The Lake of Dreams - Kim Edwards [72]
“Oliver Parrott, what do you know.” Keegan, smiling, shook his head. “Isn’t he something? Was he wearing a bow tie?”
“He was.”
“What a character. I like working with Oliver because he really cares about the quality of the glass, about making the repairs authentic. But he’s, shall we say, quite persnickety. He’ll make you do a thing over and over and over again until he feels you’ve got it right.”
“He’s really excited about the windows,” I said. “I maybe said too much, though. It didn’t cross my mind until I’d left that he’d want them for the Westrum House, but of course he will. I’m thinking I should call the church, let them know he might show up.”
“I wouldn’t worry about it too much. The Reverend Suzi is pretty savvy. Oliver was bound to find out sometime anyway.”
I picked up my cup, which Keegan had filled to the brim, and coffee sloshed onto the counter, onto a stack of papers. I grabbed a dish towel and sopped up the spill, drying off the top few papers, though a faint brown stain radiated across the center of a flyer. It was a copy of the one I’d seen hanging in the library, advertising the town meeting and setting out the Iroquois position on the land. At first I thought Keegan had just picked one up, but then I realized the whole stack was made up of these flyers.
“Yours?” I asked.
“Yep. Don’t worry about the spill. I’ve got plenty more.”
“I didn’t know you were involved in the land issues,” I said, remembering the solstice party, how Art and Joey—and yes, even Blake—had dismissed Keegan as being on the wrong side of history.
“I’m moderately involved. They asked me to help post these, and I said sure. Since Max was born it’s seemed more important to me, to have that heritage. To pass it along. And I happen to believe in this particular cause.”
“I guess the land is pretty valuable,” I said. “I think most of my relatives are angling to get it.”
“Thick as thieves,” Keegan said, cheerfully. “I was surprised at Blake, but there he is, right in the middle of it. The Landing,” he added, somewhat derisively. “Even the name is stuck in the past.”
“Well, what do you think the land should be used for?”
“That’s just it. That’s the point exactly. It shouldn’t have to be used for anything, not farms, not weapons bunkers, not high-end homes. It should just be.”
“Not casinos.”
“No, I agree with you. We’d like to keep it in some kind of preserve, if we got it. The thing is, Lucy, we see that land as a sacred trust. We want to protect it. And this is a rare opportunity. Even though they’ve had weapons and bombs and who knows what buried there all these decades, a lot of the land has been left alone. There’s a herd of white deer that’s evolved over the decades within those fences, and there’s a nesting place for black terns, which are endangered. We’ve been working with the conservation groups, and that’s been good. But the developers are hungry. Famished. To be fair, a lot of people have been hurting for a long time, and it got worse when the base closed. You don’t see it so much in town, because of all the tourists and the money on the lake. But drive out into the countryside, and it will hit you.”
“I kayaked a little way into the lake by the depot, but I was afraid to go too far. I saw the white deer, though. Five of them, disappearing into the trees. Beautiful. I noticed several streams; I hadn’t realized they were there. I wonder—has anyone done a hydrology study of that land? There’s been so much development on the lake in the last couple of decades. At some point, all the demands—the septic tanks, the piping of water—starts to be too much for the ecological system to handle. Plus there’s the issue of runoff.” I thought of Indonesia, the rising waters. “Build too much and there’s no place for water to go, and you get floods.”
“Well, that’s interesting. There’s been some flooding toward the south end of the lake, but I don’t think anyone has connected the dots to all the new