It had been bad enough when Nick attacked her for what she’d done. Now the newspapers and lawyers would be piling on as well. She wasn’t cut out for this. All she wanted was the safe, rational world of laboratory testing. She’d never wanted to be on the front lines of controversy.
“I don’t know how you can be so calm about this,” she whispered.
“My dear, I am beyond calm. I am ecstatic. The results of our tests are exactly what we’d hoped. In one week, we will have the opportunity to present our findings to a court of law. It isn’t us who are on trial, it is science itself. And I am confident we will win.”
Rosalind wished she shared Dr. Leal’s confidence, but the role of public crusader didn’t come easily to her. She wasn’t a rule-breaker or a scofflaw. She was the girl who paid her bills early, walked to the corner to avoid jaywalking, and never missed a deadline.
Now she was at the forefront of a risky venture to change the way this country handled water. Life would be so much easier if she wasn’t compelled to join this crusade. Each morning as she left home, she braced for a barrage of hostility, but after the initial upheaval, things took an unexpected turn. Although the articles in the newspapers stirred the concerns of a suspicious public, the stories also dazzled sanitary engineers and water authorities throughout the nation.
A stream of telegrams bombarded Dr. Leal, seeking more insight than could be gleaned from the snatches of information in the press. Almost every day, they had visits from scientists and engineers, asking to see the chlorination system in action. Water specialists from as far away as Chicago and Washington came to witness the revolutionary system. Rosalind let Dr. Leal take the lead in explaining the engineering components while she summarized the work being done in the laboratory. She felt an immediate kinship with these men. They spoke the same language. Their mutual appreciation for science made it easy for her to find common ground with them.
That all changed on Friday, when a man unlike the others came riding up to the Boonton Reservoir with the vigor of an elite athlete. He casually tied his stallion to the hitching post, giving Rosalind plenty of time to admire his tanned, weather-beaten skin, blond hair, and steel-blue eyes. He had the ramrod-straight bearing of a general.
Because he was one.
“General Mike O’Donnell,” he introduced himself as he strode across the lawn to shake Dr. Leal’s hand.
Rosalind recoiled. This was the man who had participated in the unseemly gossip about her and Dr. Leal while on the golf course with Nick. It was a struggle to remain composed as his gaze trailed to her and he sent her a generous smile.
“You must be Dr. Werner,” he said, closing the distance between them. She offered her hand, but instead of a handshake, General O’Donnell bowed and pressed a fleeting kiss to knuckles.
She withdrew as quickly as courtesy permitted. During these final few days before the court hearing, they needed to show their system to as many sanitary engineers as possible. The fight to win chlorination of water was going to be fought city by city, and if they could move New York into their column, it would be a huge coup.
She swallowed back her distaste and followed Dr. Leal and the general inside the chlorination facility. General O’Donnell scrutinized the setup in fascination. He asked no questions but listened intently as Dr. Leal explained the system.
“Impressive,” he finally murmured. “I gather Nick Drake is kicking up a fuss over it?”
Rosalind bit her lip. Even thinking about Nick summoned a surge of regrets, and she let Dr. Leal answer the question.
“We haven’t given up hope of convincing him of the merits of the system. We will do anything we can to assist New York, should you wish to adapt the technique for the larger reservoirs. New York would be a powerful ally in publicizing the advantages of chlorination.”
Rosalind stood to the side, grateful to be left out of this conversation, for it was in this very room where she had watched Nick’s admiration for her morph into cold disillusionment. He still might come around to seeing their side. He was an intelligent man and desperately wanted to do the right thing.
But no matter what the fate of their chlorination experiment in the years to come, she knew Nick would never look at her with the same openhearted admiration he once had. She’d been a fool to ever think he could.
Chapter
Sixteen
Nick’s fingers beat a nervous rhythm atop the canister of documents resting across his lap, keeping time with the rackety chugging of the train as it carried him farther north. Nothing about this business trip to Duval Springs was going to be pleasant, but delivering these charts to the town’s mayor counted as the worst thing he’d ever been asked to do. It was why his predecessor at the water board had cracked under the pressure and been forced to resign.
Nick wouldn’t crack. The governor had appointed him to this position because Nick had the muscle to push this initiative across the finish line. That meant clearing thousands of people out of Duval Springs and arranging to have their homes and businesses pulled down and demolished. No one said it was going to be a cakewalk, and Nick had been bracing himself for the confrontation during the entire two-hour train ride.
The only bright spot was reading the morning newspaper covering the ongoing outrage over the chlorination of the Boonton Reservoir. The mayor of Jersey City had sent a request to Judge McLaughlin for an immediate cease and desist, but the paper had no comment from the judge. All Nick could hope was that the mayor had more success with the judge than he had. The memory of being forced to turn Rosalind’s notebooks in to the court’s custody still chafed.
His gaze trailed out the window, and he wished his chest didn’t still ache each time he thought of Rosalind. Why couldn’t she have waited until the expiration of the ninety-day order? If the judge ruled in her favor, he would have accepted it like a man, put on a good face, and then joyfully continued courting her. He wouldn’t have let a legal case come between them.
But dishonesty did, and that meant Rosalind would be forever in his past.
The train slowed as it approached the town, chugging slowly past the general store, a couple of churches, and the red brick schoolhouse. This was the kind of village so perfect it ought to be painted on a postcard. It was Nick’s job to tell the mayor that the location of the coming reservoir had been finalized, and Duval Springs was about to be destroyed.
Bruce Garrett had warned him what to expect. “The Duval brothers run that town like it’s their own private fiefdom. Alex Duval is the mayor, and the town hangs on his every word. Especially the women. Don’t let your wives or daughters anywhere near him. The brother also has a lot of power in town, and the two of them are troublemakers.”
The muscles in Nick’s legs ached as he stood and waited for the dozen other passengers in the car to disembark. He could have paid for a private compartment, but he never felt comfortable splurging on such luxuries when he was alone. He was still a man of the people, no matter how large his bank account had grown.
Not like the mayor he was about to meet. The Duval family had been in control of this village for two hundred years. It had been named after a French fur trapper who settled the area in the seventeenth century, and his descendants controlled the village to this day.
Nick tucked the tube of maps under his arm while scanning the fresh paint on the train station and pristine flower boxes lining the main street. He couldn’t deny the Duvals did well by the town, but they were still a pair of entitled men who had inherited everything they owned and refused to see reality.
A woman setting out bread in front of the general store nodded and smiled at him. She obviously didn’t know who he was. Not so with the group of men already knocking back beer on the patio of the tavern. A man with a face as gnarled as an old apple shot a stream of tobacco juice at Nick as he walked passed. Nick shifted just in time, but a few droplets still hit his boot. He clenched his teeth. He had bigger battles to fight than a tiff over tobacco juice. Besides, the man
had a right to be angry.
“You’re not welcome in this town,” another man hollered from the patio.
Nick ignored him and kept walking toward the town hall. It wouldn’t take long to deliver these maps, and then he could get out of this doomed village on the next train heading back home.
The town hall was a red brick building with white columns and an American flag in the front. It was one of the town’s newer buildings, probably only twenty years old, but already the wooden steps had been worn smooth by countless footsteps over the years. The mayor’s office was housed in a single room to the left of the front lobby. A young woman staffed the desk.
“I have an appointment with Mayor Duval,” Nick said. He couldn’t meet her eyes. She was young and fresh-faced, and her welcoming smile was a giveaway that she had no idea why he was here.
Not so with Alex Duval, whose eyes were as hard as flint as he rose from his desk. He was a young man, barely over thirty, but with an air of command from having spent most of his adult life in the army. Nick had dealt with him before, but always from opposite sides of a courtroom as Duval Springs launched a series of injunctions to stop the coming reservoir.
“Hello, Alex,” Nick said tersely.
“Let’s go to the tavern,” the mayor said.
Nick shook his head. Men were already drinking at the tavern even though it was only one o’clock in the afternoon. Tempers were going to get hot, and he didn’t want alcohol in the mix.
“We can meet here,” Nick said. “Your desk is big enough to spread out the maps.”
“But not big enough to have other people at the table. My brother will want in on this conversation, as will the local mill owners. Everyone is already gathering at the tavern.”
Nick’s jaw tightened. So the men of the town had been waiting for him, and given the fresh tobacco juice on his shoe, things were already getting heated.
Alex headed toward the door, but Nick walked in the opposite direction, setting the tube on the mayor’s desk and wriggling out the curled up maps. He wasn’t going to be bullied into walking into the lion’s den over at the tavern. He used a pencil cup and a coffee mug to weigh down the curling ends of the map.
Alex’s curiosity got the better of him, and he wandered back to the desk to scrutinize the map that had been years in the making. In the center of the six-foot map was a stark red line that encircled forty-three miles of rural New York. It was the flow line where the future reservoir would be created, and smack in the middle of the circle was the idyllic village of Duval Springs. In the coming year, thousands of workers would move into the valley to dismantle every house, shop, school, and church in the town. The remnants would be mounded up, set on fire, and the ashes swept away, as though the town had never existed.
Nick watched as Alex studied the map. The young mayor didn’t move a muscle, but the color drained from his face, and his eyes widened. It was impossible not to feel sympathy.
“You can see that Duval Springs is within the flow line,” Nick said as gently as he could. “I’ve brought a court order giving the residents of the village nine months to settle their affairs and leave. I’m sorry, Alex.”
Without a word, the mayor pushed the mug aside to curl the map back up. He didn’t bother to insert it into the tube, just strode out the door and toward the tavern.
Nick followed, but at a distance. The men at the tavern were about to learn that their entire lives were going to be upended through no fault of their own. The Duval brothers had put up a valiant battle over the past few years, showing up at court hearings and hiring lawyers to argue their case in Manhattan. They had been allowed to have their say. The city’s authorities listened respectfully, but everyone could guess the outcome.
Everyone except the people of Duval Springs, who had refused to accept the inevitable.
Ahead of him, Alex spread the map out on one of the outdoor tables of the tavern, and half a dozen men gathered around to scrutinize it. Hercules Duval, the owner of historic Duval Tavern, could not be more different than his younger brother. Well over six feet tall and built with a wall of muscle, he looked like a Viking. If a glare carried heat, Nick would have burst into flame.
Nick kept a respectful distance from the table, but minutes passed, and none of the men spoke as they stared at the map showing the destruction of their world. It was a cool day, but perspiration beaded up and rolled down Nick’s back. He’d come to town to deliver the map and the court papers. Decency demanded that he stay to answer questions, but all he wanted to do was sprint to the train station and get out of this condemned village.
“I’ll answer any questions you have,” he said quietly, bracing himself for the onslaught that was sure to happen. It didn’t take long.
The man whose face was like a shriveled apple stepped forward. “I built an extension on my boardinghouse two years ago,” he said. “I took out a loan for five thousand dollars, and now you tell me the state is going to pull it down? Is the state going to pay off that bank note?”
It was a fair question, and Nick didn’t know the answer. “The state is going to compensate you for all property that can’t be moved. I don’t know about paying off loans.”
“I’ve got twenty acres of apple trees,” another man said. “Fifteen acres are in the flow line, and five aren’t. Is the state paying for those five acres too? Because there’s not much use in maintaining an orchard of five acres.”
Hercules Duval folded his beefy arms across his chest. “Richard, why are you even talking about leaving your orchard? This isn’t over yet.”
“It’s over,” Nick said. “You can bury your head in the sand and pretend that the world will stop turning if you keep praying, or you can roll up your sleeves and figure out the next chapter in your lives. It won’t be here.”
Hercules snorted. “The people of this valley survived the Dutch invasion, the French and Indian War, and the British. We can survive New York City trying to steal our water.”
Nick hated this. He hated every second of knocking the foundations out from beneath these men, of grinding their thin sliver of hope into the dust, but it had to be done.
“Government appraisers will be coming into town to take an inventory of the village. I suggest you cooperate and allow them onto your land. They can’t get an accurate—”
“My mother died last April,” the mayor said. “We buried her in the family plot alongside eight generations of Duvals. What do you propose we do about that cemetery?”
Nick shifted his weight. Cemeteries were a thorny problem likely to rub salt into the wounds of these people, but all graves would have to be moved. It would be a public health disaster to build a reservoir atop human remains, and government surveyors estimated the valley contained over four thousand graves that would need to be unearthed and reburied elsewhere.
“The government will pay six dollars per body that needs to be disinterred. You’re free to move your mother to any cemetery above the flow line.”
Hercules lunged forward and shoved Nick back a few feet. “No one is touching my mother’s grave,” he growled. “Take your six dollars back to New York and shove it where the sun doesn’t shine.”
A couple of other men banged their fists on the table, grumbling in approval. One man drained his beer and hurled the empty mug at Nick’s head. He ducked in time, the glass shattering in the dusty street behind him. He kept his hands at his side. He wouldn’t meet anger with anger, but it was getting hard.
“You will have the opportunity to relocate any family graves you choose. If you refuse to move your mother’s body, I will make arrangements to have it done for you.”
“You and what army?” Hercules roared, then punched Nick in the face.
The force smacked him against the side of the tavern. Everything was spinning as someone put him in a headlock, using a knee to deliver a swift series of blows to his gut. Nick dropped to the ground, tugging his attacker down and rolling over him, firing back with his fists. Someone else
kicked him in the ribs. A surge of energy mixed with anger fueled his muscles, powering him to ignore the pain as he got up on his feet just in time to block a punch from a thick-set man.
“That’s enough, Jack,” the mayor said, hauling the thick-set man away, but a kick from behind sent Nick sprawling back into the dust. More blows fell.
“Nice town you’ve got here,” Nick managed to gasp. It was four against one. Blood filled his mouth, and one eye swelled so badly he couldn’t see through it. Someone jerked him upright and punched him in the face so hard that he hit the ground again. Dirt went up his nose and down his throat. He coughed, struggling to get a breath.
“Break it up!” the mayor shouted in a commanding voice, and the beating immediately stopped.
Nick lay curled in the dusty street, holding his breath because it hurt too much to breathe. Slow footsteps approached, and he braced himself as a pair of dusty boots came into his blurry line of vision. There wouldn’t be much he could do if another round of kicks were heading his way.
It was the mayor. Alex squatted down beside him, his voice emotionless.
“I can call someone from the Garrett place to come get you,” he said. “Or we can put you on the train back to Manhattan. What’s your pleasure?”
He chose Garrett’s mountainside fortress, as it would be physically impossible to make a two-hour train ride home in his current condition. One of Bruce’s bodyguards arrived half an hour later with a wagon. Nick had once thought it idiotic for a real man to need a bodyguard, but maybe he should reconsider it the next time he came to Duval Springs.
And there would be a next time. The construction of the reservoir was going to take years, and the Duval brothers couldn’t intimidate him into backing down.
It was embarrassing how much help he needed getting into the back of a wagon. He lay prone in the wagon bed, gritting his teeth each time the wheels bumped over a rut in the road. He’d been in plenty of back-alley brawls in his younger days, but never anything like this. His shoulder, probably dislocated, hurt the worst. He could tell the instant the wagon left the jarring dirt path and rolled onto Bruce Garrett’s smoothly paved expanse before the mansion.
A Daring Venture Page 19
