Rattled
by By Galant, Debra
Category: Fiction , Political

Heather Peters is a blond dynamo and the most acquisitive and materialistic woman you may ever meet. Along with her husband, Kevin, and eight-year-old son, Connor, she moves to Galapagos Estates, a new housing development situated just where the New Jersey suburbs meet the countryside. All Heather wants is a nice house. Well, a nice house and a nice piece of land. And, of course, a basement gym, a master bath with radiant heat, Jacuzzi, and his-and-her toilets. She could make do without a media room if she had to. After all, the pioneers didn't have plasma TV, and they survived.The action begins when Heather and Harlan, a local egg farmer who works as a sometimes handyman, are setting up her patio for a tea party. Harlan's lived in town all of his life, and while he is contemptuous of the new McMansions and their inhabitants, he's found he can make money from them. When a timber rattlesnake comes out of the grass, Heather shrieks at him to kill it. Harlan knows that these snakes are endangered, but she is kicking up such a fuss (screaming bloody murder while standing on top of her new garden furniture) that he goes ahead and does it.What neither realizes is that these snakes are being tracked by a local animal rights group and that it's a crime to kill them in the state of New Jersey. They also don't know that Galapagos Estates was illegally built on a rattlesnake habitat by a shady developer who fudged the environmental report. The dead snake is traced to Heather, who is hauled out of back-to-school night and into a jail cell. When an ambitious local reporter tells her story, Heather basks in the resulting media circus. but things get ugly when the animal rights group "liberates" fifteen hundred lab rats at Heather's house and the residents of Galapagos Estates band together to force the Peterses to move. But don't count her out yet - Heather doesn't get mad, she gets even.