In the distance, she saw something altogether foreign. Erected in the dead center of the road was some sort of small structure, painted stark white to thwart the heat of the sun.
Some sort of guardhouse. To guard what?
She continued walking, but slowly now, taking it all in.
Beyond the new guardhouse, she could make out the outlines of cement trucks and construction materials stacked in assorted piles. They went on and on, no lack of building materials here.
A gust of breeze confirmed her worst fears.
When it blew across her face, lifting her hair from her cheek, she sniffed not only the usual salt air, but the unmistakable odor of cement mix. That, and pine timber without the protection of its hard outer bark, sliced and laid open to the elements in long, thin boards.
There was a light in the tiny booth, and she could just make out the back of a man’s head.
Virginia knew she should stop, but she didn’t.
Instead of passing the booth on the road and in the open, she dipped into thick trees on the side of the dirt road and continued forward, using them as cover. About twenty yards in, she edged closer to the clearing to take a look.
Larry was right.
Huge sections of land leading to the beachfront had been cleared. In the milky white moonlight, the ground looked naked without the pine-scrub covering. The gentle dips and curves of dune had been flattened like a big, square pancake and cordoned off in neat, precise rectangles with construction string, waiting to be shored up with pine timbers, then filled in with thick concrete.
Her only witness a solitary Island owl, Virginia made her way back to the Jeep, stepping surely and silently through the trees, touching them gently, lovingly, with her fingertips as she went.
The night was black and the roads were dark, even with her brights on, as she drove back, the wind whipping in through the Jeep’s open windows, wet with sea salt.
The Island was no longer hers. It had grown suddenly into a strange, unfamiliar beast.
Everything seemed different now. Surreal. The curves on the back roads she had walked as a child and driven since she was fifteen jumped out at her as if she had never driven them before.
The worst she had imagined was that the beach-replenishing project was under way, started by the County Commission without her knowledge so as to avoid the predictable protests and sabotage that came with any proposed Island development.
What she had stumbled upon was much worse. This was no Magic Market, no two-pump gas station.
The development of condos on the Island’s south end meant the end of the beaches…the end of Island life as she knew it.
It meant the end if something wild and beautiful and the beginning of something common and predictable.
High-rises mean people, throngs of them. High-rises mean paved roads, boiling hot asphalt poured over machine-flattened dunes. There would be traffic lights and crosswalks and grocery stores and water slides, possibly even…a mall.
The delicate balance between marsh, beach, dune, and salt water would be strangled dead.
Virginia couldn’t let that happen.
She released the steering wheel with her right hand, reached into the glove compartment, and pulled out a cell phone and a knit cap she always wore to protect her brain from dangerous cell waves.
She veered off the soft shoulder while trying to turn on the cell, and then instinctively yanked the Jeep back onto the highway and jammed the cap on.
It was late, but she dialed the bungalow shared by her two most trusted guerrillas, Renee and Dottie.
Renee picked up on the second ring with a protective “Hello,” knowing calls at this hour could only mean a death in the immediate family or eminent nervous breakdown on the part of the caller.
“Did I wake you up?” Virginia asked.
“No…it’s okay, Dottie and I had just turned off The Tonight Show. Lily Tomlin was on. What’s up?”
“Code Orange!”
“Orange? What do you mean? What happened? Did they hold the Commission meeting behind our backs? What…they approved the replenishing? Are you hurt? What?”
Virginia’s throat caught. “No. It’s worse than that. High-rises are going up on the south beach. The foundation’s about to be poured.”
“But that’s impossible. Who told you?”
“Nobody told me, I saw it for myself, ten minutes ago. A guardhouse is protecting it so they must expect trouble. I’ve never seen a guardhouse on this Island in my life.”
“Oh my God.”
“Call everybody.”
“Now?”
“Yes, now!”
Virginia had a feeling in her heart that if she could just do something right now, she could single-handedly turn back time and change what had happened right under their noses, on their own Island. But she had to act now.
“I’m sure that would wake them up.”
“So wake them up. Just start the Chain.”
The Chain consisted of one guerrilla calling the next in a prearranged manner to which they all agreed in case of an emergency.
“What do I tell them all?”
“To come to my place. Hurry, Renee. Okay?”
“Okay. We’re on our way.”
“Just start the Chain.”
“Will do.”
She tried to thank Renee, but her voice broke. She hung up, tossed the phone and the cap into the backseat, and kept on driving.
Off the sides of the road, black silhouettes of pines and oaks and palmettos blew back and forth in the wind off the ocean with such a force that they blended to look like figures dancing wildly, savagely.
She continued to speed, taking crazy turns as they came one after the next, the road jumping out from behind the oaks as if it were alive, trying to leap out and scare her.
And she was scared. For the first time in her life, Virginia Gunn was afraid.
29
New York City
“I’M GLAD YOU AGREED TO HAVE DINNER WITH ME, HAILEY.”
“I’m glad, too,” she told Adam Springhurst across the white tablecloth, and surprisingly, she meant it.
Earlier, when he’d come upstairs just as she was packing up, she’d been almost dismayed to see him. It had been a long day, and her last patient was Melissa.
Skittish as she was, Melissa clammed up altogether when her session was interrupted by the arrival of a plumber the super sent up. Hailey shut her office door so Melissa could go on talking about her fifth birthday-the last “happy” one, before her stepfather had shattered her life. But she was distracted by the sound of a wrench clanging against pipes, and finally asked if they could end the session early.
“The plumber found the leak and fixed it,” Hailey told Adam when he showed up, “so you shouldn’t have any more problems downstairs.”
“Good. Want some dinner to celebrate?”
Her gut instinct said no, but on second thought, dinner out would really be nice. Three hours later, they were having coffee and cannoli at a little Italian restaurant a few blocks away from the office. The conversation was easy, Adam was well-educated and well-traveled, full of funny stories. He asked all about her…her life in Atlanta, her apartment, her hours, even the funny story about switching office suites. He seemed keenly interested in every detail.
And he came out of nowhere. No conversation in the preceding months, no hellos over the mailboxes, no bumping into each other in the neighborhood. Nothing. Just hello, need to check your plumbing, let’s go to dinner.
“So if you weren’t here with me,” Adam said, breaking off a piece of pastry, “what would you be doing tonight?”
“I’d have gone to the gym, or for a run. Then home. Pretty simple.”
He smiled. “You answered that without having to think. Sounds like you’ve got a routine down.”
“I guess I do.”
“Same here. Before the divorce, when I was living up in Westchester, I’d get off the train just in time to tuck the kids in, grab something to eat, and fall into bed. I thought that was a rut. Now…it’s pretty much the same thing. Without the commuter train or the kids.”