Murder at Town Meeting (eBook)

7:34 PM

I’m sitting in the sound booth at the back of the middle school auditorium balcony. It’s really just a big box with a glass window and a couple of consoles for running lights and microphones. I asked Mr. Carroll, who’s sitting in the non-voters’ section because he lives in one of the Bridgewaters, I forget which one, and he said I could. He’s school superintendent. He’s cool. I haven’t been in here since eighth grade when we did the spring talent show. Arianna, she was my girlfriend at the time, until my parents interfered, we ran six lights and two mikes, nothing compared to what we got at the high school. We popped a circuit breaker and messed up the order on two songs. No big deal.

We made out fine.

‘Made out’ being the operative word.

‘Words,’ Birnam says. Birnam’s very particular. He came in here with me. There was no chance I could ditch him.

Arianna’s sitting in the non-voters’ section with her friend Karen Pina. She hasn’t noticed I moved in here yet. She’s sixteen too, seventeen in November. Karen’s eighteen already and she’s a registered voter, but she says she doesn’t want to sit down on the floor with old white men.

It’s funny being back in the middle school. It’s a lot smaller than I remembered. The stage is especially small. I was on it for Pirates of Penzance in the eighth grade. I got to play a pirate but didn’t get a solo because my voice was breaking. I got to marry Arianna, who was a daughter of the Major General. Birnam was a policeman for about the first week of rehearsal and then he dropped out. The stress was too much for him. He was in the sixth grade, but he was supposed to be in the fifth. He’s got double-promoted twice, which is why now he’s a sophomore when he’s only supposed to be in eighth grade. He’s very smart, and we’ll leave it at that.

Arianna’s just turned around and is trying to figure out where I disappeared to. So, that’s good. We had a rough summer, but maybe things will get better now. (Birnam, quit punching me.) The high school did the play South Pacific last winter, and I got to play Lieutenant Cable and she was my girlfriend, Liat, who is supposed to be Tonkinese, which is kind of like Chinese. Arianna got cast because she has beautiful skin color. She’s Cape Verdean, which is not black, but is a kind of black, except people from Cape Verde, which are some islands off the coast of Africa, are Portuguese, not really black, which is not the same as white but not black either. It’s a little tricky, and we got in trouble because I was supposed to fall in love with her in the play, but I also fell in love with her backstage. Actually, I’ve been in love with her since Pirates, so last year I invited her to the Sophomore Swing, which is a dress-up dance in the spring, and she said yes, but then my mother told me we couldn’t go to a dance together because my dad talked to her dad, and they decided it wasn’t a good thing, so we had to break up, and she ended up going with Jimmy Gomes, who’s Cape Verdean too, and he’s only a freshman. Well, sophomore now.

It was kind of like in the play where Lieutenant Cable loves Liat but can’t marry her because she isn’t white.

I’m white, so it was a problem for my parents, which is funny because my parents packed me and Birnam in their Jeep Cherokee and we did Woodstock when I was nine, and my parents are the biggest hippies on the planet, love, peace, and rock-and-roll, and you’d never guess they are prejudiced. They were stoned and naked the whole time. I guess they didn’t think that would scar me. No one knew it was gonna be such a big thing back then. Just some concert in a field that got way out of control. But I don’t remember black people at Woodstock except maybe Jimi Hendrix onstage a little, so I don’t know. I was only nine and wasn’t paying attention to those things.

Only a few black people live in South Quagmire, but a lot of the people who live here are Cape Verdean. They came to work on the cranberry bogs. Arianna’s grandfather came here when he was ten. He left his home and his parents and came here with his older brother. He’s been here ever since, and now he’s on the School Committee. So Arianna and I have been together in school since first grade and we’ve been friends since eighth grade when we got married onstage, which our drama teacher, who is really just the elementary school music teacher, Mrs. Lewis, called color-blind casting.

I think she is not as prejudiced as my mother.

My father, I don’t know. They wouldn’t say what he talked about with Arianna’s dad, and he wouldn’t tell me either.

My father’s name is Charles Wood, but everyone calls him Chuck. Chuck Wood, get it? Some people call him Woodchuck Wood just to be funny. He doesn’t like it. He works at the cranberry company as a maintenance foreman. Runs a forklift, keeps the refrigeration units from breaking down. My mother’s name is Gladys, but she changed it to Cher when she married Dad. Cher Wood. Like in Robin Hood, right? Or because she’s a big fan of Sonny and Cher, I don’t know. My brother Birnam is three years younger than me. My brother Woodstock just turned six. My parents say he was conceived at Woodstock, but Birnam says, “Do the math!” and Birnam is usually right about these things. My name is Petrified.

My parents spend a lot of time under the influence of drugs.

Anyway, it’s our country’s Bicentennial year, and our town of South Quagmire’s been through a lot— (Huh, what? Yes, thanks, Birnam) — one-hundred-twenty-eight years’ worth of Town Meetings. We broke away from East Quagmire and formed our own town in 1848. We had our hundred-and-twenty-eighth annual Town Meeting in March which I didn’t go to. Karen Pina did, and said it was boring as hell and lasted three nights. But I did get to ride in the ladder truck in the big parade on the Fourth of July and a girl went streaking down the middle of the street. After she went by, Sparky Manx almost drove off the road and killed a bunch of Girl Scouts. They had to jump the stone wall that borders the cemetery to escape getting run over, and the high school band never did find the right key again, and the trumpets all went sharp for ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’

She was hot.

She wasn’t from around here.

She was someone’s cousin from Detroit.

Chief Dobbs just walked in.

`That makes 98.

He went right over and started talking to Miss Makepeace. Everyone’s placing bets he won’t make it past Article One before he has a tantrum and storms out. Chief Dobbs has a really bad temper. He’s our town’s fire chief and you don’t want to make him mad. Whew, boy, does he get mad. The adults are placing bets with Nigel Brate, he’s the town bookie and also a selectman, and he owns the packy, that Chief Dobbs won’t make it to the end of the meeting. This is illegal, but the police chief won’t deal with it if he wants his raise to be radioact— der, stupid, stupid—retro— retroactive— I keep messing that up— in his next contract, which comes up in June, so everyone’s getting in on the act. People go to Brate’s Liquor Emporium to buy booze and cigarettes and bet on dogs, horses, football, that kind of stuff, but Town Meeting time he runs a pool on stuff like what article will Chief Dobbs storm out on and how many times will Miss Ottick say she was born in this town. My parents are betting Article Six for Chief Dobbs and four times for Miss Ottick, that’s the younger one, Miss Edie, except they won’t put money on it because they hate Brate. He’s part of the military-industrial complex, which has something to do with a bunch of helicopters he keeps stashed over in East Quagmire. Anyway, Dad says Chief Dobbs has to get through Article Three at least because there’s a lot of money involved in Little Quagmire Swamp, but then he’ll go mental over the ambulance. It should be interesting.

C’mon, c’mon, people.

What’s wrong with people, they can’t even show up for Town Meeting? Miss DeBarros, she’s Arianna’s aunt, she was my history teacher last year, she says Town Meeting is the purest form of democracy, but how’s democracy supposed to work if people don’t show up to vote? It’s now 7:39 and we need two more people to have a quorum so we can start the meeting.

I don’t see Little Anthony. If he was here, we’d have our quorum. Almost. It’s funny Arianna is here but not her father. She’s still looking around for me.

Now she sees me. She’s waving.

I’m waving back.

She’s looking at me funny. Maybe she remembers the last time we were in here together.

Nothing much else is going on, so I guess I’ll keep talking.

Chief Dobbs is looking very emotional at Miss Makepeace. She’s hot. He’s probably emotional about her driveway or how the police chief burned rubber in her driveway. Chief Dobbs hates the police chief. Sparky Manx says it was him laying her driveway started the whole thing. Chief Dobbs called it a driveway fit for a goddess. He laid it, then he bragged about it for weeks and made all the firefighters go over and look at it, but they could only stand on it in their stocking feet. When it rains she supposedly can see her reflection in it. She’s the town’s executive secretary. She got promoted from the Board of Health because she’s so healthy.

Yeah, right.

Chief Dobbs likes laying asphalt among other things, that’s what Sparky Manx says. Sparky’s thirty-eight and knows about laying...