“Surely you have friends and supporters who would help," Jane said. "All those neighbors who are attending your classes today, for instance."
“Oh, everybody's sympathetic. They're not to blame for this situation. The wording of the vote was so deceptively innocuous, we all fell for it. Even Benson thought it only meant that nobody abutting our land would be able to put in a sleazy trailer park or a garish tourist trap. He voted for it. When we discovered what it really meant, and the environmentalists got their way and started announcing openly that they were targeting us as an example, all our friends and neighbors rallied around. But, Jane, these aren't wealthy people. Many are retirees on limited incomes. A great many of those who do have the money to help are really Chicagoans who have a second home here and can't vote. And frankly, most people in the county still don't grasp that it's going to happen to them as well when the group is through with us. They see it as a vendetta against us, which they sincerely regret, but refuse to understand that we're just the test case."
“You don't seem as angry as I'd be about this," Jane said.
Allison smiled. "I'm not supposed to allow myself to get angry. And while I am furious at anyone else taking away our freedoms, in purely practical terms, it isn't as bad as it sounds. We don't want to expand this place to be the equivalent of a Wisconsin Disneyland. We like it as it is. We didn't move here to get rich, but to have a good life. And that's what we've got.”
Jane glanced around the big, warm, inviting room. "It sure is."
“. . and even if we wanted to leave, we couldn't," Allison went on, punching some keys on the computer keyboard. "We can't sell it. Well, legally we can sell it, but then the utilities go back to ground zero."
“What does that mean?"
“That anybody who might buy it couldn't use any county water or electricity."
“My gosh! That's horrible. Could they put up windmills or something?”
Allison shook her head. "Nope. Those are structures. Forbidden. Our investment here has become, in legal terms, an enormous white elephant.”
Thirteen
"I'm so sorry to hear that," Jane said. . "Oh, don't be. I wasn't wanting pity. Just explaining the situation. Like I say, we very much resent strangers coming in and usurping our rights. But they're not really keeping us from doing anything that's important to us. Benson and I have no intention of leaving. We came here with the idea of living out our lives in this building. So the fact that the land is impossible to sell is really okay. We have no children to leave an inheritance to, so there's not that concern."
“What about Edna? What if she outlives both of you?" Jane asked bluntly.
“Oh, she's entirely likely to. She is, in her own words, a tough old bird. Edna also has quite a nest egg of her own. She inherited from a spinster aunt who was a whiz at investing. And Edna's no slouch at it herself. That's the only thing she's interested in on the computer. She buys and sells stocks through it. I guess that's really another reason we aren't as upset as we might be. If both Benson and I truly became infirm, we could give this place to a nature reserve and live on Edna's money. She'd like nothing better. She keeps begging us to let her buy something in Chicago and move back."
“And you won't consider it?"
“Not now. Probably not ever, if we can help it. Edna's marvelous and wouldn't lord it over us that we were financially dependent on her, but we don't want that. And it all comes back, in the end, to the fact that we love it here. And we love our independence, even if we have to fight Edna for it," she added with a grin. "So are you interested in seeing the stock program?”
The discussion was clearly over.
“Actually, I'd rather see what kind of games you've got," Jane said.
“A woman after my own heart," Allison said. "Most of them are shareware. I'll make you copies and you can mail checks to the creators of the ones you like. I've got a great graph program, too. Do you knit or needlepoint?"
“Both. Badly.”
Allison laughed. "Well, I can help you make absolutely beautiful charts. What you do with the actual work is your own problem.”
Two hours passed like minutes. Jane went away with a dozen disks with new games and a promise from Allison that if Jane would bring her laptop back later in the day, she'd see if she could figure out a few problems Jane was having with it.
“I have to take a nap after lunch," Allison said, "but anytime after two would be fine.”
Jane went down to the dining room, where people were just beginning to drift in for lunch. Seeing no sign of Shelley, she decided to take her disks back to the cabin before she lost them. It was starting to drizzle and there was, once again, the faint, distant rumble of thunder. So much for bird-watching.
Shelley was in the cabin, changing her sneakers for boots.
“Make anything naughty out of leather?" Jane asked.
“Not unless you consider an eyeglass case naughty," Shelley said. "It was fun, though. The guy teaching it had all sorts of neat stuff to show us. I fell in love with a zippered notebook. I figure by the time I took lessons, bought all the materials and tools, and wasted half of them learning how to do this, I could have a really great notebook like it for just under two thousand dollars."
“Sounds like a bargain to me," Jane said, taking. a towel to her hair, which had gotten damp on the walk back.
“Yeah, so I bought his for ninety," Shelley said. "Take a look."
“Wow, that is neat," Jane said. The notebook, a deep reddish brown leather, had a deeply incised paisleylike pattern all over it. "What are you going to keep in it?"
“You sure know how to ruin a good mood," Shelley said. "I have no idea. Important papers of some kind. Of course, if they're really important, it means I'd have to keep the notebook in the safe and not enjoy it."
“Then keep something really trivial in it.”
"Nothing in my life is trivial, Jane. You know that. So what did you and Allison do?" Shelley asked, fondling her new notebook lovingly.
“Lots of computer things. She gave me a bunch of games to try out. And she's going to dink around with the laptop this afternoon to see if she can't kill that weird error message I keep getting. She's really good at this computer stuff. She's good at a lot of stuff, come to think of it. She's got a quilt set up in their big living room upstairs. Reds and greens. Really vivid, with what looks like thousands of little squares that form interlocking rectangles. She told me something interesting about this property, too.”
Jane outlined the main points of the environmentalists' actions and the results.
Shelley was making little yelps of outrage as Jane spoke. "That's outrageous! It can't be legal! Why, I'd fight that tooth and nail.”
Jane nodded. "You certainly would. And you'd probably win. But they aren't going to fight it. It's too expensive. They'd have to bring it to a countywide vote and promote their view pretty much by themselves. They don't have the money, and Allison's health wouldn't permit campaigning. Or they could flaunt the law and spend the rest of their lives and a fortune watching it grind through the courts. Besides, they don't mind that much."