Goose in the Pond - Earlene Fowler [53]
“Sure,” I said, watching him walk down the mission steps toward the bridge.
I started walking myself, my thoughts a confused jumble. The words common good kept repeating in my head. Both things in this situation were for the common good. So which one was more worthy? Deep in my gut the thought of Bonita Peak being turned into an upper-middle-class housing project made me sick. But what about the suffering of people still alive? If I knew the money went toward saving the lives of accident victims or making the last days of children with AIDS easier, would I be able to overcome my distaste over seeing more of San Celina’s pristine open land turned into stucco houses? And what about my stand on personal-property rights? Didn’t Nora have the right to make that decision? Wouldn’t I give up the ranch, even everything I owned, to save Gabe’s or Dove’s or Daddy’s life? I loved our land, but I loved the people in my life more. Personal rights versus common good. Where does one draw the line?
A small practical voice added, That certainly adds more people to the list of who would want Nora dead. How far was Peter willing to go to make sure Bonita Peak was saved? I was pretty sure that Nick would be an easy person to sway in the conservancy’s direction, especially when he was feeling this vulnerable. And though I hated to admit it, it certainly made Nick’s position as a suspect more viable—at least in the police’s eyes. After what happened to us in Kansas, I’d come to learn a fine line separated love and hate and how very easy it was to slip, just a split second, over that line. And a split second is all it takes to kill someone.
Before I realized it I found myself in front of Eudora’s. A cup of strong coffee was what I needed right now. There were more immediate problems waiting for me on my own personal home front.
It was a busy night at the cafe. Monday evening was officially “group” night, when local writing, music, and artists’ groups received half off all coffee drinks in an effort to persuade them to hold their meetings at Eudora’s. Though many groups steadfastly continued to meet at Blind Harry’s, the basement coffeehouse could only hold so many, and Eudora’s had successfully acquired the overflow.
From the Elvis room came the raucous sound of bongos, harmonicas, and a cheery fiddle, much too upbeat for my present mood, so I took my cup of plain old coffee into the quieter though just as crowded Faulkner room. In one corner a group of senior citizens were energetically critiquing someone’s tongue-in-cheek poem, “Ode to a Grecian Goat.”
Finding no unoccupied tables, I started back out when someone called my name. The pushy tone made me shut my eyes briefly and wonder if I could successfully ignore it, claiming the noise had made it impossible to hear.
“Harper, I know you hear me,” the scratchy voice called. “Get over here. I want to talk to you.”
I reluctantly turned around. He was sitting in a small corner table surveying the crowded room like a self-satisfied potentate of a small but powerful nation. To the world “he” was William Henry Hedges, owner, publisher, and paper-clip counter at the Central Coast Freedom Press. To me, he was plain old Will Henry, acquaintance and general irritant since sixth grade.
In school, all the way through our junior year of college, when he transferred to UC Berkeley, Will Henry had been thin as a metal fence post, with elbows and knees as knobby as a old cow’s. He’d sprawl in the back of classrooms, his feral smile in place, and make fun of whoever didn’t believe the way he did at that particular moment. Radical when it was chic, he’d softened both physically and politically as he’d aged. Back in the seventies, his clothing preference ran to musty-smelling Mexican serapes, bell-bottomed jeans covered with peace signs, and those thick tire-tread-soled sandals. Now he carried a tight potbelly that hung slightly over his artificially faded jeans and had replaced his serape with a tweedy jacket. He