Chapter 14 of 20Contingent on the Vote

The binding vote on the old schoolhouse was set for Monday, October fourteenth, in the Town Hall meeting room, and Harriet Ainsworth had nothing she could put in front of a lawyer. She had a transcription from the founder's diary that ended in the words "poison pill." She had a tax map with a parcel left off it. She had a purchase order for a drilling rig standing on the town green, paid for out of the highway budget. None of it had a legal name yet, and none of it would stop a vote.

She carried all of it down Main Street in Havenwood on Friday evening to Holloway Hardware, because Sam Holloway had gone to Lydia Croft's reception out of duty and had not come back yet.

Sam came in through the alley door at the back, crossed the floor without turning on more lights than he needed, and set a paper plate on the counter — two slices of ham, a deviled egg, a wedge of cheddar. He did not look at it again.

"You left the door open," Harriet said.

"I left it open so I'd have a reason to leave early." He hung his coat on the nail beside the register and reached for the pot on the hot plate.

"Don't." She moved the pot out of his reach. "Start at the top. Who was in the room?"

"You know who."

"Say it anyway."

"Sterling. Chen. Miller. All three at one table in her dining room, and the pocket doors between the room and the hall were pulled to behind them."

He pulled the coffee can of loose nails out from under the counter, the one he kept for customers who came in with a broken hinge and no money, and squared it against the edge of the register.

"That's a quorum," she said.

"Yup."

"A quorum of the selectboard, in a private house, no notice and nothing posted."

"Yup."

Harriet set her pen down beside the register and let that settle. "Who did the talking?"

"Marcus did the numbers. Lydia did the mood."

"Property values."

"Up. Tax relief off the new construction. A square with people in it on a Saturday morning."

"Except Bea."

He said the name plainly and let her do the rest.

"Bea was not in the room."

"Bea was not in the room, and she was not asked into the room, and she is the one who keeps the place."

"Who else?"

"The bank. The orchard. The insurance office. Everybody in town who signs a payroll."

She looked at the plate he had not touched, at food he had taken out of politeness and would throw away, and understood that a consensus built over deviled eggs on a Friday night was not something a public meeting could be counted on to undo, and that she had until Monday to find another way.

"Did anybody take minutes?"

"You're joking."

"I never joke about minutes."

Sam wiped the same clean spot on the counter and did not answer that.

"Sam."

"Harriet."

"They kept the Society out of the room on purpose."

"They kept the Society out of the room because Bea would have asked a question they don't have an answer for."

She walked back to the storeroom, where the old stove sat under a shelf of snow shovels and the pallet of ice melter was already stacked by the door, and she called Bea from there.

"Bea, it's Harriet."

"Harriet, dear. It's dark out, and I've got a brick sitting on the diary."

"Did Lydia Croft call you?"

"Lydia Croft has never called me in her life."

"So no."

"So no. What's happened?" A chair creaked on her end, the sound of Bea deciding to sit down for it.

Harriet looked at the shelf of shovels and chose the shortest version. "There was a reception tonight at her house. Sam went."

"For the development."

"For the development."

Bea took a breath in and let it out.

"And I wasn't asked."

"You weren't asked."

"I've been in that house, and it wasn't for a party."

"Go back out there and listen to Sam."

"I will."

"And Harriet. Whatever they're selling, they're selling it hard, and that means they need the sale."

The front door opened while she was still in the storeroom, and Chloe Hassan came in with her bag on her shoulder and her recorder already in her hand.

"Your door's open."

"So it is."

"Are you closed?"

"Yup."

"Then I'll be quick, and you can throw me out."

She set the recorder on the counter. Sam looked at it and did not touch it.

"I was at the Hannaford in Rutland, and I came back to a text that said the whole board was at Croft's tonight."

"There was a reception."

"What's the difference?"

"A party has music," Sam said from behind the register. "A reception has a slide show."

Chloe wrote something down, and Harriet watched the pen move and knew the shape of the story was already forming in that notebook, which was the reason to be careful and the reason to be quick.

"Who was there?"

"You'll read it in the minutes."

"Whose minutes?"

"Exactly."

Harriet took the pen off the register, turned a receipt over on the counter — a key blank, three dollars and twenty-nine cents — and started writing.

"Write this down," she said.

"I'm writing."

"All correspondence, written or electronic, between the office of the Town Manager and Croft Properties, or any agent of Deakin Commercial."

"Deakin Commercial."

"Roy Deakin, out of Manchester. Ask for it by name."

Chloe's pen stopped. She tapped it against the edge of the counter and waited.

"And if they say there's nothing?"

"Then they have to say that in writing, and the writing is a record too."

"Why would the board care about that?"

"Because all three of them spent the evening in one private room discussing town business behind a closed dining-room door and nothing posted, and I would rather they explain that to a reporter than to me."

"That's the first straight answer anybody in this building has given me."

"I haven't given you an answer. I've given you a question with a filing number on it."

Chloe took a picture of the page with her phone, then left, and Sam shot the deadbolt behind her.

"You didn't tell her about the diary."

"It isn't proof of anything yet. When it is, I'll know what to call it."

"There's more."

"There's usually more."

"Not like this."

He came back to the counter and stood with his back to the nail where his coat hung.

"Lydia stood up at the end, and she had a folder."

"A folder."

"She didn't pass it around. She held it up and said Croft Properties has a signed letter of intent."

"From who?"

Sam looked at the paper plate he had carried home and never eaten from.

"A developer out of Manchester. She wouldn't give a name."

"Roy Deakin."

"Yup. Signed and dated. Contingent on the vote. Those were her words. Contingent on the vote."

Harriet looked at the transcription lying face down on the counter and thought about a man who had written, in his own hand, that the safeguard he built was written into the law itself. She had the word. What she did not have was the name a court would use for it, or the paper that proved it.

She pulled the receipt back across the counter and wrote one more line under the others, then signed it in the same square letters she used on every certificate that came across her desk.

Sam read it over her shoulder. "They'll say no."

"Then they'll refuse in writing, and Monday night I'll ask them to read the refusal out loud."