“I still don’t understand why they wanted me there.”
“Don’t look at me. I’ve been in Chicago with you. It’s not one of our regularly scheduled meetings. Nobody even sent me an agenda. Maybe they want you to liaise in your official capacity.”
Norah scowled. “I could liaise a lot better if I were unpacked and settled. And if I’d slept since December.”
“Yeah the last three weeks haven’t so much maintained our original impression of Wishful being a sleepy little town. On the plus side, nobody looking at you would know you’d been driving for the last seven hours.”
Fifteen minutes locked in his bathroom and she’d erased the fatigue from her face and done something with her hair that made her look neat as a pin and ready for the boardroom. It was a fascinating form of female magic.
She brought a self-conscious hand to the twist at the base of her head. “Thank God my suits were in a box at the back of the truck.”
“You shouldn’t have worn a suit.”
“Without knowing exactly what they want me for, a suit is a safer option. It’s always better to be over-dressed than under-dressed. Besides, it was this or jeans, and I’m not going before the rest of the City Council in jeans. Especially not at what is evidently a public session.”
“Yeah, but I won’t be able to pay attention to a thing for imagining getting you out of it.”
She slid him a look that was part exasperation, part heat. “Behave.”
“Where’s the fun in that?” He tugged open the door to the courthouse.
The halls were empty other than the security guard, George Buckley, one of Violet’s brothers. An easy smile split his dark face. “Welcome back.”
“Thanks, George. How’s it looking in there?” Cam asked.
He and Norah walked through the metal detector, collecting their stuff on the other side.
“Pretty good crowd for a mid-afternoon session.”
“Hopefully it’ll be a quick one. It’s been a long day.” Cam escorted Norah to the main door of the courtroom. “This is where I leave you. I’ve gotta go in the other door.”
“Where should I sit?”
“Somewhere down front.” Cam kissed her quickly, resisting the urge to linger. “I’ll see you on the other side.”
Norah stepped through the door. Cam smiled to himself.
“She suspect anything?” George asked.
“Not a thing.” She wasn’t gonna know what hit her.
Cam hurried down the hall to join the rest of the City Council and his mother at the front of the courtroom. It wasn’t as full as it had been for the vote on the special use permit, but still the floor level benches were pretty packed. Norah had found a spot on the second row beside Miranda and Piper. As Cam slid into his seat beside Ed, his mother rapped her gavel and brought the session to order.
“Thank y’all for joining us this afternoon. We’ll jump straight on in. The forensic accountant has finished her investigation. The former City Planner did, indeed, embezzle $124,000 from city accounts over a period of several years. He has failed this city and is currently awaiting trial.”
That spawned considerable murmured comment from the peanut gallery, but they quieted as Sandra continued. “The City Council has conducted its own investigation into how this egregious crime remained undiscovered for so long. Without getting into the long details, it boils down to antiquated record keeping and a perfect confluence of circumstances, such that those responsible for oversight were lax in their duties. I take responsibility myself for not being more diligent upon my return to office after my cancer treatment. That being said, a number of changes are being made moving forward to prevent something like this from ever happening again, not the least of which is a brand new electronic accounting system designed by Jay Quimby.”
Sandra went on a bit longer about the rest of the changes and reiterated a policy of transparency to pre
vent mismanagement of city funds. “Further details are available for those who are interested. However, none of this is why we called this special session of the City Council.”
As his mother surveyed her audience, Cam thought she’d been taking lessons from Norah on how to play the crowd.
“Four months ago, our town was struggling financially. Yes, at the civic level, some of that was because of the criminal actions of the City Planner. But even without that added burden, Wishful has been in a long-term economic decline for the last two decades. It seemed that the only way out of that was the recruitment of and dependency on some larger industry, like the ones the town was built around. When no opportunities of that nature became available, we were susceptible to the lure of promises made by GrandGoods, a big box store that would’ve changed our way of life.”
She paused and shot a look in his direction. “Councilman Crawford was the lone voice of dissent. He made the unpopular choice, the hard choice, to do whatever he could to protect that which we hold dear. And in doing so, he brought in the assistance of a young woman with more grit, determination, and hope than any single person I’ve ever met.”
Cam watched, fascinated and amused as Norah actually sank lower in her seat, as if to shrink from all the eyes turned in her direction.