Juliette Rose Meets Maggie by the Charles

The next morning, Juliette Rose called in sick again to her regular job stirring up trouble in places other than Wilbur and headed the battered old VW microbus for Boston.  She was meeting an old friend of hers on the Cambridge bank of the Charles River for lunch.  In Wilbur, it was another beautiful spring [...]

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Juliette Rose Considers Her Options

“I can’t go in front of a judge and ask for an injunction on the basis of something Robert heard in the woods,” Roger was saying to an exasperated Juliette Rose. “We have to have something concrete, some kind of proof.”
“Like what?” DJ asked before Juliette could explode.
“Almost anything that would support what Robert says.  [...]

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The Dancing Vampire Questions Her Oomph

Mave was profoundly confused, her emotions in upheaval, her mind in a whirl.  For a while she considered the possibility that she was actually sick with some kind of stomach flu because it seemed so tight and empty and she couldn’t eat.  Then she thought it might be a mild heart attack because it was [...]

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Teddy Makes a Deal

Teddy Davenport had two missions in life. The first was to get his senator re-elected, which frankly didn’t look like it was going to be all that much of a challenge. The second was to secure for himself a cushy job in the private sector with a nice big office; a secretary with [...]

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Getting to Know Each Other

“The band will be back tomorrow,” Nikki said over supper.  She had made a tub of lasagna big enough to feed the 5th  Fleet and at least half of the 3rd Battalion Field Artillery Marching Band & Wind Ensemble.  “I learned how to cook in a commune,” she explained when Cas noted the size of [...]

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Don Nelson Remembers

The two sides – who barely spoke civilly to each other when they met in the General Store or the Post Office – hit head-on over the school budget cuts.  Those who owned houses now worth much more than they’d paid for them were getting socked with rising property taxes and wanted them cut.  The [...]

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A Little History

You’d think the news that a chemical plant – and all that comes with it – might be built within bowshot of Wilbur and right smack dab in the middle of a State Forest watershed would unite the town like never before but in fact it split Wilbur right down the middle.  Half the population [...]

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An Informer

“It’s Don Nelson, I bet,” Juliette said. “He’s always been in favor of the road. Thinks it would be good for business, good for Wilbur’s tax base. And he gives a lot of money to those pricks.”
“If it is, he’s telling them right now that we know about the plant,” Roger said. [...]

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Working the Phone Tree

Meanwhile, news about the chemical plant was spreading across Wilbur like mosquitoes in May. Roger, Juliette Rose, and even Robert took turns on the phone calling everyone they knew, and those people called everyone they knew, and on it went until only a tiny fraction of Wilbur’s 700-odd residents were unaware of the sneaky [...]

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The River

Ignorant of the stew brewing above, Nikki led Cas through the woods to almost exactly the same spot Robert had vacated so hurriedly a short time before. For a city kid, he moved well in the forest. He seemed to have an instinct for the least destructive path. He didn’t bull his [...]

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