Impervious (City of Eldrich Book 1)

by Laura Kirwan

  Kady appeared in the doorway with a white mug. “Energy vortex? There’s an energy vortex?” She looked worried.

  “Nope,” Natalie replied. “Meaghan was telling me about Sedona.”

  Kady and Natalie exchanged glances. There it was again. The unspoken conversation.

  Kady handed her the mug. Meaghan had been expecting the typical crappy office coffeemaker sludge, but this smelled wonderful. Kady plopped a metal spoon, a couple of little white tubs of half and half, and a few sugar packets on the desk.

  Natalie moved behind the desk, sat down, and leaned over to turn on the computer. Meaghan thanked Kady for the coffee. Kady then left to answer the phone, although Meaghan didn’t hear anything.

  “Ears like an owl, that one,” Natalie said. “How’s the coffee?”

  “Freaking fabulous. Got a Starbucks downstairs?”

  Natalie let fly a booming laugh. “Oh, I’m better than Starbucks. It was your dad who started us on the high-end coffee habit. I replaced the espresso machine a few months ago, but he got us the original one.”

  “Espresso machine? You juicing the whole building?”

  “Nope. Just us. Sally and Nate over at Eldrich Brew would go out of business without city hall, but our coffee maker was here first, and we’re too lazy to walk across the street. Sorry about the plastic tubs. I had to pinch those from the mayor’s office. Leftovers from a reception or luncheon or something. We usually have a pitcher of cream, but I didn’t make it to the food co-op last night.”

  “Cream? Actual cream? You’re as bad as my brother.”

  At the mention of Russ, Natalie looked up at Meaghan and then looked down fast, her face red.

  I’ll have to keep an eye on that, Meaghan thought. Her brother sleeping with her office manager could be awkward, to say the least. But Russ couldn’t unzip his pants without proposing marriage, so maybe Natalie merely had a crush on him.

  Natalie scowled at the computer. “I told Eddie last week to get this damn thing set up.” She muttered under her breath, and smacked it, like she had Jamie’s computer. “There we are. Good to go.” She stood up and gestured towards the chair. “All yours, boss.”

  “Where’s Jamie?” Meaghan asked as she sat down behind the desk.

  “He had a hearing over in Williamsport. He’ll be back at lunchtime.” Natalie walked out of the office, then turned in the doorway. “Check your calendar. You’ve got a meeting in the mayor’s office at ten, and then you and Jamie have a two o’clock with the council director.” Natalie grimaced. “Emily.”

  Ah. There was the queen bee. “That’s Emily Proctor, right?”

  Natalie nodded.

  “Down there or up here?”

  “Oh, up here. I made a point of it,” Natalie said, venom in her voice.

  “Good. Based on the look on your face when you say her name, I’m betting she’s a great big pain in the ass?”

  Natalie snorted with laughter. “That’s what Matthew used to call her. He always made her come up here. Totally pissed her off.”

  “But it makes a point. Anything else I need to know about? What about lunch?”

  “The mayor will probably offer to take you out. We’d do it ourselves, but we wanted to wait until you got settled a little and Jamie’s around all day.”

  “What’s the mayor like?”

  Natalie sighed. “You want tactful or honest?”

  Meaghan raised an eyebrow. “Let me hear honest.”

  “Everyone calls him Mayor McCheese.”

  Meaghan laughed so hard she almost spit out the sip of coffee in her mouth. “Oh, hell. That’s funny. Sad but funny. So, let me guess. Oily but kind of hapless?”

  “Yup. He’s not a bad guy, just a schmoozy booster type. You know. Lots of rah-rah with the chamber of commerce but not enough spine to stand up to the council.”

  “To Emily, you mean. Natalie, if you’ve got nowhere to be right now, shut the door, sit down, and give me the dirt.”

  Natalie smiled and shut the door.

  Chapter 12

  Emily had worked for the city for more than twenty years. She’d started out as a part-time secretary for a council member and ended up running the show. Why a city the size of Eldrich even needed professional staff for its council members was never mentioned.

  Emily built her empire with deliberation and care, and now, under the guise of separation of powers, was accountable to no one, except the council members whose egos she stroked and whose secrets she kept. She controlled the flow of information in and out of the council offices with an iron hand and tolerated no dissent. All contact between council members and the rest of the city had to go through her. Council members who balked found themselves, through some electoral alchemy they didn’t understand, serving only one term.

  “She even used city funds to buy a high-end coffee maker to keep the council members from going over to Eldrich Brew before meetings so she can keep an eye on them,” Natalie said. “She’s that much of a control freak.”

  When Matthew was city solicitor, he kept Emily in check. Her reign of terror extended only to the council members, her tiny administrative staff, and the occasional new, low-ranking city employee who made the mistake of thinking Emily was bound by the same rules as everybody else.

  Emily hated Matthew. He was impervious—that was the word Natalie used—to Emily’s machinations. And so a fragile detente emerged. Matthew talked with the council members any time he damn well pleased and Emily stayed out of his way. In return, Matthew didn’t actively lobby the council to fire her.

  Then Matthew retired and without his monolithic presence on the third floor to thwart her, Emily made her power grab. The two successive city solicitors hired following Matthew’s retirement had been terrified of her, particularly Bob, Meaghan’s immediate predecessor.

  Bob was a former partner in a large Manhattan law firm. He’d left his wife of twenty years for a gorgeous trophy wife. The trophy wife decided she wanted to make artisan goat cheese in the country and that’s how they got Bob.

  He was a good lawyer but a weak manager, with no government experience, and no match for Emily. Despite Natalie’s and Jamie’s attempts to bolster him, Emily pinned Bob squarely under her thumb.

  Jamie took the brunt of it. Despite being a young attorney, with only a few years of experience, Jamie got dumped with every project Bob feared might somehow anger Emily. Instead of protecting Jamie, Bob threw him to the council, like raw meat, then shrugged and smiled and hemmed and hawed, while Jamie was savaged for trying to do his job.

  The more local the politics were, Meaghan had learned over the years, the more brutal and dirtier the fighting got.

  From what Natalie said, it sounded like Emily had it out for Jamie, in a personal nasty sort of way. When Meaghan asked about it, Natalie looked blank a moment, then said, “Yeah, she doesn’t like him.” She didn’t elaborate.

  Mayor McCheese,—Anthony “Tony” Diebler—was elected right before Matthew retired. It was Tony who’d handpicked and appointed Bob, and like Bob, Tony was terrified of Emily. The council now had their hands in daily administrative decisions that far exceeded their legislative authority. Emily bullied and harassed staff, eviscerated funding requests as punishment for perceived transgressions, and engaged in destructive email campaigns against people who crossed her. Her control over the council was now absolute. Emily had become, in the vacuum created by Matthew’s retirement, the single most powerful person in city hall.

  “Well, that explains it,” Meaghan said.

  “Explains what?” Natalie asked.

  “All the weirdness. I’ve had the strongest sense that people weren’t telling me something. Now I know what it is. This job won’t be the cakewalk I was led to believe it would be. I’m going to have to earn my paycheck.”

  “You okay with that?” Natalie asked.

  “Sure. I love a good fight. Emily’s not going to know what hit her.”

  Natalie looked thoughtful. “Oh, I think
she already knows exactly what she’s dealing with. I think she’s downstairs right now stewing about it. Meaghan, I know it’s a small town and you’ve dealt with much bigger stuff, but watch out for her. She’s more dangerous than she appears.”

  Meaghan laughed. “Yeah, yeah. I know. And so are the woods and the stairs and blah blah blah. You know, I’m not completely helpless. I’ve seen her type before. I can handle Emily.”

  Natalie glanced at her watch, her face bright red.

  Mystery solved. Exactly what Meaghan had thought. A big messy personality conflict on the first day. That’s what everybody wasn’t telling her.

  “You need to get downstairs to the mayor’s office,” Natalie said. “It’s almost ten. Take the elevator down to two.”

  “I’ll take the stairs,” Meaghan said, watching Natalie for a reaction. “I need the exercise.”

  “I’ll walk down with you. I need to drop something off with Annie. The mayor’s secretary. I can introduce you before his Cheesiness makes an entrance.”

  Okay. Meaghan had merely given herself a bad case of the heebie-jeebies, induced by stress. Nothing more. She’d dealt with plenty of people like Emily before. And in a town this tiny, she thought, how bad can city hall politics really be?

  Annie, a smiling blond woman a few years older than Natalie, greeted them from her desk in the reception area. The mayor was running a few minutes late. She told Meaghan to have a seat and chatted with Natalie a moment. It sounded like they were neighbors.

  Small town, Meaghan thought. They all know each other. Another change she’d have to get used to. Phoenix was a sprawling community full of people from somewhere else, some of whom only lived there during the winter. Meaghan had lived in her last house for ten years and had never met the people who lived across the street.

  Natalie left Meaghan in Annie’s care and headed back up the stairs.

  Annie busied herself with something on her desk and Meaghan waited. The office was silent except for the tick of a large antique clock above Annie’s desk and the occasional muffled voice from somewhere further back in the office suite.

  “He’s back in the building,” Annie announced after a couple of minutes. “He should be here any time now.”

  Meaghan wondered a moment how Annie knew that. The phone hadn’t rung. She wasn’t near a window or working at her computer. Meaghan didn’t see a cell phone or tablet anywhere. Then Mayor Diebler bustled into the room and schmoozed Meaghan into his office before she could think about it further.

  Tony Diebler was pleasant enough, but his nickname fit. Meaghan had gotten a hint of it when he’d called her in Phoenix to offer her the job in Eldrich. Middle-aged and divorced, Tony liked to flirt with women far too young for him. He wore too much cologne. He had good hair, which Meaghan could tell he was proud of, and described himself as an “innovative problem solver.”

  Meaghan thought he’d be easy enough to manage. They were about the same age, which made her at least twenty years too old for him. No worries there. Tony merely needed to be reassured from time to time that he was the boss, the alpha male. He needed the illusion of authority, not the substance, and as long as Meaghan allowed him that illusion and stroked his ego a bit, he’d stay out of her way.

  They chatted for about twenty minutes about the city and Tony’s general goals as mayor. Lots of grandiose ideas but no obvious boondoggles on the horizon. Natalie had been wrong about the lunch invitation. Tony already had lunch plans he claimed he couldn’t break, and Meaghan returned upstairs, relieved, and grateful for her sack lunch. She didn’t think she could tolerate Tony’s cologne much longer. Besides, she needed the time to prepare for her meeting with the notorious Emily Proctor.

  Chapter 13

  Meaghan pored over the city code, reviewed Bob’s files, and quizzed Natalie and Kady about what they knew, heard, or suspected about various projects. It was all standard municipal stuff, except that since Matthew’s departure, the city seemed incapable of completing anything.

  In each project, Emily’s thwarting presence was obvious. Nothing got done because at the last minute the council got cold feet. Somewhere in the file, there’d be a nasty email from Emily, sent out to far more people than needed to be involved, blathering about “frustrating legislative intent” or “usurping legislative authority.”

  And, damn, she hated Jamie, absolutely despised him. It had gotten to the point where the council, urged on by Emily, were trying to insert themselves into how Jamie handled his court cases and threatening to fire him if he didn’t comply with their every whim.

  That stopped as of today. If Emily didn’t like it, too bad. Meaghan would try to be tactful, but considering that Emily had a history with Matthew and likely already hated Meaghan because of that history, she wasn’t going to waste time building bridges. There was no excuse for the way Emily bullied Jamie. He was a good kid and he didn’t deserve it.

  Meaghan sighed. She’d just thought of a handsome thirty-year-old man as a kid. “God, I’m getting old,” she muttered.

  By one thirty, Meaghan was ready. She didn’t have all the details, but enough to make her point. She’d try to keep things civil as long as she could, but she planned to make it crystal clear to Emily that the legislative meddling stopped today. Meaghan would not be bullied or pushed.

  Jamie rushed past Meaghan’s open office door about one forty-five carrying a huge file box. She heard him drop it on his desk and then he appeared in her doorway. He looked worried.

  “I’m sorry,” he said in a rush. “Court went long and I had to grab lunch. I need to talk to you about the meeting with Emily, and there’s a lot to go over—”

  Meaghan cut him off with a raised hand. “Breathe. Okay? Take a deep breath. Let it out.” She pointed at the chair in front of her desk. “Sit down. It’s all good. Natalie told me everything.” Jamie’s eyes widened in shock. What, did he think she couldn’t figure this stuff out? “I know Bob didn’t protect you. I will. Count on it.”

  Jamie’s face broke into that wide disarming grin. “Oh, that. Bob. Yeah. Thank you.”

  Oh, that? What else was there? “Let me do the talking,” Meaghan continued. “If I can keep things cordial, I will, but that’s not my top priority. Things are changing. As of today. And she’ll know that by the time she goes back downstairs.”

  “She won’t like it.”

  “I don’t care. I cannot emphasize enough how much I don’t care.”

  Jamie sagged into the chair, relief wafting off him like steam. “Will Natalie be there?”

  Meaghan smiled. “Safety in numbers?”

  “Something like that.”

  “She’ll be there. I need her institutional memory. And judging by the files, Natalie and Emily have gotten into it before. And Natalie’s won.”

  “She holds her ground, yeah,” Jamie said, nodding.

  Two minutes before two o’clock, Meaghan, Jamie, and Natalie walked to the conference room across the hall from the solicitor’s office. Meaghan’s stomach fluttered with nervous anticipation. She noticed Jamie’s hands shaking and Natalie looked apprehensive. Their anxiety was palpable.

  She took each of them by the arm before they entered the conference room. “Let me do the talking,” she said in a low voice. “Don’t be scared. I’ve dealt with her type before. Her bullshit ends today.”

  Emily was waiting for them. Based on her fearsome reputation, Meaghan had been expecting a cross between Grendel’s mother and Lady Macbeth. Instead, Emily was petite, with chin-length dark hair, not a strand out of place. She wore all pastels. A pink cotton sweater set. A pale green, pink, and powder blue plaid skirt. Pearls. Sensible tan flats. She looked like she’d stepped out of an LL Bean or Talbot’s catalog.

  Emily smiled, a forced cheery grin that didn’t reach her eyes. “Hello, Meaghan,” she said in a little girl singsong. She held out her well-manicured right hand. On her left hand, she wore a gold wedding band with a large diamond. “I’ve heard so much about you.”


  And in the same way Meaghan liked Natalie right away, Meaghan disliked Emily. She was the type who smiled and chirped and was oh so nice, while she stabbed you in the back over and over with a rusty knife.

  Emily had a limp fish handshake. Meaghan took her hand for a moment, then dropped it. Looking her square in the eye, Meaghan answered, “And I’ve heard so much about you, Emily.”

  Emily’s eyes narrowed, she frowned for a quick moment, and then the artificial smile reappeared.

  Once they were all seated, Emily gave a speech about how great it was when everyone worked together, but how city government only worked if both branches, executive and legislative, were kept separate and boundaries respected.

  Meaghan broke in. “Excellent point, Emily.” Meaghan leaned back in her chair and smiled. Here we go, she thought. “It’s been my experience in local government that the judicial branch doesn’t have the same ‘check and balance’ power it does at the state or federal level. This leaves a power vacuum unless you have a city attorney—solicitor, I mean, still getting used to the terminology—unless you have a city solicitor who functions as that third player.”

  Emily’s fake smile was gone.

  “A strong city solicitor,” Meaghan said, “is important to keeping the council and the mayor in check. Without that third pole of power it becomes tug-of-war. Or a shoving match, if one side is too powerful.”

  Jamie stared at her, in open admiration.

  Emily scowled. “And I suppose you think that’s you.”

  Meaghan nodded. “Yes. I do. You remember my father. We’re a lot alike.”

  Emily stood up in a huff. “I don’t like what you’re insinuating.”

  “Emily, please, have a seat.” Meaghan gestured at the table. “I’m not insinuating anything. But with regard to boundaries, you’re right. There’s been a power vacuum in this office for a while now and it’s thrown the relationship between branches out of balance.” Meaghan took a deep breath to steady her nerves. “It’s nobody’s fault. The work needs to get done, I understand that. But now that I’m here, we need to discuss the council’s practice of inserting itself into executive functions, particularly with regard to my office.”