Judgement By Fire (6 page)

As he finished
speaking, his eyes sought hers, and Lauren thought there was something there,
some special message for her, separate and nothing to do with the conflict.

            But it couldn’t be
so. She knew that. Her love of this area was too deep, too passionate, to be
set aside in a pigeonhole apart from the rest of her feelings. Now was not the
time or place to tell him so and she listened as Paul replied, in his usual
understated and polite manner.

“You
understand that the residents of West River are almost unanimously opposed to
your proposals?”

The television
camera crew focused on both men during this exchange.  Jon acknowledged Paul’s
statement without appearing to hear the shouts of protest and jeers that burst
from others in the crowd. Paul signaled for everyone to step back.

Then all hell
broke loose.

            Someone from behind
pushed forward, either to get a better view or just not happy to see the
protest end on so low-key a note, and the action caused a ripple effect as
people struggled to understand what was happening whilst keeping their footing
on the treacherously icy surface of the pitted road.

Lauren felt
Lucy slump against her, sensed her friend had fainted in the cold and the
crush, and anxiously turned to try to protect the other woman. But as she swung
around to catch Lucy, she slipped and lost her own footing, falling with Lucy a
dead weight in her arms.

Not knowing
what was happening but seeing Lauren slip, Jon instinctively reached out to
grasp her protectively. But Lauren was pivoting towards him and the sign she
still grasped on its wooden post swung out, connecting heftily with Jon’s
temple.

With an oath,
Warren, who’d seen the incident out of the corner of his eye and thought his
boss was being attacked, pushed past Wilkes to place himself between Jon’s
fallen body and the protesters, angrily grasping Lauren’s protest sign wielding
arm.

The crowd
alongside and behind, not having witnessed Lucy’s faint and the ensuing events,
knew only that one of their number was being roughly grabbed by a Rush Co.
official, and they surged forward in outrage, to be met by two dozen large,
armed police officers who’d been speedily brought up from their discreet
positions at a signal from Chief Ohmer.

It was a
short-lived but wild melee, over so fast that Lauren remembered little but the
whirr of TV cameras and the click of press still photographers’ equipment, the
shouting and the sight of Jon’s pale, anxious face leaning over her as she
struggled to her knees with Lucy in her arms.

Jon, helped to
his feet by Wilkes and Dillon, shrugged off his colleagues’ help to swiftly
scoop Lucy’s frail body into his arms while grabbing Lauren’s hand. Using his
own husky frame as a wedge, he pushed through the crowd, protectively
sheltering the two women until they were beyond the scope of the pushing,
shoving, shouting match taking place all around them.

            Frozen with horror,
Lauren saw the vivid scarlet blood seeping down the side of her rescuer’s face,
and saw the raw pain in his eyes—pain overlaid with anger.

“What the hell
went down there?” he rasped. “Did you deliberately start that?” He bobbed his
head towards the angry crowd. “And why, for God’s sake?”

Shocked by the
events and stunned speechless by his accusation, Lauren could only gape at him
until he turned on his heels and walked angrily away from her. Then Paul was by
her side, rubbing Lucy’s bloodless cheeks and lifeless hands, his own face
ashen with fear.

Lauren managed
to get Chief Ohmer’s attention and seeing Lucy on the ground, still
unconscious, the chief immediately started spitting out orders to his
well-disciplined men. Within minutes, a police car with Paul cradling Lucy in
its back seat was speeding towards the nearest hospital with emergency lights
flashing and siren wailing. 

*
* *

            They left behind a
now subdued group of protesters, mostly quiet and shamefaced in their shock at
how the peaceful protest had turned into something so ugly.

Lauren was
aware of a hurried conference between Jon Rush and the police chief, and of
feeling ashamed that she had brought that look of anger and pain to his eyes.
She thought the sight of his pale, shocked face, vivid blood oozing from under
the cap of blond hair, would stay with her forever. She wanted to go to him,
but didn’t know what to say.

Before she had
sorted things out in her mind, the Rush Co. Jeep had been heading off down the
road leaving her once again with the view of its red taillights gleaming in the
gloom beneath the trees.

An angry
Police Chief Ohmer subjected the group to a careful questioning about the
incident and eventually accepted Lauren’s story about Lucy’s fainting spell and
her own accidental wounding of the company’s chief executive officer.

“You mean you
didn’t wallop that bugger deliberately?” Peter Wellman quipped.

His jocular
robustness was quelled by a dangerous glare from the police chief, who then
told them he had advised that the meeting planned for later in the afternoon
between the protest committee and Rush Co. officials be postponed “until
tempers have simmered down”.

            “I want you all to
know that, in light of today’s proceedings, we’re going to be keeping an eye on
each and every one of you. Even a hint of trouble like this afternoon, and
you’ll be talking to the provincial court circuit judge!”

With that,
Ohmer stomped off, his feathers distinctly ruffled that there had been trouble
on his patch.

            Lauren trooped
homewards silently with the rest of the group, which straggled in threes and
fours in the gathering winter gloom. She turned down an offer of an early
supper with the Wellmans and the Polechucks in favor of returning to her own
quiet studio.

But once home,
she found that she couldn’t settle despite the exhaustion that had caught up
with her from the past week. She worried about Lucy, hoping Paul would find a
moment to call her and let her know what was happening, and the events of the
afternoon kept replaying in her mind.

Even more
worrying, her answering machine contained a dozen calls with hang-ups and
without any message being left. Lauren looked up the number for reporting
problems to the telephone company, but found herself robbed of the energy to
face Ma Bell’s officialdom by the depression that had dogged her steps from the
protest site.

For a while
she mixed paint and toyed with ideas on canvas, but her mind’s eye kept
returning to Jon Rush’s angry, accusatory face, the scarlet blood oozing down
the shockingly pale skin: blood from a wound that she had caused. No way could
she ever attempt to echo that vision on canvas.

            Giving up on her
artwork, she started to prowl around the studio, attempting to tidy the growing
mess that seemed to creep up on her out of nowhere. Then the telephone shrilled
again and Lauren grabbed up the receiver, expecting to hear Paul with a
progress report on Lucy. But instead, she heard her dinner date of earlier in
the week, Steve Wallace, his voice sounding peevish.

“You’re really
hard to get hold of, you know that? I’ve tried to get you before, but got that
damned awful answering machine,” he declared irritably.

But Lauren was
able to forgive him his pettiness. “So it was you! I’d gotten kind of worried
about all those hang-ups,” she exclaimed in relief. “Why ever didn’t you just
leave a message?”

“Well, there’s
not much point in talking to a machine, is there? And would you really have
called me back?” Suddenly, Lauren felt an uneasy shiver.
Had the man been
drinking?

“Of course I’d
have called you back, if you’d left a number. But I’ve been so tied up with
things here; there’s hardly been time to breathe.”

“Well, clear
your schedule, I want to take you to dinner again tomorrow night.”

Lauren drew in
a sharp breath.
Just who did he think he was? Ordering her to clear her
schedule because he felt like a date?

“I’m sorry,”
she said, too angry all of a sudden to keep the coldness out of her voice.
“I’ve got a million and one things to do, and on top of that, I’ve got a show
coming up and I’m nowhere near ready for it…I’m afraid I won’t be going out for
quite a while.”

Momentarily,
she regretted being so sharp with him, but her regret dissolved at his next
words.

“So, you can
devote hours to a silly little protest committee, but you’ve no time to see
me?”

His selfish,
petulant scorn was just too much after all that had happened that day. Lauren
slammed down the phone, hesitated over turning the ringer off, but decided that
she wanted to know the moment Paul had any news, so she left it turned on with
the answering machine also on to monitor her calls.

She returned
to her housecleaning attempts, but her concentration had evaporated. Finally,
she added another layer of woolly socks, grabbed her warmest jacket and her
cell phone, and went out to seek solace in the woods with her camera slung
around her neck.

            It was barely five
p.m., yet the woods had the breathless feel that accompanies winter’s end in
Ontario, where daylight and dusk mingle together for an extended twilight. Just
before night could be expected to fall blackly, starlight or moonlight
reflected back on the snow often created a sense of light that was otherworldly
and beautiful.

“
The woods
are lovely, dark and deep
…” Lauren quoted Robert Frost to herself as she
walked familiar paths, breathed in the sharp, cold smell of evergreens and
sensed the excited tension held within the pregnant boughs of deciduous trees
ready to explode into green at the warming sun’s command.

            She breathed deeply,
tension draining away as the peace of the woods seeped into her soul, making
her whole again. That was how she always felt out here, and she was never
afraid, even at night. It was so familiar, so welcoming to her, yet full of
surprises—like the bobcat she’d seen just weeks ago which she was trying hard
to capture on canvas as her ready camera had captured him on film.

            But the woods held
more surprises that twilight afternoon.  She hadn’t gone too far when she came
upon a clearing with a glowing campfire, the scent of supper rising from a pan
hanging from a crudely constructed tripod over the flames.

 Lounging
casually on a sleeping bag was a warmly layered figure, his attention held by a
book on his lap, illuminated in the glow of a hurricane lamp. Heavy layers of
sweater and parka aside, she’d recognize that lithe and powerful form anywhere
!
How dare he—invading her woods as if he had a right to be there!

Lauren’s
indignation carried her forward though all the while her head was telling her
that the camper had as much right to enjoy the forest as she did. Before she
could stop herself, Lauren was drawn into the clearing and the warm light of
the campfire.

He looked up
as she stepped out from the sheltering trees, and their eyes caught like flame
on tinder. She held herself away, cold on the surface, as she stared at him,
wondering if her own hostility would be mirrored in his reaction to her.

After all, she
belatedly reminded herself, he was the wounded party—literally. But his smile
was genuine, hard to resist, even in a traitorous son of a...

            “Welcome to my humble
abode. Please come in.” His rich, deep voice held laughter at his own
situation, and at her finding him there, but no embarrassment. It was almost as
though he could read her mind, and she flushed. “You’re lucky enough to have
arrived in time to enjoy a munificence of smoked baked beans, if you’d like
to?”

There was a
question in his tone, and a deep, hidden longing which came close to melting
her icy anger. It was as though he had, if not forgotten, at least laid aside
the memory of the last few hours, leaving their time together here as pristine
as the snowdrifts between the trees.

But Lauren
shrugged and hardened her heart against him. No way could they share a meal and
sit and chat like old friends—
or new lovers,
that nasty little voice
inside her whispered—with all that lay between them.

“Gee, I’m
sorry, but there’s an irresistible stale raisin teacake at home with my name on
it,” Lauren knew she sounded childish, but couldn’t bite back the insult in her
tone.

            “You mean you’d
rather eat stale teacake than share my bean feast?” he asked, shaking his head
in mock incredulity.

“I’d rather
not share anything with you—ever!”

Liar!
Whispered
that treacherous little voice deep inside, the one that no amount of logic
could subdue. But the flare of something unreadable in his expression showed
her that he’d caught the full import of the message she was sending. She would
have left then, but he rose lithely from the ground and crossed the space
between them with a few long strides, his gaze capturing hers as surely as if
his strong arms had pulled her to him. She experienced a shiver of longing, the
temptation to melt against him, but still held back.

“What are you
doing here, Rush?” she asked coldly.

“Why are you
so angry with me? If anything, it should surely be the other way round?” he
asked, seeming genuinely puzzled.

“Because you
lied to me last night,” she spat back.

Understanding
dawned in his eyes.  “I didn’t lie to you, I told you my name,” he protested.

“No, you told
me part of your name. But you didn’t tell me WHO you were,” she insisted.

“And is who I
am so important, or who you are? Can we not put Rush Co. and Art Before Commerce
aside and be Jon and Lauren? Is that so hard?”