Read Online Bone Valley by Claire Matturro - Free Book Online Page B

waking up out of my sadness.
    “Can’t. Don’t have time to get you there and us back here. Meeting starts at five-thirty.”
    I glanced at my watch. “Where’s the meeting?”
    “Got a room at MCC reserved,” Angus said. “You ought to come to the meeting, anyway. If you’re going to represent me and Miguel, you need to know about this.”
    “What’s this?”
    “Public meeting of all the Manatee County people who oppose the Antheus mine permits. We’re trying to stop them. By turning public opinion against them,” Miguel said.
    Uh-huh, and you’ll get another SLAPP suit filed against you for your efforts, and you’re not going to be able to afford to pay me for defending the first one, the stupid orange-defamation case, I thought, but graciously didn’t say.
    Then I thought, well, okay, a radical meeting with Miguel and Angus was probably a better topper for a day of saving fake panthers and feeding baby birds than arguing with Philip over where to have our alleged wedding. “Shoot, let’s go, then,” I said.
    “Good. Let me get you some literature,” Angus said, and reached into the glove compartment and pulled out a ream of folded papers, forcibly stuffing other papers back into the compartment. “This is the list of the Antheus shareholders, you might recognize some of the names from Boogie Bog.”
    No, Boogie Bog and its real name, Bougainvillea Bayou, were about the only names on that topic I was apt to recognize, but I took the list.
    “Here’s a list of the names and addresses of people and government agencies you should write to and protest.” He shoved another sheet of paper at me. “And here’s a sample letter. All that information is correct. But put it in your own words. Handwritten letters are supposed to carry more weight,” he said.
    Yeah, a primer in public participation—a handwritten note? Like, without, say, a donation of thousands? How naive was this guy?
    But I was soon distracted from my cynical appraisal of Angus’s activities. “Well, I’ll be damned,” I said, looking at the short list of Antheus shareholders, all four of them. And M. David Moody’s name, big as Bob’s baby squirrel eyes, was first on the list. Someone had redlined through his name. “What did M. David have to do with Antheus?”
    “M. David pretty much was Antheus. He owned sixty percent of the stock. A lot of that land was his initially, acreage he bought in the seventies and eighties when it was relatively cheap. So he put his land into the company, and kept the controlling interest,” Miguel said, and pulled the truck into the Manatee Community College parking lot.
    I folded up the various sheets of paper and stuffed them into my purse.
    “M. David had valuable contacts with international phosphate companies. I always figured that Antheus, once they got their permits, would either sell out completely to one of those phosphate giants at a huge profit, or he’d at least bring one of those companies in as a partner,” Miguel said.
    As I tumbled out of the truck, I thought, so M. David had been the mover and shaker on Antheus. Okay, this had just gotten a whole lot more interesting.
    Trudging after Miguel and Angus as they made their way inside a conference room, I wished I’d had a chance to change clothes, wash up, and maybe grab a trail mix bar, but people were already milling about. Serious-looking people started shaking hands with Miguel and Angus.
    “There are snacks and drinks over there, if you want any,” Miguel said.
    Hungry, I walked over to the table, quickly deduced there was nothing I could eat, but snagged another Zephyr Hills water. By the time I had it opened, Miguel and Angus had already walked up to the front of the room and Angus was calling the meeting to order.
    Apparently, antiphosphate meetings were run by the same set of rules by which my brother Delvon’s church was run, that is, anybody can say anything at anytime, and the louder the better. In other words, a