The Real Macaw: A Meg Langslow Mystery

should be interesting. My first real venture into outdoor decorating!”
    “And Dad can help with the plants,” I said. “What he doesn’t know about plants isn’t worth knowing.”
    Mother nodded, absently.
    “So you’ll draw up some plans?”
    “Yes.” Her voice sounded absent. Clearly she was already hard at work. She turned and went back inside.
    Maybe it didn’t make sense, revving Mother up to decorate something we might be in grave danger of losing. But it made sense to me. By the time Mother finished with it, there was no way anyone could possibly call our yard blighted. Over the top, maybe, but not blighted. I felt a surge of power, as if I’d just put a stake in the ground to tell the encircling forces of development, “Not here!”
    “Hey, Meg!”
    It was Randall, waving at me from atop the macaw shed. I strolled over to see what he wanted. As I did, it occurred to me that maybe I should have him give me an estimate on painting the house. Better yet, I should ask him what repairs he thought we needed to make the house look first rate.
    And I also remembered that half the county board was made up of Randall’s family, and the rest was mostly people whose grandparents had gone to school with his. Surely if the developers wanted to seize our land through eminent domain, they’d have to go to the county board, not the town council. And the county board wouldn’t do that—would they?
    By the time I reached the shed, Randall had climbed down from the roof and was standing with crossed arms, supervising a cousin who was continuing the work.
    “You still working on figuring out how Parker was murdered?” he asked.
    Okay, I hadn’t been, but if that was what Randall wanted to talk about, I didn’t mind. I was curious, and maybe it would give me an opening to work the conversation around to see what Randall knew about the surveyors and which way he thought his relatives on the board would jump.
    “I’m not trying to do the chief’s job,” I said aloud.
    “’Course not.” He sounded amused, as if he didn’t really believe me.
    “But I am curious,” I said. “Someone suggested Parker was killed by one of his former girlfriends. Or possibly one of their husbands or boyfriends.”
    Randall chuckled softly.
    “It’s possible,” he said. “More than possible. The man got around, I’ll give him that. But I’m wondering if maybe they want us to think that.”
    “They? You mean whoever did it?”
    “I mean the powers that be in town,” he said. “I have a feeling maybe someone doesn’t want the chief to look past Parker’s love life.”
    “I think the chief’s smart enough and stubborn enough to keep looking till he finds the truth,” I said. “And what do you think he’s going to find?”
    “I think Parker was about to be a whistle-blower.”
    “A whistle-blower about what?”
    “Remember that whole town beautification project?” he said. “The one that was supposed to turn Caerphilly into a major tourist destination?”
    “The one where they went around putting down cobblestones in streets that weren’t built until long after cobblestones went out of style?”
    “The cobblestones, the gas streetlights, the miles of split-rail fence.” He snorted and shook his head. “Maybe if they’d picked one historical era and tried to stay authentic to it.”
    “I didn’t realize they were trying for historical authenticity,” I said. “I thought they were just trying to pretty everything up. A lot of that work was done over in the ritzy part of town, and it’s pretty hard to make the houses over there look like anything but McMansions with pools and tennis courts.”
    “They wanted to go for historical accuracy,” he said. “But that plan ran aground on the fact that up until the late eighteen hundreds, there wasn’t really anything here. Maybe twelve houses surrounded by a few thousand acres of cow pasture. So they went in for prettifying the town center. And I guess they succeeded.”
    “Succeeded in prettifying all the character out of it,” I said. “Looks like hundreds of gentrified town centers all across the country.”
    “Maybe that’s why the tourist traffic they were expecting never materialized.”
    “Yes, we Virginians are reasonably picky about our history,” I said. “We’ve got too much of the real thing to be fooled by some developer’s plastic imitation. But fascinating as this all is, what does it have to do with Parker’s