Free A Dawn of Death by Gin Jones Page A

side of them.
    "What do the neighbors think of this development?"
    "They're resigned to it, I suppose," Jack said. "A few of them tried to stop the building permit process, but Sheryl was a human bulldozer and ran right over them."
    "What do her competitors think of her?" Helen said. "There must be other developers here in Wharton. Did she bulldoze her way over any of them?"
    "Probably," Jack said. "I've heard complaints about her getting too much preferential treatment because of her affordable-income units. It's all legal , though, not like she's bribing anyone, so there isn't much the competitors can do about it. They could get the same treatment if they offered similarly priced housing."
    Helen watched another tree fall and felt the urge to go home and hug the trees that gave her cottage its privacy. "What about environmentalists? They can't be happy about losing the natural habitat that was here."
    "You've met Dale Meeke-Mason," Jack said. "She's the town's most vocal environmentalist. She and Sheryl were frequently at loggerheads, but they always found a way to work things out in the end. Dale is passionate about her causes, but she learned about compromise early on. Did you know that the Meeke family and the Mason family were among the earliest settlers of Wharton?"
    Helen shook her head.
    "They were. And they rivaled the Hatfields and McCoys for nursing a grudge from generation to generation. Everyone thought it would go on forever until Dale's parents came along and ended the hostilities with their marriage."
    "I don't suppose Dale proposed to Sheryl in order to resolve their differences."
    Jack laughed and shook his head. "Dale's pretty committed to her causes, but I doubt even she would go quite that far. She just knew how to pick her battles with Sheryl. Dale managed to shut down one development, but that was about five years ago, and there were some serious wetlands issues, so Sheryl had to have known it was a long shot. Most of the time, though, Dale just extracted some concessions to make the project more palatable. Like setting aside some land for the residents' recreational activities and putting a right to hang clause in all of her homeowners association documents."
    The fact that Dale and Sheryl had a long history of working out their differences without resorting to violence was encouraging, Helen thought. It suggested that Dale wouldn't have killed Sheryl even if their negotiations broke down. For once, the evidence was leaning in the direction Helen wanted it to. Sheryl's death was just an accident, and Dale had nothing to do with it.
    Now if Helen could just get a few more questions answered about what the bulldozer had been doing at the garden, she could let go of her suspicions and concentrate on her new hobby.
     
    *   *   *
     
     Jack parked as close to the construction office trailer as he could get. Instead of staying behind to play games on his phone, he insisted on getting out to escort Helen. Normally, she would have been annoyed by the unnecessary solicitousness, but she hadn't taken two steps before realizing that the ground wasn't quite as even as it had appeared from inside the car. It was littered with rocks and rutted with the tracks of the earthmoving equipment. The last thing she needed was to trip and injure herself before she'd even had a chance to get stronger by working in the garden.
    They were halfway to the construction office when Marty Drumm burst out of it carrying two hard hats. He leaped across the three steps to the ground and raced to intercept Helen and Jack.
    "What are you two doing?" he shouted. As he ran, he pointed in the direction of the road. "Can't you see this is a hard hat area?"
    Helen turned to see what he was pointing at. There was a large sign installed parallel to the road, a few feet in front of where Jack had parked. She hadn't paid any attention to it, assuming it was the standard advertising sign that could be seen at any construction site with the