Qwilleran himself left the cafe soon afterward and drove downtown. He parked and walked along Center Street, noting the new brick sidewalks, ornamental trees, and simulated gaslights. Approaching the Lessmore agency, he thought of stopping to ask a couple of questions: Would there be any objection to a gazebo? What were the revolving lights on the mountain? The office was closed, however. Generally, Center Street had the deserted air of a downtown business district on Saturday when everyone is at the mall. There was no one but Qwilleran to read the picket signs in front of the courthouse: SAVE OUR MOUNTAIN ... NO MORE SLASHING . . . STOP THE RAPE . . FREE FOREST.
At the office of the Spudsboro Gazette a Saturday calm prevailed, and when he asked for Mr. Carmichael, die lone woman in the front office pointed down a cor-ndor.
The editor was in his office, talking to a law enforcement officer, but he jumped up exclaiming, "You must be Jim Qwilleran! I recognized the moustache. This is our sheriff, Del Wilbank . . . Del, this is the man who's renting Tiptop for the summer. Jim Qwilleran used to cover the police beat for newspapers around the country. He also wrote a book on urban crime."
"Am I intruding?" Qwilleran asked.
"No, I was just leaving," said the sheriff. He turned to the editor. "Don't touch this thing, Colin. Don't even consider itat this time. Agreed?"
"You have my word, Del. Thanks for coming in."
The sheriff nodded to Qwilleran. "Enjoy your stay, Mr"
"Qwilleran."
The editor, a fortyish man with thinning hair and a little too much weight, came around the desk and pumped his visitor's hand. "When Kip told me you were coming, 1 flipped! You were my hero when I was in J school, Qwill. Okay if I call you Qwill? In fact, your book was required reading. I remember the title, City of Brotherly Crime. Dolly told me you were renting Tiptop. How do you like it? Have a chair."
"I came to see if I could take you to lunch," Qwilleran said.
"Absolutely not! I'll take you to lunch. We'll go to the golf club, and now's a good time to go, before the rush. My car's parked in back."
On the way to the club Carmichael pointed out the new public library, the site of a proposed community college, a modern papermill, a church of unconventional design.
"This is a yuppie town, Qwill. Most all the movers and shakers are young, energetic, and ambitious."
"I noticed a lot of expensive cars on Center Street," Qwilleran said, "and a lot of small planes at the airport."
"Absolutely! The town's booming. I bought at the right time. The furniture factory is being automated. An electronics firm is building downriver and will be on-line this year. Any chance you'd like to re-locate in Spudsboro? Kip said you took early retirement. There's plenty to do herefishing, white-water rafting, golf, backpacking, tennis . . . My kids love it."
"To be frank, Colin, I plan to be the solitary, sedentary type this summer. I have some serious thinking to do, and I thought a mountaintop would be ideal. How about you? What brought you and your family to Spudsboro?"
"Well, my wife and I had been hoping to find a smaller, healthier community to bring up our kids, and then this opportunity popped up. I'd always wanted to manage my own newspaper. Don't we all? So when the owner of the Gazette died and it went on the block, I grabbed it, although I may be in hock for the next twenty years."
"Are you talking about J.J. Hawkinfield?"
"He's the one! It's his house you're staying in. My kids wanted me to buy that, too, but they were asking too much money for it, and we don't need all that space. We're better off with a ranch house in the valley. And who knows if the school bus could get up the mountain in bad weatheror if we could get down?"
When they arrived at the golf club, groups were pouring into the clubhouse. Saturday lunch, it appeared, was the accepted way to entertain in Spudsboro. Men wore blazers in pastel colors. Women dressed to outdo each other, one of them actually wearing a hat. Altogether they were far different from the sweaters-and-cords crowd that patronized restaurants in Moose County. There were club-shirted golfers as well, but most of them walked through the dining room to a noisy bar in the rear, called the Off-Links Lounge.
Carmichael ordered a Bloody Mary, and Qwilleran ordered the same without the vodka.
"How do you like Tiptop?" the editor asked.
"It's roomy, to say the least. Something smaller would have been preferable, but I have two cats, and no one accepts pets in rental units. Dolly Lessmore twisted an arm or two to get me into Tiptop."
"Yes, she's quite aggressive. As they say at the chamber of commerce meetings, he's less and she's more . . . Cheers! Welcome to the Potatoes!" He lifted his glass.
Qwilleran said, "What do you know about your predecessor?"
"I never met J.J., but people still talk about him. They're thinking of naming a scenic drive after him. He was quite powerful in this town and ran the Gazette like a one-man show, writing an editorial every week that knocked the town on its ear. Mine must sound pretty bland by comparison."
"What was his background?"
"J.J. grew up here. His family owned the Gazette for a couple of generations, but he wanted to go into law. He was in law school, as a matter of fact, when his father died. He dropped out and came back here to run the paper, but he was a born adversary, from what I hear. He stirred things up and made a lot of enemies, but he also spurred the economic growth of Spudsboronot to mention the circulation of the Gazette."
Qwilleran said, "From a conversation I overheard in a coffee shop this morning, there's divided opinion about economic growth."
"That's true. The conservatives and old-timers want everything to stay the way it was, with population growth at zero. The younger ones and the merchants are all for progress, and let the chips fall where they may."
"Where do you stand?"
"Well, you know, Qwill, I'm exposed to both viewpoints, and I try to be objective. We're entering a new century, and we're already engulfed in a wave of technology that's going to break the dikes. And yet . . . the environment must be understood and respected. Right here in the Potatoes we've got to address such issues as the stripping of forests, damming of waterfalls for private use, population density, pollution, and the destruction of wildlife habitat. How are they handling it where you live?"
Qwilleran said, "In Moose County we're always thirty years behind the times, so the problems you mention haven't confronted us as yet. We haven't even been discovered by the fast-food chains, but the situation is going to alter very soon. The business community is pushing for tourism. So I'll watch the situation in Spudsboro with a great deal of interest. Who are the pickets in front of the courthouse?"
"That's an ongoing campaign by the environmentalists," Carmichael said. "Different picketers show up each weekendall hill folks from Little Potato, some of them with a personal ax to grind. There are two kinds of people on that mountain, living quite primitively, you might say. There are the ones called Taters, whose ancestors bought cheap land from the government more than a century ago and who still cling to a pioneer way of life, and then there are the artists and others who deserted the cities for what they call plain living. We call them New Taters. They're the ones who are militant about protecting the environment. Strange to say, some of the conservatives in the valley are afraid of the Taters, even though they're on the same side of the fence politically. It's not a clear-cut situation."
Two golfers walking through the dining room to the lounge attracted a flurry of interest from women who were lunching. One had a shaggy head of sun-bleached hair and the other was neatly barbered. Qwilleran recognized the latter as Dolly Lessmore's husband.