waving her fist at the stage and letting everyone know that as far as she was concerned, the last thing that was needed was a lot of outsiders—here she waved generally in Allie’s direction—coming onto the Cape and stirring things up and spoiling the ecology and the environment and bringing with them their big-city litter and crime and who knows what else!

Lester Pinns, who had been banging his fist on the podium for the last ten minutes, finally gave up his angry efforts to allow only recognized speakers to stand and be heard, and he called a twenty-minute break to give everyone a chance to cool down.

Allie had been hoping for a chance to slip unobtrusively away from this humiliating scene. The crowd moved slowly up the aisles, muttering and continuing their arguments as they left the auditorium, and she waited till the room was mostly cleared before she headed for the hallway where her poncho was hanging. As she passed the small groups of people gathered around the coffee urn near the front door, she heard the angry buzz of their comments.

“We sure don’t need these make-believe
Mayflower
s churning up the waters of the bay, disturbing the lobster pots, the clam beds—”

“—you said it—crazy idea—bunch of tourists, pretending to be pilgrims, digging for water, or sunken treasure, or who knows what all—”

“—damned fools, they don’t understand, it’ll make jobs for lots of people—”

And as she picked her way through the crowd, getting at last to the front doors and out into the parking lot, where the rain was really falling now, the one word that pursued her, overheard repeatedly: “Outsiders, these damned outsiders.”

She pulled the hood of her poncho over her head and ran through the unlit parking lot to where the Cherokee was parked, eager to get away from this hostile place as fast as she could. With no light in the parking lot, she didn’t see Zach leaning against her car door until she reached it. He appeared before her out of the dark, apparently paying no attention to what the rain was doing to his hair and his clothes. He’d been waiting for her and, as he pulled the car door open for her, he said, “I saw what happened in there, Allie.”

She got into the car and threw her bag onto the seat beside her. Seeing Zach there, knowing he’d witnessed the whole thing, that was really the frosting on the cake!

“I suppose you found that really amusing.”

“In a way. You should have known better than to come in and make a spectacle of yourself.”

“A spectacle? I didn’t think I was making a spectacle of myself. I was just doing some sketches.”

She tried to pull the door shut, but Zach held it open so he could talk to her. She yanked at it a couple of times, but he wouldn’t let her close it.

“Allie, you can’t just waltz into these meetings and do whatever you feel like. You should have realized that. Don’t you have any respect for anything?” He held the door firmly. “Stop yanking at this door. I want to talk to you!”

“Well, I don’t want to talk to you, Zach! Close that door! I’m getting wet!” She started the motor, gunning it involuntarily. She was getting madder every moment. “Adam should have warned me this would be a meeting full of small-town, closed-minded bigots!”

The mention of Adam’s name had its usual enraging effect on Zach.

“So that’s what you were doing here! Well, you ought to have stayed for the rest of the meeting.” With all his force, he slammed the door shut. “They’re going to vote in favor of an environmental impact study,” he shouted after her as she tore out onto the highway, doing sixty in about four seconds. “How are you going to make a full report to Adam if you don’t stay for the whole meeting?!” He was yelling after her in the direction of her disappearing taillights.

He was left alone in the black parking lot with the pouring rain soaking through his clothes, alone with his fury and his frustration.

Chapter Eleven

I
t rained hard all night, and it rained hard all the next morning, and the foul weather was not helping Allie’s rotten mood. She had slept badly and had awakened still angry and unrested. Now, at ten in the morning, she had already spent two hours trying to work in the studio and she wasn’t getting anywhere.

It was awful enough to have been humiliated in front of the whole town. But how much worse it had been that Zach had been there to watch her being ridiculed! The memory of him, rain-drenched, yelling at her as she drove away out of the parking lot last night, was with her still, interfering with her concentration. What was it he’d been shouting at her? She hadn’t been able to hear more than a fragment. Something about Adam. It was always something about Adam.

With each passing hour, she had grown more fidgety. She’d paint a bit, and then lay her brushes down, and walk aimlessly around the studio. Then she’d paint some more, and then walk some more. After a while, she gave up and went into the living room. Ten or fifteen minutes passed while she paced nervously, like a caged animal, back and forth, alongside the big sliding door that opened out from the living room onto the deck. Every now and then she paused to watch the storm whipping up the surface of the ocean, churning up great waves and smashing them against the shore. The unending downpour was being driven relentlessly against the house by fierce winds from the northeast, and the racket of the elements outside matched the turmoil and anger that were increasingly raging inside her. The winds and the rain seemed to be challenging her to come out and fight.

For a while she studied the monstrous flashes of lightning across the water, trying to analyze the scene, hoping to turn it into future paintings, wondering if any painting of the wild water and the whipping wind outside could express the tangle of her own confused emotions. The studio had a window facing the ocean, and the light would be good for several hours. She could try to do it.

But instead of going back into the studio, she abruptly walked to the closet next to the front door. From a shelf inside the closet, she took a thick, warm sweater and pulled it on over her cotton shirt. The bright yellow rain poncho was still crumpled up on the chair where she’d flung it last night, and she slipped that on over her head. She stepped into a pair of worn Top-Siders that were standing next to the front door and then, without even picking up her handbag, she opened the door and walked into the fury that was raging around the house.