I’d been chewing on the same question for hours.
“I don’t think it’s something that happened at the meeting,” I said. “I think it’s something that was going to happen after the meeting. The committees, for example. Several of them were organized to dig out information that someone might not want found.”
“Good point.”
“So which of the committees did Grandfather volunteer for last night?” I asked. “Maybe that would tell us what’s got his attacker running scared.”
“I don’t remember that he volunteered for any of them,” Ms. Ellie said. “Your grandfather’s better at giving orders than volunteering.”
“Are you sure? Can you ask whoever’s keeping the list?”
“I have the list,” she said. “Let me check.”
I followed her into her office and fretted as she pulled a file folder out of her desk and flipped through the four- or five-page document it contained.
“As I thought,” she said. “Not on any of the committees. But he did promise to bring down some auditors to help with some of the financial investigations.”
“That’s right,” I said. “I remember him shouting that out during the meeting.”
“I thought he ran a charitable foundation, not an accounting firm,” she said, as she tucked the list back in its folder.
“He does run a foundation,” I said. “And he’d be the first to tell you that any foundation worth its salt needs top-notch auditors. He gets a lot of funding requests, and he has to have someone to help him sort out which ones are worthwhile and which are not.”
And which ones were actually scams. I wasn’t sure whether many of the requests they got were crooked or whether Grandfather just talked a lot about the ones that were, but I knew his audit staff was large, skilled, and enthusiastic about unearthing potential fraud. He’d bragged about that at the meeting, too.
“What if someone heard his offer and got scared?” I asked. “Of course it would have to be someone who was at the meeting, which lets out my favorite suspect, Mayor Pruitt.”
“Not necessarily,” she said. “Could also be someone who got a full report from his spies.”
“You think the mayor sent spies?”
“We know he sent spies,” she said. “We expected him to—after all, it’s a public meeting. We even knew who they were. Poor things—he made them come down to the town hall to brief him once the meeting was over. Kept them there well past midnight, I heard.”
“We have spies down at the town hall?”
“One of his spies is actually our spy. Would have joined Corsica if she wasn’t on the town payroll. She told us all about it.”
“And the mayor wasn’t happy?”
“She says he went berserk. I think she’d have mentioned it if he told any of his spies to sneak back and bludgeon your grandfather, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t order someone to do it as soon as no inconvenient witnesses were around.”
We stood in silence for a few moments.
“Are we seriously considering the possibility that one of our elected officials is a cold-blooded murderer?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. “I think he’s capable. And if he thought Parker Blair and your grandfather were trying to expose him for the crook he is, he’d sure as hell have motivation. Watch your back. We don’t want him going after you next.”
The mayor’s round red face popped into my mind. When I’d first come to Caerphilly, I’d considered him a comic figure. The prototypical sleazy small town politician. Then I’d realized there was nothing comic about him at all. His was the latest in a long line of Pruitts who’d lived well at the expense of the citizens of Caerphilly, and the idea that he might be about to lose control of the goose that had been providing them with so many golden eggs for a century and a half—that might well turn him homicidal.
“I’ll be careful,” I said. “But it’s not as if he has it in for me particularly.”
“He knows you,” she said. “He knows you’ve helped the chief out a time or two. And he knows you won’t take the attack on your grandfather lightly.”
I nodded.
“So maybe I’ll stay here for a while where there are plenty of witnesses,” I said. “What can I do?”
“Fiction’s pretty well taken care of,” she said. “A bit too well. But we could really use someone to work on the nonfiction. Everything except the cookbook section, which is also pretty well covered.”
As I made my way to the stairs, I could see what she meant. The fiction shelves, particularly the genre sections, were filled with happy people, and some aisles sounded less like work crews than book club meetings.