The Real Macaw(99)

He put a clipboard atop my plate. I peered down at the paper it contained.

“The petition to recall Mayor Pruitt?” I asked. He nodded, and I signed with a flourish. “Long overdue, if you ask me. How many more signatures do you need?”

“Got more than enough,” Randall said as he retrieved the clipboard. “But somehow we missed getting your John Hancock yesterday, and I thought maybe you’d like to be in on it.”

“Absolutely,” I said. “Any idea who’ll be running to replace him?”

“I just might,” Randall said.

“You live outside the town limits,” I said.

“He could move into town,” Clarence said.

“Fat chance finding a place,” I said. “Do you know how tight the real-estate market is?”

“I do,” Clarence said. “And as a responsible executor, I consider it my duty to see that Randall pays full market price when he buys Parker’s house from the estate.”

Of course, Randall could have a tough, uphill battle. Getting enough signatures on the recall petition today didn’t mean Mayor Pruitt was out. And the Pruitts would fight back tooth and nail.

Still, the very notion of a Shiffley replacing a Pruitt as the mayor of Caerphilly made me chuckle.

“Ah!” Mother exclaimed. “There they are!”

I turned to see Michael and Rose Noire strolling in, each carrying a twin.

“Aren’t they adorable?” Mother cooed. She held out her arms for Jamie, who actually was looking adorable at the moment. Josh was beet-red and howling like a banshee.

“Sorry,” Michael said. He was bouncing Josh just the way he liked to be bounced, to no avail. “He’s been cranky all morning.”

“I know how he feels,” I said.

“You want me to examine him?” Dad asked.

“He probably just misses his mother,” Rose Noire said.

“His mother misses him, even if he is being a pill,” I said, holding out my arms.

To my astonishment, a couple of seconds after I propped Josh on my shoulder, he stopped crying, hiccupped a few times, and fell asleep.

“See?” Rose Noire said. “He only wanted his mother.”

“Coincidence,” I said.

Just then Timmy burst into the room.

“Aunt Meg!” he shouted. “Clarence says I can keep her if Mommy says okay! Can you call and ask her?”

Keep her? I peered over to see which of our four-legged residents had captured Timmy’s heart.

Tinkerbell the wolfhound. Of course. A dilemma. On the one hand, it might be a satisfying payback, returning Timmy with a pet wolfhound in tow. On the other hand, who knew how long he and any pet he adopted would be staying with us.

“I have no idea what your mother will say, but I’ll ask her,” I said finally.

“Yay!” Timmy seemed to think that Tinkerbell’s fate had been happily settled. He sat down at the table and looked up expectantly. Tinkerbell settled down at Timmy’s feet, no doubt hoping for a few table scraps.

“Pancakes, Michael?” Dad asked, as he slid a plate in front of Timmy without asking.

“Love some,” Michael said. “By the way, Festus says we have a long battle ahead of us, but he’s optimistic. And he also says we all owe a big debt of thanks to the late Parker Blair. I wasn’t quite awake enough to follow his explanation, but I gather if we hadn’t found out about the whole debt problem when we did, Festus’s job would have been infinitely harder.”

Everyone fell silent, and I could hear the bacon sizzling in Dad’s skillet. I wondered if the others were fretting about the many problems facing Caerphilly, or feeling sadness over the death of Parker. Or, like me, a little of both.

I lifted my glass of cranberry juice.

“To Parker Blair,” I said. “He had his faults, but he loved animals and he did us all an enormous service. I wish we’d all had a chance to get to know him.”

“Here, here,” Clarence said, and the rest of the breakfasters murmured agreement and toasted Parker with coffee, juice, and in Rob’s case, Diet Dr Pepper.

We were all putting our cups and glasses down when Sammy stuck his head in the back door.

“Chief!” he said. “The forensic computer guy’s here from Richmond!”

“Great!” Dad and the chief said in unison as they leaped toward the door.

Dad scurried out the back door after Sammy. The chief closed his eyes for a few moments, took a deep breath—I could almost hear him counting to ten—and followed at a more sedate pace.

“Isn’t that nice?” Mother said. “Having the police station here is going to be such great fun for your father.”