The Real Macaw: A Meg Langslow Mystery

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