The Real Macaw: A Meg Langslow Mystery

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