Читать книгу Dead Cow in Aisle Three - H. Mel Malton - Страница 5

There’s bargains here for everyone— At Kountry Pantree, saving’s fun!

—An advertisement in the Laingford Gazette

You’re a traitor, and you should be shot,” Aunt Susan said. She was sitting in the guest chair at my kitchen table, shelling peanuts and swigging beer out of a bottle.

“I’m just doing a job, Susan,” I said. “The store would go ahead anyway, whether I’m involved or not. I have to eat, you know.” I was at my drawing board, preparing some sketches for the Kountry Pantree PR committee. They’d hired me to design and build a mascot costume for their new grocery superstore in Laingford.

“Just doing a job—that’s my point,” Susan said, tossing a couple of unshelled peanuts to my dogs, who sat begging shamelessly at her feet. Crunch, crunch. “This thing is all about money. No matter what one’s principles might be, everyone has their price—even my own niece.”

“I’m sorry I can’t afford to take a political stand with you right now,” I said. “I’ll support you behind the scenes if I can, though.”

Susan snorted. “Maybe you’d be so good as to build a mascot for the League of Social Justice, then. A pit bull would be nice. Or an enraged bear. We’re going to fight the Kountry Pantree to the death, you know.” She placed a peanut on the table and brought her fist down on it, hard.

Secretly, I thought that Susan’s newly-formed lobby group would be better represented by a valiantly squeaking mouse. You can’t halt progress when a bunch of fat-cat developers starts throwing money at Town Council.

“The League is meeting down at George’s tonight, isn’t it?” I said.

“Yes, and I came by to make sure that you’ll be there,” Susan said. “You have inside information about those sharks that will be very useful.”

“I refuse to be a mole,” I said. Okay, maybe I’m going overboard with the animal imagery, but that’s the way it is with town planning issues. They bring out the beast in everybody. Survival of the fittest, dog eat dog, nature red in tooth and claw and all that. Grrrr.

“We won’t ask you to divulge any company secrets,” Susan said. “We just need names and dates and that sort of thing. We don’t want to tip our hand just yet, and we decided it was better to get it from you than from the Gazette.”

“The guy at the paper probably knows way more than I do,” I said. “He’s the one following the story.”

Back in May, the Laingford Gazette had appeared on the stands with a big headline, “Council okays new Superstore.” Local reaction was swift and frantic. The new store, into its third month of construction where the main road into Laingford meets the highway, was going to be huge. It wasn’t so much a store as it was a shopping complex. Acres of state-of-the-art convenience, offering groceries, fresh flowers, a photo processing lab, a pharmacy, a video rental outlet, a fast food joint and, as they say, much, much more. The downtown business people were horrified.

“It’ll kill the downtown core,” they said in angry letters to the paper.

“It’ll create jobs and boost the economy,” its proponents countered. The arguments were academic anyway. After a dozen weeks of round-the-clock construction, the huge building was almost finished, growing like a toadstool in the muggy July air.

The publisher of the Laingford Gazette, Hans Whiteside, had stirred up the small town very handily with inflammatory editorials and a public poll. “What do you think of the new superstore? Fill out this ballot and drop it off at the Gazette.” It was rumoured that Whiteside had a financial interest in the project, but he had kept the fire burning under the issue, presumably in order to make sure that everybody, for or against, kept on buying his paper. He had put his star reporter, young Calvin Grigsby, on the story, then sat back and watched the fur fly.

“Town divided on Superstore issue,” the headlines went. “Kountry Pantree: Jobs, Jobs, Jobs,” said one, and “Is downtown doomed?” said another.

The League for Social Justice (LSJ) was hastily formed in the weeks following the announcement. Its members, the owners of businesses threatened by the development, included a grocer, a pharmacist, a florist, a photo shop owner, a video store owner and the guy who owns the downtown pizza place.

The League was my Aunt Susan’s idea. She owns a feed store in Laingford. Not that the Superstore proposed to sell agricultural supplies; Susan had been burned already by a big American farm supply company, the Agri-Am, opening up near her place on the other side of town. It had undercut her prices, poached her customers and crushed her like a potato bug. Her store was now up for sale, and her reasons for establishing the LSJ were revenge-based. As she said in a letter to the editor, “Corporate greed can devastate small business. I know first-hand. We need to join together to prevent it from happening again.”

“Why don’t you invite Calvin Grigsby to your meeting?” I said. “He can give you the low-down, and at the same time, you’ll get some publicity.”

“We don’t want publicity, at least not yet,” Susan said. “When we make our presentation at the next council meeting, we want it to be a surprise.”

“Want what to be a surprise?” I said.

“You’ll see. In the meantime, I’m relying on you to come down to the house tonight. You don’t have to stay for the whole thing. In fact, I’d rather you weren’t in on the strategy session. I know how good you are at keeping secrets from the authorities.”

“Thanks a lot, Susan,” I said. I guessed she was referring to my relationship with one of Laingford’s policemen, Mark Becker. A couple of times in the past, I’d been involved in some messy situations that had required police investigation. It seemed I was always saying the wrong thing to the cops, which usually led to them arresting the wrong person. “You’re not planning to do anything illegal, are you?”

“Never you mind,” Susan said and drained her Kuskawa Cream Ale, depositing the empty bottle on the table with a decisive thunk. “Just be there tonight, if you please.” She stood up to leave, brushing peanut shells off her green work pants. “Your puppy has just defecated under the table,” she said.

“Oh, Rosie!” I said, picking up Rosencrantz and carrying her to the door. Rosie was a three-month-old yellow lab who had experienced a certain amount of stress in her first few weeks on the planet. I’d inherited her from a screwed-up actress at the end of an ill-fated puppet show I’d been working on in May. Her mistress had treated her like a human baby, carrying her everywhere wrapped in blankets. No attempt had been made to housetrain her, and she was still unclear on the concept. My other dog, Lug-nut, was doing his best to be a mentor, but he wasn’t exactly police-dog material either.

“I don’t know what on earth induced you to take in that creature,” Susan said, as I carried Rosie to the poop-place next to the composter.

“Compassion, Susan. Your feeding her all those peanuts probably didn’t help.”

“Nonsense. It’s fibre. Very good for dogs.”

“Precisely my point,” I said. Lug-nut, seizing the opportunity to provide a little canine instruction to his young housemate, watered a nearby fern, and Rosie followed suit. I administered lavish praise.

“You can bring them too, if you come,” Susan said.

“Since when did I need your permission to bring my dogs to George’s house?” I snapped. Susan had recently moved in with George Hoito, my farmer-landlord and good friend and, incidentally, her lover. She and her teenaged ward, Eddie Schreier, had kind of taken over his life, and I resented it.

“Touchy, touchy,” Susan said. “See you at eight.” She set off down the path through the woods to George’s place. I watched her go, inwardly fuming. Susan had brought me up after my parents died in a car accident. We were very fond of one another, really, but this new domestic proximity wasn’t working very well.

Before Susan and Eddie had moved in, I was the official farm hand, helping to take care of George’s herd of dairy goats, milking them, assisting at births and doing chores around the farm. Now my position had been usurped. Eddie did most of the chores I used to do, and Susan was filling George’s head with all sorts of newfangled ideas. She’d bought him a computer and was setting up a bunch of goat-husbandry programs. I knew that automatic milkers weren’t very far away, and I wanted no part of it.

I’m a puppet maker by trade and don’t make much money at it. The arrangement, pre-Susan, had been that I did the chores in lieu of rent. Now that my job had effectively been taken over by Eddie (who is seventeen and as strong as a horse), I felt I had to pay George something for the privilege of living in his homestead cabin. The log cabin, set on a hill overlooking the farm, is primitive, with no running water (there’s a hand pump at the well), no hydro and no plumbing (outhouses are very low-maintenance). It’s heated by a small wood stove, and it’s perfect for someone like me, a slob who needs a lot of space. George had so far refused payment, but I didn’t think he’d refuse forever. Milking machinery is expensive, and I knew perfectly well that Susan thought I shouldn’t be living there for free. She was the one who had arranged for me to move into the cabin in the first place, four years ago, when I had been suffering from a bad case of city burn-out. It was supposed to be temporary, until I could find an apartment in town, but frankly, I had never bothered to look. George’s place was my dream home. Perhaps Susan still believed I would one day return to the Big Smoke. It was decidedly awkward.

Now she was holding subversive political meetings in George’s old farmhouse in the valley and was planning some sort of revolutionary tactic that would probably get her into trouble.

When I’d taken the Kountry Pantree job, I had thought it would signal a new, calmer period in my life. In the previous year, I’d been involved in, well, a couple of murders. That’s how I’d met Becker, the cop Susan thought I couldn’t keep secrets from. We’d had a sort of on-again, off-again flirtation going, and after the last mess in May (involving the theatre company I was working for) we had both worked hard to repair the damage. Now it was late July, and we were actually “seeing each other”, as the saying goes.

Trust Susan to wreck it. She’d never liked Becker, and I could just imagine the triumphant look she’d give me as he was forced to haul her away from some sit-in protest in the Kountry Pantree parking lot.

“Stay, Rosie, Luggy,” I said, using the hand-signal I’d learned from reading Your Perfect Puppy. I wanted to go clean up Rosencrantz’s poop, and the book said you’re not supposed to let them see you do it, or they’ll treat you as a housemaid. The dogs stared at me for a moment, then bounded up the stairs ahead of me. By the time I’d gathered up paper towels, disinfectant and a spatula, the poop was gone and Luggy was licking his lips.

Fighting nausea, I went back to the drawing board.