Gourdfellas

by Maggie Bruce

  I tried to return a smile but I’d have to stop gritting my teeth and get rid of my suspicious mindset before anyone believed me. Was she, as Karen would say, sucking up? Trying to buy my support? I preferred to think of her offer as enthusiastic and generous.

  “You really think a theater and some classes will generate the same tax revenues as a casino? And how does that answer the social justice problem and help out the tribes who were treated so badly—and continue to be? Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want that casino. But Marjorie Mellon identified a concern and was preparing to do something about it. And she’d managed to address issues that Nathaniel Bartle and Susan Clemants raised.” The challenge in my voice seemed to startle Trisha, who frowned when I glanced in her direction.

  Joseph Trent, who looked better in his faded green sweater than his usual pharmacist whites, tsked twice. “You don’t have to be so negative. Some problems can’t be solved by thinking about things in the same old way. Who says it’s possible to make up for what the Europeans did when they colonized America? It doesn’t make sense to spend energy on problems that can’t be solved.”

  “So, we just forget the past and move on? Isn’t that a little like condoning what was done?”

  “Not at all.” Trent’s color and his voice rose. “It’s a lot like saying that we’re not the ones responsible and we have to figure out how to move forward.”

  The toy store owner nodded her vigorous agreement. “That’s right. And anyway, we don’t want to create new woes with our solutions to old problems. Which is what the casino would do.”

  I wanted to steer the conversation back to Marjorie, but before I could, Trisha Stern said, “The casino won’t just create problems. It’s bound to ruin a way of life that’s been embraced by a lot of people for a long time. I just can’t see what’s to be gained if we take what little we have left of natural beauty and turn it into something ugly. There’s got to be a better way to solve all the problems, I just know it.”

  I’d never seen her so worked up. And I wasn’t the only one—Joseph Trent and Sue Evans looked surprised as well. Her intensity raised the pesky specter of suspicion again. Was Trisha Stern really capable of murdering Marjorie Mellon to protect her corner of the universe? Could she come up with a devious little plan to pin it all on me? Even if she could pull off both those things, it was hard to see how she could come into my house every day to work with my brother and chat pleasantly about crocuses and canning tomatoes.

  I set my questions aside and searched for one more provocative comment that might encourage someone to reveal a dark secret.

  “Look, some people who are for the casino aren’t simply greedy.” I was winging it here, but I pushed on. “Like Nathaniel and Susan. And personally, I’m not so sure that Marjorie was only after money. She sounded like she really did believe that a lot of good would come out of it. Besides, I’m not even sure she was killed because of her stand in favor of the casino.”

  Trisha laughed uncomfortably, Joseph Trent frowned and looked down at his scuffed shoes, and Sue Evans took a step back, as though that would protect her from being contaminated by the idea I’d just dropped into the middle of the circle.

  “I don’t mean to be rude or anything, but you’d be better off if that were true, right?” Trisha glanced over at the makeshift stage. “Looks like the meeting’s going to start.”

  The hard surfaces of the Lovett barn had turned the conversations into a roar, and I was glad when the microphone squealed and Mel Lovett tapped on it for attention. The roar subsided enough for his voice to be heard when he said, “Thanks for coming out tonight. We have a lot of work to do if we’re going to be ready for next week’s meeting. The final vote is the week after that, so we can’t waste time.”

  “The town council doesn’t have enough votes to pass the thing,” Trisha whispered. “People are defecting like crazy. I don’t think there’s anyone around, now that poor Marjorie’s gone, who can get enough support to present a unified front and make a difference for their side.”

  Only Trisha had acknowledged out loud that Marjorie’s death might make a difference in the outcome of the vote. But I didn’t have time to try to get her or anyone else to say more, because Mel tapped on the microphone again and said, “And so I’d like to introduce our first speaker, Randall Smith. Randy, come on up.”

  My mediation homeowner—I felt my fists clench against my sides. I had at least one more session with the Smith-Caterra case, and I’d hate to have to excuse myself because Randall Smith had said things at this meeting that might prejudice me. I didn’t trust Tony Caterra, probably wouldn’t hire him to change a washer in my sink until I saw how the case went, but he was still entitled to my impartiality. Would Randall Smith say something helpful about how to defeat the casino—or was this going to turn into a public forum on his mistreatment at the hands of his former contractor?

  You’re not here to win a political battle or get details for a mediation case, I reminded myself. You’re here to see if you can find out anything about who might have killed Marjorie Mellon.

  Smith, his long hair pulled back into a ponytail, had cleaned up his act for the occasion. He placed two hands on the stack of boards that served as a makeshift podium and scanned the crowd, a huge smile on his face. “I’m just an ordinary guy. I go to work, come home and eat whatever I’m served while I watch television. I hang out with my buddies, I drive my kids to soccer practice, and I grumble when my wife hands me the ‘honey-do’ list.”

  A smattering of laughter rippled through the crowd. Mel Lovett smiled at Connie as she nestled her head against his shoulder. Joseph Trent, too, glanced at his wife, an almost pretty woman who looked as though she could use a day off and a wardrobe makeover. It didn’t seem to bother them that Smith’s comments perpetuated the tired sexist cliché of marriage as an arrangement to get needs met by putting up with boring but necessary obligations. If the person I wanted to spend the rest of my life with talked about me that way in public, the next time he’d see me would be in divorce court.

  Lighten up, I told myself, and listen.

  “And I like it that way. I like everything about my life. Well, except for a couple of plumbing problems and these twelve gray hairs.” He stopped again, waiting for the laughter that never came. “So I just want to make sure that we keep Walden Corners the way it is. Well, not exactly the way it is. Those guys have a point about we need to figure out how to bring in more tax money. But this is definitely not the way to do it. We need to bring a small manufacturer out here. Get the roads in shape so a trucking company can take care of all their needs. Make sure we have a labor force and affordable housing and good schools to keep them happy. Then other businesses would come in, see? And, man, it would mean jobs, everybody from people on the line to secretaries. Then, with all those extra jobs, we’d need more barbers and grocery stores and restaurants, and, well . . . it keeps on keepin’ on, if you know what I mean.”

  Elizabeth appeared beside me. “Great idea,” she whispered, “except that manufacturing is going overseas. Cheap labor, cheap taxes. He thinks it’s still 1950, maybe, because that’s as far as he ever studied in school.”

  “Now, I know some of you think it’s crazy because we’ve outsourced so much manufacturing,” Randy Smith said, as though he’d heard Elizabeth, and probably half the people in the auditorium. “But we can help turn the tide. We can start a ‘made in America’ thing. And Walden Corners can open its very own flag company. So that’s all I have to say. I hope you give it some thought.”

  For a man who had shown me nothing but anger and petulance, Randy Smith had come up with a creative idea. I didn’t love the idea of a manufacturing facility—I’d want to see the environmental impact studies that proved it was safe—but it certainly would help the unemployment situation and bolster the tax base.

  “You know his brother-in-law and father and two cousins are just about to run out of unemployment benefits. That doesn’t exactly make Randall Smit
h an altruistic man, but at least he’s thinking.” Elizabeth scribbled notes on her pad, then looked up at the podium again. “Okay, pay attention, girls and boys. Here comes Seth.”

  It took a while for Seth to plug in his computer. The microphone buzzed, and he stood back, looking as relaxed as he had the last time we’d spent an hour in my kitchen cooking a complicated recipe for pork posole.

  “I won’t take too much of our time here tonight. I just have a couple of things to say.” His voice sounded as though a very intimate personal conversation had been accidentally amplified. He was a good actor . . . but wasn’t that required of all good salespeople? That was his job, after all. The details of what he said might be different from the words of a guy who sold refrigerators, but the ideas were the same. You had to convince a customer that you were the one who could get her what she didn’t even know she wanted, in the most convenient and most satisfying way.

  “The ideas I’ve heard—and will hear—tonight are good ones,” he said. “Some seem like they’d be easier to accomplish, others seem like they’d suit the population of Walden Corners and Columbia County better, still others seem like they’d have the best chance to generate the most money to get the town what it needs.”

  So far, he hadn’t said anything new, but as I glanced around I realized that the crowd was paying attention in a way that they hadn’t earlier.

  Seth clicked a remote that started a PowerPoint presentation. The first screen showed a photograph of three police cars pulled up at odd angles in front of a big windowless building. “This is only one of seventeen incidents last year at a casino in Wisconsin in which the local police force had to be called out.”

  He clicked to the next screen. A bar graph with several pairs of elements appeared. “The line in blue represents the year before the casino came to town, and the line in red represents the year after. This first measurement is town revenue. You can see how much it jumped in one year. That’s pretty good. But when you look at these other things, it’s a different story. The number of automobile accidents involving drunk drivers—higher. The cost of maintaining the town police force and the jail, higher. And most interesting to me, in this particular town, the percentage of kids who graduated from high school in four years dropped by five percent and the number of divorces increased by eleven percent.”

  I was reminded of the old saying about “Lies, damn lies, and statistics.” Other things might have happened in that town to account for those numbers. A factory might have closed, leaving families desperate and dysfunctional. The mayor might have hired a bunch of incompetents to run the show. Where was he going with this? He clicked the remote and the next screen came up.

  The picture, of a pond surrounded by graceful willows, benches, and in the background, a complex of two-story garden apartments, was captioned with the words GRACIOUS LIVING FOR ADULTS.

  “This is emphatically not what we used to call an old age home,” he said. “It’s more like a high-end condo with a wide range of services. Store, beauty salon, a medical center.”

  He spoke about the number of jobs the facility would generate, about the tax revenues it would raise, and about how the nature of the community would be preserved. “Best of all,” he said as though he was sharing a delicious secret, “my friend Sue Evans has said that the arts complex she proposed might well live side by side with this new development, so it’s a total win-win situation.”

  I couldn’t think of a single objection, except that I hated the idea of any group of people being isolated from the natural mix of ages, genders, backgrounds. Still, if someone else wanted to live that way, I wouldn’t stop them. It might not be a bad thing to have a retirement community in Walden Corners. If city people could be convinced to spend their golden years here, they’d bring money and a desire for high-end consumables that would make my own life practically perfect. After all, Parma proscuitto and brine-cured olives were indulgences that made daily life feel like a party.

  The crowd responded with enthusiastic applause, and Seth closed his computer, unplugged it, and stepped down from the makeshift stage, leaving me with the big questions still running like a news crawl at the bottom of my screen.

  Had he really given money to the other side? And if he had, what did that mean?

  Chapter 12

  The kitchen of Melissa’s Taconic Inn still smelled of herbs and melted butter. The staff, under Nora’s supervision, had been encouraged to try new things, some of which had been more successful than others. The chicken with herbed dumplings had gone over better than the bacalau, a Portuguese salt cod dish that even some city people shunned, not knowing what they were missing. Nora had talked about how she was struggling to find the balance between being innovative and trying too hard. Whatever had come out of the kitchen a couple of hours earlier smelled as though it fit squarely on the Big Hit side of the ledger.

  Melissa and Elizabeth waved and Nora pointed me to a chair and sat down beside me.

  “I just called Scooter and told him we’d be a little late. He didn’t seem to mind one bit. Told me to tell you your brother is totally awesome.”

  “He sure is.” Melissa blushed and shook her head. “You know what I mean. He plays pro ball and he’s a nice, unspoiled guy. That’s an unusual combination.”

  “So you’re buying season tickets to the Mets home games?” Nora asked with a twinkle. “That means more work for me, partner. So maybe we need to renegotiate our arrangement.”

  I definitely needed to avoid making comments about Melissa and Neil, but that didn’t mean everyone else would.

  Before Melissa could respond, Susan breezed in, all twinkle and high energy. Elizabeth was the only one who didn’t smile a hello at her.

  “Do you think anyone followed me here?” Susan peered under the long, scarred butcher block work table and then grinned. “Nope, we’re safe. I can’t wait to tell you what I found out.”

  Nora took down one of the chalkboards the staff used to list daily specials, and looked expectantly in Susan’s direction. “Spill it, girl. We’re ready.”

  “Nathaniel Bartle has gotten together with Oneida Gaming and they’re planning a sweat lodge ceremony to purify their hearts before they go to the next meeting. Where they plan to convince the town council to change the procedure. They want to cut out the public referendum and let the town council vote decide.”

  My jaw dropped. According to established procedure, the nine-member town council could make recommendations, but a referendum had to follow. Of course, the county and the state hadn’t yet passed the bills that would grant their seals of approval to expanding gaming into Columbia County, never mind Walden Corners. If too many people in our town and too many people in the entire county disapproved, it was likely that nothing would go forward. But if town councils thought they could skip right to what they wanted instead of having voters decide . . . I didn’t even want to think about the chaos that was sure to follow.

  “If you don’t like the rules, change them? Isn’t that, like, illegal or something?” I still found it hard to believe that a man of principle would suggest such a thing. Nathaniel Bartle, gentle and compassionate, had embraced the end of providing justice for Native Americans by accepting the means of behaving unethically. “And the rest of them went along with it?”

  Susan pushed a springy red curl away from her forehead. “Some of them. Tony Caterra said that he knew that five of the council members would vote yes. He practically guaranteed it. But someone else said that it would take a referendum after the council vote to clear a rules change like that, so they were back where they started.”

  I noticed that Susan was referring to what they were planning. What had happened to her sense of we? Now didn’t seem the right time to ask, so I said, “Did anyone say anything about Marjorie?”

  “Everyone.” Susan shook her head. “Every single soul there said what a lovely service it was and how the pastor had said such nice things. They all talked about what a shame that she was gon
e, but nobody seemed to care about her life—just her death and the loss it would be to their cause. I could hardly stand to listen to them talk about her as though she were a tool that had gone missing and now they were terribly inconvenienced.”

  “Wow, that’s harsh. Didn’t her friends speak up?”

  “She was a loner.” Nora handed slices of white cake with chocolate frosting all around. “Did her work, mostly at night. She was pretty active in the local Rotary, you know, again the business thing. But I never heard of anyone having dinner at her house. Never saw her out shopping with anyone. I’d say she wanted it that way.”

  Elizabeth’s eyebrow rose, punctuating the skepticism in her voice. “Nobody really wants it that way. I always think there’s either a little bit of misanthropist or a lot of fear of being hurt in people who stick to themselves as much as she did. You know, as though the rest of us weren’t good enough, or were bound to do something nasty. Anyway, Marjorie really was a loner. Even her daughter didn’t have much to do with her.”

  “What’s her daughter like?” I didn’t know much about Anita or any other aspect of Marjorie’s personal life. I had built a picture of Marjorie Mellon based on what I’d heard, and on three brief encounters. It all added up to an energetic, self-aware person whose sarcasm provided a facade to keep any tender parts hidden from view.

  “Anita. She moved to Tennessee right after high school. Of course, she came back for the funeral, but she didn’t stay long. At least, not in Marjorie’s house, the house where she grew up. She went to school with us, but she ran with a different crowd.” Melissa shook her head. “Connie was the school social worker then. She tried to help Anita sort things out, but nothing seemed to get through to her. I always thought she wanted bright lights and big city, but she ended up in an even smaller town in Tennessee. Maybe she just needed to get away from Marjorie’s constant carping and criticism.”