Little Pink House_ A True Story of Defiance and Courage - Jeff Benedict [32]
The good news came with some bad news. “It appears that the local Reuse Committee is still considering public auction as an option,” Abromaitis told Claire. “As you know, we made a commitment to develop the site on a concurrent timetable to that of Pfizer.”
The message was clear enough: the state would go after the navy base, but someone had to go after Basilica and get him to back off his public-auction plan. Navy officials were scheduled to arrive in town within days to meet with Basilica’s committee and to finalize the auction plan. Any hopes of stopping them required immediate action.
With a mock test sheet in front of her, Susette rested one elbow on a green paperback edition of Taber’s Cyclopedic Medical Dictionary. Yellow Post-its with handwritten notes stuck out of the badly worn pages. She started filling in the blanks next to the abbreviations.
QD: Daily.
QOD: Every other day.
BID: Twice a day.
TID: Three times a day.
QID: Four times a day.
ACHS: …
Her mind went blank. “Oh, my God,” she said. “I have to focus.”
ACHS: Before meals and before bed.
She checked her answers. All were correct. She pushed aside her study manuals. Unable to stop thinking about the letter Claire and the broker had sent her weeks earlier, she called City Hall and asked to speak with the mayor. Beachy took the call. Susette introduced herself and provided her street address.
“Do I have a reason to be concerned?” she asked.
“Yes, you do have reasons to be concerned,” Mayor Beachy told her.
Beachy had spent the previous day in Hartford, meeting with the governor’s economic-development team overseeing the New London project. He didn’t like what he had heard. Pfizer, the NLDC, and the state were on a fast track to clear the Fort Trumbull peninsula. The city had no intention of saving any of the houses in the neighborhood. Beachy came away convinced the project had taken on a new course, one that spelled trouble for anyone standing in the pathway of progress. Susette’s house was in the way.
“What can I do?” Susette asked.
Beachy paused. Pfizer and the state had already committed hundreds of millions of dollars to the plan. Powerful business and political forces were combining to remake the neighborhood. The only way to stop the momentum would be to stir up a real controversy, a political storm.
“There’s only one person I know that can help you fight this,” Beachy said.
“Who?”
“That would be Kathleen Mitchell.”
“Who’s she?”
Beachy hesitated.
Fifty-three-year-old Kathleen Mitchell had grown up in nearby Groton. When she was a child, her mother wouldn’t allow her to visit New London, calling the place a ghetto. But as an adult, Mitchell had moved to New London and become a social worker and a political activist working on behalf of the poor and underprivileged. When the government had threatened to cut off funding for day-care centers in the city, she had organized protests and walkathons. The press had come, and the day-care centers had been saved.
Beachy viewed Mitchell as a bit crazy, crass, edgy, and unpredictable. But she cared deeply about people, especially the poor and the powerless. Poor herself, Mitchell volunteered much of her adult life, helping the disadvantaged. And she had a gift for drawing a lot of attention to a problem.
“Kathleen is a stirring stick,” Beachy said. He gave Susette her number.
Susette called Mitchell immediately and introduced herself. “I live in Fort Trumbull,” she said. “There’s a development coming, and Pfizer is behind it.”
Mitchell had been following the news coverage. Always itching to fight for the underdog, Mitchell assured her the NLDC could be stopped. “There’s ways to go about fighting this,” she said.
“How?” Susette asked.
Mitchell suggested an initial strategy meeting at Susette’s place. She recommended inviting Mayor Beachy to join