Page 41 of Silver Linings

Overactive imaginations?

Ben somehow doubted it. Although he hadn’t met too many people in the logging industry, not when he’d grown up in Southern California and had spent most of his professional life in the Southwest, he had to believe that loggers as a rule must be pretty hard-headed, practical people. It probably wasn’t a very good idea to be indulging in flights of fancy when cutting down hundred-foot trees that could kill you without batting an eye.

Put together, all those stories made it sound as if there definitely were strange energies in the forest. What they meant, he wasn’t sure.

The only thing he was sure about was that coming here hadn’t been a waste of time.

No, it could never be that, not when this trip to Silver Hollow had resulted in him meeting Sidney Lowell.

As he drove over to her house — their deluxe meat-eaters pizza riding shotgun on the passenger seat — Ben wrestled with how much he should say to Sidney about what he’d learned…if anything at all. Somehow, he didn’t think she’d be overly thrilled to learn he’d been snooping into her family history.

Then again, it was that very history which had sent him here in the first place.

Maybe it was time to come clean about his motivations. He’d never been a fan of hiding things from people, and even though he knew there wasn’t much chance of a future with Sidney, not when they were so geographically unsuited to each other, he also didn’t want to continue on false pretenses if there was even the slightest chance of them getting together.

By the time he pulled up in front of the detached garage, he’d convinced himself that a foundation of lies was no foundation at all.

The real problem now was deciding on the right time to tell her.

Well, they’d eat first, and then he’d see how things went. At least he could tell her that he’d posted flyers at the library and City Hall — and at the artist’s co-op across the street, since he’d gone over there once he was done with his research in the archives department. It was a fun place with all kinds of art, from local pottery to watercolors of the forest and surrounding areas to some whimsical silver jewelry made by the woman who was minding the co-op when he came in.

In fact, he liked one small painting of a grove of birch trees so much that he bought it, figuring he could take it home and hang it in his rented house in Yucaipa to remind himself of his time in Silver Hollow.

“Pizza,” he said after he’d rung the doorbell and Sidney had opened the door.

“Right on time,” she responded, sounding approving.

Well, there might have been absent-minded professors out there in the world, but Ben knew he wasn’t one of them. His mother had been too much of a stickler about punctuality for him to ever be late unless there was a ten-car pileup on the freeway or something.

He kind of doubted that sort of thing happened very often around here.

“I do my best,” he said with a smile.

Sidney’s gray eyes twinkled a bit. “Good to know. The table’s set, so we can go ahead and get started.”

Ben followed her into the dining room, where everything was already set out and waiting for them, including a bottle of wine. Not chianti, but he figured a red blend was pretty universal.

After he’d set down the pizza box and she’d poured some wine for both of them, he said, “I got the flyers posted. Any reaction so far?”

Sidney’s nose wrinkled. “Oh, yeah. I put up a flyer in the pet shop and then handed the rest out to other businesses on the street. Everyone seemed interested and supportive…until Mayor Tillman showed up in my store this afternoon.”

“Oops,” Ben responded, and she only shrugged.

“No big deal,” she said. “Sure, he tried to guilt me about how Northwest Pacific was bringing jobs and money to the town, but I told him it sounded to me as if their own loggers were going to be doing the work, so I didn’t know if he should really be talking to me about jobs. Then he got blustery — you know, the way some guys do when someone won’t roll over for them — and said I didn’t know what was best for Silver Hollow and that I needed to dial down the activism a bit. I just looked him in the eye and informed him that free speech is protected in this country, and if he didn’t like what I was saying, he was free to go elsewhere.”

Ben listened to all this with a sense of increasing respect. Yes, he’d already seen that Sidney was a pretty tough woman…she would have to be, after everything that had happened to her…but it was still something to hear how she’d faced down the mayor without batting an eye.

No wonder she’d come home and done what needed to be done. Maybe she’d wept in private over the disappearance of her mother and grandmother, but he doubted she’d shown that more vulnerable face to the public.

“And did he?”

Sidney had just taken a large bite of pizza — maybe to fortify herself after delivering that speech — so she had to wait to finish chewing before she could reply.

“Did he what?”

“Go elsewhere,” Ben replied, knowing he was probably grinning a bit too broadly.

She smiled in return, then swallowed some wine to wash down the pizza. “Oh, yeah. He mumbled something about a meeting he had to get to, but I knew he was just using that as an excuse because he couldn’t think of how to respond. So, I think it’s fine. In the end, it’s what the people of the town want, not what Mayor Tillman wants.”

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