No Ordinary Day (9 page)

Lucy pushed the button on the door handle.

The window ignored her just as the engine had.

Annoyed, Lucy took hold of the door handle and opened the door slightly.

“What do you want?” she demanded, trying to avoid the rain that was now whipping into her car in the cold wind.

The dark eyes blinked.

“Do you need help?” Sergeant Evans’ voice was flat, absent the humor that had been in it during his presentation.

“I do—but I don’t want to drown, so I think I will call AAA, thank you.”

Thick brown brows over the deep, dark eyes drew together, and the heavily-lashed lids of the eyes themselves blinked again.

“Sounds like you need a jump. I have cables.”

“Again, thank you, but no, thank you.” Lucy closed the door again, locking it manually.

The face disappeared from the window, replaced by the back of a dark regulation raincoat with long pleats in it as the soldier turned away. Lucy took the opportunity to fumble in her purse, searching for her AAA card.

Only to jump when the face appeared at her window again, followed by another polite rap.

“What do you want?” she demanded through the window in the closed and locked door.

The voice that responded was muffled by the rain and the door.

“Look, I can get you going and out of here in five minutes if you’ll just—”

“I—do—not—trust—you,” Lucy said loudly with exaggerated slowness through the car window.

Sergeant Evans pulled his head back in surprise. “Why?”

Lucy unlocked the car door and cracked it open again.

“Because you just gave aid and comfort to the enemy, Sergeant,” she said hostilely. “What you and the Army Corps of Engineers fail to understand is that most of the West Obergrande folk would like to see the working side of town systematically drowned, not because they are worried about our fate in a flood, but because they find our side of town ‘unsightly,’ all those nasty factories and mills where middle-income people work, all the lower-end housing where we live, where our children go to school, along with theirs from the west side.

“If they drown the school, they can rebuild it in West Obergrande, in their own neighborhood, and make it ‘prettier,’ as that one stupid woman said tonight that started the biggest fight, I believe. When a large part of our side of town is swallowed by the lake and the Hudson River, their property values will go up—most of them will have lakefront property. The rest of us, of course, would be screwed. And you just gave them valuable ammunition to do it. So, while I appreciate your kind offer, I’m going to have to turn it down, because I know where I stand, and whom I can, and cannot, trust. Thank you sincerely for your service to our nation as a National Guardsman, but you can move along now.”

She closed the door, her left side wet with rain, and went back to her search for the roadside-assistance card.

Ace Evans stared, straight-faced, through the window for a moment while she turned her purse upside down angrily and shook the contents into her lap.

Then shrugged, turned again and walked away into the dark.

1:35
AM

It took the
tow truck more than an hour to reach her.

By then, Lucy was kicking herself for her rash rejection of help from the Army National Guardsman, whom she determined, while waiting endlessly, would have undoubtedly gotten her car started while minding his manners after the chaos of the Town Board meeting.

Instead, she was paying for her bad temper by sitting in the heavy cigar smoke of the tow-truck’s cab, coughing every now and then, while the operator jumped her battery in the pouring rain.

She had needed to make her way back inside the town hall to use the pay phone to reach AAA, mentally thanking Glen Daniels for loaning her the umbrella overnight. In spite of the umbrella she had managed to get bone-chillingly soaked, as the rain was now blowing sideways, and had broken the heel off one of her shoes on her way back to the car.

I need anger management classes,
she decided while she waited.

Finally, when her car was running again, and the tow truck driver opened the door, she stepped down from the cab tiredly and thanked him, got her card back from him along with the paperwork, and made her way under Glen Daniels’ umbrella in the heavier rain.

I’m going to get Glen some baklava as a thank-you present,
she mused as she returned to her running car.

She put the umbrella in the front seat once more, touched the rosary, fastened her belt and drove off into the night to her tiny but beloved house in East Obergrande.

At the corner,
the lights of a jeep came on.

It sat quietly as Lucy’s car drove around the corner and out of sight.

Then pulled away in the other direction, heading to the local motel for the night, too late to start back to Saratoga until morning, a little over an hour’s journey home.

Out behind the
town hall, where cars had been parked like sardines over the course of the night, a dozen or so remaining people finally left the building, exhausted.

Two of them, however, held back as the rest got into their cars, long enough to exchange a glance.

Then opened their umbrellas and hurried into their own vehicles.

Heading off into the black night, the heavy rain and the obtrusive mist beneath a dark, moonless sky.

‡

THE NEXT DAY, Friday, 7:03
AM

Obergrande Elementary School

K
elly Moran came
into the classroom in a foul mood, shaking the rain from her clothing and dripping it from her coat onto her shoes.

“This is ridiculous,” she muttered, fighting with her broken umbrella to close it. “Thank God it’s Friday.”

Lucy was perched atop a small stepladder, hanging up student self-portraits.

“No kidding,” she agreed. “Look at it out there—it looks like a tornado is brewing—except there’s no separation of light and dark in the sky, and it’s not green.”

“No, it’s pretty much black all the way down to the ground,” Kelly agreed, hanging her dripping coat in the teachers’ closet. “And the bloody rain is blowing
sideways
—they give us snow days when the weather’s awful in winter. I can’t imagine those poor little kids waiting for the bus this morning.”

“Maybe we’ll get an early dismissal,” Lucy said, coming down from her stepladder. “Clarence is passing over Philadelphia almost four hundred miles to the south, and dissipating, but the edge rains are supposed to hit us this morning—that’s probably them out there now.”

“How was the Town Board meeting last night?”

“Awful.” Lucy picked up the ladder, closed it, and took it back to the closet. “A total free-for-all.”

“Yeah, I can’t believe they’re bringing that dam thing up again,” Kelly said, laying out the morning’s
WHAT IS SPECIAL TODAY?
cards on each desk. “Where does the Board stand on that? I thought we voted it down.”

“We thought we did too, but apparently that wasn’t enough for the West Obergrande folks.”

“Hmmph,” Kelly snorted in annoyance.

“Dan Saunders, Donna Marquarte, and Joni Wolfe are all pretty soundly against it, or at least it seems that way,” Lucy said, leafing through her lesson plans.

“Donna and Joni don’t surprise me—I expect you got a ‘how can you do more harm to the poor people in the community?’ bleeding heart speech from Joni?”

Lucy looked up from her desk in surprise.

“Well, yes, but I happen to agree with her,” she said.

“So do I, but, unlike Donna, there’s something so, I dunno, so hippy-dippy about Joni that it’s hard to take her seriously.” Kelly dusted off her hands, then went over to the calendar. “I’m a little puzzled about Dan Saunders—doesn’t he live in West Obergrande? Aren’t there streets with his family name on them?”

“I think so,” Lucy said, writing the morning’s riddle on the whiteboard in yellow, red, and black for Germany Day. “But he’s a business owner and seems like a very practical, hands-on kinda guy. I frequently see him down on the waterfront, working alongside his employees. He owns a lot of businesses in town, some of which are in East Obergrande. And it’s not all that hard to name a street in the Adirondacks if you want to. In Cold Brook, there’s one called Hooper-Dooper Avenue.”

Kelly laughed. “That must be the one across from Sesame Street.”

“That would be
Mr.
Hooper-Dooper Avenue. George Durant is all gung-ho for the dam, for the redesign of the town that the Public Benefit Corporation would pay for,” Lucy continued, fixing a spelling mistake in the riddle. “He kept saying ‘we can be better than Placid!’ over and over again. He got unanimous eye rolling when he said that—as if there is enough money in the world to out-class Lake Placid—no way.”

“Sheesh. What about Phil Schirmer?”

“He’s his usual flip-flop self—you know how he’s always with whomever has spoken to him last?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Well, apparently the pro-dam side got to him last night.”

“Great,” said Kelly gloomily. “Where do the mayor and the town supervisor stand?”

“Mayor Tibedeau seems to be fairly objective,” Lucy said. “He seems pretty distressed at the thought of moving all those houses, relocating all those people from the apartments, but he did point out that there would be money for those things. He remained calm, except for the fruit-throwing.”

“Fruit
-throwing? Seriously?”

“Yep. Bob Lundford was mad from the beginning to the end of the meeting, shouting at people and banging his gavel, but I can’t say I have any idea where he stands.”

Kelly shook her head, as if to shake off the thoughts of the meeting and the weather. “Wonderful. So, change of subject—how was your date with Glen Daniels last night?”

Lucy blinked in surprise. “How did you know about that?”

Kelly laughed. “Girl,
everyone
knows about that. So dish—is he really as dull as the grapevine says?”

“Not at all,” Lucy said defensively. “He’s great. We had a nice time.”

“Ooooooooohh,” said Kelly as the racket of approaching feet and the children attached to them began sounding in the hallway beyond the door. “You’ll have to tell me more at the end of the day.”

7:52
AM

The class was
in a somewhat better mood that morning, despite the rain, Lucy decided.

The language arts lesson of the day was one that included poetry, music, self-awareness, and physical movement that she had come up with the year before. It had been a great success then, but the previous year the day on which she had presented it was so beautifully sunny that she had taken the class outside to do it.

This day could not have been more different.

Nonetheless, she and Kelly had brought all the kids together in a big circle with their sit-upons, low, thin pillows on which most of their floor activities were done.

As Mrs. Moran turned on the CD player, Lucy ran through the rules again.

“OK, who are the Mondays?”

Four children sat forward, waving red construction-paper circles.

“Tuesdays?”

Three hands waving orange circles shot up.

She continued to quiz the class, making certain each child understood the day of his or her birth, as correlated to the colors of the rainbow and, satisfied that they did, she got down on her knees and sat with her backside on her heels, encouraging all but Kristen Feeny, her wheelchair-bound student for whom Kelly Moran was the primary aide, to do so as well.

“Ready, Kristen?” she asked.

The little girl nodded excitedly.

“All right,” Lucy said, pulling a thick tangle of curls out of her eyes, “everyone sing—let’s go!”

A chorus of young voices, mostly on key, broke into song along with the disc:

Monday’s child is fair of face,

Tuesday’s child is full of grace,

Wednesday’s child is full of woe,

Thursday’s child has far to go,

Friday’s child is loving and giving,

Saturday’s child works hard for a living,

But the child who is born on the Sabbath Day

Is bonny and blithe and good and gay.

When each child’s day of birth was sung, he or she popped up off the floor, jumping high in the air and waving their colored circles, then sat quickly back down. The song went through three choruses, increasing in speed each time, giving the kids three opportunities to jump. Mrs. Moran stood behind Kristen, who happened to be a Friday, and spun her around each time that day was mentioned, causing her to giggle wildly.

When the song was over, they fell with exaggerated silliness back on their sit-upons, Lucy being careful to keep her skirt from riding up unexpectedly.

“Good job,” she said, a little out of breath. “All right, I think it’s time for morning snack.” She wiped the sweat off her brow with the sleeve of her sweater. “Whew! All right, guys, while Mrs. Moran gets the juice and trail mix, I just want to say that what you just sang is a very, very old poem, written long before you were born, and while we’re not sure who wrote it, the first time it was ever recorded in a book was in 1838, in England.”