“We do,” I said. “But Sheriff Price is getting along—I think he must be ninety by now. He can’t do as much as he used to, so when the town hired Chief Burke, the sheriff appointed him assistant sheriff. The police officers and the deputies all report to him. In fact, it’s really all one force, so they all get to choose whether they’d rather be called ‘deputy’ or ‘officer.’ ”
“So this is just a temporary situation, then?” he asked.
“No, it’s been going on for five years.”
“Five years? Isn’t the sheriff an elected official? You haven’t had elections in five years?”
“We had them, yes,” I said. “And reelected Sheriff Price.”
“You reelected a guy who doesn’t do anything?”
“A lot of voters do that,” I said. “At least we know we’re doing it. And he doesn’t do anything wrong, which is more than most places can say about their elected officials.”
Werzel shook his head.
“I’m guessing he ran unopposed.”
“No,” I said. “There were two other candidates. But everyone liked Sheriff Price’s campaign platform better.”
“And just what was his campaign platform?”
“That if elected he’d reappoint Chief Burke as assistant sheriff and stay out of his way,” I said. “About the only people who had a problem with that were the felons the chief has put away, and they don’t get a say anymore. It was a landslide.”
Werzel shook his head and walked away, scribbling in his notebook. I could tell he didn’t quite believe me. Clearly he’d been in the big city too long. And he wasn’t just avoiding the Salvation Army kettle—he was giving it an ostentatiously wide berth.
A pity we already had someone playing Ebeneezer Scrooge on the Dickens float.
Floats. I checked my watch, and realized that the time had flown faster than I realized. I only had thirty minutes until parade time.
I fought back a moment of panic. I’d spent hours rearranging the cards that represented the various floats, bands, and other participants into the optimal order and then negotiating with everyone to keep as much of that structure intact as possible. But with half an hour to go, I suddenly realized that however useful all that planning had been—if for no other reason than to keep my own sanity intact—it was time to let go of my vision of the perfect parade and let the real thing happen. As long as the Twelve Days of Christmas appeared in the proper order at the beginning of the parade and Santa brought up the rear, no one else would know or care if the rest of the participants weren’t all neatly arranged in the agreed-upon order.
I headed for what I’d come to think of as the starting line. My nephew, Eric, intercepted me before I’d gone more than a dozen steps.
“There you are,” I said, reaching out to take the clipboard he was carrying.
“Aunt Meg,” Eric said. “Can you do something about Cousin?”
I was about to say “Cousin who?” and was already looking around for a familiar Hollingsworth face when I remembered that Cousin was the name of the donkey Rose Noire had recently adopted. We’d originally named him after a particular cousin whose obstinate personality resembled a donkey’s, but Mother had protested strenuously, and we’d compromised by just calling him Cousin.
I turned to see that Rob was trying to coax Cousin up the ramp onto the truck for the live nativity scene. Mary, Joseph, and assorted shepherds were standing around looking impatient, waiting for their turn to mount the ramp. What in the world . . . ?
I strolled over.
“Why don’t you give it up?” I said to Rob. “Clearly Cousin isn’t interested in being on the float, and I can’t imagine anyone really wants to ride all the way to Caerphilly with an unhappy donkey.”
“But we have to have a donkey!” Rob said, continuing to tug at Cousin’s lead. “Like all the carols say. ‘The friendly beasts around him stood’ and ‘the ox and ass kept time’ and all that.”
The elderly ox was already lying down and chewing his cud in a faux rustic pen atop the float, along with two of Seth Early’s spare sheep.
“Don’t you think you could just let him follow on behind the float?” I asked. “A century ago, Cousin would have had to pull the float, so I’m sure he’d be perfectly happy to walk behind.”
“It’s just not the same,” Rob said.
Just then, Cousin suddenly took a couple of quick steps up the ramp. The abrupt slacking of the rope took Rob by surprise, and he fell backward. Cousin took advantage of Rob’s fall to back down almost to the bottom of the ramp. By the time Rob had scrambled up and grabbed the rope again, Cousin once more had all four feet firmly braced, and two of them were back on solid ground.