A Flicker of Doubt - Tim Myers [66]
“I’m glad for you, but what do I do about this?”
She barely hesitated, then said, “Stall them for as long as you can. I’ll get a lawyer on this immediately.”
“I have one standing right here with me, if you’d like to speak with him.”
“Is he any good?”
“I’d hate to go up against him,” I said simply.
“Put him on.”
Cragg had a hurried conversation with Ruth, Sanora growing more and more impatient by the second.
Heather burst into the candle shop. She was so upset, she barely missed a beat when she saw Sanora standing beside me. “Harrison, what’s going on?”
“That’s what we’re trying to find out”
She didn’t say anything else, but she didn’t leave, either. Cragg whispered again, then hung up. “It’s obviously I a duplicitous move on Runion’s part There shouldn’t be any problem getting an injunction to stop it”
“We don’t have time for that, Gary,” Sanora said. It was clear why Cragg was so interested in the environment all of a sudden: his crush on Sanora was quite obvious, and what’s more, she knew it, and was using it to her advantage.
Heather said, “I’ve got the chains we used to protest when they razed the old theater downtown.”
Sanora looked at Heather and said, “You were a part of that?”
“I want to preserve what we’ve got, not pave over it,” Heather said snippily.
“I wasn’t criticizing, I’m impressed,” Sanora said.
Heather didn’t know how to take that “Hang on, I’ll be right back.”
Two minutes later she showed up with a hefty length of chain and a padlock. “I’m going to chain myself to the biggest tree I can find so they can’t do anything.”
Cragg said, “I don’t recommend it. Let me handle this the legal way.”
Sanora said, “We don’t have time for that. You go do your paperwork and we’ll hold them off as long as we can.”
“We?” Heather asked abruptly.
Sanora smiled. “You don’t think you’re going to have all the fun, do you?”
“I thought you were all for development” I said.
“Not like this,” Sanora said. “This is where we need to take a stand.”
I made up my mind in an instant “Wait a second. I’m going with you, too.”
Eve, who had remained silent through the discussion, piped up. “Harrison, this isn’t the kind of publicity we need. You can’t afford to offend our customers by being arrested.”
“They’ll just have to live with it,” I said. “I’m doing this for Cyrus, too.”
Cragg drove off to the courthouse while Heather, Sanora and I raced through the woods toward the sound of the bulldozers.
“I hope we’re in time,” Sanora said.
“We’ve got to be,” Heather answered.
We came into the clearing and stopped behind a giant oak that would be the first tree that had to come down. A crew was unloading the last bulldozer from a massive flatbed truck. Heather said, “We’re just in time. ^ Take this end, Harrison.”
We circled the tree, putting our bodies inside the loop of steel. Nobody noticed us as we faced the heavy equipment, and once the lock was snapped in place, we stood waiting for someone to see our protest I tried yelling at the workers to get their attention, but the bulldozers were making too much noise.
The first monster started lumbering toward us, and for a second I didn’t think he was going to see us in time to stop. Heather and Sanora joined me as I screamed at him, waving my arms to try to capture the driver’s attention. I was silently glad Heather had done this before. What a nightmare it would have been if we hadn’t pulled our arms out before attaching the chains.
I could smell the dozer’s diesel breath when the operator finally spotted us. He shut off the engine, and a man in a hard hat raced toward him. “Johnson, what do you think you’re doing?”
He pointed to us in disgust, and the foreman turned I to the other operators and made a killing gesture with his hand at his throat.
The woods were suddenly filled with an echoing silence.
“What do you clowns think you’re doing?” he shouted as he stormed toward us.
“We’re saving the woods,” I said.
“What you’re doing is delaying me, and I hate to be delayed. Unlock that chain and get