Page 78 of Snake

“I needed it for the potato salad,” Lexi said, carrying a large container of paprika across the kitchen. “I didn’t steal, just borrowed. Sorry.”

Autumn took the jar with a reassuring smile. “You have more right to it than I do, I think.”

Lexi’s sweet, noncommittal smile became a more complicated expression. “That depends on who you ask.” Before Autumn could react, she turned and went back to her own work.

Candy turned to Autumn and did a conspiratorial eye-roll. “The youts, am I right?” she muttered. “Everything’s a drama with them.”

Having not the foggiest idea what drama Lexi was either dealing with or perpetrating, and unwilling to come down on any side of a situation she didn’t understand and had no right to inquire about, Autumn plastered her business smile on her face and said, “Well, it certainly was lots of drama for me back then.”

“And me,” Candy sighed. “Wouldn’t redo my teens and twenties for anything.”

Normally, Autumn would agree. Right now, wondering if she’d made nothing but wrong choices in her career, she might not say no to the chance to start over.

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~oOo~

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The groundbreaking ceremony for the Signal Bend Pavilion was as quaint and charming as any other Signal Bend event Autumn had experienced. Though it was summer, the high school band, and the high school jazz combo, played sets. Though the ceremony was held on the build site, which was bare lot where the building had been razed, and what was left of the parking lot, there was a kids’ play area, with several bouncy buildings and a ball pit. Tons of food from the Horde (which also included food from Marie’s), beer and wine from the town bars, and a cotton candy machine. Horde patches and their women and older children provided the labor. Cox was on security detail, wandering the site looking ready to hurt anybody who might be inclined toward mischief or malfeasance. But everyone seemed in too good a mood for trouble.

It was enough of a party that the town made a real showing. Autumn estimated about three hundred people, which worked out to about fifteen percent of the town population. A very good turnout.

She had arranged for MWGP to ship out a trade-show display, a setup very similar to the kinds of information signs one saw at a park or historical site. This one had architectural renderings of the finished project, with text the marketing team had created for her original proposal, detailing the amenities and benefits of the project. Somebody had set up that display exactly as Autumn had suggested, so that attendees could take a short journey through the phases of the project. They’d put it up so that at the end of that journey, people came out right in front of the small dais/stage thing the club had built.

It all looked perfect. If she’d been in charge of setting all this up, she would have made only a few small adjustments—tweaks, really—and she would have obsessed about it for weeks. As it was, she’d obsessed about sending the display ahead without her and making the instructions as clear as possible.

The actual ‘groundbreaking’ part was like every other such event she’d been part of: the mayor spoke. Badger, the Night Horde president, spoke. Showdown, the president of Signal Bend Construction, spoke.

Then it was time for MWGP to have its say. Before Chase had decided to steal her thunder, Autumn had been drafting a speech, but she hadn’t looked at it for days. She’d known there was no chance he’d sit behind her and let her be the voice and face of his company.

But Chase had been sullen and silent all day. He’d recovered physically for the most part, but emotionally he was still pouting and uncommunicative. When Mayor Kennerman introduced ‘the MWGP team’ for their moment at the mic, Chase barely reacted. He just sat there, staring at some point above the heads of their audience of a few hundred townspeople.

Autumn gave him about twenty seconds, then leaned over and muttered, “Chase?”

He flapped one hand toward the podium. “Do it yourself.”

Oh boy. The trip home was going to be horrific.

Well, this was neither the time nor the place to obsess about that. This was the time and place to be positive and professional, to cheerlead her first Heartland Homestead.

So she stood and went to the podium herself. Though she didn’t have her draft speech, she’d stood at podia like this often enough. She knew the cliches and catchphrases. This time, though, she really meant everything she said. She truly believed in this project.

All she had to do was be honest. And she was.

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~oOo~

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When she was finished and the crowd offered her polite applause (and no heckling!), everyone who’d been on the dais stepped down and headed to the sectioned part of the lot designated for the ceremonial groundbreaking. The massive machines parked at the side of the lot would actually break the ground; this was just a photo op. Thus, Showdown handed her a shiny new shovel wrapped with red, white, and blue ribbons.

Chase snatched it immediately from her hands, with enough force that the shovel slammed into a leg of the trade-show display and set the whole thing to shaking so hard Autumn thought it might collapse.

It didn’t. Everybody watched it quiver and settle, then a strange quiet held on, like a communal held breath.

In that quiet, Chase jammed the shovel into the ground and left it there as he stomped off.

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