43
Edward was waiting for her as soon as she pulled up outside the cottage. She jumped out and into his arms.
"I love you and I'm sorry!" she cried.
"Hey, no!" he protested, "You were right. I was trying to control your actions, you had every right to challenge me."
She allowed him to carry her into the warmth of the little house. She looked around. She guessed that in floor space it wasn't much larger than the Black house, but the difference was astounding.
"Enjoy yourself?" he asked her as she flung herself onto the sofa in front of the roaring blaze. He placed a cup of tea on the table and she smiled her thanks and cradled the hot cup in her freezing hands.
"I spoke to Jacob." She told him.
"I expected you to, you were going to see him after all." He grinned. She pulled her tongue out at him and patted the seat next to her as a hint.
"Sit down. I want to tell you what happened." She said. She told him what she had seen at the reservation. She could see that he too was shocked that the family was living in such conditions in this day and age. The fact that the wolves had run out of clothes and had almost no money to live on also shocked him.
"What can we do though?" he asked when she finished.
"Well, you have all this money you are so eager to spend." She looked down as she said it, trying not to see if he disagreed with her. "And they have so little."
"Can you see them accepting charity?" he asked, she frowned. She hadn't thought of it like that. "Think, Bella. How you reacted when we tried to buy you something, like a new car?" she blushed. He was right. How could she forget? The tribe may not have a lot, but what they had in abundance was pride. "Let's go see Carlisle and Esme, you never know, they may have some ideas."
"Alice too." She said. Edward paused and looked at her closely.
"You don't have to see Alice, if you don't want to." He told her gently.
"We need her, she will have to organise everything. As long as she doesn't try and organise me I'm ok." Edward paused a second and then smiled at her.
"Message received, she promises to behave."
"Let's go!" she almost dragged him out of the house. He seemed surprised when she passed her truck and stood at the side of the Volvo, waiting for him to unlock it. He grinned and she even allowed him to open the door for her. He leant down and kissed her lips thoroughly before jumping straight over the car and landing right at the door. He gunned the engine and allowed the rear of the car to skid until he was facing the right way, put it into gear and with another grin he drove off.
"There are many ways we can help the reservation, but the best way would probably be to get them to start businesses and make sure that they succeed, if we go about it right they will never know we were involved." Carlisle stated, "the most obvious way for an Indian reservation to make money is to open a casino, however I doubt the residents would be pleased with that." Bella shook her head, not only would it be dangerous to the wolves of the village, it wouldn't be very popular with the local law enforcement.
"We can't risk it." Alice was sat on the sofa very subdued, Bella felt slightly guilty about the way Alice was reacting to her presence, but she wouldn't… she couldn't… back down. "We need something that won't bring in people, but will bring in either money or work."
That was exactly the problem. Most money was generated from tourists in one form or another, and with the secrets the tribe was keeping the one thing they could not afford was more people in the area.
"Well to start with couldn't we just drop off some clothes? I mean, come on, they can't spend forever running around barefoot with only a pair of shorts." Rose said.
"We need Charlie." Jasper said, surprising everyone. "He knows the tribe after all, he virtually lived with them for years. He will have some idea of what they can do and what is unreasonable." Bella looked at her watch, then checked it with her phone, pleased to note that it was exactly the right time. Her father should be just finishing his shift at the station, she called him and asked him to visit. Esme almost ran to the kitchen to put a couple of small pot pies from the freezer into the oven, for both Charlie and her to eat. She smiled her thanks when the matriarch came back into the room.
They all decided to think on it individually until he got there. Esme, Rose and Emmett got out laptops and started surfing. Carlisle and Jasper went to his library and got some books about the history of the region from the shelves and started to go through them. They were still wracking their brains, when the sound of the cruiser coming up the lane broke the silence. Charlie walked straight into the house without pausing to knock, Bella was please to see that her father really was very comfortable with her new family. She had half expected him to be stand-offish as he wasn't the most sociable of people, but he seemed to accept them as family, and treated them as such.
"What's up Doc?" he said, twitching his moustache, he had evidently realised during his convalescence that Emmett had a weakness for Loony Tunes.
Carlisle explained what Bella was asking of them. Charlie frowned and sat on the sofa, thinking hard.
"The trouble is that there isn't a lot the men folk can do. Traditionally the Quileutes are farmers and fishermen. The fields have long since overgrown as it's not really viable for them to farm, the soil is too poor unless they continually clear land, after a couple of years it is exhausted. They still fish a lot to supplement the diet, but basically they don't do much as they were mainly whalers and it's against the law to hunt the whales now." He told them.
"Your Uncle Quil mends watches," Bella pointed out.
"Yeah, but the trouble is very few people nowadays use the sort of watches he can mend." That was a good point, most watches, even analogues ran on batteries and computer chips rather than wheels and cogs.
"What about the garage, Sam used to work there." She asked.
"The garage tends only to fix their own cars and trucks. It may seem strange but they don't even fix the vehicles in Forks. The folk in the town tend to use Dowling's if it's an emergency and the garage in Port Angeles if it can wait. None of them would even think of going onto the reservation, the tribe aren't exactly welcoming of strangers." There it was again. No matter what they did it could not encourage people to visit the village.
"I don't know how they do it." Bella said, "I saw Jared driving a truck that must have been from the 1930's and it was still running."
"Wow! Is that old thing still in use?" Charlie laughed, "I remember Jared's grandfather running about in it." Alice sat upright on the chair, rigid. Everyone watched her as she had a vision. Edward smiled and Bella looked at him for an explanation, he just grinned at her and squeezed the hand that she noticed suddenly he was holding.
"Well, I've found one way to get some money into the village." Alice told them when she came out of the trance. She was happy, but not too 'bubbly' about what she had seen. "We can put an advertisement in the Seattle Times asking for classic vehicles for a film. I've seen adverts like that before, if they are making, say, a gangster film for 1930's Chicago they may advertise for vehicles of the right age that they can either purchase or rent. It usually doesn't matter what condition they are in as long as they run. The magic of the film industry can gloss over any backfires or such and the props people can make an old decrepit rust bucket look brand new."
"That could work, but that's just money for one family." Charlie pointed out. "We need something that will help the whole community."
"No, if we advertise for that truck that Bella saw, then the Cameron family will share the money between the pack members, this will help the families out tremendously." She said.
"I thought you couldn't see the wolves?" Bella pointed out, blushing as Alice met her gaze, she still felt guilty over her temper tantrum.
"I can't, but I have seen certain villagers over the years, especially the women, and can get a glimpse of their futures at times when they are far enough away from the pack to be seen. What I can see at the moment is Jared's mother and a young woman shopping for clothes in the Sear's Big and Tall catalogue in PA, ordering shorts, shirts and shoes for all of the men." Bella smiled, yeah they would need a big and tall the way the men grew when they started phasing.
"Still, that is a very short term measure, we also need something that will bring in income for coming years." Edward pointed out.
"What about crafts?" Rose asked, "There's a boom in the market for native goods, are there any traditional crafters?" She turned her laptop around and showed them an eBay search for Native American crafts.
"I know of quite a few of the women who do the bead weaving, cloth weaving and suchlike." Charlie said. "Though it is a dying art, I'm not sure any of the younger generation are involved in it."
"Only women?" Rose was rather indignant.
"Well yes, they see that sort of thing as a female skill. The men are hunter/gatherers, the women stayed home and wove baskets and blankets and ornaments." He laughed. "When Billy was recovering from the car accident they tried to teach him how to weave as a sort of occupational therapy, they may as well have tried to castra…" he coughed and didn't finish the word. Emmett winced and then grinned.
"So basically, what you are saying, is that if we set up some sort of online business for Indian crafts that the women will make them all and the men will sit around and do nothing." Rose asked for clarification.
"Pretty much." Charlie shrugged. "They see anything that isn't fishing or hunting as not worthy of their time." It wasn't just Rose who made a sound of disgust at the closed minds of the tribe.
Alice got her phone out of her pocket and then turned it to Carlisle for approval.
"Yes that should do to start with." Carlisle nodded and read out the advertisement.
"What if someone else has a truck and answers the advert?" Bella asked.
"If they belong in the village or seem in need of money we will buy that one too, if not then we will just ignore any others that come in."
"I was thinking." Bella blushed and looked at her father.
"What is it Bells?" he asked, she felt a warm glow at the nickname she hadn't heard for some time.
"I was thinking of my truck. If Jared sells his I was thinking of letting him have mine and Edward could buy me that new car he's always trying to push on me." Her husband's face lit up as if it was Christmas morning.
"I actually promised Jake that if you ever got rid of it, I would give him first refusal." He admitted. "He didn't think you would want it once you went to college so asked if I could sell him it back if he could afford it."
"That's perfect!" she smiled. "Then they could advertise for that one too after a couple of months and give them another infusion of cash."
"Ahh, I see where you are going with this." He said.
"Well, why not? They could advertise for old vehicles, do them up and sell them on to the film makers."
"It is quite a good idea." Charlie looked at everyone else. "The boys all do Shop at school and have quite a knack for getting them roadworthy."
"But what about spare parts?" Rose asked, "I've already warned Bella that the truck needs parts that are no longer available."
"There's a scrap yard full of years worth of good parts." Charlie told her. Bella remembered that Jacob was heading there to spend a morning looking for bits the day she got ill. "The main trouble so far has been they have the parts but not the vehicles to put them in."
"Who owns the scrap yard?" Edward asked.
"No one, I don't think, I think it's just a patch of land the tribe have used to dump their old vehicles on and it's sort of developed into a free-for-all, there has to be over 50 years worth of old vehicles in there. None of them are running, but they could be used for parts."
"What about grants?" Esme asked, looking up from her phone that she had been busily working on.
"What type of grants?" Bella asked.
"Well, there's all sorts available from all sorts of charitable foundations, we could set up a foundation and offer grants to Native American tribes to help protect their way of life." She explained, "of course it would have to be fair and open to all the Native American tribes that need money, but it isn't like we couldn't make more if we needed to. The one thing we cannot offer them is scholarships to universities, the young men especially will have to stay close to home just in case they phase." She said, a bell sounded from the kitchen. "Dinner's ready you two." She moved to the kitchen and Bella and Charlie moved to the dining room, the rest of the family followed them.
"To be honest I was shocked at the conditions that a lot of them are living in, Billy's house has a tarpaulin on the roof to keep the rain out, the boards are rotten at the bottom and the paint is badly peeling." Bella told them all as she started to eat her pie. "This is delicious Esme." She smiled her. Esme smoothed a hand down Bella's hair, Bella blushed again, why had she made such a fuss over a few clothes when such a simple gesture meant so much to her. Was it worth risking everything just to get her own way? She pushed it all to the back of her mind and concentrated on the Quileute problems.
"I was thinking of something like the NRC but for the northern tribes?" Esme came back to the question of grants and charitable foundations.
Bella took her iPhone out of her pocket and looked the charity up. She was not just impressed that there was already such a foundation, but shocked that the problem wasn't just with the local tribe but seemed to be country wide. Why had she never known about this problem? She knew historically the Native Americans had been treated badly and cheated out of their lands by the white man, but it was shocking to realise that in a lot of places they were still considered second class citizens.
"How soon could you set something like this up?" she asked. "It seems very complicated to me."
"Well, personally we couldn't, it would put us too much in the public view, but we could use the Pacific Northwest Trust. Jenks, our lawyer could easily set up something through the foundation for us in a couple of weeks, then we would just have to wait until someone on the reservation applied for a grant for us to actually set things in motion, we could also have him set up events to raise money so that no one on the reservation gets suspicious at the amount of money suddenly being thrown at them. We also want to set it up so that the tribe know that future generations of wolves don't have to go through such deprivation, or more importantly their families don't."
Bella's mind wandered slightly as she remembered the poverty of the reservation and allowed herself to dream of making things better. "How much?" she broke out of her day dream when she heard Rose and Esme arguing over the amount of start-up capital for the charity.
"I still say if we don't start it with a decent amount we will just have to top it up sooner than we should, after all large movements of money in this day and age are viewed with suspicion by the government." Rose said, Esme though seemed determined.
"We just can't fund the entire thing from the get-go, we need to be seen to raise money as well as the start-up."
"Excuse me," Bella broke in, "Did I hear that figure right?" She was sure she hadn't.
"You see that what I'm saying makes sense, don't you Bella? We should put $50 or $60 million into the fund to start with!" Rose insisted. Bella's head spun as Esme tried to talk her down to a 'reasonable' $10 or $20 million to start with.
Alice shook her head and held up a timid hand. "We can't. The maximum we can give to start with without federal interference is limited to $5 million, it will be plenty. The fund raisers will bring in almost a million more and from there the fund will grow. Anything approaching your figures will just cause trouble and suspicion, not to mention the knock on effect on the already troubled economy if we liquidate so many assets." The two women sat down and frowned.
Rose took her laptop off the table and started working something out, Esme took a sketch pad and pencils and also looked busy. Bella shook her head, she couldn't even imagine one million dollars, never mind several!
There wasn't a whole lot more they could do until things were set in motion, Alice offered up a couple of specific criteria that would make the grants accessible and attractive to the local tribe, and everyone else put together ideas for fund raising. Charlie, sat next to Bella, reached over and hugged her lightly with one arm.
"I'm proud of you." He told her, making her blush brightly, "not everyone would try and improve the living conditions for a whole community, hell I never thought of it."
"You didn't have a bunch of obscenely rich vampires itching to spend money to give you inspiration." She pointed out.
"Nevertheless, I am proud of you Bella," he drew a document out of his inside jacket pocket and placed it on the table looking solemn.
"What's that?" she asked, almost afraid to touch it in case it was something to do with Renée.
"The Washington State Education Board has considered your application for wanting to be exempt from having to attend Forks High School and have ruled in your favour. You can stay in the area and not have to go." He looked at Edward, "both of you." He clarified.
She jumped to her feet and hugged him, then turned and hugged Edward, he laughed at her joy.
"So, Mrs. Cullen, as we don't have to attend school, want to go car shopping tomorrow?" he asked, she groaned and the family all laughed.