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So this is it, Adam thought, loosening the tie that Anne had demanded he wear. Adam was trying to appear casual, but was afraid he was failing. The eyes of everyone inside City Hall were trained on him.
“Imagine them in their underwear,” Adam thought to himself, remembering the advice one of his high school teachers had given him before a debate tournament began. The fantasy exercise hadn’t worked forty years ago, and it wasn’t working any better tonight. What he needed was Anne. Adam tried to look cool and calm as he scanned the crowd for the woman he loved.
Adam spotted Bradford Glasscock, who had been in Adam’s bookstore, The Reading Room only a few hours ago complaining that someone had actually stolen one of his funeral home’s hearses. It wasn’t the theft that bothered Bradford as much as the fact that the St. Isidore Police Department hadn’t been able to find the vehicle.
“How tough can it be to spot my hearse?” Bradford said. “It’s not like there are twenty or thirty of them at a time driving through St. Isidore. There are only three hearses in town. I own them all.”
Adam, standing behind the oak counter where coffee was served to just about everyone in town at one time or another, could only nod in agreement. He’d never had a car or truck stolen, but he and Anne had been in more than one life-threatening, near-death experience, where there wasn't a single cop to be found. He understood Bradford’s frustration.
“I mean, it is simple,” Bradford said. “It’s not hard. If you spot a hearse driving through town and one of my people isn’t behind the wheel, it has been stolen. Stop them. Arrest them. Throw away the key. Case closed.”
Adam had smiled then, and he smiled now at City Hall, remembering Bradford’s perfectly understandable frustration. Adam’s gaze drifted to two rows of spectators off to the right side of the meeting room. Weeping silently, or sitting stone-sold with a look of forged determination on their faces, the dozen St. Isidore residents and two people from Wisconsin, were all on his side. These fourteen souls had all lost loved ones in the Suicide Forest.
Each had told his or her story. It was the people from Wisconsin who had really broken Adam’s heart. They were just a couple of tourists, who along with their three kids, had been persuaded to spend a summer week in the beautiful town of St. Isidore and visit the town’s number-one attraction, the Suicide Forest.
“We sucked them in,” Anne had murmured to Bradford when Alan King, the father of the family of Wisconsinites walked away from the microphone after telling his story.
Alan might as well have had the phrase, “Suburban Madison, Wisconsin" stamped on his forehead.
He was one of those people who just looked wealthy. Even a blind man could see that Alan came from money. Oh, his family weren’t among the richest billionaires in America, but Alan made all the right moves, said all the right things, wore the right clothes and drove the perfect BMW that showed good breeding.
Since the microphone was set for someone about 5-foot-10 inches tall, and Alan felt like he had to bend down to have his mouth as close to it as possible; Adam figured he must stand about 6-foot-3 or maybe even taller. The fact that Alan bent down to the microphone showed Adam just how the poor guy had been crippled by what had happened to his family in the Forest. Any other time, Alan, making a presentation, would have stood tall and just the proper distance from the microphone so that he could be heard without any squeals of feedback or echo. But now, he’d lost that edge. Wearing tan khakis with the crease perfectly pressed and an office-casual shirt with a logo on the pocket that Adam couldn't identify; Alan should have taken the spotlight and run with it.
Instead, he and his wife, who Alan almost seemed to ignore, looked like a couple of rubes who’d never seen the inside of anything fancier than Walmart.
“Our children, Nancy and Russ, ran ahead of us in the Forest,” Alan almost whispered into the microphone. Most in the audience were straining to hear him. Most, but not all, didn’t want to miss a word. However, there was a contingent in the back of the room, sitting in the last row, five men and their wives, who had heard it all before. Stories like Alan’s had not moved them then, and would not affect their attitudes now.
These were men who were truly rich; five men who were in fact on the list of the Wealthiest Families in America, billionaires all. They ran St. Isidore.
“We decide what is going to happen,” one said in a rare moment of off-the-record candor with Joy Ellis, a reporter with the St. Isidore Chronicle. “And then we tell City Hall what to do.”
While Alan was speaking, Anne looked back at the row of the Neighborhood Association as they liked to call themselves. Anne didn’t think there was anything they could do to her personally. But they could make it rough for Adam. And that is just what they might be thinking now, she thought. It would not be all that hard for them to ruin The Reading Room. All they had to do was put the word out, and people would walk or even run by the front door without ever thinking twice about going inside.
If that didn’t work, the fire and health departments would run so many nuisance inspections and investigations that even a couple with the cast-iron spines of Adam and Anne wouldn’t last long. They both knew that. Anne also knew that Adam’s election as mayor had come as more than a total shock to the Neighborhood Association, it was an insult of the highest magnitude.
The Association had started out innocently enough. The way the story was told, there was a mayor, long since dead, who ran some kind of a Ponzi-scheme scam back in the 1940s involving blackmarket products that were rationed during the war. Once the war ended, the FBI started investigating black marketeers like the good mayor of St. Isidore, and the crap really hit the fan.
The fathers of the current Neighborhood Association had decided that nothing like that would ever besmirch the good name of St. Isidore again. In the next election, they got their man into the mayor’s office and took over de facto control of City Hall. It was a tradition carried on through the years, until somehow, Adam King had defeated the Association’s candidate. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, Adam had gone to work on his favorite issue, closing down the Suicide Forest, which was such a tourist draw that it had become a cash cow with leaves for the Neighborhood Association.
“Russ and Nancy ran ahead,” Alan continued. “We never gave it a thought,” he said as his wife began weeping into her hands which were clasped prayer-like in front of her face.
“They ran,” she said standing tiptoe and easing Alan out of the way so she could ge at the mike, “totally out of our sight. But why worry? We could not believe anything could go wrong.”
“We just kept walking,” Alan said. “We do love nature. We walked about a mile and then we saw them.” Alan began trembling. Adam was afraid the man would fall and he probably would have hit the ground if his wife hadn’t braced him back to the microphone.
“What did you see?” Adam asked, immediately regretting he’d opened his mouth. Everyone in town knew what had happened. There was no need to bring up such a horrid memory again, and even less reason to make Alan and Linda — that was her name, Adam read on the sheet in front of him — relive the nightmare.
“They saw their children hanging from a tree,” came a shout from the middle of the room.
“It could have happened to anyone’s kids,” said a woman. “It did happen to my sister’s children,” said another. “Her family, my family was never the same.”
“Burn it down,” demanded a man standing near the door to the meeting room, “But the fucking forest down,” he continued to shout as a couple of cops led him out a side door.
Adam thought about that scene again, as he gathered his strength to cast the vote he’d been waiting to make ever since deciding to run for office. It was finally time. Just for the fun to if, Adam decided to look at the Neighborhood Association. He wanted to look them right in the eye, as he cast a vote for the future of St. Isidore. Adam wanted them, he needed them to know, he was not afraid.
Adam didn’t stare. He challenged the five members of the Neighborhood Association as he took a breath to cast his vote. Just as Adam was about the to speak, one of the five, Dan Van Howe, rose from his chair and walked slowly to the back of the auditorium. Van Howe took one step gingerly after the other and almost seemed to be sniffing the air as he strode toward the door at the rear of the room.
Showing any hesitancy at all was so unlike Dan VanHowe. A Vietnam War veteran, who, with his best friend David Stieger had made a fortune in the tourism business by building motels and restaurants, then hotels and posh taverns to serve crowds that poured into the Suicide Forest; VanHowe was known as a man who gave no quarter. Rock solid, Van Howe had never lost the habit of training with free weights, a routine he had picked up in the marines as a fighter pilot. One of the many local legends surrounding him included the tale of how he knocked a couple guys into comas with two punches when they tried to put a finger on his granddaughter. Dan might have been seventy-two-years-old, but he asked no quarter and certainly would never back down from a fight.
But here Dan Van Howe was creeping to the back of the meeting room like he was walking on egg shells, as Adam was about to cast a vote that could open the road to ruin for his company. It gave Adam pause. He looked at Anne, and she back at him. Each questioned the other with raised eyebrows. Adam nodded his head toward Dan Van Howe and the roomful of eyes followed his to see the man who made a town tremble kneeling by the back door, praying.
Adam paused, hesitated, glanced at Anne, and took a breath to say the word that would change St. Isidore forever. Once Adam voted, the first reading would be finished. Pending the city commission’s change of heart, or a protracted legal battle, the Suicide Forest would be finished.
Adam and Anne exchanged a smile. He knew it as going to be a good night. So did Anne. Adam winked, raised the forefinger of his right hand, signifying to the audience that he had made his decision.
And, then, he was gone.