The From-Aways

by CJ Hauser

  “On what grounds?” Leah says.

  “Ms. Gunthrop says you’ve failed to give proper notice. The green is already all booked for the spring.”

  “Gunthrop?” I say. “She’s in charge of stuff like this?”

  “I’m in charge of everything,” Gunthrop says as she emerges from the back room. She is wearing a lavender skirt suit. “The town will be spraying pesticides all week.”

  “What kind of pesticides?” Leah asks, calling Gunthrop on her obvious lie. “Could you refer me to the company that will be spraying? I’ve been looking for someone to care for my own yard and—”

  “This is bullshit!” I say. “Tell the bugmen to come another day!”

  “I’m afraid it would be very expensive to reschedule,” Gunthrop says.

  Leah asks, “If we file for a permit today, what’s the earliest we can use the green?”

  “I’d have to check the town calendar,” Gunthrop says. “It could be months. We’re actually just closing for lunch right now, and I have meetings all afternoon, so I’m afraid if you’d like me to check the calendar, I’ll have to ask you to come back tomorrow.” She strides out of the office, waving to us as she goes, a little kid’s wiggling-fingers good-bye over her shoulder.

  The paisley bureaucrat is still holding our forms. She ducks under her desk and we hear an awful whir.

  “Are you shredding our forms?” I say.

  “You’ll have to get going,” the bureaucrat says. She shoos us out of the office and hangs a sign on the doorknob that says WE’LL BE BACK IN . . . , with a little clock. She moves the clock’s hands to two P.M. An hour from now. “See you tomorrow,” she says, and wobbles down the hall.

  Leah and I stand in the hallway, the overhead lights flickering orangely. I feel like I might seize.

  I say, “This is what you get for trying to do things legally. So I guess we won’t have any permits and I guess it will just have to be another fucking mess with more cops and then of course I guess more fines. And then we’ll have to have another concert to pay off those fines and then I hope Carter has a really good plan. I mean, I hope John Lennon is going to rise up from the grave for a very special duet because otherwise—”

  “They left the door unlocked,” Leah says.

  “Sure,” I say. “Half of Menamon is unlocked.”

  “So why can’t we just get them, then?”

  “Them?” Law-abiding Leah Lynch . . . dare I hope?

  “The permits. Come on.” She pushes the door open. Inside, she blows through the knee-high O.K. Corral door that separates the waiting clientele from the office workers. “Over here,” she says, like it’s nothing.

  I throw my arms around Leah and hug her. This is what I’ve been waiting for: sneaking around an office and stealing documents! It’s Butch and Sundance, Woodward and Bernstein; it has been all along.

  Leah shrugs me off and starts opening drawers, looking for the forms. “Here’s the one for grilling,” she says. “We’ll need the others too, plus some sort of stamp or seal. Or a picture of her signature.”

  I sit on the bureaucrat’s desk. The top flexes in with an aluminum bang. “You know, Mrs. Lynch, this is hardly professional behavior,” I say. “Would you care to comment on the effect a whiskey bender has had on your career?”

  Leah makes a face. “Are you going to help me or are you just going to make suspicious noises?” she says. Bossy Leah is back. I hop up and the desk bangs out.

  As we’re rifling, we’re careful to leave everything as we found it, though it’s hard to remember what things looked like because this is actually the most boring office of all time. The drawers are full of voting records, receipts for ordering office supplies, copies of people’s liquor-license applications, paperwork paperwork paperwork.

  Leah starts going through a filing cabinet in the back room, in search of old permits that might have Gunthrop’s signature on them. “So we can make a viable facsimile,” she says.

  I find the form that allows us to have amps, to plug in and jam hard, but after half an hour of searching we still haven’t found those that actually allow us to hold a gathering on the green.

  I pull open a cabinet in the rear of the room and flip through the manila folders. More boring shit. Land deeds. Construction permits. I see a file that says 29 Penobscot Road. This is Rosie’s street. I think maybe I’ll find a picture of her house in the file.

  I open the file and there it is. A small house with gray shingles and blue trim. There’s a second-story deck and all sorts of crazy shells and buoys hanging off it. There are three chairs on the deck and a tidy garden below. There’s a dogwood tree. It’s just a house, but it’s a nice house, and I imagine if it were mine I wouldn’t want it razed.

  The photo is clipped to a bunch of papers and I slip it off the stack and into my pocket. I look at the stack of papers in my hand, mostly inspection documents. Papers evaluating the condition of the roof and the age and viability of the heating system. The deed for the sale between the Salems and the Dorians. It’s a good deal. Way more than a house like that could be worth and definitely enough for them to live comfortably for a very long time. I slip the folder back into the filing cabinet.

  And then I notice that the next folder is a Penobscot Road deal too. And the next. All the deeds of sale for the Penobscot properties to the Dorians are grouped together in this cabinet. Behind them there’s another folder, a thicker one. I look at Leah across the room but I don’t say anything because I don’t want her to know I’ve filched the photo of Rosie’s house. I look at the clock. Another ten minutes have passed. Bureaucrat will be back in twenty.

  I pull the thick folder out. Inside is all the paperwork that was necessary for the Dorians to demolish the Penobscot houses. The paperwork needed for them to fuse the properties together so they might be treated as a single-value entity for tax purposes. The building inspector’s report and their building permits.

  The next folder has a series of amendments and waivers to the standard building permits issued in the last folder, orders from Maude Gunthrop and even George Barker, the first selectman. Their signatures are all over the papers.

  “Yes!” I say. “Leah, I’ve got a copy of her signature. A copy of the first selectman’s too.”

  “Great,” she says. “Now we just need that last permit. It’s not a copy of the permit you’ve got there, is it?”

  “No,” I say, “it’s—” And I look at it and the bureaucratic legalese makes my brain bleed.

  It’s a document that says the town’s Scenic Easement Policy restricting building rights on Penobscot Lot Six has been waived. It’s signed by Barker and Gunthrop. The next has to do with a designated nesting habitat for loons on Penobscot Lot Two. It’s also a waiver. There’s a manila envelope in the back of the file. I open it up and it isn’t a waiver or a document of any kind. It’s a stack of photocopies. Of checks. Made out to the town from the Dorians. Each check is attached to a payment advice showing where the money was allocated. They say things like Menamon Tourism Initiative and Business District Development Fund.

  “Leah,” I say. “Come look at this.”

  “Did you find the permits?” she asks, standing up and stretching.

  “No,” I say. They couldn’t actually have been dumb enough to just file these here, could they? I must be wrong. But I look at the file again, and then I think of the paisley bureaucrat and every other local official I’ve met in this town. Yes, yes, they could be. Yes, they are. “No,” I say to Leah. “I found something better.”

  Leah comes over and takes the files from me. “They’re letting them break all sorts of rules,” she says. “Building laws. Environmental laws.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “And in return they’re funneling money into pet projects.”

  “Business District Development Fund,” Leah says. She walks over to a cabinet she was looking through a few minutes ago. She pulls files for each of the programs listed in the payment advices.

  “We�
��ve got twenty minutes,” she says. “We’ve got to make copies of all of this and get the hell out of here.”

  “Isn’t that kind of illegal?” I say.

  Leah grins. “What would Woodward and Bernstein do?” she says.

  31

  Leah

  When we show Charley the files she immediately heads for her office, shouting over her shoulder, “I’m calling the printers. Our account maxes out at three hundred copies and I think we’ll need more than that.”

  “Our circulation is three hundred copies?” I say.

  Charley throws her hands up. “We print that many and I know for a fact half of them get used as wrapping at Deep’s,” she says. “But if you write me this goddamn story next week, we’ll increase the run.”

  She slams the door.

  I sit down on my desk.

  Charley opens the door again. She’s cradling the phone to her ear and fumbling with a cigarette. “I’m supposed to say ‘good work,’ right?” She lights the Marlboro and says, “Hello?” Someone has picked up at the printers. She closes the door.

  “This means we’re running it,” I say. It means a lot of things, because if we run this piece I can’t say for sure what will happen with the Dorians but I am pretty sure they won’t be looking for a full-time landscaper. We’d be fine, Henry and I, on just our two paychecks, but that’s not how Henry will see it. Not if I’m the one who wrote the article.

  Something else has been bothering me too. All those files. The easements. The fencing exceptions. How could Henry not have known? Could he really have been breaking that many rules with this project and not at least suspected something seriously illegal was going on?

  “Hell yes, we’re running it,” Quinn says. She puts her chin on the desk. “But first we’ve got to tell Carter,” she says.

  “So call him,” I say.

  “It will sound better coming from you,” Quinn says.

  I shrug and pick up the line. Charley has already established that we’ll need to run more copies with the printer and now the guy is telling her all about last night’s Sox game. “Oh really,” Charley says, which is odd because I’ve never heard her encourage anyone to talk longer before. Is Charley flirting?

  “Sorry, I need the line,” I say, and press the button to disconnect them.

  “Hey!” I hear Charley yelp from her office.

  Quinn looks green as I dial Carter. The phone rings twice.

  “What’s happening?” she says.

  “It’s ringing, what do you think is happening?” I say.

  “Hello,” Carter says, his voice so deep I feel like I’m phoning in a request to the radio station.

  “Carter, this is Leah Lynch at the Menamon Star. Quinn Winters and I have some documents we’d like to discuss with you.”

  “Certainly,” he says. I get the impression he’s humoring me.

  “Could we meet you somewhere?” I say.

  “The Stationhouse?” he suggests.

  “We could be at the Stationhouse in . . . fifteen minutes?” I say.

  “No! No!” Quinn is hissing right next to my face. “It’s too public. Tell him he doesn’t understand how sensitive these documents are.”

  “Do you want to get on the phone?” I say. “Or do you want to let me do this?”

  Carter is laughing on the line.

  Quinn looks at me expectantly. Her eyes are enormous and her mouth is half open. “What’s he saying?” she says.

  I hold the telephone away from my face so she can hear. “He’s laughing,” I say.

  Quinn bangs on the desk.

  “Carter?” I say into the phone.

  Carter laughs once more. “She’s just like her mother, is the truth,” he says. “But don’t tell her that. We can meet at my place.”

  “See you in fifteen,” I say, and hang up.

  “What? What is it?” Quinn says. She’s wearing these thin old jeans, holey at the knee, and a yellow T-shirt so faded it’s almost white. Her hair has grown long; it is snarled but almost down to her waist. She is full of all this anxious, angry energy. I’ve never known anyone else like her.

  “You’ve saved my ass a couple of times, you know that, Winters?” I say.

  “You looked like you might drown yourself in that pool,” Quinn says.

  WHEN WE GET out of the lobster pot at Marks’s house, we hear him shout, “I’m around the back.” Quinn and I head toward the other side of the house and unlatch a tall wooden door with a pineapple shape cut out of it. It swings open grandly, and there, reclining in a pink velveteen armchair in a corner of the yard, is Carter. Next to him stand a holey, overstuffed brown chair with enormous arms and a squat blue corduroy chair, stunted legless on the ground.

  “Nice patio set,” I say as we cross the yard. Quinn shuffles behind me like a hiding child.

  “Why don’t you girls have a seat,” Carter says. Quinn sits in the tattered brown chair with the big arms. She holds her fists in her lap like Alice in Wonderland, small in her seat and trying hard to be well behaved. I hold up the file folder.

  “Are these the very sensitive documents?” Carter says.

  Quinn blurts, “The town is taking money from the Dorians to bend all the building laws.” She leans forward but her body stays rigid.

  Carter makes a face, like he’s not sure he believes it, but takes the copy of the files I’ve made. He flips through the pages. When he has examined half the packet he looks up. “They shouldn’t be allowed half the stuff they’re doing up there,” he says.

  “Not the serial borders, not the alternate driveway,” I say. “They’re not supposed to be building a chicken coop on most of that land, much less a house. The parts that used to be the backyards on Lots One and Three? That’s scenic easement.”

  “Their fences,” Carter says.

  I nod. This is the part I hoped would not have to be a big deal, but of course it is.

  “Legally their fences can only go around two-thirds of the property. The fence that’s going up on Lots One and Three is technically in the scenic easement. It’s illegal.”

  Carter looks at me. “Deer fencing,” he says.

  “Yes,” I say. “Deer fencing, which— ” I hesitate. I don’t know whether I should say what I know or keep my mouth shut. I want to find a way to break this story and protect Henry too, but it seems impossible to do both. I have the information. I have the news. How can I not share it? It would go against every part of who I am to not share news like this.

  “Which,” I start again, the betrayal rolling, “according to some research I’ve done, will be eight feet high.” These specifics are from Henry’s blueprints. The ones he rolled out for me in the kitchen. The ones I told him he shouldn’t be showing me. I have retained all the details, and now, it seems, I’m going to use them. “According to town law, they can’t go that high. Fences can only be six feet.”

  “Six feet won’t keep a deer out,” Quinn says.

  “It would seem that’s why the town has received about five thousand dollars for the Downtown Business Improvement Initiative,” Carter says.

  “Five thousand is just for the fences,” I say.

  Quinn says, “They’ve paid the town about thirty grand total to bend the rules.”

  “And screw the loons,” I say.

  Carter looks up from the file. “You gonna write this up?” he says.

  “Yes,” Quinn says. In my head I say “maybe.” Maybe I will write this up but maybe I’ll be a good wife instead. I shouldn’t write it, like I shouldn’t have told them about the fences, but I’m a newspaperwoman. How can I not?

  “If I said to wait until after the benefit, would you do it?” Carter says.

  “We can’t write it that fast anyway,” I say. “It’ll take a few days to get everything confirmed.”

  “Why?” Quinn says.

  “I just want the benefit to be a good thing,” Carter says. “No mudslinging.”

  “If you don’t want our mud,” Quinn says,
“then don’t take it, okay? Give us back our files.” I see her clench and release her fists.

  “I want it,” Carter says to Quinn. “Just not until after the benefit.” He looks at me next. “Are you going to put your name on it?”

  “Charley, our editor, Charlene Lynch, she’ll stand behind it. I’m not sure about me.”

  Carter nods. “Does Hank know about what they’re doing?”

  This, of course, is the question. Does he? In my stomach I think the answer has to be no, Henry wouldn’t. But I saw the drawing. Henry’s penciled-in eight-foot fences.

  “That’s what I’m going to find out now,” I say. I point at Quinn. “I’ll see you tomorrow. We’ll start then.”

  I’M DRIVING HOME when I see Henry’s truck parked at Deep’s. I wheel into the lot. The glass storefront is all steamed up and the front door is open. Inside, I see they’re laying down a bed of new ice chips in the case. A million little shavings in a heap. There’s ice all over the wet floor and a man is sweeping it out the front.

  “Hey!” I hear. I walk around the shop and find Billy Deep in a black rubber apron and knee-high rubber boots hosing down the docks. He grabs a bucket and heads for me. His shiner has melted away. “You looking for Hank?”

  “What’s Henry doing here?” I say.

  “He came to apologize for my eye and all,” Billy says. “I told him it was fine, but that I didn’t have much to say to him. No offense or anything.”

  “Where is he now?” I ask.

  Billy points to a shack down near the docks. “Shucking room,” he says. “I told him my eye might feel better if he shucked the rest of my oysters.”

  The shack’s doorframe is open, plastic flaps hanging down. It’s a small room. Three long tables are covered in burlap sacks. The smell is briny and every possible thing is wet. Henry stands at the end of one table, next to a transistor radio tuned to the classic-rock station that plays a sea shanty an hour every hour. He is also wearing a black rubber apron. His shirtsleeves are rolled up and his arms are wet to the elbow, the hairs slicked down. His cheeks are red. He is shucking fast, for the sport of it.