A Valley to Die For Read online

  “Road’s in good shape,” she said as she handed over her jacket. “No dust, no mud, can’t get better than that.”

  Carrie knew all too well that road mud could stick to boots until they weighed twice as much as they ought to, and if it was dry, dust raised by passing vehicles choked walkers.

  Today Mag’s feet were clean, though she wiped them carefully on the entry mat. In the country that gesture was automatic.

  Jason, who was keeping records for the committee, carried a notebook with papers sticking out at odd angles. Everything about his appearance—from grey hair frizzing at the edges of his tweed cap to rumpled slacks—proclaimed a disorganized person, but Jason Stack didn’t fit that mold. He was very businesslike, something his appearance denied now and had probably denied when he was head of a large manufacturing plant back in Ohio.

  “I’ll bet he’s caught a lot of people off guard,” Carrie had once said to JoAnne, “because he’s about the most organized person I know.”

  The fact that Jason’s wife Eleanor was back in Ohio with a daughter who had just produced her second child wouldn’t have disrupted his always orderly thinking.

  Jason drank de-caf black when Eleanor was present, but today he accepted regular coffee with sugar and milk, then asked if JoAnne had learned much at her meeting with the Environmental Commission.

  “I talked with her last night, and she seemed quite excited and pleased about something,” Carrie said, “but the cat knocked over a jar on the kitchen counter just as she started to tell me about it, so she said she’d save the news for the meeting today and hung up.”

  Mag’s thin mouth twisted in disgust. “I went to lunch at JoAnne’s once and that cat was sitting on the table. Could barely manage my meal after that. FatCat is a stupid name for such a skinny thing anyway. She told me some crazy story about the cat coming from a rich family—whatever that’s got to do with it. You’d think she’d have a dog, living alone and all.”

  Carrie said nothing. Mag seemed to have forgotten that she, like JoAnne, had no dog and that the Booths had several cats. Carrie hadn’t the foggiest idea where the Booths’ cats ate.

  Mag started to say something more, and Carrie was afraid she was going to continue making a fuss about FatCat, but Shirley spoke up first. “Our cats wouldn’t get away with jumping on the table. Roger’d swat them.”

  Roger’s lop-sided grin told Carrie he probably wouldn’t swat them at all. Funny, Roger didn’t need anything or any action to help him feel masculine, and he was really one of the gentlest people she’d ever met. She doubted that he and Amos would have gotten along, but then, Roger could probably good-old-boy anyone into friendship, even Amos, who hadn’t had many close friends besides Evan Walters.

  “Time to start the meeting,” Jason said. “I’m not surprised JoAnne’s late, but where’s Henry?” He turned his round face toward Carrie and winked. “I thought surely he’d be here before anyone else.”

  Carrie, who’d never blushed in her life, supposed Jason expected her to do so now. Instead, she stared at him, trying to show no emotion—then swivelled to stare at the front door instead as Henry opened it and walked in.

  She hadn’t locked the door after the early arrivals but was still surprised when Henry came in without knocking. It wasn’t like him, and his assured action startled her. This was her private home—her own space. She didn’t get up to greet him, held in her chair by a tongue-tied confusion she didn’t know how to settle. He acted like he owned the house. What he’d done reinforced Jason’s typically masculine insinuation, which she realized would get sparks out of JoAnne if she heard about it.

  Of course, it was possible she and Henry had been seen by someone from here the few times they’d gone to dinner together, even though they always chose restaurants in Bonny or Rough Creek. In her experience, if one person in the area knew anything, then everyone did.

  Well, who cared if they’d been seen? She was a mature adult. She did hope no one mentioned it to JoAnne, though. JoAnne would be quick to tell her what to do, and Carrie was far from eager to have any more discussions about Henry with her.

  Henry glanced around the room, then looked at Carrie. “JoAnne?” he asked and continued without listening for the obvious answer. “I went by her house, and there was no sign she’d come back. Do you think someone should check? You have a key to her house, don’t you, Carrie?”

  “Is she off wandering again?” Jason asked, sparing Carrie from the need to reply. “Let’s just get started. She’ll probably be here soon. Roger, you first. How did you and your cousin get along?”

  Roger leaned forward on the couch, rested his arms on his knees, and looked slowly around at all of them with his familiar grin.

  He’s enjoying this, Carrie realized with surprise, glad to turn away from worrying thoughts about Henry. Roger Booth, bless his heart, had an audience of move-ins. He knew quite well they were going to be entertained by how he told his story, and, far from being embarrassed, he was enjoying it!

  “Well, Herb and me,” Roger began in an exaggerated drawl, “we decided he needed a load of stone fer somethin’ ’er other, so we took his old truck and went to the Martinville quarry. They’ve about blasted away all the bluffs along Spider Crick. It had rained the night before and, let me tell you, that crick was milky with rock dust.

  “Fella there wasn’t the owner. Said the boss wasn’t around much. That was better fer us since this fella, he enjoyed talkin’. He’n Herb had seen one another at the café in town so they was like old friends, and we got along fine.

  “I asked if they might be lookin’ fer help, said I had a boy needed a job, and the fella said he was going to need a job soon hisself ’cause they was fixin’ to shut that quarry down. Said they’d about come to the end of that property and couldn’t buy more around there, which was no surprise, seein’ the mess they made of what they had.

  “So I said, was there any plans fer more quarryin’ someplace else? Maybe my boy could travel. He said he’d heard they planned a new quarry over th’line in Arkansas, but he didn’t want to travel that far from home if he could get work closer by.

  “Then Herb acted real interested in how they did the quarryin’ and asked the fella to show us how it all worked, said it seemed pretty dangerous to him what with the blastin’ and heavy rock. Since the fella was there by hisself and it was an off day fer customers, with them runnin’ out of stone and all, he was real proud to show us the works.

  “We’re right about the blastin’. There’s lotsa that, and lotsa dust. Mountains of busted rock, and machines big enough to move mountains. They got a couple of ponds supposed to hold rain water until the dust settles out, but they looked pretty full of muck themselves, and, if they work, why was that crick milky?”

  Roger’s smile had disappeared. “Let me tell you now, Herb says that valley was a beauty before the quarry came. Clear water where folks fished and went swimmin’, and high bluffs with different layers of rock. Once he went to a church picnic on the farm there, and kids picked bunches of wildflowers. Some kid even climbed part way up a bluff and got some kinda flower there.”

  He looked at Shirley, and she said, “Wild columbine.”

  “Yea, those. They had it all, huckleberries, blackberries, walnuts; birds and other creatures everywhere, just like we got in our valley now.

  “Well, maybe since that quarry has been there more than fifteen year, they could do things rougher than they kin now, what do you think? Maybe there’s new rules?” He looked around at the group again, still not smiling.

  Jason spoke up. “Let’s not forget our objective—that is, what we want to do—is stop the thing altogether. Get everyone told how destructive it’ll be and get it stopped.”

  Carrie winced, wondering if Roger had noticed Jason’s pompous assumption that he wouldn’t understand the term “objective,” but Roger simply shrugged.

  “May not work that way, Jason. The quarry owner may have friends we can’t fight, and that land
didn’t come cheap, even if it had been abandoned fer years. It’s good farm land fer around here, so the quarry folks got real money tied up. It may be all we kin do is figure out a way to keep ‘em from lettin’ that dust fly everywhere or run into the crick. Most of the regular folk, those of us been here, think if the county government is behind it and the place holds a few jobs out like a carrot in front of a mule, ain’t no way any of us is gonna stop it. County’s gonna think more about money than care fer one more little ol’ valley bein’ smashed up.”

  Everyone was quiet, and Carrie felt her own hopes sag. Were they losing the will to fight? Maybe JoAnne’s report—whatever it was—would make the difference.

  Jason turned to her. “You’re next,” he said. “What did all the officials say?”

  Carrie’s assignment had been to talk with people on the town council in Guilford, seven miles downstream on Walden Creek, as well as the state congressman, members of the Quorum Court, and the County Judge.

  She reported first on what the judge, who was the chief executive officer of the county, had said about needing rock for road work, then added, “The others acted sympathetic, but no one knew of any state or county laws that could stop a quarry as long as owners got approval of their plans for maintaining air and water quality. Roger’s right, there are new laws about that. The best anyone could suggest is that national environmental regulations be looked into. Also, they said we might contact the State Game and Fish Commission and ask about endangered species in the area, maybe in the caves. Perhaps there would be something there. I wonder if the Environmental Commission told JoAnne the same thing?

  “Anyway,” Carrie finished, “though a few of them seemed to understand how we felt, and the people in town are concerned about the creek, not one of them was ready to oppose the quarry. I think it’s all going to be up to us.”

  Silence held the room until Henry said, agitation evident in his voice, “Well, the next step seems to be what JoAnne found out in Little Rock, so where is she? Why isn’t she here?”

  Carrie got up. “I’ll call her house and then bring back something to eat. Everyone want sausages with their rolls and coffee?”

  Shirley followed Carrie into the kitchen, bringing the tray of used coffee cups with her. Without asking for instructions, she turned on the kettle and began spooning instant coffee into cups. Carrie punched in JoAnne’s number and pictured FatCat pacing around the offending noise on the desk in the kitchen.

  After fifteen rings Carrie gave up and went to get the plates.

  CHAPTER III

  The committee ate Carrie’s brunch as eagerly as if she’d spent all morning in the kitchen preparing it.

  There, she thought, that proves it. It doesn’t take a zillion-ingredient recipe and stacks of dirty pans. All it takes is friends getting together—then no one cares whether your kitchen helper was Julia Child or the Pillsbury Doughboy!

  Carrie’s helper was much more likely to be the Pillsbury Doughboy. By the time she married Amos, she had established a casual approach toward culinary efforts in her nearly-spinster life. Frozen dinners and simple, one-dish meals suited her just fine, though sometimes she did enjoy creating specialty edibles from unique and often bizarre combinations of basic ingredients. She had frequently surprised guests with dishes whose origins were long lost in “Carrie’s kitchen fiddling,” as Amos called it. Since he preferred to work late and eat alone at the Tulsa Legal Club, it hadn’t mattered to him whether she cooked fancy or didn’t cook at all.

  And, as far as their son Rob was concerned... well, he’d been used to ready-prepared food from the time she opened the first Gerber jar. When she’d tried to apologize to him recently for what she had begun to suspect was a warm-fuzzy-home-cooked-meal-deprived childhood (was it something she’d read in a magazine?), Rob only laughed and asked how she thought he’d manage alone today if he hadn’t learned her cooking methods early on.

  Perhaps it was no surprise that, over the years, Carrie’s friends had given her cookbooks. She always thanked each giver with the same burst of enthusiasm that inspired her special kitchen creations, and every one of them went away feeling that all Carrie McCrite had lacked was the right cookbook. She shelved each book in a special maple bookcase Amos brought home from his office, dusted them all twice a year, and sold them all—in mint condition—right before her move to the Ozarks. She kept only a small file box with a few favorite recipes and a hand-written notebook that preserved the details of her more successful kitchen experiments.

  Now she felt a warm satisfaction as she watched Jason, whose wife was a dedicated cook-from-scratch woman, pick a last scrap of caramel topping off his plate, lift it to his mouth, then lick his fingers carefully. After a short pause for appreciation, he looked around at the group and said, “We can’t wait any longer for JoAnne, so we might as well adjourn the meeting. It’s important to find out what she learned from the Environmental Commission before we plan our next move.”

  Roger and Shirley looked just as placid as they had when the meeting opened, but it was easy to tell that everyone else was annoyed by JoAnne’s absence.

  Mag said sourly, “It’s just like her to plan a meeting and then run off after some will-o’-the-wisp at the last minute, not caring a bit if it bothers any of us.”

  The group agreed on the necessity for taking some kind of action as soon as possible, so Jason suggested they meet again the following Saturday, making sure JoAnne would be there. Mag invited them to get together at her house.

  “Jack’ll be busy around the farm,” she said, “so we’ll have the place to ourselves.”

  Carrie had met Jack Bruner on one of her rare visits to Mag, and she saw him in Guilford occasionally, but that was all. Mag was certainly opinionated and outspoken, but at least she was friendly enough. Friendly was the last word Carrie would have chosen to describe Mag’s husband. He was dark and moody, taciturn to the point of hostility. Carrie thought of him as one of those people you’d never want to be alone with in a dark alley—or anywhere else.

  Whenever Mag’s sharp tongue tried Carrie’s patience, she’d remember Jack and pray for the Lord to help her be kind and loving toward his wife, and to love Jack too, although that seemed impossible.

  Carrie couldn’t help suspecting that Jack was an abusive husband. Without meaning to pry or be a busybody, she’d find herself looking for bruises or other signs of injury every time she was with Mag. So far, she’d seen no outward signs of abuse, and Mag had never said anything to suggest such a terrible thing, but Carrie often wondered if Mag’s sharp, thoughtless tongue wasn’t the result of an unhappy life.

  Everyone on the committee had been surprised when Mag asked to join them in the effort to stop the quarry. Carrie herself was quite sure the Bruners didn’t care about the valley one way or another. She had decided Mag just wanted a chance to get away from the farm and Jack—though now she had invited them to her home. Maybe what she wanted was friendship with her neighbors.

  After Jason closed the meeting and everyone left, Carrie finished cleaning up in the kitchen, thinking all the while that she should walk down to JoAnne’s house.

  No one in the group seemed worried about JoAnne, simply because she was so well-known for leaving home to pursue any quest that interested her at the moment. But what about the cat? JoAnne usually called when she was going to be gone more than a few hours and asked Carrie if she’d look in on FatCat—a request that was always irritating, since Carrie worked full time and felt she had better things to do than go stroke a spoiled cat while JoAnne went off on a lark.

  JoAnne could leave food and water out to cover most absences but said she didn’t want her cat to feel lonely, so would Carrie mind stopping by for a moment to make sure the cat was all right, and maybe give her a love pat or two?

  Carrie’d finally had enough nerve just the other day to tell JoAnne how she felt about tending the ego of a cat. She thought JoAnne had ignored her protest, but maybe she’d listened after all. Maybe th
at was why she hadn’t called about FatCat before she left.

  JoAnne was like Amos. She was certain of her opinions, self-assured, smart, easy to be jealous of, easy to admire and love. Carrie had understood from the beginning why she was drawn to JoAnne, and she sometimes felt overwhelmed because two such people had come into her life, taking, in their turn, the position her father once held.

  But right now, checking on the cat did give her a good excuse to check JoAnne’s house, and she didn’t feel like settling down to her work until she’d done that.

  The two women had worn a path through the forest between their homes, and as she walked the familiar, leaf-padded trail, Carrie wondered if notes from JoAnne’s meeting with the environmental people might be on her desk in the kitchen. She would have taken good notes.

  Why on earth, though, had she asked Henry to go over the notes with her? Did he have some special training or knowledge about such things? He had been a real estate agent after he left the police force. Maybe he knew something important about property law that would help them? It would have to be very important, or JoAnne would never have asked his help.

  It was cold, getting colder, and the sky was clear. That meant there could be frost flowers in the woods tomorrow morning and since they only appeared a few times each winter, she didn’t want to miss a chance to see them. She’d go for a walk before church, carrying her portable radio so any trespassing hunters would know she was in the area.

  When Carrie came out of the woods into the sunny clearing around her friend’s house, everything looked normal, and very quiet. The place where JoAnne parked her grey truck was empty. Carrie knocked on the door, listened to the silence, then, feeling an increasing skin-prickling nervousness, picked up the third flower pot by the front steps, got the key, and opened the door. She called JoAnne’s name, timidly at first, then more loudly. There was no answer. Of course not.