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 murder?”
“We tried to raise a red flag when that project went through,” Randall said. “Me and some of my cousins. But no one wanted to believe us. Mayor Pruitt made it look like sour grapes because they brought in an outside firm for the construction work instead of hiring us. Nothing came of it. No one believed us. Then Parker started poking around.”
“Why?” I asked. “Is he a Shiffley relative?”
Randall shook his head.
“Parker’s people are all gone now,” he said. “They came here and opened that furniture store right after the war.”
“The Civil War?” I asked.
“World War II,” Randall said, giving me an odd look.
“You never know around here,” I said. “So if he’s not a Shiffley, what was his interest in the beautification project?”
Randall smiled and leaned back against the shed.
“He started out wanting one of those beautified buildings,” he said. “He figured the only way to keep his store going was to go upscale. No way he could do that a couple blocks from the bus station. So he made a list of the buildings that would do for his fancy new store, and then he started digging into who owned them. And the more he dug, the less he liked what he found. Nearly every one of those buildings in the beautified section of town is owned by a Pruitt or someone who’s thick as thieves with the Pruitts.”