Some Like It Hawk

by Donna Andrews

  Contents

  Title Page

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Also by Donna Andrews

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks, as always, to the crew at St. Martin’s/Minotaur, including (but not limited to) Matt Baldacci, Anne Bensson, Hector DeJean, Meryl Gross, Andrew Martin, Sarah Melnyk, David Rotstein, and my editor, Pete Wolverton. And thanks again to the Art Department for another wonderful cover.

  More thanks to my agent, Ellen Geiger, and the staff at the Frances Goldin Literary Agency for handling the business side so I can focus on the writing, and to Dave Barbor at Curtis Brown for taking Meg abroad.

  Many thanks to the friends—writers and readers alike—who brainstorm and critique with me, give me good ideas, or help keep me sane while I’m writing: Stuart, Elke, Aidan, and Liam Andrews, Renee Brown, Erin Bush, Carla Coupe, Meriah Crawford, Ellen Crosby, Kathy Deligianis, Laura Durham, Sally Fellows, Suzanne Frisbee, John Gilstrap, Peggy Hansen, C. Ellett Logan, David Niemi, Alan Orloff, Valerie Patterson, Art Taylor, Robin Templeton, and Sandi Wilson. Thanks for all kinds of moral and practical help to my blog sisters at the Femmes Fatales: Dana Cameron, Charlaine Harris, Toni L.P. Kelner, Kris Neri, Hank Phillipi Ryan, Mary Saums, and Elaine Viets. And thanks to all the Buds, who do not quail when my subject lines contain the ominous words [long] or [rant].

  Andy Straka gave me much useful advice on hawks, so if the falconry in the book is accurate, he gets the credit—and if it isn’t, he can blame my memory and Dr. Blake’s.

  When I realized that my plot required placing Meg and the town of Caerphilly in legal peril, I turned to Barb Goffman and Dina Willner. Without their excellent advice, Meg’s lawyer cousin, Festus Hollingsworth, would probably have been disbarred by now, and if you find any glaring legal errors in the book it’s probably something I forget to ask them about.

  I was planning to write another book entirely before a brainstorming lunch with Chris Cowan, at which she asked, “Did everybody really leave the courthouse? What if there’s still one guy holed up in the basement?”

  And that’s how Phineas Throckmorton was born.

  Chapter 1

  “Welcome to the town that mortgaged its own jail!”

  The amplified voice blaring over the nearby tour bus loudspeaker startled me so much I almost smashed my own thumb. I’d been lifting my hammer to turn a nicely heated iron rod into a fireplace poker when the tour guide’s spiel boomed across the town square, shattering my concentration.

  “Mommy, did the blacksmith lady do that on purpose?” piped up a child’s voice.

  A few onlookers tittered. I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, then opened them again. I checked to make sure that all fifty or sixty of the spectators were safely behind the fence around my outdoor blacksmith’s shop. Then I raised my hammer and began pounding.

  Nothing like blacksmithing when you’re feeling annoyed. The voice from the tour bus still squawked away, but I couldn’t hear what it was saying. And I felt the tension and frustration pouring out of me like water out of a twisted sponge.

  Along with the sweat. Even though it was only a little past ten, the temperature was already in the high eighties and the air was thick with humidity. It would hit the mid-nineties this afternoon. A typical early July day in Caerphilly, Virginia.

  But in spite of the heat and the interruptions, I managed to complete the current task—shaping one end of the iron rod into the business end of the poker. I flourished the hammer dramatically on the last few blows and lifted the tongs to display the transformed rod.

  “Voila!” I said. “One fireplace poker.”

  “But it needs a handle,” an onlooker said.

  “A handle?” I turned the rod and cocked my head, as if to look at it more closely, and pretended to be surprised. “You’re right. So let’s heat the other end and make a handle.”

  I thrust the handle end of the poker into my forge and pulled the bellows lever a couple of times to heat up the fire. As I did, I glanced over at my cousin, Rose Noire. She was standing in the opening at the back of my booth, staring at her cell phone. She looked up and shook her head.

  “What the hell is keeping Rob?” I muttered. Not that my brother was ever famous for punctuality.

  I wondered, just for a moment, if he was okay.

  I’d have heard about it already if he wasn’t, I told myself. I pushed my worry aside and kept my face pleasant for the tourists. After all, I’d been making a good living off the tourists all summer. However inconvenient it had been to move my entire blacksmithing shop from our barn to the Caerphilly town square, it had certainly been a financial bonanza. Maybe it wouldn’t be a bad idea if the town held Caerphilly Days every summer.

  I just hoped we didn’t have to continue them into the fall. What if—

  I focused on the tourists again and continued my demonstration.

  “To work the iron, you need to heat it to approximately—”

  “That tent on your right contains the office of the mayor,” the tour bus boomed, even closer at hand. “Formerly housed in the now-empty City Hall building.”

  No use trying to out-shout a loudspeaker. I smiled, shrugged apologetically to the tourists, and steeled myself to listen without expression as the voice droned on, reciting the sad, embarrassing history of Caerphilly’s financial woes.

  “Alas, when the recession hit,” the loudspeaker informed us, “the town was unable to keep up with payments on its loan, so the lender was forced to repossess the courthouse, the jail, and all the other public buildings.”

  Convenient that they didn’t mention the real reason Caerphilly couldn’t make its payments—that George Pruitt, our ex-mayor, had stolen most of the borrowed funds for his own use. Actually, a few buses had, until he’d threatened to sue, so now they just mentioned the ongoing lawsuit against him. Not as dramatic, but less apt to backfire.

  “And to your left, you can see the Caerphilly Days festival, organized by the citizens to help their troubled town out of its dire plight.”

  I always winced when I heard that line. It wasn’t exactly false—but it did seem to imply that we craftspeople were donating our time and our profits out of the goodness of our hearts, to benefit the town. We weren’t—we were making good money for our own pockets. Our real value to the town lay elsewhere.

  Not that we could let the tour buses know that—or worse, the Evil Lender, as we all called First Progressive Financial, LLC, the company that had foreclosed on so much of our town. Only our new mayor made an effort to cal
l them FPF, and that was because he spent so much time negotiating with them and had to be polite.

  I glanced into the forge and was relieved to see that my iron was hot enough to work. I glanced at Rose Noire and nodded, to indicate that I was about to start hammering again. She bent over her cell phone and began texting rapidly. To Rob, I assumed.

  “Come on, Rob,” I muttered. “Hurry up.”

  I pulled the rod out of my forge and began the much more complicated job of hammering the handle end into a sinuous vinelike coiled shape. Mercifully, by the time the iron needed reheating, the amplified tour bus had moved on, and I had only the tourists’ questions to deal with.

  “What happens if you break it?”

  “Don’t you ever burn yourself?”

  “You shoe horses, don’t you?”

  “Wouldn’t it be faster to do that with a machine?”

  I spun out my answers in between bouts at my anvil. Finishing the poker required several return visits to the forge, followed by several vigorous rounds of hammering. I could see Rose Noire, cell phone in hand, keeping a close eye on my progress. I treated the rod—and the tourists—to one last crescendo, a great deal louder than it needed to be, dunked the rod into the water bucket, releasing a small but dramatic cloud of steam, and held up the finished poker for the tourists to admire.

  And then I did it all over again. Several times. I answered what seemed like several hundred more questions—or more accurately, at least a hundred iterations of the same half dozen questions. Finally the clock in the courthouse building chimed eleven, signaling the end of my shift.

  I finished up the andiron I’d been making and thanked the tourists. Then I changed my sign to the one saying that Meg Langslow’s next blacksmithing exhibition would begin at 2 P.M. and slipped through the gate in the back of my enclosure. The cousin I’d recruited to mind the booth and sell my ironwork for me dashed in and began quickly shoving the tables of merchandise from the side of the enclosure to a much more prominent place front and center before the crowds dispersed.

  Normally I’d have stayed to help her, but Rose Noire was waiting for me. She looked anxious. Not good.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “Rob’s been delayed,” she said. “He’s fine, and he’ll try again later.”

  “Delayed?” I realized that I’d raised my voice. Several tourists were looking at us, so I choked back what I’d been about to say. “Back to the tent!” I said instead.

  I strode rapidly across the small space separating my forge from the bandstand at the center of the town square. At the back of the bandstand was a tent. The town square was filled with tents of every size, shape, and description, but whenever anyone barked out “the tent!” as I just had, they nearly always meant this one.

  Rose Noire scuttled along anxiously behind me.

  As soon as I stepped inside the tent, I felt my fingers itching to tidy and organize. Even at its best, the tent was cramped and cluttered, since it served as the dressing room, green room, and lounge for all the craftspeople and performers participating in Caerphilly Days. Several coatracks held costumes for performers who would be appearing later or street clothes for anyone already in costume. And every corner held plastic bins, locked trunks, totes, knapsacks, boxes, grocery bags, suitcases, and just plain piles of stuff.

  “Mom-my!” Josh and Jamie, my twin eighteen-month-old sons, greeted me with enthusiasm. They both toddled to the nearest side of the huge play enclosure we’d set up, holding out their arms and leaning over the child fence toward me, jostling each other, and repeating “Mom-my! Mom-my!”

  Eric, my teenaged nephew, was sitting at the back of the enclosure, holding a toy truck and looking slightly hurt.

  “They were fine until you came in,” he said.

  “I know,” I said. “They just want to guilt-trip me.” Making a mental note to chivvy my fellow tent users into a cleaning spree later in the day, I stepped into the enclosure, sat down, and let the boys climb on top of me. Hugging them calmed me down.

  “Thank you for watching them,” I said. “And not that I’m complaining, but what are you doing here instead of Natalie?” Eric’s sister had been our live-in babysitter for most of the summer.

  “Grandpa says Natalie’s ankle is broken and she needs to stay off her feet,” Eric said. “So Mom drove up this morning to take her home and bring me as a replacement for the next few weeks. Assuming that’s okay with you.”

  “It’s fine with me.” Having Eric babysit was fine, anyway. Should I feel guilty that my niece had broken her ankle chasing my sons? I’d worry about that later.

  “And thank goodness you’re here to help out in time for the Fourth of July,” I said aloud. “Everything will get a lot easier after the Fourth.”

  “I thought Caerphilly Days went on all summer,” Eric said. “What’s so special about the Fourth?”

  “I haven’t told him,” Rose Noire said. “And evidently Natalie is very good at keeping a secret.”

  “But he’s a resident now, at least for the time being,” I said. “Eric, do you swear you won’t tell a single soul what I am about to reveal?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I mean, I swear by … um…”

  “Cross your heart and hope to die?” I asked.

  He nodded.

  “Okay. Then it’s time we told you Caerphilly’s sinister secret.”

  Chapter 2

  “Sinister secret?” Eric repeated. I could tell I’d captured his attention.

  “There’s nothing sinister about it,” Rose Noire said.

  “It’s a little sinister,” I said. “And besides, I like the alliteration. So Eric, you heard about what happened with all the town buildings?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Mayor Pruitt mortgaged them and stole the money.”

  “We don’t know for sure about the stealing part,” Rose Noire said. “It hasn’t been proven in court.”

  “I know you’re reluctant to think ill of any other sentient being, even a Pruitt,” I said. “But if you want to make a bet on what the verdict will be if they finally manage to try the mayor for embezzlement…”

  “Ex-mayor,” she said. “And no. But I still think we should be careful to say ‘alleged.’”

  “If it makes you happy,” I said. “I’m sure our alleged horse thief of an ex-mayor will appreciate the consideration. Getting back to the secret—Eric, did you hear about Phineas K. Throckmorton?”

  “You mean the crazy guy who refused to get out when the lender repossessed the town buildings? The one who barricaded himself in the courthouse basement?”

  “Eric…” Rose Noire began.

  “The allegedly crazy guy who allegedly barricaded himself,” Eric said quickly.

  “Not crazy, just eccentric,” I said. “Reclusive. And there’s nothing alleged about the barricading. He’s been down there since April of last year.”

  “Wow,” Eric said. “Over a year in the courthouse basement?”

  I could see him turning the idea over in his mind. I wondered if he’d guess Mr. Throckmorton’s secret—for that matter, the town’s secret.

  “He must reek by now,” Eric said finally. “I stink if I go a day without a shower. And—does he even have a toilet?”

  “There’s a bathroom in the basement,” Rose Noire said.

  “You mean like an outhouse?”

  “A real bathroom,” I said. “Shower. Sink. Toilet. Running water. Installed in the forties, so it’s old, but quite functional.”

  “And how fortunate that the town water system’s idiosyncratic,” Rose Noire said. “So that shutting down his water supply would mean shutting off the fire hydrants all around the town square.”

  “And that the phone and Internet cables come in through the basement,” I said. “So they can’t cut his communications off without cutting off their own—not to mention excavating the courthouse lawn.”

  “Still—he must be going stir-crazy there all by himself,” Eric said. “And in
a tiny, cramped basement?”

  “It’s not tiny,” I said. “He’s got the whole courthouse basement, except for the twenty-by-thirty-foot antechamber where the stairways come out. He barricaded the door from the antechamber into the main part of the basement where the archives are. I suppose you might call the archive area cramped—it’s certainly a maze of paper-filled rooms and corridors. But it covers a whole city block.”

  “Okay, but what does he eat?” Eric went on. “ He can’t possibly have stashed away enough food to last all this time. What happens when he runs out?”

  “He won’t,” I said. “Any more than he’s going to go stir-crazy from being by himself. That’s the town secret. Or rather, this is.”

  I hoisted Josh onto my shoulder and walked to the back of the tent. I stopped just before I stepped from the children’s pen into the smaller pen containing Spike, our small and temperamental furball of a dog. Spike scrambled up as I approached, scampered to the front of the pen, and stood looking up expectantly.

  “Bite me and you sleep in the barn for a week,” I said. “Maybe a month. And no play time with the twins.”

  With Spike formally on notice, I stepped into his pen. Spike, wisely, stood aside. Eric, carrying Jamie, followed, clearly more anxious than me about the state of his ankles.

  I strode to the back of the pen. It was flush with the side of the tent, just at the part where it backed up to the bandstand. I leaned down and, with a dramatic flourish, flipped up a low flap.

  “Voila,” I said.

  Eric stooped down to peer through the opening, then jumped back and looked up at me anxiously.

  “Holy cow,” he exclaimed. “What is that horrible thing?”

  Horrible thing? I bent down to peer through the flap. A pair of unblinking eyes peered out of a tangle of gray fur to meet mine. I was startled for a second, but then I relaxed.

  “Good girl, Tinkerbell,” I said. “It’s only Rob’s dog,” I said to Eric. “She’s an Irish Wolfhound. Not horrible at all—just big. Lie down, Tink.”

  I moved aside so Eric could look through the flap again. Tinkerbell, satisfied that Eric was with me, curled back up on the ground beside the flap. Josh began wriggling, so I set him down inside the pen. Eric followed suit with Jamie, then peered through the flap again.