The Real MacAw (25 page)

“You haven’t started checking it out?” he said. “Interrogated a few pet shop owners?”

“No,” I said. “And I told Clarence not to, either. And I told both him and Mother not to tell anyone about the macaw swapping.”

He nodded.

“I think I’ll give him a call.” He stood up, signaling that we were through. “See if he knows some of the places that might have macaws.”

“And make sure he knows that it’s your job to go snooping, not his.” I stood up, too.

He paused with his hand halfway to the phone and looked up at me.

“Thanks,” he said.

“For bringing you this information or for not going out and trying to find the source of the macaw myself?”

“Yes.” He picked up the phone and began dialing.

On my way out, I pitched in by carrying a box of files out to the truck that Sammy was loading. I decided to leave my car in the parking lot and walk the few blocks to the town hall to help Mother and the garden club ladies. After all, helping them would give me an excuse for prowling around the town hall. I had no idea what I hoped to find—the Pruitts hadn’t stayed in power for decades by leaving incriminating evidence lying around where the casual passer-by could spot it. But the town hall was where my prime suspect hung out. I felt drawn there.

Chapter 20

I found a cluster of elderly lavender-hatted ladies in a huddle in front of the town hall. They had several rows of potted plants lined up on the sidewalk and were looking up and down the street as if awaiting transportation. Or maybe as if they feared plantnappers might strike before the transportation arrived.

“Oh, look!” one of them exclaimed as I drew near. “It’s Meg! I’m sure
she
can manage.”

They all turned and beamed at me. I sighed, and wished, just for a moment, that I’d gone back to the library. Or maybe home.

“What’s up?” I asked, as I drew up beside their temporary sidewalk jungle.

“Some of the plants that need to be rescued are a bit too much for us to manage,” one said.

“Mother told me.” I spotted a folding luggage carrier and nodded at it. “Mind if I use that?”

“Of course!” several of them exclaimed, and almost knocked each other down in their haste to deliver it to me.

“So what do you want me to fetch?” I turned to one garden lady who was holding a clipboard with some papers on it. What was it about a clipboard that made its holder look as if she were in charge, or at least knew what she was doing?

“There’s a large peace lily in room 201,” she said.

“A peace lily?” I repeated.

“Spathiphyllum floribundum,”
one garden lady said, as if that explained everything.

“Like this,” several of them exclaimed, shoving forward a pot containing a peace lily.

I knew what a peace lily looked like, but I was surprised to hear that one had gotten so large that a pair of the abler garden ladies couldn’t carry it, especially since they had the sturdy luggage carrier to help them.

I inspected the nearby peace lily. It looked healthy enough, but around the size I’d expect a peace lily to be. Not at all unmanageable. I could see them looking at it and, no doubt, realizing what I was thinking.

“Only bigger,” one of them said after a few moments.

“Oh, yes!” another said. “Much bigger.”

“Much!” Several others chimed in.

“Enormous!”

“Yes, it should be quite a well-grown specimen,” the lady with the clipboard said. “And there’s also a large
Ficus benjamina
in room 301. And if you see any other potted plants that we’ve forgotten, just snag them while you’re there.”

I was pretty sure now that the problem wasn’t the size of the plants but their location.

“Okay,” I said. “Rooms 201, 301. Peace lily, ficus, anything else that’s green.”

“Excellent!” the clipboard lady said. She handed me a pair of purple gardening gloves. Not a bad idea if I was going to be doing manual labor, so I put them on, to the delight of the garden club ladies.

I folded up the luggage carrier and tucked it under my arm. Coming back with the plants, I could use the handicapped access ramp, but for now it was shorter to climb the marble steps, and easier to carry the folded luggage cart than drag it.

When I reached the top of the steps, I glanced down and saw them all clustered together, staring anxiously up at me as if I were going into battle. I stopped in the lobby at the building directory to see what perils awaited me in 201 and 301.

Aha. Room 201 was the county manager’s office.

Room 301 was the office of the mayor.

“Wonderful,” I muttered.

“What’s that?” chirped a cheerful voice behind me.

I glanced around and saw what looked, at first, like a giant ambulatory spider plant, creeping slowly along the marble floor of the lobby. Closer inspection revealed that the top of the plant was suspended from a purple gardening glove. Presumably one of the shorter garden club ladies was hidden beneath the impressively thick curtain of trailing fronds with baby spider plants at their ends.

“Can I help you with that?” I asked.

“Oh, no,” the voice said, and the plant rustled and quivered as if the hidden garden lady was shaking her head vigorously. “I’m doing fine. Carry on! Good luck!”

Good luck? Did she think I’d need it?

I pressed the elevator button and watched as she crept away. As I stepped into the elevator, I found myself thinking it was a pity Rob wasn’t here with his little video camera.

When I stepped out of the elevator, I saw, directly ahead of me, a set of stout mahogany double doors with “201” stenciled on them in gold leaf and an old-fashioned Gothic typeface. A brass plaque on the wall beside the doors read “Office of the County Manager.” The right door was ajar. Odd that it would be open on a Sunday. Of course, this was no normal Sunday.

I peered in.

I’d expected an antechamber with a secretary, but apparently the county manager didn’t quite rate that. Still, it was a largish office, decorated in the same neutral colors and conservative style you found throughout the town hall. And like many other public spaces in the county, the room’s walls were blighted by hideous, oversized oil paintings illustrating scenes from Caerphilly’s history and geography, painted in the thirties and forties by a Pruitt with artistic ambitions and no discernible talent.

The painting I could see from the doorway showed a group of townspeople with pudgy Pruitt faces and stiff-ruffed early seventeenth-century costumes, being fawned over by several dozen obsequious, scantily clad Indians. Clearly a figment of the artist’s imagination rather than a genuine historical scene. Neck ruffs had been passé for decades by the time the town was founded, and the Pruitts hadn’t showed up until the late 1800s. Of course, the ruffs did hide the fact that the artist hadn’t the slightest idea of how to paint the human neck. Thanks to the ruffs, the townspeople looked fairly normal—normal for Pruitts, anyway—but the Indians all looked as if someone had pounded their heads a little way into their bodies.

I’d have replaced that horror with something more to my taste on day one. Was it significant that none of our recent county managers had?

I took a step into the room and saw Terence Mann standing beside a bookcase, gazing at its contents. His back was to me.

The enemy. Okay, not the major enemy, and probably not one we’d be stuck with in the long term if the opinions expressed at last night’s meeting were anything to go by. Still, however satisfying it might be to bash him in absentia, apparently none of the garden club members could bring themselves to confront him in person.

I found I was rather looking forward to it. I took a deep, calming breath and knocked on the half-open door.

“Come in.” The look on his face when he turned around was anything but welcoming. Not quite fear, perhaps, but definitely a lot of anxiety.

And then, after he’d studied me for a few seconds, his long, bland face relaxed. Now he just looked melancholy.

“May I help you?” His voice was brittle, but polite.

“I’m here for the plants.” I braced myself for what I assumed would be a hostile reaction, but he only shrugged.

“Help yourself.” He turned back to the bookcase.

It was only then that I noticed a cardboard moving box at his feet. I thought it unlikely that he was helping with the evacuation.

He glanced back and saw where I was looking.

“Yes, they fired me this morning,” he said. “So it’s fine with me if you haul away everything in the damned building. I don’t even give a tinker’s damn whether you’re working for the county board or just scrounging for valuables for yourself. Not my problem anymore. Just wait till I pack a few personal items and you can have anything that’s left.”

“No, not your problem anymore,” I said. “Of course, the rest of us will be dealing for years with what you’ve left behind.” And so might he if the talk about taking legal action against him was more than hot air, but I didn’t want to tip him off if he hadn’t heard about it already.

“I didn’t cause Caerphilly’s problems,” he said over his shoulder. He was running his finger along the spines of the books and occasionally plucking out one and dropping it into the box. “Cause them—I didn’t even know about them when I took the job. I thought I was coming to a nice, quiet, affluent county where the biggest problem would be talking the farmers into installing a few more traffic lights. And by the time I found out—hah!”

I wasn’t sure if that was a laugh or a snort. He finished with the bookcase and stepped over to the desk.

“No one blames you for causing the original financial problems,” I said. “But you didn’t do much to help solve them, either, did you? When you figured out how bad things were, why did you try to cover up instead of leveling with everyone?”

“Hah!” he said again. Definitely not what I’d call a laugh. “I thought the board was in on it. I assumed they wanted me to keep it hush-hush. It never occurred to me that every single one of them either couldn’t read a spreadsheet or couldn’t be bothered.”

“So instead you went along with the mayor’s plan,” I said. “The mayor, and his developer friends, who’ve been trying to get around the county’s antigrowth policies for decades.”

He was putting a paperweight in the box. He stood up and looked at me for a few moments.

“Oh, that’s right,” he said softly. “Your property’s one of the ones they’ll be seizing.”

“One of the ones they want,” I said. “We’ll see about the seizing.”

“It’s not personal, Mrs. Waterston,” he said. “I know it feels that way to you, but I didn’t steer the developers to your land.”

“No, I’m sure the mayor did that,” I said. “But you could have said, ‘No, we can’t do that.’”

“According to the legal advice Mayor Pruitt has received, we can,” he said. “I didn’t think it was reasonable to turn down a plan that would save the county just because a few people are inconvenienced by it. I had to put the welfare of the whole county first. You can see that, can’t you?”

He was clever. He struck just the right tone—practical common sense tinged with a hint of regret for the inconvenience he was causing, and a strong suggestion that he was disappointed at my selfishness and obtuseness. For a few moments, I almost found myself buying into his point of view. Who were we to stand in the way of saving the county?

And then I shook free of the spell.

“What you’re trying to do isn’t saving the county,” I said. “You’re just trying to get the county out of a temporary financial bind. And to do it, you’re willing to sell out to a bunch of developers who want to change the county in ways no one here wants.”

He shook his head, smiled his bland smile, and was opening his mouth to speak again. I hastened to drown him out.

“I read up on that Supreme Court case,” I said. “The one where they upheld the city’s right to seize a woman’s house so they could give her land to a developer. You know what’s on the land where her house used to be? Nothing. It’s a vacant lot now. Circumstances changed, the developer backed out, and now that city has a bunch of vacant lots that used to be people’s homes.”

“This is a completely different problem,” he began.

“And we need a different solution,” I said. “Not the one you and the mayor are trying to shove down our throats.”

“You don’t understand what we’re going to do—” he began. And then he stopped and shriveled slightly, his already stooped shoulders hunching even more.

“What
he’s
going to do,” he said. “Not me and the mayor anymore. Just the mayor. He’s the one who got all of you into this in the first place. Go yell at him.”

I hadn’t been yelling, but maybe he was expecting me to. The county board probably hadn’t whispered when they’d fired him this morning.

“I’ll be going up to the mayor’s office as soon as I take that peace lily downstairs.” I trundled the luggage cart over to the plant and hefted it. Not the giant mutant peace lily I’d been led to expect. It wasn’t any bigger than the one they’d showed me on the sidewalk.

“That’s all I need,” I said.

He didn’t answer. He had picked up a silver frame from his desk. It held a picture of him with Francine and a slightly younger version of the son who was on Timmy’s T-Ball team. He was staring at it with a gloomy expression on his face.

I felt a momentary twinge of sympathy. Not for Mann, but for Francine, and maybe a little for the kid, who was one of the least bratty of Timmy’s teammates. What happened to the boy if Francine decided not to move on with her husband when he found a new job? Or maybe when Mann decided that even without a new job he didn’t want to stay in Caerphilly another minute?

Not my problem. I glanced around, saw no other plants, and began turning the luggage carrier around.

Mann slipped the silver frame into the box and strode toward the door.

“You can tell them to come up now,” he said.

“Tell who?” I asked.

“Whoever the county’s sending to inspect my boxes,” he said. “I told them this morning I didn’t want to take them until someone did that. I want proof that I didn’t take anything but my own personal property.”