MEETING MINUTES
City Council Session
City Hall Complex,
Cypress Hollow, CA
Wednesday, June 10th, 7pm
PUBLIC COMMENT
Members of the public may speak to agendized items; up to three minutes per speaker, to be determined by the presiding officer. If you wish to address the Council on any issue that is on this agenda, please complete a speaker request card located on the table at the entrance to the Council Chambers, and deliver it to the City Clerk prior to discussion of the item. You are not required to give your name on the speaker card in order to speak to the Council, but it is very helpful and the City Clerk is a very busy woman who doesn’t appreciate her time being wasted.
CALL TO ORDER
The City Council convened in a Regular Meeting. The City Clerk Hazel Montrose took the Roll Call as follows:
Present: 7—Mayor Finley, Councilmembers Smith, Capps, Harrington, Smith (L.), Walker, Fitzsimmons.
Absent: 1—Councilmember Keller (J.)
City Clerk Hazel Montrose announced that Councilmember Jake Keller is out of town fighting a wildfire in Ukiah. Evelyn Archer led a motion to send him good thoughts. Motion passed, though Mayor Finley said she shouldn’t have brought it up before the Pledge of Allegiance.
The (carefully nondenominational so as not to tick off Sam Waters again) invocation was led by Pastor Trimble.
Mayor Finley led the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America.
Approval of May Minutes
Councilmember Harrington moved to approve the minutes of the May meeting. Harrington’s motion passed 6-1. Councilmember Walker moved that they be filed as a waste of time since he’s still apparently mad at Harrington not paying him rent on the Strawberries For Sale sign in his broccoli field. Walker’s motion failed 1-6.
ACTION ITEMS
ZONING CASE #Z42: Cindi Smythe of Animal Control moved to look into leasing the old Valle property for a spay/neuter clinic. Buddy Hansen seconded. Tim Snopes wondered if this would be against the natural order, stating that cat and dogs “like to get it on and why would we stop them?” Retired veterinarian Jim Younger stated Tim Snopes should get his rat terrier Randy fixed before it knocks up the rest of the female canine population, passing on its stubby legs and crossed eyes. Veterinarian Mac Wildwood offered his services free of charge for any potential spay/neuter clinic. Tim Snopes removed himself from the meeting after stating he would meet his wife Tina Snopes at the Rite Spot after everyone else came to their senses. Motion passed unanimously in favor of exploring leasing options.
CONSENT AGENDA ITEMS
Pirate’s Cove
Mayor Finley called upon Elbert Romo to speak.
Elbert Romo addressed the City Council in opposition to the new staircase being built at Pirate’s Cove. Mayor Finley pointed out that Mr. Romo had missed the council meeting in April when everything was hammered out and that if he was so hopping mad about it he should have found time in his calendar to attend. Mr. Romo stated that as Head Pirate, he should have been alerted as soon as the proposal was drafted. Mayor Finley expressed surprise that Head Pirate was an actual position. Mr. Romo countered, saying it was indeed a position of quite some merit. Mr. Romo then called the Mayor a “horse’s patootie” and said that if she wanted open access to every “Damn” tourist that drove through town, then the resulting anarchy would be upon her own head. He then departed, slamming the door behind him. The City Clerk is pleased to report that all present remained clothed throughout this exchange.
Lighthouse Memorial Park
Theo McCormick offered a motion that the art installation to be erected where the old lighthouse stood be his newly completed work, “Radio Tubes Through the Ages.” Mr. McCormick’s motion was rejected.
Fiona Lynde then offered a motion that Stephen Lu, of Fiona’s Fill, be contracted to build a scale replica of the lighthouse in memoriam of those lost at sea. The City Clerk is pleased as punch to say that all present were in favor of this motion, and it passed unanimously.
Taking of Minutes
Mayor Finley motioned that the City Clerk be obliged to keep her own opinion out of the Meeting Minutes since “the meeting minutes are, after all, turned over to Trixie at The Independent for everyone in town to read and it’s kind of embarrassing when you do that, Hazel.” Motion failed, 6-1. The City Clerk was pleased.
Proposal
Abe Atwell motioned that he be allowed to take the podium. Mayor Finley allowed the request. What follows is transcribed from the City Clerk’s voice recorder (which, it should be noted, should be replaced and soon, since it doesn’t connect to her new MacBook).
Atwell: You all know me, but for the record, I’m Harbormaster Atwell. Most of you know I hate talking in front of people. The last time I did this, it didn’t go very well.
Pause for laughter.
Atwell: And the last time I stood up here, I was fighting for something that didn’t matter. I put a whole bunch of stock in an old pile of timber, thinking my old man would have been proud of me for doing so. It took a while to figure out how wrong I was, but I think I’ve got the important stuff figured out now.
Atwell left the podium, taking the microphone with him. The City Council microphone squealed. Marshall Gedding adjusted the amp.
Atwell: There’s nothing worth saving in this life that you can burn down. The only thing worth fighting for is love. My father would be proud that I finally figured that out, thanks to the woman in front of me.
Atwell kneeled in front of Fiona Lynde. The microphone was about to bust a gut and even though Marshall Gedding fussed with it, Atwell turned it off. It was okay, though, because the Council Chambers were quiet as church on Monday morning and the City Clerk could hear just fine.
Atwell took a ring out of his pocket. The City Clerk noted it was quite a bit bigger than her own, which wasn’t that surprising given what the City Clerk’s husband spent on it.
Atwell: Snowflake, will you marry me?
Lynde: Zamwow.
Atwell: Is that a yes?
Lynde: Frabimous!
Atwell looked desperately at Zeke Hawkins, who whispered something to Daisy Lane.
Atwell: You’re killing me, Snowflake.
Lynde didn’t answer. Instead, she launched at Atwell in a kiss that made this City Clerk think the two seem quite compatible. Neither of them came up for a while, which was fine because the City Council Chambers erupted in so much hooting and hollering that Mayor Finley had to use her new gavel for three straight minutes (7:19-7:22).
Eventually, Ms. Lynde indicated to the Mayor that her answer was in the affirmative.
The City Clerk isn’t ashamed to admit there wasn’t a dry eye in the house.
The End
✨
Dearest Reader,
THANK YOU for reading Fiona and Abe’s Story! Now, as a wee gift to thank you, here’s an exclusive sneak peek of the next book in which we meet get to meet the delightful andmeddlesome matchmaker Eliza: Eliza’s Home.
✨
Eliza’s Home – CHAPTER ONE
“You can make it. You will make it,” Eliza muttered to the truck, which was rattling out a discouraging put-putting noise. It was juddering as if trying to shake water off, and every now and then the engine gave an ominous thunk.
The salt-wet wind filled the cab of the truck, and goosebumps rose on her arms, just as they always did when she was moving – when the air would be different tomorrow, and the day after that.
The truck shook again and started to slow. “No, no, don’t do this. Come on, truck, you owe me.” It was only a year old, a 1944 Model 498T. Eliza was sure it wasn’t the engine, not in a vehicle this new.
She should have known that guy had watered his gasoline. It had been too good to be true, the farmhouse on the side of Highway 1 with the hand-lettered sign, “Gas For Sale.” He hadn’t charged enough for the fuel, and she should have been more suspicious. She’d been in a hurry, though, too distracted to stop and wonder about it. She’d just wanted to get back on the road. He’d given her a frank up-and-down while she took the money from her envelope.
“You married, girl?”
Eliza had ignored him. He didn’t need to know her story. Not with the way he was leering.
“’Cause if you wasn’t, I’d say stay a spell. You hungry? I shot some quail yesterday, got it on ice. You gotta watch for buckshot, and they’re mighty tiny birds to take a load like that, but they’re still good. You’d like ‘em.”
She had thrust the money into his hands and avoided his goodbye shoulder squeeze by twisting sideways. Not even thirty minutes north, with the vast blue ocean on her left and a low line of green hills on her right, the Ford had started making funny sounds.
“Come on, come on,” Eliza said to the truck, which clearly wasn’t listening. She’d only been heading north for seven hours, and she’d been planning on making it at least to the Oregon border by late tonight. Then Washington, and then Canada, Vancouver. Across the border, with her envelope of cash. A new country. A new plan – one that would change and move just as she did. When she tired of Vancouver, she’d work her way east across that vast country, and if she bored of that, she’d head down to New York, a city she’d loved when she’d passed through it once at twenty-two, just out of college. Some place George would never find her. “Come on, just to the next gas station. I’ll get someone to empty you out and we’ll start again, with nice, fresh, clean fuel.”
But the Ford refused to comply, shuddering to a slow crawl and finally coming to a complete stop on the side of the road with a cough and a sigh.
“Shoot.” Oh, if she got that farmer in her sights, if he drove by right now, she’d give him what for and how. Eliza got out and stood next to the truck for a moment, clenching her hands in fury. She kicked a tire and stubbed her toe.
Then, careful to look both ways across the narrow, two-lane highway even though there wasn’t a car in sight, Eliza crossed and then clambered up the low sand dune on the other side.
The ocean stretched out in front of her, as deep a blue as a color could be, as vast as the sky above. The water seemed different here to that in San Diego, and she felt as though she was seeing a real ocean for the first time. Down south, the water was friendly, inviting. When you looked at it, you knew you could swim and swim and then dry off in the sun, sand crusting in the crooks of your elbows and knees. Here the water was rough, telegraphing its frigidity even from a hundred yards away. White caps battled each other, and sandpipers raced at the edges of the white froth, dodging the waves as if they were scared to get their feet wet.
“Damn it!” she yelled at the waves. She waited for someone to chastize her. Good girls never curse.
No one spoke. There was no one visible for miles, not to the north where a heavy bank of fog drifted landward, nor to the south, where the ocean curved away and out of sight in a tangled blur of blue-gray.
“Hell!” Still nothing. It felt good, and Eliza’s heart lifted for a moment before it came crashing back down to reality. She was here. Alone. Running away again.
So she said the worst thing she could think of. “Goddamn!” She followed it with a quick, very satisfying scream of frustration.
Lightning didn’t strike. God didn’t poke his finger through the thickening fog and strike her dead.
“Jesus on a tent pole, woman! What in Hades is wrong with you?” As a man rose from behind the dune to her right, Eliza screamed even louder, this time in fright.
“Are you dying? Have you been stabbed and I just can’t see the blood yet?” The man hurried toward her, his long legs pumping through the drifting sand. “Are you wounded?”
“What are you doing there? Why were you hiding? Are you a criminal?” What if he was a rapist? A murderer? Perhaps she should have taken that farmer up on his offer of a quail dinner.
The man held his fishing pole aloft. “Sure, most criminals carry fishing gear to throw off their victims. No, I was taking a blamed nap in the sun after managing to catch exactly nothing this morning.” He was closer now, only half a dune to go, and he was looking at her as if he thought someone should cart her off to the nearest asylum. “I have this crazy need to check on women screaming their heads off.”
“Huh. That’s strange. I didn’t hear a thing,” said Eliza, putting her hands on her waist and facing him squarely.
The man raised his eyebrows. They were very nice eyebrows, Eliza couldn’t help noticing. Full but well shaped, they framed his brilliant blue eyes. He had the lightest stubble across his wide jaw, as if he’d shaved so early that by now, in the early afternoon, it had already started to grow back. He wore a green work shirt with a paint stain on the right cuff.
As if he knew she was looking at it, he flicked his wrist to turn the cuff around. “If you didn’t scream, then I’m afraid I have a moral obligation to go find the woman who did, though by the sound of it, she’s probably already dead.”
“I wouldn’t waste your time, then,” Eliza said. “Dead is dead.”
He shrugged. “True.” Looking back at her truck, he asked, “Walk you back to your vehicle, miss?”
“Speaking of dead,” she said.
“Ahhh.” He offered his arm, and the strangeness of a man popping up in the dunes and offering to walk her across the highway suddenly struck her as more amusing than alarming.
“Thank you, sir.” She took it. His bicep was twice, no, three times the size of George’s. A shiver ran through her.
“Joshua Carpenter.”
“Eliza,” she said.
“Eliza . . .”
“Just Eliza.” She wouldn’t say George’s last name. That time in her life was over.
“All right, just Eliza.” They were across the road now, and Joshua gestured to the hood. “May I take a look?”
“You may,” she said, unlatching the hood. “I think I bought bad gas.”
Joshua pointed southward. “Blue farmhouse? About thirty miles back?”
Eliza nodded.
“Yeah. This is right about where the cars usually stall. Did he ask you to marry him?”
“I wasn’t that lucky. I just got an offer of buckshot quail.”
“I’m not sure how Horace thinks he’s going to catch a girl that way, but he keeps pulling the same stunts. I can tow you up to my place and drain the tank. I have real gas in a can, too, enough to get you to Cypress Hollow.”
Eliza looked up and down the deserted road. “Tow? With your teeth?”
“Will you wait here?” he asked. “Stupid question. I’ll be back. Give me twenty minutes.”
And with no more said, the man headed eastward, over the low, grassy hummocks and through a stand of eucalyptus, at which point Eliza lost sight of him.
She sat down on the truck’s tailgate with a thump.
Fog was rolling in now as if it meant business. The sky darkened as the sun was hidden, and Eliza realised it was later than she’d thought. It would be full night in a couple of hours. And she had nowhere to go. The only home she knew was behind her. Honey’s face flashed into her mind, her sister’s eyes dark with anger and disappointed hurt. Go ahead and run, then. Again.
Pain clawed at her stomach, warring with the hunger pangs. She had an apple, but she’d been saving it for dinner. If only to make herself feel better, she reached across the seat to touch the envelope of money – the cash she’d so carefully put aside, a dollar at a time, for the last year.
It wasn’t there.
“No,” she said. “No, no, no!” She crawled across the bench seat, scrabbling at the floorboard. “No.”
Five minutes later, she admitted defeat. A short while after getting the gasoline, something white had fluttered in her peripheral vision at the open passenger window, but she’d thought it was just part of the newspaper George had left on the seat.
Her envelope. Her getaway fund.
Gone.
Tears filled her eyes as she crawled out of the truck, but she pushed them aside with a furious hand. She would not feel sorry for herself. That never did any good for anyone.
She would figure this out. Just like she’d figured everything else out up until now.
A rumble shook the sand beneath her shoes. It got stronger and louder, and Eliza’s heart sunk again. What now?
Around the curve of the road in front of her trundled a tractor. The man named Joshua Carpenter rode high on the seat. He’d run into the country and come back with a huge machine to help her out. He gave a cheery wave, and Eliza sighed. It was all just going to get worse, now. At this point, the best thing she could do was take off, run down the road and hope for a friendly passing car to give her a lift to . . . where? Just as she had no money to pay for this tow, to pay for his gas, she wouldn’t have any money if she left on foot.
She scrabbled in the storage compartments of both doors and came up with a single nickel and two pennies. They were cold in her clenched palm.
No money still equalled broke, no matter where her feet were planted.
CHAPTER TWO
After Joshua expertly attached the ropes, he towed her half a mile, turning inland at a stony drive. Eliza sat in the driver’s seat of the Ford, the window down, her elbow out. It was novel and dizzy-making to be moving but not steering.
The driveway twisted and wound through low-spreading oak trees, as though the road had been constructed around them. A jackrabbit raced its way over a small mound, leaping silently.
Joshua stopped in front of a bright red barn. It looked newly built, and sturdy. Tools – a spade and a hoe – leaned against the outer wall, shined and ready for work. By the time she had climbed out of the truck, he had already collected what he needed, appearing from the darkness of the barn carrying a metal can and a hose.
“Just need to siphon it.”
And here she was again. Owing another man for help, and this time completely unable to pay. Eliza rubbed her hands together in sudden nervousness. This man, so sure of himself and the way he moved around the truck, made her think of George. What was George doing now? Was he going crazy trying to find her? Had he gone to Honey’s house yet? Of course he had. That would have been the first place he went. And, normally, Eliza would have taken refuge at her sister’s house. It’s what she’d done before.
But not this time.
This time she was gone.
Joshua smiled at her and then leaned forward, putting the loose end of the hose that trailed from her gas tank into his mouth.
“What are you—” It looked as if he were going to suck the gas right out of the tank.
And then, sure enough, Joshua turned and spat a mouthful of gasoline onto the ground. He wiped the back of his hand across his lips as he looked directly at her. “Can’t say it tastes good, but it wakes a man up, that’s for sure.”
His eyes – she’d never seen such a blue. They were the color of the San Diego sky, the sky she’d left behind. “You could have killed yourself doing that.”
“A man never died siphoning gasoline unless he stole it from a neighbour with a rifle.”
He set the hose down on the ground, and fuel trailed from it into the dirt.
Eliza sighed.
“Now, none of that,” Joshua said crisply. “We’ll have you up and running again in no time.”
Shaking her head, Eliza turned. If tears crept into her eyes, she wouldn’t let this stranger see them.
The scenery was a good distraction, anyway. If a person were to plan the perfect place to live, this might just be it, she figured. Low hills spread before them, the road to the barn a rocky track through the perfection. Thick fingers of fog trailed over the hill, looking for all the world like dark, gray cotton balls. She longed, for a ridiculous moment, to dig her fingers into that softness, to pull it apart.
“It’s a nice view you have,” she said, hoping Joshua wouldn’t hear the catch in her throat.
“All right, isn’t it?” Joshua’s words were simple, but his voice held much more. He loved this land. What must that be like? To belong to land, to own it. To feel confident in it. To know you weren’t going anywhere else. To not want to leave.
“So nice,” she repeated. “Do you live close by?” Maybe his house was over the next rise, just out of sight. Maybe his wife was there, baking a sweet ham, finishing the rolls, wondering what had kept him so long.
He shrugged and knelt to touch the hose. The fuel was now slowing to a trickle. “Sort of.”
An odd answer. “So you live close by, yet far away?”
“Exactly.”
That smile of his could do things to a girl. Eliza was glad she was only passing through. And that she was done with men forever.
Well. At least she would be, as soon as she could afford a divorce.
Joshua kicked at a clod of dirt at his feet. His cowboy boots were well worn, just like the jeans that clung to his wide, muscled thighs.
Eliza snapped herself back to attention. He was saying something about building a house . . .
“. . . so while I work on that, I’ve been staying here.”
She frowned and gestured to the barn. She must have missed something. “Here?”
“There’s a hay loft. It’s nice, actually. The horses and cows down below make a kind of built-in heater, and I sleep like the dead.”
“While you build your house.”
He tipped his cowboy hat back and rubbed the side of his nose. “You got a sec, maybe?”
Eliza looked at her truck. She nodded. “It seems I do.”
Keep reading Eliza’s Home!