The Real MacAw (17 page)

“Meg? It’s nearly seven
P.M.
Don’t you want to go to the meeting?”

I woke up and found that Michael was leaning over me, holding Josh.

And I had a crick in my neck.

“Oh, bloody h— Oh bother,” I said. Michael wasn’t the only one trying to clean up his language before the twins started talking.

“What’s wrong?”

“Just another napping injury.” I massaged my stiff neck. “That’s it. Mother will have a cow, but we need a second recliner.”

“Funny you should say that,” Michael said. “I had the same thought myself a couple of days ago. And I thought I’d order it and surprise you.”

“And did you?” I hurried over to the nursery bathroom to throw some water on my face.

“I dropped into Caerphilly Fine Furniture,” he said. “And the guy there took down the make and model number and said he would order it.”

“Guy?” I stuck my head out of the bathroom. “Was it Parker Blair?”

“I assume it must have been.” He was checking the contents of the diaper bag against the checklist I had posted on the wall by the changing table. Both boys were babbling happily in their cribs. “Which means, I suppose, that we’ll have to find someplace to order it all over again.”

“Don’t be so sure,” I said. I grabbed Jamie and headed for the door. “Parker was super organized. If he said he was going to order it, I bet he did. Check with Clarence, or whoever Clarence gets to take care of the store until the estate is settled. While you were there, did you notice anything else?”

“Like the name of his future killer written on the wall in blood?”

I glanced over to see that he was grinning at me.

“Good point,” I said. “He didn’t know he was about to be murdered.”

“He was pleasant, efficient, and organized,” Michael said as he lifted Josh onto his shoulder.

“Yeah.” I picked up Jamie, who was happily babbling, as if trying to join in our conversation. “Very organized. I bet if he knew his life was in danger, we’ll find that he left some kind of record. The chief should do some more searching in his papers.”

“After checking the alibis of all his girlfriends?” Michael stopped on the landing, halfway down the stairs. “There was one funny thing that happened. He has one of those bells that rings whenever someone comes into the store. We were at the counter, looking through catalogs, and the bell rang. He looked up, said, ‘Come in,’ but I heard a little gasp, and when I looked over my shoulder the door was shutting again.”

“As if someone didn’t want to be seen entering his store?”

Michael nodded and resumed his careful descent of the tall stairway.

“I can’t be sure, but the gasp sounded feminine,” he said. “And it was silly to run away—I’d have assumed she was there for the same reason I was—to buy furniture. So maybe the chief should concentrate on any of Parker’s girlfriends who happen to be married or otherwise involved.”

“Of course, those are going to be the hardest to find,” I said. “Have you told him about this?”

“I only just remembered it,” he said. “But I will.”

And he probably would, if he remembered. Maybe I should mention it to the chief. And find out if Rob had broken the news about his imperfect alibi.

Downstairs, as we were settling the twins in their double carriage for the trip to the barn, I kept thinking about the second recliner—not just about how much comfort it would add to our lives, but also that in a weird way it would be a posthumous present from Parker. Assuming he had ordered it, and I was willing to bet he had.

It would be nice if I could repay him by helping the chief catch his killer.

“Whoa,” Michael said. He’d stuck his head out the back door to see if the twins needed jackets and stood gaping.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“This is some crowd,” he said. “Is the whole county coming to this meeting?”

Since both twins were awake and happy, I helped Michael lift the carriage down the steps and then left him to wheel the twins out to the barn while I roamed around a bit to check out what was happening in our backyard and barn. Caroline might have hoped to turn out the whole county for her meeting in our barn, but I’d envisioned a few dozen people tut-tutting for an hour or so before adjourning to help with the evening’s animal-tending chores. To my surprise, both sides of our normally quiet country road were lined for at least half a mile in either direction with the cars, trucks, and SUVs of people coming for the event. Nearly the entire congregation of the New Life Baptist Church had come en masse. Apparently anticipating the parking problem, they’d all parked in the church lot and were ferried over in loads using the converted school bus normally reserved for taking their award-winning choir to performances.

They’d brought the supplies and equipment to set up coffee and tea service at one end of the barn, and one of the deacons was driving the bus up and down the road, fetching latecomers who’d had to park far away.

They’d even brought folding chairs for themselves. In fact, most of the people who came brought their own seating. A forest of folding chairs, wooden, metal, or webbed plastic, was growing up on the barn floor.

Randall and a bunch of his Shiffley cousins were also at work. They had knocked together a small stage at one end of the barn, just in front of my office door. A few of them were testing the microphone and speakers they’d set up while the rest were arranging the folding chairs in rows that would gladden the heart of the fire marshal if she showed up.

And she probably would. I saw a lot of county and town employees. Including the chief. I wasn’t sure if he was here in his professional role or as a member in good standing of New Life Baptist Church.

Several Shiffleys and Baptists were helping unload hay bales that Seth Early was lending to hold the people who hadn’t thought to bring their own chairs. I recognized a lot of Caerphilly faculty members on the bales.

The one part of the barn not filled with chairs was Spike’s pen. We’d installed it so Spike could keep me company while I did my blacksmithing with no danger that he’d trip me when I was carrying pieces of metal heated to a bright red nine hundred degrees. The Corsicans had populated the pen with many of the cuter and more appealing animals. Clarence, Rose Noire, and several other Corsicans were showing the animals off to the crowd, bless their hearts. Clarence was holding a clipboard and scribbling things on it. With any luck, he was getting commitments to take the animals as soon as they could be released. Maybe they wouldn’t even need to call on the foster homes Parker had arranged.

“Over here!” I saw Michael waving to me. He’d found us seats on a hay bale just behind the stage, and was sitting there supervising as a regular parade of women came by to inspect the twins in their double baby carriage.

I spotted Cousin Festus on the other side of the barn, talking with Caroline and Dad, and waved at him.

Festus would be the first to admit that he’d decided to become a lawyer at the age of thirteen, after watching Gregory Peck in
To Kill a Mockingbird.
And while Jimmy Stewart in
Anatomy of a Murder,
and Spencer Tracy in
Inherit the Wind
had helped cement his career choice, Festus remained largely true to his original hero worship of Atticus Finch. He wore old-fashioned, light-colored three-piece suits and thick-framed glasses similar to the ones Peck had worn in the movie and styled his hair in as close as he could come to Peck’s habitual fashion, the better to allow an errant lock to fall over one eye at the climax of his closing statements. He cultivated Finch’s calm, mild-mannered tone of voice and had even replaced his original Tidewater, Virginia accent with the rather more generic Hollywood-style southern accent Peck had adopted in the movie.

Immediately after his graduation from law school, a brief, unhappy stint as a public defender convinced him that the criminal justice system was unlikely to provide a steady supply of the kind of stoic, long-suffering innocent clients that he had been looking forward to defending. After a period of intense soul-searching he’d switched to a civil practice. He now specialized in, as he put it, “helping Davids fell Goliaths”—the Goliaths in question being usually corporations and governments.

Juries loved him, and rumor had it that during negotiations, more than one opposing legal team had hastily settled after Festus shook his head sadly and uttered, in the mildest of tones, the fateful words, “Well, gentlemen, I do believe we will be obliged to settle this in a court of law.”

He was standing to the left of the temporary stage, with his left thumb tucked in his vest pocket, sipping a cup of New Life Baptist coffee and surveying the crowd with great satisfaction.

Part of his satisfaction probably came from the fact that there were two television crews taking crowd footage. The one from the college TV station was no surprise—most of the students who ran it came from Michael’s drama classes. But the crew from one of the Richmond stations—now that was an achievement. I wondered if Festus or Caroline had arranged it, or if news was slow enough in the big city that what passed for a crime wave in Caerphilly had caught their attention.

And I could tell from Festus’s expression that he liked what the TV cameras were capturing. If they panned across the crowd they’d be showing everything from New Life choir matrons in their Sunday best hats and dresses to farmers in overalls; from county board members in well-worn suits to faculty members in corduroy jackets with elbow patches. And all of them at least temporarily in perfect harmony with each other, united by their outrage against the Pruitts and buoyed by the excitement of the meeting.

About the only people who didn’t seem terribly thrilled to be here were those few county board members. Clearly they’d have some explaining to do, eventually. They’d probably claim that the mayor had pulled the wool over their eyes, and they’d probably be telling the truth.

Timmy was sitting with a group of kids from his kindergarten class. Their teacher was pointing to various people in the room and talking to her charges. Using the town meeting as a teaching moment, no doubt. I moved a little closer so I could overhear.

“No, the town can’t just fire the mayor,” she was saying, “because the town voters elected him. But if enough voters are unhappy and sign a petition, we can unelect him.”

“Can I sign?” one kindergartener asked, raising his hand. Half a dozen others also began waving their hands to volunteer. I left her to break the news of their disenfranchisement to the eager little citizens.

It was a few minutes after seven when Caroline Willner stepped to the podium and adjusted the microphone down to where she could reach it. She had a large tortoiseshell cat draped over one shoulder. I doubted live cats would really catch on as fashion accessories, but I predicted that the tortoiseshell would not go unadopted. Several people were pointing at him, and I overheard several variations on “Isn’t he sweet!”

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Caroline said.

The crowd began shushing each other, and settled down in a remarkably short time.

“I’ve been asked to chair this meeting.” Scattered applause greeted these words. “Although I’m deeply concerned with the fate of Caerphilly, I’m not actually a resident, so I probably have as good a chance as anyone at being impartial.”

Murmurs of approval from the crowd. I couldn’t help thinking what a smart choice she was. Of the Corsicans who had the confidence to tackle chairing a meeting, she was certainly the best choice. Dad would have been too gentle with the crowd and Grandfather too brusque.

“Before we get started,” she said. “I’d like to ask Reverend Wilson from the New Life Baptist Church to start off tonight’s proceedings with a blessing. Reverend?”

The reverend, a slightly hunched elderly man with close-cropped white hair and skin like polished mahogany, stepped briskly to the podium. A few people shifted uneasily. No one had ever called any of the reverend’s sermons boring, but then no one had ever called any of them short, either.

They needn’t have worried. The reverend was a man who knew how to read a crowd.

“Lord,” he said. “We ask your blessing on this gathering.”

A few amens rang out from various parts of the barn. I wasn’t sure whether this was intended as the usual call-and-response the reverend’s words would inspire in church, or whether some audience members were trying to hint that he’d already covered the topic sufficiently.

“There has been a great wickedness done in this town,” he went on. More amens. “And we ask your assistance in smiting the doers of that wickedness. Amen!”

He sat down amid a frenzy of amens and applause. Surely one of the shortest blessings he’d given within living memory. I suspected the reverend was as eager as most of the audience to get on with the meeting.

Caroline retook the microphone.

“I don’t know how many of you are up to speed on developments here in the county. Bear with me while I repeat a few things that might be old news to some of you. Early Friday morning, the police found Parker Blair murdered in the cab of his furniture store’s truck. I’m sure most people assumed that Parker’s demise had something to do with his … active social life.”

Snickers erupted in various parts of the audience, and the snickerers were hushed back into silence.

“But this morning Meg Langslow and Randall Shiffley uncovered information that indicates Parker was about to blow the whistle on a serious scandal here in Caerphilly. We’ll leave it to Chief Burke to determine whether Parker’s findings had anything to do with his death.”

She bowed to the chief, who was sitting along one side of the stage, and he bowed back with reasonably good grace.

“Parker learned that the town beautification project was not paid for with federal funds and private donations, as Mayor Pruitt claimed, but with loans.”

“But that was a town project,” someone called out. “What does that have to do with the county?”

“Town didn’t have anything worth using as collateral,” Randall Shiffley called back. “So they hornswoggled the county board into letting them use all the county buildings as collateral.”