The Real MacAw (8 page)

“The season?” The other mother snorted. “Are you kidding? Our kids would be in college before we saw him again!”

The two of them cackled together.

I glanced at Francine. She was frowning, lips pursed. Evidently she shared my feeling that too much hilarity at the expense of a murdered man was in poor taste.

“Good God,” one of the mothers at the top of the bleachers stage-whispered, pointing at the field. “What do you suppose
those
two are up to?”

“No good, that’s for sure,” another muttered.

Chapter 6

I looked to see what the two mothers were talking about and winced. Terence Mann, Francine’s husband, was the third-base coach. But he wasn’t watching the game at the moment. He was talking intently to Mayor Pruitt.

I studied Mann. He was tall, a little over six feet, but gave the impression of being taller—partly because he was rail thin and narrow shouldered, and partly because he had a slight, habitual stoop, as if he spent far too much time courteously bending down to listen attentively to much shorter people. He had the sort of face most people called handsome mainly because it was symmetrical and you couldn’t put your finger on anything in particular that was wrong with any of the features.

He was stooping even more than usual to reach down to Mayor Pruitt’s level. Why, I have no idea—considering how red the mayor’s face was, and how wildly he was waving his arms, he was probably shouting loud enough for Mann to hear him without stooping. In fact, stooping probably put Mann much closer to the mayor’s bellows than I’d care to be.

And even from the bleachers I could tell that the mayor wasn’t using language you’d want five- and six-year-olds to hear. Someone should go over and tell him to clean it up in front of the kids.

I was standing up to do it myself when the Red Sox coach dashed over and shooed them off the field. The mayor ignored him, but Mann began loping off the field almost before the coach arrived. To keep haranguing him, the mayor had to scurry in his wake, like a ping-pong ball chasing a praying mantis.

“Good riddance to bad rubbish,” one of the mothers said. Several others tittered.

Francine shot a quick glance in their direction and then fixed her eyes on the field. Her face looked grim, but I had to admire her presence of mind. I’d have been tempted to confront the two gossiping mothers if they’d said something like that about my husband.

Then again, maybe she wasn’t angry at them. Maybe she was at least a little upset with her husband. I had a feeling she wasn’t just annoyed because his inattentiveness had contributed to the melee on the field.

I patted her arm.

“Don’t let it get to you,” I said, softly enough that the others wouldn’t hear.

She glanced up and smiled, briefly.

“I’m used to it,” she said, in a similarly quiet tone. “Of course, this whole shelter thing is making it worse than ever.” She pronounced shelter more like “shelteh,” causing me to mishear it, just for a second, as “sheltie,” and spend a few anxious moments racking my brain to recall if we had a sheltie at the house, or if there had been some kind of sheltie-related incident in town. Clearly I had dogs and cats on the brain.

“It’ll blow over,” I said.

“I doubt it,” she said. “I’ve even thought of taking some kind of speech lessons so I blend in more. Do you think maybe your husband would know someone at the drama department who could teach me how to speak more like the locals?”

“Probably,” I said. “But why would you want to? A lot of people pay good money to get rid of southern accents—why would you want to learn one? Especially since in a year or two—”

I was about to say that in a year or two, they’d probably move someplace else when her husband took another job. Probably not a tactful thing to say. What if she was hoping they’d settle down and lead the rest of their lives in Caerphilly? Or what if she was thinking, like many of the locals, that her husband might not last a few more months in his job, let alone another year or two?

“In a year or two, people will stop noticing your accent so much,” I went on, changing my course. “They won’t pretend to think of you as a native—I’ve lived in Caerphilly for years now, and they have yet to forget that I’m not from around here. To some locals, you’re an outsider for life if all four of your grandparents weren’t born in Caerphilly County. Don’t sweat it.”

“I just wish—” she began.

But whatever she was intending to say was drowned out by an abrupt howl from Josh. I began digging through the diaper bag.

“Hell of a set of lungs on that kid,” one of the mothers said. She sounded cross and superior, as if to imply that as infants, her darlings had always asked softly and politely for their meals.

“Just stop your ears for a second,” I said. “I’ll take care of him.” Jamie joined in.

“Can you handle both at once?” Francine asked.

“Not easily,” I said. “Would you mind doing one?”

“I’d love to!”

I handed her Josh and a bottle, and picked up Jamie to do the honors with him.

“You’re not breastfeeding!” one of the mothers exclaimed. “Don’t you realize how important breast milk is for babies’ health! You should—”

“I completely understand the importance of breast milk,” I said. “That’s why I pump as much of it as I can, divide it in half so each boy gets his fair share, and top it off with enough formula to fill them up, since by now they’re
each
drinking slightly more in a day than I can produce.”

“Well, that’s all right then.” The woman pulled back slightly. Had I snapped at her? My tone had sounded perfectly civil to me, but I was running on even less sleep than usual, so I wasn’t necessarily a good judge of the finer points of human interaction.

“Sorry if I snapped,” I said. “My dad’s a doctor, you know, so I get rather a lot of free medical advice from him.”

“I’m sure,” she said.

“He and my cousin Rose Noire are in complete support of what I’m doing,” I said. Although Dad and Mother were only part-time residents of Caerphilly, he commanded a certain amount of respect in the county. So did Rose Noire, though in somewhat different circles—but if any of these women shared my cousin’s interests in alternative medicine, organic nutrition, and holistic child-rearing, they’d probably feel reassured.

“Oh, well that’s great, then,” the mother said. She was edging farther away from me.

Had I made things better or worse? I couldn’t tell. Either way, if I’d made her wary of publicly reproaching bottle-feeding mothers, maybe that wasn’t a bad thing. Not everyone had a choice about how to feed their babies. What if I was one of those mothers who couldn’t produce milk at all, or whose babies couldn’t easily feed? Or an adoptive mother? Couldn’t she imagine how someone in one of those situations would feel? Her words stung me a little, even though my only problem was that my kids outnumbered me and had healthy appetites.

And why did I feel so compelled to defend myself to these women I hardly knew? When had motherhood become so damned competitive?

At my side, Francine was shaking her head and chuckling slightly.

“Honestly,” she whispered, rolling her eyes. “Some people.”

I felt reassured. I settled Jamie in a comfortable position and checked on the game. The Red Sox were at bat now. Timmy and his teammates were having a competition to see who could pull his batting helmet down the farthest over his eyes.

“How many innings do these games run?” I asked.

“Only three,” Francine said. “Feels like nine, though.”

“That’s because it takes about as long as nine in the majors.” I sighed and tried to find a more comfortable position on the unpadded metal bench. I was probably in for a lot of hours on these bleachers. Both Michael and my father adored baseball, so if either or both of the boys showed the slightest shred of athletic ability, they’d undoubtedly be playing T-Ball in another five years.

So I’d get a head start planning how I was going to cope. For example, figuring out how to volunteer for a cushy job before getting assigned an impossible one. I didn’t want to be bench coach, for example. It was like playing a game of whack-a-mole with live preschoolers. Not an assignment I should take on.

But the mother who was sitting beside a grocery bag of snacks and a cooler full of cold treats, guarding them lest the team begin pigging out prematurely—now that was the job to have. Snack Mom.

Or perhaps even better, the job of the woman who came up and exchanged a few words with the snack mom before scribbling a few things on the paper on her clipboard. Snack Coordinator.

“I hope she brought something my monster will eat,” one mother muttered behind us.

“I think it’s more important that the snack be healthy,” another mother announced.

As I listened to the ensuing debate over the relative merits of organic trail mix and Cheetos, I decided that any job connected to the snacks was too controversial.

Base coach. You stood out in the field, you made sure the runner ran when the ball was hit, and in the right direction, and you tried to keep the baseman awake and pointed toward the game. And you stood far away from the bleachers and their gossiping occupants. My kind of job.

A job Terence Mann seemed to have given up on. He and the mayor had retreated to a more private place near the edge of the woods that surrounded the athletic field and were still having a visibly heated conversation. Mann seemed to be getting the worst of it—most people did when they argued with the mayor. But the mayor didn’t look happy either.

What were they up to?

The thought continued to nag at me for the rest of the game and all the way home. Michael was out in the barn helping with the animals, so I dropped Timmy and the boys with him and went back to the house to grab what I needed to run my errands.

And maybe one of my errands should be stopping somewhere to learn a little more information about what was going on in town. But where? Bothering the chief for information was definitely out, but if I ran into Horace, I could probably get a few tidbits about the murder investigation. Ms. Ellie, at the library, kept her finger on the pulse of local politics, and could probably hazard a guess at what Mayor Pruitt and Terence Mann had been arguing about. But I wasn’t sure anyone could answer the most nagging question—whether Parker Blair’s murder had anything to do with any of this. For that—

“Earth to Meg?”

Chapter 7

I glanced up to see Caroline Willner looking at me with a concerned frown on her face. No wonder. I was standing in the pantry doorway with my stack of fabric grocery bags in my hand, staring into space.

“Sorry,” I said. “I was just thinking. Sleep deprivation meets information overload. How’s everything out in the barn?”

“Fine, as long as someone sensible’s there to keep them organized.” Clearly from her tone, Caroline considered herself the number one if not the only person to fill the sensible post. “Can I ask you a question or two? About something I can’t seem to get a straight answer on from any of the Corsicans?”

“Sure.” I dumped my empty bags on one of the kitchen chairs and sat down myself. Even if Caroline’s question was a short and simple one, my feet were tired.

“You could use some tea,” she said. She grabbed two cups from the cupboard.

“You don’t have to bother,” I said. “I could do that.”

“Sit,” she said. “And give me the straight scoop on this Mayor Pruitt.”

“I’d call him a weasel, if that wasn’t an insult to any self-respecting mustelid. What about him?”

Caroline popped two cups of cold water into the microwave and punched a few buttons before answering.

“I’ve been talking to Randall Shiffley today,” she said finally.

“What’s Randall doing here?” Since Randall owned and ran the Shiffley Construction Company, we usually only saw him when something needed repairing or renovating. Just hearing his name made me want to go and make sure the family checkbook was still safely stowed in my desk, and that the stubs didn’t show any more five-figure bites out of our savings.

“Doing a few repairs that your father thought we needed for the safety and comfort of the animals,” Caroline said. “Don’t worry,” she added, seeing from my expression that I already was. “I think you’ll find they’re all improvements, and if you don’t agree, Randall can undo them.”

I took a deep breath. I didn’t trust Dad’s judgment, but if Caroline and Randall thought these were improvements, they probably were. And then Caroline added the final note of reassurance.

“And CORSICA’s paying, of course. Anyway, since he got here this morning, Randall Shiffley’s been telling me some pretty shocking things about Mayor Pruitt. Should I take them with a grain of salt?”

I sighed.

“Yes, but only a grain,” I said. “Randall’s a Shiffley, and the mayor’s a Pruitt. Randall would almost rather cut out his tongue than say something nice about a Pruitt. Not that I can imagine the mayor doing anything worth praising. Keep in mind, of course, that I’m not precisely a neutral observer. I’ve had a few run-ins with the Pruitts myself.”

“The Pruitts and Shiffleys are feuding then?” Caroline looked as if she would enjoy a nice, juicy bit of gossip. “Kind of a Montague and Capulet thing?”

“I’d have said Hatfields and McCoys, but you get the general idea,” I said. “The Shiffleys are old Caerphilly. Their ancestors settled the area, and some of them are living on and farming land that’s been in their family since before the Revolution. The Pruitts were carpetbaggers—came in just after the Civil War and built factories and mansions. In some places, a hundred and fifty years would qualify you as a native, but not in this part of Virginia. To the Shiffleys, the Pruitts are still Not from Around Here.”

The microwave dinged.

“And yet a Pruitt got elected mayor,” she said, as she popped tea bags into our steaming cups.

“Of the town,” I said. “Half the town council are Pruitts, if it comes to that. Pruitts or political allies of the Pruitts. Town politics are dominated by the Pruitts and the college, which was founded by a Pruitt. It’s different in the county. That’s dominated by farmers.”